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.
Not sure it is the first time in history for feminisation to have destructive social consequences: here is Sir John Glubb in ‘The Fate of Empires’:
“An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. ‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone.’ Many women practised law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded.
Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed.”
Very interesting! My spontaneous reaction is that it could have something to do with demographics. When overpopulation hits, there especially are too many women. Women, after all, make people, so the less demand for new people, the less demand for wives. As Marcia Guttentag observed in Too Many Women, it is when there is a surplus of women that feminist movements tend to arise: Women raise demands to enter professions because they have nowhere else to go. So I expect that feminist movement could be a symptom as much as a cause of crises.
One could argue that cultural evolution standing predominantly between different ways of negotiating with male nature, as has forever been the rule, has served humanity, men and women, well. What is the urgency of developing ways of negotiating with female nature?
1. Right now female nature is making quite an impression on society. Here and now, male supremacy is not an alternative.
2. Gender oppression isn't ideal. If nothing else, it is easy to see that it is a waste of resources. There is no gender unequal society that I personally like in particular.
The comparison with chimpanzees is interesting. There it makes sense that the females have a harder time cooperating, given their geographic dispersion. But humans were not like that, we lived closely together in tribes and bands. In that sense we were much closer to the Bonobo.
Most hunter-gatherer bands did not have the concept of a "household" at all, everything was shared within the band. It would be interesting to inquire if, and if not, why not, this did not end up in bonobo-style cooporation between the women of the band.
>>Most hunter-gatherer bands did not have the concept of a "household" at all, everything was shared within the band.
Richard Wrangham would disagree. In his 2009 book Catching Fire - How Cooking Made us Human, he points out that only the goods acquired by men tend to be shared among hunter-gatherers. Marriage was about acces to gathered food as well as sexual access, he writes.
This obviously changed as groups got bigger, but for when we were living in bands, sharing everything was the only real defense against seasonal shortages:
> Richard Lee described that solution from his own experience with the !Kung of Africa's Kalahari Desert, but he was also generalizing for hunter-gatherers of all continents and all environments when he wrote: "Food is never consumed alone by a family; it is always (actually or potentially) shared out with members of a living group or band of up to 30 (or more) members. Even though only a fraction of the able-bodied foragers go out each day, the day's returns of meat and gathered foods are divided in such a way that every member of the camp receives an equitable share. The hunting band or camp is a unit of sharing." - Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday, p 301
This is even more pronounced when it comes to starvation, where they observe a Musketeer-like all-for-one
> Compared to accidents, violence, and disease, which are frequently recognized and mentioned as causes of death in traditional societies, death due to starvation as witnessed by Wollaston receives much less mention. When it does occur, it is likely to involve mass deaths, because people in small-scale societies share food, so that either no one starves or else many people do simultaneously.- p 299
And in some societies, this principle did apply to sexual access as well. To quote William H. Crocker in "The Canela: Kinship, Ritual and Sex in an Amazonian Tribe":
> It is difficult for members of a modern individualistic society to imagine the extent to which the Canela saw the group and the tribe as more important than the individual. Generosity and sharing was the ideal, while withholding was a social evil. Sharing possessions brought esteem. Sharing one's body was a direct corollary. Desiring control over one's goods and self was a form of stinginess. In this context, it is easy to understand why women chose to please men and why men chose to please women who expressed strong sexual needs. No one was so self-important that satisfying a fellow tribesman was less gratifying than personal gain. - p 125
This is interesting as I hadn't considered that female 'society' might be less evolved than that of males. However, I was impressed by your post /violent enough to stand still/ (if that was the one about hunter gatherer males putting all available resources in to (individually) fighting over women).
Could the rules of womens team 'sports' serve as a template for increasing the complexity of women's society? While some sports like football seem to use the same rules as the men's game other sports are very different. Say, synchronised swimming with its apparently far less socially complex rules (no within team role specialisation).
I think sports in general can serve as a template for more complex societies. Sports have formal rules to make competitions healthier. Complex societies also have such formal rules, for the same reason: To turn competition into something constructive.
In today's society, competition between women have no rules. Everything is allowed as long as no rules from the more evolved society shared by men are violated. Unsurprisingly, competition between women is very unconstructive.
I know I know I'm so late to this here but reading this comment about women's sports made me think of two findings I've heard explained on podcasts lately.
1 - male NBA players on OPPOSING teams offer each other more physical signs of encouragement, i.e. shoulder taps, high fives, fist pumps, pats on the backside etc than female team-mates do
2 - In male team sports there are umpteen examples of transcendent players who are head and shoulders better than their team-mates. Messi, Ronaldo, Pele, Maradona, from the US currently someone like Shohei Ohtani. Yet their team-mates do not resent them. There are no such equivalent figures in female team sport. Everyone is just about as able as everyone else.
I do not know what these things denote, but they seem interesting and germane.
I don't believe in developing "female developed codes of honor for the female side".
The "male developed codes of honor for the male side" are all an evolution of the "fair fight" concept, which itself has evolutionary roots (well described here: https://www.hbes.com/the-evolutionary-origins-of-fair-fights/ ): fighting or competing in order to demonstrate strength and dominance, rather than just defeating the opponent in the most effective way. "Fair fights" evolved to serve a purpose in an already existing system of male alliances based on status, dominance and prestige. I just don't see a way of anything equivalent developing on the female side, at least anytime soon.
>>The "male developed codes of honor for the male side" are all an evolution of the "fair fight" concept, which itself has evolutionary roots
Yes! That is a very good point. Men have developed rules for how to compete. From “fair fights” as described in the article you linked to full-blown market mechanisms. Men have evolved ways of competing that are less destructive, or even constructive for the ingroup.
I think females need to do the same thing: Evolve ways to compete that are less destructive. Women compete over the best men. Currently, there are almost no rules for that competition. Plastic surgery, make-up, no-strings-attached sex… everything is allowed. Which makes the competition a race to the bottom. Without fairness rules, men's competitions would be races to the bottom too. Men have evolved ways to avoid the worst traps of mutual destruction and women will have to do that too.
But I have to admit that I have few clues for how to get started with it in practical life.
Again, I think there is no incentive or mechanism for females to evolve or develop female equivalents of fair fights and rules of honor.
The male rules evolved in an environment in which groups of men had to compete with other groups of men. This resulted in differences between in-group and out-group dynamics as noted in a comment by Bazza above and heavily described in evolutionary psychology. What males have figured out long time ago is that hierarchical structures based on status, dominance and prestige are a more scalable, sustainable and effective way to build bigger, more powerful in-groups that would dominate other out-groups more easily.
There is no equivalent on the female side - groups of women competing with other groups of women was not, is not, and will not be a defining feature of the human society. The "no rules" / "race to the bottom" female intrasexual competition you described results in the fact that there are no female in-groups - for a woman, all other females are members of the out-group they need to compete with in a vicious way.
As noted by (female) evo psych Tania Reynolds ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIzghRqqbnQ ), women form groups and alliances, but the purpose is not to compete with other groups - they are essentially mutual non-aggression pacts providing the women in the group with some protection against aggression from individual women from outside the group. Therefore, female relationships are more egalitarian. If there is no hierarchy within the female in-group, there is no point in developing "fair fight" or "rules of honor" that would help to define which woman in the group is "stronger".
The article describes the first wave feminism as one big female in-group set up to compete with a big and powerful male out-group. Still, this does not support creation of "fair fights" and "rules of honor" as 1. the big female in-group is still egalitarian and not hierarchical and 2. this is intersexual competition, therefore not all rules of intrasexual competition would apply.
Sadly, your arguments are both very well-researched and logical.
If I understand you right, men have evolved a psychological preference for fair fighting. Women never evolved such a psychological preference, because they never needed to both fight and cooperate the way men did. For that reason, women lack the mental hardware to fight fairly.
Unfortunately, I suspect you are right. At least I have no good reason to assume that you are wrong. Humans might be mentally flexible enough for females to be able to pick up the concept of fair fighting. But they also might not.
Currently, human evolution primarily takes place through birth rates. Competition between females of different cultures is a reality. If you are right, females are deemed to be totally hapless in this game. If we can't say to each other “let's compete constructively, girls!”, then we will be outcompeted by women herded by men. Gender equality will just be a blip in history. It is entirely possible that this is the way it will be.
Thank you for being possibly the first person in the history of internet to politely concede in a discussion in a comment thread.
I am not sure if women are fully hapless in this game. As you pointed out in the article, this may need just a little more effort in going "against human nature" and against the lack of environment that requires female groups that compete with each other (maybe this could be engineered somehow) to build a better culture and society. One way of doing this would be to somehow combine feminism with appealing to men and high fertility to make sure feminism somehow survives.
If not, ultimately the artificial wombs will free women from pregnancy and childbirth, which in my opinion is the only way true gender equality can be achieved. The technology is already available (they have already grown lambs this way), it just needs to become ethically acceptable.
>>Thank you for being possibly the first person in the history of internet to politely concede in a discussion in a comment thread.
Ha ha, I don't thrive in the wild: The general internet is far too rough for weak fighters like me. I had to start a blog in order to dare to comment anywhere at all.
>>One way of doing this would be to somehow combine feminism with appealing to men and high fertility to make sure feminism somehow survives.
Certainly a tricky task. I think we should start today. Most of all, feminism would need to shift from making women appealing to men in the short term to being appealing in the long term. Feminists would have to stop focusing on looking better than other women and start focusing on being good companions.
>>If not, ultimately the artificial wombs will free women from pregnancy and childbirth, which in my opinion is the only way true gender equality can be achieved.
Artificial wombs are a very interesting idea. I'm not as technology optimistic as you are. Making babies is a messy pursuit and I wouldn't be surprised if women's bodies are needed for it for all the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, you are right in principle, and there is a technology that functions as a light-version of artificial wombs: Infant formula. It has been extensively tried and tested and shown not to produce lower-quality babies https://open.substack.com/pub/woodfromeden/p/sweden-is-smarter-than-france-or?r=rd1ej&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web (Emily Oster has written very good articles about it, but her quality writings are a bit difficult to find)
I guess it is a sign of weakness of our society that we can't even adopt that simple and reliable technology in the name of gender equality. Anders and I have raised six children on infant formula and it has been an important way for us to cooperate more equally and rationally.
Some would argue that ours is the Age of Female Codes. An idea that has been growing in salience recently is that the 'feminisation' of Western society - though necessary to some extent - has now OVERSHOT in the 21st c. West. Viewed this way it should not be so surprising if this has led to some souring of young men on the idea of 'Progress'. There has even been an acknowledgement of this amongst some well known dissident feminists..... as I have written about here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance. Snippets:...".....recently - in a certain kind of feminist journalism - I keep coming across warm-hearted acknowledgements that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life.........As an armchair philosopher it has always seemed to me that the question of steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all. But it’s fair to say that masculinity has not had a good press in recent decades. As journalist Kathleen Stock (* see bio note below) remarked recently “Men are pretty much banned from making any generalisations about women good or bad......"
"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. As long as every man strives for numerous women for himself, unrelated men will always be in fundamental conflict with each other."
And yet, unrelated males are not in conflict as much as unrelated females are:
Benenson, J. F., & Christakos, A. (2003). The greater fragility of females' versus males' closest same‐sex friendships. Child development, 74(4), 1123-1129.
"Based on prior studies, it was hypothesized that females’ closest same-sex friendships would be more fragile than those of males. Analyses... demonstrated that females’ current friendships were of a shorter duration, that females were more distressed than males when imagining the potential termination of their friendships, that more females’ than males’ friends already had done something to hurt the friendship, and that females had more former friendships that had ended than males had."
It's almost as though females are constantly competing in a zero sum game of reproductive greed, while men cooperate in a non-zero sum game with a bountiful external universe.
Why do you assume that human male nature is to have many breeding partners? Quite a few animal species mate for life with one other partner, or mate for life and screw around on the side. The assumption is a bit of a problem here because a lot of the argument seems to ride on it.
Sexual dimorphism with bigger males is an indicator of polygyny in a species. Humans have lower sexual dimorphism than elephant seals but still quite high
It is an indicator, but it is not 100% certainly. There is a lot of room for oddities there, and humans are pretty damned odd on many margins.
Plus there are a lot of points between "one male, one female" and "one male, all the females" in the animal kingdom. "One male, one female, and both shuck some side corn here and again" is also quite popular.
Agreed; humans are only mildly polygynous. Even in societies where polygyny is legal - which are in the minority - have more monogamous and promiscuous parings than polygynous ones.
Not all men. There clearly are men with inclinations toward both monogamy and polygamy. But even if the latter constitute a rather small minority, they will still cause problems for those who prefer to pair with one woman.
I think that needs to be shown, especially that they cause such a problem that societies erect institutions to sublimate human nature in order to achieve that end. (Which, it seems apparent, they do not do too successfully, even in more advanced societies.)
Or look at it this way, your essay assumes that human nature is X and societies developed and were selected based on how well the society forces humans away from X towards Y. An alternate view that is consistent with the evidence is that human nature isn't X at all, but rather Y, and all societies tend to be like Y because that is human nature and not because the societies are subjugating human nature. In fact, that is the simpler explanation considering that almost all societies have a rough version "men have a low numbers of wives, wives have one husband, but they screw around secretly on the side," and of course all the issues around hidden ovulation and the like.
>>I think that needs to be shown, especially that they cause such a problem that societies erect institutions to sublimate human nature in order to achieve that end. (Which, it seems apparent, they do not do too successfully, even in more advanced societies.)
Isn't marriage an institution? At least one point of it seems to be for men to share the women between them.
>>Or look at it this way, your essay assumes that human nature is X and societies developed and were selected based on how well the society forces humans away from X towards Y. An alternate view that is consistent with the evidence is that human nature isn't X at all, but rather Y, and all societies tend to be like Y because that is human nature and not because the societies are subjugating human nature.
Human nature is x. Societies make it a, b, c, d, e… I
I mean, the definition of human nature is what can be perceived, or at least assumed, in all societies. If different societies end up to be fairly similar, that can have two reasons:
1. Human nature is difficult to overcome. For that reason, all societies are rather close human nature
2. One way of organizing society is so superior to others that the winning formula is the only thing we can see. Pacifism is one such example. I'm sure that many humans prefer to live peacefully. But since peaceful societies find it difficult to defend themselves, pacifist societies are nonetheless uncommon.
Surely human nature evolves through genetic selection of those members most fitted to a particular form of society.
For example, a society that becomes locally successful when it starts to consume other animal's milk in times of food scarcity selects for adult members who can tolerate milk sugars making it ever more successful (so long as the environment remains unchanged).
Marriage is an institution, yes. However your argument, lest we forget, is that the institutions are there to subjugate human nature. Yet marriage need not be subjugating human nature if our nature is to pair up with a single (or low number) of mates; marriage is then just our way of declaring "this other human is my mate."
That's my entire point, that your argument requires institutions and society that forces humans to act in a way contrary to their nature, but it is also at least equally consistent with observed reality that human nature is what we see, and societies and institutions are just the structures we build around that process. Blue footed boobies do little dances with their mates to solidify their bonds, we gather up our relatives, bore them for a while, then feed them to solidify ours. There is no a priori reason to assume we do our thing to force people to act counter to their nature while other species do their thing because it is their nature.
Your second point misses a third option: Human societies aren't about overcoming human nature, but are the product of human nature and must work within human nature. Those that attempt to ignore or change human nature, or force humans to behave contrary to their nature, tend to crash and burn horribly, as we have clearly seen over the last 50 years or so. But, so long as a society works within the bounds of human nature, lots of different versions can exist.
Perhaps you meant something similar to that with option 1, but your statement about "Human nature is x, Societies make it a, b, c,..." implies that you are still cleaving to the idea that societies work counter to human nature on some margins as their primary function. That is what needs to be shown.
No, actually, I think we agree, more or less. I don't think society subjugates human nature, really. I think it negotiates with human nature. Say, for example, that there are both human males who prefer to live peacefully in monogamous unions and human males who like to fight to conquer as many women as possible. In some societies, the first type of men have their way. In other societies, all men are supposed to fight for their right to as many women as possible. Both kinds of societies acknowledge aspects of human nature. The two societies are different because they acknowledge different aspects of human nature.
>>There is no a priori reason to assume we do our thing to force people to act counter to their nature while other species do their thing because it is their nature.
Definitely no a priori reason. The only reason to assume that humans are more flexible in relation to their nature compared to other animals is the comparatively vast variation between human societies.
I am not sure how to square society negotiating with human nature with this paragraph:
"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."
I also don't see how to square that paragraph with the notion that there are two entirely different natures of human males. If there are two different types you can't really say "Males are, by nature, reproductively greedy." Male nature has to include the nature of all males, or at least the vast majority.
And again, we are talking about marriage/mating patterns, which most human societies are not really all that different on. Certainly not "comparatively vast." So that doesn't give reason to assume that society is flexing against human nature as oppose to being the expression of human nature.
Was it really oppression that limited women or was it also (maybe partly) protection?
Not sure it is the first time in history for feminisation to have destructive social consequences: here is Sir John Glubb in ‘The Fate of Empires’:
“An increase in the influence of women in public life has often been associated with national decline. The later Romans complained that, although Rome ruled the world, women ruled Rome. In the tenth century, a similar tendency was observable in the Arab Empire, the women demanding admission to the professions hitherto monopolised by men. ‘What,’ wrote the contemporary historian, Ibn Bessam, ‘have the professions of clerk, tax-collector or preacher to do with women? These occupations have always been limited to men alone.’ Many women practised law, while others obtained posts as university professors. There was an agitation for the appointment of female judges, which, however, does not appear to have succeeded.
Soon after this period, government and public order collapsed, and foreign invaders overran the country. The resulting increase in confusion and violence made it unsafe for women to move unescorted in the streets, with the result that this feminist movement collapsed.”
Very interesting! My spontaneous reaction is that it could have something to do with demographics. When overpopulation hits, there especially are too many women. Women, after all, make people, so the less demand for new people, the less demand for wives. As Marcia Guttentag observed in Too Many Women, it is when there is a surplus of women that feminist movements tend to arise: Women raise demands to enter professions because they have nowhere else to go. So I expect that feminist movement could be a symptom as much as a cause of crises.
One could argue that cultural evolution standing predominantly between different ways of negotiating with male nature, as has forever been the rule, has served humanity, men and women, well. What is the urgency of developing ways of negotiating with female nature?
Two reasons:
1. Right now female nature is making quite an impression on society. Here and now, male supremacy is not an alternative.
2. Gender oppression isn't ideal. If nothing else, it is easy to see that it is a waste of resources. There is no gender unequal society that I personally like in particular.
The comparison with chimpanzees is interesting. There it makes sense that the females have a harder time cooperating, given their geographic dispersion. But humans were not like that, we lived closely together in tribes and bands. In that sense we were much closer to the Bonobo.
Most hunter-gatherer bands did not have the concept of a "household" at all, everything was shared within the band. It would be interesting to inquire if, and if not, why not, this did not end up in bonobo-style cooporation between the women of the band.
>>Most hunter-gatherer bands did not have the concept of a "household" at all, everything was shared within the band.
Richard Wrangham would disagree. In his 2009 book Catching Fire - How Cooking Made us Human, he points out that only the goods acquired by men tend to be shared among hunter-gatherers. Marriage was about acces to gathered food as well as sexual access, he writes.
This obviously changed as groups got bigger, but for when we were living in bands, sharing everything was the only real defense against seasonal shortages:
> Richard Lee described that solution from his own experience with the !Kung of Africa's Kalahari Desert, but he was also generalizing for hunter-gatherers of all continents and all environments when he wrote: "Food is never consumed alone by a family; it is always (actually or potentially) shared out with members of a living group or band of up to 30 (or more) members. Even though only a fraction of the able-bodied foragers go out each day, the day's returns of meat and gathered foods are divided in such a way that every member of the camp receives an equitable share. The hunting band or camp is a unit of sharing." - Jared Diamond, The World Until Yesterday, p 301
This is even more pronounced when it comes to starvation, where they observe a Musketeer-like all-for-one
> Compared to accidents, violence, and disease, which are frequently recognized and mentioned as causes of death in traditional societies, death due to starvation as witnessed by Wollaston receives much less mention. When it does occur, it is likely to involve mass deaths, because people in small-scale societies share food, so that either no one starves or else many people do simultaneously.- p 299
And in some societies, this principle did apply to sexual access as well. To quote William H. Crocker in "The Canela: Kinship, Ritual and Sex in an Amazonian Tribe":
> It is difficult for members of a modern individualistic society to imagine the extent to which the Canela saw the group and the tribe as more important than the individual. Generosity and sharing was the ideal, while withholding was a social evil. Sharing possessions brought esteem. Sharing one's body was a direct corollary. Desiring control over one's goods and self was a form of stinginess. In this context, it is easy to understand why women chose to please men and why men chose to please women who expressed strong sexual needs. No one was so self-important that satisfying a fellow tribesman was less gratifying than personal gain. - p 125
This is interesting as I hadn't considered that female 'society' might be less evolved than that of males. However, I was impressed by your post /violent enough to stand still/ (if that was the one about hunter gatherer males putting all available resources in to (individually) fighting over women).
Could the rules of womens team 'sports' serve as a template for increasing the complexity of women's society? While some sports like football seem to use the same rules as the men's game other sports are very different. Say, synchronised swimming with its apparently far less socially complex rules (no within team role specialisation).
I think sports in general can serve as a template for more complex societies. Sports have formal rules to make competitions healthier. Complex societies also have such formal rules, for the same reason: To turn competition into something constructive.
In today's society, competition between women have no rules. Everything is allowed as long as no rules from the more evolved society shared by men are violated. Unsurprisingly, competition between women is very unconstructive.
I know I know I'm so late to this here but reading this comment about women's sports made me think of two findings I've heard explained on podcasts lately.
1 - male NBA players on OPPOSING teams offer each other more physical signs of encouragement, i.e. shoulder taps, high fives, fist pumps, pats on the backside etc than female team-mates do
2 - In male team sports there are umpteen examples of transcendent players who are head and shoulders better than their team-mates. Messi, Ronaldo, Pele, Maradona, from the US currently someone like Shohei Ohtani. Yet their team-mates do not resent them. There are no such equivalent figures in female team sport. Everyone is just about as able as everyone else.
I do not know what these things denote, but they seem interesting and germane.
I don't believe in developing "female developed codes of honor for the female side".
The "male developed codes of honor for the male side" are all an evolution of the "fair fight" concept, which itself has evolutionary roots (well described here: https://www.hbes.com/the-evolutionary-origins-of-fair-fights/ ): fighting or competing in order to demonstrate strength and dominance, rather than just defeating the opponent in the most effective way. "Fair fights" evolved to serve a purpose in an already existing system of male alliances based on status, dominance and prestige. I just don't see a way of anything equivalent developing on the female side, at least anytime soon.
Is this why 'fighting fair' within the in-group is important ie its a low damage way to establish hierarchy,
while 'anything goes' (genocide) when fighting with an out-group over resources?
>>The "male developed codes of honor for the male side" are all an evolution of the "fair fight" concept, which itself has evolutionary roots
Yes! That is a very good point. Men have developed rules for how to compete. From “fair fights” as described in the article you linked to full-blown market mechanisms. Men have evolved ways of competing that are less destructive, or even constructive for the ingroup.
I think females need to do the same thing: Evolve ways to compete that are less destructive. Women compete over the best men. Currently, there are almost no rules for that competition. Plastic surgery, make-up, no-strings-attached sex… everything is allowed. Which makes the competition a race to the bottom. Without fairness rules, men's competitions would be races to the bottom too. Men have evolved ways to avoid the worst traps of mutual destruction and women will have to do that too.
But I have to admit that I have few clues for how to get started with it in practical life.
Again, I think there is no incentive or mechanism for females to evolve or develop female equivalents of fair fights and rules of honor.
The male rules evolved in an environment in which groups of men had to compete with other groups of men. This resulted in differences between in-group and out-group dynamics as noted in a comment by Bazza above and heavily described in evolutionary psychology. What males have figured out long time ago is that hierarchical structures based on status, dominance and prestige are a more scalable, sustainable and effective way to build bigger, more powerful in-groups that would dominate other out-groups more easily.
There is no equivalent on the female side - groups of women competing with other groups of women was not, is not, and will not be a defining feature of the human society. The "no rules" / "race to the bottom" female intrasexual competition you described results in the fact that there are no female in-groups - for a woman, all other females are members of the out-group they need to compete with in a vicious way.
As noted by (female) evo psych Tania Reynolds ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aIzghRqqbnQ ), women form groups and alliances, but the purpose is not to compete with other groups - they are essentially mutual non-aggression pacts providing the women in the group with some protection against aggression from individual women from outside the group. Therefore, female relationships are more egalitarian. If there is no hierarchy within the female in-group, there is no point in developing "fair fight" or "rules of honor" that would help to define which woman in the group is "stronger".
The article describes the first wave feminism as one big female in-group set up to compete with a big and powerful male out-group. Still, this does not support creation of "fair fights" and "rules of honor" as 1. the big female in-group is still egalitarian and not hierarchical and 2. this is intersexual competition, therefore not all rules of intrasexual competition would apply.
Sadly, your arguments are both very well-researched and logical.
If I understand you right, men have evolved a psychological preference for fair fighting. Women never evolved such a psychological preference, because they never needed to both fight and cooperate the way men did. For that reason, women lack the mental hardware to fight fairly.
Unfortunately, I suspect you are right. At least I have no good reason to assume that you are wrong. Humans might be mentally flexible enough for females to be able to pick up the concept of fair fighting. But they also might not.
Currently, human evolution primarily takes place through birth rates. Competition between females of different cultures is a reality. If you are right, females are deemed to be totally hapless in this game. If we can't say to each other “let's compete constructively, girls!”, then we will be outcompeted by women herded by men. Gender equality will just be a blip in history. It is entirely possible that this is the way it will be.
Thank you for being possibly the first person in the history of internet to politely concede in a discussion in a comment thread.
I am not sure if women are fully hapless in this game. As you pointed out in the article, this may need just a little more effort in going "against human nature" and against the lack of environment that requires female groups that compete with each other (maybe this could be engineered somehow) to build a better culture and society. One way of doing this would be to somehow combine feminism with appealing to men and high fertility to make sure feminism somehow survives.
If not, ultimately the artificial wombs will free women from pregnancy and childbirth, which in my opinion is the only way true gender equality can be achieved. The technology is already available (they have already grown lambs this way), it just needs to become ethically acceptable.
>>Thank you for being possibly the first person in the history of internet to politely concede in a discussion in a comment thread.
Ha ha, I don't thrive in the wild: The general internet is far too rough for weak fighters like me. I had to start a blog in order to dare to comment anywhere at all.
>>One way of doing this would be to somehow combine feminism with appealing to men and high fertility to make sure feminism somehow survives.
Certainly a tricky task. I think we should start today. Most of all, feminism would need to shift from making women appealing to men in the short term to being appealing in the long term. Feminists would have to stop focusing on looking better than other women and start focusing on being good companions.
>>If not, ultimately the artificial wombs will free women from pregnancy and childbirth, which in my opinion is the only way true gender equality can be achieved.
Artificial wombs are a very interesting idea. I'm not as technology optimistic as you are. Making babies is a messy pursuit and I wouldn't be surprised if women's bodies are needed for it for all the foreseeable future. Nonetheless, you are right in principle, and there is a technology that functions as a light-version of artificial wombs: Infant formula. It has been extensively tried and tested and shown not to produce lower-quality babies https://open.substack.com/pub/woodfromeden/p/sweden-is-smarter-than-france-or?r=rd1ej&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web (Emily Oster has written very good articles about it, but her quality writings are a bit difficult to find)
I guess it is a sign of weakness of our society that we can't even adopt that simple and reliable technology in the name of gender equality. Anders and I have raised six children on infant formula and it has been an important way for us to cooperate more equally and rationally.
Some would argue that ours is the Age of Female Codes. An idea that has been growing in salience recently is that the 'feminisation' of Western society - though necessary to some extent - has now OVERSHOT in the 21st c. West. Viewed this way it should not be so surprising if this has led to some souring of young men on the idea of 'Progress'. There has even been an acknowledgement of this amongst some well known dissident feminists..... as I have written about here: https://grahamcunningham.substack.com/p/shall-we-dance. Snippets:...".....recently - in a certain kind of feminist journalism - I keep coming across warm-hearted acknowledgements that Masculinity and Femininity are complementary polarities in any sane conception of The Good Life.........As an armchair philosopher it has always seemed to me that the question of steering a fair course through the choppy waters of discourses about relations between men and women is the trickiest of all. But it’s fair to say that masculinity has not had a good press in recent decades. As journalist Kathleen Stock (* see bio note below) remarked recently “Men are pretty much banned from making any generalisations about women good or bad......"
"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. As long as every man strives for numerous women for himself, unrelated men will always be in fundamental conflict with each other."
And yet, unrelated males are not in conflict as much as unrelated females are:
Benenson, J. F., & Christakos, A. (2003). The greater fragility of females' versus males' closest same‐sex friendships. Child development, 74(4), 1123-1129.
"Based on prior studies, it was hypothesized that females’ closest same-sex friendships would be more fragile than those of males. Analyses... demonstrated that females’ current friendships were of a shorter duration, that females were more distressed than males when imagining the potential termination of their friendships, that more females’ than males’ friends already had done something to hurt the friendship, and that females had more former friendships that had ended than males had."
It's almost as though females are constantly competing in a zero sum game of reproductive greed, while men cooperate in a non-zero sum game with a bountiful external universe.
That is a very good point. Humans are reproductively greedy by nature. All living creature on Earth are, except maybe eusocial insects.
Why do you assume that human male nature is to have many breeding partners? Quite a few animal species mate for life with one other partner, or mate for life and screw around on the side. The assumption is a bit of a problem here because a lot of the argument seems to ride on it.
Sexual dimorphism with bigger males is an indicator of polygyny in a species. Humans have lower sexual dimorphism than elephant seals but still quite high
It is an indicator, but it is not 100% certainly. There is a lot of room for oddities there, and humans are pretty damned odd on many margins.
Plus there are a lot of points between "one male, one female" and "one male, all the females" in the animal kingdom. "One male, one female, and both shuck some side corn here and again" is also quite popular.
Agreed; humans are only mildly polygynous. Even in societies where polygyny is legal - which are in the minority - have more monogamous and promiscuous parings than polygynous ones.
Not all men. There clearly are men with inclinations toward both monogamy and polygamy. But even if the latter constitute a rather small minority, they will still cause problems for those who prefer to pair with one woman.
I think that needs to be shown, especially that they cause such a problem that societies erect institutions to sublimate human nature in order to achieve that end. (Which, it seems apparent, they do not do too successfully, even in more advanced societies.)
Or look at it this way, your essay assumes that human nature is X and societies developed and were selected based on how well the society forces humans away from X towards Y. An alternate view that is consistent with the evidence is that human nature isn't X at all, but rather Y, and all societies tend to be like Y because that is human nature and not because the societies are subjugating human nature. In fact, that is the simpler explanation considering that almost all societies have a rough version "men have a low numbers of wives, wives have one husband, but they screw around secretly on the side," and of course all the issues around hidden ovulation and the like.
>>I think that needs to be shown, especially that they cause such a problem that societies erect institutions to sublimate human nature in order to achieve that end. (Which, it seems apparent, they do not do too successfully, even in more advanced societies.)
Isn't marriage an institution? At least one point of it seems to be for men to share the women between them.
>>Or look at it this way, your essay assumes that human nature is X and societies developed and were selected based on how well the society forces humans away from X towards Y. An alternate view that is consistent with the evidence is that human nature isn't X at all, but rather Y, and all societies tend to be like Y because that is human nature and not because the societies are subjugating human nature.
Human nature is x. Societies make it a, b, c, d, e… I
I mean, the definition of human nature is what can be perceived, or at least assumed, in all societies. If different societies end up to be fairly similar, that can have two reasons:
1. Human nature is difficult to overcome. For that reason, all societies are rather close human nature
2. One way of organizing society is so superior to others that the winning formula is the only thing we can see. Pacifism is one such example. I'm sure that many humans prefer to live peacefully. But since peaceful societies find it difficult to defend themselves, pacifist societies are nonetheless uncommon.
Surely human nature evolves through genetic selection of those members most fitted to a particular form of society.
For example, a society that becomes locally successful when it starts to consume other animal's milk in times of food scarcity selects for adult members who can tolerate milk sugars making it ever more successful (so long as the environment remains unchanged).
Marriage is an institution, yes. However your argument, lest we forget, is that the institutions are there to subjugate human nature. Yet marriage need not be subjugating human nature if our nature is to pair up with a single (or low number) of mates; marriage is then just our way of declaring "this other human is my mate."
That's my entire point, that your argument requires institutions and society that forces humans to act in a way contrary to their nature, but it is also at least equally consistent with observed reality that human nature is what we see, and societies and institutions are just the structures we build around that process. Blue footed boobies do little dances with their mates to solidify their bonds, we gather up our relatives, bore them for a while, then feed them to solidify ours. There is no a priori reason to assume we do our thing to force people to act counter to their nature while other species do their thing because it is their nature.
Your second point misses a third option: Human societies aren't about overcoming human nature, but are the product of human nature and must work within human nature. Those that attempt to ignore or change human nature, or force humans to behave contrary to their nature, tend to crash and burn horribly, as we have clearly seen over the last 50 years or so. But, so long as a society works within the bounds of human nature, lots of different versions can exist.
Perhaps you meant something similar to that with option 1, but your statement about "Human nature is x, Societies make it a, b, c,..." implies that you are still cleaving to the idea that societies work counter to human nature on some margins as their primary function. That is what needs to be shown.
No, actually, I think we agree, more or less. I don't think society subjugates human nature, really. I think it negotiates with human nature. Say, for example, that there are both human males who prefer to live peacefully in monogamous unions and human males who like to fight to conquer as many women as possible. In some societies, the first type of men have their way. In other societies, all men are supposed to fight for their right to as many women as possible. Both kinds of societies acknowledge aspects of human nature. The two societies are different because they acknowledge different aspects of human nature.
>>There is no a priori reason to assume we do our thing to force people to act counter to their nature while other species do their thing because it is their nature.
Definitely no a priori reason. The only reason to assume that humans are more flexible in relation to their nature compared to other animals is the comparatively vast variation between human societies.
Following on from my other comments. The diversity of human societies reflects the diversity of environments that we have established ourselves in.
Humans are using society to adapt to the local environment eg polyandry in parts of extremely resource poor Tibet etc etc
I am not sure how to square society negotiating with human nature with this paragraph:
"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."
I also don't see how to square that paragraph with the notion that there are two entirely different natures of human males. If there are two different types you can't really say "Males are, by nature, reproductively greedy." Male nature has to include the nature of all males, or at least the vast majority.
And again, we are talking about marriage/mating patterns, which most human societies are not really all that different on. Certainly not "comparatively vast." So that doesn't give reason to assume that society is flexing against human nature as oppose to being the expression of human nature.