Gorilla Warfare
The current effort to
sexually integrate the U.S. military is not without precedent. Consider the
natives of New Caledonia in the South Pacific, who earned their place in
military annals by subduing and then eating the crew of a French survey ship in
1850. The men and women typically headed off for war in unison, although their
roles did differ once the fighting began. The women would fall back to the
rear; then, as one 19 th -century observer put it, "whenever they see
one of the enemy fall, it is their business to rush forward, pull the body
behind, and dress it for the oven."
OK, so these women aren't
quite the role models that proponents of sexual integration would order up from
central casting. But history has provided few candidates for that job. As
Maurice Davie noted in 1929 in his cross-cultural survey, The Evolution of
War , "war is the business of half the human race."
As a
rule, the fact that women have not traditionally performed a given role has no
bearing on their competence to perform it now. Centuries of female exclusion
from academia or civil engineering haven't rendered modern women unfit for
those professions. However, male dominance of the killing business seems to
have been going on for a lot longer than a few centuries--maybe long enough to
have influenced human evolution, shaping the biological foundation of human
psychology. If so, does that mean male and female psychology are so different
that the sexual integration of the military is misguided? The question breaks
down into three subquestions.
1 Are men designed by natural selection for warfare?
As regular "Earthling" readers may recall, the premise of evolutionary
psychology is simple: Those genetically based mental traits that, during
evolution, consistently helped their possessors get genes into the next
generation became part of human nature. Careful thought experiments have shown
that, in a context of regular violence, mental traits conducive to killing
would do more for your genes than mental traits conducive to getting killed
would. So if during human evolution men often fought in wars and women didn't,
then indeed men might be naturally better warriors than women.
Of course,
the frequency of war in prehistory is not well recorded. (Hence the term
"prehistory.") But various hunter-gatherer societies--the nearest real-life
models of the social environment of human evolution, and thus the purest
observable expression of human nature--have been known to engage in
intervillage raids. Australian Aborigines of the 19 th century,
according to one chronicler, made it a point "to massacre all strangers who
fall into their power." In some of these societies, more than a fourth of the
males die violently.
And whether or not our distant male ancestors
often participated in actual "war," they probably fought other males and
sometimes killed them. The warless !Kung San hunter-gatherers of the Kalahari
Desert, once romanticized as The Harmless People , were found a few
decades ago to have homicide rates between 20 and 80 times as high as
industrialized nations. (And some of this killing is coalitional--two brothers
and a friend gang up on an enemy, etc.) So, ethnographic evidence alone
suggests that men could well be designed by natural selection to fight, and
perhaps to do so in groups.
There is
more evidence, which we'll get to shortly. However, the policy implications of
any male propensity to fight would depend on other questions. For example:
2 Are women by nature shrinking violets, innately
repulsed by war, incapable of violence? Hardly. Feuding Australian
Aborigine women would sometimes square off and whack each other with yam sticks
until somebody intervened. Among the Ainu, the indigenous hunter-gatherer
people of Japan, women would go to war and actually fight, though only against
other women.
Even when women aren't
combatants, they hardly shy away from the thought of war, or from its gore.
Among the Dayak of 19 th -century Borneo, women would surround a
returning warrior, singing songs of praise, while the head of one of his
victims sat nearby on a decorative brass tray. Among the Yanomamo of South
America, women watch the one-on-one "club fights" that sometimes escalate into
intervillage conflicts, screaming insults and egging their men on. Among the
Ba-Huana of the Congo, one 19 th -century ethnographer reported, "the
chief instigators of war are the women." If their men are insulted by other men
and don't retaliate, "the women make fun of them: 'You are afraid, you are not
men, we will have no more intercourse with you! Woma, woma [afraid]! Hu!
Hu! Hu!' Then out go the men and fight."
All told,
though women as a group are less combative than men, they are not wholly averse
to combat. And plainly, some women are more eager and capable fighters
than some men. (I'm male, but no one has ever confused me with Charles
Bronson.) So why deny high-testosterone women an opportunity to join in the
fun? If there is a good reason, it has to do with our final question.
3 Why do men fight so much? Here we come
to a problem that will prove stubborn if the military tries to sexually
integrate ground combat forces such as the infantry. The problem isn't so much
that men are designed by natural selection to fight as what they're designed to
fight over: women .
Even today, Yanomamo men
raid villages, kill men, and abduct women for procreative purposes. Moreover,
tough, mean men enjoy high social status, which attracts women and helps the
men get genes into the next generation. The anthropologist Napoleon Chagnon has
shown that Yanomamo men who have killed other men have more wives and more
offspring than average guys.
It's not
just a question of men disinclined to violence getting killed off. Two men
might fight over a woman until one man submits and the winner gets the woman.
Or, men might fight for seemingly nonsexual reasons, but the winner still
enjoys the high social status that wows the ladies. Indeed, it's possible that
non-lethal violence has done more to shape the male propensity for violence
than simple killing has.
Male combat is common among primates. It is the reason
that, in many primate species, males are so much bigger and stronger than
females. Indeed, the more polygynous the species--that is, the more females a
dominant male can sexually monopolize--the larger the size difference between
the sexes. The toughest male gorillas get a whole harem of females to
themselves, and the wimpiest get zilch. Eons of combat over such high genetic
stakes have led to males that are about twice the size of females. In our
species, the more modest but still marked difference in size and strength
between men and women is hard evidence that violence, whether lethal or
non-lethal, has paid off for men in Darwinian terms. Among the other evidence
is the fact that testosterone makes people aggressive.
The
problem with fielding a sexually integrated army of gorillas wouldn't be that
the females can't fight. Try stealing a female gorilla's baby and see how you
fare. The biggest problem is that if you put three male gorillas together with
one unattached female, esprit de corps will not ensue.
Yes, of course human males are better at
controlling their hatreds and rivalries than gorilla males are. But are humans
so good that it makes sense to sprinkle a few women into a group of infantrymen
and send them all off to war, where everyone's prospects for survival will
depend on their solidarity? Hoping (even subconsciously) that one of your
comrades will die seems a poor frame of mind to carry into battle.
Does the
same argument apply to nonmilitary workplaces? Doesn't sexual integration sow
dissension there as well? I'd say that any downside to sexually integrating
nonmilitary workplaces is not severe enough to restrict the rights of women (or
men). And--in many workplaces--there may be a big upside to sexual integration.
But the military is special. The cost of dissension is death, not lower
earnings. (And during big wars, when the draft is on, many of the victims are
people who didn't volunteer for the job. That's one big difference between this
issue and the issue of sexually integrating police forces.)
This logic has no direct bearing on the currently topical
issue of sexually integrated basic training. The troops that take basic
together don't go off to war together, so their bonding isn't a matter of life
and death. Still, basic training is meant to model some of the rigors of war,
and it turns out to be a useful model indeed: The complaints of sexual
harassment that deluged the Army after the Aberdeen scandal (which itself
didn't involve basic training) show how male and female psychology can
complicate life for a sexually integrated army. Obviously, the more conspicuous
problems--men propositioning women, for example--can be minimized with
sufficiently harsh punishment. But the underlying psychological forces will
still be there, taking their toll. And remember: When soldiers go from training
camps to actual war, things get more primitive, not less.
One can imagine combat roles
for women that wouldn't fly in the face of human nature. (Why not try ?) But
reflecting on human nature doesn't seem to be a common pastime at the Pentagon.
Sexually integrating ground combat forces is now favored by one assistant
secretary of the Army. The secretary himself, Togo West, has said he is open to
the idea. And already combat forces are somewhat integrated in the Air Force
(squadrons of pilots) and Navy (ship crews). (These things, though, as
integrating the infantry would be.) Given the stakes, shouldn't such decisions
be informed by some knowledge of sexual psychology? Or, instead, we could just
wait for a war and use 20-year-olds as guinea pigs in a poorly researched
social experiment.
