Like A Natural Woman

FEMINISM AND SCIENCE: A spot of rewiring.

I am hardwired to feel tenderness towards young children, and to seek protection from men. I naturally tend towards romantic interests who make me feel that they could provide for me, and am genetically predisposed to value loyalty and intelligence over good looks. I am also a feminist. And personally, I don’t think anything that I just said is contradictory.

Feminists shouldn’t be scared of the idea of what’s ‘natural’ to females. Empowering women doesn’t mean denying that they aren’t men. I was born a female, and I am as such, to a certain extent, ‘naturally’ different from someone born male. Whether that’s how my brain works now, or how my brain worked then, is a separate point. As it happens, I grew up a woman, and am probably to a certain extent influenced by my ‘natural femininity’ even now. However, I could have grown up to be someone showing no personality traits associated with ‘traditional femininity’; or, I could have grown up to be someone who identified as a man. No scientist I know would say that any of these was wrong. It is all too easy to look at any bit of writing claiming to reveal what women (or men) are ‘hardwired’ to do or think, and feel outraged. It’s ridiculous – you can’t say that half of the population all experience and approach the world in one homogenous way, can you? What about all those incredibly caring men? What about those women who have no maternal instinct whatsoever? What about the competitive, ambitious female businesswomen and the sensitive, aesthetically-minded male artists? Are we going to dismiss them all as ‘abnormal’? As going against nature?

Well... kind of, yes.

Bear with me, here. I think the problem we have here is that we have somehow come to fetishize being ‘natural’. Some of it for good reasons – I buy organic when I can, am sufficiently lazy to appreciate not having to cake odd-smelling brown stuff onto my face every morning and will gladly frolic in a wildflower meadow given opportunity. I do not like wholly unnatural things like deforestation, morbid obesity or nuclear weapons. Some natural is good, some unnatural is bad. But if there’s one thing the world order, natural or not, doesn’t like then it’s a hard-and-fast rule.

I mean – tape worms, they’re natural. High infant mortality – part of human life for thousands of years. Bad breath, going bare-foot, yearly migration, celery (just me?), bubonic plague, living in caves – they’re all just as Mother Nature intended. The point is that just because we’ve evolved to do something over a few thousand years doesn’t mean that in 2013 we haven’t stopped doing them for very good reasons. If that squirrel with bubonic place in America has his way, we might suddenly all find ourselves getting natural in a plaguey sort of way again, but I’m not supporting the Black Death coming back again, even if it is natural for us to incubate disease and spread among ourselves to our own detriment (sorry, squirrel).

Conversely, there is nothing natural about: running water, developing ways to find adequate nutrition without killing the same things we draw on Easter cards, surviving cancer, human flight, cake. The last one might sound stupid, but stupid things often provide the best illustration of a point. Thinking about making yourself a cheeky Victoria Sponge: natural process? Well, first off you have to turn the oven on. Except that of course that requires man-made technology and a load of gas sucked (against nature) out of the ground, none of which are processes which human beings are innately given to. Even putting aside the oven issue, we’ve got the ingredients to worry about. There’s nothing natural about butter; or bicarb; or even flour, really, because we only learned to do that, didn’t we? Some genius looked at a load of grain and thought – wonder what would happen if I ground it up a bit? Answer: not a lot, until we get to a First Baker, who looked back down the line of grain-grinders and metal-box-smelters and bread-makers and thought, ‘wonder what would happen if’, and created the cake. He/She probably didn’t do it in a gas oven, with eggs from a chicken-farm and flour bought at a huge superstore, but the basic idea was the same, and all it takes is a bit of fast forwarding to reach the Victoria Sponge. A lot of people might accept the use of fire, and the municipal farming methods as being down to ‘evolution’, but that does force me to ask – what about the rest of it? The question is – at what point did cake-making stop being ‘natural’?

Actually, no. Scratch that. The question really is – why the hell does it matter? Cake is good. It tastes nice. There are numerous difficulties with farming methods and use of fossil fuels that we will not get into now, because the niceness is the most pertinent point. Are we going to stop enjoying afternoon tea because it’s not uncooked steak with a few foraged berries? Erm, no. Let us eat bloody cake.

SO – to return to the original matter in hand. It is natural for me, as a woman, to want to be a mother, a faithful sexual partner, and a provider for the assembled brood. It is probably natural for me to a certain extent to fancy tall, broad-shouldered men with six packs who look like they throw a good spear and could handle a bison. So what? Whether it’s evolution, human nature striving towards unnatural ends or sheer bloody mindedness, I and most other women have moved beyond that point. We’ve invented the metaphorical wheel, discovered the figural fire – we’ve come up with this thing called equality, and we now think that all humans being fundamentally deserving the same opportunities in life might be quite good, actually.

In a similar way, we came up with this thing called love, and decided that it might be alright for some people to be gay. We came up with this thing called empathy and decided that we might not force people to live with intense pain if they rationally made a choice that they didn’t want to. We got past having to do everything just because we needed to in order to survive, and we discovered choice.

In that case, why do we need scientists looking back and telling us what we used to be like, I hear you ask. Because we have to acknowledge some parts of scientific truth, in order to recognise social truths. It’s not dangerous to say that men are in a primal way to women with child-bearing hip-ratios, or that women are in a basic sense programmed to be more attuned to emotional states. The problem arises when we accept that as a limitation, not a simple starting point. There’s no getting around the fact that men and women are biologically different, and some of those biological effects might reside in the brain, too. But so what. The brain is an incredibly complex organ that no-one understands properly, but we do not that it is malleable. If it wasn’t, we would stay as we are from birth – without language, without emotional understanding, able to do what we are programmed to do, which is to demand nutrition, cry, and defecate.

Science which tells us something about what we started off as is not dangerous. Shoddy articles which make it look like that’s what we’re fated to end up – they’re dangerous. But as feminists we need to distinguish between the two. Good science and good feminism aren’t incompatible, even when the first has something to say about ‘natural’ gender differences. It’s those people who argue that we should limited to and defined by these differences who deserve our outrage, for it’s those people who are hijacking science and using it to justify any number of hideous, sexist things which demean both men and women. Surely we’ve done enough twin studies by now to realise that we are not the product of genes alone?  

That said, I’m prepared to give the sexists a chance, too, just so long as they’ll walk their talk. I’ll stick to the way I was born, the way I was ‘in nature’, if they will. That is, I’ll trade motherhood and domestication for going back to breast-milk and falling over unless propped up. Or to living in cave, starving at winter, and getting carried off by wolves. Either is fine by me. Whatever comes naturally.