Steven Pinker -- How the Mind Works - Hampshire High Italian ...

Family Values 447(Effective birth control is recent and still far from universal.) Thereforefathers take an interest in their daughters' sexuality, a mimic of the Electracomplex but without either party desiring the other. In many societiesmen take horrifying measures to guarantee a daughter's "purity."They may lock her up, cloak her from head to toe, and extirpate herinterest in sex by the horrible custom known by the euphemism "femalecircumcision" (it is a circumcision in the same sense that Lorena Bobbittperformed a bris). When the measures fail, they may execute anunchaste daughter to preserve what they call, ironically, the family's"honor." (In 1977 a Saudi princess was publicly stoned to death forbringing dishonor to her grandfather, the brother of the king, by havingan indiscreet affair in London.) Parent-daughter conflict is a specialcase of conflict over the "ownership" of women's sexuality, a topic towhich we will return.The other popular theory subverted by parent-offspring conflict isthe biology-culture distinction, in which babies are a bundle of uncivilizedinstincts and parents socialize them into competent, well-adjustedmembers of society. Personality, in this conventional wisdom, is shapedin the formative years by the parenting process. Parents and childrenboth want the children to prosper in the social milieu, and since childrenare in no position to shape themselves, socialization represents a confluenceof their interests.Trivers reasoned that, according to the theory of parent-offspring conflict,parents should not necessarily have their children's interests atheart when they try to socialize them. Just as parents often act against achild's interests, they may try to train the child to act against its owninterests. Parents want each child to act more altruistically to its siblingsthan the child wants to. That is because it pays the parents for a child tobe altruistic when the benefit to a sibling exceeds the cost to the child,but it pays the child to be altruistic only when the benefit exceeds twicethe cost. For more distant kin such as half-siblings and cousins, the differencebetween the parents' interests and the child's interests is evengreater, because the parent is more closely related to the half-sibling orcousin than the child is. Similarly, parents may try to persuade childrenthat staying home to help at the nest, allowing themselves to be sold in