Notes Towards A Sex-Realist Feminism

Happy Mother's Day!

I.

Biological sex is one of the primary causes of women’s oppression.¹

II.

Of the various aspects of sex that cause women’s oppression, the two most important² are:

• Women bear and breastfeed children.

• Men are physically stronger and more athletic than women, and more prone to violence.

The first difference leads to a sexed division of labor in all cultures (including, vestigially, our own). In the absence of contraception, a sexually active adult woman will spend most of her reproductive years pregnant or breastfeeding, bearing one child every two to four years (Why Sex Matters, pg. 94).³ Therefore, women are limited to work that can be done while pregnant or breastfeeding and (according to the laws of comparative advantage) men wind up doing work that can’t be done while pregnant or breastfeeding.

Sexed divisions of labor don’t inherently favor men over women. For example, in hoe cultures, women can perform agricultural labor while taking care of children. As you might expect, women in hoe cultures tend to have more autonomy, to be able to divorce their husbands, and to experience less sexual policing through honor killings, seclusion, etc. The Iroquois, one of the most gender egalitarian premodern cultures, were a hoe culture.

Nevertheless, in many cultures, men perform more economically valuable labor than women; women are dependent on men for food. Because men can survive without women more easily than women can survive without men, men’s interests are weighted more highly than women’s. They have a better BATNA.

This problem is compounded by male violence. Men are more willing than women to engage in violence, and before the invention of firearms would normally win fights with women. The group who can kill you if angered gets more of what they want than the group that can’t. Therefore, human societies tend to systematically favor the interests of men as a class over the interests of women as a class.

Let me be clear about what I’m saying here. You all know me as the person who is constantly saying Patriarchy Hurts Men Too, and I’m not walking that back. The sexed division of labor harms men who want to be stay-at-home fathers as much as women who want to be CEOs. Being a member of the violent class is not all it’s cracked up to be—as you can hear from any young man drafted against his will to kill strangers in a different country for no particular reason.⁴ Even paradigmatic cases of atrocities committed against women don’t seem to benefit men that much. In some sense, sure, purdah and female genital circumcision favor men’s interests over women’s. But I think the vast majority of men, if fully informed, would prefer to have female friends and orgasmic wives.

Nevertheless, when you take a step back and look at broader society, it is clear that nearly all societies favor the interests of men in general and powerful men in specific over the interests of women. In its most extreme—and tragically common—form, this becomes patriarchy.

Everyone has their own definition of patriarchy. My favorite is Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s four-part definition in The Woman That Never Evolved: patrilocal residence, patrilineal descent, male-biased inheritance of significant property, and ideologies of male dominance.⁵ In a patriarchal society, therefore:

1. Patrilocal residence: Upon marriage, a woman is wrenched away from her family, whom she grew up among and who know her and love her, to live with strangers. As such, she has little negotiating power.

   1. In many patriarchies, a woman’s mother-in-law controls and sometimes abuses her, as a perverse sort of recompense for when the mother-in-law was controlled and abused by her own mother-in-law.

2. Patrilineal descent: Because descent is reckoned along the male line, it is crucial that women both have sex with approved men and refrain from sex with unapproved men, which many feminists call “compulsory heterosexuality.” As Adrienne Rich wrote in Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence, compulsory heterosexuality works:

   1. “to deny women [their own] sexuality—[by means of clitoridectomy and infibulation; chastity belts; punishment, including death, for female adul-

      tery; punishment, including death, for lesbian sexuality; psychoanalytic

      denial of the clitoris; strictures against masturbation; denial of maternal

      and post menopausal sensuality; unnecessary hysterectomy; pseudo-

      lesbian images in the media and literature; closing of archives and de-

      struction of documents relating to lesbian existence]

      2. or to force it [male sexuality] upon them—[by means of rape (including marital rape) and wife beating; father-daughter, brother-sister incest;

      the socialization of women to feel that male sexual “drive” amounts to

      a right; idealization of heterosexual romance in art, literature, the me-

      dia, advertising, etc.; child marriage; arranged marriage; prostitution;

      the harem; psychoanalytic doctrines of frigidity and vaginal orgasm…]”

   2. She gives more examples but you get the idea.

3. Male-biased inheritance: Women don’t own a significant amount of property. In particular, women don’t have access to land, which before the Industrial Revolution was the primary means of production.

   1. In principle, a sufficiently determined woman could own land and hire a man to do the plowing—a possibility which male-biased inheritance closes off. Under male-biased inheritance, a woman’s only way of supporting herself is attaching herself to some man or other.

4. Ideologies of male dominance: Women are taught to be humble, obedient, submissive, chaste, and hardworking. Even if they are in a situation where they could challenge all of the above, they have internalized norms and values that make them genuinely think they should obey men. Similarly, men might be able to buck the system and give their wives and daughters freedom—but they have been taught that power over women is their unquestionable right.

I want to emphasize that, while I say “men” and “women” here, I am not proposing some mass gender-wide coordination process or a Secret Council of Patriarchs. These norms evolve naturally out of the different economic positions of men and women. For example, from the Routledge Handbook of Imperial Chinese History:

Possession of one concubine or more became the norm for Song men who could afford them. This commodification is connected to the spread of foot-binding. Foot-binding began in the tenth century among dancers and courtesans. Though still rare in the eleventh century, the practice was widespread among elite families by the thirteenth century. Why would this fashion jump from dancers to elite women? Concubines competed directly with wives for their husband’s affections. As this competition became common, more women bound their daughters’ feet to make them more attractive to prospective husbands. There does not seem to have been general female protest against this practice. Nor does there seem to have been much sympathetic camaraderie among wives, concubines, and maids. Instead, social role trumped gender identity. Women acknowledged that their success lay in working within the social system that placed the family structure and its prescribed roles above individual aspiration.

Individual women and men made the best choices they could given their incentives, which were shaped by economic factors and the reality of biological sex. As a result of these incentives, men’s sexual arousal was prioritized over women’s ability to walk short distances and exist without pain. Similar patterns repeated for thousands of years across six continents; in many places, they still do.

III.

In the present, women are often disadvantaged specifically because they are the sex that gets pregnant and carries children to term.

Ruxandra Teslo has been writing an excellent series of posts lately about childrearing and women’s careers. The primary cause of the gender wage gap, she points out, is motherhood:

Teslo attributes the gap primarily to women’s preferences: they enjoy spending time with children more than men do. I think she underestimates the amount that pregnancy and breastfeeding disrupts a woman’s career. Pregnancy is nine months of moderate to severe illness. For example, I had a pretty mild pregnancy, and I spent most of my first trimester too tired to do anything more complicated than read fanfiction. Not great for your career! If the baby is breastfed,⁶ it’s significantly easier for the mother to handle night wakeups—which means she suffers the brunt of chronic sleep deprivation. When a breastfeeding mother returns to work, she will need to spend twenty minutes every two to three hours pumping breastmilk.

I don’t mean to say that women don’t also prefer to spend more time with their children: I think it’s very likely that they do, for whatever social or biological reason. But I think the practicalities of pregnancy and breastfeeding are a very important factor.

Teslo points out, insightfully, that middle-class and upper-class women tend to delay pregnancy until their thirties, which means that they have to have children during the most important years for career advancement:

It seems that one’s 30s are particularly important for job advancement in such greedy careers [careers where you earn more if you work more hours]. One’s 30s is when when young academics go through postdocs and end up establishing their new labs. When lawyers see the highest increases in their salaries. When people who decide to become entrepreneurs have the highest chance of success. And the list goes on.

In short, ambitious women who have children often wind up trapped on the lower rungs of their career ladders.

The problems Teslo points out affect only a small percentage of elites (though one with a disproportionate effect on the world and on the size of the wage gap). But I think Teslo’s observations epitomize the way that fertility shapes women’s life chances in general. Even among nonelite families, biology is putting its thumb on the scale such that if someone has to cut back on hours, work a less demanding job, or stay home entirely, it’s probably the woman. If the mother breastfeeds or takes more time off work because she has to recover from the pregnancy, she has more opportunity to attune with the child and develop parenting skills. Without concerted effort, this small initial imbalance can compound into an incompetent father who feels constantly criticized, an overworked mother who feels like she can’t trust her husband, and a very unfair division of parenting labor.

But fertility also shapes the lives of women who don’t want children yet, or at all. I have written before about the importance of a right to an abortion, and don’t want to reiterate the point here, other than to gesture at it. The burden of contraception falls disproportionately on women: side effects, dealing with the medical system, cost.⁷

Anecdotally, young men often go through life assuming that sex is a fun recreational activity, much like tennis, and like tennis it would be a horrific injustice if it sometimes resulted in an eighteen-year three-hundred-thousand-dollar commitment to raising a vulnerable human. Young women don’t. Sexually active women know the fear that their period has come late.⁸

And also, uh, being the sex that bears children just sucks in a bunch of ways that have nothing to do with society. Bleeding for a week every month sucks. Menstrual cramps and PMS and period diarrhea suck. And then when you’re freed from them you discover that menopause also sucks. Morning sickness and fatigue and back pain and Braxton Hicks contractions and waddling around with a bowling ball strapped to your abdomen all suck. Childbirth really, really, really sucks.

We often hesitate to say that something is unfair for women unless there is some specific (probably male) malefactor whom we could in principle convince not to do that. But, actually, at the risk of being accused of being merely gender dysphoric, I’m going to say that being of the sex that produces eggs is terrible. Sure, there are advantages—it’s easier to have a kid without an other-gender partner, it’s pretty cool to carry around a person inside you—but on the whole biology has dealt women a dreadfully unfair hand.

IV.

But biological sex affects women’s lives in many smaller ways.

Caroline Criado Perez’s excellent Invisible Women lays out a number of ways that society is designed for men:

• 87% of female pianists have hands that are too small to play a piano optimally. This is a major reason that women are underrepresented in high-level piano performance. It also causes workplace injuries: female pianists have a 50% higher rate of pain and injury.

• Speech-recognition software is 70% more likely to accurately transcribe male voices than female voices. The reason speech-recognition software does worse on female voices is that the training corpuses mostly involve male voices.

• Women are less likely to be in car crashes than men, but are more likely to be injured or to die.

  • Women tend to sit farther forward when driving because they're shorter, which isn't what cars are designed for, so they are at greater risk of internal injury in a frontal collision.

  • Women also have less neck and upper torso muscle than men, which makes them more vulnerable to whiplash. Car seats throw women forward faster than they throw men forward, which increases the risk.

  • Many women with large breasts have to wear seatbelts improperly in order to fit it around their breasts.

  • Until 2011, there was no female crash test dummy used to test crashes-- the crash test dummy was a median male, at an average male height and weight and with male muscle-mass proportions. Even when female dummies are used, they tend to be scaled-down male dummies, even though women have lower bone density and different muscle mass distribution and, you know, breasts.

  • 62% of third-trimester pregnant women don't fit in the standard seatbelt. Wearing the seatbelt over your belly, rather than below it, significantly increases your baby's risk of dying in a car accident.

• Only 29% of women wear personal protective equipment (PPE) designed for women's bodies. Three-fifths of respondents to one survey said their PPE sometimes made their work more difficult. Poorly fitting PPE can be a safety hazard and even sometimes fatal.

• Controlling for aerobic fitness and strength, women in the British army are seven times as likely to have musculoskeletal injuries and ten times as likely to have hip and pelvic stress fractures. This is probably because equipment is designed for male bodies, and because women were required to match male stride lengths (which are on average about 10% longer).

  • The British coast guard has one-piece uniforms with a crotch zipper. Men can just take out their penises when they need to pee; women have to remove all their PPE and strip naked.

• Although there are over a million female farm operators in the United States, farm tools are typically designed for men or in a “gender-neutral” way that assumes everyone is the same size as an average man.

  • As a result, female farm operators deal with “tools that are too heavy or long; hand tools that are not appropriately balanced; handles and grips that are not appropriately sized or placed (women’s hands are on average 0.8 inches shorter than men’s); and mechanised equipment that is too heavy or that is difficult to control (for example pedals on tractors being placed too far from the seat).”

And so on and so forth. Anyone who has gone through the world in a typical woman’s body (or an unusual man’s) can name a dozen such experiences—from too-high standing desks to one-size-fits-all T-shirts that fit like a tent.

Of course, none of these decisions are malicious. No one is deliberately designing cars that kill women or pianos that are uncomfortable for women to play. Feminism aside, many businesspeople would make more of a profit if they managed to accommodate their entire audience.

It’s just that—we developed standards for how products should be engineered. Maybe there wasn’t a woman in the room, or maybe everyone subconsciously thought of the average person as male, or maybe it didn’t occur to anyone that women are farmers and coasties. And once the standards are set, it’s hard to switch them. New training datasets are expensive. We already bought the PPE. People’s muscle memory is set for pianos of a particular size. And, most of all, most of the time people just do the normal thing and don’t stop to ask if it makes sense.

V.

Radical feminists, they say, are feminists that go to the root of sexism. They don’t mess around with equal-pay laws and maternity leave and no-fault divorce and adequate representation in the Marvel Cinematic Universe. No, they get at the basic problem, the reason that women are disproportionately likely to be raped and to be poor and to have very little control over the course of their own lives.

Inexplicably, actually existing radical feminists generally seem to have concluded that the root of patriarchy is that some people like BDSM porn. But I do like the concept.

I propose to you that the root of women’s oppression is that they are the ones that birth children. And because the root of women’s oppression is, in the final analysis, biological rather than societal, the solution too is not societal but biological.

The greatest feminist victory of all time was not the right to vote or ending the marital rape exemption: it was the birth control pill. Modern feminists are not smarter or more dedicated or more eloquent than Mary Wollstonecraft or Harriet Taylor or the Grimke sisters. The difference is that modern feminists can be sexually active without having a child every two to four years—which means that they can be married and do literally anything else.

We have made progress towards freeing women from the chains of biology, even beyond birth control. We have formula that is, for people in the developed world, nearly as good as breastfeeding. We have safe abortions. We have epidurals. We have a suite of medical innovations that have taken pregnancy from the most dangerous activity women do to something that’s safer than driving a car. We know how to use hormonal birth control to prevent periods. It is within sight that, with adequate access to long-acting reversible contraception, no woman would have to get pregnant without her full and free consent.

But further steps await us. We must, as Ruxandra Teslo recommends, extend women’s fertility into their forties and even fifties. We must develop formula that is exactly as good as breastfeeding—if not better. We must improve transition technology, so that (as much as possible) people are males or females by their own free choice, and can select from both sides as pleases them.

And most of all: we need artificial wombs.

As long as the continuation of the human race relies on women to sacrifice their bodies and their health, women will never be truly equal. You can correct for this fundamental inequality here and there: better maternity leave protections, more flexible hours, letting people skip college, large tax credits for pregnant people so that they’re paid for their essential work. But you’re not going to fix the problem until there is no longer a job:

• with an enormous opportunity cost,

• which more than a third of humans have to do if we would like society to function,

• and which to a first approximation only women can do.

Artificial-womb technology is in its infancy. We would need to overcome numerous technical challenges before the technology would be ready for a human fetus. But there is every reason to believe that artificial wombs are possible. And society hasn’t put in an amount of research effort that is remotely concomitant with the importance and urgency of the problem.

If you want to liberate women, don’t major in gender studies. Major in reproductive biology.

1. This is not a transphobic viewpoint; see my post here. Trans women (like other unusual women) can experience sexism because they’re read as women or because they internalize female socialization. Infertile women aren’t magically free from misogyny either.

2. Other large sex differences—such as in sexuality and in toy preference during preschool—are less important in my opinion.

3. Many people gloss this as “one baby per year,” which is incorrect. Women naturally stop ovulating when they don’t have enough calories or when they are very physically active; many hunter-gatherer women spend years in the state we call female athlete triad. Further, most women experience a period of lactational amenorrhea after they give birth. Women in our culture rarely breastfeed in the way that produces significant lactational amenorrhea: to maintain high prolactin levels, the child should breastfeed throughout the night and continuously through the day. Of course, these stack: undernourished, extremely active breastfeeding women are very unlikely to ovulate. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others has an extensive discussion of birth spacing among hunter gatherers.

4. And that’s not even getting into the intersection with race: men from minority/oppressed ethnicities are often perceived as more violent, and thus subject to everything from incarceration to lynching.

5. Yes, this definition means our society isn’t a patriarchy, but rather an ex-patriarchy with a bunch of sexism sticking around like a bad hangover.

6. Breastfeeding is optional in a way that pregnancy isn’t, of course, but it’s widely promoted as necessary for your child’s health and wellbeing.

7. There are, to be sure, advantages to this—women have more options for dealing with reproductive coercion.

8. For that matter, women who aren’t sexually active know the fear that they’re the next Virgin Mary and the angel forgot to make an announcement.