Making Sense with Sam Harris - #135 — Navigating Sex and Gender

Episode Date: August 20, 2018

Sam Harris speaks with Martie Haselton about sex and gender, the role of hormones in human psychology, “Darwinian feminism,” the unique hormonal experience of women, transgenderism, the Google Memo, and other topics. If the Making Sense podcast logo in your player is BLACK, you can SUBSCRIBE to gain access to all full-length episodes at samharris.org/subscribe.

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There have been many things in the news. There was the Pennsylvania clergy sex abuse bomb that went off this week. A grand jury report detailing the abuse of more than a thousand children by more than 300 priests over the years. And there are probably vastly more. This sort of thing is underreported, as we all know, and also sedulously covered up by the church. In fact, it's not much of an exaggeration to say that the Catholic Church is a machine, one of whose primary functions has been to ensure that children get raped and that the world doesn't find out about it. This really is not an exaggeration.

That reminded me of an article I wrote about ten years ago when a similar scandal happened in Ireland. I wrote an article titled, Bringing the Vatican to Justice. Actually, I may have read this on a much earlier podcast, but I'll just read the first two paragraphs here because it's really all I have to say in the present case, and it makes a point that I think is all too rarely made. So here's what I wrote, I think in 2009 or so. I've paid too little attention to the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic Church. Frankly, it has always felt unsportsmanlike to shoot so large and languorous a fish in so tiny a barrel. And there seemed to be no need to deride faith

that is most vulnerable and self-abased. Even in retrospect, it is easy to understand the impulse to avert one's eyes. Just imagine a pious mother and father sending their beloved child to the church of a thousand hands for spiritual instruction, only to have him raped and terrified into silence by threats of hell. Then imagine this occurring to tens of thousands of children in our own time, and to children beyond reckoning for over a thousand years. The spectacle of faith so utterly misplaced and so

fully betrayed is simply too depressing to think about. But there was always more to this phenomenon that should have compelled my attention. Consider the ludicrous ideology that made it possible. The Catholic Church has spent two millennia demonizing human sexuality to a degree unmatched by any other institution, declaring the most basic, healthy, mature, and consensual behavior as taboo. Indeed, this organization still opposes the use of contraception, preferring instead that the poorest people on earth be blessed with the largest families and the shortest lives. As a consequence of this hallowed and incorrigible stupidity, the Church has condemned generations of decent people to shame and hypocrisy,

or to Neolithic fecundity, poverty, and death by AIDS. Add to this inhumanity the artifice of cloistered celibacy, and you now have an institution, one of the wealthiest on earth, that preferentially attracts pederasts, pedophiles, and sexual sadists into its ranks, promotes them to positions of authority, and grants them privileged access to children. Finally, consider that vast numbers of children will be born out of wedlock, and their unwed mothers vilified, wherever church teaching holds sway, leading boys and girls by the thousands to be abandoned to church-run orphanages,

only to be raped and terrorized by the clergy. Here, in this ghoulish machinery set whirling through the ages by the opposing winds of shame and sadism, we mortals can finally glimpse how strangely perfect are the ways of the Lord. Okay, so that's how I opened that article. But let's be clear about what's happening here. This isn't just the law of large numbers, where you sample hundreds of thousands or millions of people and you find some thousands of them abusing children. There's something special about the Catholic Church. There's a specific machinery here based on dogmatism and faith in ridiculous ideas.

based on dogmatism and faith in ridiculous ideas. And every detail matters, like the belief in hell and sin and celibacy and the shame of out-of-wedlock birth. Of course, there are other religious communities that have abused their kids and conceal the crime so as not to bring embarrassment to the institutions. There have been scandals among the Orthodox Jews in New York in recent

years, but no one has perfected this horror show like the Catholic Church. This is an institution that routinely spends millions of dollars to protect individual priests who they know have raped children for decades, moving them from one parish to the next, where they can rape again, paying hush money to victims, and when these cases wind up in court, doing everything they can to shame and discredit the children or the adults who were once those children. This is pure evil, and the details are insane. I'm just going to read you a snippet from the Pennsylvania Grand Jury Report. Okay, this is a quote. Despite a priest's admission to assaulting at least a dozen young boys, the bishop wrote to thank him for, quote, all the good you have done for God's

people. The Lord who sees in private will reward, end quote. Another priest confessed to anal and oral rape of at least 15 boys, as young as seven. The bishop later met with the abuser to commend him as a, quote, person of candor and sincerity, and to compliment him for, quote, the progress he has made in controlling his, quote, addiction. When the abuser was finally removed from the priesthood years later, the bishop ordered the parish not to say why. Quote, nothing else need be noted, end quote.

This is further down here in the report. We came across a file in which the diocese candidly conceded that this, quote, is one of our worst cases, end quote, but of course told no one about him. Actually, we came across the statement in the files of several other priests. Then there was the file with a simple celebratory notation, quote, bad abuse case. Victim sued us. We won. There was the priest, for example,

who raped a seven-year-old girl after she'd had her tonsils out. This is me now. This girl was raped in her hospital room. Just picture the life of this person in the context of a faith so captivating that there was no recourse here. Picture the family around this girl. You get indoctrinated from birth into a cult, and this is a cult staffed with an inordinate number of pedophiles who gain access to your kids. Back to the report. Or the priest who made a nine-year-old give him oral sex and then rinsed out the boy's mouth with holy water to purify him. Or the boy who drank some juice at his priest's house and woke up the next morning bleeding from his rectum, unable to remember anything about the night before. Okay, so that's as much as I'll give you.

Sorry to ambush you with that, but it's hard even for me to pay attention to this stuff and remember how horrible these details are. None of this should be surprising. This is in the DNA of this organization. If you had to sign a user agreement for the Catholic Church, this should be part of it. Somewhere in the fine print, it should say, the ideology of our organization acts as a filter attracting sexually confused and conflicted and conscienceless men, and we employ these people and hide their crimes. And we've done this for over a thousand

years. Now give us your kids. Hearing that the Catholic Church is raping children should be as surprising as hearing that Google and Facebook are selling your data to third parties. Anyway, it's intense to read about all this. You're getting me just after I did that, hence the top spin. Imagine if there were a Fortune 500 company that was raping and abusing children for its entire existence and systematically concealing it. What would we have done to that company? And now, consider what hasn't happened to the Catholic Church.

Okay. There have been many other things in the news. I can't bear to comment on Trump at the moment. But it's good to see people in the military coming out publicly in criticism of him. After McRaven wrote his letter. after McRaven wrote his letter. And there was the Sarah Jong hiring at the New York Times. I think I'll talk about that with Jonathan Haidt, who's coming up this week.

And then Jaron Lanier is finally coming up, but that had to get rescheduled, so got some good podcasts on the horizon. I'm going to break now for my discussion of funding the podcast. As always, if you've heard it, you can skip it. It's seven minutes long. But if you haven't heard it or remain to be yet convinced to support the show, you might give it a listen because it's on the basis of listener support that this thing works. Okay, back in seven. works. Okay, back in seven. I'd like to explain why I don't run ads on the podcast, and why I've decided instead to rely entirely on listener support. For those of you who haven't heard me

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So thank you. Okay, well, today's guest is Marty Hazleton. Marty is the world's leading researcher on how ovulatory cycles influence women's sexuality. She's a professor of psychology at UCLA and at the Institute for Society and Genetics. She's a former editor of the leading journal in the field, Evolution and Human Behavior, and she now directs the Evolutionary Psychology Lab at UCLA. Anyway, I had a great time talking to Marty. We talk about sex and gender and the role

of hormones in human psychology, something she calls Darwinian feminism. We focus on the unique hormonal experience of women. But up front, we talk about things like transgenderism and the Google memo and other controversial topics. This stuff is increasingly important, not only ethically, but politically. It cuts across many of the free speech concerns we've been airing on this show. So without further delay, I bring you Marty Hazelton. I am here with Marty Hazelton. Marty, thanks for coming on the podcast. Hi, happy to be here. So describe what you do. I should say at the top here, we'll be discussing your book,

Hormonal, The Hidden Intelligence of Hormones. But how is it that you have come to write about hormones and what is your particular academic perch? So I would call myself an interdisciplinary evolutionary scientist, by which I mean, you know, some people would probably look at my work and say, oh, that's evolutionary psychology. I know what that is. But I think of myself as being a little bit broader than what is typically assigned to evolutionary psychology, if that makes sense. assigned to evolutionary psychology, if that makes sense. So, you know, I certainly have looked at phenomena that are well-worn territory in evolutionary psychology, like mating relationships and so forth. But I've really also been interested in connecting the dots between using the evolutionary or adaptive logic to understand why humans do the things that they do

and perhaps to get new insights into those things and test new hypotheses. And actually look then at behavior and see what people are doing and describe that, sometimes in some detail. But I'm also interested in the mechanisms in between, both the psychological mechanisms, which I think people who are interested in evolutionary psychology would recognize as straight-up evolutionary psychology, but I also do this work looking at hormonal moderators or hormonal mediators of the kinds of phenomena that we're interested in. And maybe this is too nitty-gritty for your audience. I

don't know. Please just tell me if you want me to back off a little bit in terms of the technical detail. But I think it sort of, you know, puts me in, you know, this field of biological endocrinology or social endocrinology, but also behavioral ecologists, I reference their work. I do a lot of comparative work in setting up my studies. So I look at the literature on non-human primates and on female animals who experience estrus all the way across the spectrum. So some of our insights actually come from looking at rodents. You know, humans clearly aren't rodents. Not all of them. Not all of them. Right. Except the rats. But yeah. So so the comparative work also figures into my approach. So I said I want to sort of claim a broader base for understanding the particular social phenomena that I'm interested in, which mostly had to do with intimate relationships. Well, it is a fascinating and fraught intersection of disciplines, as you know, and I think I'm going to lead you on to some of that dangerous territory. There are several taboos here. There's this taboo around viewing the human mind in biological terms at all,

and there's a related taboo around acknowledging sex differences. I mean, it's even taboo in some quarters to acknowledge that biological sex is even a thing. Yeah. Okay. And this leads us to what I think you consider to be mistaken notions of feminism. And in your book, you write about something called Darwinian feminism. Right. So let's just pick a place to start here. Perhaps we should just start with the basic concern around understanding the human mind in biological and evolutionary terms. I mean, it's not, I don't think anyone at this point thinks that the logic of evolution subsumes

every interesting question about what it's like to be us or what it is to have a human mind. But how do you view biology and psychology at this point? You know, I think you kind of have to take it on a case-by-case basis. For some things, like things that are linked with reproduction, and this perhaps is why this is such well-traversed territory in evolutionary approaches, social scientific approaches. You know, so thinking about reproduction so close to the engine of natural selection and therefore how our minds and the minds of our cousins, our non-human cousins, have been shaped, that seems very straightforward. human cousins have been shaped, that seems very straightforward. Now, that's not going to tell us everything. So we're not going to be able to derive from first principles everything that we want to understand about humans. And there are plenty of surprises. And I could give some examples of some of those. But you're asking me a more general question,

which is the intersection between psychology and biology. I don't think that anybody who is credible could say that it's all biology, right? It's turtles all the way down. Because humans do things that are very uniquely human. And I think this is interesting both in response to as a potential response to your question, but also is one of the things that's tripped us up in gaining access to information that I think is important. So humans are undeniably their own kind of special species, right? We can drive Porsches. We can, you know, make lattes. We can we speak multiple languages. We can read and write in those languages. We have a way of preserving cultural knowledge over time that has allowed us to technologically exploit our modern environment or our environment in general to an extent that you just don't see with with other species.

that you just don't see with other species. So I think that seeing, so that's just a really important thing to acknowledge and any competent treatment of evolution and human behavior will include a large component that explores how those things happen, how they make humans unique, how they make the animal models or the more purely biological models inadequate as the full story.

You know, of course, the line between biology and culture is difficult to draw because much of culture has to be viewed as a kind of extended phenotype. And, you know, we've evolved for some tens of thousands of years in the context of having linguistically based culture. Yes. And I think that there are some fascinating evolutionary psychological questions there. So we can ask the question, well, what are the kinds of things that humans bring when they are entering their social world? What are the kinds of things that they bring with them that help them acquire these useful bits of culture? So things like, and this is some work that's been done, has, was done at UCLA and continues to be done all over. It's gotten very popular. It's gotten very influential,

I should say. And that is thinking about how we keenly observe different potential behavioral models and which of those models have behavior that is most likely to be repeated because they show some signs of success, right? So I think that there are some really fascinating evolutionary psychological questions about what is the evolved machinery that we bring to this, our social world that allows us to practice, transmit, benefit from technology. Let's focus now on sex and gender, because this is really where you have spent most of your time. First, I think the difference between sex and gender may not even be clear to most people. How do you define these terms?

Yeah, well, I think that there's some disagreement about just exactly how we should define the terms. So I think of gender as being more of the sort of like continuous difference in masculinity and femininity. So you can occupy any number of different levels of relative femininity or relative masculinity, the things that we would recognize. So if we can think about masculine and feminine as what is gender typical, there is still a ton of variation between those gender-typical central tendencies. And so I think it is most appropriate to, and it becomes very awkward otherwise, it's most appropriate to refer to those things as gender. You know, I read a paper, it's been a few years now, but I believe it was about mate copying, mate choice copying in guppies. And the guppies in the paper were referred to as having gender.

And I just thought, hmm, okay, this is definitely not how I'm thinking of the appropriate definition of the word. But I think what it points out, yeah, is that people are reluctant to use the word sex, male, female. Right. That's what I was going to say. There's something awkward, not even socially, but just semantically or grammatically using sex in all of these sentences. And I'm sure that in the past I have used gender in many of these cases as a synonym for biological sex. Yes. And so I would tend to think of, so biological sex. And I talk about, so I teach a class, an entire year-long freshman cluster course, the so-called sex cluster. It's all about sex and gender. And in that class, we dig deeply into these issues.

But one of the things that we do is we sort of arrive at some common definitions. And sex and gender, the difference between sex and gender is one of those. And so the way that we tend to think about sex and the way that I think about it is it's more like understanding what are those central tendencies of masculinity and femininity that we can identify as being sexually dimorphic characteristics of human beings. Now, of course, there are going to be exceptions, right? There are fascinating cases of intersex. There's the question of sexual orientation, which takes people away from those gender-typical categories. And so there's still plenty of variation, but I tend to be comfortable with using the word sex, referring to biological sex.

So if we're talking about at the chromosomal level, if we're talking about on average differences in hormones, although even there things can get a little squishy. But then I find I think sex is really most appropriate. And even somebody's identity, whether they identify as male or female, I would often be comfortable using the word sex there as well. Now that we're fully in the wilderness, let's just define some more of these terms. So intersex and transgender and non-binary, give me the lexicon. with a phenotype that is neither clearly male nor female in some important way. And so the classic case, I suppose, would be looking at babies who are born with genitalia that are neither clearly male nor female. So they have an intersex condition. Is there a chromosomal abnormality here? We're just talking about amounts of testosterone or not? It has lots of potential triggers. So humans, when we are born, we are sort of what, you know, there's sort of a female default to

our phenotype. And then with the appropriate gene and hormone actions, you'll see sex differentiation. You'll see sex differences emerge between males and females in utero and well beyond, of course. And so at any of those levels, something could be different during development. So whether it be at the chromosomal, you know, whether you're XX or XY, XX or XY, and some XX individuals will appear to be male in their phenotype. And so, you know, so there are the genetic predictors, but then there are other things that can happen down the line that involve hormone levels and potentially also some environmental determinants. Environmental trauma, that's the easiest case.

determinants. Environmental trauma, that's the easiest case. Somebody who has a botched genital surgery and is that changed from male to female or vice versa would also potentially have an intersex identity fall into that category of intersex. What's really interesting, I think, and I think really pushes the boundaries of political correctness is to ask the question, I think really pushes the boundaries of political correctness is to ask the question, well, we know what's gender typical. Usually a male is attracted to a female, a female is attracted to a male. What about these very numerous, voluminous cases of people who are attracted to members of the same sex, or maybe have bisexual attraction, or maybe they just change their attractions over time. Do we think about that as a sort of intersex condition, even though everything else about them might be very gender typical? Right. So let me just, before I wade into that. So non-binary is a statement about

a person's self-perceived gender weighting. Yes, yes. And so those may be people who have an intersex condition or who just want to not be in the gender binary. They are more comfortable being in between, perhaps not having people know anything about the biological foundations of their sex at some level. So these are people who will identify openly as queer. Often those people have same-sex attractions, and so part of their queer identity will be breaking out of that binary with respect to, you know, who one is attracted to. There's just, there are lots of flavors in the, you know, the sexuality rainbow, so to speak, for humans. And we're discovering even more of them as we move along. So that's queer or non-binary. But then there are,

of course, all of the different boxes that you might be able to check on a questionnaire about your sexual orientation. Yeah, the boxes are proliferating. Somebody I saw on Twitter a few months back took a picture of the beginning of, I think it was like the LSAT or some other standardized test where they were asked to check their gender, and there was something like, you know, 12 boxes? Right. That doesn't surprise me. Yeah. And maybe there need to be 12 boxes so that everybody's preference is acknowledged and respected. You know, I know that it's bothersome to people who are, you know,

who really prefer binaries and boxes and want to categorize the world in that way. And so we make people uncomfortable, I think, when we acknowledge that there are these variations. But I think it's really important to do just, you know, as a scientist who studies these topics that have real human relevance. So these students come into my class and they may be just questioning their gender identity. They may have a lot of questions about, you know, how they are different in some way from others that they have noticed. And, you know, one of the things that I'm really proud of at my time here at UCLA is exploring those things, talking about them, and giving students a language to do both, to ask some questions about themselves, but also to, you know, sort of have their consciousness raised about these gendered issues in our everyday

society. Well, I wasn't actually planning to start here, but now that we've opened Pandora's Box, let's just stay with these more esoteric questions before we get into just basic differences between men and women. So just to pivot back to the time bomb, it sounds like you armed for us. Is it a plausible thesis that homosexuality should be thought of in terms of intersex? Is that what you just suggested? Well, I think that we're really pushing the boundaries when we ask that question. And no doubt people will get quite irritated with me for having raised it. But I think that if what we mean by sex is gender typicality, and gender typicality is not hard for us to quantify.

So what are the, on average, what are the differences, what are men like on average? What are women like? We respect the fact, of course, that, you know, in defining that, that there's a lot of variation. There's a lot of variation. But as soon as we recognize that an individual is not fitting into that binary or not even really getting close to the on average male or female in certain aspects of their phenotype, then I think we ask the question, well, do we want to consider that to be an intersex case? I wouldn't say condition necessarily, because that medicalizes

it a little bit too much. But, you know, so as soon as we apply, start being principled in our application of these definitions, then I think it leads us to these questions, which rightly have made people quite uncomfortable. Well, then what would you do with all the other just ambiguities of human sexuality or the varieties. So you have things that are, I guess, traditionally classed as paraphilia or something that's definitely non-standard. If you have a boot fetish or you have something that's not especially well-subscribed, does that throw a wrench into any kind of paradigm where you would want to just think in terms of this single continuum? Well, I think that we might think about those cases

as just different, and so there are all kinds of ideas. If you'd like to continue listening to this conversation, you'll need to subscribe at SamHarris.org. Once you do, you'll get access to all full-length episodes of the Making Sense podcast, along with other subscriber-only content, including bonus episodes and AMAs and the conversations I've been having on the Waking Up app. The Making Sense Podcast is ad-free and relies entirely on listener support, and you can subscribe now at SamHarris.org. you