Feminism is just an ape alliance

Since the beginning of history, alliances between men have built on more than maleness. Women need to follow that example and build alliances on more than femaleness.

Bonobo females socializing, Democratic Republic of Congo, 2010. Wikimedia Commons 

The point of society is to build something better than human nature alone can achieve. Human nature is, per definition, what humans all over the world have in common.  

In the competition between groups of humans, those groups that could achieve something more than that general human nature won. If every group has human nature, those who have human nature plus something else have an advantage.

That something else is society. Successful societies acknowledge some parts of human nature and repress other parts. Competition between societies has developed and fine-tuned different formulas for suppression and promotion of different aspects of human nature. The concept is so superior to human nature alone that almost all humans today live in large-scale, highly evolved societies. Small-scale groups organized by crude human nature just can't compete. (That is, they can't compete other than at the fringe. Criminal groups can be seen as spontaneous expressions of crude human nature right within civilization.)

Against nature

There is a subdivision to human nature: Human male nature and human female nature. Mostly it is overlapping. But there are also some differences in how males and females all over the world behave.

I'm convinced that the constraining of male nature is what made human civilizations arise in the first place. I wrote about that in my posts Violent enough to stand still and Why do humans ever develop? Males are, by nature, reproductively greedy. How could evolution make them otherwise? That reproductive greed makes them each other's enemies. As long as every man strives for numerous women for himself, unrelated men will always be in fundamental conflict with each other.

For any civilization to form, males need to find ways to overcome this fundamental conflict. As long as groups of men are regularly split-up by infighting over who should have that woman, men can't form any bigger military units. Ceasing that infighting is very difficult to achieve, since it is against nature. It required some kind of freak event, where a group of men happened to avoid infighting for a while, maybe under an unusually awe-inspiring leader. Those men could conquer their neighbors, initiating a feedback loop. A feedback loop that worked against some of the fundamental principles of human nature.

That way, civilization was formed by men who gradually and tentatively defied their own, and each other's nature. This is no easy task. However refined formulas human nature is squeezed into, it is still always there, very close to the surface. It often breaks through, when people succumb to their inclinations instead of following the rules of conduct. Still, however imperfect society is, it is there for a reason: It works better than human nature alone. 

In the absence of history 

Throughout history, male nature was repressed and modified in more and more advanced ways. History more or less is about men developing more and more sophisticated ways of cooperating against other groups of men.

For history to begin, male nature needs to be constrained and modified. General human nature, shared by both sexes, also needs to be constrained and modified: For example, both sexes have an inclination for stealing and just taking what they need for themselves and their families. Such tendencies need to be suppressed for humans to cooperate in bigger units.

But how about specifically female nature? Just as there is a typically male pattern of instincts, there is a typically female pattern too. It is less visible because females are weaker and cause less disorder, but it is definitely there. Was there any corresponding civilizing process on the female side? 

I don't think so. While males developed more and more advanced forms of cooperation among themselves, they used females to bear and care for their children and to perform hard and tedious labor. That way, female nature wasn't gradually and painfully overcome by cultural evolution. It was just repressed by the culture developed by males. Over time, the repression increased in sophistication. In some places it increased in severity. In other places it decreased in severity. But nowhere females were responsible for setting the rules that repressed and enhanced their own nature, the way males were.

Freedom in captivity

That is, until the 20th century. When industrial society was established, females could create their first large-scale alliances. After thousands of years of cattle status, females could finally demand equal rights.

Human females are not the only female primates living under male supremacy. For example, chimpanzee females are also oppressed by males. Primatologists suggest that this is because they need so much resources for their own children that they can't form close alliances with each other. Adult females with children live geographically a bit apart from each other: They need to use different feeding ranges to get enough food. Although some alliances between chimpanzee females have been observed in the wild, stable female alliances against male violence mostly rise among captive chimpansees.¹ Wild chimpanzee females in general can't afford to live that closely together. 

Human females might have been oppressed for the same reason: Since every female was occupied with feeding her own children in her own household, women couldn't get close enough to each other to form alliances against male oppression. Not until a substantial share of them left their own households to work together at workplaces all day long. Female emancipation coincided in time and space with the rise of industrial society. It seems like human female alliances can only arise in the captivity of high-tech industrial society. Otherwise, every woman is too busy feeding her own children in her own household.

When increasing numbers of females left their family units and started working close to each other, they could finally create a basic alliance against oppression. The success of that alliance was greatly helped by the fact that males had much smaller incentives to oppress women than before. As long as males wanted many children, they needed someone to bear and care for those children. But (as I wrote in my post Why fertility inevitably shrinks in successful market economies), after people with small families gained more and more advantages in the competition for social status in the 20th century, demand for children plummeted. Men could afford to set their child-producers free, because they didn't want that many of their products anyway. 

Just an ape alliance

The feminism of today is nothing less than the very first large-scale female alliance in history. After millennia of being too isolated to unite against the physically stronger males, females finally formed a coalition that successfully defends their rights.

No wonder this very first female alliance is crude and unsophisticated. Basically, it builds on one rule: Female good - male bad. Females are supposed to support each other just for being female. Mainstream feminism says that whenever there is a conflict between males and females, or between females and any other part of society, females should always take each other's side. It is not like all feminists strived for this. For generations, many intelligent women put quite a bit of effort into thinking of the best way possible of being female. But ultimately they didn't win. Instead, the simplest and most inclusive strain of feminism did, because it could gather the maximum number of adherents.

The explicit lack of higher ideals in this alliance is demonstrated in the taboo against criticizing female lifestyle choices. “You are criticizing women's own choices” is seen as an argument strong enough to kill every discussion. There is no corresponding phrase on the male side. No one says “you are criticizing men's own choices” in a voice of disapproval. That is not an argument, because there is no alliance between men that says that men must always support each other. But there is an alliance between women saying that women must support each other, regardless of how much they secretly dislike each other's choices.

This broad agreement of unconditional support is a very crude form of alliance. Fundamentally, it is not much more advanced than the alliances bonobo females form against males of their species. Contrary to their chimpanzee cousins, the bonobos are not male dominated. Probably due to the higher nutritious value of the forest where the bonobos reside, bonobo females can afford to spend time close to each other. They form alliances and gang up with each other against the physically stronger males. Not because they share any special ideals or ideology (after all, they are apes), but because they have some interests in common by nature. Female bonobos form coalitions of self-interested animals. Human females adhering to mainstream feminism do the same: they form a coalition of creatures that, by nature, have similar interests.

Above the baseline

The only reason a large-scale alliance with such terms can exist at all within a civilization, is that female nature is rather timid compared to male nature. Male nature includes raping women and killing rivals. Not all males are prone to such behavior. But many enough are that without laws and codes of honor, killers and rapists will rule the world of men, and others will have to bend to them. 

The antisocial sides of female nature are more diffuse. Females have a tendency to prioritize their own children above society at large to a higher extent than males. They also have a tendency to engage in social exclusion of individuals that stand out in any sense.² Not all females are prone to this kind of behavior. But many enough are that they tend to form reality in female-dominated areas. 

This kind of behavior doesn't immediately cause mayhem the same way that male vices do. But it may nonetheless contribute to eroding society little by little, making it dwindle until it gets overrun by other societies where people are better at cooperating. A society burdened with typically female vices could get just as uncompetitive as a society burdened with male vices. This might be what we are seeing right now: For the first time in history, entire cultural spheres are losing pace because antisocial aspects of female nature as well as male nature are too freely expressed. Woke is the classical example of a heavily female-led toxic movement. But there are also less obvious expressions of toxic femininity, like a lack of excellence in female-heavy fields due to unwillingness to accept any competition between females. 

Until the last century, cultural evolution stood predominantly between different ways of negotiating with male nature. At last, expressions of female nature are becoming an important part of cultural evolution too. 

Let evolution begin! 

That is, in itself, a step forward for human culture. In general, a society that negotiates with human nature is more efficient than a society that most of all represses human nature. A society that negotiates with both male and female nature is more promising than a society that negotiates with male nature and represses female nature. 

Sadly, we haven't seen much of that kind of society yet. The general alliance of females against males was a first step on the road towards it. In order to start negotiating with their own nature the way males have been doing for millennia, females first of all need to be free from oppression from males. But freedom from oppression is only a very first step. What matters is to use that freedom to rise above nature. Otherwise, that freedom can't be upheld in the long term. Almost all groups of emancipated females have birth rates below replacement rate. As things are, non-emancipated females are outcompeting emancipated females.

In very simple societies, men also form alliances based on biology. They form men's societies into which all teenage boys are initiated, and keep their rituals secret from women. But even those alliances are more advanced than present-day mainstream feminism, because although they welcome all adult men, they only do so on the condition of showing bravery: Even there, only being a biological man is not enough. Subsequently, such inclusive, simple alliances of men have been outcompeted by more differentiated alliances with more complex codes of honor. 

All over the world, alliances built on codes of honor are wildly more efficient than those that are built solely, or mostly, on biology. The reason is simple: Everybody has biology. Codes of honor are extras, on top of biology. The female side is no exception from those laws. In a world of evolution, groups of females governed by codes of honor will be more successful than groups of females uniting only on the basis of biology. 

Hitherto, the only pervasive codes of honor that exist for females are those developed under male rule. Rules on female chastity, fidelity and domesticity have only been developed in societies governed by males. In the absence of female-developed codes of honor for the female side, the human race will revert to male-developed codes of honor. Not because those codes of honor are perfect or even especially pleasant, but simply because most children will be born to mothers following such codes of honor. 

The human race will be governed by groups of people who aim higher than human nature. Those groups might be dominated by males, females or both. Whoever aims higher than nature, in its male, female and human forms, stands a chance of inheriting The Earth. 

1. Richard Wrangham, Demonic Males, 1997, page 226-227

2. Joyce Benenson, Warriors and Worriers, 2014