Making Males Aggressive and Females Coy: Gender across the Animal-Human Boundary

Abstract

Sexual selection, as conceived by Charles Darwin, explained the origins of phenomena in the animal kingdom that could not be attributed to natural selection—why males and females differed in their appearance and behavior and the presence of beauty. Yet, in the early decades of the twentieth century, few biologists found Darwin’s proposed mechanism of female mate choice plausible, as they rejected the idea that animals possessed the capacity to aesthetically evaluate and choose a mate. Animals in the early twentieth century instead functioned as mechanical foils against which zoologists sought to define what it was to be human. After World War II, however, animals as social beings became sources for understanding our human instincts. Men were quickly bestialized because of their association with aggressive, warlike behavior, whereas women were exempted from such degenerate stereotypes. Yet, less than a decade later, biological anthropologists and zoologists began to frame female animals as equally manipulative, albeit by acting sexually coy and exercising their natural prerogative—female mate choice. Aggressive males and coy females were active constructions of the post-WWII period, not passive importations from Darwin’s theory of sexual selection over a century earlier. This article interweaves two polarities, animal and human, male and female, to elucidate the evolution of biological constructions of animality and gender throughout the twentieth century.

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