Of kayaks and gender

A few months ago, in Kauai (one of the Hawaiian islands), while my wife and I were paddling up a river within a group of two-seater kayaks, we struck up a conversation with the guide, a sturdy Samoan, full of grace and energy. The conversation drifted towards the subject of couples – he was engaged and about to marry – and towards the way they behave when they share a double kayak. In an enthusiastic burst of everyday philosophy, and taking for granted that the experience of kayaking mirrors the way couples conduct themselves in life, he wondered how couples manage to stay together. Some, to be sure, enjoyed the beauty offered by a kayak trip along rivers tangled in tropical forests, but many quarrelled throughout the journey and carried the argument on into the walks through lush woods that ended at the foot of marvellous waterfalls. He laughed as he recalled a man who had simply thrown himself out of the kayak, swearing that he would not share the craft a moment longer with “that woman”, and who then set off swimming back to the starting point of the excursion, some three kilometres downstream… while the woman carried on with the kayak, ignoring her husband’s performance. Another man, after arguing with his wife on the way up the river, took the guide aside as the walk in the forest was beginning and asked him to quicken the pace so as to leave his wife behind and, if possible, lose her. Another couple ended up fighting with their paddles while they were still in the kayak. One woman refused to get back into the same kayak as her husband, complaining that he was not paddling vigorously enough and was leaving her with the task of moving the craft forward. Another, furious, accused her husband of deliberately failing to follow the precise instructions she was giving him about the rhythm and depth of his strokes.

What a challenge it is to share a kayak! Whoever occupies the rear seat, generally the man (kayaks are built in such a way that the rear seat offers more legroom), controls the rudder pedals: his function therefore consists in steering the craft. This position gives him the possibility of adjusting his paddling rhythm to that of the person in front, but it also reduces his visibility, since the person sitting in front occupies the centre of his visual field. Whoever sits at the front, generally the woman, has a better view of where the kayak is heading and spots unexpected floating obstacles; she is less able to perceive her companion’s movements, generally has less muscle mass with which to react in an emergency, and has, of course, no access to the rudder control.

Let us add that, because of the arrangement of the seats, whoever sits behind is more likely to strike the one in front with his paddle (accidentally or otherwise) than the reverse, and that both have equal opportunity to splash the other (accidentally or otherwise) with some clumsy movement.

In short, double kayaks seem to have been designed as an experiment by a brilliant and somewhat perverse social scientist, with the aim of studying the “prisoner’s dilemma” in action.

Setting aside the temptation to build double kayaks of an innovative, flexible design apt to reduce conflagrations between the genders, the ideal distribution of tasks, given the present configuration, would seem to be the following:

But in everyday life (even in Kauai!), facts and circumstances are multidetermined and are only partly affected by a bucolic setting. And what if one were one of those people who give instructions from the passenger seat? Or, as the jargon of addiction has it, what if one were co-dependent? Or, to be more precise, suppose that the insect repellent or the sunscreen had been forgotten. To begin with, which of the two was supposed to remember to bring it (in each one’s opinion, which may not coincide with the other’s)? Suppose that, for one of them, it is too cold or too hot, or that the seat is too hard. To begin with, which of the two came up with the idea of this wretched kayak trip (in each one’s opinion, of course)?

Or perhaps, the evening before the excursion, one of the two wanted to make love, but the other pushed him away, or simply did not perceive certain subtle signals, or did not feel like it, or was so tired as not to notice, or fell asleep before the other could clearly deploy his signals of interest. The next day, the one who was spurned may be carrying a residual frustration, or resentment, or shame; and when that surfaces in his behaviour, the other sees in it a thoughtless display of bad temper, with no reason for it, and in turn begins to feel irritated. And what if the husband is a Latin macho who refuses to accept suggestions or to share responsibilities, because he experiences every contribution from his partner as a challenge to his virility? And what if she is an accomplished feminist and experiences every move of her partner’s as an attempt to subjugate her? And what if both things happened at once?

Yes indeed: women and men, we share the kayak of life, and the splashes are becoming more and more explicit, which brings with it an ever greater risk of the craft capsizing. Are the people in the front seats rebelling after having borne an excessive load that spoils the potential pleasures of the trip? Are those in the rear seat becoming weaker, or more docile, or more sensitive and understanding? Or have they been defeated by the sheer strength and solidarity of those in the front seats?

Has the design of the kayak changed insidiously over the last hundred, four hundred, or perhaps ten thousand years? What follows is an attempt to answer these questions.

Life in the cave (or: where have the sabre-toothed tigers gone, just when we need them?)

Over the century that has just ended, the notion of “masculine” has been under constant revision. Until the present era, masculinity was unambiguously defined by the practices that characterised it: conquest (the expansion of frontiers), the control and defence of borders (and hence wars), hunting, the exploration of new territories (whether physical or intellectual adventures) and politics. In the course of this century, and above all during the last thirty years, the possibility of carrying out each of these activities has been drastically reduced, as has the prestige attached to them and their character as an exclusively male domain.

This process has also been framed as a war between the genders, and it has consolidated an extremely critical view of the way men are, not only on the part of the vanguard of the feminist movement, but also on the part of sensitive men who have lent their support to such changes (4). What is more, the direction of the change that men might lead, together with the changes proposed by feminism, is far from clear; nor is it encouraged by our culture.

At this point, a few brief historical reminders are in order.

As most readers will probably know, the Second World War, a conflagration in which tens of millions of young men took part (and in which a few million of them died), accelerated many other social processes in the United States. During the war, a substantial number of women and members of minority groups – until then relegated to domestic tasks or to other low-prestige, low-paid jobs, such as farm labourer or household staff – were called upon to meet the obligation imposed by wartime, namely to replace in the factories and offices the men sent to fight at the front. When the war ended and the men came back from the front, women and minority groups were invited with some eloquence to return to the subordinate positions they had occupied before.

And, lo and behold, they did not accept the invitation. And when the invitation became more coercive, they organised. Thus was born the civil rights movement. And thus, drawing on organisations of women whose highest representatives had until then been the suffragettes, the feminist movement arose. Oppressed minorities had acquired a voice.

The feminist revolution is of course a phenomenon of cultural origin: it arose when it did – some thirty years ago – and not before, because circumstances were favourable to it. This cultural revolution centred on gender problems has been carried by the voice – and the energy – of women. Men, by contrast, have remained rather confused, unable to translate into words and deeds the predicament they were going through. As the popular North American philosopher Garrison Keillor put it, “masculinity, which was once an asset for success, now seems rather a problem to be overcome” (Keillor, 1992). Men have lately made many attempts at introspection on these subjects; but let us admit it, introspection is not one of man’s strong points. The “men’s movement” never materialised, so that the question of “gender” continues to be carried by women.

Without falling into excessive simplification, how are we to describe, from the man’s point of view, this current misalignment, this malaise that is played out not only between the genders but also within each of them? My reflections lead me to the evolution of the human species. The differentiation between modern apes and human beings is estimated to have taken place three and a half million years ago, if we take Australopithecus afarensis as our reference (Johanson & Edey, 1981). Homo sapiens, for his part, that cosmopolitan species of hunter-gatherers, came onto the scene some 200,000 years ago, which represents only 6% of the evolutionary time of the human species. And, ever since we began to differentiate ourselves from the other evolutionary branches, our species has lived in groups, whether in caves or in small enclaves. In order to survive it was necessary – as it still is today in the few tribes that preserve pre-agricultural traditions – that the hunter-gatherer group distribute roles among its members so as to guarantee both preservation and innovation. These traits constitute deep aspects of all of us, and they still play a part today.

An exercise, dear reader

But before going further into this history of evolution, I would like you, the reader, to take part in an exercise, an experiment that requires your collaboration. It will call for a certain amount of visualisation, or a certain access to the bank of memories; if you remember past experiences better with your eyes closed, close them for a moment, please. And relax: this will be a pleasant experience.

Go back, dear reader, to the time when you were twelve years old. You are at home. It is a weekend. Someone knocks at the door or rings the bell. Who is it? It is your best friend, your accomplice, coming to see you. And now, where do the two of you go? Indoors or outdoors? And what do you do? Imagine it, visualise the scene, see yourself with him or with her, going wherever you go, doing whatever you do; picture the bodily postures you adopt, the activity you engage in. Try to visualise that scene as fully as you can.

The great majority of women describe the scene by saying that they invite their friend in, that they go to the bedroom or the sitting room, that they sit on the bed or in an armchair, face to face, with a great deal of eye contact, and that the main activity is conversation. The great majority of men evoke a shared activity, generally outside the house: they go out to play a sport (basketball, football, cycling), or to fish, or, in some cases, simply to walk, alternating silences and personal conversations; they rarely place themselves face to face and rarely establish eye contact: they maintain instead a parallel bodily conduct.

Where does this remarkable characteristic come from, one that differentiates the genders and that, minor differences aside, seems to be found in every culture? Is it merely a manifestation of the customs of this century, or of the last five hundred years? Might it not be that the supposition that this is a manifestation of custom has its source in the arrogant, recent presupposition that we are born without antecedents, stripped of our evolutionary roots, tabula rasa, destined to receive nothing but the imprint of our culture?

Back to the cave

Let us go back to the cave, or the village, or whatever place hunter-gatherers from time to time considered their home, a familiar place that offered them a respite from their nomadic life, or else to the spot where they camped for the night in the course of their wandering existence.

In order to survive in that hostile world infested with sabre-toothed tigers and other predators (not to mention inhospitable hominid neighbours), an adequate sexual dimorphism, that is, gender differences already present in the genetic endowment, was intensified by social norms (5). Certain members of the tribe – those who most looked the part and who had the greatest potential for aggressive behaviour – placed themselves at the periphery and watched the outside attentively, the place from which both risks and food for all came. They were regarded as the protectors of the community and as the hunters; it was they who took on the task of fighting collective dangers and of providing the clan with the most nourishing supply of protein.

For a man to look at another, or even to take an interest in another’s reflections, involved a risk, for it distracted him from the more useful task of watching out for enemies and potential food. And when these individuals ventured into that dangerous, unknown territory far from the enclave – to hunt, or to explore a territory in search of a more favourable environment – it was likewise in the common interest to stay alert and to prevent the sounds that might signal danger from being drowned out by excessive conversation (in those circumstances), just as it was to avoid losing visual cues of danger by looking at one another (6). They had no other option but to keep watch in relative silence, maintaining only sporadic eye contact among themselves. These explorers were nonetheless bound by a very strong tie: they relied on one another to survive risky situations collectively, and they also maintained a very close tie with the community. They brought back essential food and distributed it; they risked their lives to defend and protect the tribe and, on occasion, they cared for the children during the seasons of migration (as many male primates and human hunter-gatherer groups still do today). Other members of that tribe, for their part, had to take on other tasks, namely to preserve the group both generationally (by taking charge of food and of other goods, such as weaving or the tanning of hides) and transgenerationally (by having children, raising them and caring for them). To that end it was essential that they collaborate face to face, for reciprocal attention and close contact made it possible to develop these activities to the full. To cite one rather essential activity as an example: the more the task of raising young children in unfavourable circumstances became a communal one, the greater the chances that the children would survive (this has been demonstrated by studies of the collective habits of many anthropoids) (7). The germ of the social norms of these groups evolved in harmony with the specific tendencies of each gender and with the cultural distribution of roles, ensuring an interdependence between preservation and innovation that optimised tribal circumstances and needs (8).

Genetic determinants, social norms and the cyclical processes of nature have co-evolved synergistically over the centuries (Capra, 1996). The specific traits under analysis here have been both genetically expressed and culturally imposed, besides being reinforced by contexts (9). This assertion must be understood within the already mentioned framework of “deep ecology” (10), an evolutionary perspective that proposes a systemic approach to human beings in their social and natural context. This approach goes beyond a dichotomy between biological and cultural variables, which might give rise to a nature/nurture discussion. From this point of view, it is coherent to suppose that certain fundamental gender differences have an evolutionary substrate specific to each gender; culture, for its part, will take charge of selecting, in the Darwinian sense, the rules that suit the manifestation of these characteristics. But of course cultures, which begin as an ad hoc habit, themselves end up becoming extremely complex systems with a dynamic of their own.

What would happen if, because of the natural ups and downs in the evolution of the complex subsystem formed by culture, society and the economy, some of these practices lost their fit with the manifestation of one or another evolutionary characteristic of the members of the species? Is that not precisely the case of the human species in context, as it manifests itself at the end of this century, in the readjustments concerning what it means to be a woman and to be a man?

What remains of male territories?

Let us examine the value that the (hypothetical) evolutionary trait present in men may have in 1999, a trait that favours behaviours of attack and defence, exploration, hunting and loyalty to the group, while relegating to second place the everyday acts of social exchange, of the creation of social bonds and of undifferentiated collaboration. Let us begin with the attack/defence characteristic and its most common expression: war, an activity that has been, over the centuries, typically male. Despite the terrible human cost of every war, this activity lost part of its popularity only very recently, when: (a) the power of the atomic bomb was unleashed, making us aware both of its accessibility and of the inadmissible character of the consequences of its use; (b) the intense presence of television during the Vietnam war made it plain that war is an immeasurable everyday horror that cannot be hidden behind any patriotic rhetoric. Thus it is that, even though local wars continue to be fought, war has lost its popular support. (This is of course a Western comment, and perhaps a North American point of view: sectarian wars and fundamentalist wars are increasingly popular in the Balkan countries and in the Third World.)

Moreover, today, in order to hunt – at least in the United States and in Western Europe – one has to decide to ignore the supermarket (where everything is to be found) and pay an entrance fee to some nature reserve where one may take photographs of wild animals; or else become a member of a far-right group and get hold of a machine gun to go hunting with. Hunting as a means of obtaining food has become obsolete, or has died out, in much of the world.

Let us turn to exploration. The whole world has been explored for cartographic purposes and travelled over to exhaustion. The few remote places (remote for us) that may not yet be fully explored remain so thanks to the tourism ministries of those countries. Anyone with the economic means can today explore Antarctica: tea service included! Simply by paying a travel agency, I can obtain the illusion of conducting an exploration. What remains unexplored is outer space, access to which requires an extremely complex technology and a journey reserved for a handful of astronauts. Thus we can today strike off the list both war and exploration, two male domains that were for so long essential to the survival of the species.

Let us now examine politics. In this new era, governed by a revolutionary technology and by the collapse of ideologies, politics has passed from the sublime – with mythical figures such as Gandhi, Kennedy or Che Guevara, to cover different areas of the spectrum – to the pathetic, from Nixon to Pinochet or Gaddafi, and lower still; not to mention that governments are ever more clearly transferring their sphere of control to the power of the multinationals. The swing of political rhetoric to the right leads to social inequities being described as a deserved punishment, as the consequence of the lack of personal merit of the destitute, rather than as a matter of social responsibility – which is spirited away under the rhetoric of individual responsibility. If one of my sons said to me, “Dad, I want to go into politics”, I would answer, “Come on, be serious, choose something respectable!” We can therefore strike politics off the list as well, even if many men and women choose it, perhaps mistakenly, out of naive romanticism, or because the transformations of the organisation of the world fascinate them. Here again, of course, this is an opinion biased by my culture. In many parts of the world politics, even if it carries certain risks, offers quick and dirty access to wealth and power. And perhaps, in some corners of the world, politics is practised with noble intentions (11).

It would seem that, in our species, of all the activities that were the domain of man, there remains only the merciless and bloodthirsty world of business – with a particular emphasis on the corporate world – and the world of sporting pseudo-wars (although the commercialisation of sport has blurred the boundaries between sporting activity and business). Indeed, the corporate pyramid of power is as closed as that of the armed forces: there are very few generals and a great many recruits at the bottom of the ladder (12). Furthermore, since the dawn of the industrial revolution, the corporate world has taken shape as anomic, increasingly alien to any sense of collective responsibility. And so, unless you plunge into it blindly, as many men do, you will not be long in losing all respect for that new frontier that is the corporate world or the world of professional sport. Some men, in despair, take refuge in the imaginary world of action films, or even of comic strips, where a testosterone-laden mythology prevails. Others simply kill people.

A ten-thousand-year drift

Everything seems to indicate that the change in our cultural practices, which drew them away from their reciprocal fit with the phylogenetic inclinations of the species, accelerated very substantially some ten to fourteen thousand years ago, when hunting and gathering, which had been the main activity and the cultural axis for millions of years, ceased to be sufficient to sustain a constantly growing population (Shepard, 1973) (13). It may be that this also coincided with – and was favoured or intensified by – an evolution of the mind of the species towards more complex and more fluid cognitive processes (Mithen, 1996). At the dawn of the agricultural revolution, plants and animals began to be domesticated, which in turn made necessary a modification of habits, habitats, priorities and, generally speaking, of culture (14). This brought about an important change in the appropriate skills and attributes of both men and women, among them the fact that men had less need to engage in practices oriented towards the periphery of the clan. For the great majority of men, turning to agriculture meant a radical change of priorities, particularly once agriculture ceased to be a voluntary subsistence agriculture and became coercive, with the advent of centralised political power (Prior, 1971). Country life turned into a heavy, daily and tedious routine; it meant the loss of a tribe to care for, and a marginal subsistence in which there was more chance of being exploited than of having self-determination (or of exploiting others, for that matter). Women too underwent equally radical changes in their habits, since they progressively lost the vital daily experience provided by the female collective; they were condemned to producing children as cheap labour (in imitation of farm animals), and it was not unusual for them to have to work the land alongside their partner, when they did not do so alone (while the man looked for a male task to devote himself to, or was compelled to go to war, or ended up enslaved by other men who appropriated the land).

This loss of reciprocal fit may have accelerated some three thousand years ago, at the height of the Greek and Roman civilisations, when, according to Foucault (1984), the practices of the self gained importance in our societies – that is, the self-referential recognition of the individual, which replaced the postulate of belonging to a community, creating the present-day illusion of an ego at the centre of the universe.

And the process accelerated dramatically some four hundred years ago, as a consequence of the progressive loss of the security provided by the reciprocal obligations of the clan, a loss that came about in the wake of the industrial revolution.

Whether this process is fourteen thousand, three thousand, four hundred or thirty years old – with, in all likelihood, an irregular progression from then until our own day – it may be that certain components of our genetic-social programme tempt us men to try out certain activities that our era has ruled out or left behind. (And it is not that I am saying: “Ah… what a fine time it was, the time of noble wars, of noble exploitation, of noble hunting that led to the extinction of species, of noble exploration and conquest, of noble politics!” I much prefer demystification!)

All these contextual transformations and this progressive loss of reciprocal fit take place in a society that educates us by means of broad-brush stereotypes. Men find themselves in an extremely violent social situation, since the suppression of the multiple expressions of their roles goes hand in hand with powerful social mandates that identify these expressions with the masculine, a situation complicated by the social prohibition of emotional exchange and by the loss of the experience of reciprocal support. This ecological description neither exonerates men from nor absolves them of responsibility for the acts of violence to which this contradiction may give rise, but it opens a window from which to appreciate the deep pain that this obscure conflict can engender.

It is hardly surprising that Western men should feel confused and disoriented. There is not even any need to teach men to be strong: there is no longer any reason for them to be! As in Pirandello’s 1921 play, Six Characters in Search of an Author (Pirandello, 1998), men are looking for a way to recognise themselves as men, while their attempts to attune themselves to the environment fail. It is understandable that they should try to shed their emotional illiteracy and learn from women how to behave in the interpersonal world: their own style of behaviour no longer serves. Of course, behaving like a woman, even if it is a good learning experience, does not necessarily manage to favour reciprocal fit, since certain essential behaviours of women likewise result from an evolutionary mandate and many of them may also be in crisis. And the hybrid solution that proclaims, “Let us go into the woods among men, to beat drums and read poetry”, has few adherents. One might also propose, within this framework, that the recent resurgence of fundamentalism and of balkanisation is nothing other than a desperate attempt to recreate the earlier conditions of reciprocal fit, that is, a reaction against the loss of the harmony that once existed between gender-differentiated tendencies, social norms and nature.

Too many peas in the pod: overpopulation as an additional variable

Hunter-gatherers had very few offspring; their numbers balanced ecologically with the characteristics of the environment. Farmers, by contrast, had an interest in having cheap labour available: children were therefore a primary product to be maximised. Our species has gone from a total world population of ten million individuals in the year 10,000 BC to a little over six billion today, with an annual increase of more than 1.4%. In the course of this century, our species may have crossed the threshold of tolerance of demographic density without noticing it, its growth not having been mitigated, for want of massive wars, plagues or recent meteorites (except in the fiction of that optimistic recent film entitled Deep Impact).

Now, every species has a concrete organic response by which to mitigate the harmful effects of overpopulation (Futuyma, 1997), even if the ways in which these responses manifest themselves vary considerably. The most frequent reactive characteristic is the tendency to disperse, which recurs in every species. Some resort to mutation and equip themselves, for instance, with wings. Others systematically practise cannibalism on newborns or commit infanticide. Others still unleash acts of unprecedented violence, consisting in collective killings, including battles that leave half the population dead. Or they throw themselves collectively off a cliff. Or else their immune defences are weakened by stress, and a large part of the species dies of one disease or another.

It is possible that all of us, men and women alike, are reacting to the overpopulation of our planet according to some atavistic mandate. As a species, we have tried many of the solutions already mentioned – we have not yet grown wings – but, as I said above, many of them are losing prestige in our Western sociocultural environment. It may be, however, that new creative attempts are in gestation, as alternatives, for confronting overpopulation. One of them – attested by a great deal of evidence – is the progressive reduction in men’s total sperm count, across different cultures and different nations, a most reasonable mechanism for reducing the rate of demographic growth. Even if this is probably not due exclusively to overpopulation, but also to the displacement of the reciprocal ecological fit, the crisis of masculinity and the progressive reduction of the sexual drive might contribute to reducing the alarming birth rate. Another reasonable method for diminishing demographic growth would be for a growing combative aversion to arise between the genders, which would lead to a reduction in the number of babies conceived by conventional methods.

In sum, it may be that the present reduction in the quality of inter-gender life in our species has been facilitated by an overlap between the evolutionary failure of reciprocal fit already discussed and a neutralising mechanism triggered in our species by overpopulation.

Possible clinical advantages of the evolutionary story (or: what is a postmodern therapist like me doing in a story like this?)

Now that the problem has been complicated by the possible addition of this variable, let us return to the scheme that concerns us. I have presented the outline of a hypothesis about what might be the core of the crisis of masculinity, namely the decrease in the ecological fit between genetic tendencies, social rules and the environment, a decrease that affects at least men or, perhaps, our whole species. This ecological and evolutionary point of view, while respecting and supporting the feminist struggle, also implies that the crisis of masculinity is neither the product nor the cause of the feminist movement.

The other proposals one hears today on this theme are: (a) the traditional, conservative or fundamentalist proposal, which maintains and reiterates the oppression, the marginality and the reification of women; and (b) the postulates of feminism (assuredly preferable to the former), which either hold men guilty of the oppression of women, or hold society guilty of granting men special faculties when both sexes are intrinsically equal, obvious physical differences aside (see for instance Burke, 1996).

There is indeed abundant evidence that our present-day society is filled with practices that are oppressive towards women, including men’s violence against women, as well as many other social behaviours endorsed by men to the detriment of female self-determination. Feminism is an extraordinary political movement that works to widen women’s access to every sphere of life, and my speculations do not contribute to slowing that change; nor do they provide any argument likely to interfere with its pace. I believe, however, that, in reaction to the awareness of women’s subordinate condition, the feminist movement frequently falls into the category error of confusing culturally sustained characteristics with individual responsibility. This error may have been the starting point of the relentless attack on men that has characterised a certain feminist literature and certain everyday feminist practices, which take for granted that men’s oppressive behaviours are, in every case, deliberate acts performed in order to preserve inequalities, rather than cultural vestiges of everyday practices. From this point of view, the dominant feminist bell is like a powerful piece of software containing a virus: women acquire power at the cost of incorporating a story of victimisation, claim and restitution that imposes a polarisation within couples and families. In other words, the postulate that men are emotionally handicapped, prone to violence, domineering and coercive beings whom women united in the feminist movement are about to dislodge from their position of power, constitutes a story that, useful though it proves in a great many cases, is not good enough either for men or for women as a community. To begin with, it does not help them to row.

To be sure, the outline of an evolutionary hypothesis that I propose here as an alternative cannot be proved true or false. But then, of course, none of the other hypotheses can be either. If, for the time being, none of them turns out to be demonstrable, how are we to choose one of them? Which one has the greatest transformative potential for organising our conversation, therapeutic or otherwise?

One interesting possibility stems from certain criteria proposed for constructing a “better-formed story” (Sluzki, 1992; Sluzki and Cobb, 1999). In any therapeutic conversation (for instance in a consultation with an individual, a couple, a group, a family, an organisation, caught in a dilemma that immobilises them), we shall tend to introduce, into the problem-saturated story in which they are stuck, changes that help it to turn into another story, one endowed with the following attributes:

• it is plausible, that is, it rests on prior information and on recognisable experiences, which contradict neither consensual norms nor cultural myths;
• it is elegant, that is, it has internal coherence, harmony and fluidity;
• it is evolutionary, that is, it has continuity over time and specifies the potentials for change, learning and growth;
• it is equitable, that is, it places all the characters in a preferential position, without determining in advance victims and executioners, the sane and the mad, the noble and the villainous, liars and the gullible;
• it is ethical, that is, it favours respect and concern for all the participants, avoids oppression and pain, and encourages growth and joy, reciprocal support and a sense of collective responsibility.

The evolutionary story proposed here presents, I believe, some of these potential advantages over the other descriptions:

• it is plausible, that is, viable in the light of ethological, palaeoanthropological and anthropological data, and it fits with everyday experience;
• it has internal coherence and harmony, and contains no more windmills than the other stories that prevail today;
• it is evolutionary, not only in its logic, but also in that it introduces ideas carrying potentials for growth and for relational change, which prompts us in another way to relate to one another and to the environment;
• it is equitable, since it defines the conflicts of both genders – I have emphasised the malaise of men inasmuch as this paper was originally presented at a conference on that theme, but it applies to women as well – and it accords fully with feminist aims in their struggle for women’s full access to all their potentials and all their options;
• it is ethical since, by bringing to light different dilemmatic situations, it favours respect and concern for oneself as well as for others, and collective responsibility.

And, in the last instance, by the mere fact of keeping it available as a possible alternative, it widens the range of viable stories within our reach as therapists and, in so doing, enriches our options for facilitating change. In this respect, it is worth recalling the categorical imperative that von Foerster (1984) proposed as a guide for our therapeutic work, namely to increase the variety and the quality of our options, and of those of our patients. The evolutionary hypothesis I am proposing here may be useful to them, and to all of us, in the complex and unavoidable cooperative process of rebuilding the two-seater kayak while rowing in the middle of the river; and perhaps it may even allow us to enjoy the trip.