Seabright The War of the Sexes

How Conflict and Cooperation Have Shaped Men and Women from Prehistory to the Present
Course Book
ISBN: 978-1-4008-4160-8
Verlag: De Gruyter
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: Adobe DRM (»Systemvoraussetzungen)

E-Book, Englisch, 256 Seiten

How our stone-age brains made modern society, and why it matters for relationships between men and women

As countless love songs, movies, and self-help books attest, men and women have long sought different things. The result? Seemingly inevitable conflict. Yet we belong to the most cooperative species on the planet. Isn't there a way we can use this capacity to achieve greater harmony and equality between the sexes? In The War of the Sexes, Paul Seabright argues that there is—but first we must understand how the tension between conflict and cooperation developed in our remote evolutionary past, how it shaped the modern world, and how it still holds us back, both at home and at work.

Drawing on biology, sociology, anthropology, and economics, Seabright shows that conflict between the sexes is, paradoxically, the product of cooperation. The evolutionary niche—the long dependent childhood—carved out by our ancestors requires the highest level of cooperative talent. But it also gives couples more to fight about. Men and women became experts at influencing one another to achieve their cooperative ends, but also became trapped in strategies of manipulation and deception in pursuit of sex and partnership. In early societies, economic conditions moved the balance of power in favor of men, as they cornered scarce resources for use in the sexual bargain. Today, conditions have changed beyond recognition, yet inequalities between men and women persist, as the brains, talents, and preferences we inherited from our ancestors struggle to deal with the unpredictable forces unleashed by the modern information economy.

Men and women today have an unprecedented opportunity to achieve equal power and respect. But we need to understand the mixed inheritance of conflict and cooperation left to us by our primate ancestors if we are finally to escape their legacy.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Seabright, Paul

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsgeschichte
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Spezielle Soziologie Familiensoziologie
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaften Interdisziplinär Neurowissenschaften, Kognitionswissenschaft
• Naturwissenschaften Biowissenschaften Biowissenschaften Evolutionsbiologie

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Acknowledgments ix

Part One Prehistory

Chapter 1: Introduction 3

Chapter 2: Sex and Salesmanship 27

Chapter 3: Seduction and the Emotions 40

Chapter 4: Social Primates 60

Part Two Today

Chapter 5: Testing for Talent 93

Chapter 6: What Do Women Want? 111

Chapter 7: Coalitions of the Willing 126

Chapter 8: The Scarcity of Charm 141

Chapter 9: The Tender War 157

Notes 183

References 211

Index 233

Über Autor(innen)

Paul Seabright is the author of The Company of Strangers: A Natural History of Economic Life (Princeton). He is professor of economics at the Toulouse School of Economics, director of the Institute for Advanced Study in Toulouse, and has been a fellow of All Souls College, University of Oxford, and Churchill College, University of Cambridge.