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The Democrat/Liberals are fighting human nature.
13. Kay S. Hymowitz
Femina Sapiens in the Nursery
The conflict between parenting and career is hardwired in the female brain.
Femina Sapiens in the Nursery
So many of us have fought the battle of “Motherhood vs. Career,” and come up with a final decision based on personal and individual understandings of what is involved. This article by Kay Hymowitz investigates the question in a fascinating way, and sheds new light on this moment in time.
Feminists consider sexual identity a “social construct,” a human—or, to be more precise, a male—invention. Evolutionary scientists, on the other hand, believe that we have inborn physical and psychological traits that result from millennia of adaptations to our natural environment. Where feminists see society, evolutionists see nature. But recent findings in primatology, neuroscience, and genetics have… lent support to some deeply controversial ideas about differences between the sexes. Among the most troubling for [the feminist view] is that the inner conflict between child rearing and independence may be a battle between two powerful evolutionary forces.
If there’s one part of evolutionary thinking that spells bad news for the feminist worldview, it is parental-investment theory, an idea originally proposed by Harvard professor Robert Trivers. Trivers was attempting to clarify Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which went something like this: females of most species are more particular about their mates than males are. Females, as he put it, “invest” more than males—and that includes being cautious about their sexual partners, the fathers of their offspring. Parental—which almost always means maternal—investment governs mating and reproduction. The profound female connection to her offspring is the Rosetta stone of female sexual behavior. Just about all scientists have signed on to Trivers’s basic template that in nature, females almost always do the kids.
The notion that females are more highly invested in their children than males is being confirmed by findings in biochemistry and neuroscience, as these disciplines clarify the role of hormones—particularly testosterone and oxytocin—in sexual and reproductive behavior. Like the male sex hormone testosterone, oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus. But in most other respects, it is the anti-testosterone. Instead of fueling aggression, it promotes attachment, reduces fear, and leads to feelings of pleasure and well-being. Testosterone appears in males at far higher levels than in females; oxytocin, on the other hand, is more prevalent in females. Women have many more oxytocin receptors in their brains than men do, and those receptors rev up during orgasm, childbirth, and breast-feeding—signaling that at a biological level, the boundaries most of us take as axiomatic between sexual pleasure, reproduction, and mothering are not all that clear.
13. Kay S. Hymowitz
Femina Sapiens in the Nursery
The conflict between parenting and career is hardwired in the female brain.
Femina Sapiens in the Nursery
So many of us have fought the battle of “Motherhood vs. Career,” and come up with a final decision based on personal and individual understandings of what is involved. This article by Kay Hymowitz investigates the question in a fascinating way, and sheds new light on this moment in time.
Feminists consider sexual identity a “social construct,” a human—or, to be more precise, a male—invention. Evolutionary scientists, on the other hand, believe that we have inborn physical and psychological traits that result from millennia of adaptations to our natural environment. Where feminists see society, evolutionists see nature. But recent findings in primatology, neuroscience, and genetics have… lent support to some deeply controversial ideas about differences between the sexes. Among the most troubling for [the feminist view] is that the inner conflict between child rearing and independence may be a battle between two powerful evolutionary forces.
If there’s one part of evolutionary thinking that spells bad news for the feminist worldview, it is parental-investment theory, an idea originally proposed by Harvard professor Robert Trivers. Trivers was attempting to clarify Darwin’s theory of sexual selection, which went something like this: females of most species are more particular about their mates than males are. Females, as he put it, “invest” more than males—and that includes being cautious about their sexual partners, the fathers of their offspring. Parental—which almost always means maternal—investment governs mating and reproduction. The profound female connection to her offspring is the Rosetta stone of female sexual behavior. Just about all scientists have signed on to Trivers’s basic template that in nature, females almost always do the kids.
The notion that females are more highly invested in their children than males is being confirmed by findings in biochemistry and neuroscience, as these disciplines clarify the role of hormones—particularly testosterone and oxytocin—in sexual and reproductive behavior. Like the male sex hormone testosterone, oxytocin is produced in the hypothalamus. But in most other respects, it is the anti-testosterone. Instead of fueling aggression, it promotes attachment, reduces fear, and leads to feelings of pleasure and well-being. Testosterone appears in males at far higher levels than in females; oxytocin, on the other hand, is more prevalent in females. Women have many more oxytocin receptors in their brains than men do, and those receptors rev up during orgasm, childbirth, and breast-feeding—signaling that at a biological level, the boundaries most of us take as axiomatic between sexual pleasure, reproduction, and mothering are not all that clear.
