The Sexist Gene - a Critique of Dawkins' Selfish Gene
The Sexist Gene
Today's date is the 25th of February 2022. I have just finished it.
I gave up on this book twice, only picking it up again because one of my lecturers loves it so much he based an entire module on it. As a result of this, my memory of the first part of the book is foggy, but I cleared the second half in the past week and I have some thoughts. This is why it took me over a year to read it and why I only rated it two stars.
Structure and Writing Style
I've read a lot of scientific texts. By now, I can wade through the technical language and come out the other side with a sound understanding of what was said. Dawkins' book is supposedly written to be accessible to a general audience, but I disagree. Topics that take half a page to adequately explain in a textbook take thirty here, and Dawkins has an unexplainable dislike of diagrams, which would have made his points an awful lot clearer and quicker. He's also fond of wandering off on tangents, which again makes his points hard to follow. I feel he could have benefitted from an editor.
His conclusion, I felt, should have been longer. I would have appreciated the last chapter to be devoted to summing up the book, rather than a hasty advertisement for the book's sequel. He gave the conclusion the last page or so, and failed to touch on topics he'd previously devoted whole chapters to. If I were to submit such a conclusion in a university assignment, I would certainly be critiqued for it.
The book has lots of positive reviews, eight pages of which Dawkins modestly puts at the end of the book. What I did notice was that these reviews all came from people Dawkins discusses heavily in his book. Chapters were given to the works of W.D. Hamilton, who returned the favour with a glowing review. Favouritism and bias? Never heard of them.
Overall my main complaint about the structure and writing was that it was boring, and it didn't have to be.
Memes in the Meme Pool
When I first read this phrase, I couldn't help but laugh. Dawkins proposes that a new replicator has formed, which he names memes. He in fact donates a whole paragraph detailing how he came to this name, including that he wanted it to sound like gene. I might suggest that this reflects his ego. As usual, he takes his time getting to his point, and doesn't make it very clearly. What I took away from this chapter is that he is trying to claim that thinking about things and telling them to others is equivalent to gene transfer. He'd call this meme transfer. For example, if I watch a really good movie and think about it afterwards, I have created in meme. When I go to tell my partner, I am spreading the meme. If he then goes on to tell his family, the meme is 'replicating' and spreading throughout the population. Dawkins, I believe the word you're looking for is thinking. I would do further research into 'meme-ology' to make sure I'm understanding it, but quite frankly I'm too glad to be done with the book to look into his work in more detail. Either way, I find the popularity of the term to refer to something funny you saw on the internet quite fitting.
There was one good thing about this chapter - it was relatively short.
Sexism
Dawkins is an old white man. Anyone who isn't an old white man will appreciate why this is an important piece of information. As a book about science, I expected The Selfish Gene to be a safe read. It's safe to say I was wrong.
I do not dispute that the animal kingdom is not fair when it comes to gender. Females often carry more responsibility than males, and I do not take issue with the discussion of this in the book. What I do take issue to is Dawkins' referrals to human societies. There is one paragraph which hit me particularly hard, prompting me to go so far as to question my place within science. It comes at the end of the chapter Battle of the sexes, and I enclose the quote here.
"One feature of our own society that seems decidedly anomalous is the matter of sexual advertisement [...] the equivalent of the peacock's tail is exhibited by the female, not by the male. Women paint their faces and glue on false eyelashes. Apart from special cases, like actors, men do not. Women seem to be interested in their own personal appearance and they are encouraged in this by magazines and journals. Men's magazines are less preoccupied with male sexual attractiveness, and a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion, both among men and among women. When a woman is described in conversation, it is quite likely that her sexual attractiveness, or lack of it, will be prominently mentioned. This is true, whether the speaker is a man or a woman. When a man is described, the adjectives used are much more likely to have nothing to do with sex."
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene
Wow. There's a lot to unpack here, so let's start at the beginning.
Have you ever seen a men's magazine with a shirtless man flexing his muscles on the cover? Is this not the equivalent of a made up woman on the front of a woman's magazine? From this point onwards, Dawkins kicks it up a notch - "a man who is unusually interested in his own dress and appearance is apt to arouse suspicion". It's quite clear that he is referring to homosexuality here. As we all know, any man who washes his hair and irons his clothes must be gay. It might surprise Dawkins to learn that out of all the women I know (as a woman myself, that's a lot), they all prefer men who take care of themselves and make an effort in their appearance. Clearly all women are attracted to gay men, right Dawkins?
Now the last part. I've had an awful lot of conversations in my life, and I can say with absolute accuracy that a woman's sexual attractiveness, or lack of it as Dawkins so nicely puts it, has not been a predominant feature of many of them. But that might just be because I'm a woman. Let's consider my partner, a man's perspective. I asked him how often when discussing a woman her sexual attractiveness was predominantly mentioned. His answer? Almost never.
Dawkins saw fit to publish this in a scientific book. This would suggest that these are his views, and directly reflect how he sees society. If the majority of his conversations around women are predominantly to do with their sexual attractiveness, it is safe to assume there is a strong streak of misogyny in Dawkins. This is the man who is hailed as a genius, whose books are pushed to me by my lecturers. Books that make me feel like I don't belong in science, that no matter how good my work is, all the men will only be talking about how tight my skirt was. Why was this allowed through editing and multiple editions of the book? Why is this the message we are sending to our next generation of scientists?
Dawkins also has a habit of comparing things to sex completely unnecessarily. For example, when describing the relationship between life cycles and discreet organisms, he compares it to "the spiralling feelings of a woman and a man during the progress of a love affair". Tell me, why was this necessary? Is Dawkins including it simply to brag to us that he has had an affair?
We need to do better for our female scientists. I shouldn't be surprised every time I find the first author in the journal article I'm reading is a woman. Books like this perpetuate the idea that women don't belong in STEM, and in this day and age it is not acceptable.
To conclude, don't waste your time or your money. Reading a textbook will not only make the subject much easier to understand, but will also spare you the prattling of Dawkins' own ego and enough misogyny to almost push you out of the field.
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