I agree that it’s not irrational to base decisions about the fatherhood role largely on direct biological descent.
I was addressing even sven’s unsettled feelings concerning the fact that “we are thinking consciously in terms of perpetuating genetic code, finding optimal mates, optimizing the amount of energy we put into our offspring while ensuring they have a good chance of spreading your code, etc.”
I do see people do that–or at least talk that way–and I do think it’s an irrational way to think about things. There’s no reason to think that the “values” suggested by our evolutionary history should be our own values.
Your apparent claim was not “fixing industry A is less good than fixing industry B”, it was “fixing industry A is less good than not fixing anything at all”.
And it could be seen that way, if one is looking at the overall fairness level of society. if you are not, why would it make any difference which of the industries you fixed? If the only level of fairness we can consider is that of the individual, it makes equal sense to first address the small number of situations where women have an advantage as it does to first address the overwhelming number of situations where men have an advantage.
But think back to how this was all handled in the days before DNA testing.
If the woman was married, her husband was the baby’s legal father, unless he accused her of adultery. Of course, he’d have to provide some proof that his wife was a cheating whore of a slut, unless he was a king or something. And proving that you were unable to control your wife’s sexual escapades would be pretty humiliating.
If an unmarried woman had sexual relations with a man, and became pregnant, well, in most cases the baby would have no father unless the woman find some way to get the father or some other man to marry her. The baby would be a bastard. If the father was a wealthy man, he might provide for the baby voluntarily. Or he might not. But generally, if a woman was married her husband was the father, and if she was unmarried the baby HAD NO FATHER.
Is this the “natural” situation you want to return to?
Because, absent a genetic test, what else are we supposed to do when an unmarried woman has a baby? Let the woman pick a father out of a catalog? Let the woman pick a father out of a catalog, but that catalog is restricted to men who had sex with her between 8-10 months before the baby was born? And how would she establish, legally, which men she had sex with? And would it matter exactly what sexual practices were engaged in?
If we’re going to make fatherhood into a random lottery, it seems to me that the fairest way to run that lottery is to find out which sperm fertilized which egg, and whichever lucky sperm got there first determines the father.
But of course, paternity tests don’t actually determine legal fatherhood in most cases. Paternity tests are very rare. It’s only when paternity is disputed that paternity tests are used. And so if we rule out paternity tests in cases of disputed paternity, what are we left with? Either he said she said, or the ancient rule that an unmarried woman’s child had no father. And the corollary to that, if women didn’t like it maybe they shouldn’t have sex unless they were willing to bet the guy who impregnated them would be willing to marry them. Or infanticide, or abortion, or adoption, or raising the baby on your own as a ruined woman or grass widow.
It is a fantasy that in the olden days before genetic testing, if a woman was sleeping with multiple men and got pregnant she could simply pick the most suitable legal father out of that pack. In reality, if a woman was sleeping with multiple men and got pregnant, since there was no way to establish genetic paternity there was no way to establish legal paternity. One of those men would have to volunteer. And while that man might be willing to have sex with a promiscuous slut, chances are he wouldn’t be willing to marry her.
However, you’re a woman, so the tought that maybe your kid could not be biologically your kid is necessarily foreign to you. Long before we had this technology, men have wondered “is this really my child?”, have had doubts that lingered in the back of their heads, and so on. Our technology doesn’t create a need to know, that has always existed, it just gives the answer.
This desire of men to have the certainty of a biological link that women naturally have is certainly one of the main reasons (if not the main reason) why men wanted to control women and in particular their sexuality.
It’s not a secondary, unimportant issue, and it’s certainly nothing new.