A conversation with Amanda Marcotte on evolutionary psychology

I now belong to the exclusive club (of thousands) comprised of people who have been in an argument, on the internet, with Amanda Marcotte. Marcotte posted today in Slate's XXFactor blog about a study showing that women who are more involved in their families' decision-making have sex less frequently than women who are less involved in their families' decision-making. Marcotte (rightly) criticized the media's treatment of the findings, which essentially interpreted them like so—Men are turned off by bossy women—or—Get back in the kitchen if you like sex—or the like. The subjects upon whom the study was based however, were drawn from a number of African nations, where, as Marcotte puts it:

we can't assume that less sexual intercourse is a bad thing for these women. For many women, fewer bouts of intercourse might mean more sex that is mutual and involves protection to prevent unintended pregnancy and STI transmission. I looked up the HIV prevalence rates in these countries, and found that it ranged from 1.5 percent to 13.6 percent. Compare that to the U.S. HIV prevalence rate of .3 percent. In many sub-Sahran African nations, a woman's chance of getting HIV rises exponentially when she marries, which is again the opposite of what it's like in the United States. Equating the sexual choices of empowered women across cultures in light of these cultural differences is simply irresponsible.

In short, encouraging female empowerment in household decision-making may help to improve women's health outcomes in these countries, which is nothing to make light of.

But then Marcotte appends this little nugget, which is completely tangential to the preceding:

And of course, even research conducted by "evolutionary psychologists" with a misogynist agenda can't help but turn up findings that demonstrate greater social equality for women leads to women wanting to have more sex. [emphasis mine]

Now, I'm never quite sure to what extent the phrase "evolutionary psychology" has become total disphemism—when I was in college, I knew people who used it as essentially synonymous with "bullshit," or who reacted to the phrase as violently as they would have reacted to "eugenics" or "social darwinism." I remember a philosophy professor who lamented the ease with which amateurs could come up with just-so stories purporting to explain aspects of human behavior, and how such stories easily spread without the least bit of empirical support, such that eventually, even an engaged and intelligent person would have a hard time telling which stories comprised mainstream, established biology, and which ones were just dreamed up by a crank somewhere. Even so, it is uncontroversial right now to say that your genes influence your behavior, which, it seems to me, is the only thing that needs to be true in order for evolutionary psychology to be a fruitful field of research. That's not to say that every evo-psych hypothesis will be borne out—just that the field as a whole can't be dismissed with the wave of a hand that Marcotte gives it. So I commented:

Amanda, in my opinion, you've been on fire for the past several weeks, with really good posts on lots of things, but especially access to birth control, abortion services, and comprehensive sex education. This one too is (mostly) a necessary corrective to the way this study has been presented in most media outlets.

But I'm mystified by the scare-quotes around "evolutionary psychology," and your characterization of the field as having "a misogynist agenda." Surely you must have something in particular in mind as an example, which you could link to--something other than the linked discussion of Baumeister, which doesn't have the first thing to do with evolutionary psychology, as far as I can see.

The usual feminist critiques of evolutionary psychology (and yours, I'm forced to suppose) are aimed at that field's taking seriously the possibility that some of the observed behavioral differences between men and women may be hard-wired biologically, as opposed to being simply the results of differences in how male and female children are socialized. But nobody in the field, as far as I know, is claiming either (a) that the identification of such biological hard-wiring does anything to establish the way society *ought* to be arranged in the here-and-now, (b) that there aren't significant behavioral deviations between individuals of the same sex, or (c) that all behavioral variance is the result of biology.

Of course, that doesn't stop some unscrupulous or lazy writers from drawing such conclusions from the research. But that's not a problem with evolutionary psychology--it's a problem with science reporting.

Bottom line: Flatly, categorically denouncing evolutionary psychology as misogynist--as if assuming that your reader already agrees with this characterization--is lazy. The studies are either methodologically sounds, or they aren't. If they're unsound, fine--how so? But if they're sound, and you persist in denouncing the field as misogynist, you run the risk of sounding a lot like the hypthetical, dittohead conservative, who, confronted with evidence of anthropogenic climate change, or evolution, or that access to contraception improves everyone's quality of life, nevertheless holds to the party line, insisting that "reality has a liberal bias."

Marcotte responded:

I read and research a lot of "evolutionary psychology", and while they are very good at getting people to cop to anti-feminist opinions and sexist behaviors, I have not really seen many---any?---that prove their contention that these behaviors or opinions are encoded in the genes instead of learned from the environment. They simply note people are sexist and claim that it's genetic. I sense an agenda there, because if you were putting science in front of an agenda, you would acknowledge the huge body of research supporting the idea that we learn our behaviors and beliefs from our environment.

But I'm happy to read studies that prove that sexism is genetic and unchangeable instead of socialized and changeable! I just haven't seen it in all the years I've been writing about this.

I'll add that I refuse to blame journalists reporting these studies for "misrepresenting" them. If anything, most journalists aren't skeptical enough of evolutionary psychology. They pass along evo psych theories from researchers who haven't got a scrap of evidence for their theories, and who put these studies out without subjecting them to peer review. If journalists actually did a better job, you wouldn't get the pro-evo psych outcome you're looking for (the one that proves women are born sexless gold-diggers and men born helpless horndogs). You'd actually see these studies being debunked as people realize that because a behavior turns up on a survey doesn't mean it's genetic.

I wrote back:

But Amanda, most feminists have absolutely no problem accepting the conclusion that homosexuality and heterosexuality are strongly influenced by biology. (In fact, they'd be likely to strongly object if someone suggested otherwise). And that conclusion is bolstered by evidence that is formally very similar to the evidence that some behavioral differences between men and women are biologically-influenced--in neither case do we understand the entire pathway between the gene and its behavioral expression (nor, in many cases do we know what gene we're looking for), but the correlations are suggestive. So why the double-standard? Unless it's just that one of these scientific conclusions bolsters our prescientific, political opinions, and the other undermines them?

And Marcotte responded:

For some reason, it won't post my comment, but in sum, I fail to see why feminists who issue reasonable, evidence-based critiques of poorly constructed studies are "anti-science", but anti-feminist ideologues who make un-evidenced claims about women's biological inferiority get a free pass for the crime of putting politics in front of science.

Finally, I wrote:

Amanda,

1. You haven't (here) presented a "reasonable, evidence-based critique" of the entire field of evolutionary psychology, sufficient to justify your characterization of the entire field as having "a misogynist agenda."

2. I never called you or anyone else "anti-science."

3. You wrote, "But I'm happy to read studies that prove that sexism is genetic and unchangeable instead of socialized and changeable!" This isn't an either/or proposition--both nature and nurture play a role in people's behavior, and no serious biologist contends otherwise.

4. You wrote, "I refuse to blame journalists reporting these studies for 'misrepresenting' them." And yet that's pretty much exactly what you did in the body of your blog post.

5. You wrote, "If journalists actually did a better job, you wouldn't get the pro-evo psych outcome you're looking for (the one that proves women are born sexless gold-diggers and men born helpless horndogs)." I fail to see what I've said that would allow you to conclude that that is the outcome that *I'm* looking for.

To be clear, I do think that it is extremely likely that there are broad, statistical ways in which men and women (in general!) differ from each other behaviorally that can't be explained solely in terms of environmental influences--mainly because the converse would be so unlikely as to be positively miraculous. It would mean concluding that it makes no difference to your behavior which of two different cocktails of hormones your brain is exposed to in utero, at puberty, and throughout the rest of your life. And if THAT doesn't matter, then how in the world can you explain why natural selection ever bothered to produce two different sets of hormone cocktails in the first place?

But that doesn't mean that I subscribe to the cartoon version of evo-psych that you're so ready to foist on me. I promise you that I am every bit as skeptical as you are about *particular* claims of gender difference being biologically based, especially if they are as absurd as concluding that women are biologically incapable of enjoying sex. But the general claim that men's and women's behavioral differences are *in part* attributable to differences in biology (1) seems completely plausible, if not trivially true, and (2) does nothing to undermine my own commitment to social and political gender equality.

That's it for now anyway—I haven't heard back. I mean what I wrote at the very top, by the way. Marcotte is a good writer, and her contributions on gender issues (and many other things) are invaluable. See her blog, pandagon.net. She has a talent for fiery rhetoric that is sadly lacking on the left most of the time. But she is also an ideological purist. If you disagree with her on a tangential point (as I did) or quibble with her over language, you just are the enemy. I really was surprised (even on the internet) how quickly this argument went ad hominem—how quickly I was personally accused of misogyny by her.

There are at least two reasons why feminism shouldn't claim to be based on the claim that there are no behavioral differences between men and women that are attributable to biology. First, there's no reason why social and political equality between men and women needs to be founded upon an assumption of bioligico-behavioral identity between men and women. Social, political, legal, economic (etc.) equality between men and women is good for both men and women irrespective of whether there are some biological differences between us that influence our behavior. Secondly, absolute claims are brittle—if you build the house of feminism on the assumption that all observed gender differences are attributable wholly to enivronmental factors, evidence to the contrary (of which there is plenty) undermines the entire project of feminism.