Bad news for men-you’re SO over!
SCIENCE
WOMEN AFTER ALL
by Melvin Konner (Norton £16.99)
Why can’t a woman be more like a man?’ grumbled Professor higgins in the musical My Fair Lady. If the irascible professor were around today, he would be in a very bad temper indeed, for a new book argues that the future for men is to learn to be more like women.
Melvin Konner is a chap himself (and, as it happens, also a professor) but he begins his new book with a startling proposition: ‘ This is a book with a very simple argument: women are not equal to men; they are superior in many ways, and in most ways that will count in the future.’ This seems a bold, not to say unrealistic, claim to make at a time when true equality of pay, representation in government and senior business roles, the sharing of domestic chores, childcare and the care of elderly parents is still an aspiration rather than a reality; and when violent sexual abuse is frequently directed at women who speak out on these issues, or at public figures such as the academic Mary Beard, who deviate from a rigid and unrealistic standard of female ‘beauty’.
Still, if Professor Konner is keen to shower the female sex with praise and predictions of future biological supremacy, why argue?
he certainly lays it on thick in his introduction. ‘ Women are fundamentally pragmatic as well as caring,’ he writes. ‘Co-operative as well as competitive, skilled in getting their own egos out of the way, deft in managing people without putting them on the defensive, builders rather than destroyers . . .’ And so on.
By the time he gets round to claiming that ‘ sex scandals, financial corruption and violence are all overwhelmingly male’, and describing maleness as a ‘birth defect’, you almost feel like begging him to stop.
After all, some of us are quite fond of our fathers, brothers, husbands and sons. But he is determined to prove that ‘millennial male dominance is about to end. Glass ceilings are splintering into shards of light, and women are climbing male power pyramids in every domain of life.’
Perhaps fortunately, the hectic tone of male self- abasement doesn’t continue throughout the book. Women may be scaling the male power pyramid, but Konner’s route to the summit of his argument proves to involve a long scientific trek.
We begin with the evolution of maleness and femaleness. ‘Suppose,’ the professor urges, ‘you are an eight-inch-long whiptail lizard . . .’ It might sound a big ask, but the effort will eventually prove to be worth it.
Several species of whiptail lizard, it turns out, are uniparens — that is, the females reproduce without the necessity for father lizards. There is a lesson there for future womankind. Before we reach it, there is plenty of sober discussion of sexual difference in humans and the natural world, from the mating habits of bonobos — a more charming sort of chimpanzee that makes love face-to-face — to the ways in which the early devel- opment of agriculture made life worse for women (increased childbearing, shortened lifespans, the rise of male power politics).
In a ‘female-forward future’, he suggests, ‘sexual abuse of either sex by people in power will decline by almost the same extent that women replace men’.
As an example, he cites the replacement of the scandal-beset French politician Dominique Strauss-Kahn as head of the IMF by ‘the beautiful and elegant Christine Lagarde’. (he seems not to notice the oddity of complimenting Lagarde on her appearance while remaining silent on Strauss-Kahn’s features.)
But he saves his boldest prediction until last. Remember the whiptail lizard? Well, perhaps human females might one day also ‘deploy biological science on behalf of male-free reproduction’.
Then he bizarrely suggests our great-granddaughters might engineer males to be smaller, or reduce them to ‘diminutive parasites that sink their teeth into women’s sides and fuse with them, delivering a periodic pulse of sperm’.
Konner argues that ‘women have come so far that, however far they have to go, there is no turning back’.
In the next half- century, he predicts: ‘We will not see the end of men — but we will see the end of male supremacy.’
12 weeks The age at which a foetus develops male or female genitalia