Viewpoint: Are women instinctually attracted to dominant men?

[Anthropologist Richard Wrangham writes:] Women don’t like many specific acts of demonic males. But paradoxically, many women do regularly find attractive the cluster of qualities and behaviors—successful aggression, dominance and displays of dominance—associated with male demonism. Both men and women are active participants in the very system that nurtures the continued success of demonic males; and the knot of human evolution, with the demonic male at the center, requires an untying of both strands, male and female.

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But there are a couple of problems with the sexual-selection theory of male dominance. First, the theory is poorly supported by anthropological evidence. Studies suggest that our pre-civilization ancestors, who were nomadic hunter-gatherers, were relatively peaceful and egalitarian. War seems to have emerged not millions of years ago but about 12,000 years ago when our ancestors started abandoning their nomadic ways and settling down.

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And remember that women’s preference for domineering men is supposedly instinctual, rather than a rational response to a male-dominated world. The sexual-selection theory of male dominance is a form of victim-blaming. It is an especially insidious just-so story, because it feeds the male fantasy that women want to be dominated.

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I fear that biological theorizing about these tendencies, in our still-sexist world, does more harm than good. It empowers the social injustice warriors, and that is the last thing our world needs.

Read full, original post: Do Women Want to Be Oppressed?