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from Books & Reviews
The Politics of Gender
Book Review: Why Men Rule: A Theory of Male Dominance, by Steven
Goldberg, Ph.D. (1993, Open Court).
"It is terribly self-destructive," Steven Goldberg tells us,
"to refuse to accept one's own nature, and the joys and powers it
invests."
In this scholarly and meticulous essay, Dr. Goldberg, Chairman of the
Sociology Department at City University of New York, analyzes the distortions
of gender studies, which have become a "sacred cow" of academia.
Thus it is no surprise that over a period of ten years, his first work
on this subject (The Inevitability of Patriarchy) was turned down
69 times by 55 publishers, earning him recognition in The Guinness Book
of World Records for the most rejections of a manuscript before final
acceptance.
"We live in a time when many academics like to believe that the
variations of human behavior and social institutions are virtually unlimited,"
Dr. Goldberg says. But society must, to a certain extent, conform itself
to psycho-physiological reality.
"In real life, most parents want to prepare their children for
the real world, and are unwilling to sacrifice them to the demands of ideology--which
is what they do when they grossly misrepresent the world..."
An analysis of sex-related differences is important to sexual-reorientation
therapists, because it opens discussion of an essential question: Is
there a human nature to which man must conform? Or are gender
and sexual orientation infinitely malleable?
Socialization "does not consist primarily of parents telling little
boys to be 'aggressive' and little girls to be 'nurturant'--these tendencies
exist without socialization--but of developing the skills and attitudes
that make best use of such tendencies as already exist." He adds,
"To believe that males should not have a stronger dominance
tendency...is to hope for the impossible."
It is the idea of male dominance which most annoys feminists, Dr. Goldberg
says, but, "It does not matter whether the reader enjoys the idea
that the male dominates and protects the female, or detests it"--it
is simply, he says, a fact.
"Every society recognizes a particular emotional difference between
men and women...the male strength and dominance, and the female gentleness
and endurance portrayed in our novels and movies mirror not merely our
society's view of the emotional natures of men and women, but the views
of every society that has ever existed..."
Science reveals empirical realities which we must recognize. However,
"empirical analyses alone cannot find the answers to moral-political
questions." Science speaks only of what is, while social-moral
philosophy tells us what should be.
For example, a recent study found some evidence that promiscuity is
in a man's genes. If this study is correct, then it is "normal and
natural" for a man to be tempted to adultery; but we do not build
a social-moral philosophy around the idea that faithful marriage is therefore
impossible. In fact, recognizing that stable families are vital to society,
we might use our knowledge that "promiscuity is in the genes"
to strengthen social sanctions against adultery, thus making unfaithfulness
less likely.
Valuing of Male Attributes Distorts Feminist Reasoning
Feminism was once dominated by the idea that sex-related tendencies
are purely cultural in origin. Today, he says, most feminists now recognize
that physiological differences play at least some part in sex-related
behaviors. But many feminists clearly value masculine qualities more highly
than feminine ones--thus, there has been a long effort to establish the
idea that women have been less prominent in professions like mathematics,
philosophy, and music composition simply because society has socialized
them not to compete in these areas.
A recent study of the top 4,000 executives at the Fortune 500
companies found that men outnumbered women 3,993 to 19.
"The higher the status--the more competitive the position--the
lower will be the percentage of women," he says. But many feminists
claim that it is simply bias and discrimination that has prevented equal
representation. However, Dr. Goldberg disagrees.
Males occupy more high-status roles because they are motivated more
strongly to achieve that high status. He gives many examples of
what appear to be role-reversals in other societies--where women do the
usual men's work, and men do the "women's work"--but invariably,
he says, the apparent "man's work" the woman is doing is lower-status
in that particular society, and is therefore less sought-after by the male.
"Males occupy higher-level roles because high status motivates the
male more strongly."
He does not argue that either sex is uniquely associated with competence.
But he does say that few women would devote the lifelong expenditure of
energy necessary to achieve such positions, and any increase of women in
these positions will be slight. "In the future, America may well have
a female leader, but we shall never see a time when males fail to attain
the overwhelming percentage of top hierarchical positions."
When Females Supervise Males
"Even if the male's greater dominance tendency were over-ridden
and large numbers of women placed in positions of authority, it is unlikely
that stability could be maintained. Even in our present male bureaucracies,
problems arise when a subordinate is more 'aggressive' than his superior
and, if the more 'aggressive' executive is not allowed to rise in the bureaucracy,
delicate psychological adjustments must be made. Such adjustments are also
necessary when a male bureaucrat has a female superior...It seems likely...that
if women shared equally [with men] in power at each level of the bureaucracy,
chaos would result..."
In every society, women are responsible for the care and rearing of
the young, "the single most important function served in any society,
or in nature itself."
The Universality of Patriarchy
An idea that undergirds much of feminist thinking is that patriarchy,
matriarchy and "equiarchy" are all equally possible, and that
there is no natural order which decrees that men will rule in every society.
Accordingly, feminists tend to say that our expectations of men and women
are culturally determined, and therefore infinitely malleable. Many feminist
writers "camouflage their intellectual inadequacy behind a facade
of scholarship...and...a profusion of footnotes...One would be hard put
to find another group that talked so much about science, without doing
any science."
"In science," Dr. Goldberg says, "...truth is the perfect
defense, and nature will give you a lift only if you're going her way."
Our physiology imposes limitations on social possibility, he warns us,
and society must not expect its institutions to ignore these limitations.
Of all social institutions, there is probably none whose universality
is granted so unanimously by anthropologists as patriarchy. "There
is not, nor has there ever been, any society that even remotely failed
to associate authority and leadership in suprafamilial areas with the male.
There are no borderline cases." He says there has never been
a matriarchy. "If the reader insists on maintaining a belief in a
once-existent matriarchal society, all we can do is demand evidence more
convincing than his desire that there should have
been one."
Misinformation has a long life. Dr. Goldberg studied 32 introductory
sociology textbooks, and discovered that all but two begin their chapters
on sex roles with the claim that anthropologist Margaret Mead said the
Tchambuli of New Guinea reversed male-female sex roles.
Dr. Mead had, in fact, had been denying this claim for fifty years.
In a review of Dr. Goldberg's book, she acknowledged that "It is true,
as Professor Goldberg points out, that all the claims so gliby made about
societies ruled by women are nonsense. We have no reason to believe that
they ever existed...men have always been the leaders in public affairs,
and the final authorities at home."
"More than sloppiness is at work here," says Dr. Goldberg.
"Some of the authors of current texts have admitted to me in private
that they know the Tchambuli are not an exception." He adds,
"We used to call this 'lying.'"
Cognitive Differences Between the Sexes
Men are more dominant and driven toward high-status positions, and this
explains some of their preeminence in social heirarchies. But there is
another factor--there are also cognitive differences between men and women.
Feminists, he says, often assume that women, if not for social conditioning,
would be just as capable as men of a career in nuclear physics. In fact,
a simple and accurate descriptive statement--such as "women are not
as good at math as men"--often evokes antagonism. "Rejections
of descriptions because one does not like them are hardly justified,"
he says. "We know that men and women think and behave differently,
whatever the cause...The social is given its limits and direction by the
physiological...Falsity of assumption cannot be balanced by a doubling
of emotional investment."
"There exists in our culture," he says, "a powerful hunger
to believe that gender differences in cognitive aptitudes are exclusively
cultural." Men surpass women in dealing with high-level logic and
abstraction, which leads them to excel in math, composing, chess, philosophy,
and so forth--fields in which, he says, there is no woman of genius.
Women equal or surpass men on all cognitive tests not related to mathematical
reasoning or associated aptitudes, although neither sex is more intelligent
than the other, he says, when we speak of intelligence in a broader sense--in
all its different forms.
He stresses that none of this information justifies discrimination against
the woman who happens to be as qualified as a man in a male-dominated field--but
she must be aware, realistically, that "she can never hope to live
in a society that does not attach feminine expectations to women."
Patriarchy, Male Dominance, and Male Attainment
Three factors are universal throughout all known cultures: patriarchy,
male dominance and male attainment. He argues that these tendencies are
manifestations of neuro-endocrinological differences between men and women,
and that male dominance serves obvious survival functions.
He defines patriarchy as the occupation, by males, of the overwhelming
percentage of upper heirarchical positions in political and other heirarchies.
Male attainment is defined as acquisition by males of the high-status
roles--whatever these may be, in any given society.
Male dominance is indicated when both sexes believe that dominance in
male-female relationships resides with the male, and that social expectations
and authority systems reflect this balance of power.
Wherever there is a hierarchy, high-status role, or member of the opposite
sex present, he says, the male more readily and more strongly responds
with--
- Competitiveness (the impulse for attainment and dominance);
- Relative suppression of other emotions and needs, and a sacrifice of
rewards (health, family, relaxation and so forth) that conflict with the
need for attainment and dominance;
- Whatever actions are required for attainment of the aforementioned
position, status and dominance. (Society, he says, conforms to nature by
recognizing and institutionalizing this male ambition.)
If patriarchy, male dominance and male attainment are indeed a function
of human physiology (as he believes they are), then "the emotional,
behavioral, and--ultimately--social-institutional manifestations...may
be inevitable..."
The theory does not imply that males perform better than females
in their positions, but that they are more strongly motivated to attain
these high-status positions. He also says, "I am in no way implying
that there is some law of nature which requires that the males of a species
should dominate...No scientific analysis of empirical relationships
can ever entail a social policy (what is cannot entail what should
be)."
The Physiological Roots of Male Dominance
"There is an enormous amount of evidence," he says, "which
demonstrates beyond doubt that that the testicularly-generated fetal hormonalization
of the male central nervous system promotes earlier and more extensive
maturation of the brain structures that mediate between male hormones and
dominance behavior; this makes the male hypersensitive to the presence,
later on, of the hormones which energize dominance emotions and behavior,
and result in his stronger tendency to respond to the environment with
dominance behavior."
He mentions the cases where a boy was raised as a female through removal
of the external male genitalia, and socialization as a girl; but the experiment
was unsuccessful because fetal hormonal masculinization had already occurred.
"As the evidence demonstrates conclusively," he says, "dominance
tendency is primarily a result of hormonal development and not primarily
of anatomy, gender identity, or the socialization that reflects anatomy
and gender identity."
In his discussion, Dr. Goldberg reminds of us some important principles
of logical argumentation. The fact that some women are more dominant than
some men does not invalidate the statistical fact that men are, on average,
more dominant than women. Furthermore, when he says that women will "never"
form a majority in the upper levels of corporate hierarchies, he reminds
us that science speaks in the language of probability.
For psychotherapists, Why Men Rule should lead in a useful direction.
An acknowledgment of physiologically-based sex differences could help explain
the particular problems common to same-sex love relationships (jealousy,
competition, violence, instability) which some clinicians believe to be
inherent to any same-sex coupling. While gay advocates see the supposed
"equality" of same-sex coupling to be an advantage, reparative
therapists often theorize that sexual sameness actually fosters inherent
competitiveness. (For example, dog trainers know that two female dogs,
or two males dogs, never live together as equals; whereas male-female
pairs live in relative harmony, because they do not compete within the
same dominance heirarchy.)
Why Men Rule represents one step toward honest inquiry into the
vast, unexplored, and compelling area of physiologically-based sex differences.
Updated: 8 February 2008
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