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.

hobgoblin, yes women can be seen as a possesion. jsut because he sleeps with many women doesn't mean he considers any of them as any less his. loyalty isn't usually a characteristic i would have though prevalent in a controlling man. it is one he would expect from 'his' women but not one he would consider as necessary from him.

EnglandAllenPoe because thats not the way they want to sow their seed

polygamy (sp?) has just sprung to my mind. not sure if this is a good example, but in communities where polygamy is the norm it is usually men who get to marry more than once. i could be wrong here as i am not well read on it but are there any communities where womena are able to marry more than one man?

booyhoo, do you think he sees the resultant off spring as less his though if they are not the offspring of the woman with whom he is to all intents and purposes, partnered with?

I'm just thinking about the male purpose and how the sense of power stems from this and then considering why it is that men very often deny and flee that responsibility that gives them power and purpose in the first place.

Someone mentioned it earlier and i think they are right it is to do with the fact that paternity can always be in question (in the past ofc now we have tests that can be done) and so men ensured that any offspring that the woman they are with has is theirs also. Which means some sort of ownership attitude has to be in place e.g. limited interaction with the opposite sex when married, 'virginity' of a woman important etc.

I'm not sure about that at all hobgoblin. I don't have enough experience (thankfully) of this type of man but i think you could be right. not sure why that is though. you would imagine that the resulting children would be equally important but history tells us this isn't the case.

it could be case of the man knowing what side his bread is buttered so to speak. as in he will support the children of the woman that is most likely to give him more children but a child from a one night stand is forgotten because the relationship with it's mother is not useful for further procreation. he has limited provisions(money) so choses to so spend it where the yield will be greater?

Really interesting thread.

'The average age gap between children in hunter-gatherer society is 4 years, so a mother would only have one slower child to carry/breastfeed/look after at a time.'

SAF Do we know why would that occur? Did they really manage to avoid the fertile times so successfully or were they not fertile so often (presumably more than once every 4 years)?

We might have DNA tests now, but they are only 99% correct, or something - there could still be a seed of doubt.

I wonder why it is though that a lot of men hate the idea of sperm banks because of the idea of having children somewhere which are "his" but not knowing about them (or being in control of them perhaps?) - and this is the overriding reason given by the majority of men in sperm bank debates I have heard of - and impregnating a woman after a one night stand etc seems to be a lot of mens' worst nightmare too - and yet when relationships break up, a lot of the time the man will move on, find a new woman and have children with her and completely abandon his existing children. Why is this and why are the two not mutually exclusive?

Of course the simple explanation could be that generally they are mutually exclusive and these are two separate "types" of men, but still...

seenyertoes it is most probably due to teh fact that infacnts are breastfed until at least the age of four and tehy are fed on demand aswell, no routines, and the children spend most of tehir time with the mum so have constant access to feed. bfing delays the return of ovulation if done on demand and often. most of them cosleep aswell.

bertie, probably down to the fact that children born from sperm bank donation or a none night stand can appear at any time and stake a claim on him, either financially or emotionally or both. the fear comes from not being in control of this i assume. whereas when a relationship breaks up and tehre are children involved, he has already agreed to have these children and has passed the stage of commiting to care for them. the fear of teh unknown and all that?

I agree with Sprogger on the point about evolution. Natural selection operates in the here and now. It selects the individuals who are most likely to survive under their current environmental conditions. In the long term when conditions change their offspring may die, but natural selection isn't God - it doesn't plan ahead at the level of the individual.

We seem to be having a conversation about what humans have evolved to do, and in that case the only groups that can be used for evidence are the groups that were around in the environment of evolutionary adaptation (EEA) - the first of our species. Their individual behavioural traits were selected as successful and they formed a new species - humans. It is rather arrogant to believe that humans right now are going to also be successful in evolutionary terms simply because our ancestors got it right in their environment.

We have no evidence that misogynistic traits were selected in the EEA; in fact we have good evidence from the health status of the women that there was far more equality than we see in other types of human society. There has been very little evolutionary change to humans since our species came into being, so what the Romans did or farmers did is merely social change.

A lot of the behaviour we have engaged in over the last 10,000 years has been a disaster. Many of our supposedly great cultures have been unsustainable and collapsed - the Romans, the Norse colonies, the Maya of South America. And all of these cultures lasted longer than our Industrial/Post industrial culture has survived so far. And we have very good reasons to believe that our current way of life may collapse - it is unsustainable.

I think the point is that men can act in a certain way in our current world, but that doesn't make their behaviour natural or beneficial for the future of their individual offspring or our species or society's future.

We evolved to live communally in small groups as hunter-gatherers. We no longer live like that and there is no point looking at evolution to see why we behave in the way that we do, because the way that people in power have been behaving is often an evolutionary and social failure that leads to the deaths of their culture and many of their people. Many of our supposed achievements have been an evolutionary dead end.

Many species don't evolve - they die. Humans really haven't been here very long in evolutionary terms and our collective behaviour is suicidal.

(Also, I disagree that palaeolithic art is pornographic. Not every picture of a naked human is pornographic, and there is a difference between pregnancy/fertility depictions and objectification. I think we are looking at it through modern, sexualised eyes).

With regard to breastfeeding, the entire gap between children cannot be explained by breast feeding stopping periods. That period would only last for the first 9-15 months despite women nursing for well beyond that. The rest of the gap between children is because of people living on a low calorie diet which stops their or because they are not having sex.

I recommend 'Human Energetics in Biological Anthropology' for an explanation of birth spacing and lots of other stuff about women's work and health.

The obvious point to take from that is that women get to control their fertility in hunter-gatherer societies.

That should have read 'stops their periods/reduces their fertility.'

ooh, thanks milly, i was misinforming on that. sorry.

also agreed about looking at naked images through our modren, sexualised eyes.

"oh flipping heck children are soooo squabbly

can I finish later?!"

This phrase entirely sums up why women are yet to reach the heights of invention and achievement that men attain as a matter of course.

In some cultures though the woman is not allowed to have sex until she has stopped breastfeeding as they believe that sperm comes out through the milk (yuk!) - so it may well be abstinence.

SAF, yes I agree on the issue of the 'guiding force,' but I do think evolution is more than the reproduction of an individual (although I do not think that is what you are implying). I have said before on a thread about homosexuality that evolution is about inclusive fitness.

The unit of selection is the gene, not the individual. So a person who is homosexual may in a past environment have decided not to have children. As a consequence of not having children themselves, they are able to invest more in the survival of their nieces and nephews. Those nieces and nephews would then be more likely to survive than children who do not have additional,non-parental investment, and they carry with them some of the genetic material of the homosexual person, so that the homosexual person has genes that survive into the next generation, even though they themselves have no offspring.

So the behaviour of a kin group, including the men in that kin group, is important for the survival of genetic material in that next generation, even if they are more distant relation rather than being the actual Father. Being a good uncle to two nephews is as good a genetic survival strategy as being a good father to one son is.

I know I have contradicted myself between two posts - I suppose I should clarify between selecting individual behaviour and genetic material, but I have to go to work.

Very interesting thread though.