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| From the Editor: Worthy Notions |
Against the Ingrained
Dwight Cass
07/01/2004
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The campus culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s, when politically correct
university students tried to become the arbiters of intellectual debate, often
swept away the good with the bad. In hindsight, it seems that the student
protesters (many of whom were women) who shouted down scientists and authors
like Richard Dawkins and Edward O. Wilson during their lectures on sociobiology
and evolutionary science did not do themselves any favors. Their anger was
understandable: tomes of reductionist doggerel meant to provide genetic
exculpation for bad behavior by men were at that point littering the best-seller
lists. But the campus uproar over these books eventually raised such a clamor
that it largely obscured more credible work.
 Today, this furor has receded,
and the more dogmatically reductionist ideas about genetics and behavior have
become little more than fodder for The New Yorker’s cartoonists. This is
fortunate, since talented biologists, sociobiologists and evolutionary
psychologists are doing important work on the origins of our expectations about
power and gender roles in relationships. Biology is clearly not the only factor
(and few believe it to be the dominant one) in setting these expectations, but
the evidence suggests it does play a part.
If so, it may help explain the
tenaciousness of the problems that doom so many relationships between affluent
women and less affluent men. Our beliefs about the roles we should play in a
marriage seem at times to be almost primal. Indeed, when we cannot reconcile
belief with relationship, it is often the latter that we discard, rather than
the former.
This is visible in the esteem issues suffered by professional men
from nonaffluent backgrounds in their relationships with affluent women. These
men, raised to be breadwinners, have been inculcated with the idea that career
accomplishments are the best measure of their worth to themselves, their
families and society. When they marry into a family that does not perceive
success the same way, it can cause them enormous stress. Psychologist Lee
Hausner tells of a surgeon at the top of his profession whose wife’s family did
not respect him for his career accomplishments. This couple was unable to make
the emotional investment that might have allowed them to reconcile their
different values; the marriage eventually ended. Meanwhile, many women, even
those of high professional and financial standing, will tacitly admit that they
want their husbands to support them—a desire that may cause them to be
dissatisfied with their spouses when they marry fiscal unequals.
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