Monday, March 3, 2008
The Science of Female Supremacy: An Interview with Steve Moxon
Femi-Nazis piece by
Bernard Chapin
I’ve been interviewing political authors and figures for five years. Never once have I posed more than 10 questions to a subject. In the case of Steve Moxon, who has just released “The Woman Racket: The New Science Explaining How the Sexes Relate at Work, at Play and in Society”, I asked 14. My enthusiasm is quite appropriate, however. The Woman Racket is a tour de force and a classic which should be read again and again. Previously, Mr. Moxon authored “The Great Immigration Scandal” which was a result of his time spent as a Home Office immigration caseworker. He blew the whistle on widespread abuse and the nature of the government’s policy of “Managed Migration” and was then duly fired. Mr. Moxon also pens a blog which debates “political correctness fascism” and counters journalists’ misguided take on immigration and male-female issues.
BC: Mr. Moxon, allow me to congratulate you on your new book. I know it’s only March but there’s no question it’s the best book I’ve read this year. My first question concerns its title. Your work is a thorough review of the scientific basis for sex differences, but “The Woman Racket” is a most polemical sounding phrase. Do you think this may limit your audience?
Steve Moxon: Yes, but the bigger problem is to get attention in the first place. The title succeeds in achieving that! It contrasts with the sub-title—which tells you that the book is popular science. It’s somewhat cryptic. Actually it’s not mine, but a phrase from Norman Mailer; one that beautifully encapsulates the recent cultural turn of perennial prejudice against men into a virulent political entrenchment of it. And it conveys something of this prejudice in a meta sense: at first glance some might think it’s a book about ‘the white slave trade’ or some other bogus supposed exploitation of the sex we spend too much time caring about.
BC: Are women privileged in America and the United Kingdom?
Steve Moxon: Women are privileged (compared to men) in every society and in every period of history. This will always be the case irrespective of whatever social systems emerge in the future. The females of all animal species constitute the ‘limiting factor’—the logjam—in reproduction, and given that reproduction is the fundamental biological imperative (maximising reproduction over various timescales within the local reproducing group), then this inevitably translates in various ways to the female being prized, and correspondingly to males competing against each other to avoid reproductive oblivion.
BC: What is “the male filter?”
Steve Moxon: The ‘genetic filter’ role of the male complements the role that the female has in taking care of most of the time-consuming business of reproduction (gestating; having, feeding and looking after the offspring). This is because there is another brake on the biological imperative of maximising reproduction apart from all the business that females are saddled with: the build-up of transcription errors in the necessary gene replication in sex that attends reproduction. It makes sense that dealing with this is not also loaded on to females, otherwise females would become an even bigger logjam in reproduction.
The biological division of behaviour that we then get is the basis of why we have males and females in the first place. Males act in effect as a ‘quarantine’ station for deleterious genetic material, and also as laboratories for nurturing new better gene combinations. There are various mechanisms for this, some where genetic material is actually placed exclusively in the male half of the lineage, but most where genetic material is more exposed in males than in females—so that natural selection acts much more on males than on females. Some of this differential exposure is through the mechanics of the sex chromosomes, but most is to do with males being driven to intra-sexual competition: either of their sperm or as adults.
Hence the fierce competition of males for a high place in the male dominance hierarchy. It is the rank achieved that determines female sexual interest, so that less fit males reproduce less, if at all; so that they take their relatively poor genes with them out of the gene pool. Conversely the minority of males with less ‘bad’ genes do get to reproduce and the males who have no bad genes and maybe additionally some new ‘super’ gene combinations, are reproductively successful possibly to a prodigious extent.
BC: In terms of feminism, do you think that the lesbian influence is more pronounced than we widely acknowledge? I ask you this because I have often thought that feminist attempts, at root, are an attempt to decrease the status of males while simultaneously increasing the status of women. This appears plausible in that it makes females more appealing sexually in lieu of the centrality of status in relation to their reproductive proclivities.
Steve Moxon: Feminism is just business-as-usual elitism. It is not about serving the interests of women as a whole: it is a disservice to most women. Feminism is an intensification of the natural prejudice we all share towards males—that is, towards the majority of necessarily lower status males. High status males and attractive women win out. Plus ca change.
The reason that we all have a prejudice towards males generically is because of the biologically based importance of ‘policing’ the male hierarchy. The function of the male as the ‘genetic filter’, and indirectly that the female is the ‘limiting factor’ in reproduction, gives rise to the adaptation of male intra-sexual dominance-submission behaviour and the epiphenomenon of male hierarchy. All males (even the lowest ranked) have a strategic interest in being members of this, but males have an interest in tactically getting round this to obtain sex, if they can. This has led to the evolution of our shared social psychological ‘cheater detection’ mechanisms to very effectively ‘police’ male behaviour. Consequently we tend to ‘do down’ men, and conversely ‘big up’ women.
BC: Is it a result of the feminist movement that the general public has been consistently misled concerning the differences between men and women in the workplace? I ask you this chiefly as a product of your contending that women have a predilection “for work that is in keeping with their natural tendency towards social networking, as opposed to the natural male inclination towards goal-directed competition.”
Steve Moxon: Yes, feminism is actively opposed to most women. The social milieu in which the various strands of feminism arose in recent decades is the relative collapse in natural female roles: home-making and motherhood. The striving for women to be given a role in the workplace is the reaction to this, and women clinging to the roles that have been relatively marginalised is seen as a great obstacle to this development, and so such women are regarded as having ‘false consciousness’ so as to excuse the totalitarian refusal to accept that they have a valid opinion.
BC: In America the “pay gap” is thought to be even less statistically significant than it is in Britain. Could you clarify for readers the surprising argument that a low pay gap actually illustrates “sex discrimination against men?”
Steve Moxon: The ‘pay gap’ between the sexes should be far bigger than it is. Only 10-15% of women have an attitude to work as that of men: to work full-time continuously. Of this already small proportion of women, only about a quarter are ‘careerists’. This is a very small pool from which work organisations can recruit to produce the sex-equal staffing ratio at higher job positions that social policies are designed to produce. These are the jobs that pay much more, and with women overwhelmingly naturally absent from them, then the ‘pay gap’ overall inevitably must be substantial. It is artificially reduced by public sector initiatives to falsely flatten differentials, to over-promote women, and to falsely equate work sectors and niches.
So it is that we have pay legislation that forces local councils to pay part-time day-care staff the same rates as to full-time, outdoor shift-working refuse collectors. That these very different jobs are naturally paid according to substantial differentials is firmly tied up with their contrasting sex-typicality. No normal women take dirty, dangerous jobs, because pay premiums to compensate for the undesirability of the work are of no use to them. This is because only men see their ‘mate value’ rise through gaining status (the proxy for which is money).
Women’s ‘mate value’ is to do with their fertility, as signaled by indications of youth and beauty; which are ‘givens’ that can’t be changed by any sort of competition or throwing money around (despite what cosmetics firms may claim). Women instead choose jobs that are really a benign social extension of their home-making role. So they are usually part-time, people-orientated jobs with excellent working conditions. Just the sort of jobs that are easy for employers to fill. There are a number of reasons that explain the ‘pay gap’, and all attract policies to ameliorate the impact on women’s pay. These necessarily directly or indirectly discriminate against men.
BC: You posit that women showcase same-sex favoritism at a rate four times that of men. Might the inevitable outcome of such a preference result in female bosses and managers attempting to purge men from the workplace? Or, at least, be far more likely to do so to the opposite sex than males would be?
Steve Moxon: Certainly. Experimental work shows that women have a fourfold same-sex preference for members of their ‘in-group’, and this exactly matches the preference for women over men by organisations involved even in male sex-typical work (IT and accountancy) when it comes to selecting applicants for job interviews from their applications (Riach & Rich, 2006). So there is clear evidence that work organisations as a whole are operating on female prejudicial principles. This will seriously backfire, however, because it’s highly deleterious for those work organisations, for several reasons. Unlike men, women tend not to be task or work group orientated (the female in-group being family and friends and tenuous extensions of these; not a symbolically identified all-inclusive social group such as those within the same workplace). In almost any performance you care to measure, men polarise and women remain in the middle, so meritocracy will be sacrificed.
BC: Does the predicament in which man finds himself in our new century largely a result of chivalry? In light of sex-based quotas and other modes of state oppression, is not chivalry an act of self-destruction?
Steve Moxon: Chivalry ( or ‘gallantry’, as it used to be called), is natural male deference. This is, in biological terms, the non-engagement is dominance-submission interactions. We know from other primate species that the sexes never interact in dominance-submission terms. We also now know that there is a single gene controlling this. This ensures that default behaviour between individuals of the same species is in some way sexual: it is only when a same-sex other is encountered that the gene works so that dominance-submission behaviour kicks in.
BC: Are women more controlling in their interpersonal relationships than are men?
Steve Moxon: Yes. Very recent research has clearly established this in long-term sexual partnerships. This is because women have a greater need than men to ‘mate guard’—to keep their partner’s main reproductive effort for themselves. Men certainly don’t want their wives sleeping with other men, because that would risk them bringing up some other man’s child. This is why men have evolved to be so jealous of their partner simply having sex with anyone else. But once a wife is pregnant and then gestating and breast feeding (which went on for four or five years in the ancestral environment), then she was not sexually available and a man could relax.
For a woman, on the other hand, there is the ever present risk that she could be deserted. This is not just a problem regarding provisioning and less concrete aspects of fathering in raising any children she has, but it means she couldn’t have further children by her (first) husband. The problem is that a woman’s value as a mate declines precipitously with age (and the effects of having children), so if her husband deserts her, any subsequent husband she may find will be a very substantially poorer ‘bag of genes’, as it were, than the first. For many men it works the other way: a man can often rise in status as he gets older, so far from ‘mate guarding’ his first wife, he may well be glad to be rid of her to make way for a new and much younger and more attractive one.
It is for the reason of this sex difference re ‘control’ that the actual social science research (as opposed to the mantra emanating from the advocacy movement) reveals that domestic violence is more prevalent female-to-male than it is male-to-female, and by wide margins at serious levels and in terms of unilateral aggression.
BC: Has the furor over domestic violence essentially been one big lie? I say this in relation to Chapter 10 “Home Lies,” and particularly the excellent analysis conducted by Professor Martin Fiebert in 2007 suggesting that not a single study (out of 200) revealed that significantly higher levels of aggression occurred in the male-to-female direction than vice-versa.
Steve Moxon: Most of these studies showed either rough equivalence, or significantly or considerably more DV female-to-male. So DV is predominantly female-on-male—especially at serious levels of violence, and where the violence is unilateral. To present DV as advocates do as essentially a male perpetrated crime indeed is one very big lie. Not only is most DV by women, but overall most violence by women is towards men (twice as much as that towards other women), and this dramatically contrasts with male violence, which is very many times more frequently directed towards other men.
BC: You cite a Home Office rape study from 1999 indicating that the majority of rape complaints were classified by police as “no crime” or “no further action.” Why was no action taking against female false accusers? Is this an example of chivalry justice?
Steve Moxon: At root this is down to the standard ‘doing down’ of men and ‘bigging up’ women. Prejudice in favour of women—privileging them—means that they are given ‘the benefit of the doubt’ regarding their motivation for fabricating a complaint; yet we know that the predominant form that female aggression takes is ‘relational’ (’indirect’). Fabrication of complaints that have a devastating impact on those accused is exactly how we should expect women to behave. But apart from this—and this is the bigger picture—women make up allegations not through malice but to cover up their own misdemeanour—even when the embarrassment caused seems trivial. The underlying reason for this appears to be to do with evolved reasons why women might non-consciously try to cover up extra-pair sex. It seems that we intuit this, and somehow accept this sort of behaviour by women.
BC: Is there any truth to the notion that males think more logically than do women? Conversely, are women more emotion-based in their reasoning?
Steve Moxon: There are now known to be massive sex differences in brain architecture, so that there are near order of magnitude differences between male and female brains in terms of IQ-related neural connectivity and processing tissue. Men’s brains are much more about processing, whereas women’s are much more about connectivity—it has long been known that the structure carrying the nerve fibres connecting the two cerebral hemispheres is far thicker in women. This structural difference shows up overall. So it is that Simon Baron-Cohen characterises male brains as ‘systemising’ and female as ‘empathising’. This difference has evolved because of the very different problems that the sexes have to deal with in their lives. Women have to be ‘people’ people, and men have to compete and be good at something.
BC: Can we conclude that males paying for sex is non-pathological? Indeed, is it merely a reflection of supply and demand?
Steve Moxon: Not only is it non-pathological, but it makes sense morally. All normal men, quite apart from a long-term loving relationship desire an endless stream of novel sexual partners. Most men are not attractive enough to women (because they don’t have high enough status) to achieve this, and even those men who are high status don’t want to risk their long-term relationships for a fling. Their one-night-stands may well be in courting mode, as it were, and actively seek to destroy the man’s marriage. Unlike men, women’s jealousy has evolved not to be provoked so much by a partner’s extra-pair sex as by emotional infidelity, so women usually are relatively unperturbed by a partner’s visits to prostitutes. A fully fledged long-term affair is an entirely different matter.
BC: I recognize that England and America have differing laws and regulations, but what universal policies could government enact—or perhaps more importantly, discontinue—to better the lot of men in our nations, and, thus, increase equality and justice for all?
Steve Moxon: The law should start with recognising profound sex difference rather than pretending that treating the sexes exactly equally is fair. It isn’t. For example, policies that seek to equalise the sexes in jobs high up work organisation hierarchies necessarily very heavily directly discriminate against men, because it is natural than men hugely outnumber women here. Men are far more intra-sexually competitive than are women. Without a good job a man has no life: he can’t attract or maintain a partner. This is not true for any woman. All women can have a life irrespective of the nature of their jobs, or whether they have any job at all.
BC: Thank you so much for your time and thank you for writing this book, Mr. Moxon.
Bernard Chapin
Mr. Moxon’s blog: http://stevemoxon.blogspot.com/
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