Via LabRat:
Evo Psych Bingo!
As LabRat says, there is legitimately such a thing as evolutionary psychology, but going around saying we should have 1950s gender roles and/or promiscuous polygyny, because science and because cavemen is not how it really works.
(I always wonder if "1950s gender roles" even really existed in the 1950s. They do show up in the media of the time, but when I talk to people who were alive then they always paint a much more nuanced picture, with a lot of working mothers and non-nuclear families and non-useless fathers. I suspect that the "housewife, breadwinner, Junior, and Sis" family model was somewhat more prevalent in the 1950s, but hardly universal.)
Let me just tell you, as someone who works with a lot of scientists, that evo psych stuff isn't taken nearly as seriously as pop science would have you believe.
ReplyDeleteThe problem is not only that it isn't hard science, it's that many evolutionary psychologists incorporate fundamental misunderstandings of Darwin's model into their theories.
I think the idea of evolutionary psychology is actually quite fascinating, so it's all the more upsetting to see people using it merely to justify what makes them feel good rather than for legitimate inquiry. It's got nothing to do with being "PC," a world that a lot of people like to throw out whenever someone disagrees with them, ironically enough.
It's definitely not taken terribly seriously in most psychology and evolutionary biology circles- and one way you can tell is how many books there are on the subject. Scientists that are being taken seriously publish in journals, and then maybe get around to books if they feel like it.
ReplyDeleteIt still has plenty of currency with the public, depressingly.
As for the 1950s, my grandmother was a doctor and single mother in rural Texas. She was more "pillar of the community" than "outcast". I look seriously askance at Ward and June.
My mom paints a pretty bleak picture of the intense pressure to conform to the standard "feminine role." (And she grew up in a city, with immigrant parents, so hardly Ward and June.) Possibly she felt it more, being inherently a freaky sort, but it sounds extremely soul-crushing.
ReplyDeleteBut when people who never have been married and have no intention to marry, start telling those who are married which roles they should have, this is some wrong way too.
ReplyDeleteweb - Oh, there definitely were more rigid gender roles then, I just don't think they were quite as extreme and universal as certain people (most of them born in the 70s and 80s) seem to think.
ReplyDeleteMe - Yeah, I've never made a movie so I can't say if Raiders of the Lost Ark is better or worse than Twilight, it's basically impossible to have any opinions about something I haven't done myself.
A little different.
ReplyDeleteIf you never cook - you'd better not teach to cook those who do. And even more - if you legally bind them to cook your way, don't complain afterwards that traditional cuisine is no more and that is why it's time to start eating, like, clay.
I don't think the "'50s family" was much more prevalent (a little more, but not much more), but the people in charge of media were less likely than they are now to consider "a lot of families aren't like that" as a valid reason to show families that weren't like that. And that was still the era of the Hayes Code, so movies especially.
ReplyDeleteI'm married. Can I have an opinion?
ReplyDeleteInsisting you know what's best for someone's relationship, legally wed or no, either because of your ideology or because you have "tradition" or "biology" on your side is in itself arrogant, high-handed, and generally wrong.
The rigid gender roles were definitely more prevalent in the middle and upper classes. Working class people going back for centuries - even in the Victorian era, which was even more stereotypically obsessed with gender roles - couldn't really afford to have a stay-at-home mom and just constantly pop out babies and bake all day. Middle class people actually used rigid gender roles to distance themselves from the working class. It was called the "cult of true womanhood" and it basically was a way to say poor women weren't worth anything because they weren't real women. It was a way to justify treating the poor like crap.
ReplyDeleteAlso, non-traditional families were rarer in the 1950s in the middle class. They had lower divorce rates because no-fault divorce didn't exist yet - women had to prove that they were being mistreated in order to escape their marriages, which was difficult to do. The law saw domestic abuse as a private problem and didn't recognize marital rape as rape at all until the 70s. There were very few single mothers, too, because it was common for unmarried pregnant girls to be forced into homes for unwed mothers by their parents. When they gave birth, they'd be coerced, shamed, or just outright lied to and their babies would be forcibly taken away.
So, yeah, the 50s were fucked up.
Both sets of my grandparents lived in something close to a "1950s lifestyle" back during those days. Though instead of having two kids, my mother's parents had 3 and my father's had 5. However, at least 6 of the 8, including both of my parents, are or were extremely dysfunctional people. (I say "are or were" because some of them are dead. And I say "at least" because one of them died before I ever met him and another whom I've hardly ever seen or heard about.) I'm wondering if maybe there's a connection, like if a "1950s lifestyle" tends to damage people's sanity or something.
ReplyDeleteLabrat - True, I'm not a big fan of bossing people around (usually...), but I get irked by the "you don't know anything unless you've done it, in which case you know everything" argument.
ReplyDeleteI never said a word about "you know everything" so here you are outright projecting, but does not the first half make any sence at all?
ReplyDeleteWell, I have to wonder then what evo.psych. has to say about the communist block of the 50s 'cause we sure as hell didn't have male breadwinner female housewife distinction. Hell, most countries were adamant in claiming everyone's equal (kinda the whole point, no? :P), up to the point where women had to 'volunteer' to do physically extremely demanding jobs right next to their male counterparts. Think some random 40 year old secretary who types all day long, and stick her to building roads in August. If they could carry guns during the war, they can carry shovels in rebuilding.
ReplyDeleteIce - Yeah, I should have said "1950s America," apparently some other countries were already going against evolution (or whatever) during that time.
ReplyDeleteI always wonder if "1950s gender roles" even really existed in the 1950s.
ReplyDeleteAs shallow as this may sound, the thing that really rammed home the eternal weirdness of humans? Victorian porn. As long as we've had cameras, we've been using them to take pictures of all kinds of people doing all kinds of things to all kinds of other people. It's a vivid illustration of how generally futile it is to try to judge what a society _was_ by uncritically viewing the models it presented in its entertainment.
I think what you're saying about evolutionary psychology is *basically* true. The kind of simplistic "just so stories" kind of evolutionary psychology, especially that associated with the so-called "Santa Barbara Church", leaves a lot to be desired when it comes to their models of behavioral evolution and hypothesis testing.
ReplyDeleteThat said, I think a lot of the feminist critique and general snarkiness about evolutionary psychology, as embodied in the "bingo card", is pretty simplistic and show none of the nuance I've seen in actual *scientific* critiques of evolutionary psychology. Worse, much of the feminist critique is centered around a kind of "social constructionist" ideology based on kind of a "blank slate" model that if anything is even *less* grounded in science than many of the worst exponents of evolutionary psychology.
This has the unfortunate effect of feminists of various sorts coming up with ideas about sexual ethics that have no reference to the way people actually are, but only to the way they "should" be in some hypothetically perfect feminist society. (And yes, you bet I'm aware that "is" does not equal "ought", but at the same time "ought" most certainly needs to be *informed by* "is".)
I've pretty well outlined my views on EvPsych over on Feminist Whore's blog before (link), so I'll refer back to that rather than write further.
Also, here a dense but *highly recommended* academic critique of sloppy EvPsych, from an evolutionary psychology textbook, no less:
Evolutionary Psychology and the Challenge of Adaptive Reasoning
If you're interested in roles and societal structures in 1950s America, I recommend the book The Way We Never Were.
ReplyDelete