Smashing The Patriarchy

The Screaming Twenties have barely drawn breath, and already we’ve been wallowing through the show-trials of white capitalist male supremacy’s largest and most untouchable adult sons: Donald Trump and Harvey Weinstein. The similarities are more than circumstantial. Both are rich, powerful men outraged at being held to account for even a fraction of the crimes they’ve been accused of. Both have allegedly enjoyed a full curriculum of moral corruption, from rape and sexual assault to blackmail and intimidation to the use of foreign powers to undermine their enemies and lube their way to hectic impunity. And both spent many, many years grooming allies. Weinstein and Trump bet heavily on creating complicity—so much complicity that the institutions they occupied cannot hold them to account without damning themselves by association. Both of them bet on being too big to fail.

In Trump’s case, he won the bet. The doomed attempt to impeach the president drew to its inevitable end last week, as Washington and the world were forced to acknowledge that, as California Rep. Adam Schiff put it, Trump “has compromised our elections, and he will do so again. You will not change him. You cannot constrain him. He is who he is.” Directly addressing any remaining Republicans in the Senate chamber with an inch of backbone, Schiff insisted that “you are decent. He is not who you are.”

The appeal came too late. In fact, the greatest threat that liberalism poses to the survival of the species is its relentless strategic assumption that “decent people” in full possession of the facts will do the right thing. Nobody, after all, is more anxious to win the war than those who already know they’ve lost the moral argument.

Presidents don’t go on trial alone. Politics is always in the dock beside them, fidgeting and trying to explain how on earth this was allowed to happen. This time, Trump’s defenders didn’t even try to pretend he didn’t conspire with foreign interests to help his own re-election campaign. “The question is not whether the president did it,” said Tennessee Republican Lamar Alexander, primly explaining why he was voting to let the Hog Emperor off the hook, “but whether the United States Senate or the American people should decide what to do about what he did.” And what the Senate decided to do is nothing at all, as trembling Republican excuses for statesmen cowered before the Reality Crimelord’s demands to wrap up the whole thing without witness testimony. Only Mitt Romney dared to break ranks and vote “guilty.” Thinking back to when that guy was the enemy, the ultimate subject of liberal derision, rather than the one Senator prepared to act from the center of his faith at the risk of Republican shunning brings on a sense of moral vertigo—a sudden understanding of how Trump has tossed a brick right through the Overton window of American political norms.

The root of the word “privilege” is “private law”—you get to rewrite the rules to suit yourself, or flagrantly ignore them. Where systems of privilege are robust, corruption, abuse, and sexual violence are not aberrations. They are enforcing mechanisms.Trump and Weinstein considered themselves untouchable, were treated as untouchable, and the ability to assault young women with impunity wasn’t just a side perk. Abuse, including sexual abuse, was and remains the core of how power operates in industries and institutions built on complicity. The test of power is always how much you can get away with it. For men like Trump, getting away with it is their personal brand, their special sauce. He appeals to a caucus of bitter moral cowards whose dearest wish is to be allowed to get away with it, too.

Harvey Weinstein got away with it for years. Allegedly. Right now, as the trial is still in progress, I am legally obliged to say that Harvey Weinstein has not been found guilty of any of the more than eighty allegations of rape and sexual assault that have been made public, much less the two that are currently being litigated in New York state. Yet. I am morally obliged, however, to point out that the way in which Harvey Weinstein has not been found guilty of eighty counts of rape and sexual assault is not the same as the way you and I have not been found guilty of eighty counts of rape and sexual assault. “Innocent until proven guilty” is a legal principle, not a moral standard. Especially not when assuming his innocence so often requires us to assume her guilt, and hers, and hers, and hers. I am not a judge. I am not a juror. I don’t have the power to put a human being in a cage for the rest of his life, so I’m allowed to say what I actually think. I’m allowed to say it’s unlikely that hundreds of witnesses and teams of prize-winning investigative reporters are wrong. I think he did it. And so does almost everyone in his industry. And so do you.

Most of us know he did it, and that matters. Weinstein’s predilection for pouncing on young starlets in hotel rooms and crushing their careers if they dared to complain was an open secret in the international film industry. “Everybody fucking knew.” That’s the way Weinstein’s one-time protege Scott Rosenberg put it. Everyone knew what Weinstein was up to, and almost everyone chose not to know what they knew, chose to look away. Because acknowledging the scale of the wrongdoing, acknowledging what everyone knew, would have required action. It would require the bystander either to actively do something about it, or to actively do nothing, to allow it all to keep happening, the rapes and the violence and the silencing, the casual destruction of young lives by lumbering sociopaths who get off on hurting people and getting away with it.

Sometimes saying what everyone knows is an act of civil disobedience. When one person names her rapist, knowing the cost, knowing that she is likely to be punished again for the crimes committed against her, that is an act of defiance. When a hundred or a thousand or ten thousand women break ranks to speak out against structural violence, that is a revolution. The #MeToo movement was women realizing, collectively, that the cost of silence was higher than the cost of speaking up. It is no accident that the #MeToo movement came on the heels of Trump riding his flaming reckless clown car of white male resentment into the White House. Trump, who has also been accused of sexual misconduct, including rape and assault, by at least twenty women, has as much to do with the #MeToo movement as Weinstein.

As Weinstein’s victims tearfully recount their experiences in front of a New York jury, the #MeToo movement is on trial as well, the movement that began with Weinstein and mushroomed into a global wave of civil disobedience in response to a failure of justice, a failure of due process. The justice system has failed to protect women from male violence just as the democratic system has failed to protect citizens from unscrupulous grasping oligarchs who get off grabbing government power by the pussy and getting away with it. The system has failed to do what nice white liberals expected it would, hoped it would—it failed to be reasonable or “decent.” The truth currently dawning like the morning after a war is that the system was always designed to smooth the path to power for men with enough wealth and guile to grab it. Unfortunately, the system was also designed on the basis that nobody would get carried away and do anything really, really stupid, like elect a deranged thug with the critical faculties of a rabid rottweiler barking at its own reflection and the self-control to match. Nobody would do anything that stupid. What could possibly go wrong?

The question of the day is whether the mechanisms of democracy are in any way capable of controlling men like this, smug nationalist autocrats entirely unburdened by conscience. And the answer to that question is, no, not at all. These show-trials are a test of whether these things can be settled in a civil manner, a test of democratic strength and of social decency. America has so far failed the test, just like Hollywood has for so long failed the test, for the same reasons: overconfidence, laziness, not bothering to study their history or anticipate difficult, uncomfortable questions. Questions like “how much humanity is the average whey-faced political invertebrate prepared to sacrifice for his own career?” Questions like “is patriarchy too big to fail?”

That’s the question I’ve kept coming back to, over these years of political consensus contorting itself into torturous knots to contain truths it can no longer bury. Watching what’s happening in culture right now, it’s hard not to feel the same cognitive dissonance as so many of us did watching the world economy collapse in 2008. Try thinking back to the desperate retrenchment of that autumn, the rolling news sweaty with red-eyed once-and-future kings of international finance explaining that while, yes, they had extravagantly shat the bed and many millions of people were about to suffer horribly, there was no conceivable alternative: we had to bail them out, or else. It was phrased as economic common sense. It felt, and continues to feel, like a mugging, and more than ten years later, there’s no pretense anymore. Civic society is now openly held hostage to white male pride, with belligerent tyrants daring us to come at them and see what happens. And for anyone who still believes that decent people can settle this among themselves, for anyone who is clinging with all ten fingers to comfortable complicity, here’s the bad news: we can never go back.

Even if Trump wins his second term, even if a hundred Harvey Weinsteins walk away from justice, we are not going back to the way it was before, pretending not to see, giving the benefit of the doubt, making excuses for abusers because it’s less frightening to hew to the flimsy belief that these men didn’t know what they were doing than it is to admit, say, that the world’s biggest superpower would rather elect a rapist than a woman.

There’s no regaining that special type of innocence peculiar to those of us who grew up trusting institutions to act rationally and in the public interest, trusting that once injustice was seen to be done, it would be remedied. America can never return to a time before it acquitted a president for crimes he clearly committed in pursuit of power he should never have been permitted to have. Western culture can never return to a time before Harvey Weinstein went to trial, before influential abusers in every industry were named and shamed. And men like this, unscrupulous oligarchs who mouth the language of the good old days while setting fire to the future are counting on general nostalgia for a past where women and people of color knew their place, and understood their duties, and understood that our final duty was to bury the evidence of white male shame. They are counting on a general yearning for a time when we understood the duty to hide the bruises, to cover up the corruption, to bury the damage deep in our bodies so powerful men and those who trail in their wake could continue to think of themselves as decent. As innocent.

The laws have long been in place and the evidence easy to summon to send men like Trump and Weinstein to jail. What was lacking was the political will to enforce those laws. Men like Weinstein and Trump have figured out, you see, that if you just drive a throbbing golden juggernaut of white male confidence right through the rules, nine times out of ten people will look the other way—not because they like you, but because they like things to be orderly and comfortable.

Most people want to believe in the idea of a just world. They want to believe that the consent of the governed still matters, so they try to give it in retrospect. Because for most people, these are crimes so enormous they undermine our sense of safety, crimes so big they can’t be allowed to be crimes at all. And that’s a kind of innocence we can no longer afford. It’s happening all over the world, wherever swollen strongmen swindle their way into power. It’s happening in India, in Britain, in Brazil. And wherever it’s happening, the center ground, people who believe in the “decency” of the system, are clinging to the swinging basket of institutional checks and balances, holding their breath as the ground disappears and the air gets thinner, wondering if it’s too late to let go.

Is Patriarchy Too Big to Fail? By Laurie Penny. The Baffler, February 11, 2020

I moved to Los Angeles to become an actress at 24. These are character descriptions of roles I have read for: “thin, attractive, Dave’s wife”; “robot girl, a remarkable feat of engineering”; “her breasts are large and she’s wearing a red sweater.”

I stuffed my bra for that last one. I still did not get the part.

After a while it was hard to tell what was the greater source of my depression: that I could not book a part in a horror film where I had three lines and died on Page 4, or that I was even auditioning to play these roles at all. After dozens of auditions and zero callbacks, my mom suggested I get breast implants. From her perspective, I had walked away from a coveted job at Goldman Sachs and chosen a profession of self-commodification. She wanted to help me sell better.

But I wasn’t drawn to acting because I wanted to be desired. I was drawn to acting because I felt it would allow me to become the whole, embodied person I remembered being in childhood — one that could imagine freely, listen deeply and feel wholeheartedly.

I continued to audition and continued to fail. My depression deepened. My self-esteem plummeted. My boyfriend would get drunk and punch holes in the wall next to my head. I let him. He spat in my face. I let him. He dissolved into tears in my arms. I let him. And then I sifted through the ashes of his anger and his father’s anger before him to help him uncover the forgiveness he needed to move on. I was auditioning to be “Dave’s wife.” I was “robot girl, a remarkable feat of engineering.”

After a day of running from men with chain saws in audition rooms and a night of running from the man I shared a bed with, I decided I was done auditioning. I felt I had to write my way out of these roles or I wouldn’t find my way in the real world, either. I could not be what I could not see onscreen.

So I went to the library in downtown Los Angeles and started reading books and watching films about how to write dramas for the screen. I clung to Jodie Foster in Jonathan Demme’s “Silence of the Lambs,” to Holly Hunter in Jane Campion’s “The Piano.”

But aside from a handful of exceptions, I was overwhelmed by the number of dramatic narratives that murdered their female characters.

In “The Big Heat” she has a pot of boiling coffee thrown in her face and is then shot in the back. In “Chinatown” the bullet tears through her brain and out her eye. And in case this seems like a trend of the past, consider the more recent noir “Blade Runner 2049,” where the holographic femme fatale is deleted and the remaining women are stabbed, drowned and gutted like a fish.

Even the spirited Antigone, the brave Joan of Arc and the unfettered Thelma and Louise meet tragic ends in large part because they are spirited, brave and unfettered. They can defy kings, refuse beauty and defend themselves against violence. But it’s challenging for a writer to imagine a world in which such free women can exist without brutal consequences.

We live in a world that is a direct reflection of these stories we’ve been telling. Close to four women a day are murdered in America at the hands of their partners or former partners. One out of every four women in America has been the victim of a rape.

I am one of those one out of four. Our narratives tell us that women are objects and objects are disposable, so we are always objectified and often disposed of.

There are centuries of trial and error inside the “hero’s journey,” in which a young man is called to adventure, challenged by trials, faces a climactic battle and emerges victorious, changed and a hero. And while there are narrative patterns for the adventures of girls — “Alice in Wonderland,” “The Wizard of Oz” — those are few and far between, and for adult women, even less so.

Even when I found myself writing stories about women rebelling against the patriarchy, it still felt like what I largely ended up describing was the confines of patriarchy. The more fettered I felt inside the real world, the more I turned toward science fiction, speculative fiction and lo-fi fantasy.

I eventually co-wrote, produced and starred in two microbudget films, “Another Earth” and “Sound of My Voice.” Both stories left reality just far enough behind to give me the mental freedom to imagine female characters behaving in ways not often seen onscreen.

I emerged from the Sundance Film Festival with offers to act in projects I would never have been allowed to read for a week prior. Most of those roles were still girlfriend, mistress, mother. But there was a new character on offer to me as well, one that survived the story.

Enter, stage right: the Strong Female Lead.

She’s an assassin, a spy, a soldier, a superhero, a C.E.O. She can make a wound compress out of a maxi pad while on the lam. She’s got MacGyver’s resourcefulness but looks better in a tank top.

Acting the part of the Strong Female Lead changed both who I was and what I thought I was capable of. Training to do my own stunt work made me feel formidable and respected on set. Playing scenes where I was the boss firing men tasted like empowerment. And it will always feel better to be holding the gun in the scene than to be pleading for your life at the other end of the barrel.

It would be hard to deny that there is nutrition to be drawn from any narrative that gives women agency and voice in a world where they are most often without both. But the more I acted the Strong Female Lead, the more I became aware of the narrow specificity of the characters’ strengths — physical prowess, linear ambition, focused rationality. Masculine modalities of power.

I thought back to the films I watched and stories I read burrowed deep in the stacks of the library. I began to see something deeper and more insidious behind all those images of dead and dying women.

When we kill women in our stories, we aren’t just annihilating female gendered bodies. We are annihilating the feminine as a force wherever it resides — in women, in men, of the natural world. Because what we really mean when we say we want strong female leads is: “Give me a man but in the body of a woman I still want to see naked.”

It’s difficult for us to imagine femininity itself — empathy, vulnerability, listening — as strong. When I look at the world our stories have helped us envision and then erect, these are the very qualities that have been vanquished in favor of an overwrought masculinity.

I’ve played the Strong Female Lead in real life, too — as an analyst at an investment bank before coming to Hollywood. I wore suits, drank Scotch neat and talked about the women and the men I was sleeping with like commodities on an open market. I buried my feminine intelligence alive in order to survive. I excelled at my linear task of making more money from a lot of money regardless of the long-term consequences for others and the environment.

The lone female V.P. on my floor and my mentor at the time gave me the following advice when she left to partner at a hedge fund: Once a week, open the door to your office when they finally give you one, and place a phone call where you shout a string of expletives in a threatening voice.

She added that there doesn’t actually need to be someone on the other end of the line.

I don’t believe the feminine is sublime and the masculine is horrifying. I believe both are valuable, essential, powerful. But we have maligned one, venerated the other, and fallen into exaggerated performances of both that cause harm to all. How do we restore balance? Or how do we evolve beyond the limitations that binaries like feminine/masculine present in the first place?

In 2014 I went back to the library and encountered Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower,” a sci-fi novel written in 1993 imagining a 2020 where society has largely collapsed from climate change and growing wealth inequality. Butler’s heroine, the 17 year-old Lauren, has “hyperempathy” — she feels, quite literally, other people’s pain. This feminine gift and curse uniquely prepares her to survive the violent attack on her community in Los Angeles and successfully encourage a small tribe north to begin again from seeds she has saved from her family’s garden.

Butler felt to me like a lighthouse blinking from an island of understanding way out at sea. I had no idea how to get there, but I knew she had found something life saving. She had found a form of resistance.

Butler and other writers like Ursula Le Guin, Toni Morrison and Margaret Atwood did not employ speculative fiction to colonize other planets, enslave new life-forms, or extract alien minerals for capital gains only to have them taken at gunpoint by A.I. robots. These women used the tenets of genre to reveal the injustices of the present and imagine our evolution.

With these ideas in mind, Zal Batmanglij and I wrote and created “The OA,” a Netflix series about Prairie, a blind girl who is kidnapped and returns seven years later to the community she grew up in with her sight restored. She opens up to a group of lost teenage boys in her neighborhood, telling them about her captivity and the inter-dimensional travel she discovered to survive it. It turns out these boys need to hear Prairie’s story as much as she needs to tell it. For the boys face their own kind of captivity: growing up inside the increasingly toxic obligations of American manhood.

As time has passed, I’ve come to understand what deep influence shaping a narrative has. Stories inspire our actions. They frame for us existences that are and are not possible, delineate tracks we can or cannot travel. They choose who we can find empathy for and who we cannot. What we have fellow feeling for, we protect. What we objectify and commodify, we eventually destroy.

I don’t want to be the dead girl, or Dave’s wife. But I don’t want to be a strong female lead either, if my power is defined largely by violence and domination, conquest and colonization.

Sometimes I get a feeling of what she could be like. A truly free woman. But when I try to fit her into the hero’s journey she recedes from the picture like a mirage. She says to me: Brit, the hero’s journey is centuries of narrative precedent written by men to mythologize men. Its pattern is inciting incident, rising tension, explosive climax and denouement. What does that remind you of?

And I say, a male orgasm.

And she says: Correct. I love the arc of male pleasure. But how could you bring me into being if I must satisfy the choreography of his desire only?

And I say: Good on you. But then how do I bring you into being?

Then I hear only silence.

But even in the silence I dream of answers. I imagine new structures and mythologies born from the choreography of female bodies, non-gendered bodies, bodies of color, disabled bodies. I imagine excavating my own desires, wants and needs, which I have buried so deeply to meet the desires, wants and needs of men around me that I’m not yet sure how my own desire would power the protagonist of a narrative.

These are not yet solutions. But they are places to dig.

Excavating, teaching and celebrating the feminine through stories is, inside our climate emergency, a matter of human survival. The moment we start imagining a new world and sharing it with one another through story is the moment that new world may actually come.

I Don’t Want to Be the Strong Female Lead. By Brit Marling. The  New York Times  , February 7, 2020.

Fathers are happier, less stressed and less tired than mothers, finds a study from the American Time Use Survey. Not unrelated, surely, is the regular report that mothers do more housework and childcare than fathers, even when both parents work full time. When the primary breadwinner is the mother versus the father, she also shoulders the mental load of family management, being three times more likely to handle and schedule their activities, appointments, holidays and gatherings, organise the family finances and take care of home maintenance, according to Slate, the US website. (Men, incidentally, are twice as likely as women to think household chores are divided equally.) In spite of their outsized contributions, full-time working mothers also feel more guilt than full-time working fathers about the negative impact on their children of working. One argument that is often used to explain the anxiety that working mothers experience is that it – and many other social ills – is the result of men and women not living “as nature intended”. This school of thought suggests that men are naturally the dominant ones, whereas women are naturally homemakers.

But the patriarchy is not the “natural” human state. It is, though, very real, often a question of life or death. At least 126 million women and girls around the world are “missing” due to sex-selective abortions, infanticide or neglect, according to United Nations Population Fund figures. Women in some countries have so little power they are essentially infantilised, unable to travel, drive, even show their faces, without male permission. In Britain, with its equality legislation, two women are killed each week by a male partner, and the violence begins in girlhood: it was reported last month that one in 16 US girls was forced into their first experience of sex. The best-paid jobs are mainly held by men; the unpaid labour mainly falls to women. Globally, 82% of ministerial positions are held by men. Whole fields of expertise are predominantly male, such as physical sciences (and women garner less recognition for their contributions – they have received just 2.77% of the Nobel prizes for sciences).

According to a variety of high-profile figures (mainly male, mainly psychologists), bolstered by professorships and no shortage of disciples, there are important biological reasons for why men and women have different roles and status in our society. Steven Pinker, for instance, has argued that men prefer to work with “things”, whereas women prefer to work with “people”. This, he said, explains why more women work in the (low-paid) charity and healthcare sector, rather than getting PhDs in science. According to Pinker, “The occupation that fits best with the ‘people’ end of the continuum is director of a community services organisation. The occupations that fit best with the ‘things’ end are physicist, chemist, mathematician, computer programmer, and biologist.”

thers deny societal sexism even exists, insisting that the gender roles we see are based on cognitive differences – spoiler: men are more intelligent. “The people who hold that our culture is an oppressive patriarchy, they don’t want to admit that the current hierarchy might be predicated on competence,” Jordan Peterson has said, for instance. His reasoning suggests that women would be happier not railing against it but instead observing their traditional gender roles. Such theories have been demolished by a range of scholars, including neuroscientist Gina Rippon and psychologist Cordelia Fine.

There are certainly biological differences between men and women, from their sexual anatomy to hormones. Yet even this isn’t as clear cut as it seems. For instance, around one in 50 people may be “intersex” with some sort of atypical chromosomal or hormonal feature – that’s about the same as the proportion of redheads. Men’s brains are on the whole slightly larger than women’s, and scans reveal some differences in the size and connectedness of specific brain regions, such as the hippocampus, in large samples of men and women.

And yet, only a tiny percent (between 0 and 8%) of individual men and women turn out to have a typically “male” or “female” brain. Most people are somewhere in the middle, and whether someone has skills for maths, spatial awareness, leadership or any other gendered attribute can not be predicted from knowing their sex, as multiple studies have shown. Anatomically and cognitively, there are more differences within the two sexes than between them.

There is no evidence that women are any less capable of the jobs and social positions that men predominantly hold. When women are given the opportunity to hold “male” roles, they show themselves to be equally proficient. Researchers recently calculated that it was bias against women, not under-representation, that accounts for the gender distribution seen in the Nobel prizes, for instance. Women are not less intelligent, less logical or less able than men. The roots of patriarchy, in other words, cannot be found in our biology.

Male supremacy, for all its ubiquity, is surprisingly recent. There’s compelling evidence that patriarchal societies date back less than 10,000 years. Humans probably evolved as an egalitarian species and remained that way for hundreds of thousands of years. One clue is in the similar size of human males and females, which show the least disparity of all the apes, indicating that male dominance is not the driving force in our species. In fact, equality between the sexes in our early ancestry would have been evolutionarily beneficial. Parents who were invested in both girls and boys (and the grandchildren from both) gave our ancestors a survival advantage, because this fostered the critical wider-ranging social networks they depended on to exchange resources, genes and cultural knowledge.

Today, hunter-gatherer societies remain remarkable for their gender equality, which is not to say women and men necessarily have the same roles, but there is not the gender-based power imbalance that is almost universal in other societies. In contemporary hunter-gatherer groups, such as the Hadza people of Tanzania, men and women contribute a similar number of calories, and both care for children. They also tend to have equal influence on where their group lives and who they live with.

Matriarchal societies may also have been more common in our ancestral communities. Strong female relationships would have helped to glue a larger community together, and being able to rely on friends to babysit would have given our ancestors the time and energy to support the group through food provision and other activities. Indeed, there are several societies where matriarchy is the norm – I’ve visited some of them, including the cocoa farming Bribri people of Costa Rica, and the rice farming Minangkabau of Sumatra, Indonesia. These are communities in which women are the landowners and decision makers.

In other words, humans are not genetically programmed for male dominance. It is no more “natural” for us to live in a patriarchy than in a matriarchy or, indeed an egalitarian society. In the same way, it is just as natural for humans to eat a “paleo” diet as it is to eat bubblegum-flavoured candyfloss; to have sex as a man and a woman or as three men; to live in a straw hut or in a glass bubble beneath the ocean. This is because, unlike other animals, we are cultural beings – for our species, culture is our nature, and key to understanding our behaviours and motivations.

Social, technological and behavioural invention are part of our nature – part of what it means to be human. We are driven by culture more than instinct. And our culture influences our environment and our genes. Our extraordinarily flexible, cumulative culture allows us to make ourselves even as we attribute our successes and failings to our genes.

That’s not to say that just because a cultural trait has emerged it is necessarily “good”. Patriarchal norms, for instance, are damaging to our health and our societies, increasing death and suffering, and limiting humanity’s creative potential. We are, though, neither slaves to our biology nor our social norms – even if it can feel that way.

Human cultural conditioning begins at birth, indeed, social norms even have an impact before birth: one study found that when pregnant women were informed of the sex of the baby they were carrying, they described its movements differently. Women who learned they were carrying a girl typically described the movements as “quiet”, “very gentle, more rolling than kicking”; whereas those who knew they were carrying a boy described “very vigorous movements”, “kicks and punches”, “a saga of earthquakes”.

Many of the ideas we consider universally held are simply the social norms in our own culture. Liberté, égalité, fraternité may be values worth dying for in France, for instance, but personal freedom is not considered important or desirable for other societies, which prioritise values such as purity instead. Consider the idea of responsibility. In my culture, if you deliberately hurt a person or their property this is considered a much worse crime than if you did it by accident, but in other cultures, children and adults are punished according to the outcome of their actions – intentionality is considered impossible to grasp and therefore largely irrelevant.

The biological differences between males and females, or indeed between ethnic groups, tell us nothing about how intelligent, empathetic or successful a person is. Modern humans are 99.9% genetically identical. Although we have expanded far beyond our tropical evolutionary niche over tens of thousands of years, we have not speciated – we have not even diversified into different subspecies. Our ancestors have not needed to make dramatic biological adaptations to the very different environments we live in, because, instead, we culturally evolved and diversified into a complexity of differently adapted cultures, each with their own social norms.

It is our cultural developing bath, not our genes, that profoundly changes the way we think, behave and perceive the world. Studies comparing the neural processing of populations of westerners and East Asians, for example, show that culture shapes how people look at faces (westerners triangulate their gaze over eyes and mouth, whereas East Asians centralise their focus). Language reveals our norms and shapes the way we think. Children who speak Hebrew, a strongly gendered language, know their own gender a year earlier than speakers of non-gendered Finnish. English speakers are better than Japanese speakers at remembering who or what caused an accident, such as breaking a vase. That’s because in English we say “Jimmy broke the vase”, whereas in Japanese, the agent of causality is rarely used; they will say: “The vase broke.” The structures that exist in our language profoundly shape how we construct reality – and it turns out that reality, and our human nature, differ dramatically depending on the language we speak. Our brains change and our cognition is rewired according to the cultural input we receive and respond to.

Many of our social norms evolved because they improve survival, through group cohesion, for instance. But social norms can also be harmful. There is no scientific basis for the belief that a person’s skin colour or sex has any bearing on their character or intelligence. However, social norms can affect a person’s behaviour and their biology. Social norms that classify particular groups to the bottom of a social hierarchy encourage society to collude with that positioning and those people do worse in outcomes from wealth to health, strengthening the norm. A major study, by researchers at Berkeley, of 30,000 American shift workers found that black, Hispanic and other minority workers – particularly women – are much more likely to be assigned irregular schedules, and the harmful repercussions of this were felt not just by them but also by their children, who fared worse.

The danger of ascribing genetic and biological bases for our actions is that individuals and groups are not given equal opportunities in life, and they suffer. It is, after all, very convenient to believe that the poor are feckless and undeserving, morally weak or stupid, rather than casualties of a deeply unfair systemic bias. Equally, it’s much more appealing to think of one’s own successes as down to some sort of innate personal brilliance rather than luck and social position.

If we persist in the idea that there is a natural – a best – way to be a human, then we blind ourselves to the great diversity of potential ways of being, thinking and feeling, and impose social limitations on those whose life choices are no less legitimate than ours. It’s worth noting, though, that many norms that were once believed to be set in biological stone or ordained by gods have been changed by societies – sometimes remarkably quickly. If we invented it, we can alter it. An accepted “natural” state that has existed for millennia can be changed in mere months.

Smashing the patriarchy: why there's nothing natural about male supremacy. By  Gaia Vince. The Guardian , November 2, 2019.