INTRODUCTION: IN THE LOST TIME
Once there was an old, old house, with the blackened ceilings of paleolithic fires and the painted walls of Gravittian hunters. In this house lived a small young woman and a bigger young man. Her first baby came at thirteen, her tenth at twenty-five, and then she died of a hemorrhage. The young man took another mate and hunted for all who survived. When he came home with meat, he was celebrated, respected, as a hero. But his life, too, was short. He died of cold on a hunting trip.
They were fully modern humans, having developed bipedalism a hundred thousand years before. They did speak together, and there is no reason to believe that the biological musth called Love did not come upon them as they shared in each others' tribulations and triumphs.
We are their descendants, and in many ways we still follow the ancient ways. These ways were ancient even when they lived. These ways stretch back to the other primates and further, to the period when reptiles and mammals split and the mammals developed sex chromosomes.
We are ancient, and we live in a long continuum. But our lives are short: a mean life expectancy of twenty-five or younger when that old house was built, and a brief eighty revolutions around the sun today.
The young woman in that smoky house was mated to a boy very early in her life, though we don't know the social institutions that led her to mate, whether she chose to or was forced to. Once she entered a stable sexual relationship, though, her life was narrow and predictable from then on. She would be pregnant or lactating so often that menstruation would be an exception. She would never know menopause. There would always be a baby on her hip or her back. She would gather tubers or the local vegetables, she would stay close to home, and she would be responsible for the children as her mate was responsible for the meat.
3000 generations went by. The old family was lost in time, leaving only a jawbone perhaps, or a high-arched footprint turned to rock from African river mud. In this new time, archaeologists, paleontologists, geneticists and other scientists dug for clues as to their own origins. Ethologists and zoologists and anthropologists joined in the search. Biologists became interested. The speculations of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had to guess at the state of humans before civilization, were no longer accepted at face value. The folkorists and mythologists and ancient historians stepped back. Empirical evidence began to flow from the burial-mounds, the cave bones, the hunting sketches.
Scientists presented their findings, argued and fought, and added to the work until vague shapes began to appear. The shapes were the real outlines of ancient human societies. And the most significant findings, almost all could agree, revolved around sex; the differences between men and women, the development of male dominance in human society, and the silence of women and the conversation of men.
Very recently a new theory of biology has come to dominate the science, developed by a genius named Charles Darwin. This Theory of Evolution was revolutionized and strengthened in the twentieth century by the science of genetics. The human genome, and its effect on evolution, became as important a revolution in human thought as quantum physics was having on Newtonian physics at about the same time.
One theory of evolutionary biology and genetics posited that men and women, as groups, have different evolutionary goals. For men, with less of an investment in parental duties, the goal remains to inseminate as many females as possible, to the benefit of their particular genes. For women, with far fewer eggs than males have sperm, the goal is to be inseminated only by a male who would invest more parental time, who could hunt for meat, and who would protect the baby and her when she was temporarily disabled due to pregnancy and lactation. The woman, then, did not want to be inseminated by random mating, coerced mating, or any other way of mating than a carefully-considered mating chosen by her.
Women had another concern, namely, their own well-being. Left to themselves, without pressure to mate, they might not have produced children at all, because of the dangerousness of childbirth, mating relationships, and being committed to caring for a helpless human being.
These evolutionary goals were in direct conflict. It was to the advantage of men to prevent women from choosing their own mates or choosing not to mate at all. Because of their ancient biological advantages, men prevailed in their evolutionary goals, and male domination began. Its most important characteristic from the beginnings of human culture was to systematically deprive women of control over their bodies, especially control over whether they would have intercourse and with whom.
Soon enough, though, women, who had been silent (or silenced) ever since, began to ask questions. They wanted to know why, after all this time, they still had to contend with the ancient traditions derived from biology in a new world with conditions that would have been unrecognizable to the ancient couple. They asked how the ancient arrangement had turned into a rigid and hypertrophied system that held them to caveman days. Let us explore a way of life based on our current conditions, they said.
These women, who called themselves feminists, and the scientists (some of whom were feminists too), identified at least six biological causes operative at the dawn of human history which still controlled their lives, even in these new conditions, and also two cultural processes which were so old, no one could say when they began, with our animal sisters or with us.
Of course, we can't know the full story. We can't know the details. There are many fascinating evolutionary theories that can't be detailed here, such as the theory that women who were not amenable to sexual access, i.e., refused to marry or refused domination, did not survive the selection process, which would meanthat women of today have been selected for passivity and compliance.
All this is theory, but it is theory overwhelmingly supported by the weight of empirical evidence to date. Because the evidence and theory cannot be detailed in a less-than-book-length essay, extensive footnotes including further reading are provided instead:
BIOLOGICAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Testosterone/androgens, leading to relatively greater aggression and use of violence in men.
Men have on the average about fourteen times more testosterone in their blood than women. It is an androgen, a crucial hormone for fetal masculinization, and the hormone of aggression. Biological studies point out that testosterone does not act alone and is profoundly influenced by environmental conditions.
In paleolithic times, aggression was certainly important to hunters and in territorial battles. It was valued, and in the warrior societies to come much later, venerated. It had another impact on society. The relative lack of aggression of women disadvantaged them in fighting. The potential for violence (acting as a coercion) and violence itself were advantageous to men in their evolutionary goal of maximum sexual access to women.
2. Sexual Dimorphism
Human males are about 15% larger than females, putting them on a spectrum of primate sexual dimorphism which correlates with moderate polygyny (as opposed to monogamy). They are more muscular, with larger and stronger bones. They are taller, with a greater reach. Females are at a relative disadvantage in attempting to fight off rape or violent coercion.
3. Reproduction Consequences
Girls were disabled and hampered by childbirth, lactation, and the helpless infant for the first five years of its life. Childbirth may lead to infection, chronic pain, tearing of tissues, and death. Chronic sequelae of constant childbirth disadvantaged women physically.
For those who survived childbirth, there was lactation, which seems to last about one to three years. During this period the mother and baby must be in constant close contact. The mother is the adult available when her infant is attacked by animals, illness, or other humans, and therefore is more vulnerable to attack herself as she is slowed down. This would work to the advantage of male evolutionary goals, not female. It is true that lactation usually prevents a new pregnancy - but this could be got around, and is in many primate species, by killing the infant.
Pregnancy has many physical characteristics which disable women, from illness (nausea), vulnerability of carrying a child, center-of-balance problems, weight gain, and slowness. All these things disadvantaged women who resisted sexual access.
Human women are the only primates who not have a specific period of estrus. Their times of ovulation are hidden, even usually from the women. Other primate females have long periods of time when they are left alone by males, but the human female would have been approached constantly, wasting her energy and requiring constant vigilance.
4. Lifespan
Death, on average, occurred before either young man or young woman could develop wisdom, reflect, or memorialize their lives. Traditions must have been slow to develop and hard to pass down. Most women never experienced the long afternoon of life without fear of pregnancy which modern women find after the age of fifty. Mating occurred at puberty, so the disabilities of reproduction were constant.
5. Omnivorousness
Some primates, like gorillas, are vegetarian. But humans and our sister chimps also eat meat. The hunt was the province of the strongest members of the tribe, so men were the hunters. Meat is more calorie-rich than plants, so the meat-bringers were celebrated, and their power to distribute their kill added to male power generally.
6. Bipedalism
Combined with children's long period of helplessness, our ancestor's move to standing up meant that babies could not cling to their mothers' backs. Human mothers had to hold their children on hips or in their arms, or constantly adjust to the weight of tying them on their backs, hampering them.
CULTURAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Territorialism/Population Pressure
Territorialism is probably a mix of biology, since chimpanzees are fiercely territorial, and the pressures of environment which probably led to cultural traditions of defense and limited warfare. The subject of territorialism has been extensively studies and only a brief and focused mention can be made of it here. However, it appears that territorialism would have been engaged in by the physically stronger members of a family, kinship group, or "tribe", namely, the men, and would have valorized those who were most aggressive and violent. Sexual access as a "reward" of war is a custom so old we find not trace of its beginnings, but it may have some biological basis overlaid with cultural tradition. The sexual access thus granted would not necessarily be voluntary.
2. The Taboo on Incest and the Practice of Exogamy
The incest taboo, which seems also to be almost universal in ancient human societies (with a few exceptions such as noble sibling marriages in ancient Egypt), according to experts like Claude Levi-Strauss, encouraged the also almost universal practice of exogamy. In such systems girls married only men outside their kinship group and left their own groups. Sometimes the girl was then "disowned" by her native group; she was "dead to them", and other times the group she married into became allied with her native group. But her physical movement meant that she left her female relatives and lifelong alliances behind. The married women in a group, then, would not have lifelong ties and their ability to resist sexual access as a group would be hampered, while the men and boys in the same group would have organized in childhood. It further led to the practice of female infanticide, as females were just mouths to feed who would leave the tribe and never contribute t it as adults.
Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), in contrast have a system of sending their young males outside the group to mate. Females retain their lifelong alliances and may as a group restrain adult males. Bonobo "society" is seen by ethologists and zoologists as having a more equitable balance of power, with less sexual coercion, than human society.
3. The Discovery of Paternity and the Practice of Hoarding of Surpluses
Paternity was not obvious and other primate groups seem unaware that a particular act of coitus may lead to the female's pregnancy. This may have worked to women's advantage, but at some very early point, paternity was discovered. The current theory is that this increased fathers' investment in their own children, also an advantage to women.
But with the settlement of humans into agricultural societies beginning about 8,000-10,000 years ago, some people (almost always men, for many reasons) were able to accumulate surpluses of food and animals. The cultural tradition grew, and is still also almost universal today, that the surplus accumulated during the fathers' lifetime was his "property" to be distributed as he wished, with tradition ascribing the distribution to his male children (since girls would leave the group). The increasing strength of this tradition caused men to adopt as goals the accumulation of a surplus to make their kinship group strong, and the evolutionary biologists would say, to ensure their genes were passed on. The hoarding of surpluses by men translated into the power to lead the group and to make the rules, which would have advanced men's evolutionary goal, not women's.
For all these reasons and many more, all known human societies became male-dominated before the discovery of writing, which brings into history. It is true that there were Ice Age fertility cults of the Goddess which left figurines all over Europe, but in spite of the important work of M. Gimbutas and R. Eisler in this area, there is little evidence of any matriarchal society in human history. This is not to say that the status of women was invariant across the world; far from it. In some societies, there were relatively egalitarian arrangements in which the elders, while they were men, exercised little real coercive power. The few matrilineal cultures appear to have been far more egalitarian as the practice of expgamy of females was not so marked.
Culture very importantly mediated biology early in pre-history, but original biological and evolutionary roots of male domination appear to be strongly supported by science. This fact has many consequences today as women continue to struggle for liberation from male domination in societies unimaginably more complex and mediated by culture.
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