"Talking to an ageing Don Juan the other day, I was struck by his sudden defence of his behaviour…
"It's in our genes," he said comfortably. "I could impregnate every woman in this room, but you couldn't have a child with every man in this room. So men evolved to be really, really promiscuous."
"And doesn't that make you feel good," I said.
"Sure," he said happily.
In the 19th century, that same man might have believed that God made men to be leaders and women to be followers."
Roses are Red - So What
This quote aptly illustrates everything feminists hate about Darwinism. It links two concepts, which orthodox feminists erroneoulsy believe are inextricably linked with evolutionary theory; male chauvinism and biological determinism. It’s crafted to instantly trigger a thousand feminist stress responses, the message: know thy enemy!
The shame of this article - the unchallenged claim of Walter’s ageing Don Juan, that he could impregnate every women in the room, that such a feat was ‘in his genes’ - is that it is false and either Walter knew this and published it anyway, or she didn’t conduct even the most cursory research on the claim. Either way, the ethics of both acts are rather suspect and unfortunately typical of feminist scholarship in this area.
What Walter did here – indulging her negative muse – was to use her privileged position in the media to disseminate untrue myths about male dominance, which your average lay person would have no idea how to counter. Who needs patriarchy, when feminists do the job themselves!
Had Walter done some research, she would very quickly have discovered the following, which might have given the piece some journalistic worth:
“Imagine a male that mates with 56 women over 56 days and a woman mates with 56 different men over the same period. The woman is likely to become pregnant and bear one offspring in the same year…If the male avoids the time of menstruation he has about a 15% chance of impregnating a woman during her fertile period. Only half of the female ovarian cycles will be fertile, some women will be infertile...and implantation will only take place about 40% of the time. The number of women a man could expect to make pregnant is one.”
Cartwright p34
Next time you come across a Don Juan of any age, remember to pass this on!
Cartwright's calculation is nice, but one could get the same result with some imagination (and sympathy). I have heard John Searle put the matter this way: it's ad-hoc to say that because males have so much sperm, they want to spread it around indiscriminately. One could just as easily say that women, having so few eggs, want to make sure as many and as various sperm as possible have a shot at them. The point is not about outcomes, as in Cartwright/Don Juan, but it's the same point concerning motivation as in Don Juan/Walter, and I think it shows its wishful character.
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