15 March 2001, 811 words
All through the Carnival season I kept expecting to see a protest about Shadow's Horn from outraged feminists. After all, the song does say that a woman's fidelity must be purchased, and our local feminists often mount their high horse for far more trivial insults. But only columnist Donna Yawching voiced a criticism last Sunday and, except when she writes about women's issues, Donna is usually very clear-thinking and humorous.
Otherwise, the silence seemed a tacit acceptance of our materialistic mindset. (If proof is needed about how much value Trinidadians place on possessions, consider the overwhelming support for Brent Halls and his cutlass: clearly, most Trinidadians view a TV as more valuable than a hand, if the TV is theirs and the hand even that of a teenage mother.)
But, strictly speaking, the reason a jobless male is in greater danger of horn isn't because women are materially motivated. It has more to do with how evolution has shaped human attitudes so both sexes can maximise their genetic replication. Darwin observed that, among animals, male competition and female choice was virtually ubiquitous. So, among homo sapiens, men compete with one another in order to get women to choose them (even if, as in despotic or extremely patriarchal cultures, the women don't have much choice once the competition is over).
One interesting consequence of this is that it may be men's unconscious genetic drive to compete, and not the so-called glass ceiling, which better explains the paucity of women in boardrooms and parliaments (and why, contrary to what you will hear from some so-called intellectuals, matriarchal societies have never existed).
In fact, men who promote female advancement have frequently observed the reluctance of women to put themselves in leadership positions. Some years ago, I interviewed several top women managers at major companies in Trinidad and Tobago. Nearly all of them said that it was their male bosses who pushed them to go for the posts and dismissed the idea of a glass ceiling.
Such women, I think, have done far more to advance the status of women in our society - by being professional, intelligent, competent, and personable: qualities which have no sex bias - than our feminists, who are typically abstract, trite, strident or pseudo-intellectual. (For therein lies feminism's great irony: that once women began to achieve equal rights, the label "feminist" became an epithet even for truly independent females.)
In all cultures, however, men are more concerned with achieving status than are women. This is because male status is a key to unlocking women's sexual favours, whether in marriage or out. How status is defined, of course, depends on the culture: among the Yanomamo Indians of South America, a man's status is enhanced by the number of men he has killed; in most tribal societies, it is determined by how much livestock a man owns; in modern societies, it is determined by wealth or fame or accomplishment.
A woman's status, however, has little impact on the male strategy to pass on his genes. Technically speaking, all a man has to do in order to maximise his genetic fitness is to impregnate as many women as possible. It is for this reason that men are more likely to horn than women, and it is also why, in choosing a mate, men place greater value on youth and beauty than women do.
Women, on the other hand, maximise their genetic fitness by choosing mates carefully. Thus, women place greater value on ambition, industriousness, reliability - i.e. the qualities that indicate status and security for her and her offspring.
Moreover, a woman's criteria for choosing a mate are often determined by her own advantages. In the United States, for example, the best predictor of a man's wealth is his wife's looks. And women with higher education and well-paying jobs typically place even more value on income and education in a potential mate than do less accomplished women. That is why professional women find it harder to find mates, as demonstrated in Joannah Bharose's series on single women in the Independent.
It is also why, over the sum of human history, about 80 percent of all cultures have practised polygyny since, evolutionarily speaking, it is more rational for a woman to share a powerful husband than to have exclusive rights to a weak one. (To localise an example used by social scientist Laura Betzig: Would you rather be the third wife of Ken Gordon or the first wife of Rex West?) This is why, as Shadow correctly observes, a woman is more likely to be unfaithful with a man of higher status than her spouse.
And this, I suspect, is also the core reason why our feminists have had no problem with Horn: because they see female infidelity as an effective expression of women's rebellion.
Copyright ©2001 Kevin Baldeosingh