The Heart Wants Inequality: The Inconvenient Truth of Mate Preference and Its Relevance to Today's Sexual Politics
Proverbial forces and sexual liberation contribute to social inequality. Can feminist philosophers like Amia Srinivasan rise to the occasion and provide a vision for sexual equity?
Feminism is at a cultural and political nadir, consumed by infighting and sublimated to bizarre new ideas about gender. The Manosphere gave us the Red Pill but subsequently fragmented becoming inchoate and at times deranged. A confluence of technological, economic, and cultural changes have purportedly facilitated a sex recession or alternatively, a wasteland of sparing hook-ups between strangers connected by cyberspace. Consistent with the sex recession narrative, involuntary celibates (Incels) have manifested as an online interest group, inspiring much hand-wringing among the chattering classes. Voting patterns are remarkably bifurcated by sex with men favoring Republican and women favoring Democrats. A fifty-year-old legal precedent that guaranteed national abortion access was recently repealed. These appear to be tumultuous times in the arena of sexual politics. How have we found ourselves here? Is it possible our much of our sociopolitical discontent can be traced back to the battle of the sexes? If this is the case, what should we do to remedy it?
Although I don’t have any amazing answers to the provocative questions above, I do hope I’ve at least convinced you that sexual politics are culturally and politically salient - likely more so than you have previously considered. There is a lot of complexity here. We could follow many fruitful topics of discussion in this domain, but I’d like to focus reader attention on the social consequences of mate choice, especially for egalitarian ends. Then, I’d like to fold this into a discussion of an essay collection titled The Right to Sex by celebrated feminist philosopher Amia Srinivasan. I’m interested in the tension between the egalitarian commitments of radical and even more mainstream feminism and Romantic notions of individualism that enable dating and mating patterns that generate and perpetuate unequal social and economic outcomes.
Mating Dynamics Influence Social Structure
Human mating dynamics are influenced by a lot of variables, but there are two especially critical and related factors that have important and often unnoticed effects on social organization: sexual selection and assortative mating. The first simply refers to a type of natural selection where mates of one sex have a preference for certain traits in the opposite sex and pair off on that basis. The immediate effects of sexual selection are negligible, but over many generation there can be important cumulative effects. For instance, in certain human populations, there is evidence to suggest that women have preferred to have children with taller men, which led to an increase in the average height of those populations over generational time. An important part of the dynamic of sexual selection in humans is that men and women have, by virtue of sexual dimorphism, differential parental investment in offspring. Female investment is high, while male investment is low. In other words, sperm is cheap, while ova, childbearing, and childrearing are expensive. Given the tradeoffs involved, it is no surprise that female mating preference is hypergamous, meaning that women tend to prefer to have long-term relationships with men who are of equal or greater station. This is often phrased “women marry laterally or up social hierarchies but not down them.” An importance consequence of the above forces is that we end up having more female ancestors than male ancestors (twice as many!) and that many of our received biological traits, including behavior, are shaped by the sexual preferences of those same female ancestors.
Our second term of interest is assortative mating (AM), which is a fancy way of saying that like marries like. The whole opposites attract is a RomCom fantasy. People tend to couple up with partners who have similar traits, whether that is physical features like height or cognitive traits like intelligence. This extends to social identifiers like race, class, and religion too. Subsequently, AM can have both immediate and long-term effects. The social, cultural, economic, and political import of mate choice is often dramatized in many works of fiction like Game of Thrones, where marriages are used to cement alliances or help maintain certain traits (e.g. dragon riding). These example help illustrate some of the flavor of what AM is. Our preference to couple based on trait (i.e. phenotype) similarity is apparently extremely strong. For instance, the social scientist Gregory Clark has shown that the correlation in social status between bride and groom is often 80-90% in England stretching back to 1754. Similar figures have been observed in many other populations at different times and places throughout history. It is hard to overstate how momentous the consequences of AM are for social organization. Returning to Clark, he has shown that it can take 10-14 generation for certain traits to revert to the mean when the baseline expectation would be for traits to revert from one generation to another. He’s basically making the case that at a coarse-grained level, social status is remarkably stable inter-generationally and that AM is part of why that is.
So now we know a little bit about why people couple off the way they do. I hope that I’ve illustrated how important this can be to the distribution of social outcomes. There is a lot of complexity here, but to put it simply, the freedom Western societies afford people to freely choose whom they date, marry, and have children with results in a profoundly and resiliently unequal distribution of socially desirable or economically valued traits. If we profess to care about equality or equity, shouldn’t we care about trying to remedy the externalities of the mating market? Surprisingly, this may be an issue that could unify otherwise disparate political coalitions. Finding workable solutions will be difficult though.
The Redistribution of Sex as a Leveling Mechanism:
Does Expanding the Social Contract for Incels Create a Gileadean Hellscape or a Progressive Utopia?
Opposed extremists from the political fringes have had a simmering mutual interest in the distribution of sex or some flavor of this question. Incels from the Manosphere have been gauchely expressing an impetuous and uncompromising need for consistent sexual exclusivity with beautiful, chaste women. Sometimes these expressions have even risen to the level of detestable and tragic violence like in the case of Eliot Rodger and his rampage at Isla Vista. On the other side, feminists have been expressing concerns about the lack of sexual interest from men in overweight or otherwise unprepossessing women. They assert that too many men adamantly cling to a quasi-fascistic aesthetic standard of female desirability that was concocted and then perpetuated by a system of white male patriarchy. Despite the differing perspectives and priorities, the salience of the scarcity of intimacy underlies discontent in both groups. The represent an interesting opportunity for political compromise, but the obvious policy solution is unpalatable to many.
Some astute commentators have bravely ventured to discuss this issue. The widely respected, right-of-center NYT Opinion writer Ross Douthat somewhat recently asked whether access to sexual intimacy should be redistributed to men unable to obtain partners normally. Douthat is asking by way of economist Robin Hanson, “If we are concerned about the just distribution of property and money, why do we assume that the desire for some sort of sexual redistribution is inherently ridiculous?” To retread, the urgency of this question is not just the existence of incel complaints but large socioeconomic realities. Many social scientists, pundits, and journalists have pointed out that there is a significant portion of men who are unable to compete in a service-based, high tech economy. These same men subsequently suffer in the dating market. Few women can imagine them as a provider, protector, or head of a family. Instead, they look redundant at best and an additional and possibly dangerous dependent at worst. These lost men are consigned to the irrelevance of their parent’s basements, where they numb themselves with simulacra of competence (video games) and sexual fulfillment (porn). In his piece, which is delicately argued, Douthat’s implicit prescription, which is expressed more a wistful hope, is to return to the widespread uptake of monogamous marriage, a revanche for traditional sexual mores with some modern adjustments. This is of course unacceptable to ardent partisans of sexual liberation, who ironically are the same feminists complaining of “toxic masculinity” today. Masculinity may be less toxic if tamed by the "testosterone suppression mechanism” of marriage.
These ideas are likely startlingly sterile and viscerally revolting to non-materialists, but in our otherwise secular civic society that is purportedly dedicated to the value of equality, why is this outside the Overton Window? Is there not a right to sex like there is a right to not live in deep squalor and poverty? Why is “healthcare” rather than “intimacy” placed before the refrain “is a human right?” This may seem unfathomable, but to not reckon with this means accepting an entente with inequality.
Douthat’s column like Hanson’s provocative thought experiment before it were of course met with vitriol from Twitter-brained hyperpartisans, especially of feminist or progressive persuasion. It is these sorts of questions that suggest that many on the American Left are more committed to Romantic notions of individualism than social solidarity or social equality. The Right shares a similar notions of individuality but is willing to temper those externalities by embracing and preserving social institutions of the past that are likely a product a cultural evolution and serve important functions. Unfortunately, even Douthat’s implicit prescription would not remedy the inequality that results from mating dynamics. Even if the Atwoodian nightmare of enforced monogamy was achieved by some conservative coup of cultural retrenchment, the freedom to choose one’s mate would allow for robust assortative mating patterns to continue. It seems acceptable political solution are far beyond reach. Inequality wins.
So far, we’ve yet to dig too deeply into the ideas that feminism has to offer concerning the bleak battle of the sexes. The titular essay of The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan makes a valiant attempt. Are the answer satisfactory?
Venus Glides Passed Mars in the Boudoir: Review of The Right to Sex
The Right to Sex by Amia Srinivasan is billed as an important, nuanced, and provocative work of philosophical feminism. It has received a lot of interest and praise from critics and commenters even grabbing the attention of right-of-center economist Tyler Cowen. I had high hopes for the collection. Unfortunately, I was deeply disappointed. Srinivasan's collection of interrelated essays may have been more persuasive or effective if the billing had been humbler, the title changed, and the actual science of sexual dimorphism and mating dynamics engaged rather than ignored or denied. Feminism, both philosophical and political iterations, will inevitably be doomed to failure and irrelevancy as long as it clings desperately to magical thinking about sex and sex differences. If feminist do indeed abhor reactionaries, chauvinists, and traditionalists, then they would be wise to actually address the world as it actually is rather than how they wish it to be.
Srinivasan’s biological denialism, stereotypical of fourth wave feminist thought, is evident immediately in The Right to Sex. In her first piece, she recycles the boilerplate language of transgender activism, claiming that sex is "assigned" at birth. This claim (and the idea generally) is frankly ridiculous, or it is a bad faith reference to the process of putting male or female on a birth certificate as if this legal formality has any import to the actual underlying biology of any individual. Sexual identity is an innate characteristic - one that concerns gamete size (small, many, and motile for males versus large and few for females). In other words, sex is about reproductive mode, one that is necessarily binary by evolutionary design. Even in disorders of sexual development (DSDs), individuals often referred to as intersex, gamete production either adopts or attempts to adopt a male or female mode. Intersex individuals are not both sexes at once (a true hermaphrodite) nor some special third mysterious gender. Moreover, intersex individuals are typically infertile, unable to participate in reproduction, and are external to the evolutionary history and future of the homo sapiens. They are of course humans deserving of all the same legal rights and humane treatment as others, but they shouldn’t be erroneously invoked to “problematize” the sex binary. There is an abundance of research across multiple scientific disciplines that illustrates beyond any reasonable doubt that there are significant morphological, behavioral, and psychological differences on average (broadly termed sexual dimorphism) between the sexes (for a quick, accessible primer on some of these see T: The Story of Testosterone by Carole Hooven).
There are other examples throughout The Right to Sex that underscore Srinivasan's sloppiness with emprical data and basic reasoning. And yes, a discussion of sex without some grounding in empirical reality is an enormous oversight. In another one of her earlier essays in the collection, Srinivasan claims that the critics of the "believe women" meme, who tend to be proponents of silly common law practices like due process and the presumption of innocence, are committing a category error. You know the court of public opinion isn’t are real courtroom, dudes! It is hard to call this type of argument anything other than - and I loathe the overuse of this term - gaslighting. Please allow me to uncharitably but accurately paraphrase Srinivasan:
It is uncool and unhelpful to have standards of evidence in our justice system and have them supported by cultural beliefs. We should totally replace this proven but old model with the super awesome new model that just accepts any claim made by a person who is a woman (side note: we will refrain from providing a precise definition of what a woman is because that'd be trans-exclusionary); no questions asked. At least this way, we can arbitrarily and often vindictively discipline and control all of our least favorite people. Yay, “Shitty Media Men” lists for all!
Srinivasan tries to claw herself out of this quasi-fascistic hole by expressing ambivalence about the whole project of punitive justice. This is an especially in vogue idea among many cognoscenti. This commitment is inconsistently set aside for particular violent crimes like rape or even non-violent sexual misconduct. It is also a sentiment out of step with the moralizing and Puritanical tone of much of Progressive social activism online. However, this is of little practical meaning or import. There is no alternative correctional model that exists in any civilized society of any magnitude. Srinivasan's messy skepticism about the Liberal project generally is useless and as we can see the actual implementation of ideologically aligned policies/efforts like the "dear colleague" Title IX guidance letter and the #MeToo cancelings have unlocked a Pandora's box of damage on civil society. It has likely irreparably damaged feminism’s politically viability as well.
Quite possibly the most galling aspect of the whole work, is the argument emerging from the titular essay that purportedly interrogate why human’s desire what they desire. Both frustratingly and amusingly, Srinivasan largely dismisses the biological and "pre-political" inputs for desire and just assumes the preferences we see expressed today are instantiations of received oppressive ideologies: white supremacy, sexism, Western standards of beauty, etc. She also just patently rejects sex redistribution as a reactionary project. She’s even skeptical of voucher programs for dispossessed men who’d like to visit prostitutes. Ironically, sex redistribution policies could possibly be empowering to women, depending on the mechanisms. She doesn't engage with any of the literature or journalism that has actually investigated or ruminated on these questions (excepting Douthat's piece and Robin Hanson's musings). There is no discussion of anthropological studies of sexual preference across cultures and time nor reckoning with the rigorous and robust findings of behavioral endocrinology, primatology, and evolutionary psychology. She mentions "hypergamy" in the same breath that she's implying that Jordan Peterson is the "custodian of the patriarchy" but doesn't investigate whether the phenomenon actually describes female mating strategies and preferences. Moreover, she doesn't wrestle with related phenomena like assortative mating or how sorting mates has become more efficient over the last several decades. She does dip into the recent data on the "sex recession," but she downplays it and fails to grasp the implications of these data. Her solution to the obvious problems between young men and women is to reimagine what desire is. I mean… come on.
Although Srinivasan deserves praise for her willingness to engage with thinkers and ideas most feminists would reflexively condemn or sneer at without reading and for her ability to express some epistemic humility and ambivalence about her political program, it isn't enough to save the work. She still piles contradiction on top of contradiction, commits oversight after oversight, over-simplifies already facile explanatory models, and navel-gazes about solipsistic or irrelevant ideas. I don't see anything of meaning or insight being added to this otherwise compelling topic. The real evidence of this is that despite all the kvetching about the tensions between sex-negative vs sex-positive feminism, neoliberal feminism vs socialist feminism, contemporary sexual dynamics, and the historical alliance of traditionalists and sex-negative types on anti-porn activism, Srinivasan is basically a party-line fourth wave feminist whose political program is broadly socialistic; it is the reliable default for every troubling question or potential contradiction that arises. It appears her economic priorities supersede any of her gender-based program (Is this really feminism anyhow? Who's to say that a feminist can't be a capitalist?). How is this anything other than exactly what anyone can find from most left-leaning, college-educated 18-35 year old women on Twitter minus the usual vitriol?
So what should we do about the problem facing men and women today? I think we’re stuck in a quagmire, and the only way forward may be to trudge backward a bit until we find solid ground. Or we can also just accept the realities of our inherited biology, social structures, and culture.
An Artificial Intelligence Tries Feminist Theory
ChapGPT is a large language model (LLM) designed for interaction. In other words, it is a type of artificial intelligence (AI) or deep learning technology that is able to generate responses to verbal prompts. I prompted it with “I'd like you to emulate a scholar of feminist theory. Think in the mold of Amia Srinivasan. Tell me, is there a right to sex?” To which it answered:
In feminist theory, the concept of a "right to sex" is a controversial and complex issue that has been debated by scholars and activists for decades. Some feminists argue that individuals have a fundamental right to engage in consensual sexual activity and that any interference with this right is a violation of personal autonomy and bodily integrity. Others argue that the concept of a "right to sex" is problematic because it can be used to justify harmful behaviors, such as sexual coercion or exploitation, and may reinforce traditional gender roles and power dynamics.
One argument against the concept of a "right to sex" is that it can be used to justify the objectification and commodification of women's bodies, particularly in contexts where women are pressured to conform to traditional gender roles or to meet men's sexual needs. This perspective suggests that the focus should be on promoting consent and agency in sexual relationships, rather than on asserting a right to sex.
Overall, the concept of a "right to sex" is a complex and multifaceted issue that has been the subject of ongoing debate and discussion within feminist theory and activism. There are valid arguments on both sides of the issue, and ultimately, it is up to individuals and communities to decide how they want to approach this topic.
As you can see, ChatGPT can respond clearly and appropriately to the prompt, giving the impression of real thought, but basically that facsimile of thought is pablum. It is a response that would (sadly) get a passing (or better) grade at many undergraduate institutions, but it is still clearly insipid. Thus, on hot button issues, we should expect to see LLMs to regurgitated ideas skewed somewhat toward the loud radical fringe yet still tempered by the sheer volume of milquetoast ideas.
Nonetheless, it was an interesting exercise to see what ChatGPT would say on this question.