The Roots of Misogyny

[wukter]

Why is practically every human society across all times, places and cultures dominated by men?
I have read that War on Women article that MillyR linked to. It's chilling. Why is it everywhere?

I would be interested in your thoughts, or maybe there is actually a simple, widely accepted answer that I could be pointed to.

What are dowries all about? I know they play a big part in infanticide in some areas?

In terms of competition, all animals have to do things to increase their chances of surviving and passing on genetic material directly by reproduction or indirectly by altruism to related kin.

All of these activities use energy. If too much energy is used on competition with others, the energy required to forage for food to survive and the energy required to reproduce may not be available. Competition can take the form of actual violence or displays of strength and impressiveness - fluffing of feathers and so on.

Each individual has to weigh up whether or not they have the available energy to win a competition in each specific scenario. So an individual may decide to always be competitive regardless of the skills of the competitor, to never be competitive, or to sometimes be competitive if they think they can win without using too much energy through taking into account the skills of the opponent.

So sometimes it a good evolutionary strategy to be competitive, but it is also under other circumstances a good evolutionary strategy to be altruistic, either to kin or to non-related individuals if they are going to reciprocate. So a lot of time is spent in social animal groups in checking that individuals are reciprocating and that 'fairness' is happening. Where reciprocation does not occur, it may be enforced or the failure punished.

I don't know if this explains anything about men and women. Obviously women put a lot more energy into reproduction and nurturing as a biological issue - pregnancy and breastfeeding - and a lot more into collecting food as a social issue. So I would speculate that if men were made to put more effort into nurturing and providing essentials, they would have less time and energy available to put into competition.

But I remain unconvinced that evolution and ecology can really explain the complex issues surrounding human social structures.

good question about dowries. I don't much about it. It would be interesting if anyone knows what it is all about.

It's not uncommon amongst apes for an inexperienced/1st time mother to kill her baby. I saw a documentary on this yrs ago and they figured it came down to character as much as nuture.

They followed for yrs a group which included a very caring mother (so the example was there) and one that repeatedly killed her offspring.

Just thought I'd mention it cause of discussion about infanticide.

I also think Riven's theory is interesting - maybe the 'protecting' became seen as more important than 'rearing' as populations grew and there was more frequent clashes over resorces.

Having thought a bit more about it, I think that there is a conflation on here between aggression and competition. In all species, a lot of competition is not aggressive, and a lot of aggression is about enforcing mutually beneficial altruism.

Feminism is really situated as a response to the latter. Male dominance is about enforcing the altruism of women on the basis that men's control protects and benefits us. Feminism points out we are being lied to- the contribution men are supposedly making in terms of socially organising, controlling and protecting us is a far lesser contribution than the contribution that women as a group make in terms of raising children, providing the essentials of food and heat needed for survival. Men's altruistic acts as a group are less than women's altruistic acts as a group. The more that women point this out, the more men as a group try to tighten their grip and enforce our altruism.

This happens at every level - from the employed man who tells his SAH female partner that she should work 14 hours a day at home with young kids with no help from him because his 8 hour day is so supposedly exhausting, to a developing, war-torn country where overwhelmingly women nurture and provide while men run around with guns.

So I would say that male dominance is not about competition - it is about a mutual altruism which men are cheating at, and how they resist women's attempts to point this out, sometimes by responding with violence and aggression.

...And that's why feminism is so often interpreted as "you hate all men", then MillyR. If feminists are about evening out the reciprocation/altruism, no wonder they don't want to hear it.

The reason I was asking about dowries was because I was wondering about when women went from being seen as high-value, because they could have babies and expand your family, to being so low value that you have to pay another man to take them off your hands. Or is it more complex than that?

The problem with viewing male dominance as mutual altruism rather than competition, is that it treats men as one bloc. It ignores the competition for power between men, which I think is the real driver that leads to male dominance.

It's hard isn't it, you want to go back and work out what the origins were of all the shit we see today. But it's such a fine line between debating/investigating and excusing.

The thing is, whenever it started it's a harmful and ridiculous system of beliefs: was then, is now. If the reasons for it being continued into the present day are bullshit (twisted interpretations of religion, intellectual inferiority of women etc), presumably they've been bullshit for a long time if not forever.

Riven, yes people have researched it. I mentioned it in on 30 Jul at 14.48 on this thread.

Claig, I also agree that there is competition between men, but there is also competition between men and women, individually and as groups. And the power that men have is held collectively. An individual man may deprive an individual woman of power, but it is the systemic nature of male power that leads to male dominance.

Despite all of this, I am not convinced that speculating about the past actually helps us resolve anything in the here and now. So much of our contemporary behaviour makes absolutely no sense in terms of survival, so it is rather odd to be talking about people jostling for power over invention or Monet which makes no odds either way in terms of survival. Human happiness is about so much more than just surviving.

Well quite, MillyR, there are so many possible explanations, but it's a bit like asking "why did psycho man X kill his wife and four children?" because a) you can never really know and b) what's important is that he did, and he shouldn't have.

More depressingly, I was thinking "what is at the root of misnogyny today?"

And the answer - the fact that people can get away with it.

"So a lot of time is spent in social animal groups in checking that individuals are reciprocating and that 'fairness' is happening. Where reciprocation does not occur, it may be enforced or the failure punished."

Milly, that sounds like my MIL !

MIlly, of course competition between males is relevant today. It's the entire basis of patriarchy. The aggressive, ruthless ones do well under a capitalist system and reap the rewards in terms of power. Then there are the more woman-friendly males who cooperate more with females (the ones who take responsibility for their children, don't run off and help with housework: remember it's always a choice for men whether to stay or not. Lots of men run out on their family; some move abroad so they don't have to pay maintenance).
Men who cooperate with women are seen as 'weak' and are ridiculed and often forced to step in line. Many cultures, like the US and Russia, have hazing of males in the army, or college fraternities, for example. Lots of men die in these hazings (physical beatings in Russia, alcohol poisoning in the fraternities)
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That's why I think men are goaded into visiting brothels by other men, even if some men would rather be loyal to their wives. The 'pack' mentality is all-pervasive among men.

It's a totally different dynamic among women.

For some reason women do seem to be attracted to their 'bit of rough', otherwise we could all just mate with lovely, kind passive men and the genes of the aggressive men would die out, but it doesn't work that way.

I think the problems have come about because women don't live together anymore, that's all. Marriage: the whole point of it was to split women up and weaken them. 1 woman living with 1 man, it's a disaster for women.

As for dowries,
NO, I think dowries are a good thing compared to the bride price
You save up your whole life for your daughter's dowry and try to make it as valuable as possible because it reflects the value of your daughter (not a nice concept but bear with me). The dowry belongs to the daughter, not the husband, so the husband's family cannot lay claim to it. A kind of insurance policy. But obviously it's a social status thing: the larger the dowry, the higher the woman's social status and the better marriage she can make.

Bride price, WTF! IN some cultuure a man's family can buy a woman. WTF.

military service is compulsory in Russia

WHat fascinates me is that in subsistence tribes the work only took up about 2 hours a day. You couldn't hoard food/capital and get rich, but what a great way to live. I can't stand housework, I think it's so unecessary, and you look at tribes in the Amazon and see it is a completely pointless and unecessary waste of labour.

The subjugation of women coincided with farming. Before that women lived in gathering societies with hunting men. The studies show that a minority of men score highly in IQ, but more than the average score lowly, while women are better when you take the mean and median scores into account.

Before agrarian society began, women formed groups around bands of men who could provide protein. He who could provide most protein had most women around him. Once he could not provide the next provider of protein was chosen.

In the meantime, women gathered and fed and taught the offspring. Women and men were equal. What some think of as "Caveman Porn" was more likely to have been produced by women, who spent more time in the cave and more time collecting the dyes and practicing technique than the men. It's not "Porn", it's a celebration of our continuation as a species.

Sakura, I agree with a lot of your points but cannot agree with you re: dowries. Isn't it the fear of having to provide a dowry that leads some impoverished parents to kill girl babies at birth? And the original idea of a dowry might well have been that it belongs to the daughter, rather than to her husband and his family, but instances of 'bride burning' in India, for example, suggest that this is not so in practice.

bride burning in India

THank you PF. yes, it looks worse than I originally thought The

I just meant to say that the idea of dowry in itself is painted as being a terrible thing but it's a lot worse the other way round, when there's a bride price, and it's the man's side who has to save up for marriage. Because then it literally is like buying a woman.

I think they used to burn widows in Hinduism as well (but don't quote me on that)

"women formed groups around bands of men who could provide protein"

Dione, I read that in many tribes women also were able to hunt for protein themselves: small animals, fish etc.

Sakura, you are thinking of suttee.

I am not sure why bride price (buying a woman) is worse than dowry (selling a woman), but perhaps I haven't thought it through.

I think you are right about women hunting for protein too, which perhaps takes us back to SwallowedAFly's point about 'gift culture' near the start of this thread?

found a link about dowry from yahoo answers India. It was a custom originally intended to protect the bride if things went wrong in the marriage. It was introduced because women were not able to inherit their parents' property, therefore the parents needed to provide a dowry for their daughter instead. However, it has become the major cause of female infanticide according to the person on yahoo answers, because parents of a girl know that they will have to provide the dowry in the future. It seems that is has been made illegal in India since 1961, but the tradition still lingers on.

in.answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20080803191808AApsYvc

Sakura, I'm not saying competition between men isn't relevant today.

I am just saying that if we want to look at what is going on in male dominated societies, we need to look at what is going on in them now. We can look at what is happening now in ecological or evolutionary terms, but not without also looking at social constructs.

My point is that we can't look at what happened 10,000 or 50,000 years ago and say that is why things are happening now, but I feel constantly drawn into this thread because people keep saying our ancestors did X or Y, and that is why men are the way we are. But most of it is just speculative.

Like this argument that women clustered around men who provided protein. There is no way we could possibly know that. How could that possibly be demonstrated? It isn't even a generalisation that can be made about most hunter-gatherers now, so it isn't even backed up by a good analogy.

People who make arguments in wider society based on 'cavemen' or chimpanzees or whatever as an explanation of the natural behaviour of men and women tend to be arguing against feminism. People who actually work in the field don't make grand claims about the distant past as an explanatory model for what is going on now.

The OP asked "Why is practically every human society across all times, places and cultures dominated by men?
I have read that War on Women article that MillyR linked to. It's chilling. Why is it everywhere?"

I think to understand this question, you need to look at the past and try and understand how and why it came about. I, personally, think the answer is quite simple, it is as daftpunk originally said "men are more power-seeking". But others will disagree and think it is to do with hunting or farming. Feminism is a political movement and it has done a lot of good and has much more to do. But, I think that to change society and power structures, you must first understand human nature (and animal nature, since humans are also animals). One way of understanding human nature and human societies is to study history, to look at the past, since human nature itself has changed very little over thousands of years.

Claig, I agree with that, but I think there is a limit to what we can know about the past; a lot of the stuff people say about the past as a justification for patriarchy is fantastical.

I agree a lot of it is conjecture and we have no way of knowing the truth. But probably the key thing is to understand human nature and we can get a glimpse of that by studying the past and studying great literature, where great minds give us an insight into people and their motivations. I used to like psychology, but I now think most of it is bunkum, but there are still good insights into human nature that can be gained from reading some of the main figures in that sphere.