The third and last part of a mini-series on the evolutionary psychology of sexual coercion. The first two posts were written from the female side. This post is about the male perspective.
_In a meta-study of people's sexual fantasies, women's fantasies were significantly more likely to include their own sexual pleasure than their partner's. Men’s fantasies were slightly more likely to include another person's sexual pleasure than their own_
I was interested to read more about this, but I read through the Henning and Leitenberg reference and could not find this claim anywhere. Can you provide a pointer?
I see on page 481, Henning and Leitenberg report that men are more likely to imagine being active performers, while women are more likely to imagine being passive recipients—but that seems to me to be a somewhat different claim.
I'm sorry, I mixed up two studies. The study that says the above is Eileen Zurbriggen , Megan R. Yost, Power, Desire, and Pleasure in Sexual Fantasies, 2004.
If your assumptions are true. What do you think is the solution at the societal level - if there even is one? Teach men to be more responsive to women's silent declines of men's sexual advances (as you suggested in your first post)?
Basically, there are three ways human societies counteract sexual coercion:
1. Gender segregation
2. Upholding standards of self discipline among males
3. Upholding standards of self discipline among females
I think the only solution there is, is to apply these three measures in the best possible proportions. Mostly, I think Western society has evolved rather good proportions between the three measures. A lot better than for example Muslim societies, which place too little emphasis on male self discipline. However, I think that selectively applying some gender segregation between males and females who don't know each other and are drunk would be a very effective measure to reduce the prevalence of sexual coercion. If males and females agree to segregate half a meter apart the first times, or even the first time they meet, I think there would be significantly less sexual coercion. Especially if they meet in public places where there are others who uphold the norms of physical segregation.
Unfortunately, I don't think it will pay off much to ask men to be more attentive to silent declines. That is a strong ideal in Western society already. Those who are capable of being attentive and want to be attentive are probably already fairly attentive.
I recall a time as a teenager when I joined my childhood friend (who's family are devout Mormons) to a weekend trip for other kids and teenagers organized by the church. One of the evenings they organized a dance for the older kids (probably 13/14 yo). Boys and Girls were allowed to dance with each other but only if we kept a distance of a large Bible between our torsos. My 14 y/o self was properly dismayed at this seemingly arbitrary rule of conduct. Something Ive always thought of more as religious moralizing rather than as a prudent form of social engineering.
I guess us atheist liberal heathens might have to take a page or two from religious traditions and norms. Or rather, not throw the baby out with the bath water.
But I suspect a lot of people in western liberal and secular societies would feel like physical segregation (even a small one) is a rather stark restriction on our ability to congregate and mingle. But norms do change so it's not impossible.
>>I guess us atheist liberal heathens might have to take a page or two from religious traditions and norms.
I very much think so! Western society has existed for so long that most of the good ideas that can be produced from its own principles have already been produced. The low-hanging fruit grows elsewhere.
>>But I suspect a lot of people in western liberal and secular societies would feel like physical segregation (even a small one) is a rather stark restriction on our ability to congregate and mingle.
Yes, it is not for everyone. But many (most?) people actually self-segregate from people of the opposite sex until they know them a bit entirely voluntarily. As things are, young women of that kind need to be prepared to decline suggestions of casual sex, although they reap none of the benefits from it. It would be great if there was an entirely secular and rational way to communicate that one is out of that game.
Norms change, but how and when they change isn't necessarily in response to a bunch of people thinking it's a good idea. Having money and status makes a huge difference when trying to push norm changes.
I also have a sense that it's difficult for ordinary humans to make changes to their norms in order to reap a benefit. Instead, at least in modern society, I fear that most changes occur downstream of a personalized story, moral ideation, and an outgroup to persecute along the way.
I wonder if one is guaranteed to be societally defenestrated after asking if human populations are equally self-domesticated (in general, or in this particular way). After all, there's nothing necessarily judgmental about this -- most would prefer to think of themselves as less domesticated rather than more. If one population is far more likely to do the back-alley kind than the casting-couch kind, another is vastly more like to do the latter than the former, and some third group is somewhere in the middle, that would be interesting.
>>I wonder if one is guaranteed to be societally defenestrated after asking if human populations are equally self-domesticated (in general, or in this particular way)
You bet! Richard Wrangham devoted a number of pages right at the beginning of his book to explaining how plain unthinkable that idea is. He reports both about 20th century thinkers who thought that self-domestication was good and that Europeans were more domesticated and other who thought that self-domestication was bad and who said that Europeans were less domesticated than others. They were both totally wrong, he insists. On the other hand, he elaborates the theory that Neanderthal humans were less domesticated than Homo sapiens.
>>If one population is far more likely to do the back-alley kind than the casting-couch kind, another is vastly more like to do the latter than the former, and some third group is somewhere in the middle, that would be interesting.
I think that if someone wants to get socially defenestrated and investigate the issue, sexual coercion would be a bad start. If about a third of men actually feel that committing rape is fine under the right circumstances, the actions of that third will vary hugely with the circumstances. Investigating general levels of spontaneous violence in the population would give a much better clue. My guess is that violent rape increases with levels of violence in general. It obviously does so in times of war.
Could it be that some of that one-third of men who "feel that committing rape is fine under the right circumstances" are indulging fantasies they wouldn't in fact enact in real life, just as some women who have rape fantasies do not actually want to be raped? That proportion seems inconsistent with the low percentage of men who fantasized coercive sex in Aella's survey. If the number is literally accurate, that means one-third of men are willing to commit acts that could result in psychological trauma and/or injury to a woman (or man?) for momentary self-gratification. That implies a low, if not absent, capacity for empathy, not to mention a complete absence of the most basic moral values, i.e., the value of not using other humans for purely selfish instrumental ends, let alone by violent means. Conceivably it's true, when one considers the prevalence of major and minor crimes in most societies, public rudeness, and so on. But if it is true, a frightening proportion of our fellow humans have what can only be described as sociopathic traits.
I'm finding myself resisting that high percentage. I realize it's from Buss, and should read it myself. On the one hand, it's shockingly high. On the other, I have read that in wars, e.g. WW2, a soldier, even a commanding officer, who sought to prevent rapists from committing rape might be shot by the rapists. Could be an example of how an aggressive minority can dominate majorities, but rape certainly seems common in the anarchic conditions following a battle.
When I was 20 years old I spent three months in Syria. There a substantial proportion of men, I would guess at least a third, openly disregarded my opinion about whether to have physical contact with them or not. If a third of Western men think that maybe, under some conditions, they could do the same and disregard the opinion of a female partner, I wouldn't be entirely surprised.
Yes. If you combine 1) the intensity of the reproductive urge; with 2) our considerable capacity for rationalizing our actions; and 3) the cultural environment, which could be more or less constraining; in combination, you get a high incidence of rape depending on the environment. If you substitute for (1) other human drives, such as the drive for power, and you get all the rest of the horrors humans inflict on each other. Worth noting that worst human crimes were done in the name of a greater good, i.e., the crimes of Marxism/Leninism (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.), Nazism, etc.
> The fact that humans are a part of nature is just mundane. The interesting question is how we could ever escape as far as we have from the basic laws of nature.
Maybe you mean, "The interesting question is how nature could be rich and complex enough to create life forms that do anything but follow unconscious, selfish instincts?" Even life forms as simple as jellyfish are comprised of multiple organs that work together, including mitochondria with their own distinct genetic code. Cooperation is how a tree's roots provide water for the leaves--and how plants of the same species share nutrients underground, via their interconnected fungal network (which itself requires cooperation between plants and fungi).
The rule is: Cooperation takes longer to evolve because it's more complex, and creates somewhat fragile systems because it depends upon conditions to be right, but overall, cooperation outcompetes selfishness. Humans as a species, and as individuals, do have some readiness to revert to a lower level of uncooperative existence, because the stable social order needed for cooperation to be adaptive isn't always guaranteed. But tiny bands of gangster rapist thieves just aren't going to be able to handle a coordinated society of cooperators who look at their psychopathic tendencies with disgust; they wouldn't even be able to reproduce very effectively.
> 1. The happy-wife-happy-life principle... 2. Men who sought to please their partners were much better at initiating and maintaining illicit affairs. I think argument 2 is stronger than argument 1.
I don't really know how to *test* this, so maybe you're right. But my strong suspicion is that "happy-wife" has been more important than illicit affairs. Most children throughout (pre)history have been raised by their biological fathers. (Matrilineal horticulturalists provide a large exception to this that might need to be considered on their own terms, but they weren't the majority of societies by any stretch.) Under typical social conditions, if she's miserable, morning sickness, malaise, terror of coming childbirth, general loneliness, and the possibility of outright suicide can all spell doom for not only her pregnancy and her later efforts at breastfeeding and childcare, but even for her, and then where is he? Go find another woman to terrorize and fail reproductively with?
>>Maybe you mean, "The interesting question is how nature could be rich and complex enough to create life forms that do anything but follow unconscious, selfish instincts?" Even life forms as simple as jellyfish are comprised of multiple organs that work together, including mitochondria with their own distinct genetic code. Cooperation is how a tree's roots provide water for the leaves--and how plants of the same species share nutrients underground, via their interconnected fungal network (which itself requires cooperation between plants and fungi).
Not my most most thought-over sentence this year. Humans are only copperative compared to other mammals. Ants are still much more copperative. And they certainly are part of nature.
>>(Matrilineal horticulturalists provide a large exception to this that might need to be considered on their own terms, but they weren't the majority of societies by any stretch.)
The question is not only how many they were, but also to what degree they became the ancestors of current humans. Only one migratory event, that of the Indo-Europeans, erased much of the possible direct ancestry from matrilineal horticulturalist groups. There were probably many more occasions in history when patrilineal groups conquered other, possibly matrilineal groups.
>>Under typical social conditions, if she's miserable, morning sickness, malaise, terror of coming childbirth, general loneliness, and the possibility of outright suicide can all spell doom for not only her pregnancy and her later efforts at breastfeeding and childcare
Unfortunately, I think the idea that oppressed women are reproductively unhealthy is not backed up by data. I also wonder how on earth women without great support could go through pregnancy. Anthropology does little to explain that thing. It only says that in a number of primitive societies, women actually are the main providers and men keep women as enslaved laborers and sexual objects. Obviously, those women reproduce.
Cooperation between men and women probably pays off best of all in Malthusian agricultural societies. There they compete for limited amounts of land with other couples.
> Only one migratory event, that of the Indo-Europeans, erased much of the possible direct ancestry from matrilineal horticulturalist groups.
I think you may be referring to the Yamnaya, here? As pastoralists, they were very likely patrilineal, and they do seem have contributed a great deal of the ancestry of Northern Europe. But there's still plenty of old Western Hunter-Gatherer and Anatolian "Farmer" DNA around. This latter component is likely chock full of matrilineal practices, as those folks were practicing pre-plough horticulture.
But we don't even have to go back that far; after the Yamnaya, there's suggestive evidence that northern Europeans settled down nicely into a horticultural, matrilineal mode of existence; for example, the Northern Europeans described by Tacitus scorned the plough, and as you'd see in any matrilineal tribe, "Sisters’ children mean as much to their uncle as to their father."
Yes, I'm referring to the Yamnaya, but I don't like the word really, because it implies that our Indo-European ancestors spoke Russian.
Matrilineality is a way to organize small-scale societies, just like patrilineality. Those of us who are alive today are very likely to have ancestors who were successful in both kinds of societies. I just think that even if we find out that x percent of all small-scale societies are matrilineal, I don't think that should lead to the conclusion that x percent of our ancestors lived in matrilineal societies. Since all large-scale societies are patrilineal, that means that patrilineal traditions at some point vanquished matrilineal traditions. Which I think makes it likely that the ancestors of the winners became patrilineal at an earlier point than average. And humans alive today are the descendants of the winners to a disproportional degree.
I do think we agree that most children throughout our semi-recent ancestry were raised with input from their fathers. But no, most large scale societies are not patrilineal. Even the Amish are really bilineal, carrying only vestiges of unlineal habits. And when considering the enormous amount of promescuity around today, it's hard to go far with the claim that patrilineal norms left a strong imprint on our genetics.
But maybe you're thinking of something different from what I am when we discuss these things? Just to be clear, although women often had it worse in patrilineal societies than matrilineal ones, they really have it best in bilineal societies. Comparing patrilineal against matrilineal societies more compares sexual norms (strict vs loose) and wealth inequality (high vs low) than whether or not women were particularly agentic. As I understand it, bride capture and rape were likely higher in both types of unilineal society than in modern or ancient bilineal societies.
To be honest, I don't have any strong idea of the importance of patrilineality and matrilineality. At least not as strong as many other people interested in anthropology. Does it always mean very much, or is it just an arbitrary way of organizing things? Napoleon Chagnon explained that patrilineality has a mathematical advantage: In a patrilineal system, men who are said to be related to each other are more evenly related than in a matrilineal system. That makes it easier to form war parties. Otherwise I'm not sure at all about the importance of counting relatedness one way or the other.
My impression is that some kind of matrilineality, the kind that makes mother's brothers father figures, stems from a perception of paternity insecurity. But I don't know how many matrilineal societies actually go to such extremes in discounting the importance of fatherhood.
I think you have a great point that bi-lineality is in effect the Western norm. It sounds completely sensible that the most gender-equal societies are bi-lineal, because such a system implies that both sides contribute some of the same. Like the European inheritance/dowry system, where marriage meant the combination of wealth from both sides.
_In a meta-study of people's sexual fantasies, women's fantasies were significantly more likely to include their own sexual pleasure than their partner's. Men’s fantasies were slightly more likely to include another person's sexual pleasure than their own_
I was interested to read more about this, but I read through the Henning and Leitenberg reference and could not find this claim anywhere. Can you provide a pointer?
I see on page 481, Henning and Leitenberg report that men are more likely to imagine being active performers, while women are more likely to imagine being passive recipients—but that seems to me to be a somewhat different claim.
I'm sorry, I mixed up two studies. The study that says the above is Eileen Zurbriggen , Megan R. Yost, Power, Desire, and Pleasure in Sexual Fantasies, 2004.
https://sci-hub.se/https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/00224490409552236
I have corrected it now. Thank you for pointing it out.
Edit: It is on page 292, by the end of the page
Thank you for the updated link.
If your assumptions are true. What do you think is the solution at the societal level - if there even is one? Teach men to be more responsive to women's silent declines of men's sexual advances (as you suggested in your first post)?
Basically, there are three ways human societies counteract sexual coercion:
1. Gender segregation
2. Upholding standards of self discipline among males
3. Upholding standards of self discipline among females
I think the only solution there is, is to apply these three measures in the best possible proportions. Mostly, I think Western society has evolved rather good proportions between the three measures. A lot better than for example Muslim societies, which place too little emphasis on male self discipline. However, I think that selectively applying some gender segregation between males and females who don't know each other and are drunk would be a very effective measure to reduce the prevalence of sexual coercion. If males and females agree to segregate half a meter apart the first times, or even the first time they meet, I think there would be significantly less sexual coercion. Especially if they meet in public places where there are others who uphold the norms of physical segregation.
Unfortunately, I don't think it will pay off much to ask men to be more attentive to silent declines. That is a strong ideal in Western society already. Those who are capable of being attentive and want to be attentive are probably already fairly attentive.
That makes sense!
I recall a time as a teenager when I joined my childhood friend (who's family are devout Mormons) to a weekend trip for other kids and teenagers organized by the church. One of the evenings they organized a dance for the older kids (probably 13/14 yo). Boys and Girls were allowed to dance with each other but only if we kept a distance of a large Bible between our torsos. My 14 y/o self was properly dismayed at this seemingly arbitrary rule of conduct. Something Ive always thought of more as religious moralizing rather than as a prudent form of social engineering.
I guess us atheist liberal heathens might have to take a page or two from religious traditions and norms. Or rather, not throw the baby out with the bath water.
But I suspect a lot of people in western liberal and secular societies would feel like physical segregation (even a small one) is a rather stark restriction on our ability to congregate and mingle. But norms do change so it's not impossible.
>>I guess us atheist liberal heathens might have to take a page or two from religious traditions and norms.
I very much think so! Western society has existed for so long that most of the good ideas that can be produced from its own principles have already been produced. The low-hanging fruit grows elsewhere.
>>But I suspect a lot of people in western liberal and secular societies would feel like physical segregation (even a small one) is a rather stark restriction on our ability to congregate and mingle.
Yes, it is not for everyone. But many (most?) people actually self-segregate from people of the opposite sex until they know them a bit entirely voluntarily. As things are, young women of that kind need to be prepared to decline suggestions of casual sex, although they reap none of the benefits from it. It would be great if there was an entirely secular and rational way to communicate that one is out of that game.
Norms change, but how and when they change isn't necessarily in response to a bunch of people thinking it's a good idea. Having money and status makes a huge difference when trying to push norm changes.
I also have a sense that it's difficult for ordinary humans to make changes to their norms in order to reap a benefit. Instead, at least in modern society, I fear that most changes occur downstream of a personalized story, moral ideation, and an outgroup to persecute along the way.
Millennia of adaptation to make men non-rapey is not enough for the toxic masculinity movement.
Of course not. There are still tons of toxic masculinity left. Just as there are tons of toxic femininity.
I wonder if one is guaranteed to be societally defenestrated after asking if human populations are equally self-domesticated (in general, or in this particular way). After all, there's nothing necessarily judgmental about this -- most would prefer to think of themselves as less domesticated rather than more. If one population is far more likely to do the back-alley kind than the casting-couch kind, another is vastly more like to do the latter than the former, and some third group is somewhere in the middle, that would be interesting.
>>I wonder if one is guaranteed to be societally defenestrated after asking if human populations are equally self-domesticated (in general, or in this particular way)
You bet! Richard Wrangham devoted a number of pages right at the beginning of his book to explaining how plain unthinkable that idea is. He reports both about 20th century thinkers who thought that self-domestication was good and that Europeans were more domesticated and other who thought that self-domestication was bad and who said that Europeans were less domesticated than others. They were both totally wrong, he insists. On the other hand, he elaborates the theory that Neanderthal humans were less domesticated than Homo sapiens.
>>If one population is far more likely to do the back-alley kind than the casting-couch kind, another is vastly more like to do the latter than the former, and some third group is somewhere in the middle, that would be interesting.
I think that if someone wants to get socially defenestrated and investigate the issue, sexual coercion would be a bad start. If about a third of men actually feel that committing rape is fine under the right circumstances, the actions of that third will vary hugely with the circumstances. Investigating general levels of spontaneous violence in the population would give a much better clue. My guess is that violent rape increases with levels of violence in general. It obviously does so in times of war.
Could it be that some of that one-third of men who "feel that committing rape is fine under the right circumstances" are indulging fantasies they wouldn't in fact enact in real life, just as some women who have rape fantasies do not actually want to be raped? That proportion seems inconsistent with the low percentage of men who fantasized coercive sex in Aella's survey. If the number is literally accurate, that means one-third of men are willing to commit acts that could result in psychological trauma and/or injury to a woman (or man?) for momentary self-gratification. That implies a low, if not absent, capacity for empathy, not to mention a complete absence of the most basic moral values, i.e., the value of not using other humans for purely selfish instrumental ends, let alone by violent means. Conceivably it's true, when one considers the prevalence of major and minor crimes in most societies, public rudeness, and so on. But if it is true, a frightening proportion of our fellow humans have what can only be described as sociopathic traits.
>>But if it is true, a frightening proportion of our fellow humans have what can only be described as sociopathic traits.
I think that's spot on. People hurt each other all the time, using better or worse excuses to justify their actions.
I'm finding myself resisting that high percentage. I realize it's from Buss, and should read it myself. On the one hand, it's shockingly high. On the other, I have read that in wars, e.g. WW2, a soldier, even a commanding officer, who sought to prevent rapists from committing rape might be shot by the rapists. Could be an example of how an aggressive minority can dominate majorities, but rape certainly seems common in the anarchic conditions following a battle.
When I was 20 years old I spent three months in Syria. There a substantial proportion of men, I would guess at least a third, openly disregarded my opinion about whether to have physical contact with them or not. If a third of Western men think that maybe, under some conditions, they could do the same and disregard the opinion of a female partner, I wouldn't be entirely surprised.
Yes. If you combine 1) the intensity of the reproductive urge; with 2) our considerable capacity for rationalizing our actions; and 3) the cultural environment, which could be more or less constraining; in combination, you get a high incidence of rape depending on the environment. If you substitute for (1) other human drives, such as the drive for power, and you get all the rest of the horrors humans inflict on each other. Worth noting that worst human crimes were done in the name of a greater good, i.e., the crimes of Marxism/Leninism (Stalinism, Maoism, etc.), Nazism, etc.
Yes now that you push back, I realize that I wouldn't expect that 33% to hold across all cultures and demographics.
> The fact that humans are a part of nature is just mundane. The interesting question is how we could ever escape as far as we have from the basic laws of nature.
Maybe you mean, "The interesting question is how nature could be rich and complex enough to create life forms that do anything but follow unconscious, selfish instincts?" Even life forms as simple as jellyfish are comprised of multiple organs that work together, including mitochondria with their own distinct genetic code. Cooperation is how a tree's roots provide water for the leaves--and how plants of the same species share nutrients underground, via their interconnected fungal network (which itself requires cooperation between plants and fungi).
The rule is: Cooperation takes longer to evolve because it's more complex, and creates somewhat fragile systems because it depends upon conditions to be right, but overall, cooperation outcompetes selfishness. Humans as a species, and as individuals, do have some readiness to revert to a lower level of uncooperative existence, because the stable social order needed for cooperation to be adaptive isn't always guaranteed. But tiny bands of gangster rapist thieves just aren't going to be able to handle a coordinated society of cooperators who look at their psychopathic tendencies with disgust; they wouldn't even be able to reproduce very effectively.
> 1. The happy-wife-happy-life principle... 2. Men who sought to please their partners were much better at initiating and maintaining illicit affairs. I think argument 2 is stronger than argument 1.
I don't really know how to *test* this, so maybe you're right. But my strong suspicion is that "happy-wife" has been more important than illicit affairs. Most children throughout (pre)history have been raised by their biological fathers. (Matrilineal horticulturalists provide a large exception to this that might need to be considered on their own terms, but they weren't the majority of societies by any stretch.) Under typical social conditions, if she's miserable, morning sickness, malaise, terror of coming childbirth, general loneliness, and the possibility of outright suicide can all spell doom for not only her pregnancy and her later efforts at breastfeeding and childcare, but even for her, and then where is he? Go find another woman to terrorize and fail reproductively with?
>>Maybe you mean, "The interesting question is how nature could be rich and complex enough to create life forms that do anything but follow unconscious, selfish instincts?" Even life forms as simple as jellyfish are comprised of multiple organs that work together, including mitochondria with their own distinct genetic code. Cooperation is how a tree's roots provide water for the leaves--and how plants of the same species share nutrients underground, via their interconnected fungal network (which itself requires cooperation between plants and fungi).
Not my most most thought-over sentence this year. Humans are only copperative compared to other mammals. Ants are still much more copperative. And they certainly are part of nature.
>>(Matrilineal horticulturalists provide a large exception to this that might need to be considered on their own terms, but they weren't the majority of societies by any stretch.)
The question is not only how many they were, but also to what degree they became the ancestors of current humans. Only one migratory event, that of the Indo-Europeans, erased much of the possible direct ancestry from matrilineal horticulturalist groups. There were probably many more occasions in history when patrilineal groups conquered other, possibly matrilineal groups.
>>Under typical social conditions, if she's miserable, morning sickness, malaise, terror of coming childbirth, general loneliness, and the possibility of outright suicide can all spell doom for not only her pregnancy and her later efforts at breastfeeding and childcare
Unfortunately, I think the idea that oppressed women are reproductively unhealthy is not backed up by data. I also wonder how on earth women without great support could go through pregnancy. Anthropology does little to explain that thing. It only says that in a number of primitive societies, women actually are the main providers and men keep women as enslaved laborers and sexual objects. Obviously, those women reproduce.
Cooperation between men and women probably pays off best of all in Malthusian agricultural societies. There they compete for limited amounts of land with other couples.
> Only one migratory event, that of the Indo-Europeans, erased much of the possible direct ancestry from matrilineal horticulturalist groups.
I think you may be referring to the Yamnaya, here? As pastoralists, they were very likely patrilineal, and they do seem have contributed a great deal of the ancestry of Northern Europe. But there's still plenty of old Western Hunter-Gatherer and Anatolian "Farmer" DNA around. This latter component is likely chock full of matrilineal practices, as those folks were practicing pre-plough horticulture.
But we don't even have to go back that far; after the Yamnaya, there's suggestive evidence that northern Europeans settled down nicely into a horticultural, matrilineal mode of existence; for example, the Northern Europeans described by Tacitus scorned the plough, and as you'd see in any matrilineal tribe, "Sisters’ children mean as much to their uncle as to their father."
Yes, I'm referring to the Yamnaya, but I don't like the word really, because it implies that our Indo-European ancestors spoke Russian.
Matrilineality is a way to organize small-scale societies, just like patrilineality. Those of us who are alive today are very likely to have ancestors who were successful in both kinds of societies. I just think that even if we find out that x percent of all small-scale societies are matrilineal, I don't think that should lead to the conclusion that x percent of our ancestors lived in matrilineal societies. Since all large-scale societies are patrilineal, that means that patrilineal traditions at some point vanquished matrilineal traditions. Which I think makes it likely that the ancestors of the winners became patrilineal at an earlier point than average. And humans alive today are the descendants of the winners to a disproportional degree.
I do think we agree that most children throughout our semi-recent ancestry were raised with input from their fathers. But no, most large scale societies are not patrilineal. Even the Amish are really bilineal, carrying only vestiges of unlineal habits. And when considering the enormous amount of promescuity around today, it's hard to go far with the claim that patrilineal norms left a strong imprint on our genetics.
But maybe you're thinking of something different from what I am when we discuss these things? Just to be clear, although women often had it worse in patrilineal societies than matrilineal ones, they really have it best in bilineal societies. Comparing patrilineal against matrilineal societies more compares sexual norms (strict vs loose) and wealth inequality (high vs low) than whether or not women were particularly agentic. As I understand it, bride capture and rape were likely higher in both types of unilineal society than in modern or ancient bilineal societies.
To be honest, I don't have any strong idea of the importance of patrilineality and matrilineality. At least not as strong as many other people interested in anthropology. Does it always mean very much, or is it just an arbitrary way of organizing things? Napoleon Chagnon explained that patrilineality has a mathematical advantage: In a patrilineal system, men who are said to be related to each other are more evenly related than in a matrilineal system. That makes it easier to form war parties. Otherwise I'm not sure at all about the importance of counting relatedness one way or the other.
My impression is that some kind of matrilineality, the kind that makes mother's brothers father figures, stems from a perception of paternity insecurity. But I don't know how many matrilineal societies actually go to such extremes in discounting the importance of fatherhood.
I think you have a great point that bi-lineality is in effect the Western norm. It sounds completely sensible that the most gender-equal societies are bi-lineal, because such a system implies that both sides contribute some of the same. Like the European inheritance/dowry system, where marriage meant the combination of wealth from both sides.