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From: gadfly@ihu1m.UUCP (Gadfly)
Newsgroups: net.singles
Subject: Re: male/female differences
Message-ID: <202@ihu1m.UUCP>
Date: Wed, 16-Jan-85 00:43:58 EST
Article-I.D.: ihu1m.202
Posted: Wed Jan 16 00:43:58 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 11-Jan-85 23:50:52 EST
References: <74@mot.UUCP>
Organization: AT&T Bell Labs, Naperville, IL
Lines: 43

--
>> Here is an interesting argument if you like thinking about such
>> things: 

>> A big difference between men and women is that men are naturally
>> promiscuous and women are not.  This is because a male can maximize
>> the survival of his genes by having as many partners as possible.
>> Promiscuity in women, on the other hand, with their
>> few eggs, has no advantage: The limiting factor is gestation 
>> time, not number of partners. "Male promiscuity" is therefore selected
>> for while "Female Promiscuity" is not.

>> Alan Filipski

That's awfully stupid.  If it were that vital for a male to have many
partners, it would be equally important for females to help them out in
this regard.  If said sexual promiscuity were vital for the survival
of our species, that is.  If it's a matter of intra-species competition,
then the argument reduces to "promiscuous men will tend to have more
children, who will then grow up to be more promiscuous--if they're male."
And even Lamarck would have barfed at that one.

What Mr. Filipski's pseudo-evolutionary claptrap wants to hide is the
fact that any differences in promiscuity derive from enforced inequality
of sexual privilege, only possible in a species mentally capable of
knowing and caring who their kids are, and thus of maintaining cultural
traditions of sexual coercion and restriction.  Sure, the spread-the-
genes argument holds for many polygamous mammals, but only because a
dominant male maintains an exclusive harem of females and tries to
prevent the less powerful males from spreading their genes at all.

Humans could have a biological predisposition toward promiscuity (some
species mate for life and do OK, so it's moot), but there's no rational
evolutionary argument for males-only.  The notion that men somehow "want
it", "need it" or "do it" more than women is merely an excuse for the
basest expressions of misogyny, and a miserable one at that.
-- 
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