Fukuyama's Follies: So What if Women Ruled the World?

Myths of ancient civilizations also throw doubt on Fukuyama's assertions. Some of the earliest deities worshipped by humans were female, but they were hardly the nurturing earth mothers imagined by many scholars. The archaic goddesses unearthed from Mediterranean and Mesopotamian ruins or recalled in Mesoamerican mythology were huntresses and avid consumers of blood sacrifices, often accompanied or represented by predators such as lions and leopards. Only later were these terrifying deities "tamed" through marriage to patriarchal male gods and reassigned to agricultural duties. Although the characteristics of the archaic goddesses tell us nothing about the roles of actual women, they do suggest a time when the association of manhood with violence and femininity with gentleness was not as self-evident as it has seemed in the modern age.

MACHO MAN

Whatever our genetic and prehistoric cultural legacies, women in the past two centuries have more than adequately demonstrated a capacity for collective violence. They have played a leading role in nonmilitary violence such as eighteenth- and nineteenth-century bread riots and revolutionary uprisings, in which they were often reputed to be "foremost in violence and ferocity." In World War II, the Soviet military deployed them as fighter pilots and in ground combat. Since then, women have served as terrorists and guerrilla fighters in wars of national liberation. More to the point, women have proved themselves no less susceptible than men to the passions of militaristic nationalism: witness feminist leader Sylvia Pankhurst, who set aside the struggle for suffrage to mobilize English support for World War I by, for example, publicly shaming men into enlisting. Fukuyama concedes that, among heads of government, Margaret Thatcher is an exception to his gender dichotomy but ignores the many exceptions on the male side of the ledger -- such as the antimilitaristic, social-democratic Olaf Palme and Willy Brandt. Nor does he mention the gender of the greatest pacifist leaders of the twentieth century, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Mohandas K. Gandhi.

But perhaps Fukuyama would concede all of the above, for in the end he has little use for his own dubious claims about the inherent aggressiveness of men and niceness of women. Up until the last three pages of his essay, one might assume that he was gearing up to demand solely masculine leadership, if not participation, in the arenas of politics and war. But no. Women in the military? His only objection has to do with sex as an activity rather than a category, which leads him to the mild suggestion that men and women should be segregated into separate combat units. As for political leadership, he worries a little that the female, and hence over-kindly, heads of state who arise in the northern democracies will be a poor match for the macho young males whom he expects to dominate the south. But even here he quickly backtracks, admitting, "Masculine policies will be still be required, though not necessarily masculine leaders."

If, as Fukuyama concludes, either sex can be "masculine" in both admirable and execrable ways, what is the point of his essay, with its lengthy excursion into the supposedly murderous habits of cavemen and chimps? Perhaps Fukuyama is right about one thing: Whatever the innate psychological differences between the sexes, a certain male propensity for chest-thumping persists, and can be found among desk-dwelling American scholars as well as alpha apes.

Barbara Ehrenreich is an author and lecturer whose essays have appeared frequently in Time, The Nation, and The Guardian. Her most recent book is Blood Rites.

FATHER KNOWS BEST

By Katha Pollitt

In his 1989 essay "The End of History?" Fukuyama argued that liberal capitalist democracy was the final stage of political organization toward which the whole world was tending. Today, it seems clear that history will continue to occur, fueled by familiar energies -- nationalism, religious mania, the will to power of powerful men, drastic inequalities between and within nations, economic cycles of boom and bust. Undaunted, Fukuyama is back with another idea. He prophesies that the increasing political power of women in wealthy Western countries will incline those countries against war because evolution has made violence, aggression, and status competition hardwired components of male, but not female, nature. As with chimpanzees, so with humans: From rival male chimps tearing each other to pieces it is but a step to the famously violent Yanomamo of the Amazon, and before we know it we are on familiar twentieth-century killing grounds -- the Holocaust, Rwanda, Bosnia.

But Fukuyama warns that this female peacefulness poses dangers to the West. Other parts of the world where female infanticide and sex-selective abortion result in heavily male populations will become more pugnacious. Are Western women up to the challenge of a testosterone-saturated Asia? And what about women in the army? If men are genetically destined to bond only with other men and to compete perpetually for females, will coed army units degenerate into Peyton Place in camouflage?