 |
| Maybe this is the image in your head when you read the title of this post? |
In college in the late nineties, I devoured a fantastic new book called A Perfect Storm on a flight to Boston. I was on my way to visit my boyfriend in his hometown and to attend Fiesta in Gloucester, Mass. I don't know what Fiesta's like now, but in 1998 us youngsters were pretty happy that they opened the men's-only bars to women.
Since then I haven't read any more of the Sebastian Junger's books, but I know that he has become a public intellectual. And recently, he published an essay on Bari Weiss' site thefp.com.
It's called "How Democrats Lost Men" and you can read it for the low low price of giving them your email address so that they can send you their newsletter. (It only looks like you also have to sign up for a free trial with credit card number. You do not. The article will become available in full after you enter your email address.)
Now, why would such a thing with that title prompt me to write a post here on The Mermaid's Tale?
You'll know immediately when you read the first big pull-out quote.
When you lose sight of the evolutionary pressures that underlie much of human behavior, you risk wandering into ideological nonsense.
These are claims to evolutionary truths, presumably about the differences between men and women. I cannot wait to read this piece and find out what those truths are!
Of course I already know what they are. I guess I'm girding my loins with FUN so that the ideas don't hit as hard when I look at them.
 |
I thought I'd make an athletic cup with "FUN" on it and post it here, but while grabbing a pic to use, I found this fun one that already exists. Which reminds me. When we moved into our home years ago, my then-5-year-old and I were exploring the plants in the garden and I found myself saying, "Oh, look at the cocks 'n balls! I don't know why they call them that. Isn't that funny?" That night, in my sleep, my brain remembered that they're called "hens and chicks." Maybe now you know why so many spelling and grammatical errors cock up my posts. |
But before we consider Junger's ideas. I want to touch on what "ideological nonsense" reminds me of. Where have I heard that before?
I've just been revisiting the columns of David Brooks, trying to find "the receipts" as they say for why, over the years, such a nice thoughtful person as he is could have disturbed me so. It was the evolution, obviously, but I needed to remember. The one he wrote about the infamous "Google Memo" and its author James Damore is one good example.
Damore’s memo asserted that goals to bring more women into tech are simply unwise because of their evolved differences in cognition and psychology compared to men. About it, Brooks wrote that Damore “is championing scientific research.” About the diversity officer who said that Damore’s views, “advanced incorrect assumptions about gender,” Brooks said she “didn’t wrestle with any of the evidence behind Damore’s memo.” This behavior by the diversity officer, said Brooks, “is ideology obliterating reason.”
Brooks supports reason over ideology in this discussion, but he does not question whether the “evidence” behind Damore’s memo is ideology. Take a look at the wikipedia page about Damore's memo: it's not obvious to every expert that Damore's ideas are backed by evidence. Is everyone who disagrees with Damore and Brooks' evolutionary perspective (not just the "diversity officers" of the world) an idealogue?
I'll answer that. To some people, YES. Anyone who questions the truth of a "Darwinian" perspective is an ideologue. I teach evolution and am an atheist and yet because I have a different evolutionary perspective than the "Darwinians" of the world, I have been called a "cognitive creationist" ... in print... by a pseudonymous bleep in the Journal of Controversial Ideas whose editorial board boasts many Darwinians.
Because I am a woman, I have been assumed to be more ideological, and less rational and reasonable, than the people who side with the ideas that I disagree with. Why wouldn't I be? Darwin said I am inferior. He used the logic of his theories of natural and sexual selection to arrive at that conclusion, by the way.
Some people do not know that their view of evolutionary science is not the facts of life and natural law. Science is too much of a baby, still, to have accomplished such understanding. To do so would be equivalent to this:
Evolution is true! I'm talking about assuming we know all about how it works. There are still so many fascinating mysteries. But you wouldn't know it if you didn't even think to ask any questions of the old ideas!
But, some people are so confidently working with theories that are outdated, too simplistic, too narrow, too rigid, and even wrong to account for life on earth as we know it in 2026.
When they believe that science knows the laws of nature, then why on earth would it even occur to them that theirs is one perspective among other legit perspectives? It wouldn't. It doesn't. So, when thoughtful, knowledgeable people disagree, what choice do "Darwinians" have but to assume others are idealogues, or worse?
And, if ideological critics of Darwinism are cut from the same cloth as evolution-denying creationists, then why even listen to what they have to say? Why read their articles and books? When Darwinists don't, then of course they would never know that a legit, scientific alternative to their "Darwinian" view of life is evolution is true but we cannot know as much as you claim to know about how it occurred.
And because they don't listen to other points of view, including current biological science, and because they, perhaps, don't read widely, like in history or philosophy, then they don't know that they have been part of a Victorian-born tradition that took the truth of evolution as license to tell stories which masquerade as science and carry the authority of science. They don't know that they are victims and perpetrators of an unscientific project, hardly different from faith-based religion, largely enabled by the banishment of love, scientific progress, new knowledge, and, most importantly, uncertainty from evolutionary science in the public square.
Junger opens his essay with a scene from the civil war in Sierra Leone in 1999. He says that in the jungle town of Kenema women urged men to fight and did not fight, themselves. As an eye-witness to this moment in history, he's telling us that these sex or gender roles are ancient or universal or both compared to American society now where lots of people think that "the sexes are the same or at least interchangeable".
That's not a very knowledgeable view of gender, how it functions and has functioned, over time and space. My first thought is to recommend a book that may not be a priority read for a lot of today's "Darwinists" but should. It's called, The Invention of Women by sociologist Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí.
To sum up Oyěwùmí way too briefly, there are known ways that cultures vary in their beliefs about, and practices of, gender. There is no reason to believe that one way is the ancient condition of our evolutionary past. And gender varies less, cross-culturally now, because of European imperialism and colonialism including the colonialism of academia that erased the existence of such cultural diversity. When you read about cross-cultural variation and how it's changed due to cultural interaction, then it's harder to see the present condition, anywhere, as "just how humans evolved" which is what Darwinians are often doing as if they're doing rock-solid evolutionary science.
Back to Junger, with a long quote,
"I’m not saying that a rebel attack in Africa should be the basis for our gender roles, or that men and women shouldn’t be exactly who they want to be in our society. But when you lose sight of the evolutionary pressures that underlie much of human behavior, you risk wandering into ideological nonsense. The far right tries to turn young men into political assets by convincing them they are the “true” victims of today’s society. And the far left tries equally hard to convince them that all masculinity is suspect and dangerous, and that the only proper thing for men to do is to back out of the room, apologizing. Both viewpoints would be absurd to anyone in Kenema."
I think that's a stretch, both of the political viewpoints and what people in Kenema would think of them. But I am just me, here, and I wasn't there. He was. So, I'm not going to argue or dwell. Next he says,
"Given the awful binary of political messaging in this country, it’s not surprising that many young men have drifted strongly rightward over the last decade."
I agree. But also, the existing condition of patriarchy is probably more at fault or to blame than the current awful political messaging. Patriarchy needs patriarchy. And guess what it also needs? In our science-loving, STEM-prioritizing world, it needs "Darwinian" evolutionary perspectives like we're about to hear from Junger.
He lists some characteristics of men compared to women. I can only assume he believes that they are significantly due to evolved differences between men and women caused by sexual selection. All of them, not just the physical strength (which is about moving heavy weight) but the behavioral characteristics as well. This is mainstream stuff. He says he had a piece rejected at another outlet for saying so. Here's that passage:
"I also cited studies on female sexual preference, because male biology partly reflects thousands of generations of women choosing some men over others."
Well, maybe that editor knows, like many people know, that studies on sexual preferences of people today are not evidence, even "partly" so, that male biology reflects thousands of generations of women choosing some men over others. You can accept the truth of evolution on one hand and also, sanely and soundly, with the other hand, reject evolutionary psychological claims that what people say and do today is evidence for what their ancestors did and for how that imaginary behavior shaped our biology.
Junger's next sentence is, "It turns out that many male traits that qualify as “toxic” in liberal circles—dominance, strength, assertiveness—are particularly attractive to many young women looking for a mate."
This doesn't ring true to me—the "toxic" designation, I'm talking about, not what people report as attractive. [Note: A few hours after I published this, I noticed that I had mistakenly written the prior sentence as if I thought the studies reporting out what women find attractive weren't true. So I edited the sentence for clarity.] I wonder how all this is getting confused and muddled together, given how evolved sexual psyches have become so mainstream as a way to understand gender. I don't know. But I'm not out there believing that the evolutionary truth of humanity is exactly how a guy laid it out 150 years ago with no fossil record or genetics. So, maybe I'm not getting exposed to the backlash that Junger gets or sees others receiving. If I did, maybe I'd confuse rejection of old evolutionary storytelling as a personal attack on my maleness. Maybe it would be disorienting enough that I'd worry that all the young people have gone mad or stupid. Maybe I'd believe that if only they could grasp the science then it would all be better. Junger continues...
"Plenty of good men do not have those traits [dominance, strength, assertiveness], but men with those traits tend to have more sexual success than men without them. Which means that, over the eons, they will leave behind more offspring than their gentler brothers—and thus influence what men “are.”"
It's easier to assume that these things are all biological than to wade into the messiness of development and co-constitution. And, perhaps, people prefer to grant all the power to a god-like nature than to the families, cultures, and societies they're born into (a world that got increasingly weird in the Homo sapiens lineage, didn't it?). But to acknowledge the latter is to embrace the perspective not of sex or gender, not of sex and gender, but of gender/sex entanglement. Thanks to Anne-Fausto Sterling and other scholars, gender/sex makes a lot of sense to me and I co-wrote about it (open access) here: https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007/978-3-031-91371-6_4.
About his rejection from the other outlet, Junger continues, "I made it clear in my piece that the violence and ugliness of the far right in this country is the exact opposite of masculinity, which is committed to protecting rather than attacking vulnerable people. But my editor still declined to run the piece, explaining, “The science seems solid, but the conclusions run counter to the political currents at this publication.”"
This is typical. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, there's really only one story that's "the science" on evolution, especially especially regarding sex differences, and it's the "Darwinian" one. For the right, it's what's right and meant to be. It's all in the Bible, after all! And for the left, it is the unfortunate or inconvenient truth... BUT we can rise above it!
I feel for Junger's frustration and anger about "toxic" labeling of masculinity, maleness, and men. But am I the only one who sees that a big part of the problem is the stubborn view of human nature, especially regarding evolved sex differences?
The view from 2026 doesn't require that we hold Junger's view of the evolution of sex differences and so we don't have to reconcile "human nature" with what we experience right now, here and now, as we are, as humans are, today. What Junger and most everyone in the public square thinks we know about the past, we actually do not. We cannot know if sexual selection for masculinity gave us masculinity.
Sure, I'm not speaking from consensus. I wish! But I am speaking as someone who has looked into these things. For example, here: https://ecodevoevo.blogspot.com/2026/02/whats-true-about-evolution-of-mens.html
What would this discourse look like if we had a realistic, not dogmatic and outdated, view of evolution? Evolution would be gone from the conversation, for one. And then maybe we'd be forced to realize that what we're dealing with is all sociocultural patriarchal stuff that WE DECIDE on. People would be forced to say that they want males to dominate and to perpetuate violence, rather than launder their ideas through the authority of science and shrug and say, whaddyagonnado, that's just how humans evolved.
If we realized we have the power then we might see actual progress on the problems that Junger laments. But that progress would mean fewer opportunities for men to be the real men he's imagining, it would mean fewer (or no) wars. And I guess that would ruin the economy. So I guess getting real about gender, all that hard work, no matter how great it would be for everyone, not just women, but everyone... that would be too tumultuous. Better not. Better just keep treating Descent of Man like the Bible and keep beating the drum for eternal wars...
I cannot wait for the mainstream view of human evolution, like Junger's, to remain in history where it belongs. I can't wait. Oooooh I can't wait.
