It’s Not Sexism — It’s Biology.
Hey Michael, thank you so much for reading and taking the time to comment. I sincerely appreciate both, more than you know.
As far as it always falling on the man to adapt and change, it has nothing to do with sexism and everything to do with biology.
In most sexed animals, there are two sexes. There are a couple of wacky animals with three sexes, plenty of asexual creatures (they dominate the earth in terms of raw numbers), and some really out-there creatures with seven or so sexes (don't ask--but if you're really curious, read The Red Queen: Sex and the Evolution of Human Nature by Matt Ridley).
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Sexed animals vary in terms of parental investment. Parental investment means that each parent (sex) invests more, less, or the same in the children produced. In some animals, like the Mormon cricket, the pipefish seahorse, and Panamanian poison dart frog, males invest more than females in the offspring.
In these species, the females actually chase the males and vie for male attention. Females have to constantly change and adapt to male choice.
Males stick around and raise the kids, and females go out and chase other males.
The whole shebang is reversed.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/18462318/
The parental investment aligns beautifully with which sex stands to lose more from having children.
In humans, there's no question that females risk more by engaging in sex. Nine months of pregnancy, the possibility of the male running off and leaving the female with a baby to take care of. It's a lot. Human females evolved to be more choosy (like most other species), and males more indiscriminate.
Less risk, less selectivity.
Most birds have the same setup. Did you think male birds invented all those weird, intricate, hyper-complex dances just for fun--so we could make cute TikTok videos of them doing funky dances?
Nope. They do it because if they don't do it, nature will laugh as it unapologetically weeds their genes out of existence.
Nature made female birds choosier, more willing to forego sex and wait for the right partner. Ergo, learn to dance or be rendered genetically obsolete.
Hey, at least they have a choice!
Because of this fact, it's actually females that drive evolution. That's right, females being choosy and males having to adapt to female desires is the engine that drives sexual selection itself. Males evolve at a faster rate than females (in species where females have more parental investment) as males compete with one another for mates. In species where the males have more parental investment, the roles are reversed.
It's not sexism. It's biology.
In humans, men are the ones to adapt because, for men, sex is an extremely low-risk operation. Three minutes of pumping and sweating (if you're lucky) and bang, your job is done unless you choose to stick around. For women, it's much more of a lifelong commitment.
That should be respected and never diminished.
https://www.nature.com/articles/321164a0#:~:text=Fisher%27s%20theory%20of%20the%20evolution%20of%20sexual%20selection,preference%20for%20melanic%20males%20has%20been%20demonstrated%202.
