The War of the Sexes
How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present
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- £16.99
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- £16.99
Publisher Description
How our stone-age brains made modern society, and why it matters for relationships between men and women
As countless love songs, movies, and self-help books attest, men and women have long sought different things. The result? Seemingly inevitable conflict. Yet we belong to the most cooperative species on the planet. Isn't there a way we can use this capacity to achieve greater harmony and equality between the sexes? In The War of the Sexes, Paul Seabright argues that there is—but first we must understand how the tension between conflict and cooperation developed in our remote evolutionary past, how it shaped the modern world, and how it still holds us back, both at home and at work.
Drawing on biology, sociology, anthropology, and economics, Seabright shows that conflict between the sexes is, paradoxically, the product of cooperation. The evolutionary niche—the long dependent childhood—carved out by our ancestors requires the highest level of cooperative talent. But it also gives couples more to fight about. Men and women became experts at influencing one another to achieve their cooperative ends, but also became trapped in strategies of manipulation and deception in pursuit of sex and partnership. In early societies, economic conditions moved the balance of power in favor of men, as they cornered scarce resources for use in the sexual bargain. Today, conditions have changed beyond recognition, yet inequalities between men and women persist, as the brains, talents, and preferences we inherited from our ancestors struggle to deal with the unpredictable forces unleashed by the modern information economy.
Men and women today have an unprecedented opportunity to achieve equal power and respect. But we need to understand the mixed inheritance of conflict and cooperation left to us by our primate ancestors if we are finally to escape their legacy.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Seabright (The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life) draws from economics, biology, sociology, and anthropology in an attempt to reconcile men and women's propensity to disagree with their ability to cooperate. He argues that the origin of conflict between the sexes derives from the span of time during which partners must cooperate to raise a child from birth to independence for humans, this period is much longer than for other animals. But of course, men and women disagree about more than just child-rearing. Seabright zooms out and across history in an accessible mix of scholarly prose and chatty anecdote to explain why inequalities and disagreements persist beyond potty-training. The first section explores how males of many species use different strategies to manipulate females into reproducing with them, and how females control the males in return. Turning to today, Seabright investigates everything from the effects of technology on gender-bias, to the various benefits of tallness, talent, and charm in the workplace. But though rife with food for thought, Seabright's offering resembles a buffet more than a thought-out meal each morsel is understandable enough, but getting a grip on his overall argument is a chore. He writes that "ucidity is hard to come by," and unfortunately that's true of this book, too but that doesn't mean it isn't worth the effort. Photos