Bridget Eileen Rivera

These theories made another resurgence during the second-wave feminist movement, when ppl AGAIN built conceptions of gender upon sexual biology to keep women out of the workforce, arguing that evolutionary processes sexually “wired” men to provide and women to raise children.

But it gets worse. Making sexual biology an “essential” component to gender isn’t just used to make “women” inferior to “men.” It has JUST as long of a history of being used to justify men’s sexual violence.

Roman society took Aristotle’s ideas about vaginas being “inverted” penises & built upon it an entire sexual system where the penis was a virtue unto itself. Sexual domination became a primary way that men could prove their masculinity.

During the trans-Atlantic slave trade, as another example, pseudo-scientific ponderings about biology suddenly made it “natural” for white men to have not only a wife but also a slave mistress or two.

Biology here worked twice against Black women, who were not only sexually inferior but also racially inferior & therefore open game for white men to rape. Social Darwinism came along later to provide further justification for this type of thinking.

Today, we can even see this playing out in churches that hold to “complementarity of the sexes.” In many such churches, women become responsible for causing men to “stumble” because this is just how men are “biologically wired.”

Allegations of sexual abuse in such churches are, not surprisingly, through the roof. Whenever the differences btwn men & women are rooted in sexual biology it inevitably leads to men becoming sex-crazed animals and women their subordinates, leading to rape, assault, & abuse.

There’s actually no historical example where, when sexual biology was made an “essential” difference btwn men and women, it didn’t lead to horrendous abuse, dehumanization, and subordination of women. This is ALWAYS the trajectory of such thinking.