The Puzzle of Male Dominance
THIS TIME, OUR TIME
“How did males come to dominate human societies (as well as others, like those of our primate relatives)?” A common belief is, “because males are larger and stronger than females” In this post I will continue to argue this belief gets the causality wrong. Men dominate women because pregnancy and child care fall immediately on women. Free of the demands of baby-making and child care, men grow strong competing with one another for women. Moreover, male dominance is species-wide consistent with the species-wide imbalance of pregnancy and baby care falling on women.
Back to the 1950s
When former President Donald Trump proclaimed that he will “protect” women “whether the women like it or not,” he was not appealing to female voters. He was betting that enough male voters yearn to return to the male dominance era of the 1950s to elect him president.
Those were the days when a young woman was told that, if she wasn’t married or engaged by her early 20s, she risked becoming an “old maid” — or in Sen. JD Vance’s updated version, a “childless cat lady.”
In the 1950s, women went to college to get an MRS — a “Mrs.” degree. They were expected to produce large families and be “happy homemakers,” as in the 1950s sitcoms such as “Leave It to Beaver,” in which housewives cheerfully did their chores wearing heels and pearls. They were expected never to shut their husbands out of the bedroom. Advertisements used images of men physically abusing women to market products, such as a Chase and Sanborn coffee ad of a man spanking his wife with the caption, “if your husband ever finds out that you’re not store-testing for fresher coffee…”
Trump has a long history of abusing women, including the sexual abuse civil verdict he lost to E. Jean Carroll, and the “Access Hollywood” tape, in which he boasted of sexually dominating women. Research suggests that 1950s-style triumphant manhood, which is what Trump revels in displaying, appeals to male voters with “fragile masculinity.” One finding was that support for Trump in 2016 was higher in regions with more online searches for “erectile dysfunction.”
Consider the MAGA world’s response to the Julia Roberts-narrated Harris-Walz campaign ad, where the actress says that the voting booth “is the one place in America where women still have a right to choose, you can vote any way you want. What happens in the booth stays in the booth.”
MAGA figures condemned the ad, but their male dominance-rooted responses showed that they are 75 years out of touch. Fox News host Jesse Watters said that if he found out that his wife had voted for Harris, he would consider it “the same thing as having an affair.” Fundamentalist Christian pastor Dale Partridge insists that “in a Christian marriage, a wife should vote according to her husband’s direction.” Conservative activist and Trump supporter Charlie Kirk expressed outrage that a wife would secretly vote for Harris and then lie about it to her husband, “who probably works his tail off to make sure that she can go and have a nice life and provides for the family.”
A 2021 survey revealed that only 29 percent of Republicans thought life had changed for the better since the 1950s, even though that era was rife with racism and sexism. Trump thinks that he can rake in male votes with 1950s-themed political messaging that offers a vision of alpha males protecting — in other words, dominating — women.
“I will protect women at a level never seen before,” Trump told a rally in North Carolina in September. He argued that because abortion is now a state-by-state issue, women will “no longer be thinking about abortion” — but since that’s a fantasy, what Trump really means is “don’t worry, men will do the thinking for you.”
It’s Trump’s 1950s retro, male-dominance appeal to fragile masculinity versus Vice President Kamala Harris’s modern message: “How dare they tell a woman what she can or cannot do with her own body?”
Gregory Wallace https://thehill.com/opinion/campaign/4970994-trump-doubles-down-on-male-domnance/
We are at a major transition point in the evolution of our species, Homo Sapiens. In earlier stages, male dominated tribes led by a “big man” and his subservient followers controlled females and juveniles. Male-dominant behavior, “the patriarchy,” has almost completely been the norm for hundreds to thousands of years. Why is this?
The theory on offer here begins with the proposition that the root cause of male domination of females is not to be found in males, but in females.
This does not mean females consciously cause male dominance. It is that pregnancy and child care fall immediately and directly on females, not males. Males are thereby free to compete for sexual access to and control of females, often violently.
Males gain physical strength in their competition for females. While females grow babies, males grow body size, muscle mass, and cunning for conflict with other males. Females grow emotional maturity and intuition to deal with their more physically-able male counterparts.
How Males Came to Dominate
The creation of fit human beings is one of the most demanding in nature. Humans require most of their lifetime compared to birds and trees to successfully bring forth a new generation. To see this, have a look at “survivorship” which measures the number of individuals that survive to reproduce as a function of life expectancy for three different types of species, (trees, birds, and humans.)
Humans (Type 1) require most of their lifetime compared to birds and trees to successfully bring forth a new generation. It takes two or more decades (particularly more in modern societies) to successfully grow a human infant to reproductive maturity. Large investments of parental (and alloparental) care are required.
Pregnancy, nursing, baby and child care, physically bind females in baby-making. Males are free of these physical bonds. They need only spread their seed to make a baby. Male commitments to their babies depend on emotional attachment which can be more tenuous than the physical attachment of mothers to their babies. Many men have no idea who their babies are.
Before herds, agriculture, granaries, dwellings, and other possessions of value, tribes had women. Women are valuable to men. Men father babies on them and have strong sexual drives to do so. Males (not only human but our primate relatives as well) compete with one another for access to and control of females, often violently.
For example,
The Mongol conquests: Both foreign royals and captured women were taken as concubines during the Mongol conquests.
The Bible: In the Bible, Judges 21 describes two episodes of marriage by capture, where women are targeted to be captured for marriage.
The Muslim world: In the Muslim world, Muslim men often had intimate relationships with enslaved women without marriage. This practice was common in the Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk, Ottoman, Timurid, and Mughal Empires.
China: In China, concubinage was a formal practice until the 20th century. Concubines could be freeborn or of slave origin.
Meiji Japan: Concubinage was common in Meiji Japan as a status symbol.
Pre-Islamic Buddhism and Hinduism: Wealthy men in these religions also practiced concubinage.
In the next several posts we will explore male dominance in our time and the human biology of male attitudes, such as that of Donald Trump, who proclaimed that he will “protect” women “whether the women like it or not.”
References
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patriarchy
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_dominance_hierarchy_species
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2024/07/240717120857.htm
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2913256/
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41590-021-01058-1
https://www.nytimes.com/1977/11/13/archives/why-men-dominate-women-startling-new-evidence-of-female-infanticide.html
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/sex-redefined-the-idea-of-2-sexes-is-overly-simplistic1/
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My perspective nonetheless is that male dominance is not needed or all that welcome our modern civilization where women can participate fully in our economy and all levels of political and social life.
The fact that a few corrupt and backward leaders want to drag our culture back into the blackened caves of the past is not evidence this is the natural or Inevitable order for our species. It is, instead, a model of inter-gender relationships we can and ought to reject as no longer having legitimacy.
Very interesting article Mr Oliver. I would note, however, that males are generally physically stronger than females because of their biological make up, not as a result of having free time to compete for females. Perhaps it is an evolutionary trait inherited from those primal times.
Regardless, thank God men and women today can both actively participate in their children’s upbringing, and there is no need for one gender to dominate over the other. We are free to be coequal participants in forming families and governments in today’s democratic society