# Women: the more moral sex? **URL:** \ **Category:** Great Debates\ **Created:** [February 16, 2015, 4:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792 "2015-02-16T04:27:34Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 20\ **Page:** 4
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 12:35am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/61 "2015-02-18T00:35:11Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Wouldn’t it be more efficient for the women to do the looting and pillaging? Your question doesn’t make sense. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 1:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/62 "2015-02-18T01:02:15Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > Raping I get. Where does the pillaging and looting come in? It impresses the chicks for some reason. ---
**Author:** ![Freudian\_Slit](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/f/5daacb/32.png) [@Freudian\_Slit](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Freudian_Slit)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/63 "2015-02-18T01:58:30Z")
How effective would rape even be for impregnation? The likelihood that a given woman is ovulating is pretty low. Wouldn’t having sex multiple times over the course of a month make more sense from a biological perspective? ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 2:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/64 "2015-02-18T02:30:29Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Your question doesn’t make sense. Sure it does. I’m a cave chick and I want stuff. Is the most efficient route to get impregnated by the local looter/pillager and hope he’s enough of a family guy to stick around and give me stuff? The truth is that in these settings, women did an enormous amount of resource production supporting daily life for herself and her kids. Men did plenty, too, of course. But not having men around has never stopped women from successfully raising children. Looting is result of political forces, specifically, it happens when political entities want to have organized militaries, but cannot afford to or choose not to pay them directly. Like most of our gender roles, it’s more a reflection of agriculture than anything else. Pre-agricultural societies no doubt engaged in opportunistic theft, but before people were sedentary there wouldn’t have been a lot to steal- certainly not enough to make much of a difference in reproduction. ---
**Author:** ![Blake](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/a9a28c/32.png) [@Blake](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Blake)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 3:00am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/65 "2015-02-18T03:00:53Z")
Still not making any sense. ---
**Author:** ![JimSC](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/3d9bf3/32.png) [@JimSC](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/JimSC)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 4:07am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/66 "2015-02-18T04:07:15Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Sure it does. I’m a cave chick and I want stuff. Is the most efficient route to get impregnated by the local looter/pillager and hope he’s enough of a family guy to stick around and give me stuff? The truth is that in these settings, women did an enormous amount of resource production supporting daily life for herself and her kids. Men did plenty, too, of course. But not having men around has never stopped women from successfully raising children. The whole point of being a looter/pillager was not to do it locally and not to stick around; same with the raping part. For men, contribution to the gene pool was maximized by impregnating as many women as possible. Having sex with a large number of women (even if only a fraction of them were fertile) and then gettin’ the hell outta Dodge before the hunting party came home, was a reasonable strategy. And although I’m sure you would have been an independent and successful cave chick, if you consider the species overall, a woman that was protected and supported by a male companion was likely to successfully raise more offspring than a pregnant single woman with a two-year-old in her arms and a four-year-old at her feet. ---
**Author:** ![rogerbox](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/76d3ee/32.png) [@rogerbox](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/rogerbox)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 4:30am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/67 "2015-02-18T04:30:10Z")
> [@Slithy\_Tove](#): > > Thing about rationalwiki: you see an article you agree with and go “yeah, right on!” > > Then you find an article on a topic important to you, that you’ve studied in depth for years, and they totally bone it with an ignorant, dismissive attitude. Then you read another article like that. Then another. Examples? ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 6:27am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/68 "2015-02-18T06:27:36Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Wouldn’t it be more efficient for the women to do the looting and pillaging? > [@Blake](#): > > Your question doesn’t make sense. > [@even\_sven](#): > > Sure it does. I’m a cave chick and I want stuff. Is the most efficient route to get impregnated by the local looter/pillager and hope he’s enough of a family guy to stick around and give me stuff? The truth is that in these settings, women did an enormous amount of resource production supporting daily life for herself and her kids. Men did plenty, too, of course. But not having men around has never stopped women from successfully raising children. “Resource production,” yes – that is, doing handicrafts, and gathering food and stuff that’s just lying around – but, women’s physical and/or psychological characteristics have usually prevented them from “looting and pillaging” anything that anyone else would claim and defend. If that’s gonna get done, you’ll have to rely on the men to do it. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 6:36am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/69 "2015-02-18T06:36:02Z")
> [@JimSC](#): > > The whole point of being a looter/pillager was not to do it locally and not to stick around; same with the raping part. For men, contribution to the gene pool was maximized by impregnating as many women as possible. Having sex with a large number of women (even if only a fraction of them were fertile) and then gettin’ the hell outta Dodge before the hunting party came home, was a reasonable strategy. And although I’m sure you would have been an independent and successful cave chick, if you consider the species overall, a woman that was protected and supported by a male companion was likely to successfully raise more offspring than a pregnant single woman with a two-year-old in her arms and a four-year-old at her feet. How much protection is he providing me if he is off looting and raping all day? In every pre-industrial society I’ve seen, women and children live semi-autonomously, with the man splitting supplemental gifts among his wives but keeping much of his earnings for his own pleasure. Women live through gathering, kitchen gardens, small scale home industries and working as a community to address childcare. This isn’t about being groovy or independent- it’s a pretty ugly system. ---
**Author:** ![Hector\_St\_Clare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 7:05am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/70 "2015-02-18T07:05:03Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > That’s already been covered. By pillaging, raping and looting men can increase their number of offspring by orders of magnitude. In fact they can increase it infinitely since many males left no offspring. > > Women are limited to one child every ~2 years no matter what tactics they adopt, and historically it was unheard of for any fertile woman who desired children not to be able to produce children. > > Raping, pillaging and looting are inherently risky activities. If men undertake that risk, the return can more than pay for the risk incurred. Not so for women. > > That is the biological imperative present in men that leads to pillaging and looting that is not also present in women. As noted, this was discussed previously. Hasn’t the whole ‘rape can be an evolutionarily beneficial strategy’ been called into serious question though? There was a modeling paper based on some data from Paraguay that suggested that except for the very lowest status men, the cost of rape (to the rapist) would have been much greater than the benefit. (Rapists risk getting caught and killed, or having their children identified and killed). ---
**Author:** ![Hector\_St\_Clare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 7:06am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/71 "2015-02-18T07:06:35Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > How much protection is he providing me if he is off looting and raping all day? > > In every pre-industrial society I’ve seen, women and children live semi-autonomously, with the man splitting supplemental gifts among his wives but keeping much of his earnings for his own pleasure. Women live through gathering, kitchen gardens, small scale home industries and working as a community to address childcare. This isn’t about being groovy or independent- it’s a pretty ugly system. This was the case traditionally in much of Africa, but not everywhere in the world. Among the Arctic native peoples, for example, food production was entirely monopolized by men. ---
**Author:** ![even\_sven](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/e/dfb087/32.png) [@even\_sven](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/even_sven)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 12:00pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/72 "2015-02-18T12:00:35Z")
> [@Hector\_St\_Clare](#): > > This was the case traditionally in much of Africa, but not everywhere in the world. Among the Arctic native peoples, for example, food production was entirely monopolized by men. Well, yes. I would imagine foraging was not a huge contribution to the diets of people who live in places without forageable food. That doesn’t change the reality that in most hunter-gathered societies, “food that happens to be lying around” provides the bulk of calories. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 3:15pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/73 "2015-02-18T15:15:26Z")
> [@Blake](#): > > Acquisition of resources. Once again, this was covered previously in this very thread. I can’t see where anyone covered it in a way that actually made sense. > [@Blake](#): > > Your question doesn’t make sense. Of course it does. You seem to be expecting everyone to take it on faith that women don’t derive the same benefit from looting and pillaging that men do. > [@Freudian\_Slit](#): > > How effective would rape even be for impregnation? The likelihood that a given woman is ovulating is pretty low. Wouldn’t having sex multiple times over the course of a month make more sense from a biological perspective? The odds of catching one of eight women ovulating at any given time are the same as the odds of catching one woman ovulating in eight attempts. With the latter method, you are more likely to get it on at an appropriate time _once_, obviously, but that is offset by the improved odds of getting it on multiple times if you’re nailing multiple potential breeding partners. For a second I thought you were going with a “the female body has ways of shutting that thing down” line with that post. 😃 ---
**Author:** ![chiquitita](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/c/a6a055/32.png) [@chiquitita](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/chiquitita)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 8:04pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/74 "2015-02-18T20:04:16Z")
> [@protoboard](#): > > The stats seem to suggest so, don’t they? Unless women are simply more adept at getting away with things, men just commit more crimes, it’s a fact. There’s a lot I don’t agree with in your assertions, but let’s start with this: it depends on what a given society defines as a crime. In 16th-17th century Europe, witchcraft was a criminal offense, and, says Wikipedia: > [@](#): > > The vast majority of those accused in the European and North American witch trials were women. Estimates of the fraction of women among the victims range between 75% and 85%. because > [@](#): > > Said noted Judge Nicholas Rémy (c.1595), “[It is] not unreasonable that this scum of humanity, [witches], should be drawn chiefly from the feminine sex.” Concurred another judge, “The Devil uses them so, because he knows that women love carnal pleasures, and he means to bind them to his allegiance by such agreeable provocations.” From this article: [Witch trials in the early modern period - Wikipedia](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Witch_trials_in_the_early_modern_period) Nowadays we don’t consider witchcraft as a crime, and indeed Wikipedia characterizes the witches as victims. Yet at the time the male clerics, judges and executioners saw themselves as the moral sex, and women as intrinsically evil. The notion of women as the moral sex came about, if I remember correctly, in the 19th century. Previously, the prevalent opinion, used to validate patriarchy and misogyny, was that women were not only intellectually inferior to men, but also morally deficient. > [@protoboard](#): > > It’s pretty uncommon for women to severely hurt innocent people. **Blake** has refuted this convincingly in the very next post. Women kill children, especially theirs, and especially their own newborns, as exemplified by several cases the world over. Women kill the elderly and the disabled, as shown by numerous examples of female serial killer nurses. In summary, women hurt innocent people who are physically weaker, and when they can get away with it. This doesn’t support the theory of an innately moral superiority. ---
**Author:** ![UltraVires](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/u/ecccb3/32.png) [@UltraVires](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/UltraVires)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 10:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/75 "2015-02-18T22:11:47Z")
> [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](#): > > I don’t function on a base, animal level. Do you? I’m a faithful husband now, but even when I was single and went around spreading my seed it had nothing to do with procreation. I used condoms, and generally avoided women who weren’t using hormonal birth control. > > The point is that it makes no sense at all to reduce everything to biological imperatives because we don’t really function on that basis. When you were single and spreading your seed, I would assume that you inserted your penis into a woman’s vagina, right? Why would you do that? It seems pretty silly if you think about it from a rational level. You both can achieve orgasm in a variety of other ways. What is it that makes males and females engage in genital to genital contact? It is the urge to procreate. As you noted, you consciously do NOT want to procreate in those circumstances. The LAST thing you want is to have a child with some hottie you just picked up. But the reason that you have an innate desire to insert your penis into her vagina is to, wait for it: procreate. Your rational brain says “I don’t want to get this chick pregnant.” Your animal brain wants to do the only thing that can get her pregnant. ---
**Author:** ![BrainGlutton](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/b/82dd89/32.png) [@BrainGlutton](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/BrainGlutton)\ **Post date:** [February 18, 2015, 10:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/76 "2015-02-18T22:20:31Z")
> [@chiquitita](#): > > The notion of women as the moral sex came about, if I remember correctly, in the 19th century. Previously, the prevalent opinion, used to validate patriarchy and misogyny, was that women were not only intellectually inferior to men, but also morally deficient. I wonder if Queen Vickie had anything to do with that paradigm shift. ---
**Author:** ![kayaker](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/kayaker/32/441_2.png) [@kayaker](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/kayaker)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2015, 1:58am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/77 "2015-02-19T01:58:46Z")
> [@jtgain](#): > > When you were single and spreading your seed, I would assume that you inserted your penis into a woman’s vagina, right? Why would you do that? It seems pretty silly if you think about it from a rational level. You both can achieve orgasm in a variety of other ways. What is it that makes males and females engage in genital to genital contact? It is the urge to procreate. > > As you noted, you consciously do NOT want to procreate in those circumstances. The LAST thing you want is to have a child with some hottie you just picked up. But the reason that you have an innate desire to insert your penis into her vagina is to, wait for it: procreate. Your rational brain says “I don’t want to get this chick pregnant.” Your animal brain wants to do the only thing that can get her pregnant. If your trying to write erotica, don’t quit your day job. ---
**Author:** ![Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e8c25b/32.png) [@Really\_Not\_All\_That\_Bright](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Really_Not_All_That_Bright)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2015, 2:13pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/78 "2015-02-19T14:13:13Z")
> [@jtgain](#): > > When you were single and spreading your seed, I would assume that you inserted your penis into a woman’s vagina, right? Well, yes. But mostly only because I couldn’t get her to blow me. ---
**Author:** ![Hector\_St\_Clare](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/h/b5ac83/32.png) [@Hector\_St\_Clare](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Hector_St_Clare)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2015, 5:25pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/79 "2015-02-19T17:25:10Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > Well, yes. I would imagine foraging was not a huge contribution to the diets of people who live in places without forageable food. That doesn’t change the reality that in most hunter-gathered societies, “food that happens to be lying around” provides the bulk of calories. The bulk of calories, not necessarily the bulk of protein. Anyway, you didn’t restrict your remark to hunter gatherer societies, and your remark isn’t even true of _all_ hunter gatherer societies. It’s true that in _many_ premodern cultures women are mostly responsible for providing for their own sustenance, and this is especially true in Africa (which is one reason polygyny is more common in Africa than elsewhere), but it’s certainly not true everywhere. ---
**Author:** ![Rune](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/e68b1a/32.png) [@Rune](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rune)\ **Post date:** [February 19, 2015, 9:11pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792/80 "2015-02-19T21:11:34Z")
> [@even\_sven](#): > > How much protection is he providing me if he is off looting and raping all day? > > In every pre-industrial society I’ve seen, women and children live semi-autonomously, with the man splitting supplemental gifts among his wives but keeping much of his earnings for his own pleasure. Women live through gathering, kitchen gardens, small scale home industries and working as a community to address childcare. This isn’t about being groovy or independent- it’s a pretty ugly system. Perhaps there’s a reason they remained in a state of miserable pre-industrialization while the rest of the world moved on. That they have an inferior culture which is not representative for the majority of humanity. [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792.md?page=3) [Next page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/women-the-more-moral-sex/712792.md?page=5)