Foreword

If, like me, you turn to the very end of a book first, then you’ll see that this one has been a full decade in the making. It’s not a follow-up to my account of another racket that I encountered when working for the Home Office. That racket concerned immigration - the book being The Great Immigration Scandal - and my revelations led to the resignation of the government minister in charge, Beverley Hughes. The present book concerns a much bigger problem - in part a political scandal in which the Home Office is very much involved - but that‘s just a coincidence. And essentially this is more a popular science book than another exposé.

When I blew the whistle on the immigration scandal some four years ago, it provoked the predictable ‘shoot the messenger’ response from government and much of the ‘liberal’ media. However, within months - and certainly by the summer of 2006 (when the Home Office spectacularly imploded) - The Great Immigration Scandal was seen as somewhat prescient. If anything the problems were under-stated. The stories streaming out of the Home Office and from our so-called national ‘borders’ competed for the top prize in the ‘you-couldn‘t-make-it-up’ stakes.

Was this just a case of beginner’s luck? Does foresight in one area mean that my arguments in another, unrelated, area should be taken any more seriously? In fact these matters are not unconnected. They are both similar facets of ‘political correctness’ (PC); albeit that how the sexes relate is important in a more perennial way than recent trends in migration. My decade of research into men-women helped me to see the wider damage caused by PC in the part of the Home Office where I was working.

The Great Immigration Scandal was a hot-off-the press affair: it had to be out in the shops as soon as possible after the Home Office officially parted company with me. By contrast, I’ve had plenty of time to get this one right. And a convoluted genesis it most certainly has had. My original conception was of a P.J. O’Rourke-style polemic; but that was before I came to realise the astonishing extent of the scientific findings that underpinned my arguments. The science more than the politics began to drive the project. I spent several years getting fully conversant with a range of biology and psychology disciplines (my own undergraduate subject was psychology, but that was a long time ago, when the discipline was still labouring under the behaviourist delusion), and the book dropped any pretence to humour. The subject is far too important to be treated in any other than a serious manner, and the original polemic has evolved beyond all recognition into a work of popular science exposition.

This book is, for reasons of accessibility, distilled from an original text that includes full explanations of research that can only be briefly mentioned here. I have also written a long, fully-referenced scientific paper on the function of dominance hierarchy and the male, that underpins the key strand running through this book.

The scientific paper is available on-line, along with supplementary notes to this book, for the benefit of those who wish to understand the exposition here in detail or who would question the provenance of some of the ideas that I develop (imprint-academic.com/moxon). This allows the book to flow more easily, uncluttered with digressions or excess references. Referencing (other than news items, which are well archived on-line and therefore highly accessible) has nonetheless been retained where the findings are pivotal, likely to be greeted with particular scepticism, or can be expected to arouse the very prejudice which it is my purpose here to expose.

Reductionism defended

The arguments in The Woman Racket are grounded in recent research undertaken in a range of scientific disciplines, including the new science of evolutionary psychology (EP). Some critics argue that a biologically-based perspective underplays distinctively human attributes, as opposed to those we share with other species. But our higher cognitive functions are no less products of evolution than are our more basic motivations, so they are not as ‘in control’ of our behaviour as our intuitions would suggest they are. Higher cognition is fine-tuning or making more flexible the ancient evolved motivations - especially those of becoming more attractive to the opposite sex, and competing with same-sex others to this end. This certainly does not exclude the ability to ideate, no matter how much it may appear to have ‘a life of its own’. Our ‘conscious reasoning’ is never other than instrumental to the ‘tree’ of motivation that drives us. Even the high point of ideation, morality, is now analysed as evolutionary adaptation (eg; Ridley, 1997). Indeed, after the recent adaptationist turn in the humanities, even philosophers have joined in with the attempt to bring morality down to earth from the realm of Kantian abstraction (Katz, 2000).

Consequently, I make no apology for what might seem to some to be a form of reductionism. All science - on whatever level: physical, biological or social - is reductive. The opposing reductionist camp - the social constructivists, critical theorists, cultural anthropologists, feminists and their political allies - peddle their ‘standard social science model’ (SSSM), that the human neonate is a tabula rasa - a blank slate on which society engraves its story. Or to update the analogy, the status of the human subject is reduced to that of an empty computer memory, ready to be programmed. They’ve had it all their own way for over half a century, but the scientific community is now mostly united in the view that ‘nature’ is much more important than ‘nurture’; the latter providing us not with the important things we have in common but some of our idiosyncrasies. Nevertheless, notwithstanding the overwhelming evidence against it, the ‘nurture’ form of reductionism has become so deeply entrenched in popular thinking that it requires an equally powerful antithesis to counter it.[1] You can only fight fire with fire.

How the Leopard Got His Spots

An empty but oft repeated criticism of evolutionary psychology is that it is on a par with Kiplingesque ‘just so’ stories; but this is an elementary misunderstanding of science. Any theory or hypothesis in science must be testable. (Strictly speaking, a hypothesis must be refutable, and a theory must be able to predict, so I will use the term ‘proposition’.) A scientific proposition generically is that, counter-intuitively, X causes Y; and by virtue of this it can be shown that Z (or W, or whatever) does not cause Y (rather than this being obvious through simple observation and deductive reasoning).

Freudian theory doesn‘t pass muster here: a proposition that we behave in some way because our ego needs boosting is indeed a ‘just so’ story. This is why psychoanalysis is a pseudoscience. This isn’t true of real sciences, such as evolutionary psychology.

So, for example, the EP theory of sex difference in what elicits jealousy is a counter-intuitive proposal that an adaptation to increase fitness causes men to be jealous in response to a long-term partner’s sexual infidelity, whereas a woman is similarly made jealous by her partner’s emotional infidelity. (This reflects the different problems the sexes have: men are concerned that they really are the father of their supposed children, and women are concerned they and their children may be left to fend for themselves.) The standard view is that there can’t be any sex difference in what elicits jealousy, because the sexes have exactly the same social psychology.

So here we have a proposition that is easy to test, and which faces an opposite standard view, so data that supports one will necessarily exclude the other. Surveys and experiments have been done using jealousy-inducing scenarios, and the EP proposition is supported. Methodological criticisms of the work have been answered by revised experiments. And a fall-back position of the opposing model that concedes a sex difference but that it is through reasoning, is countered by looking at spontaneous responses.

This sex difference in jealousy is apparent from simple observation, but the explanation of it is not; and distinguishing between rival explanations can’t be decided without proper investigation.

This book is part of this counter-blast. No doubt one day a mature and synthetic understanding of how ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ entwine will come to pass. In the meantime, this is an unashamedly campaigning text, written from the scientific position of the triumph of the ‘nature’ perspective. Most of my claims should be prefaced ‘from an evolutionary bio-psycho-sociological perspective’, but this would be a little tedious, so please take that as implied throughout. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

And while we are dealing with philosophical issues let me acknowledge that my historical perspective is sub specie aeternitatis - history is viewed less as a series of random events and more as the expression of our underlying (biological) nature. (Although human nature may not be, strictly speaking, eternal, nevertheless the time-frame is long enough as to make no practical difference.) I’m aware that this puts me in uncomfortable company - Hegel is best known for viewing history as the unfolding of the universal weltgeist (world spirit); Marx just took the Hegelian perspective and secularised it. And a whole generation of positivist historians, such as Carl Hempel, attempted to explain (and predict) historical events in terms of universal ‘covering laws’. This led to a historiographical backlash: under the influence of constructivist philosophers like Michael Oakeshott, historians are now only concerned with detailed historical events - ‘just one damn thing after another.’ This led Oakeshott to deny that there was such a thing as human nature: human characteristics (and human cultures) being nothing more than a contingent response to circumstances. History, from a constructivist perspective, is not so much teleology as tragedy, with the gods interfering in human affairs in an entirely arbitrary and contingent matter.

But this is something of an over-reaction (Oakeshott was always a polemicist). How is it possible to explain, say, ubiquitous Islamic dress codes[2] without understanding that man will always have a wandering eye? Feminists argue that it is unfair that women have to cover themselves up as a consequence, but what’s the alternative? Chemical castration? Putting out men’s eyes? Similarly, my ‘Historical Blindsight’ chapter shows how much of our ‘patriarchal’ history is in fact an attempt to protect and privilege (sic) women. This is not seeking to deny (I’m no David Irving) that individual men did not use the law of coverture to exploit individual women. I’m just arguing that these seemingly Jurassic practices have to be seen in the context of their time (when the focus was firmly on the family unit rather than the individual) and that they did serve a necessary function from the point of view of society as a whole. Even Oakeshott acknowledges that individualism is a modern invention.

I should also point out that in this book about the sexes you will find barely a mention of ‘gender’. When I do use the term, it‘s in scare quotes or followed by ‘(sic)’. This is because the word ‘gender’ implies that the sexes are ‘socially constructed’, rather than essentially different in their nature. My exposition is of the overwhelming evidence against this position, hence the abandonment of the loaded term ‘gender’ in favour of the (equally loaded) term ‘sex’. This issue seems to me to eclipse the occasional usefulness of the term ‘gender’ to describe some quality of the sexes as distinct from the sexes themselves (or the sex act).

On Knowing Where to Draw the Line

This book has been ten years in preparation and has undergone extensive revision at proof stage. Inevitably, as is the case with any book that alludes to current affairs, it’s hard to know when to stop - I was contemplating adding a section dealing with David Cameron’s capitulation to the pressure groups over the rape conviction statistics but decided that transient political events were not worth chronicling.

One area that I avoided due to lack of space was the increasing feminisation of childhood and our education system. Our traditional all-or-nothing examination system has been replaced by a modular approach which favours girls’ systematic study skills (but disadvantages the truly inspired student who fails to tick the right boxes). Boys are now three times as likely as girls to need extra help with reading at primary school - a statistic that is not unrelated to the lack of male role models at home (although the connection has been challenged) and the fact that 93% of primary school teachers are female. Competitive school team sports - along with any form of contest in which there are winners and losers - are frowned on, and our health and safety culture penalises boys’ attraction to risk taking and unsupervised play. When did you last see a group of boys climbing a tree? Deprived of these natural diversions it is not surprising that 75% of the children suffering from ADHD (attention deficit hyperactivity disorder) are male. Anyone wishing to examine the devastating effects of the feminisation of childhood and education should read James Tooley’s The Miseducation of Women (2002), and Sue Palmer’s 21st Century Boys (forthcoming: September 2008).

Acknowledgements

First and foremost, I would like to thank Bruce Charlton, Reader in Evolutionary Psychiatry at Newcastle University, who has taken a close interest in shaping this book; being a diligent reader and commentator on all its sections, and provider of much encouragement and reassurance. Likewise Valerie Grant, Senior Lecturer in Health Sciences at the University of Auckland; and Margaret Jervis, a British legal academic: both of whom deserve special mention. Many thanks go to the following academics in their various fields who in some way significantly contributed, either by argument/making comments or by reading parts or the whole of this book: Catherine Hakim, Malcolm George, Helena Cronin, David Martin, Wirt Atmar, Nicola Graham-Kevan, Jay Feierman, Simon Baron-Cohen, Lionel Tiger and Sir Michael Marmot. In a category of his own for his knowledge and fearlessness regarding campaigning on men-women issues: appreciation goes to Robert Whiston. Then there are those who will not wish to be commended at all, but who provided catharsis through adorning my dartboard as photographs: Harriet Harman, Fiona MacTaggart and Vera Baird, with (on the bullseye) Jenni Murray and (on the treble twenty) Julie Bindel. (Germaine Greer resides not on my dartboard but above the loo, accompanied by quotes from her more recent writings railing against the idea that women could consider sex empowering.) Lastly, there’s someone I am unable to avoid thanking: the man whose dartboard features a pic of me, my long-suffering editor and publisher Keith Sutherland, to whom I also owe the evolutionary perspective on the size-zero modelling controversy (see page 196) and some of the other panels.

Steve Moxon

Sheffield, November 2007

1 Upward (top-down) reductionism explains mental processes as derived from the social-discursive environment, whereas downward (bottom-up) reductionism explains the same in terms of biological endowments (Valsiner & van der Veer, 2000).

2 An adequate discussion of men-women in the Islamic and Hebraic traditions would require a whole book, so I limit myself here to one sentence (see also page 175, below): Islamic garb, like other phenomena such as foot-binding and female circumcision, is as much to do with female-female competition as it is with men jealously guarding their women.