Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (23 page)

Or as evolutionary ecologist Bobbi Low put it in “Women’s Lives There, Here, Then, Now,” her incisive and sweeping overview of constraints on women, “Humans, like most other species, show an overwhelmingly positive relationship between resource control . . . and male reproductive success. . . . For females, the important relationships are between risk aversion . . . and reproductive success.” And: “For humans, as for other mammals, polygyny is the ‘default’
mating system. . . . When some males can dominate mating opportunities, they will.”

We will consider how and why Europe chose monogamy (sort of), but for now we’ll contemplate the impact on women’s status in many societies in which they knew that rich and dominant men could, on a whim, add them or their daughters to a harem as girls and keep them for life. Even in smaller-scale herding and gardening cultures, polygyny was more likely than in hunter-gatherers, and women’s influence suffered. Often, their own reproductive success was also at risk. As anthropologists Monique Borgerhoff Mulder (for the Kipsigis of Kenya), Beverly Strassmann (for the Dogon of Mali), and Daniel Sellen (for the Datoga of Tanzania) showed, having co-wives reduces your number of surviving children in some circumstances, depending on how rich the husband, how many co-wives, and other life events. So, many women lost out in polygynous marriages, even as their men were gaining. But in passing, we might also give a thought to the countless men who, in this system, never found a wife or lost their lives in continual wars.

There are four ways that wars have always been partly about women, as the Bible, the
Iliad,
and other ancient classics reveal. First, men must protect their wives and daughters from being stolen or raped by a raiding party or conquering army and retaliate if they can. Second, men want to seize and rape women left behind by their own fallen enemies. Some feminists have said that rape is not sex, and of course it is also extreme violence, but as cultural historian Camille Paglia writes, “Sex
is
power, and all power is inherently aggressive. Rape is male power fighting female power.” Third, if a marriage between two rival groups fails, then the peace made by the marriage ends. Fourth and finally, war can bring the reputation and spoils that enable a man to marry back home.

Horrific things have been done to women in recent wars, but, tragically, this is not new. Historians have largely ignored what
happened to women in war in the past, seeing it as a by-product of other goals of war. But in a 2011 study, historian Kathy Gaca redressed this balance for the ancient Western world, examining not just literary or religious texts but other documents and concluding, “The violent subjugation of women and girls through sexual assault and torment has been an integral and important part of Western warfare over the two millennia from the Bronze Age to late antiquity.” This means from the time of the Trojan War and the biblical Book of Judges until well into the Christian era. Even when the main goals were to seize cultivated lands and precious mines, “the objective of taking captive girls and women as subaltern wives, concubines, prostitutes, and slaves remains central.”

Medieval historian David Wyatt studied a later, more focused time and region: Britain and Ireland between 800 and 1200, including Scandinavians (Vikings) who colonized those islands. In all three cultures, the abduction and subjugation of women, including violent rape, was a nobleman’s badge of honor, and even common farmers could have female slaves and concubines. To earn and keep a place in the hierarchy, a man had to “have control over the procreative capabilities of a daughter, a sister, a female kinswoman or servant. . . . Men of all social levels would aspire to female accumulation,” abbots and bishops included. So pivotal was this process that the Irish word for “female slave,”
cumal,
became a unit of value, equal to three ounces of silver, eight or ten cows, or a certain amount of land. No corresponding standard of value was formally derived from male slaves. A Danish king in a twelfth-century chronicle tells his soldiers to plunder England and “cut the throat (regardless of pity) all of the male sex who might fall into their hands, preserve the females for gratification of their lust.”

Wyatt draws a parallel to the Mursi, a herding people in southwest Ethiopia near the Sudan border, whose all-male age sets gathered simply to wage ritual war. These, in turn, resemble the Nuer, pastoralists of the Sudan, a favorite subject of anthropologists; they built
an effective organization for predatory expansion at the expense of their similar but weaker Dinka neighbors. Yet these were not true chiefdoms, as in medieval Britain and Ireland, where powerful men controlled their subordinates’ sex lives in time of peace but preferred to direct young men’s desire outward, through war. In these Western medieval settings, illegitimate children of captured women (and there were many) would grow up to be warriors and wives or concubines. Leaders of the medieval Christian church sometimes preached against these patterns but more often condoned or even joined in them. It was only later that centralized royal power favored nominal monogamy.

But centralization changed only the out-group. In the Crusades, capture and rape of women was standard practice on both sides, despite the alleged religious aims of Christian and Muslim alike. The Europeans took women on the adventure, as wives, servants, and prostitutes, and when the armies of Islam captured them, they would be raped, ransomed, or both. Noblemen on both sides had difficulty reinstating abused wives, so the women often were violently raped abroad and then, if ransomed, lost status at home. Prostitutes and other female servants belonged to whichever men prevailed.

This dark history was not quite a pure quest for male reproduction. Men sometimes raped men to humiliate them and sometimes mutilated or killed women after rape; neither of these tactics enhanced the victors’ reproductive success, at least not directly. Fertile, even nubile women were buried with powerful men even in peacetime—a waste of wombs that challenges evolutionary theory. But we no longer have to debate whether all this war and conquest enhanced
some
men’s reproductive success. DNA analysis of the Y chromosome by Tatiana Zerjal and her colleagues showed in 2003 that about sixteen million men alive today—including one out of every twelve central Asian males—are genetic descendants of
one man
who lived at the time of the conqueror and polygynist Genghis Khan, whose sons and grandsons had similar habits and power.
Most likely, the man in question was Genghis Khan himself. And, as shown by Laoise Moore and her colleagues in 2006, roughly the same proportion—about 8 percent—of Irish men today have a genetic type traceable to
one man
who lived more than a thousand years ago; he was probably a chieftain in the mold discussed above.

Over the centuries those Y chromosomes passed through the wombs of millions of women, many of whom did not freely consent to the usage; nor did millions of disadvantaged, deprived, bereft, and slaughtered fathers, brothers, husbands, and suitors of those women, whose fruitless genes died with them. Not just in Asia and Ireland but throughout the world, men bear the genes and to some extent the inclinations of those who in a durable past killed men and seized women at will. As ecologist Bobbi Low put it, war is a kind of runaway sexual selection, and we have long dealt with the genetic legacy of that process in males. This is not to say that all men are rapists; very few are. But too many men in the modern world have inclinations that reflect the actions of male ancestors who achieved their success by means of violence and male domination. As I will show you later, the differences between average men and average women in sexuality, like the overwhelming predominance of men in violent crime and antisocial behavior, are likely to be in part a legacy of successful men in this benighted past. But those behaviors are no longer adaptive, and we now consider to what extent these powerful, negative forces have been brought under control.

Chapter 7

♦

Samson’s Haircut, Achilles’ Heel

I
t might seem that the status of women is a simple concept: high, low, middling, terrible, worsening, improving. But it turns out that the varied elements that go into that status can be independent in culture and history. Do women contribute a lot to the economy? Are they sharing their husbands with co-wives? Can they take formal leadership roles? Do they have a public say or a vote? How about private influence? Do they help choose their children’s husbands and wives? Do they own land?

Consider our own recent history. Women could inherit estates long before they could vote, and they voted long before they began regularly to occupy high elected office or run corporations. For generations they joined in public conversations through writing, but their contributions to the economy varied. Their right to choose their husbands would gradually improve, although it always depended on economic circumstances.

Nevertheless, we have a sense of what women’s status means in aggregate. No one would contradict me if I said that women in the West have come a long way but have a long way to go. Nor could I fairly
be taken to task for saying specific things, like “Women have begun to be elected to high office” or “There has been a huge flow of women into the labor force” or “Contraception has given women more control over their lives, but the decline of marriage has left them more often alone with their children” or “Women vote more than men do, so they have increasing influence in U.S. national elections.”

Similarly, if I attempt a sweeping view of history at this point in the argument, perhaps I can be forgiven. In simple, mobile hunter-gatherer bands, women had a voice; discussions were face-to-face, decisions day-to-day. Men tried to dominate them, but it wasn’t easy. Some men had more than one wife, but the great majority didn’t. Hunting made men important and enabled them to show off, but it also encouraged them to invest in their children. War, that universal booster of male status, was possible but not widespread or common. Inequality was limited, whether among men or between men and women.

When hunter-gatherers settled in larger, denser populations, inequalities widened. These cultures might have had nobles, commoners, and slaves, and they went to war to get more of the last. Men became more separate from women and children, but they collected women for sex and reproduction. Women were increasingly the objects of male strife, which was often in the end about controlling wombs. Men had the chance to dominate women, and they took it. Politics became a male game, played in public spaces where men could shame, ridicule, and exclude women.

All these tendencies increased with the rise of farming, again with the rise of chiefdoms, and yet again with the rise of empires. It was not a uniform, linear process in all the places where it happened. Those who study these things in meticulous professional detail say there are problems with generalizations. They are right. But in this case, the devil is not in the details; it’s in the overview. And the overview is one of declining power and status for women.

One of the ways we know this is because of a classic study by Martin King Whyte, with assistance from Kristin Moore and Patricia Paul. They approached the subject as anthropologists with respect for culture and its subtleties, recognizing that no one factor is a decisive determinant of how well women do, in life or in power. But in the end, they did come to one firm conclusion: the more complex the society, the lower the status of women. Social complexity itself is not easy to define, but it includes inequality among men; social stratification; separation of political, economic, religious, and military spheres; occupational specialization; and surplus production.

Their sample consisted of preindustrial cultures, so the most complex of them were agrarian states and empires with intensive plow agriculture. The plow itself predicts male dominance, as do herding large animals, hunting large game, and war. Probably the worst examples of males out of control are chiefdoms like those we saw in medieval Britain and Ireland, but these
generally
resembled similar societies at various times and places around the world, before cities, states, and empires.

Thomas Hobbes, in his 1651 book
Leviathan,
claimed that life in a state of nature is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” If he was thinking of simple hunter-gatherers, the predominant state of nature we evolved in, he was quite wrong. It was anything but solitary, showing intense social commitment and solidarity. It was poor by his standards (upper-crust seventeenth-century England) but usually adequate and better than the lot of the lower classes of London in his time and long after. It was neither nasty nor brutish but often gratifying and always fully human. And it was about as short, on average, as the lives of Hobbes’s poorer fellow countrymen, for the same main reason: uncontrolled infections, especially in infancy and childhood.

On the other hand, if Hobbes was thinking of the lives of his own English people a few centuries earlier, thousands of years beyond the hunter-gatherer state of nature, then for most it was indeed
(although never solitary) poor, nasty, brutish and short. The chieftains and their friends worked hard to make life like that for everyone else. But however successfully brutish you were, you wouldn’t be on top for long. Hobbes argued that the only way to avoid chaos was to have a single, sovereign, authoritarian state—the “Leviathan”—strong and ruthless enough to suppress discord.

If violence waned with the rise of the state, however, it wasn’t without long, hard wars, and it needed a blurring of the distinction between the army and the police. Put differently, the hereditary aristocracy suppressed the rest of the people every day in every way. Anthropologists call this
structural violence,
and it persists in much of the world. Men are overwhelmingly responsible for it. Some ancient empires were less brutish than others, and some rulers survived by pulling back on taxation, forced labor, conscription, seizure of women, and other oppressions. But we are talking about varying degrees. And at any given social level, men oppressed and dominated women.