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| "Vitruvian Man" by Leonardo daVinci |
"For a long time, evolutionary psychologists have claimed that we are all imprinted with adaptive imperatives from a distant past: men are faster and stronger and hardwired to fight for scarce resources, a trait that shows up in contemporary life as a drive to either murder or win on Wall Street. Women are more nurturing and compliant, suiting them perfectly to raise children and create harmony among neighbours. This kind of thinking frames our sense of the natural order.
But now it seems as if those fixed roles are more fungible than we ever imagined. A more female-dominated society does not necessarily translate into a soft feminine utopia. Women are becoming more aggressive and even violent in ways we once thought were exclusively reserved for men. This drive shows up in a new breed of female murderers and also in a rising class of young female "killers" on Wall Street. Whether the shift can be attributed to women now being socialised differently or whether it's simply an artefact of our having misunderstood how women are "hardwired" in the first place is at this point unanswerable and makes no difference. Difficult as it is to conceive, the very rigid story we believed about ourselves is obviously no longer true. There is no "natural" order, only the way things are."
The quote above is an excerpt from an extract of an intersting book by Hanna Rosin in todays Observer/guardian.co.uk. Read more here "Hanna Rosin: are men an endagerd species?" (url)
