Interview avec Nancy Giampaolo pour Noticias (Argentine)

1.- First to all I'd like to ask you a brief summary of your books, what were your motivations for writing them and if you would like to eventually publish them in the Spanish speaking market.

Generally speaking, my books are about a biological (thus evolutionary) frame on sexual & gender issues. More precisely, they can show how feminism can't function without this frame. I don't say « biology explains everything» but « without biology, you can't explain anything and do nothing if you're not an authoritarian » (I'm not and I'm rather worried about the authoritarian tendencies I see in the Left in general and in feminism in particular). For my first solo book « Ex Utero » (2009), which was more of a « manifesto » in its form, I coined the term « evofeminism » aka. a feminism which is evolutionary informed and adaptive (if new facts are discovered, then it's the ideology that has to change and not the other way round). Since, in my work, I try & tend to minimize the ideological aspect and maximize the scientific one. But my main motivation has always been the same : find truth, not tribes. My main pleasure in life is to learn things, so I'm very happy to teach things to people and when readers tell me « Now, I see things differently », this is the best that can happen to me. As of today, I wrote books about evidence-based phytotherapy, evolutionary sex research, asexuality, gendered medicine, evolutionary explanations of patriarchy and affective dependence. My forthcoming book will be about behavioral biology in general, not just about sex & gender. And I would be thrilled to see some of my books translated in Spanish, especially « La domination masculine n'existe pas ».

2.- What was your training (formation)? And your professional path?

After three years of « Hypokhâgne - Khâgne », I went studying philosophy, with a major in epistemology and philosophy of science. My specialty was about the parallels between Nietzsche and natural sciences, especially Darwin, and my PhD focused on morality. I never intended to stay in the academia after my PhD – I wanted to switch to biological anthropology and one of the giants of this field, Napoleon Chagnon, who was the victim of a vicious cabal at the time, convinced me I would be more happy and have more of an influence outside than inside academia. I'm afraid he was very right. To finance my studies, I worked as a science journalist and a translator, and that's still my main occupations now. With translations, I also can spread interesting ideas and do my part in the « culture war » of today, which can be summarized as follow : save science from academia and save society from bad science. Recently, I'm very proud to have imported Quillette in France – I translate one article per week in the french news magazine « Le Point », and I hope more « joint efforts » to come...

3.- During the last years, argentine feminism has become mostly punitivist, with some of her referents/militants usually centered in obtain privileges over the rest, like the legal system acceptance of allegations of abuse or harassment as proved facts even without evidence. Could you find any particular reason to this?

This is what happen when you have nothing left to fight because all your battles have been won but you are wanting to pursue the war nonetheless. This is the “syndrome of retired St. George”, as Kenneth Minogue would say. And it's also a sign of radical decay, when the main urge is to demolish because your utopia needs a “creative destruction” – but there's nothing good to hope from the demolition of the rule of law and due process, this only pave the way to barbaric vigilantism. The Enlightenment was born on the corpses of the European wars of religion and now I'm afraid sectarian feminists are about to kill The Enlightenment as they are planting the seeds of some new religious or tribalistic wars.

4.- The document signed by you and other French intellectuals in reaction to the Me too was harshly criticized in our country by the progressive and leftist media and -to a lesser extent- by the conservative one, but, in general, the feeling is that everything that comes from the american star system is consumed here without critical thinking. How has the situation been in France?

It was very hard in the traditional and social media, but very invigorating in private – all the messages from people who had enough of the « kindly inquisitors », as Jonathan Rauch would say, and thank us to have the courage to speak up. But our open letter was hijacked by agit-prop feminists who accused us to work for rapists and pedophiles : how can one have a good faith discussion in this context? We wanted to open a debate, they respond by digging trenches. But I must emphasize that if I (and all the authors and signatories of the open letter) have been mobbed, I had the full support of my editor at Slate and my publisher in Anne Carrière : they never try to censor me and I would always be grateful for that.

5.- Why do you think that some new branchs of the feminist movement show so little interest in science and despise biology? Can we call label this as "superstition"?

Patricia Gowaty talked about “scientific illiteracy”, I call it “cerebral creationism”, Frans de Waal calls it « anthropodenial » : it's OK to think evolution work for animals other than our species, or for our physiology but not our psychology and behavior. That's a tragic error. Like E. O Wilson or Jerry Barkow, I think biology have us in a leash, but when you ignore or don't understand it, the leash became shorter and evolution remains destiny.

6.- In my personal experience as a critical journalist of hegemonic or corporate feminism, I am often the target of aggression, especially by women. How was your experience in this field?

The same. To be honest, I wanted to have a public discourse on feminism because of all the covert (and not so covert...) aggression I get from other women when I was 20 or so. At the time, I had a very free life and sexuality, and my main inquisitors where women who said to me I was some kind of witch waiting to be burned. 


7.- Do you think there are women who are much more male chauvinist than most part of men?

This is not what I think, this is what we observe : on all societal issues like abortion, prostitution, porn, etc., the most conservative fringes of the population are female-dominated. Female intrasexual competition is a much more effective tool than « patriarchy » to explain the attacks again individual freedoms relative to sexuality. I guess it's no a coincidence if feminists are so eager to overshadow it. Feminism is very much a war between some women who want to show their boobs and some other who will do anything to stop them.

8.- In Argentina, feminist groups insist on making visible only the crimes suffered by women by ignoring those committed against men -who are greater in number (as example: men constitute 100% of the victims of police violence, a very present issue in Argentina regarding the relation among the law forces and our recent political past). How it goes in France?

The same... You now, I really think punitive feminism, as you call it, is very much some kind of universal mental virus independent of cultural of national idiosyncrasies. Here, we always hear « every three days, a women is killed by a man » and not « at the same time, three more men are killed by other men ». They refuse to see how feminicide is a particular case of letal violence which is a male dominated phenomenon, as much from the side of the victims than of the perpetrators.

And it's not to say male victims are more serious than female one, but to understand that we won't tackle any of this problem if we frame it as a «sex war» issue.

9.- Speaking from your philosophic background, can you risk any justification for this anti-scientific and victorian drift that feminism has suffered in last years?

Psychology and cognitive sciences are much more useful in this than philosophy. My guess is we are witnessing today the complete failure of sexual liberation as an utopia : you can't liberate sexuality if you don't liberate people from the psychological burden of sex and all the contamination modules it triggers in your brain. And to get there, you need much more than wishful thinking. Sexual liberation was carried by extraordinary people who make the mistake of taking their personal case for a generality and not seeing the variability of the human spectrum relative to sex urges. Sexual freedom is not a democratic reality and as E.O. Wilson said, sex is perhaps the most antisocial force of evolution. 

Original de l'interview parue dans Noticias, le 29 mars 2019