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... argued that similar differences existed among humans. Consequently, he concluded that men are, "more courageous, pugnacious and energetic than woman, and have more inventive genius. " Darwin did much to damage society during his day, women in particular. Victorian assumptions of the inevitability and rightness of a woman's role of domestic moral preceptor and nurturer and man's role of free-ranging aggressive provider and jealous patriarch were enshrined in Darwin's reconstruction of human evolution.
Our female progenitors were maternal, sexually shy, tender and altruistic, while our male ancestors were "naturally" competitive, ambitious and selfish. Not unlike Darwin himself who wrote in The Descent: "Man is the rival of other men; he delights in competition. " It was the natural order of things, just as man was "naturally" more intelligent than woman, as Darwin demonstrated to his satisfaction through the dearth of eminent women intellectuals and professionals. "The chief distinction in the intellectual powers of the two sexes is shown by man's attaining to a higher eminence in whatever he takes up, than can women -- whether requiring deep thought, reason, or imagination, or merely the use of the senses or hands" (Darwin, 1871, 102). It is quite clear how Darwin perpetuated stereotypes and created conflict between the genders in his day. One would think that time and science would have moved todays society far beyond thoughts of natural selection and survival of the fittest in the battle of the sexes. However, these premises are still affecting our culture today and tainting the attitudes of men and women in their roles in society.
Men are still viewed as the main providers of families. Further, the conclusion "now widely accepted... that males of most species are less selective and coy in courtship because they make smaller investments in offspring" is used to justify male sexual promiscuity. Male promiscuity is, in other words, genetically determined because males profit, evolutionarily speaking, from frequent mating, and females do not. The more females a male mates with, the more offspring he produces - whereas a female need only mate with one male to become pregnant. Evolution would progress only if she selected the most fit male, which is what Darwin's theory of sexual selection predicted.
For this reason, males have "an undiscriminating eagerness" to mate, females "a discriminating passivity" (Diamond, 1993, 220). Fox even argues that high pregnancy rates among unmarried teenage girls is due to our 'evolutionary legacy" which drives young girls to get pregnant. Consequently, cultural and religious prohibitions against unmarried teen pregnancy are doomed to fail. To understand the psychology of this, we turn to Freud. With all of its confusing contradictions, the influences of Freud have had a profound and subversive effect on the thinking of our present age. He changed man's understanding of himself and his nature.
Perhaps the most critical influence Freud has had upon society was his invention of a new determinism by which man does what he does and becomes what he becomes. He saw the libido as the prime mover. This legacy has dragged sex into the streets, our homes, into every nook and cranny of our lives-and has also filled our psychiatrists' couches. Much of 1970 s feminism was virulently anti-psychological, fearing that inquiry into motives and inner worlds inevitably entailed a strategy of divide and rule: divide the women into their individual inner worlds so as to remove the possibility of their recognition of what was social and therefore common, in its banal ordinariness, to every oppressed woman. It was rape, not fantasy, that began to concern feminists; and, from the late 1970 s on, it was the sexual abuse of children, not the Oedipus complex, that became a new crusade for many feminists.
Freud and all the institutions of psychoanalysis became deeply suspect for having highlighted fantasy and desire, rather than brute reality and sexual exploitation. If another such as Freud were to consider gender roles today, he would connect the roots of gender roles to sexuality. The traditional roles materialized originally from sexual desire. Women are considered sex objects because that is what society desires. Men are seen as ideally masculine because society desires their masculinity. Most everyone would like to achieve success.
Many men count on a powerful personality to achieve their goals. This is a gender role that usually ensures success. In many ways, society tells us that women can easily be successful through their sexuality. Many women can depend solely on their appearance for a successful life. This is proven through the medias use of gender and gender relationships. Sex sells and entertains because it provides the consumer with a bit of pleasure beyond that of the actual product.
Darwin, Marx and Freud are mutually constitutive. Darwin brings historicity to the heart of the sciences linking life to the earth and our humanity to both. Teleological and anthropomorphic concepts lie at the basis of his concept of natural selection. Marx teaches us the historicity of all - including scientific - concepts and points out that there is only one science, the science of history.
Freud teaches us that all of history and culture continue to be mediated by basic human drives and that no matter how high we reach into abstractions, our thought remains rooted in primitive psychic mechanisms. It would seem, then, that our conception of a human science must always draw on these three dimensions of what Marx calls our species being. The historical, conceptual and practical tasks that follow from this will surely occupy all of at least to the retiring age. We have in these three thinkers - at first glance -biology, economics and the psyche, but looked at more closely each takes us to history and historicity, to culture and its roots and to the question of the nature and man and womans role in it.
Each offers a conception of the disciplined study of humanity that always retains a notion of human values in action as the central guiding conception. None will do alone, while the task of integrating them in historical studies and in theory has hardly begun. Their writings span the century between about 1840 and 1940. Darwin (1809 - 82) and Marx (1818 - 83) were near contemporaries and published their main works almost simultaneously. They died within a year of each other just over a hundred years ago. Freud was the youngest of three years when The Origin of Species and An Introduction to the Critique of Political Economy appeared in 1859.
The problematic of his life's work makes little sense without seeing both Darwin and Marx as providing the framework of ideas and aspirations about nature and human nature. These men provided the framework of history around the constant battle against stereotypes in relationships. Sexuality is the most intimate aspect of human existence. Understanding where a sexual partners ideologies, cultural background and intellectual understandings come from is a major step in insuring tranquility, both intimately and socially. Economics, biology and psychology are the foundation of society and human nature. As Freud points out, it is impossible to avoid human nature, therefore we must seek to better understand it.
It is unfortunate that the ideologies of the men mentioned here have still implemented themselves in our culture. While their premises are valid and vastly important in the history of humankind, one must be careful to discern what is relevant in todays society and what was the experimental leanings and philosophies of the past. Charles Darwin. (1871) The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. New York: D. Appleton and Company. Diamond, Jared M. (1993) The third chimpanzee.
New York, NY: Harper Perennial. Deal, James A. , Paludi, Michele A. , (1994) Sex and Gender: The Human Experience. Walsh, Mary Roth, ed. , (1987) The Psychology of women: ongoing debates. New Haven: Yale University Press. Waldron, Jeremy. (1987) Nonsense upon stilts. London; New York.
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