Innate Masculine/Feminine Traits: Their Contributions to Conflict

This paper rests upon three basic premises, each of which is supportable as a general statement by the consensus of relevant data, whereas their specific applications more often involve hypotheses and are susceptible to differences of knowledgeable opinion. The first premise is that human behavior is rarely if ever determined solely by either nature or nurture. There is always some admixture of both, although the relative influences of genotype and environment may vary virtually without limit (see extensive discussions in Dobzhansky, 1962, and Lehrman, 1970). The second is that men and women differ in ways that reflect not only rearing and cultural influences, but also innate differences resulting from differential evolutionary pressures on the two sexes, and different biological realities. A summary of the data for this premise is in the following section. The third premise is that these different traits can and do contribute to conflict, both intra-psychically and interpersonally, sometimes by themselves and sometimes in conjunction with other kinds of psychological difficulties. Even though these differences did not evolve in anything like most contemporary cultures, they were probably conducive to some conflict between the sexes even in the conditions under which they did evolve; this is seen in studies of existing Stone Age peoples. The persistence of these traits in unnatural, contemporary environments in which their adaptiveness is more questionable very likely increases their potential for causing such conflict. And innate traits that exist in an unnatural environment or an unsympathetic ideological climate can be the source of intrapsychic conflict whether or not they become involved in interpersonal