 Welcome to the 10th episode of What Sex Got to Do with It, and I'm here with my favorite author in all of North America, Heather Remoff, and chapter nine is called Rewrite the Script. The genesis of that is, I do believe that we're evolved animals and that we have species specific behavior that's part and parcel of who we are as humans. And I also believe that not all of it serves us well. And so the question is, can we rise up of some of the species specific traits that I think are not serving us well? That's what I would call Rewriting the Script. I think Mother Nature slash Evolution has written the script for us, as I think I mentioned in that chapter. This song and dance routine that we go through in terms of courtship, the choreographer may be casting us in roles based just on whether we're male or female. And we may not necessarily want to perform in the way that our XY chromosomes would have us do, but can we rise above some of what's programmed into our species specific behavior evolutionarily and shaped behavior? Can we rise above it? I think we can. I got that idea from one of my mentors at Rutgers, Robin Fox, and he used to quote the scene in African Queen where the Catherine Hepburn character says to the, or the Humphrey Bogart character says to the Catherine Hepburn character, it's only human nature is how he explains some behavior that she found offensive and she draws herself up and says human nature is what we're here to rise above. And I think we do have to learn to rise above some of the aspects of our human nature that I don't think are serving as well. And the question is can we do it? Can we rewrite the script? That's interesting, you know. So I guess what we're getting at here is are there individuals that have variants in their behavior that is different from the average human behavior and whether or not there are people who are attracted to each other with those variants and those variants then become the dominant population, they dominate the population. Is that what we're getting at? Partly, but just for any individual, I think we're all so different. Even though you mentioned like the genetic differences between us are tiny, you mentioned in a previous episode and that of course is true. But some tiny differences can have huge expressions, huge differences in outcome. But I'm really thinking stereotypically male and female behavior. And for example, women are programmed shaped by evolution, as I've said in one of my chapters. The human brain has been shaped by evolution to be really good at two things, reproduction and survival. But what about if an individual woman decides she doesn't want to have children? Can she in a sense rise above that biological dictate and decide, you know, that's not a game I'm playing. Now you can, and we can discuss whether that may be genetic programming that makes her able to rise above it or not. But what else would it be? Well, it could be culturally. But her response to the cultural is genetic, right? Yes, I do think that's true. I would agree with you on that. So that's why I said the variants in the individual. But you know, we're all different and we have cultural expectations and can we change that? Can we change one of the underlying assumptions about males and females and that has a good genetic explanation is what the sort of shorthand version of is eggs are, or sperm is cheap, eggs are expensive. And that underlying premise explains the difference between male and female courtship behavior, sexual behavior, that women are much more selective, men less so. Can we change that? You know, do we have to abide? And certainly I think today's young people have a very different approach to sexual behavior than certainly my generation did. But I'm not sure that they're successfully rising above the biological dictates in that I, you know, for example, the hookup culture that isn't when women are less concerned about being very selective about their partners, you know, when that falls by the wayside. In a sense that would be challenging our biological dictates. And I'm not sure that the hookup culture happens well for women. And so that's the kind of thing I'm talking about. Can we, these basic biological dictates, cheap sperm, expensive egg kind of thing, can we behave in ways that violate that? And I absolutely think that we can and I think we do. But I think we have to be mindful of our own happiness and be aware of the ways in which our brains trick us into behaving in ways that are in opposition to what we say we want. And what is it that we want? Well, of course, it depends. I think most women from our relationship, I'm now here talking about male-female differences, I think most women really want to be in a more committed relationship than the hookup culture would indicate. In other words, I think their behavior is at odds with what their biologically program to feel, which is to look for connection in a way that would help the survival of any children they happen to have. I think the hookup culture isn't necessarily thinking, aiming for, not aiming to have children, aiming to not have children in most cases. But I think, I am concerned a little bit. I think I mentioned at the end of that chapter that I'm concerned that the hookup culture is mostly fired by heavy drinking. And if it takes large amounts of alcohol to help women get over their tendency to be selective and to be okay with hookup sex, then I'm not so sure that's a healthy thing. And if it takes large amounts of alcohol for men to get over their fear of rejection because I think that is as much as, I think men need to be encouraged a little bit to know that they're not going to be rejected by women. Then I'm a little concerned, I don't think that that's necessarily good for the happiness of the individual actors. I'm resisting the urge to pursue that more, not because it's not worthy of pursuit, but once again, as with chapter eight, this one just has so much potential in it. One is where you, I think it's your statement, you say that biology is not destiny, it's statistical probability. Yeah, I'm quoting my other mentor. My two mentors at Rutgers were Robin Fox and Lionel Tiger. And that's Lionel's line. Biology is not destiny, it's statistical probability. And I love that line because it means you cannot look at an individual man or an individual woman or individual anything, and just by looking at them or focusing on one thing, you can predict very much else about them. But if you always bet that women would be more selective than men, every time you saw a woman you would bet that she's a little more selective than the men in her life in terms of meeting them. If you played that out over time, you'd end up making money if you bet on it every time, but you can't predict for the individual woman or the individual man or the individual anything. And again, that goes to our very artificial construct, which is race, that's a social construct that doesn't, as far as I'm concerned, doesn't have a biological. And yet, if there are things we can identify, skin color, for example, is an easy one, to look at someone based on that and assume you can predict anything about them is just completely ridiculous. That one, it's not even statistical probability. So mostly I was talking about male and female there. You cannot, and again, gender comes in all, you know, there's a continuum, and someone is very cisgendered female on one end, and very male on the other. But then there's a whole range of behaviors in between and identities. And you just can't look at someone and predict. But overall, you know, in terms of male and female reproductive behavior, I think female reproductive behavior and male reproductive behavior in terms of how they evolved are different based. Once we have sexual selection, that's a specialized. Now we have a specialized division of labor. That's a specialized division of labor. And so we're going to be doing things differently because that creates an efficiency. Sexual selection is really good because it enables the shuffling of genes. Asexual reproduction is... It's like cloning. Yes, like cloning. You don't have the genetic variability and responsiveness. So sexual reproduction, rather, is very good in terms of an evolutionary system in that you can evolve much more quickly with sexual reproduction because it gives you more variation. And that results in this original division of labor between men and women. We've specialized, we each bring something different to it. And it's the difference between the sexes. It's the origin of the so-called war between the sexes and the fun between the sexes. Let's be clear on that. But I think we never can pretend that men and women approach sex and courtship entirely the same. There may be some men who do and some men and women may approach very much the same. But again, in terms of the statistical probability, men and women, because it's a division of labor, a specialized division of labor. But isn't so much that biology isn't destiny as much as it is that you can't predict from it? That's right. Because I think those two clauses seemingly or in contrast to each other, but they really aren't because the destiny is there, it's just that you can't predict. You can't predict based on a single trait, for example, whether someone is genetically female or genetically male. You can't predict based on that single factor. So that's, and yet, it's, so that's what that. So early on, I mean, not early on, but at the beginning of this paragraph, it starts with, when the pill enabled humans to divorce sex from reproduction, we had the hubris to assume we'd like lies divorce sex from its evolutionary history. So the notion of all sexes became science deniers. So this notion of science deniers, I mean, I found it was kind of prevalent when dealing with the vaccine for COVID, and also before COVID, it used to be that vaccine deniers mean were not, mean radical writers, mean they were on the left, for the most part. And for me, it wasn't that they were science deniers, it was that they were doing the science wrong because they would base their whole premise in like, well, it would be like a scientific logic being to what they were, the rationale they were using to get to the conclusion. And so my feelings were that you shouldn't approach these people as if they don't believe in science. You just try to understand me where their logic goes wrong and then try to reorient them there. That's my take on the feminists. You see what I'm getting at? Yes. And actually, when I was writing that, I was recalling in the 60s and the 70s, I was at Rutgers working on my PhD in the mid 70s. And I remember the early feminists and Ms. Magazine and the assumption was that there were no differences between men and women. My reaction at that time, if that's the foundation on which you're building your feminism, that there are no differences between men and women, your foundation and your building are on sand because that's not a solid base on which to build feminism. You cannot start with the assumption that there are no differences between men and women. There are a lot of differences between men and women. How much we allow them to impact things. There are biological differences for biological. Again, it's the sexual reproduction. And so that was my reaction to early feminism. Oh, you can't pretend. And I was a feminist. I am a feminist. I've always thought of myself as a feminist. I get furious, furious when women get denied opportunities and are ignored and aren't given, aren't seen as as smart or as clever. Those things enrage me. But to assume that there's no difference between men and women is, I think it gets us in trouble. Right, right. But they're not denying science though, right? Well, if you're saying men and women are the same, that's a bit of science denying. I guess my point is that they're just doing science wrong. So you see the distinction I'm making that they mean so I think they have some scientific basis for their conclusion, but they're just coming to the wrong conclusion. When you say that they are not, or they're saying, would they be people who, I guess maybe we're just a semantic, this is a semantic, so you're saying almost by definition when you come to the wrong conclusion, you're a science denier. No, no. When you start with the wrong facts, I think. And you're basing your conclusion on facts that you wish were true rather than facts that you've examined thoughtfully. OK, well, I see a point. Yeah, and the early feminists, that was a fact they wished was true, that men and women were the same. Well, and the early feminists, I'm not talking about now, of course, it's a whole range. Again, you can't say I'm a feminist and then know very much about what someone's philosophical stance on many things really is, except to know that they're a champion of women and think women's rights are important. But again, in the early days, when the declaration in my generation of your, you know, back in the 60s was that men and women are the same and that we've imposed cultural differences on them. Yeah. And I just thought, if that's the basis on which you're building your feminism, it's on a very weak foundation. Yeah, well, I still, I guess even though if you're saying that the facts are wrong and that makes it not science, I guess what I push my argument more is just that you can still get to the wrong facts using science. I mean, you just have the wrong conclusion, you know, I mean, so I think what they were saying is that there is no genetic reason, I mean, other than the sex chromosomes, I mean, for thinking that men and women are different, and so I think that's where they were starting from. And then. Yeah, I think where they were starting from was that those biological differences don't result in behavioral differences, that it's wrong to assume their behavioral differences that spring from those biological differences. And that's a hard one to prove. You know, of course, again, biology is not a statistical probability, but I remember going to conferences in the early days of sociobiology, and you'd hear researchers get up, women, who would say, oh, until I had children, I believe that you could just raise children to embrace any gender. And then they found out that wasn't necessarily true, that it was very difficult, but it doesn't apply to all children, again, because probably because there's some biological, there's a range of biological differences between children. Right, gotcha. So this is more of a style thing, you know, and so I know we can say anything on cable, but I'm not. No, don't. And so, but when you were talking about Aziz and Zari. Yeah, yeah. Now, that's an X-rated section in terms of the language. Yeah, and so I was just wondering, why did you use the F word when you couldn't use a different word? Well, because that was the comedian, Samantha B. That was the charge she leveled at Aziz on Zari. If you call yourself a feminist, then F like a feminist. Right, so OK. That's why I'm using that word, because I was reacting to her charge. Gotcha, gotcha. That makes sense. Yeah, so that's why that's in there. I originally wrote that section hoping to pitch it to a magazine and just let myself go with that one. But yeah, that's, but I was very curious when I read the transcript that described the so-called, our viewers may not even remember this episode, but a young woman named Anonymous Grace, who complained on a website, who I'm forgetting the name of the website, about the behavior of this famous comedian that she'd had to date with. And it caused quite a stir at the time. And I looked back over their behavior and kind of just traced it through, did some Monday morning quarterbacking, and just traced it through, looked at it as if I were interviewing them and watching them. It was the anthropologist who's interested in courtship behavior, looking at where the behavior went off the rails. All right, gotcha. But yeah, it was Samantha Bee's charge. Gotcha, gotcha. And I like Samantha Bee. I like her way of, her humor's funny. I like her general approach. And yeah, and you had talked about this a little earlier. It was later in the chapter, where you talk about the Humphrey Bullgatt character, and Charlie Allnut, and Rose Meane, and she says that we were putting this world to rise above nature. And this is kind of self-referential. And you kind of hinted at this before. But isn't rising above nature part of nature? Well, for humans it is, and that our culture is very much an expression of our biology. In fact, again, you'll have to help me out here. But if you look at cultural things like the 10 Commandments, all the things that they tell you not to do, why do we have to be told not to do them other than the fact that in our biology there's a tendency to do them? So those commandments, in a sense, are an attempt to rise above our human nature. Thou shalt not kill. Yet look at us as a species. What is it that we do so extremely well? We really are a pretty murderous species. We're very given to war, et cetera, et cetera. So I look at those kinds of commandments almost as an indication of what our base nature is. And those are the ways in which we're trying to rise above it. And again, if you turn on the news, it doesn't look as if we're being very successful. I hear you. I hear you. OK. Because I guess this is coming from a sense that I have when people separate us humans from nature. I understand what you're saying. Completely. We are not separate from nature. And we are very, very, very involved animals, just like every other species on this planet. And we are very much connected to nature. Unfortunately, we try to separate ourselves from nature. And I think we get into a little bit of trouble when we do that too much. But there are aspects of us. As you know, my daughter has told me I'm not allowed to say the word species because I despair sometimes at what humans are doing. And I often will say to my daughter, we're not a pretty species. And I'm afraid. I mean, I love being human. I am human. I love many of the things we do. But I'm deeply, deeply troubled about many of the things we as a species are doing. And we have to learn how to correct those things that are causing so much damage both to the environment and to each other. We're going to be getting to that. We're headed in that direction in chapter 10. But this one chapter ends me with what? I think it ends with this line. It certainly is the last paragraph that I cut out for a review. Unless and until we learn to decipher the messages, we are sending each other. Neither men nor women are likely to have experiences that lead to the emotionally satisfying relationships that both claim to want. So what percentage of the population you think is capable of deciphering the messages? Because we're not of complete failures. Oh, no, well, most people consider the most successful species ever. But we've changed our environment so much that we're no longer well adapted to it. So then what percentage is capable or is it? Repeat your question. So yeah, so you're saying that we need to be able to have, well, we need to go back and reread. Unless and until we learn to decipher the messages that we're sending to each other. That's your quote. We need to remember women are likely to have experiences that lead to the emotionally satisfying relationships that we both claim to want. I mean, so essentially saying we are either losing or have lost the ability to decipher messages. Well, I think, and I say in this chapter, that because the directive, the evolutionary directive, is to reproduce. Our brain has been designed to drive us to do that. And that women, the message, women are to be more selective than men, again, because of the cheap sperm expensive egg equation there. But women are not always going to find their absolute dream partner. And so women are very good in the early stages of courtship at kidding themselves. I say the directive to women appears to be when you can find the perfect man and when you can't invent him. And where women get in trouble is when we start inventing men in the early stages of relationship. And I just think for women to be aware of that, it helps us avoid some heartbreak. Oh, is he really everything that I'm telling my friends he is? Or is it just that I need to believe that he is? And again, she may not even be someone who wants children. But there is that biological directive there to reproduce. And this was in the context of the young women and men getting drunk in order to have a dream. And so do you think that's really just a function of age and maturity? Or do you think the species are really changing? I don't think the species has changed. I think. Well, do you think that women and young men are different in the 80s? I mean, different now than they were in the, let's say, the 80s and maybe the probably a function of digital technology? Some of it is that. And again, males do pretty much still control most things. And I don't think that by imitating the worst traits of men, women then become liberated. And I think that whole hookup culture is a matter of women imitating the worst traits of men. Most men are not just promiscuous lecturers just looking to get laid. I don't believe that at all. It's going to bring us to designing women in our next chapter. And we're wrapping this up a few seconds late. End on that. End on that.