There's much to be said for this view. Thousands of years of behavior can't be discarded, after all, in a single civilized afternoon. Still, the case is far from closed. There is much yet to be considered.
What about the huntress? We like to talk about how women melt under the stern "male gaze" of swaggering heroes as they swash their bucklers, but what of Diana, goddess of the hunt? We find her today in action-adventure movies, and other male-fantasies. Even macho men wriggle like puppies at her approach.
And throughout human history, hundreds of thousands of men spent their lives turning stone into the quarried blocks of early civilization. What about this? What about the builders (anthropologists call them "fabricators") who created civilization? Or the farmers who fed them?
From hunting and gathering, many turned to pastoral pursuits, wandering with grazing herds as hunters became herdsman, or settled down to tend and harvest the good earth, creating markets where the farmer and the cowhand could be associates, if not friends.
Where builders erected monuments to the increasingly popular marketplaces, what could we do with the hunter? And what could women do without them?
According to Evolutionary Psychologists, women go weak in the knees for the domineering jerk because they are responding at a visceral level to his perceived virility, a characteristic that once upon a time was the mark of a good provider and protector.
This may be true, but is extreme virility a desirable characteristic today? Is it good when women who date and mate with domineering jerks become "battered women," as they so often do?
Always inclined to excuse women and accuse men, pop-feminists are likely to say that women have the right to be attracted to whomever they wish, and it's up to men to change. Certainly, everyone has the right to be attracted to anyone else, but we should not ignore how we can use this "it's in my genes" excuse for all kinds of behavior; e.g.,"the date-rapist is only a throwback to another time...he can't help it."
Just because a behavior had survival utility at one time does not mean it is appropriate or even moral today. Women who swoon over domineering jerks because thousands of years ago that was the best way for females to assure survival of their offspring are no different from men who sleep with bar sluts because thousands of years ago screwing every woman in sight was the best way for males to assure themselves of offspring.
Understanding a behavior is not the same as excusing it. Civilization is not about accommodating all our most primitive drives, but optimizing our survival and human potential. As behaving like a domineering jerk or bar slut does neither, shouldn't society frown on such behaviors (as once it did) and encourage more responsible behaviors?
A man can be strong without being domineering, and a woman can be sexual without being a slut, so perhaps it's time for us to join the feminists who, in Lilith's Manifesto (WOMEN: A Journal of Liberation, Fall 1970) said: "If you, brother, can't get a hard-on for a woman who doesn't grovel at your feet, that's your hangup; and sister, if you can't turn on to a man who won't club you and drag you off by the hair, that's yours. Keep your hangups the hell out of this revolution."
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