hey all,

i just wrote this paper about a conversation between a feminist critical theorist and an evolutionary psychologist and thought i would share. and i thought it might spark a discussion about the relationship between an evolutionary perspective on human behavior and cognition and the larger intellectual projects of a social science pre-occupied with subjectivity.


Matthew: Hello everyone! Welcome to our show. As you know every week we invite two scholars who hold opposing viewpoints on a particular issue to come on the show and enlighten us with their discussion. This week we have David Buss, professor of Psychology at the University of Texas at Austin, and Sandra Bartky, professor emeritus of Philosophy and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Professor Buss is a prominent voice in the growing field of evolutionary psychology, an approach to psychology that tries to understand behavior and cognition through the lens of evolved solutions to particular adaptive problems. Professor Bartky is a prominent voice in the field of feminist philosophy and has made great contributions to feminist thought in her critique of “femininity” through a post-structuralist approach to the problem of “feminine” embodiment. Today we will be discussing the bodily practices that women go through to shape their bodies according to standards of beauty. I’d like to start off with a general discussion of how you both think one should approach this issue. Professor Bartky, why don’t we start with you?

Bartky: Well, I think that Foucault provides us with a very effective access point to understand what’s going on here. According to Foucault, we are living in a society that has been profoundly shaped by a historical trend toward an ever-greater scrutiny and disciplining of the body. In particular, through social institutions like schools, hospitals, prisons, and factories bodies entered into this great machinery of power that dominated them, penetrated them, and coerced them into docility. What is historically novel about the period that we’re living in now is that this power has entered into our bodies, shaping not just the product of our labor or enforcing deference but how we live in and experience our bodies. What Foucault does not do is distinguish between the way that these structures of power have penetrated and shaped the bodies of men and women differently. I think that this issue of women shaping their bodies according to an unattainable physical ideal is really an example of this, the particular way that this process of bodily discipline is directed at women.

Buss: Well, obviously I disagree. In trying to understand human behavior and cognition I start from the point of view that human beings are organisms that are the way that they are because they have evolved to solve adaptive problems. Indeed, every animal, including humans, that is alive today is alive because every single one of its ancestors was successful at solving the adaptive problem of passing on their genetic material before they died, and all the host of problems that needed to be solved to get to that point. This series of successes has shaped the human organism to be successful, i.e. to solve adaptive problems. Behavior and cognition cannot be separated from this organizing principle of traits that have evolved to solve adaptive problems. Indeed, any complex characteristic of any organism must exist because it has evolved to solve an adaptive problem. That’s because the selection of traits that are adaptive is the only way that complexity can arise in organisms. The chance that something as complex as a hand or an eye could come together by random mutations is infinitesimal. The only process that exists, or at least that we are aware of, that is capable of organizing a complex set of traits into something that performs a function is the natural selection of adaptive traits. And the mind is certainly both surpassingly complex and very functional. Moreover, the mind could not have evolved to be a general-purpose learning device that would function as a tabula rasa upon which culture can be arbitrarily inscribed. In terms of the computational power that it would take to do all the numerous things that humans do, to solve the numerous adaptive problems that humans have to solve to function, a general-purpose learning device simply could not perform. In order to perform the way that the mind demonstrably performs it must be composed of a set of psychological mechanisms that solve particular adaptive problems. These psychological mechanisms are themselves highly complex aspects of our brains that must have been individually selected for. I think that much of the behavior that we are talking about in terms of women shaping themselves toward an ideal is the result of psychological mechanisms designed for mate attraction. What could be more central to reproductive fitness then mate attraction?

Matthew: Thank you both for that introduction to your theoretical commitments. Let’s get down to the specifics of the practices that we’re talking about here. Professor Bartky, why don’t you start off by responding to Professor Buss’ statement?

Bartky: Well, that doesn’t really make sense to me David; it seems to me that the practices that we are looking at are not universal but culturally and temporally specific. As I said above, there really does seem to be a difference between the way that bodies are being shaped by power in the past two hundred years or so and the way that they were shaped five hundred or a thousand years ago, much less in pre-historical societies fifty or a hundred thousand years ago. If an explanation based on evolved propensities for behavior really has the explanatory power that you say that it does then where is this shift coming from and why does it fit so well with the particularities of the way that women’s bodily practices are shaped by this feminine ideal? Also, not only the way that women’s bodied are disciplined to conform to the ideal but the ideal itself has changed. Previously in western culture massiveness and abundance was valued in women’s bodies, large breasts and round hips defined the feminine. Today the fashion in women’s bodies is small, lithe, small-breasted, taut, and narrow hipped. There seems to have been a shift toward an almost pubescent and infantilized ideal of femininity away from a more adult, mature, and realistic ideal. In general, styles of the female figure seem to vary across time and cultures; they reflect cultural obsessions and preoccupations in a way that we do not fully understand. But on one level these obsessions and preoccupations seem inherently arbitrary and not subject to an overarching logic, they are historically and contextually specific.

Buss: Well, I don’t know that there has been as much variability as you’re suggesting Sandra. Many aspects of such complex cultural practices might have changed, the details of traditions and images and symbols across cultures are certainly highly variable. But nevertheless I think it’s pretty clear that there are certain basic foundational aspects of behavior associated with mate attraction that are not particularly variable, but are rather transcultural and very ancient, not limited to a particular culture or period. In particular, emulating youth has remained a constant practice throughout history and across cultures and is clearly linked to male selection of fitness for bearing children and raising them to independence. In an ancient hunter-gatherer environment where extreme hazards are common, protection from the environment is minimal, and medical care is essentially non-existent life spans were very short by modern standards and accidental mortality was very high. Moreover, girls become fertile at a very early age relative to our current cultural norms of adolescence and late childhood and certainly became pregnant at an early age in the environment where such an early pubescence evolved. In this kind of environment a young person is hugely more likely to be able to survive not only bearing a child but also living long enough to ensure it survives to an age where it can pass on its genes. That fact would create a powerful selective force for men to try to impregnate younger women as their genetic material would thus have a much higher chance of being passed on. These are powerful reasons for believing that men have an innate drive toward women who are younger. And thus women, who are also shaped by the likelihood of their genes being passed on, would be shaped by the need to solve the adaptive problem created by men’s preference for younger women. A woman who appears to be younger would have a higher chance of attracting a mate and thus passing on their genes. Despite the variability in the details of feminine ideals across cultures and periods there does seem to be an overarching emphasis on youth that fits in very well with this perspective.

Matthew: Perhaps it would be helpful if we moved this discussion toward an analysis of specific examples? It would be helpful if you could give an example of what exactly you mean by a bodily practice Professor Bartky.

Bartky: Well, one example of the depths to which this discipline has penetrated women’s bodies and bodily practices is the advice of M.J. Saffron, an “international beauty expert,” on facial exercises that are meant to eliminate wrinkles, erase frown lines, smooth the forehead, raise hollow cheeks, banish crow’s feet, and tighten the muscles under the skin. Thus the normal and expressive contours of a woman’s face subvert the disciplinary project of bodily perfection and come under disciplinary control. This really shows what Foucault is talking about when he describes the penetration of bodies by disciplinary practices, the way that bodies are petitioned and divided and the way that women live in and experience their bodies.

Buss: But isn’t this yet another example of attempting to shape your features to appear more young and thus more effectively attract males that have been genetically driven to be attracted to youth? What could be more specifically related to youth then lines associated with a lifetime of facial expressions? This is not the result of a historically specific disciplinary practice but part of an evolved strategy to appear youthful. Are not all cosmetics geared toward the concealment of signs of aging? And are not cosmetics an ancient practice that many cultures share? And while these facial exercises might not be effective, the general strategy of appearing more youthful than one really is does in fact seem to be effective in attracting a sexual partner, which is certainly a goal of women going through these practices.

Matthew: Perhaps we could take a moment to shift the discussion a bit. Professor Bartky, your notion that women and men’s bodies have been shaped and penetrated differently struck me as central. Could we talk about that?

Bartky: Certainly. While Foucault laid out a general pattern for understanding the modernization of power and the embodiments that the disciplinary practices of power create he treated the body as though it were one. He spoke of humanity as a whole, as if the place that women and men occupied within structures of power were equivalent and as if women and men had an equivalent relationship to social institutions characteristic of modern life, and in particular as if women and men’s bodily experiences were the same. Certainly women as well as men are subject to many of the same disciplinary practices. But this focus renders Foucault blind to those disciplines that produce embodiments that are peculiarly feminine. While both women and men’s bodies have been rendered docile by disciplinary practices it seems obvious from a feminist perspective that women’s bodies have been rendered docile in a way that far exceeds the docility of men’s bodies. From a feminist perspective this silence about women’s bodies perpetuates the powerlessness and subjugation of women that these disciplinary practices have imposed. I argue that it is precisely the disciplinary practices that Foucault is talking about that produce gendered bodies in the first place. People are born male or female but they are not born masculine or feminine. Uniquely feminine characteristics come from disciplinary practices that produce bodies that are recognizably either feminine or masculine. The disciplinary practices by which women’s bodies are shaped according to an ideal are only one way in which this femininity is constructed. Femininity is also designed and enforced in terms of the very movements that a feminine body is rendered capable of and the construction of the feminine body as a surface for ornamentation and objectification. For example, women are far more likely than men to be concerned with their looks and in particular with fat. In a survey taken at UCLA 27.3% of women said that they were “terrified” of getting fat compared with only 5.8% of men.

Buss: While I agree that there are obvious differences in the way that women and men experience their bodies and the way that cultures think about men and women’s bodies I also think that many of these differences can be explained in evolutionary terms. From an evolutionary perspective it is not at all surprising that women and men would have developed different strategies of behavior. This is because women and men, having different roles in reproduction, face very different adaptive problems in passing on their genes effectively. The primary difference is of course that a woman necessarily invests far more of her time and energy into the development of a child then a man does as a result of the fact that a woman has to carry a child in her body. Because of this commitment of energy, and indeed a large disadvantage in terms of individual survival that would be in itself a significant selective disadvantage, it is vital to a woman’s genetic interests that the single child that she is able to bear live long enough to pass on her genetic material. A woman thus faces two distinct adaptive problems; the first one is that a woman must attract a mate in the first place to be able to pass on her genetic material at all, the second one is that a woman has to find a mate who, also being invested in the survival of his genetic material, would contribute to caring for the baby and thus increasing the chances that her genetic material will survive to reproduce. Unlike women, a man does not have to invest a large amount of time and energy into the production of a baby in order to pass on his genetic material. With millions of sperm produced with every ejaculation a man is able to attempt to maximize his chances of passing on his genetic material by impregnating multiple females with no time delay in between. Though this selective force is balanced by the fact that once the child is born it is also in the male’s genetic best interests that it survives. These very different adaptive problems would necessarily result in the evolution of very different adaptive solutions in terms of drives. A great deal of evidence has been gathered that ancestral women desired high-status in men, high-status being an indicator of a man’s ability to ensure her child’s survival. Conversely, a great deal of evidence has been gathered that ancestral men desired youth in women, young women being far more likely to survive childbirth and live long enough to raise a child to reproductive maturity. Beyond that, the evolution of these different drives in each sex further alters the adaptive environment. Each sex would then have to adapt to deal with the adaptive problems imposed by the drives of the other sex in order to acquire a mate. It is because of this that women and men have such different strategies and concerns in making themselves more attractive to a potential mate.

Host: Thank you for that discussion of the specific aspects of mate attraction that you’re talking about. I would like to shift the discussion now to a consideration of the general nature of each other’s arguments. What do you think that the problems with each other’s assumptions are?

Buss: Well, the real issue that I have with the post-structuralist line of argument is an assumption of causality that doesn’t really seem to consider other factors like evolved psychological mechanisms. Why is it that you can look at a pattern of behavior and assume that it is because of a cultural construction?

Bartky: Well, I think that causality is pretty obvious as we can see the coercive power of these institutionalized ideals. We can trace the way that women are surrounded by messages about what femininity is in the media. We can see that women are bombarded by these messages constantly through the media. And more than that we can see that women pay attention to these messages, they consume this media tirelessly. Not only that but they criticize and judge one another and themselves constantly according to these impossible standards of beauty. Is that not coercive? How could that level of coercive power not cause changes and shape patterns of behavior?

Buss: But what then is the origin of these institutionalized ideals? Where do they come from? What causes them? It seems to me that something like a “power structure,” or a “myth,” or an “ideal” cannot have causative force; only individuals who wield power can actually cause something. And in understanding what individuals do the structure of their mind cannot be ignored. Ultimately it is minds that create the complexities of social structures and variability, and minds are evolved physical objects that have characteristics that have been shaped by the evolution that created them.

Bartky: I think that you’re misinterpreting what I mean by a power structure causing something. Of course ultimately it is people that take action, but that is the nature of structures of power. Structures of power are composed of people; they are systems of people interacting with one another. But as a system they have properties that are not reducible to the properties of the individuals of which they are composed. They are composed of relationships of power between people, and the vast and complex system that is created through all of those relationships can be described and talked about and shapes the people that are set within it. When people act, or “wield power” as you say, they do so within that system. The system does not “cause” a woman to go to a jazzercise class or tape up her forehead to prevent excessive expression in a simple sense, rather the system circumscribes the space within which women can move, limits the range of the actions that can be performed, or even conceived.

Matthew: Well, unfortunately that’s all the time we have left for today. But I would ask, are these views really incompatible? Does one have to deny the significance of structures of power and cultural constructions of femininity in shaping our bodies and minds to appreciate how our bodies add to the complexity of the phenomena through drives and instincts shaped by evolution? Is a totalizing explanation for such a complicated phenomena reaching across many different disciplinary focuses really necessary or even desirable? In particular given how little we know about the nature of, as Professor Bartky says, cultural “obsessions and preoccupations” and how little we really understand about neurobiology and the specific structure of the human mind can we really begin to talk about causality in more than suggestive terms? Personally, I think that both of these perspectives are working toward a sophisticated and appropriately complex understanding of an important part of our world. Thank you Professor Bartky and Professor Buss, and thank you to our audience for joining us. Have a good night.