IIRC, a study on domestic violence among the Ache found that how violent a man was toward his wife *wasn't* correlated with how violent he was toward other men. Wife-beating was disproportionately done by low-status men, whereas high-status men were more prone to violence against other men.
IIRC, a study on domestic violence among the Ache found that how violent a man was toward his wife *wasn't* correlated with how violent he was toward other men. Wife-beating was disproportionately done by low-status men, whereas high-status men were more prone to violence against other men.
Very interesting! I can't find such a study: "Ache" is a very unfortunate name.
In theory, the prevalence of domestic violence should depend on women's opportunities to escape. Among the Yanomamö, it was easier to escape a low-status man in a smaller group, because such a man would get less help to force her back. That gave low-status men better incentives to behave. But I don't know about any study on the subject. So many questions that could have been asked in the wild times weren't asked.
Probably it was difficult to measure domestic violence among the Yanomamö since it was so prevalent. For example, one of Napoleon Chagnon's respondents, Kaobaweh, a headman, had a good relationship to his wife: He only beat her lightly. In an environment where all or most men beat their wives, I guess an anthropologist would have to set up a threshold between lighter violence and heavier violence to get any meaningful results.
On the other hand, in both modern Western society and Aché society (if that study I can't find but sounds very plausible is correct), mostly low-status men perpetrate domestic violence. In When Men Behave Badly, David Buss theorizes that it is a strategy to retain a mate who can't be made to stay voluntarily. Men who have lost social status since they married, or are much older than their partners, are much more likely to become violent. In Western society, hoping a woman will stay out of free will is option number one. Only if that option seems to fail, some men go to option 2 and become violent and scary.
In Yanomamö society, option number 2 was socially accepted. Which probably made it less associated with low status. It might be that most men applied it, and the high-status men could do so more credibly since they were very difficult to escape.
Thanks for the response! I'll have to look around more for the Ache study--I read about it years ago.
Interestingly, this ethnographic study of rural Pashtun women in 1970s Afghanistan ("Bartered Brides" by Nancy Lindisfarne, available on Internet Archive) said that, while it was impossible in practice for a woman to escape even lethal abuse by her husband, wife-beating was looked down on. It was seen as something a real man wouldn't have to resort to in order to control his wife.
>>Bartered Brides" by Nancy Lindisfarne, available on Internet Archive
Thank you for the book tip! What an annoying book. I'm yearning to know what these people thought, talked about, ate and were doing all day. And I get page after page of linage B and lineage C and blah blah blah. Like if Nancy Tapper doesn't dare to draw many conclusions, so instead she delivers details details details. (But in spite of my complaints, it is too bad that there is no list of anthropology books. Or is there?)
I can contrast it to Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, about Iraq in the 1950s. The other women were friendly to Elizabeth through offering to teach her to cook rice properly, "so your husband will not beat you". Once her female friends got the impression that her husband had actually beaten her. She denied it (in fact, a bird had fallen in her head when she slept outdoors and she screamed because she became so scared). The friends thought that was the worst lie ever and found it hilarious.
The fact that the idea that "wife-beating is for losers"--that it's something only resorted to by men who *can't* control their wives in other ways--has independently recurred in multiple ultra-patriarchal cultures does seem like evidence that it's universally associated with low male status.
Among chimpanzees, are low-status males more likely to physically abuse females?
>>The fact that the idea that "wife-beating is for losers"--that it's something only resorted to by men who *can't* control their wives in other ways--has independently recurred in multiple ultra-patriarchal cultures does seem like evidence that it's universally associated with low male status.
Isn't it enough that wife-beating has obvious disadvantages for such a meme to spread? Some people say wife-beating if for losers > they beat their wives less > they get into fewer conflicts with wife's natal kin + become more attractive buyers of wives + they injure their wives and their reproductive capacity less.
>>Among chimpanzees, are low-status males more likely to physically abuse females?
In Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham writes that at least among certain groups of Chimpanzees, all adolescent males batter all adult females of their group, in order to make the females submit. That way, females become the first targets of those males. I have never read that the highest status males avoid beating up females. But since female chimpanzees tend to favor the status quo, the incumbent often has little reason to be violent to them.
Depressingly, it doesn't seem to be the case that wife-beating actually harms a man's reproductive capacity, at least in all societies. Among the Ache, the same study that found it was most common among low-status men also found that men who beat their wives *had more children*, presumably because their wives were too frightened to refuse sex.
The idea of long-term selection in men for willingness to abuse one's wife is a truly frightening idea, and I really hope these results don't hold for other human societies.
(I have to assume they were only seeing how violence affected the number of children a husband had *per wife*. If less-violent higher-status men had more wives, the general rule that high-status men have more children wouldn't have been violated. It also suggests that polygamy may have been a *mitigating* factor, at least in some societies, preventing maximal selection for male abusiveness.)
>>The book about women in Iraq sounds fascinating!
It is a very good book. It is difficult to believe that the protagonists have both died from old age. And Nancy Tapper's book is actually good too. I hope an AI will be able to rewrite it in the future, because it really deserves to be more readable than it is.
>>The idea of long-term selection in men for willingness to abuse one's wife is a truly frightening idea, and I really hope these results don't hold for other human societies.
Nah, why? We already know that we all have many, many shitty ancestors who became our ancestors just because they were shittier than average. Luckily there seems to be an opposite process where more prosocial people were selected. I think it is individual evolution on one side, group selection on the other side, and kin selection somewhere in between.
And let's do our best to contribute through not having children with wife abusers!
>>Among the Ache, the same study that found it was most common among low-status men also found that men who beat their wives *had more children*, presumably because their wives were too frightened to refuse sex.
David Buss reports that partner abuse is much more common among couples where the man is more than ten years older than the woman. The abusers might have chosen younger wives and thereby got more children.
And also, what if the abused wives had sex with their husbands more often because they were masochists?
IIRC, a study on domestic violence among the Ache found that how violent a man was toward his wife *wasn't* correlated with how violent he was toward other men. Wife-beating was disproportionately done by low-status men, whereas high-status men were more prone to violence against other men.
I wonder if the Yanomamo were different here.
Very interesting! I can't find such a study: "Ache" is a very unfortunate name.
In theory, the prevalence of domestic violence should depend on women's opportunities to escape. Among the Yanomamö, it was easier to escape a low-status man in a smaller group, because such a man would get less help to force her back. That gave low-status men better incentives to behave. But I don't know about any study on the subject. So many questions that could have been asked in the wild times weren't asked.
Probably it was difficult to measure domestic violence among the Yanomamö since it was so prevalent. For example, one of Napoleon Chagnon's respondents, Kaobaweh, a headman, had a good relationship to his wife: He only beat her lightly. In an environment where all or most men beat their wives, I guess an anthropologist would have to set up a threshold between lighter violence and heavier violence to get any meaningful results.
On the other hand, in both modern Western society and Aché society (if that study I can't find but sounds very plausible is correct), mostly low-status men perpetrate domestic violence. In When Men Behave Badly, David Buss theorizes that it is a strategy to retain a mate who can't be made to stay voluntarily. Men who have lost social status since they married, or are much older than their partners, are much more likely to become violent. In Western society, hoping a woman will stay out of free will is option number one. Only if that option seems to fail, some men go to option 2 and become violent and scary.
In Yanomamö society, option number 2 was socially accepted. Which probably made it less associated with low status. It might be that most men applied it, and the high-status men could do so more credibly since they were very difficult to escape.
Thanks for the response! I'll have to look around more for the Ache study--I read about it years ago.
Interestingly, this ethnographic study of rural Pashtun women in 1970s Afghanistan ("Bartered Brides" by Nancy Lindisfarne, available on Internet Archive) said that, while it was impossible in practice for a woman to escape even lethal abuse by her husband, wife-beating was looked down on. It was seen as something a real man wouldn't have to resort to in order to control his wife.
This paper says that in ancient Greek culture (unlike ancient Roman culture, where women paradoxically had much more freedom), wife-beating was highly stigmatized. Part of it seems to have been the same attitude that it's contemptible to physically fight with a woman the way you would fight another man. Another theory was that, in more-egalitarian Roman culture, wives were seen as genuinely *threatening* their husband's control to a greater degree. https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/25096708.pdf?refreqid=fastly-default%3Abf42e6cda0dce7800dad49a9b5f3cc73&ab_segments=0%2Fbasic_search_gsv2%2Fcontrol&origin=&initiator=&acceptTC=1
>>Bartered Brides" by Nancy Lindisfarne, available on Internet Archive
Thank you for the book tip! What an annoying book. I'm yearning to know what these people thought, talked about, ate and were doing all day. And I get page after page of linage B and lineage C and blah blah blah. Like if Nancy Tapper doesn't dare to draw many conclusions, so instead she delivers details details details. (But in spite of my complaints, it is too bad that there is no list of anthropology books. Or is there?)
I can contrast it to Guests of the Sheik by Elizabeth Warnock Fernea, about Iraq in the 1950s. The other women were friendly to Elizabeth through offering to teach her to cook rice properly, "so your husband will not beat you". Once her female friends got the impression that her husband had actually beaten her. She denied it (in fact, a bird had fallen in her head when she slept outdoors and she screamed because she became so scared). The friends thought that was the worst lie ever and found it hilarious.
The fact that the idea that "wife-beating is for losers"--that it's something only resorted to by men who *can't* control their wives in other ways--has independently recurred in multiple ultra-patriarchal cultures does seem like evidence that it's universally associated with low male status.
Among chimpanzees, are low-status males more likely to physically abuse females?
>>The fact that the idea that "wife-beating is for losers"--that it's something only resorted to by men who *can't* control their wives in other ways--has independently recurred in multiple ultra-patriarchal cultures does seem like evidence that it's universally associated with low male status.
Isn't it enough that wife-beating has obvious disadvantages for such a meme to spread? Some people say wife-beating if for losers > they beat their wives less > they get into fewer conflicts with wife's natal kin + become more attractive buyers of wives + they injure their wives and their reproductive capacity less.
>>Among chimpanzees, are low-status males more likely to physically abuse females?
In Demonic Males, Richard Wrangham writes that at least among certain groups of Chimpanzees, all adolescent males batter all adult females of their group, in order to make the females submit. That way, females become the first targets of those males. I have never read that the highest status males avoid beating up females. But since female chimpanzees tend to favor the status quo, the incumbent often has little reason to be violent to them.
The book about women in Iraq sounds fascinating!
Depressingly, it doesn't seem to be the case that wife-beating actually harms a man's reproductive capacity, at least in all societies. Among the Ache, the same study that found it was most common among low-status men also found that men who beat their wives *had more children*, presumably because their wives were too frightened to refuse sex.
The idea of long-term selection in men for willingness to abuse one's wife is a truly frightening idea, and I really hope these results don't hold for other human societies.
(I have to assume they were only seeing how violence affected the number of children a husband had *per wife*. If less-violent higher-status men had more wives, the general rule that high-status men have more children wouldn't have been violated. It also suggests that polygamy may have been a *mitigating* factor, at least in some societies, preventing maximal selection for male abusiveness.)
>>The book about women in Iraq sounds fascinating!
It is a very good book. It is difficult to believe that the protagonists have both died from old age. And Nancy Tapper's book is actually good too. I hope an AI will be able to rewrite it in the future, because it really deserves to be more readable than it is.
>>The idea of long-term selection in men for willingness to abuse one's wife is a truly frightening idea, and I really hope these results don't hold for other human societies.
Nah, why? We already know that we all have many, many shitty ancestors who became our ancestors just because they were shittier than average. Luckily there seems to be an opposite process where more prosocial people were selected. I think it is individual evolution on one side, group selection on the other side, and kin selection somewhere in between.
And let's do our best to contribute through not having children with wife abusers!
>>Among the Ache, the same study that found it was most common among low-status men also found that men who beat their wives *had more children*, presumably because their wives were too frightened to refuse sex.
David Buss reports that partner abuse is much more common among couples where the man is more than ten years older than the woman. The abusers might have chosen younger wives and thereby got more children.
And also, what if the abused wives had sex with their husbands more often because they were masochists?