Data indicates that women are inclined towards violent pornography, violent sexual fantasies and real-life sexual domination. In our ape ancestors, such preferences probably made sense.
My limited experience with women (one or two girlfriends, one wife, daughters) is consistent with your description of female sexuality.
Perhaps your post underrates the role of 'white knight' in woman's sexuality?
How does this fit with Richard Wrangham's hypothesis that humans socially evolved away from the other apes when coalitions of (2ndry?) males came together to displace a singular alpha male within a breeding group?
In your earlier post suggesting prehistoric people spent their spare resources fighting for (other people's?) women I don't recall you mentioning stats on the survival of a women's children after she was captured by another band.
If women with children (ie mature rather than virgin women) were often arbitrarily 'exchanged' between violent men it likely would encourage selection for a certain female disposition (emotional resilience) tolerant of grief over loss of children and/or loss of previous (sexual) relationship.
My post doesn't reach the white knights (whose existence and importance I do not doubt). It stops five million years ago. Many things happened since then. I guess I should hurry up a bit and write some posts about that time span.
Unfortunately, I don't have stats on the survival of children of captured women. I only have anecdotes. The Yanomamö observed by Napoleon Chagnon let children live, with only one exception I can remember (a captured boy about ten was killed a year after the capture by a man feeling uneasy and suspicious about him). I don't know why. Maybe as a perk to the women, to make them like their new masters better. Maybe because boys and girls were always a resource as future warriors and wives. Elena Valero, a white girl captured by the Yanomamö some decades before Chagnon met them reports that she witnessed a case of infanticide. A man grabbed a baby boy, the boy's mother tried to trick him that he was the boy's father. He thought for a moment, deemed it impossible and killed the baby.
I have also thought about the thing you mention: Evolution might have weeded out the most loyal women. Mating with the murders or oppressors of one's kin was reality for many women of certain generations. Not the least for the ancestors of Europeans, who experienced the Indo-European invasion. Genetic evidence shows that in most places, there is much more Indo-European ancestry in Y-chromosomes than in the gene pool at large. Which means that more indigenous men than women of certain generations were blocked from mating. It is a very interesting question how that might have affected the psychology of women.
Time to hurry up and sketch the other parts, I guess. A subject like this one rightfully deserves a book. I'm going to write one as soon as a literary agent turns up here and exclaims "I want you!".
>>But also the romance literature features its fair share of sexual violence, or did before political correctness sanitized away much of that
From what I have seen, romance novels have moved to a self-publishing model on Amazon and other venues, though, so I'd think that if women want to write romance novels featuring rape, and other women want to read it, they should be able to do so without woke church ladies stopping them.
>>(Here it goes: 80% of agents/editors/publishers are white women from a certain background and sensibility; these woke ladies run the industry. And contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate the Brooklyn ladies. On the contrary, I respect how these passive aggressive prude ladies took over an industry. Tip of the hat, Brooklyn ladies.
>>Everyone knows these ladies took over, of course)
Yes. If it weren't for those self publishing forums, Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn't have existed: No publishing house would have bet on an author who writes as badly as E L James, I guess. But when women showed that they actually don't care about good writing, she got a fat contract. I haven't read any self-published romance books because they are too long. But I know that if a modern woman wants to write and read violent pornographic fiction, the internet offers plenty of opportunities.
Maybe it will... but the gatekeepers appear to be dying, and the gates are open, and the barbarians in the castle... political correctness may hasten readers + writers fleeing...
Really well done with this one, Tove! Very well researched. I have a draft post that actually connects this to another post of yours, but I was frankly hoping to avoid opening this can of worms; it's the kind of topic a man looks totally chauvinistic even bringing up. Now that it's topical though, I'm having trouble even commenting coherently on your own article here - I'm too sleep deprived to say more than just "See, women are (still) ambivalent"
I guess a can of worms is a can of worms whoever opens it. Being a suitable opener helps, but finding the right location for opening is crucial. For a long time I imagined my studies of female sexuality as a feminist venture. But in reality I never found a corner of feminism where it could even remotely fit in.
Now that I have time for a better comment, I wanted to point out that there isn't necessarily anything to be explained here.
Males are larger, stronger, more dominant, and more highly sexed on average, leaving females smaller, weaker, more submissive, and less sexual on average, particularly given that females pay almost all of the costs of sex, and are extremely vulnerable during pregnancy. So it isn't necessarily surprising if men are also more dominant and women are more submissive sexually. Nor is it necessarily surprising if females don't like hook-ups and aren't as aroused as males. We are already able to explain these features of the human sexual dynamic without needing to appeal to ancient ancestry.
That said, I still agree with your analysis for multiple reasons: 1. Humans *did* descend from other primates, so we should naturally expect to see shared features, 2. the female response to scenarios of rape and humiliation is striking, and 3. this thing that I Will Have More To Say About At A Later Date (preferably next week, after I've hopefully managed to get enough sleep)
Last of all, it feels too bad that you want to integrate this kind of thing into a feminist outlook. I don't really think it can work. There are many things about evolution that do support a leftist reading: There's no evidence for a loving God underlying our psychology or anatomy, cultures and species differ radically from one another in a way which undermines the idea that our current way is a timeless right way, our closest relatives are highly sexually promiscuous which calls monogamy into question, and so on. But to me, the unfolding story about human males and females looks profoundly anti-feminist. This is the arena where conservatives would be at their best; they simply haven't started to fight here because they have little interest in the sciences that would support their values.
I definitely agree that female physical weakness can explain why women don't like hook-ups as much as men. I actually think the security aspect explains quite a bit of the hook-up gap. But I can't see why physical weakness would make women prefer men that treat them ungently.
Females of apes and monkeys are also often physically weak compared to males. Some of them still have a very high sexual drive. Being physically weak and having a strong sexual drive are not mutually exclusive (although it probably was under human patriarchy)
I'm probably living in the past, but I never saw feminism as something left wing. I just thought it was a project aiming at increasing gender equality. And in that sense I still think that studying the female side of evolutionary psychology is feminist. If men have the right to seek self-knowledge, women should have that right too.
So now that I have time, I'll add that I probably don't really know what feminism is to you. My sense is that the point of feminism has been to redress inequalities and improve the flourishing of women, whereas what I now understand suggests that women are basically where they want/will be, while young males are actually the ones who have things the worst.
I never really understood was feminism was and now it has developed into something far beyond my comprehension.
But I don't think women are where they want to be. I think they just have lost the means to express their dissatisfaction in any comprehensible way. Saying "Hey, men, you've got to love us more" doesn't sound good, so feminists repeat the old slogans about oppression although they make rather little sense today.
Twenty years ago, young men were in the same situation. Whatever their grievances towards women were, there was no socially acceptable way to express them. Now young men are gaining some power of expression while women are losing theirs.
By the way, I just read a book by Frans de Waal where he mentions the concept "Darwinian feminism". I can't find many examples on Google, but I guess that's what I'm supposed to be.
Excellent post, as usual! I"d question the use of the word 'intellect' a bit, in a Joseph Henrich "Secret of our Success" kind of way, however, and introduce the prestige vs dominance hierarchy problem. We haven't taken away the dominance hierarchy in the last five million years (which is why all the comparisons with chimps make perfect sense), but we've added a separate one that chimps cannot fathom. Using binocular vision on this question resolves most of the confusion.
Do women want to be raped? Yes. Do women want very much not to be raped? Also yes. Does a woman want to be raped by a man who is stronger than her? Yes. Does a woman want to be raped by a man who is stronger than her but weaker than other men? Hell no. Does a woman want to be raped by a man who is stronger than other men but also low-prestige? Depends (partially on the woman's prestige level and what she feels like she can get), but mostly no.
The examples from bodice-rippers (the obsolete term for them is instructive, here) you give include a rapist who is a captain. He's not a mentally-handicapped giant of a man whom the ship's crew employ as a cook or a cabin-boy. He's violent and high in both dominance and prestige hierarchies. Grey is similar, as are fictional smart serial killers. So, bizarrely, are porn actors doing rape scenes -- like anyone else on the silver screen, they're marked as high-prestige by the frame of the media in which they appear, even if on-screen they appear brutish and high only in dominance.
I thought of "intellect" in terms of "consequence thinking". Whether women feared social ostracism or single motherhood more is an open question.
I don't think women want to get raped by the strongest, most high-status man in the world. Very few people want to do everything that makes them sexually aroused. Especially women, I think.
Yeah, my apologies -- I use the word "want" in a post-Lacanian way that is difficult to elucidate without just offending people. I should have employed some workaround phrase such as "exhibit and partially experience a desire for".
"Desire" or "sexually desire" might work? The wording is an interesting question for me, because I think distinguishing between will and sexual desire is one of the keys to understanding female sexuality.
That sounds like an even longer and more fascinating discussion. I regard human sexuality in general as far more complex than most would accept, even before drilling down into the male/female distinctions. Desire in any sense of the word is complex. But to go back to want/desire for the female, consider the classic example of choosing a restaurant:
A man and a woman are going out to eat, perhaps for an anniversary. Does he really want to go? Is he just doing it for her? Does he have an actual preference of restaurant? Does she? In Lacanian terms (which land perfectly for many women who encounter this example, specifically for the subset that Lacan would have called 'hysteric', which for him was not merely not derogatory but bizarrely the highest praise and not limited to females), what the woman really 'wants' is for the man to be the Subject presumed to know, believe, desire, and enjoy: she wants him to know and believe what restaurant (and what outfit she should wear to it), to actively desire to not merely go there himself but to desire to take her there and be seen with her (and have her seen there with him), and to thoroughly enjoy doing so, himself. If, however, she has to do any of the choosing herself then SHE becomes the Subject, and the desire is ruined. That's why in a crass pick-up-artist way the maximum dating-within-a-relationship gambit is "Put on this little black dress and this necklace, I'm taking you out" [followed by taking her to the nicest place the two of them can 'pass' in].
And that's just dinner out. Gets way worse when it's a question of whether or not she's going to enjoy being choked later that evening.
I'm planning a follow-up post on what you are writing about. I think the wish to be desired as an object by men is another, newer dimension of female desire. While the desire to be dominated appears to be archaic, the desire to be desired is much more logical in a human context.
(In general, I'm boycotting Lacan because he couldn't write, but he definitely seems to have been right on that subject/object thing.)
My limited experience with women (one or two girlfriends, one wife, daughters) is consistent with your description of female sexuality.
Perhaps your post underrates the role of 'white knight' in woman's sexuality?
How does this fit with Richard Wrangham's hypothesis that humans socially evolved away from the other apes when coalitions of (2ndry?) males came together to displace a singular alpha male within a breeding group?
In your earlier post suggesting prehistoric people spent their spare resources fighting for (other people's?) women I don't recall you mentioning stats on the survival of a women's children after she was captured by another band.
If women with children (ie mature rather than virgin women) were often arbitrarily 'exchanged' between violent men it likely would encourage selection for a certain female disposition (emotional resilience) tolerant of grief over loss of children and/or loss of previous (sexual) relationship.
My post doesn't reach the white knights (whose existence and importance I do not doubt). It stops five million years ago. Many things happened since then. I guess I should hurry up a bit and write some posts about that time span.
Unfortunately, I don't have stats on the survival of children of captured women. I only have anecdotes. The Yanomamö observed by Napoleon Chagnon let children live, with only one exception I can remember (a captured boy about ten was killed a year after the capture by a man feeling uneasy and suspicious about him). I don't know why. Maybe as a perk to the women, to make them like their new masters better. Maybe because boys and girls were always a resource as future warriors and wives. Elena Valero, a white girl captured by the Yanomamö some decades before Chagnon met them reports that she witnessed a case of infanticide. A man grabbed a baby boy, the boy's mother tried to trick him that he was the boy's father. He thought for a moment, deemed it impossible and killed the baby.
I have also thought about the thing you mention: Evolution might have weeded out the most loyal women. Mating with the murders or oppressors of one's kin was reality for many women of certain generations. Not the least for the ancestors of Europeans, who experienced the Indo-European invasion. Genetic evidence shows that in most places, there is much more Indo-European ancestry in Y-chromosomes than in the gene pool at large. Which means that more indigenous men than women of certain generations were blocked from mating. It is a very interesting question how that might have affected the psychology of women.
Time to hurry up and sketch the other parts, I guess. A subject like this one rightfully deserves a book. I'm going to write one as soon as a literary agent turns up here and exclaims "I want you!".
It was enlightening and makes gender social dynamics understandable. Thank you !
>>But also the romance literature features its fair share of sexual violence, or did before political correctness sanitized away much of that
From what I have seen, romance novels have moved to a self-publishing model on Amazon and other venues, though, so I'd think that if women want to write romance novels featuring rape, and other women want to read it, they should be able to do so without woke church ladies stopping them.
From https://www.hobartpulp.com/web_features/alex-perez-on-the-iowa-s-writers-workshop-baseball-and-growing-up-cuban-american-in-america,
>>(Here it goes: 80% of agents/editors/publishers are white women from a certain background and sensibility; these woke ladies run the industry. And contrary to popular belief, I don’t hate the Brooklyn ladies. On the contrary, I respect how these passive aggressive prude ladies took over an industry. Tip of the hat, Brooklyn ladies.
>>Everyone knows these ladies took over, of course)
Regarding boredom, the way women get bored in relationships also explains why seduction artists may be well served to pursue women who may be open to fun, https://theredquest.substack.com/p/women-having-affairs-never-make-you-use-a-condom, as many notionally taken women are.
Yes. If it weren't for those self publishing forums, Fifty Shades of Grey wouldn't have existed: No publishing house would have bet on an author who writes as badly as E L James, I guess. But when women showed that they actually don't care about good writing, she got a fat contract. I haven't read any self-published romance books because they are too long. But I know that if a modern woman wants to write and read violent pornographic fiction, the internet offers plenty of opportunities.
I'm not sure if the big publishing model of the last fifty years will continue to exist in meaningful form, https://erikhoel.substack.com/p/the-intrinsic-podcast-2-traditional
Maybe it will... but the gatekeepers appear to be dying, and the gates are open, and the barbarians in the castle... political correctness may hasten readers + writers fleeing...
Fascinating and I just want to say thank you for the work you put into this.
It's a two-decade project.
How old is your eldest?
Sixteen.
So something like the time you met Anders; OK. Our eldest is also sixteen, but he's a boy.
Yes, about a year before I met Anders. Our eldest is also a boy. We only have one daughter, child number 2.
Oh; I don't know how I got mixed up.
Edit - wait now I see; this article gave *previous* ages, not current ones: https://woodfromeden.substack.com/p/the-environmental-causes-of-myopia
Really well done with this one, Tove! Very well researched. I have a draft post that actually connects this to another post of yours, but I was frankly hoping to avoid opening this can of worms; it's the kind of topic a man looks totally chauvinistic even bringing up. Now that it's topical though, I'm having trouble even commenting coherently on your own article here - I'm too sleep deprived to say more than just "See, women are (still) ambivalent"
I guess a can of worms is a can of worms whoever opens it. Being a suitable opener helps, but finding the right location for opening is crucial. For a long time I imagined my studies of female sexuality as a feminist venture. But in reality I never found a corner of feminism where it could even remotely fit in.
Now that I have time for a better comment, I wanted to point out that there isn't necessarily anything to be explained here.
Males are larger, stronger, more dominant, and more highly sexed on average, leaving females smaller, weaker, more submissive, and less sexual on average, particularly given that females pay almost all of the costs of sex, and are extremely vulnerable during pregnancy. So it isn't necessarily surprising if men are also more dominant and women are more submissive sexually. Nor is it necessarily surprising if females don't like hook-ups and aren't as aroused as males. We are already able to explain these features of the human sexual dynamic without needing to appeal to ancient ancestry.
That said, I still agree with your analysis for multiple reasons: 1. Humans *did* descend from other primates, so we should naturally expect to see shared features, 2. the female response to scenarios of rape and humiliation is striking, and 3. this thing that I Will Have More To Say About At A Later Date (preferably next week, after I've hopefully managed to get enough sleep)
Last of all, it feels too bad that you want to integrate this kind of thing into a feminist outlook. I don't really think it can work. There are many things about evolution that do support a leftist reading: There's no evidence for a loving God underlying our psychology or anatomy, cultures and species differ radically from one another in a way which undermines the idea that our current way is a timeless right way, our closest relatives are highly sexually promiscuous which calls monogamy into question, and so on. But to me, the unfolding story about human males and females looks profoundly anti-feminist. This is the arena where conservatives would be at their best; they simply haven't started to fight here because they have little interest in the sciences that would support their values.
I definitely agree that female physical weakness can explain why women don't like hook-ups as much as men. I actually think the security aspect explains quite a bit of the hook-up gap. But I can't see why physical weakness would make women prefer men that treat them ungently.
Females of apes and monkeys are also often physically weak compared to males. Some of them still have a very high sexual drive. Being physically weak and having a strong sexual drive are not mutually exclusive (although it probably was under human patriarchy)
I'm probably living in the past, but I never saw feminism as something left wing. I just thought it was a project aiming at increasing gender equality. And in that sense I still think that studying the female side of evolutionary psychology is feminist. If men have the right to seek self-knowledge, women should have that right too.
So now that I have time, I'll add that I probably don't really know what feminism is to you. My sense is that the point of feminism has been to redress inequalities and improve the flourishing of women, whereas what I now understand suggests that women are basically where they want/will be, while young males are actually the ones who have things the worst.
I never really understood was feminism was and now it has developed into something far beyond my comprehension.
But I don't think women are where they want to be. I think they just have lost the means to express their dissatisfaction in any comprehensible way. Saying "Hey, men, you've got to love us more" doesn't sound good, so feminists repeat the old slogans about oppression although they make rather little sense today.
Twenty years ago, young men were in the same situation. Whatever their grievances towards women were, there was no socially acceptable way to express them. Now young men are gaining some power of expression while women are losing theirs.
By the way, I just read a book by Frans de Waal where he mentions the concept "Darwinian feminism". I can't find many examples on Google, but I guess that's what I'm supposed to be.
Well, Mainstream feminism is definitely on the political left: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberal_feminism
I'd say five times as much, but a stranger needs my computer now!
Excellent post, as usual! I"d question the use of the word 'intellect' a bit, in a Joseph Henrich "Secret of our Success" kind of way, however, and introduce the prestige vs dominance hierarchy problem. We haven't taken away the dominance hierarchy in the last five million years (which is why all the comparisons with chimps make perfect sense), but we've added a separate one that chimps cannot fathom. Using binocular vision on this question resolves most of the confusion.
Do women want to be raped? Yes. Do women want very much not to be raped? Also yes. Does a woman want to be raped by a man who is stronger than her? Yes. Does a woman want to be raped by a man who is stronger than her but weaker than other men? Hell no. Does a woman want to be raped by a man who is stronger than other men but also low-prestige? Depends (partially on the woman's prestige level and what she feels like she can get), but mostly no.
The examples from bodice-rippers (the obsolete term for them is instructive, here) you give include a rapist who is a captain. He's not a mentally-handicapped giant of a man whom the ship's crew employ as a cook or a cabin-boy. He's violent and high in both dominance and prestige hierarchies. Grey is similar, as are fictional smart serial killers. So, bizarrely, are porn actors doing rape scenes -- like anyone else on the silver screen, they're marked as high-prestige by the frame of the media in which they appear, even if on-screen they appear brutish and high only in dominance.
I thought of "intellect" in terms of "consequence thinking". Whether women feared social ostracism or single motherhood more is an open question.
I don't think women want to get raped by the strongest, most high-status man in the world. Very few people want to do everything that makes them sexually aroused. Especially women, I think.
Yeah, my apologies -- I use the word "want" in a post-Lacanian way that is difficult to elucidate without just offending people. I should have employed some workaround phrase such as "exhibit and partially experience a desire for".
"Desire" or "sexually desire" might work? The wording is an interesting question for me, because I think distinguishing between will and sexual desire is one of the keys to understanding female sexuality.
That sounds like an even longer and more fascinating discussion. I regard human sexuality in general as far more complex than most would accept, even before drilling down into the male/female distinctions. Desire in any sense of the word is complex. But to go back to want/desire for the female, consider the classic example of choosing a restaurant:
A man and a woman are going out to eat, perhaps for an anniversary. Does he really want to go? Is he just doing it for her? Does he have an actual preference of restaurant? Does she? In Lacanian terms (which land perfectly for many women who encounter this example, specifically for the subset that Lacan would have called 'hysteric', which for him was not merely not derogatory but bizarrely the highest praise and not limited to females), what the woman really 'wants' is for the man to be the Subject presumed to know, believe, desire, and enjoy: she wants him to know and believe what restaurant (and what outfit she should wear to it), to actively desire to not merely go there himself but to desire to take her there and be seen with her (and have her seen there with him), and to thoroughly enjoy doing so, himself. If, however, she has to do any of the choosing herself then SHE becomes the Subject, and the desire is ruined. That's why in a crass pick-up-artist way the maximum dating-within-a-relationship gambit is "Put on this little black dress and this necklace, I'm taking you out" [followed by taking her to the nicest place the two of them can 'pass' in].
And that's just dinner out. Gets way worse when it's a question of whether or not she's going to enjoy being choked later that evening.
I'm planning a follow-up post on what you are writing about. I think the wish to be desired as an object by men is another, newer dimension of female desire. While the desire to be dominated appears to be archaic, the desire to be desired is much more logical in a human context.
(In general, I'm boycotting Lacan because he couldn't write, but he definitely seems to have been right on that subject/object thing.)