Being Superior in an Inferior Body

While a body cherishes its state, its gender can be a trap. I am born a man in both body and mind. God is a man, too, and on my side in this venture. Growing up, I separated my toys, chose different games, sat in a separate section in class, and learnt to differentiate commodities associated with the two sexes. I chose boys’ things all the time and later, men’s. Many years later, I decided to buy my first car with an automatic transmission. Cars run on a complicated gear system, which I disliked. For my choice, I was made to wait longer than the rest for my car. The showroom did not have one and had to retrofit my special request elsewhere. When my friends heard about my choice, they asked why I chose a women’s car. My decision was natural. I was looking for driving comfort over other features. Today, nearly everyone drives this version of a car.

Perceptions of gender related differences are woven deep into our culture and accepted as a way of life. In the end, women stand on the less privileged side of the gender scale. Luckily, I had a head start over my opposite sex from the beginning! Compared to them, I enjoyed more privileges in most aspects of living. An interesting article, titled ‘From Cradle to Cane: The cost of being a Female Consumer’, talks about a study of gender pricing in New York City in 2015. It showed that on an average across all chosen categories women’s products cost 7 percent more than similar products for men. The items included girls’ toys and clothing, adult clothing and personal care products as well as home health care products for seniors. Women paid an annual gender tax of approximately USD 1,351 for the same services as men. Such biases can be found elsewhere, too.

At the recent Cannes Film Festival, I watched a bunch of women artists standing on the red carpet, seemingly unified and speaking for equality with men at work. For some time now, lady tennis players have been demanding that they be given the same winner’s prize as for men. While institutions have recently started admitting women as members into certain ‘Men’s Only’ places, churches have done the same by admitting them as priests and recently the ban on women driving unescorted was lifted in a Gulf nation. Similar equality efforts ring all around. Since when and why women became a “sub species” and under-privileged is an intriguing evolutionary and social question I had asked myself for some time. 

Meanwhile, women who have not found what they had always wanted in society have decided to adopt the difficult way to prove they are no less. They have joined the movement to impress men. This has gone to a level where we see them play every game men enjoy playing and watching, including thrashing each other in wrestling matches. Why is there no game which only women play and men try copying? This phenomenon has taken women everywhere now, but not to a place where they matter most: in true partnership with men. They appear, but more as a token. In fiction, they are featured for the charm and to provide the twist. Elsewhere, they appear in books, but the books are titled maliciously. Philosophy skims past them. Religion is ambiguous about their status. Glossy magazines do much better, baring them superficially stopping only at the bottom of their skin layer. This throws up a social question: “What are they, after all?”

As a student of natural science, I am aware of the role a female plays in a species. Growing up from school to college, I saw women mates fall into a stereotype state. Exceptions stood out but were too few to make any mention. When it was announced that we would be flying in an all-female crew plane, many clapped and no one panicked. We took off and landed smoothly as expected to end this intriguing story. Women can do all jobs as men do. However, I found women different from men in many ways, beyond a set job. Despite many years of bondage and subjugation, their inner perception of the world has remained very different from men. This probably comes to them naturally. After all, they are meant for a different role. At times, it makes me feel they may be superior to men. Their different perception of the world obviously creates doubt among men about whether they could be true partners to men and perceive the world as they do. Over time, women have become inferior by the design of human culture. It is a debilitating fact, not conspicuous but widespread, that human culture is skewed toward men. It should lead us to raise questions when we realize that women who make up half of the human population had been kept away in the making of the “human culture”. Or, shall we call this culture now a “man culture”?

Author Angela Saini researched and reviewed scientific articles and theories and recently came out with a book titled Inferior. I would argue the choice of the title because when I started reading it, it was with a bias and in a more sympathetic mode towards women. However, soon I could see parity and connect with the content correctly. As I read every evidence it presented, I narrated it to my mother, who could only say, “I knew it inside me all the time”, without taking her eyes away from the chores she was doing.

The life of a woman begins in the womb very differently from a man’s. Researchers⁽¹⁰⁾ have shown that the mother’s placenta does more to maintain the pregnancy and increases immunity against infection if the baby is female. No one precisely knows the cause. It could be to balance out the natural sex ratio of more boys to girls in the natural world of humans. This might be nature’s way of correcting the balance by giving more chances of survival to the girl. Once born fortified, the girl outlives a boy at all stages of life. Database on human longevity in 38 countries reveals the robustness of a woman’s life over a man’s. Angela Saini cites Steven Austad, an expert on ageing, to dismiss the notion that the reason for this could be environmental as the man is more exposed to harshness due to the nature of his work and often indulges himself in unhealthy practices such as smoking and alcohol. Eventually, the longevity is well reflected by the Gerontology Research Group in the US, which confirms that among all the super-centenarians, only two are men and 46 were women. Biologically, they outlived men far and clear, thus establishing their biological dominance.

Longevity is the cornerstone of a body’s success in the natural world and women have taken the lead in this aspect, compared with men. They have lived alongside men since the beginning. They have functioned as part of a group, the smallest of which is the family. The environment they have faced and the food they consume are the same as men. They worked side by side with men while starting and raising families. These thoughts came over me as I watched the Asian Games in Indonesia, where athletes of both sexes participated in their respective disciplines. I witnessed a female athlete who ran her steps with grace and dispatched the javelin. I could only say she could be a fearsome hunter if taken back to prehistoric times. Women graciously threw, shot, jumped, ran endurance races and played in group games with acumen as ace athletes. Their body is capable of feats for any type of living, such as using tools to hunt, running, jumping over obstacles, and devising strategies in a group. And it is rightly so, as written in Woman the Gatherer, by Adrienne Zihlman. She concluded that “women made and used tools to obtain food for themselves and their children, walked long distances, carried food and infants bipedally in the evolutionary past”. This epitomizes a woman’s physical capacity. We, however, do not know about how prehistoric social structure functioned and how men and women functionally lived. What made women secondary, a receiver, a property, and pushed them to the fringes of humanity in general could at best be a wild guess.

One does not have to look far to see a prehistoric woman and to feel nostalgic about the existence of an equal culture. My lady office manager is nothing less than the picture of that prehistoric woman. She worked tirelessly and when she became pregnant, her first, I was expecting she would take a long break from work. Astonishingly, she worked without a break. She ran her house, cooked, washed and commuted to work, until she delivered the baby. That too came on a weekend, when she sent me a text message saying she had delivered a baby girl and was looking to be away from work for some time. I had replied, “You are not away, but very much at work!” Amazingly, she was back at work in a month. From a toddler, her baby girl has now grown up to be a school-going kid nurtured by a vivacious human female being, her mother. 

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The great plains of Africa, where we evolved from our forebears, is a place of female power. Spending a few days at one of the national parks, I had become aware of their brute resolution to take their species ahead. From the ever-alert elephant matriarch leading her herd to pastures across our tour path, the alpha female hyena leading a team across the plains on a hunt, to a lioness mindfully devising her strategy with her sisters for a wilderbeest hunt are a picture of synchronicity towards success. Child care, running a family, and survival are the success that has been female-centric throughout the animal world. Males worked mostly on the fringes and brought in strength, security and vital support. His investment of his time and attention is well rewarded by the females, who nurture his genes in her offspring.

Female-centric human societies had existed before and exist now. The female in these societies takes centerstage and it is not much different from the natural world. There exist human matriarchal and matrilineal societies where females dominate inheritance and running of the family. These have existed in societies which are ancient, such as in China, India and Africa. In Yunnan, located in south-west China, an ancient Tibetan Buddhist community lives with their grandmothers at the helm of things.⁽¹²⁾ Her sons and daughters live with her, along with the children of those daughters, following the maternal bloodline. Men live on the fringes, often or not involved in the upbringing of the children. Men and women practice what is known as a “walking marriage” – a sort of hook-up. These range from one-night stands to regular encounters that deepen into exclusive life-long partnerships, which may or may not end in pregnancy. But couples never live together. “For Mosuo women, such is often a pleasurable digression from the drudgery of everyday life, as well as a potential sperm donor,” says Choo Waihong.

There exist a number of societies in north-eastern India, southern India and other parts of Asia and Africa where women dominance is acceptable form of family structure. These are standalone examples of womanhood and women’s capability in raising a complete family by herself as in the natural world. These must be the very few cultures remaining where the human female is at the helm. But the news is these societies are breaking down and degenerating into the obvious stereotypes. The conformity to the surrounding has unmatched incentive. What intrigues me is: when in our history of evolution did we take control over the woman form and make human culture look what it looks like now?

We have often run to remote societies, which live in seclusion, to gather information about us. I did the same, searching for scientific reviews to see if our societies were skewed toward males right at the start and if yes, why. I came across this interesting article written by William Buckner, a student of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of California.  He writes: “In the realm of reproductive success, hunter-gatherers are even more unequal than modern industrialized populations, exhibiting what is called “greater reproductive skew,” with males having significantly larger variance in reproductive success than females. This means we were male dominant from the start.”

He writes further that “according to some anthropologists, nomadic forager data suggest a human liking toward equality, including gender equality, in ethos and action”,  yet the available data does not support this notion in the slightest. On the contrary, in 1978 Robert Tonkinson found that among the Mardu hunter-gatherers of Australia, “Mardu men accord themselves greater ritual responsibility, higher status, more power, and more rights than women. It is a society in which male interests generally prevail when rights are contested and in the centrally important arena of religious life.” Among the Hiwi of Venezuela, and the Ache of Paraguay, female infants and children are disproportionately victims of infanticide, neglect and child homicide. It is quite common in hunter-gatherer societies that are at war or heavily reliant on male hunting for subsistence for female infants to be habitually neglected or killed. In 1931, Knud Rasmussen recorded that among the Netsilik Inuit, who were almost wholly reliant on male hunting and fishing, out of 96 births from parents he interviewed, 38 girls were killed (nearly 40 percent). Females seemed unwanted across many societies.

Despite the strength of the female body, they have submitted to men in mainstream living. Over time, men have taken charge, often through desperate means, and designed the system to fit them. Women show their reluctance to fit in, but those who give way are generously rewarded. The field of science serves as a fitting example. Winning Nobel prizes may be used as a passing measure of this and is frequently used by authors. Since 1901, there have been 825 male winners of the Nobel Prize, but just 47 female winners. Of these, 16 have been for peace and 14 for literature. This signifies a massive gender disparity in contribution to science and society. There could be many reasons for this disparity and the best could be that there are too few women working in frontier areas of research. Or it could be gender bias, as in the case of Rosalind Franklin.

Psychologist Corinne Moss-Racusin at Yale University did an interesting experiment, in which over a hundred scientists were asked to review a resume submitted by an applicant for the vacancy of lab manager. Every resume which was passed on to the evaluators was identical, except that half were given under female names and the other half under male names. The evaluators rated those with female names significantly lower in competence and hiring ability. They were also less willing to mentor them, and offered far lower starting salary. Surprisingly, the sex of the evaluating scientists did not change the bias towards the candidate. This proved a clear prejudice existing in the culture of science, also showing that women are themselves discriminating against other women. Over the years, the culture of science chose a gender bias, leaving women virtually invisible in laboratories across the world. This could be happening elsewhere, too. 

It seems everything was against the female gender, which pushed them to the fringes. The combination of strength, competition, division of labor, child-bearing, or mate guarding played a role. But it is clear now that the male dominance over the female is purely a cultural expression, invented and acquired universally by societies all over the world. Humans invented a way of life which subdues the rightful woman’s way. Further cultural conditioning through behaviors, such as sex being made off-limits, adoption of celibacy as a means to remain religiously cleansed, calling free and independent women witches, enforcing restrictions on abortion, veiling women under customs and restricting free availability of contraception are classic examples that moved women’s wishes to the sidelines. In hiding, they lost their biological strength and turned into a form of cultural commodity. Such is the shortfall that an appointment of one of a them as CEO, head, leader or to any top position makes headline news, and a statistic.

As Richard E. Leakey and Roger Lewin wrote, “There are many formidable and deeply entrenched barriers in the way of women who wish to participate equally in the political and economic life of our society which are all constructed on a basis of social prejudices and conditioning. These remain intractable because of long evolutionary history which planted a propensity of sexual differentiation with males as dominant status.”. Trying to break this will be surely reciprocated, as Angela Saini gave evidence of. She wrote: “In Norway, since 2006, the law has required that at least 40 percent of all listed company board members are women. Yet, a report published in journal Social Science and Medicine in 2016 reveals that Nordic countries, which have rated year after year as the happiest countries in the world, have a disproportionately high rate of intimate partner violence against women. This could be a backlash effect as traditional ideas of manhood and womanhood are being challenged.”

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No one is a winner in this body war. Deep inside, we will remain fascinated by each other’s capacity and role. Ancient Indian scriptures had tried to get over this duality by putting forth a line of merging thoughts and creating a being called “Ardhanarishwara”, a half man and half woman form. There are many interpretations of this form, but the one I chose here, "Ardhanarishvara,reconciles and harmonizes the two conflicting ways of life: the spiritual way of the ascetic as represented by Shiva (the man), and the materialistic way of the householder as symbolized by Parvati (the woman), whose purpose in Hindu mythology is to lure the ascetic Shiva into marriage and the wider circle of worldly affairs”. I felt this interpretation closest to being a truth.