In my last column I discussed a few current examples of discrimination against women and how this is called “misogyny”.  Misogyny is a topic that never seems to go away, and currently one of the leading voices against the hatred of women is rabbi Shmuley Boteach.

Boteach asserts that a primary reason men today hate women is because they are competing with men in the political and business worlds.  Boteach says “The idea of a softer, gentler creature being possessed of an inner strength that was greater than that of a man made men feel emasculated.”  This, he says, is the reason women have been and continue to be repressed.

If there is any truth to Boteach’s belief that the repression of women stems from male feelings of “emasculation” (a very painful topic to males for obvious reasons), then I have to wonder if the causes aren’t so much women succeeding in fields that were once dominated by men as in the biological ways men and women interact.

Now women have long protested pioneering psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud’s famous remark that for women “biology is destiny.”  And in many ways women have proven Freud wrong.  But Freud did do much to demonstrate that we are all governed by forces we aren’t consciously aware of and current research is showing that men and women interact on a very deep unconscious level in ways we‘ve previously never suspected. 

It turns out that that “alpha males,” those driven, hard-nosed negotiators and managers who have traditionally dominated both business and politics, have a particular vulnerability to women.  Men with the highest testosterone levels drive the hardest bargains and thus tend to rise highest in the corporate and political worlds.  And while it would seem that men like this would not feel threatened by anyone — male or female — recent studies have shown that these same males will literally fall apart if shown a photo of a provocative woman or given lingerie to handle. 

Why this is isn’t clear, but the more aggressive and tough-minded a male is, the more susceptible he is to losing his “manliness” in the presence of women and things feminine (like having to hold his wife‘s purse).  Perhaps this gives women a mating advantage with such men; gives them more control in intimate relationships.

Another recent study shows that women display distinctly different behavior towards men with high and men with low testosterone levels (often evident from facial features — the more rugged the features, the more testosterone).    

Women prefer long-term relationships with men possessing softer facial features and thus lower testosterone levels because these males are less violent and aggressive and more committed to their relationship and child-rearing responsibilities.  But women will actively seek to have affairs with rugged, high-testosterone males.  Researchers have come to believe this is because men with higher testosterone levels also have stronger immune systems — the ability to fight off disease — a valuable genetic trait if offspring of either gender are to survive.

It appears that immunity is a very important factor in women’s mating choices.  Another recent study has demonstrated that women are attracted, apparently through scent, to males with dissimilar immune systems.  Not only is a strong paternal immune system an aid to producing healthier offspring, the genetic difference between the father and mother‘s immune systems is also.  There is a surprisingly strong correlation between immune system similarity and infidelity — the more similar a couple’s immune systems, the more likely the wife is to stray.

Since the survival of her offspring is a primary concern of a woman, the immune characteristics of her partner are especially important. Thus genetic dissimilarity and testosterone level are two of the most important factors determining who a woman will choose as a mate.  By nature, high-testosterone males — males with the strongest immune systems — are apt to lose much of their aggression and hard-bargaining abilities in the presence of an attractive woman (Boteach would say they are emasculated by attractive women).  This makes them all the more likely to succumb to “feminine wiles” and pass on their immune system’s strength.

Given powerful men’s fundamental vulnerability to women, perhaps it makes sense that they fear women.  And men and women alike tend to hate what they fear.  Perhaps in looking for the roots of misogyny we should focus more on the unconscious biological ways men and women interact.  It is, after all, only when we come to understand the unconscious forces influencing our behavior that we can overcome them.