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There's been some recent patter over at ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
aberwyn's journal about cultural ideas of male and female sexuality and the differences therein, &c., where she characterised evolutionary psych as follows:
"The method is simple: find a characteristic you want to define as Male or Female. Make up a plausible story to explain it. Make sure you set your story so far in the past that it's impossible to prove or disprove it. Write a book about it! Must be real then."
So, the game! Take a characteristic typically seen as 'masculine' or 'feminine'. Now switch genders, and make up a plausible-sounding explanation for why we "evolved" such a trait. Here's some I prepared earlier:
- Female promiscuity is an evolutionary adaptation, because the male that makes the best caretaker is not necessarily the one that will provide the strongest & best genes for her offspring.*
- Men tend to have a higher linguistic and emotional intelligence than women, because while hunting in a group it's important to have tight social cohesion; whereas women tend to have a higher spatial/mathematical intelligence, which in our prehistoric past helped them remember where to gather plants.
- Men naturally prefer pink, because of the pinkening of female lips and vulvas which indicates sexual arousal and therefore availability. Women naturally prefer blue because it is calming to their histrionic temperaments.**
* I've seen this argument advanced to explain the extramarital affairs of usually-monogamous birds -- but this recent study on zebra finches indicates that it's probably just that the genes responsible for a greater tendency towards promiscuity are heritable by both sexes.
** That last bit's a joke, obvi. (I mean, all of this is a joke, but still), but OMG you guys do you remember a few years ago when some British evolutionary psychologists proposed that women "naturally" prefer pink because of gathering berries, while men "naturally" prefer blue because of hunting under an open sky? THEY ACTUALLY SAID THIS. AND IT GOT IN ALL THE PAPERS. And then a whole bunch of historians/anthropologists/people from non-Western cultures were like "Um, guys, you know that particular set of general colour preferences is very specific to your place and time, right? And it doesn't hold true around the world and it was even reversed in your own culture a hundred years ago, mmkay? Yeah? No, evidently not."
aberwyn's journal about cultural ideas of male and female sexuality and the differences therein, &c., where she characterised evolutionary psych as follows:"The method is simple: find a characteristic you want to define as Male or Female. Make up a plausible story to explain it. Make sure you set your story so far in the past that it's impossible to prove or disprove it. Write a book about it! Must be real then."
So, the game! Take a characteristic typically seen as 'masculine' or 'feminine'. Now switch genders, and make up a plausible-sounding explanation for why we "evolved" such a trait. Here's some I prepared earlier:
- Female promiscuity is an evolutionary adaptation, because the male that makes the best caretaker is not necessarily the one that will provide the strongest & best genes for her offspring.*
- Men tend to have a higher linguistic and emotional intelligence than women, because while hunting in a group it's important to have tight social cohesion; whereas women tend to have a higher spatial/mathematical intelligence, which in our prehistoric past helped them remember where to gather plants.
- Men naturally prefer pink, because of the pinkening of female lips and vulvas which indicates sexual arousal and therefore availability. Women naturally prefer blue because it is calming to their histrionic temperaments.**
* I've seen this argument advanced to explain the extramarital affairs of usually-monogamous birds -- but this recent study on zebra finches indicates that it's probably just that the genes responsible for a greater tendency towards promiscuity are heritable by both sexes.
** That last bit's a joke, obvi. (I mean, all of this is a joke, but still), but OMG you guys do you remember a few years ago when some British evolutionary psychologists proposed that women "naturally" prefer pink because of gathering berries, while men "naturally" prefer blue because of hunting under an open sky? THEY ACTUALLY SAID THIS. AND IT GOT IN ALL THE PAPERS. And then a whole bunch of historians/anthropologists/people from non-Western cultures were like "Um, guys, you know that particular set of general colour preferences is very specific to your place and time, right? And it doesn't hold true around the world and it was even reversed in your own culture a hundred years ago, mmkay? Yeah? No, evidently not."
