Episode 88: Transcript
Episode: 88: How Gender Essentialism Warped Our View of Science
Transcription by Keffy
Annalee: [00:00:01] Welcome to Our Opinions Are Correct, a podcast about science fiction and whatever else we feel like talking about. I'm Annalee Newitz. I'm the author of a new book about recent discoveries in archaeology called Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age.
Charlie Jane: [00:00:16] I'm Charlie Jane Anders, I'm the author of the recent young adult space fantasy novel Victories Greater Than Death. And also the upcoming book Never Say You Can't Survive.
Annalee: [00:00:26] I'm so excited about that book and we'll be talking about it in a later episode. But this episode, we are going to be talking about the thorny topic of gender essentialism. What the heck is it? Why are people talking about it? How does it show up in science fiction, and also, how has it shaped science? So get ready to go down the rabbit hole of what men are, what women are, and if you don't fit those categories, screw you.
[00:00:53] Intro music plays: Drums with a bass drop and more science fictional bells and percussion.
Annalee: [00:01:20] So, let's start out by defining our terms. Charlie Jane, what the heck is gender essentialism?
Charlie Jane: [00:01:27] So, I found an interview with Julia Serrano, the author of the amazing book Whipping Girl and a bunch of other incredible books, where she was asked to define gender essentialism. And here's what she said. “Gender essentialism is the idea that there are innate characteristics which all men share with each other and innate characteristics that all women share with each other. And it leads to ideas that men are naturally aggressive, or that women are naturally nurturing, and so on. And those ideas erase gender diversity.” Which I think she covers a lot of ground there and I'm glad that she gets to the thing about how not only is this kind of forcing people into the stereotyped roles, but also it kind of like erases like real diversity of =different ways to be a man and a woman, but also different ways to be something other than a man or a woman, basically, the whole variety of human nature, kind of.
Annalee: [00:02:17] Yeah, exactly. All the things that happen in between immutable categories that are just sort of invented. So where does this even come from? Like, we're all familiar with the idea of gender stereotypes, we've all grown up with them, and we’re surrounded by them. But where does this idea come from that it's something like built into us almost like spiritually?
Charlie Jane: [00:02:37] At its foundation this is part of like, our rigid gender roles in general. And it's part of the logic behind our kind of oppressive system that tries to force us all into boxes. People usually point to Plato as the father of gender essentialism.
Annalee: [00:02:53] I love blaming Plato, for everything.
Charlie Jane: [00:02:55] I mean… you know.
Annalee: [00:02:56] All of Western culture was just screwed up by Plato.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:00] It really was, kind of. I mean, he had a lot of really weird ideas about democracy, about society, about women in general, like he was kind of a… He was not always the best.
Annalee: [00:03:10] An all-purpose crank.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:11] But anyway, Plato basically had this idea that everyone and everything has an essence that makes it what it is, so that there's like an essence, an essence of men, an essence of women, and that we have to be kind of close to the Platonic ideal of those gender roles. But you know, obviously, it's come a long way since then.
Annalee: [00:03:31] It has. Did he believe that these essences were just part of living things or did everything have an essence?
Charlie Jane: [00:03:37] Everything has an essence.
Annalee: [00:03:39] So, chocolate fudge has an essence. And like, I mean, you know, that's a good essence.
Charlie Jane: [00:03:45] I mean, the platonic ideal of chocolate fudge is something I would like in my mouth right now, for sure. But the Platonic ideal of gender stereotypes or whatever is not something I want in my mouth, or anybody's mouth ever. Keep those out of your mouth. Just, out.
Annalee: [00:03:59] So there was actually something that changed, though, in kind of the 1980s. Right? when people started talking about gender essentialism, then they weren't talking about the Platonic ideal of chocolate fudge, right? They were talking about something else.
Charlie Jane: [00:04:12] Yeah, they definitely were. And you know, there was the rise of evolutionary psychology and evolutionary biology, which we're going to talk about later in the episode. But also, there was the rise of a kind of essentialist feminism, or really kind of the surfacing of a strand in feminism that had been there since the beginning. And in the ‘80s, and the ‘90s, there was a schism in feminism between essentialist feminists who believed that there were these innate characteristics that we just heard Julia Serrano talk about. And on the other hand social constructivist feminists who believed that gender roles are created by society and that they are mutable and that they change over time and that they're not really tethered to biology or to something intrinsic to men, women, and anybody else.
[00:04:58] And obviously I feel a lot more sympathy for the social constructivist feminists. People like, I don't know, Judith Butler, like, you know, little side note, I feel like part of the reason I was able to transition and to kind of come into myself as a woman was because I read Judith Butler, and she kind of made me feel like it was all okay. I didn't have to try to embody some narrow definition of what a woman is like. And that gender is always kind of a performance or that gender is kind of a UI that we present to the world in a way, a UX. It doesn't have to be something that is connected to who we were at birth, or that we have to earn in some specific way. And I think that those ideas helped to actually change the experience of not just like cis men and cis women, but also trans people and non-binary people who felt more free to explore gender in different ways.
Annalee: [00:05:53] It's absolutely true. I mean, when I read Judith Butler's first big book, which is called Gender Trouble, it was revolutionizing for me, too. And I was a grad student at Berkeley in the ‘90s, when she came there to teach and I actually took the very first seminar that she taught when she arrived, and I was actually an incredibly annoying student. So I apologize for that. But it was so enlightening, like you said, it was so great to have someone saying gender is just like clothing. You can put it on, you can do what you want with it. You can add a weird scarf if you want, you can wear a funny jacket, those are all valid ways of experiencing gender.
[00:06:33] And, you know, she was really she was going up against people like Catherine McKinnon, and Andrea Dworkin, who'd been working really hard to expand obscenity law and stamp out pornography because they believed that women were essentially always going to be harmed by sexual content in media that was pornographic, and that there was no shifting of that at all. And so it was a really interesting and weird time for feminism. But let's turn to science fiction and how science fiction reflected that whole debate.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:06] Science Fiction has obviously always embraced gender stereotypes to some extent, especially classic science fiction like golden age science fiction, definitely stuck close to the idea that men were men and women were women and that if something different happened, it was weird and possibly alien. That might be a sign that you're really an alien or an android or I don't know.
Annalee: [00:07:27] A changeling.
Charlie Jane: [00:07:29] There was obviously classic science fiction was very much dominated by cis men who… we've talked in the past about john W. Campbell and his ideas of the superior man. And a lot of classic science fiction stories have a subtext of men being competent and women maybe not being quite so much competent. When you think about like, “The Cold Equations” where there's this manly man who finds a girl who's stowed away on his spaceship, and she's kind of a silly girl. But for me, for my money, the classic science fiction story or a classic science fiction episode, that really kind of like deals with essentialism or kind of champions essentialism in this really kind of intense brutal way is the Star Trek: The Original Series episode, actually the final Star Trek: The Original Series episode, “The Turnabout Intruder.”
Annalee: [00:08:18] Oh, yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:19] Which, sidebar Annalee and I actually watched a drag performance of “The Turnabout Intruder” where Kirk and Spock and McCoy were played by women. And that actually added a whole—
Annalee: [00:08:28] That was delightful.
Charlie Jane: [00:08:29] extra layer to it. And of course Uhura was played by a drag queen, and it was lovely. In “The Turnabout Intruder” there's a woman named Dr. Janice Lester, who is one of Kirk's many ex-girlfriends, like he's always meeting his ex-girlfriends and that show for some reason. And she's upset because when they were dating, she was troubled by the fact that women are not allowed to be captains in Starfleet.
Annalee: [00:08:54] What, they weren't?
OST Clip: [00:08:55] Kirk: I never stopped you from going on with your space work.
Lester: Your world of starship captains doesn’t admit women. It isn’t fair.
Kirk: No, it isn’t. You punished and tortured me because of it.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:11] Kirk is like, yeah, it kind of sucks that women can't be captains. But you know, don't take it out on me, man. It's not my fault. You know, I don't make the rules, I just like benefit massively from it.
Annalee: [00:09:22] And don't question them in any way at all.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:25] It's kind of it's kind of mind blowing that, obviously, it was the ‘60s. But Star Trek is supposed to represent this more progressive future and we're getting this message that like, in the 23rd century, we still won't let women be in charge. And you know, I wonder what Captain Janeway thought about all that.
Annalee: [00:09:40] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:09:43] So, Dr. Janice Lester basically hatches a plan to use some weird alien equipment she found to transfer her consciousness into Captain Kirk's body and his consciousness into her body so she can be the captain of the Enterprise and he can be this female scientist who's just pissed off all the time.
Annalee: [00:10:00] Uh-huh, and can never break through the glass ceiling of the spaceship.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:05] Exactly. God, the Starfleet glass ceiling. It's crazy. Anyway.
Annalee: [00:10:08] So where does essentialism come into that? Because for now, I'm feeling really constructivist vibes here. You know like she's kind of switching up her gender here, she's figuring out a way to worm her way to the top. Where does essentialism come in?
Charlie Jane: [00:10:20] So where essentialism comes in is that as soon as she's in Captain Kirk's body, and William Shatner really kind of goes for it with this. Captain Kirk starts acting irrational and off the hook and drama-y and—
Annalee: [00:10:36] Hysterical.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:36] Hysterical. Yes, exactly.
Annalee: [00:10:39] Also, doesn’t he do his nails at one point? I feel like there's a scene where he's like, buffing his nail.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:43] Maybe. I can't remember if that's actually in the actual episode, or if they just added that to the drag version. It might have only been in the drag version, I have to tell you.
Annalee: [00:10:53] Okay, listeners, let us know.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:57] Yeah, we'll have to go back and oh God.
Annalee: [00:10:58] We're not going to rewatch that.
Charlie Jane: [00:10:59] We’re not going to rewatch that episode.
Annalee: [00:11:00] No.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:00] But basically Captain Kirk, I've seen the episode like four or five times over the years. Captain Kirk starts acting very irrational and very kind of like, I'm Captain Kirk, why won't you believe me and just like starts kind of having a hissy fit. Again, William Shatner really just goes way over the top with this because it's William Shatner. And meanwhile, the Kirk who is trapped in like Janice Lester's body starts being more rational and more kind of sensible and trying to reason with people. And that's how Captain Kirk gets his body back in the end is by proving to his friends through his steadiness and his use of reason that he's the real Captain Kirk, even though he's in this other body.
Annalee: [00:11:41] And even though in other episodes, of course, Captain Kirk is like a giant baby who punches things, but okay.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:46] But he's a manly baby, Annalee.
Annalee: [00:11:48] Right, right right.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:48] He gets angry, he gets righteous.
Annalee: [00:11:50] He’s a rational. He is a rational, angry baby.
Charlie Jane: [00:11:54] Yeah. And so, “The Turnabout Intruder” ends up by kind of telling you that this rule against women being Starfleet captains is a good rule. Because look what happens when a woman gets to be in charge, everything just goes to hell. She starts just like janking everything up with her lady feelings, and her lady bits, and everything. And like, basically, I feel like it's a very conservative episode, which is, you know, even for the ‘60s, it's weird for the original Star Trek to be that conservative.
Annalee: [00:12:21] Mm-hmm.
[00:12:21] Yeah, because they do show a lot of characters who have a lot more social authority than they did in the 1960s. You have a Black woman on the bridge and she is an officer. And you have women in all kinds of positions of power, right? So it's weird that they're like, oh, but they can't be captain, of course. That’s such a strange, artificial boundary that they've set up.
[00:12:47] So, feminism went through this phase of essentialism, like actually, within the decades after this particular Star Trek episode. So do we see any feminist science fiction that's reflecting this kind of idea that there's something to women that is like, being a woman kind of affects you down to the fundamental core of your soul or whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:09] There definitely are, I think a lot of feminist science fiction, kind of like toys with the idea that like women are nicer than men, or that if women were in charge, things would be better because women are nicer or more nurturing or kinder, and that they would not be violent, or that they would not—
Annalee: [00:13:26] Right.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:26] And there's a ton of novels and stories about like women-only planets, or women-only societies in which that is kind of suddenly reinforced. And then there's like, one of my favorite science fiction novels of all time, which I'm going to just emphasize, I love this book, I adore this book, I am not going to—
Annalee: [00:13:43] This book is not canceled.
Charlie Jane: [00:13:44] This book is definitely not canceled. I mean, you know. That's not the kind of podcast this is, anyway. But The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. Le Guin, every time I reread it, and I've reread it several times, I'm struck by how, even though it's this amazing thought experiment about gender, in which it's like, on the planet Gethen, aka Winter, everybody is basically neutral, like gender neutral, like neither male nor female, neither men nor women, except for once a month, when they go into kemmer. Which is this weird state where, basically, it's like going into heat almost, they go into heat and then they become either men or women, depending on who they're attracted to, or who they're with, or just the pheromones they're exposed to, or their situation in general. And, in a way, it's very essentialist. It's basically saying that their biology dictates everything about their gender expression, and everything about themselves as a society. We don't meet any Gethenians who decide that even though most of the time they're in this neutral, non-male, non-female state, they're still going to try to identify as one or the other as like who they are, or they're going to identify some other gender or they're going to kind of reject the ways that gender is constructed in their society. Pretty much everybody follows this scheme and it adheres to this kind of idea. And we do meet people called the perverts, who are always one or the other—
Annalee: [00:15:14] They’re always in kemmer, basically.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:15] They’re always in kemmer. And, again, it's a biological difference. Their difference is determined biologically. And they don't seem to have any choice about it. Their gender is still not being constructed in any way beyond like, what their biology dictates.
Annalee: [00:15:32] They have no agency.
Charlie Jane: [00:15:33] Mm-hmm.
Annalee: [00:15:33] Yeah, I think now that you're sort of talking me through the plot of Left Hand of Darkness, which I hadn't really thought of in this way before, it seems like one of the big differences between essentialism and constructivism is that in essentialism, you have no agency. You are your gender, you express your gender, but in constructivism, you can… you can rebuild it. You can make your own gender. And you know, if you want to make it out of silk, that's great. If you want to make it out of poop, that's fine, too. It's whatever you want it to be, basically.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:04] Yeah, and obviously, these things are complicated in the real world. Nobody ever feels like they entirely just make their own gender. This is the thing that Judith Butler kind of had to confront later in her career when she wrote Bodies That Matter.
Annalee: [00:16:17] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:17] The idea that, like, we don't just decide, I'm going to be this gender today. It's partly about our feelings about ourselves and our bodies and partly about our interactions with the world. And it's complicated. It's not something that is as easy or as playful as a lot of us would like it to be. And a lot of people feel very innately one gender, that may or may not correspond to the gender that they were assigned at birth. So, it's complicated.
[00:16:43] But I feel like in Gethen, and part of this is because we're getting most of the story through the lens of Genly Ai than the main character, the visitor from another world—
Annalee: [00:16:52] Who does have a gender.
Charlie Jane: [00:16:53] Who does have a gender and who doesn't really understand Gethenian and culture that well, most of the time. And he insists on assigning the male pronoun to everybody. So we're getting it through his lens. And it's possible that there are complexities that he's not seeing. And in fact, Le Guin did go back and write some stories, or at least one story called “Coming of Age in Karhide” where she gets to see Gethen a little bit, not from Genly Ai’s perspective, but still, it feels like, and this is a common thing with gender thought experiments. You have a gender thought experiment, in which in order to make it work, you're kind of saying that people are just going to be what their biology dictates. And they're just going to be following the path set out for them or whatever.
Annalee: [00:17:35] So you muck around with the biology, but not really with the kind of culture part of that.
Charlie Jane: [00:17:41] Yeah, exactly. And we seldom meet people who are actually questioning it within the society.
Annalee: [00:17:46] Okay, so let's turn to some more contemporary stories about gender essentialism. Tell me what's going on after we have like Le Guin, and after we have people like Andrea Dworkin hanging around talking about essentialism in the ‘70s and ‘80s.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:00] So, like we talked about before, the 1980s and 1990s were this hotbed of essentialist feminism, and there were these big mainstream books by people like Deborah Tannen, who wrote You Just Don’t Understand and John Gray, who wrote Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. There was a really popular discourse, basically saying that men are men and women are women, and you just can't do anything about it. And men are always going to be kind of selfish jerks and women are always going to be kind of codependent and nurturing and needy, and emotionally open and kind of unable to be in charge of anything.
[00:18:34] And so kind of the apotheosis of this comes into the year 2000. When we get the movie, What Women Want, starring Mel Gibson, which…
Annalee: [00:18:43] Oh, God, this is… okay, yes. Continue.
Charlie Jane: [00:18:45] It’s one of my hate-iest movies. Basically, Mel Gibson is a total sexist jerk, who is working in an advertising agency. And he gets a new female boss played by Helen Hunt, who wants them to market more products to women and Mel Gibson is just like “bruhbruhbrubrubruhh.”
WWW Clip: [00:19:04] Mel Gibson: I'm gonna be the one guy on Earth who knows what women want, how they think, and why they do those cuckoo things they do.
Narrator: The story of a man's man who's listening to what women want.
Woman: Don't fall for a guy—
Annalee: [00:19:17] I feel like my most burning memory from that film is when he finally is trying to use female products. And he's like shaving his legs and doing depilation and he's like, oh my gosh, this is actually really hard and painful. Oh, women are more macho than I realized!
WWW Clip: [00:19:33] Narrator: And getting in touch—
[Ripping sound of tape or wax coming off]
Mel Gibson: Oh, God!
Narrator: With his feminine side.
Girl: Dad, what are you doing?
Mel Gibson: Exfoliating?
Charlie Jane: [00:19:46] He puts on pantyhose and gets electrocuted and somehow this leads to him being able to hear the thoughts of women but not men. And obviously it’s 2000. Nobody thinks about can he hear the thoughts of non-binary people? Nobody worries about that.
Annalee: [00:19:59] Yeah, there's… all right does he hear trans women? No, there are no trans women. Forget it.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:03] There's nothing but cis women and cis men in this universe and so he can hear the thoughts of cis women. The idea of the movie is that this basically enables him to become a more sensitive person. But what really happens is he becomes more manipulative. He plagiarizes his boss, he steals her work, he becomes better at selling shit to women, he becomes better at marketing to women, and kind of playing to their emotional needs because he now understands on another level. He does save a woman from committing suicide because he can hear her suicidal thoughts.
Annalee: [00:20:36] So, he does one nice thing.
Charlie Jane: [00:20:39] He does one good thing and he's kind of makes a token effort to be more sensitive by the end.
WWW Clip: [00:20:44] Mel Gibson: Mikey, no games.
Helen Hunt: Just sports. Alright, we should write that down.
Mel Gibson: All right.
Helen Hunt: Boy, can I be?
Mell Gibson: What?
Helen Hunt: Well, can I be honest with you?
Mel Gibson: Please do.
Helen Hunt: Before I came here, I heard you were a tough, chauvinistic prick.
Mel Gibson: I didn’t know you were gonna be that honest. You must have looked so forward to meeting me.
Helen Hunt: I was dreading it. I had this whole other person built up in my mind.
Mel Gibson: Well, since we’re sharing, I heard a few things about you, too.
Helen Hunt: Oh, yes, I'm sure. I'm the man-eating bitch Darth Vader of the ad world.
Mel Gibson: Verbatim.
Helen Hunt: Really? Alright, well, nice to meet you. That's not who I am at all.
Mel Gibson: Just for the record. I don't think that's who you are.
Helen Hunt: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Charlie Jane: [00:21:28] So, you know, you might think that this is a movie about better male-female communication and breaking down these gender stereotypes. But in fact, the underlying assumption of the movie is that men are incapable of understanding women, and that men are incapable of having any empathy or awareness of women and basically men are innately jerks. Like I said before, the only way you're going to get past this if there's some kind of weird, pantyhose electrocution thing that causes men to get superpowers.
Annalee: [00:21:58] Magic!
Charlie Jane: [00:21:58] Yes, basically magic is the only way that men are going to be able to understand each other. And you know, What Women Want was like part of a whole thread of these comedies about gender that show like, oh, can men and women really understand each other? Like When Harry Met Sally.
WHMS Clip: Men and women can't be friends because no man can be friends with a woman that he finds attractive. He always wants to have sex with her.
So you're saying that a man can be friends with a woman he finds unattractive?
No, you pretty much want to nail them, too.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:28] Or you know, He’s Just Not That Into You.
HJNTIY Clip: [00:22:31] You don't ever feel like we're going against nature by not getting married.
No. Going against nature is like the cat who suckled that monkey.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:40] How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days.
HtLaGi10D Clip: I could start by dating a guy and then drive him away doing everything girls do wrong and relationships.
Charlie Jane: [00:22:48] Down With Love. He Said, She Said. Also, Shallow Hal.
Annalee: [00:22:55] Oh no.
Shallow Hal Clip: [00:22:55] Really? From this moment on whenever you meet someone in the future, only going to see the inner beauty. Her heart. Her soul.
He hypnotized you!
You're saying that all the pretty girls I've met lately aren't really pretty.
Hal Larson is dating a vision only he can see. Oh, there she is, there’s—
Annalee: [00:23:12] And so then he hooks up with a woman who's fat because of course, a fat woman could never really be beautiful. She's only beautiful on the inside. So somehow, Shallow Hal forgot about hot fat ladies, but even though it's starring a hot fat guy!
Charlie Jane: [00:23:25] I know. You know, it’s so funny. Because like, I want to ask jack Black about that if I ever meet him.
Annalee: [00:23:30] I wonder if he regrets doing that movie. But anyway, whatever.
Charlie Jane: [00:23:33] Well, yeah.
Annalee: [00:23:34] We'll never know
Charlie Jane: [00:23:35] Probably not.
Annalee: [00:23:35] Dear Jack, we're wondering. How do you feel? Okay, so Charlie Jane, let's just sum it up here. Like, why is essentialism a problem, exactly?
Charlie Jane: [00:23:47] You know, it's one of those things where, again, a lot of feminism was essentialist back in the day, and now a lot of trans exclusionary feminism is still very essentialist. And you might think, well, it's feminism, it's good for women. But actually, a 2018 PLoS One paper found a strong correlation between believing in gender essentialism on the one hand and opposing gender equality.
Annalee: [00:24:09] Interesting.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:09] Yeah, and the researchers write, “Gender essentialist thinking is associated with support for discrimination and inequality.” So basically, maybe not surprisingly, when you prop up these stereotypes about how Dr. Janice Lester can never be a starship captain, people might come away thinking that women shouldn't be starship captains and in general, women shouldn't be in charge.
Annalee: [00:24:32] Yeah. All right. We're gonna take a quick break and when we come back, we're going to talk about scientific sexism.
[00:24:39] Segment change music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:44] Today, I want to recommend to you an award-winning podcast called Unwell: A Midwestern Gothic Mystery.
Annalee: [00:24:50] Unwell is an audio fiction serial set in a fictional town in rural Ohio.
Charlie Jane: [00:24:56] The show uses ghosts, the supernatural and other types of gothic storytelling to examine the fallibility of memory, building community, and family, and being queer in the rural Midwest.
Annalee: [00:25:08] It's a slow burn mystery with occasional moments of more traditional horror.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:12] Unwell is an episodic audio fiction series so be sure to listen from the beginning to hear the whole story.
Annalee: [00:25:19] Season three of Unwell is currently releasing new episodes.
Charlie Jane: [00:25:22] Find Unwell on all streaming platforms.
[00:25:31] You know, previously we did an episode about scientific racism. But maybe now we should talk about scientific sexism. What is scientific sexism?
Annalee: [00:25:38] So, let's keep beating up on Western metaphysics and go all the way back to the ancient Greeks. So, Aristotle is famous for saying that women are basically mutilated men. You know, I think Plato probably thought that was a cool idea, too. This idea kind of persists for really hundreds of years in the West. And there's a really interesting book by the historian Thomas Laqueur called Making Sex, where he kind of talks about how over time, women have been portrayed versus men. And he says that in the Middle Ages, women were thought of as the inversion of men, and like, a vagina is just like an inverted penis. And so, everything about women, whether it was their emotions, or their bodies, was just an inversion of men.
[00:26:28] And it's interesting, because as science and medicine are developing out of these ideas in the west, we see women constantly being viewed kind of as damaged versions of men or backwards versions of men.
Charlie Jane: [00:26:41] It makes me wonder about all the stuff that people put on trans women, because I feel like all this same rhetoric is often used against us. And it makes me feel like there's maybe internalized Ancient Greek misogyny being turned against us.
Annalee: [00:26:55] It's a very long history of understanding the female body in this way. And if you skip ahead to the modern age, you can see how these ideas play out in medicine and science. There's a really widely understood idea called medical misogyny, which is really referring to a whole bunch of different problems and errors that come from the idea that women are just a version of men, that's kind of a crappier version. But as a result, we don't really need to study women when we do testing of, say, drugs, for example. And you know, it's not that people who are involved in medicine in the sciences and say, the 20th century, actually believe Aristotle and are like, oh, women are damaged men. It's just that they have a kind of unconscious bias and invent all kinds of reasons like, oh, well, women might become pregnant. We don't know if drug testing on women will affect their fertility, so we should just leave women out of it. Plus, women are just men anyway.
[00:27:47] It's so amazing how long this lasted. It wasn't until 1993, that the FDA and the NIH in the United States mandated that women had to be included in clinical trials and we're still seeing fall out from stuff like this.
[00:28:05] The anthropologist Kate Clancy has done a lot of work on this. And she's been studying how people who get periods were affected by COVID vaccines. And apparently, when COVID vaccines were going through clinical trials, a lot of these were very fast trials, nobody was really checking to see if women would have a different reaction than men. Nobody was really checking to see whether these vaccines would have an effect on, say, menstrual cycles. And indeed, it did. And so all of these people who get periods, once they started getting vaccinated were like, uh, hello, this is affecting my period. And it hadn't been… it either hadn't been studied at all, or it simply hadn't been reported. And so people were getting vaccinated and then discovering holy crap, there's like this weird thing happening with my menstrual cycle. I have no idea why. And then on Twitter, people started comparing notes.
[00:29:02] And so Kate Clancy is gathering together a ton of information about this and is going to publish about it soon. But medical misogyny and medical sexism also lead to another problem, which is that medical issues that are specific to people with uteruses and ovaries often get ignored, or worse, it's actually blamed on psychological problems. And that's why endometriosis, which is incredibly painful, is often either misdiagnosed, or women are just told you're just having phantom pain, just ignore it. And it's not that like giant chunks of tissue are growing out of control all through your internal organs. Don't worry.
[00:29:42] And it still happens. A lot of people who suffer from endometriosis just don't get diagnosed for a really long time. And I mean, this affected me personally because I was having a problem where I kept menstruating, like for two years and I went to doctor after doctor and I was like this seems weird, like I don't like bleeding all the time and one doctor told me, it's just perimenopause, don't worry about it. And that seemed wrong to me. And so I went to another doctor who said I needed to do yoga. And then I went to another doctor. And finally, third doctor said, you know, why don't we do an MRI and checked it out and discovered, oh, my uterus is full of tumors.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:26] That is such a—
Annalee: [00:30:26] And so, they weren’t deadly tumors. My doctor reassured me like, it would have been fine if you'd left it, it just would have been, you know, more bleeding forever. So got rid of that uterus, by the way, the story has a happy ending.
Charlie Jane: [00:30:40] Yeah, I mean, I remember that. It was super upsetting at the time and hearing you talk about it now is super upsetting in the present. And like you can kind of tell what bodies are valued or seen as valid by who gets real medical treatment and whose needs get studied and it really is true that anything other than assist white dude’s body is considered kind of an adjunct or an add on or just, you know—
Annalee: [00:31:06] An inversion.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:08] An inversion, or just a variation that we're just gonna like, oh, you know, well, those also exist, but you know, who cares, right?
Annalee: [00:31:15] Yeah. That's why it's so great to have people out there like Jen Gunter, who's the gynecologist who has written a couple of great books debunking myths about having a vagina, she has The Vagina Bible, which is a super great book, she has—
Charlie Jane: [00:31:29] That’s my favorite kind of bible, I'm just gonna say.
Annalee: [00:31:31] Yeah, mine, too. She has a new book out about menopause that I'm super excited to read.
Charlie Jane: [00:31:36] Obviously, there's a whole bunch of reasons behind this. But what if we had people who aren't cis men doing more medical experiments and more science? Might that, you know, maybe make a little bit of a difference in how these things happen?
Annalee: [00:31:49] Yeah. And that is another big issue. When we talk about scientific sexism, one of the things that's causing these problems is that there's misogyny in the practice of science. So, you remember Kate Clancy, who I mentioned before, she's the person who's studying how COVID vaccines affected menstrual cycles. She did an amazing study back in 2014, about people experiencing sexual harassment in the field while they were doing scientific research. So, whether they were going out on a boat doing research in the ocean, or going into remote areas, doing environmental science, or studying animals in the field. What she did was she just surveyed women and asked them what they'd experienced. She surveyed 142 men and 516 women. They were working in a wide variety of fields. And of those people who were surveyed, 64% said that they had experienced sexual harassment. And 20% said that they'd been victims of sexual assault in the field. And this was especially true for younger women who were more at risk, and also people who are starting their careers, right. So these are people who are choosing whether or not to become scientists, and they're being harassed.
[00:33:08] And I mean, 64% experiencing harassment is an enormous number. And you have to understand when you're out in the field, like I've been out on the field, for archeological digs, and you're in the middle of nowhere. It’s not like you can go to your aunt's house and be like, I need to stay here tonight, or even call the police if it’s something really bad. You're stuck with these people for weeks and weeks and weeks, and it can be incredibly terrifying.
[00:33:35] So that's one reason why we see women leaving the field is just that the barriers to entry are really tough.
[00:33:42]There was also a study that just came out just this year in Science, from a group of people at the Harvard Business School. And this one is really interesting, because they analyzed biomedical patents filed between 1976 and 2010. And they're just looking at medical devices, basically, and anything related to medicine. And they found that patents that had all-female research teams were 35% more likely than all-male teams to focus on women's health. So, in other words, just having women there means that you're suddenly going to get more medical interventions and medical devices for women. And these researchers called this an inventor gender gap. And they estimated that since 1976, we've missed out on 1000s and 1000s, of female-focused inventions that could have helped people medically.
Charlie Jane: [00:34:34] Man, this is giving me a flashback to that book that you and I did back in the day. She’s Such a Geek, where we kind of talked about cis women and trans women in the sciences and tech and geeky fields. And just like the stories that we were getting from people about the harassment that they dealt with, the micro aggressions, the macro aggressions, and just all the stuff that people do to try to push women and trans people out of the sciences. It's horrifying.
Annalee: [00:35:02] Yeah, everything from small things like women being told that they can't wear a skirt when they're in the field to really major things like you said. Like being told that they're too stupid to do science.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:12] There was some really, really heinous stuff in there.
Annalee: [00:35:15] So, all that is going on. But meanwhile, there's another strand of scientific sexism.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:19] Evolutionary psychology!
Annalee: [00:35:22] Yes, evolutionary psychology.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:24] My hate-iest.
Annalee: [00:35:25] This continues to be a growth area in the practice of scientific sexism.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:30] I think you mean a tumor in the practice of science.
Annalee: [00:35:33] It’s still growing.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:34] It’s growing, ugh.
Annalee: [00:35:34] And it's not scientific. It's a pseudoscience.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:37] It's very pseudo.
Annalee: [00:35:40] But this is a field that wants to explain our psychology, everything from our hopes and fears to our desires and our preferences as a result of our evolutionary history during the Paleolithic.
Charlie Jane: [00:35:52] On the savanna.
Annalee: [00:35:52] On the savanna. Well, it's funny because they always often say, the African Paleolithic because, of course, humans were scattered all over the planet. There were lots and lots of people in East Asia that, you know, were hanging around, but we're not interested in them, we’re only interested in this one type of Paleolithic experience.
[00:36:15] So, basically, I mean, this fits in very much with gender essentialism, because a lot of evolutionary psychologists really believe that we don't have agency when it comes to a lot of our feelings and actions and desires. Not that we can't control them, but that we feel these impulses that will never go away. There's simply no way to get rid of them because they're built in through evolution.
Charlie Jane: [00:36:39] And they lead to men just naturally having to be dominant and shitty, and that's just, it’s his nature. And like cis men are just, that's just what they got to do.
Annalee: [00:36:49] Yeah, it's always used to justify male and female stereotypes in a really pernicious way. And a lot of this gets distilled in a 1990s book by Robert Wright called The Moral Animal. So this book is coming out right at the same time, as you're seeing Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus. And in this book, he's very interested in showing how humans are similar to non-human animals. So he gives us a lot of little sort of homilies and just so stories about how animals, non-human animals behave, and then compares them to humans.
[00:37:24] And so I'm going to read you a quote from him. And just a quick trigger warning, this is going to deal with rape. So if you don't want to hear about that, just skip ahead a couple minutes. He says, “A female, in sheerly Darwinian terms, is better off mating with a good rapist. A big, strong, sexually aggressive male. Her male offspring will then be more likely to be big, strong and sexually aggressive. So female resistance should be favored by natural selection as a way to avoid having a son who is an inept rapist.”
[00:38:00] Now, this is a story about orangutans. But he turns it into a parable about people. And it's very much intended to kind of illustrate the way men and women romance each other. That men should be the aggressors, and women should be reluctant because only the most aggressive aggressor, is really the best for the mate.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:17] So basically, there's no cis men who aren't rapists. There's just really good rapists and kind of—
Annalee: [00:38:24] Crappy rapists.
Charlie Jane: [00:38:24] Crappy rapists. It’s just, the difference is how good you are at at rape, basically.
Annalee: [00:38:29] One of the phrases that evolutionary psychologists like to use is they'll say that something is an evolutionary dead end. So a non-raping dude is an evolutionary dead end. So, when his book came out, it became incredibly controversial, obviously, for you know, all the reasons you might expect. And Time magazine in 1994 did a cover story about this book with the headline, “Infidelity—It Might Be In Our Genes.” So of course, Wright went on Charlie Rose, where he said this:
Wright Clip: [00:39:00] But in general, women have more trouble separating sex from affection, whereas men sometimes have a dualistic approach. That one I'd be interested in sexually, that one I might like to marry. And it's true that it seems as if, this is not a proven theory, but there's good evidence that one of the ways men put a woman in one class or another, unconsciously, that is, is to take into account whether she seems to be highly promiscuous. Men do not tend to find highly promiscuous women attractive as, you know, as future wives. And that's controversial for obvious reasons. I'm not saying it's good. I'm not saying we can't fight it.
Charlie Jane: [00:39:39] I just need to go soak my head in a bowl of warm clam chowder now for like the rest of the day.
Annalee: [00:39:45] Yeah, so this was a very influential work of evolutionary psychology and Mari Ruti who is a University of Toronto professor and the author of a book called The Age of Scientific Sexism, which came out in 2015. She talks about Wright and she says it's amazing how much of evolutionary psychology seems to be about using science to justify returning to 1950s gender roles, or maybe even Victorian gender roles. I mean, it's interesting how much Wright actually talks about how Victorian gender roles, of course, had problems. But he says, the Victorian ideal of repression actually had a good side, because it kind of prevented all the rampant raping—
Charlie Jane: [00:40:28] Oh my God.
Annalee: [00:40:28] That was going on. But I want to read a quote from Ruti, about evolutionary psychology and kind of the problems that she finds with it, as a critical analyst. So she says, “At the core of evolutionary psychology is the belief that every detail of human romantic behavior, which is often called mating behavior, can be explained by the evolutionary imperative to produce as many viable offspring as possible. That is, romance is a matter of sex and sex is invariably a matter of making babies. And it doesn't seem to much matter how the babies are made, as long as they get made successfully. When it comes to homosexuality, evolutionary pychology is truly in the Middle Ages, for a theory that reduces all human sexual behavior to the reproductive impulse, obviously, cannot account for same sex desire, except as an ‘evolutionary dead end’.”
Charlie Jane: [00:41:24] So basically, anything that's not heinous and awful, and just like Hobbesian is an evolutionary dead end. It's just all. Just an endless service of cul de sacs.
Annalee: [00:41:34] It's basically the idea that we are all in transactional relationships with the opposite sex. So you might be able to have maybe a nice intra-gender relationship, but inter-gender relationships are these transactional experiences. And again, we don't have a lot of agency over how it happens, right? There's this idea that you can repress your impulses. And this is something that Steven Pinker talks about a lot, too. He's a Harvard evolutionary psychologist who's quite well known. And he talks a lot about, well, we can act against our impulses and act against the way we've evolved. But we can't ever change how we feel, basically.
Charlie Jane: [00:42:16] Yeah, and what's really jumping out at me here is that much like those essentialist feminists we talked about these people probably see themselves as liberal or at least somewhat as enlightened, but they're really reinforcing these super crappy, kind of right wing ideas about men, women, and like, there's nobody else.
Annalee: [00:42:32] Yeah, in fact, one of the things that I love about Mari Ruti’s book is that she talks about how evolutionary psychologists are super invested in how scientific their work is. And they often will accuse their detractors of being creationists or living in a fantasy world. And she's like, but it's strange how similar evolutionary psychology’s views of gender are with Christian views. And they really sound like conservative Christian rhetoric. And so they're pretending to be scientific, but they actually are secretly these really reactionary Christians.
Charlie Jane: [00:43:07] I feel like that happens a lot. And so we've been talking about men and women and the opposite sex and stuff. But how do trans people fit into all this?
Annalee: [00:43:15] That's a super good question. Geoffrey Miller is a really well known evolutionary psychologist who is at University of New Mexico, and he wrote this book called the The Mating Mind. And he actually has some thoughts about this, which he shared in 2019 on the conservative YouTube channel, called The Rubin Report.
Miller Clip: [00:43:34] There's a much larger group of people who I think are using trans issues as a kind of wedge to destroy the gender binary. Or to kind of muddy the waters. Male and female are evolved strategies that exist because over 1000s of generations, they were the paths to successful reproduction. If you're not clearly male and functioning as a male, or you're not clearly female and functioning as a female, you’re a genetic dead end. So selection hammers against any ambiguity there. So it's not surprising that the vast majority of humans alive today clearly identify as one sex or the other.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:25] And so he talks about like, challenging the gender binary as though that's the worst thing we could possibly do.
Annalee: [00:44:31] I know he’s, again, he's using this term evolutionary dead end. And he's very careful. I should say before this clip, that we have to say, he's not against the idea of people standing up for their rights to be transgender, but you know, just descriptively and scientifically, they are an evolutionary dead end.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:50] Some of my best friends are transgender.
Annalee: [00:44:53] He doesn't even say that actually, like so he doesn't even take it that far.
Charlie Jane: [00:44:56] I'm not transphobic, but… dot dot dot.
Annalee: [00:44:58] Yeah.
Charlie Jane: [00:45:00] Yeah, so I mean, his comments really remind me of a lot of TERF rhetoric and a lot of the stuff we've been hearing from some of these people who are pushing these theories about rapid onset gender dysphoria, which we talked about in an earlier episode.
Annalee: [00:45:12] Yeah, I mean, I think that rapid onset gender dysphoria, you know, people like Abigail Shreier, who just wrote a book called Irreversible Damage, which is about how trans children are this kind of abomination. This is all playing into the same school of thought, it all grows out of evolutionary psychology and this idea that there's a scientific validity to these gender roles. It's not just a moral issue. It's not just a philosophical issue. It is just “descriptive science.”
[00:45:45] And, you know, the other thing that we're seeing, to wrap this up, I would say in the modern day that's growing out of evolutionary psychology is stuff like James Damore’s famous Google memo, which was called “Google’s Ideological Echo Chamber.” It actually got James Damore fired after a long controversy. And basically, he was an engineer at Google and wrote this eight or nine page memo about how Google's diversity policies, in terms of hiring women and BIPOC to elevated positions in the company were doomed to fail, because evolutionary psychology shows that women can't be in these leadership positions. And he has a section of his memo, where he talks about how women generally have a stronger interest in people rather than things, which is why they might not be very good software engineers, and that also women tend to be more neurotic overall. And so they're gonna have more anxiety and stress. And so that might explain why women are always complaining all the time about sexism, because they're just more stressed. You know, they're just more stressed in general.
[00:46:50] And the thing that was so funny was that after this memo came out, of course, people were freaking out about it. It was passed around online a lot. And there was a great article by Megan Molteni, in Wired, where she talked to some of the evolutionary psychologists that Damore cited in his memo, and even they didn't agree with it. They said he'd actually misapplied their research and that he'd taken these broad general studies across huge portions of the population and tried to apply them to this really, really specific narrow example of the Google workplace. And they were like, that just doesn't work. Google is already selecting for women who are interested in things. So you're not going to get this thing of, well, women are people oriented. It's like, dude, they work at Google. They like tech. That's not the issue.
Charlie Jane: [00:47:39] Yeah, it's this thing where like, people are like, well, it's science. You can't argue with science, but part of how you get pseudoscience. And we see this again, and again, in scientific racism, scientific sexism, and scientific transphobia. You get this thing where people use science to confirm their priors. And their priors are always these backward ass stereotypes that they've decided to cling to that are just, it’s like, I set out to prove that me having whatever I want, and doing whatever I feel like is natural and good, according to science. And like, well, of course, you can't question my methods. Because, it’s just… It’s ridiculous.
Annalee: [00:48:16] Yeah, one of the tricks that they'll use in their rhetoric is to say, this isn't a moral observation. This is just a realistic observation.
Charlie Jane: [00:48:24] “Realistic.”
Annalee: [00:48:24] But, somehow these quote unquote, “realistic” observations always wind up sounding a lot like Christianity. So, you know—
Charlie Jane: [00:48:34] Funny, that.
Annalee: [00:48:34] Funny how that is in a Western context that our so-called science, when it's pseudoscience winds up sounding like the most popular Western religion. So, basically, it's bad science and—
Charlie Jane: [00:48:47] And they should feel bad.
Annalee: [00:48:50] Alright, thank you so much for listening. You've been hearing another episode of Our Opinions Are Correct, you can help support the show by becoming a patron on Patreon. We’re at patreon.com/ouropinionsarecorrect. And we give you audio extras, and we give you a little essays and we talk to you and we say hi. You can also follow us on Twitter at @OOACpod. And thank you so much to our amazing producer Veronica Simonetti. And thanks to Chris Palmer for the music. Talk to you in a couple weeks.
Together: [00:49:21] Bye!
[00:49:22] Outro music plays. Drums with a bass line including bass drops.