Why are men attracted to women with a wiggle?

Novelist Todd White, whose participation has been enlivening VFR lately (here is his website), has a comment in the “HBD’er on traditional conservatism” thread you should not miss. It’s an amusing and on-point example of how Darwinists, or evolutionary psychologists, or sociobiologists, or whatever they’re calling themselves this week, have a Darwinian explanation for every human behavior, even if the answers flat-out contradict each other. The question at issue, discussed in a Darwinian book called Do Gentlemen Really Prefer Blonds, is, why do men prefer women with large pupils and a wiggle in their walk?

Speaking of human female characteristics, could there be any idea more clueless about the nature of reality than the Darwinian belief that the female human form, the most beautiful thing in the universe, is the result of some kind of accretion of accidents chosen by survival advantage, rather than the expression of an essence, namely the female essence? Again we see how the author of Genesis is more scientific than the supposed scientists who despise him. In the second chapter of Genesis, God creates man, Adam, out of the dust of the ground, and then, seeing that the man is incomplete and lonely by himself, God proceeds to create woman out of a part of the man’s body. While feminists of course complain that this makes women subordinate to men, the feminists—of course—miss the whole point, which is that the woman is made out of higher stuff than the man. The man is made out of mere dust; the woman is made out of the human body. Further, as the last thing God creates in the process of creating the world, the human female is the crown of creation. In this way and in other ways, Genesis expresses the truth of human existence, which Darwinism with its lame fairy tales does not express at all.

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September 4

Rich T. writes:

Your recent posting about the essence of femaleness is by far the most ridiculous thing I’ve yet seen posted at VFR.

Whether or not you accept current biological theory as a reasonable and well supported theory about the development of life on earth, we do know enough about the history of life through deep time to know that femaleness (an organism directly reproducing from its body) predates maleness (an organism reproducing by sharing its DNA with another organism) by at least a thousand million years.

Mammalian development reflects this. All embryos begin as female and some become male later during fetal development.

Genesis is about asserting monotheism. It list all the things that the Israelite’s contemporaries considered to be deities and downgrades them to mere creations.

To consider Genesis more scientific than modern science is an absurdity. The text is about theology and theodicy, not science, which hadn’t yet been invented.

If you want to convince me that I’m suffering from false consciousness and that traditionalism is something I should embrace, you have got to do a lot better than this nonsense.

LA replies:

Your comment is one of the most off-base and clueless criticisms I’ve ever received at VFR. Your argument is that since femaleness has existed in its most rudimentary form for a billion years, therefore the existence of human femaleness doesn’t need any particular explanation, it’s already been explained. Talk about reductive thinking! It’s clear you haven’t the slightest concept of what I’m talking about. I’m talking about the distinctiveness of human femaleness, which infinitely transcends its closest “relatives,” ape femaleness. And it’s something for which science doesn’t have the slightest explanation, unless one considers Darwinian fairy tales to be explanations.

As your comment reveals, the material reductive mindset blocks out most of the reality of the world, in order to see only those things that can be explained by reductionism. It resolutely closes its eyes to most of the world, then calls itself scientific.

Another example of this mindset is my recent materialist interlocutors who call me a mystic merely for saying that consciousness is non material.

Also, obviously, when I said that Genesis is scientific I was not using the word scientific in the ordinary sense of the word, but was being deliberately provocative. I was using “scientific” in the sense of conveying truth. I was saying that an essential truth of femaleness is conveyed by the clearly divinely inspired story in Genesis that is not conveyed by science.

And how do I know that Genesis is divinely inspired? Very simple. If I see something beautiful, I know that beauty exists. If I see a work of genius, I know that genius exists. And if I see a work that is not the product of a human mind but of a divine mind, I know that the divine exists. It’s all in Aquinas, but I haven’t read him since college and I wouldn’t be able to cite a passage.

Lydia McGrew writes:

I was struck by the oddly unscientific sound of your commentator Rich T’s statement, “All embryos begin as female and some become male later during fetal development.”

This is misleading at best. Human maleness or femaleness has a genetic component which is determined at conception, as everyone knows who pays attention to these things. While it is true that external sex organ differences do not develop until the eighth week, it is also true that the “webbed” appearance of the feet does not disappear until the eighth week, which does not mean that all embryos begin life as frogs. These are just natural developments of the organism over time, development of the nature it had at conception.

Posted by Lawrence Auster at September 01, 2009 10:26 AM | Send