SOCIETY TODAY
Medicine
A woman, a dog and a walnut tree
John Linklater
An interesting psychological experiment at Loughborough University recently made headline news* by demonstrating scientifically that most women do not, in fact, truly aim for equality of status with men. Doctor David Mack, Director of Studies in Social Psychology at Loughborough, placed a group of some fifty female students in a competitive game situation on an electronic machine. The competitive element was provided entirely by the machine itself but the women were led to believe that they were playing against another person, out of sight in a nearby room. Analysis of the recorded results showed that they scored very significantly higher marks when they thought that they were playing against another woman than they did when they imagined that they were opposing a man. The only independent varieties factor was the supposed sex of their imaginary opponent and it was therefore this which determined the change in the score.
Doctor Mack's findings are in complete accord with our understanding of the traditional, functional role of women, both in primitive societies and in stable civilised societies, and furnish useful, objective data with which to expose the incoherent, emotional and fallacious slogans of the women's liberation movement which claims that women could, and do, and should compete on equal terms with men in all fields, and which depicts men and women as bitter competitors rather than as equal partners in a joint enterprise. Women's liberationists therefore ignore the indisputable facts of genetic selection for an interdependent, non-competitive relationship within the family, and of the survival value of the family itself as the basic unit of society.
Enthusiastic partisans of women's liberation also seem to forget that most of our basic, mammalian characteristics depend upon an incredibly intricate interplay of mind and matter in the form of nerve circuits and reflexes, mostly quite outside conscious control and closely, causally related to the hormonal balance, to body growth, development and constant repair, and that we interfere with this mechanism at grave peril to our physical and mental health and, eventually, our survival as a race. .
It is perfectly true that an individual male may stay at home to look after the infants when the mother goes out to work. Such an arrangement is sometimes necessary for various reasons but, if it had been generally desirable and if it had tended to produce more capable, more competent and more stable offspring, mankind would soon have adopted it as of first choice: we should long ago have lost the distinctive, basic and unalterable, physical and mental differences between the sexes.
The curious thing is that even Doctor David Mack appears to stumble into the women's liberation trap by explaining his results at Loughborough on a basis of conditioning. He said that "women are conditioned to see themselves" in sex-linked roles "from the day that they are born — Girls wear pink and boys wear blue. She plays with her dolls while he helps dad to mow the lawn." I do not dispute the facts, and agree that most of the children of most sane parents will be thus encouraged to practice their adult roles during childhood play. This play is not the cause of the difference between the sexes, however, but is one of the first effects of that difference. It is not the jeans which they wear that determine basic behaviour pattern, but the genes which they carry.
Whether they play with cuddly dolls or bows and arrows, little girls will gradually develop a higher level of circulating blood oestrogens and progesterones than their brothers, and it is this hormonal difference which governs their behaviour pattern and physique. Little boys, on the other hand, may sometimes be given dolls to play with but this does not stop them from developing a higher level of blood androgens than their sisters. Their voices therefore break, they poke pencils into keyholes and can eventually grow beards whatever their conditioning may have been.
The Loughborough experiments should be interpreted in the light of earlier studies on the effect of sex hormones on behaviour patterns. In one classical research project, for example, progesterone was given to savage male rats which subsequently became docile, built nests and collected and protected baby rats, or models of baby rats, which were placed in their cages. It was not conditioning which led them, thus, to play with dolls, but an artificially raised level of female hormone. There is abundant clinical evidence of similar effects on humans and, although strength of character and training can modify the effect, the basic response always follows the predominant hormone.
The sex hormones are common to all mammals, and they must therefore have been genetically determined about 200 million years ago. The resulting, sex-linked behaviour patterns must likewise have an equally ancient origin, and the individual behaviour patterns have thus become inextricably intertwined with sex-linked, racial memory patterns and all the genetically determined unconscious imagery which produces the normal, receptive, passive, gentle and emotional female, compared with the typical aggressive, intellectual, skilful, outgoing and exploratory male. It is perfectly true that there are many exceptions to this pattern of differentiation, but it would indeed be a crazy society which allowed its mores to be dictated by the exception rather than by the rule.
The increasing intellectual power of mankind in general, which is related to the gradual growth in volume of the human brain contex through the ages, may well throw up an occasional Mrs Thatcher, but such phenomena do not provide any kind of logical proof that women, as a whole, are now ready to take up a status which, according to Miss G. Greer, has been denied to them by some kind of male conspiracy. There are, in addition, plenty of examples of the Briinnhilde, whose competitive aggression defeats and, often, castrates her consorts, and which is usually associated with sporadic or inadequate ovarian function leading to fluctuating, low, hormone levels, a scanty menstrual pattern and a hairy face. Such women can also be as dynamic and interesting as the intellectual dominants but any society in which they were numerically predominant would be self-destroying within a few generations.
If the average woman does not spend about ten of the most active years of her life principally engaged in reproducing, nurturing and educating her children, the human race will die out. She cannot therefore have the same role as a man, any more than he can have the same role as she has. The roles of men and women must be largely complementary and, therefore, different: a society which attempts to legislate against this difference might as well legislate against the sun-spot cycles. The women at Loughborough played less aggressively against the machine and scored twenty per cent lower when they believed that there was a man at the other end. They did this because they carried the XX Chromosome in every cell nucleus in their bodies, and because this predetermined their hormone ,levels, their neuro-hormonal responses and their behavour patterns. True freedom of will and higher intellect were neutralised by the surprise, hidden structure of Doctor Mack's subtle and elegant experiment, and the women therefore made their game decisions according to basic, archtypal expectations of what they felt would be better for them, as women facing men: they felt better to be beaten.
Previous page
