During the Question and Answer session, recounting how the position of women at the university has evolved from entrenched gender marginalisation, a female professor reminded one of the male panelists (a professor) how he chased her from their boys-only discussion group back then in their student days.

She said she had been chased because she was a girl.  There was total silence in the room as she sternly went about the apparently painful memory. I may not have been the only one that was eager to hear how the accused was to respond. To the relief of some, and perhaps the disappointment of others, the professor cleverly crafted a joke of a response.

“We chased her because we did not want to be distracted”. Everyone laughed, and the bullet died like that.

Maybe there was a real issue that we missed the opportunity to think through in appreciating the strides made since the old days and the challenges that remain. Identity issues, of which gender is part, are getting more complex by the day. One always has to tread very carefully to avoid stepping on a live wire or landmine.

Thus some questions that can easily be interpreted or deliberately misconstrued to be supportive of oppressive gender setups are often avoided. Among these is the question of the extent to which some of the things we decry about gender could be determined by nature.

Of course, this wouldn’t necessarily make them acceptable, but such knowledge might help us to understand and approach them differently. When we say that much about what we call ‘gender’ is socially constructed, to what extent is this true?

Does the accuracy of the explanation matter, anyway? Couldn’t many behavioral differences between men and women that society reinforces be grounded in biological prewiring? Being a man, I am acutely aware that my reflections can be conveniently dismissed as own-group defense or male chauvinism. Regardless, I will delve.

A few observations here. According to some socio-biologists and natural law theorists, courtship behavior of men and women is differentiated by natural distinctions in roles (sex roles). For example, nature puts a bigger reproductive burden on women; therefore, they have to be careful and slow in choosing a male – so that they can use the time to evaluate his commitment, lest they get abandoned with the child.

Therefore, ‘playing hard to get’ is explained as naturally prewired – just like a hen has to first run, perhaps to test the cock’s commitment and strength. Evolutionists would add that this is also nature’s way of ‘starving’ the weak into extinction, thus ensuring that only the best genes are reproduced.

On the other hand, naturally, apart from disease and rivalry with other men, a man doesn’t have much to fear by engaging in random sex. He can always impregnate and, if he finds it necessary or convenient, run away. This is harder for the female.

So, it is easier for a man to engage in random sex without any second thought, for the consequences may not necessarily affect his life after.

While we may appeal to our faculty of reason to be available to guide in such calculations, unfortunately many examples show us that quite often our instinctive drives overpower reason. It often takes society (where it is reasonable) to whip us back to its order or cause a sense of shame to haunt us into line.  

Coming back to natural differentiation in male and female behavior, it is observable that females may be biologically inclined to looking for attributes like ambitiousness, intelligence, ability to provide, hard work, and physical strength in men. Men are often more attracted by physical appearance of women – hence the general tendency (although not exclusive) in women world over to be keener on make-up and self-beautification.

On account of this distinction too, men, world over, tend to be more sexually promiscuous than women. And their choices are easier and faster to make because they are often about the immediately visible. On one sight, a man might say ‘I love you’.

And perhaps ‘love’, in this context, means different things to the two sexes. It is in view of this that in his widely researched book, Our Inner Ape (2005), the primatologist Frans de Waal opines that ‘the penis has a mind of its own’. Well …

Because children need their mothers more for survival, nature stops women from producing at a much earlier age than men – perhaps so that they can be there to the adulthood of children they produce. Men are only limited by their energy but otherwise can reproduce hundreds, until death. Could this natural distinction be arbitrary and without purpose?

Whereas gender studies have done a great deal in distinguishing natural from socialised inclinations, it still remains quite a complex undertaking – often worsened by tendencies towards favorable conclusions. There is also a wrong assumption that nature is fair, despite all contrary evidence.

Sometimes the reasonable thing may be to try to tame nature, not to argue that all that is messy/undesirable in human behavior is socialised. In certain ways, the logic of nature is totally contrary to our wishes and with a different or inconvenient sense of order.

But it’s also true (and very common) that a lot that is socialised can be rationalised as natural and thus, unfortunately, get normalised. Both the natural and the social are prone to human abuse. Could some solutions to gender problems be based on wrong diagnoses? Who knows!

jsssentongo@gmail.com

The author is a teacher of philosophy.

inarticle} inarticle}