In the first part of this essay, which you can find here, I put forward an evolutionary
theory to explain the recent genetic discovery that all human beings alive
today have roughly twice as many female ancestors as male. The main premise
underlying this theory, which I call Male Accentuated Natural Selection or
MANS, is that, while it is necessary for the survival of any sexually
reproductive species that as many of its females produce offspring as possible – thereby ensuring that
the next generation of the species is as well populated as it can be – it not necessary for
all its males to do so. In fact, there is actually an evolutionary advantage to
be gained from restricting the number of males that are able to mate, either by
having them fight each other for this honour, as in most species of herbivore,
for instance, or by having the females choose the most genetically attractive
among them, as in most species of birds. Either way, the result is that only
the strongest, fittest and most well-adapted of the males are able to mate and pass
on their genes, thereby weeding out any genetic weaknesses within the species
on the otherwise largely superfluous male side of the mating equation.
As I explained in more detail in Part I, whether a species
instantiates MANS through male combat or female choice is determined by a
number of factors, including size, diet and whether both parents are required to
feed their offspring: a condition which rather precludes the possibility of the
males having multiple mates and more mouths to feed than they can possibly
satisfy. Another important factor is whether the members of each sub-population
of a species are required to cooperate and work together in order to obtain
food, as in the case of most canine species, for instance: a requirement which
precludes the possibility of the males continually fighting each other and
weakening their cooperative capabilities.
As pack animals, this also applies to human beings, who also
instantiate MANS through female selection, which is to say that the males court
the females and the females choose who they will have and who they won’t.
Unlike most canine species, however, in which the females are able to fight off
the sexual advances of any male they don’t want, other evolutionary
developments in human beings have made this mode of MANS instantiation rather
more problematic.
The most significant of these was the development of our big
brains, which, of course, gave us a massive evolutionary advantage, but which
constituted an equally massive inconvenience to women during pregnancy. During
our many thousands of years of evolutionary development as hunter-gathers, this
therefore not only resulted in a separation of the roles of men and women in
daily life, with only the men going out to hunt, but an evolutionary divergence
in the physical characteristics of the two sexes, in which men became significantly
larger, stronger and faster than women, thereby placing the latter in the
desperately precarious position of being both dependent on men for sustenance
and protection while being largely defenseless against them.
Indeed, so perilous is this outcome in evolutionary terms, that
it could not have been possible without a counterbalancing social development
in which the dominant males in any hunter-gatherer community would have had to
have become protective of their women in order for that community to remain
stable and survive: a development which I argued in Part I would have probably come
about quite naturally as a result of the fact that protective males at the top
of the social hierarchy would have been doubly attractive to the females, who
would thus have consistently chosen them as mates, thereby encouraging the evolutionary
development of protective tendencies in men as part of the MANS process.
The problem with this, however, is that while it may have
achieved some level of stability within hunter-gatherer tribes and secured a
commensurate level of safety for their women, both would still have remained precarious,
not least because the solution, in itself, almost certainly magnified the MANS
effect, as evidenced by our genetic history. For instead of perhaps 10% or 20%
of the males being rejected and not passing on their genes – as one might expect to find
in most species that instantiate MANS through female selection – what we ended up with
was a massive 50% of the male population effectively being excluded from having
sex within their own tribal community. Not only would this have caused a huge
amount resentment, animosity and even hatred among the rejected group, therefore,
but it would also have led to increased inter-tribal conflict, in which the rape,
capture and enslavement of another tribe’s women would have been the primary objective
of these sexually disfavoured males.
Nor was this merely a passing phase in human development,
confined solely to the era of our hunter-gatherer forebears. For not only has
such behaviour been a prominent feature of inter-tribal conflict throughout our
history – as I hope
my account of the sack of Magdeburg sufficiently demonstrated – it is actually the
inevitable consequence of our unique instantiation of MANS through female
selection in circumstances in which the females in question are unable to
adequately defend themselves against unwanted sexual advances.
Another way in which we have continually attempted to
mitigate this threat, therefore, has been through the social and cultural conditioning of young men.
Throughout history, in cultures as otherwise diverse as those of western Europe
and Japan, young men have regularly been inducted into codes of honour and
chivalry in which the protection of women has almost always been central. Indeed,
a respect for women and a gentlemanly code of conduct determining how men
interact with them is almost universally regarded as a prerequisite for any
civilized society. The problem, however, is that because we have never really understood
our evolutionary contradiction – or even properly recognised it – the reason
why such codes of conduct are necessary is also only poorly understood, with
the result that the discipline required to maintain them has all too often been
allowed to lapse.
Worse
still, there have even been times in our ignorance – not least the present –
when we have actually deluded ourselves into thinking that such constraints
upon our behaviour are not required, and that being in some way naturally
‘good’ – unless, of course, irredeemably toxic – both men and women should therefore
be allowed to live however they like. Against all evidence to the contrary and disregarding
our entire history as a species, the inevitable result has been that the one
institution which largely kept us civilized – that of marriage – which not
only, for the most part, ensured the safety of women but greatly limited the
number of men who were excluded from the mating pool, thereby also limiting the
amount of anger and resentment with which society has had to deal – has now fallen
into decline, abandoned in pursuit of what, on the surface, appear to be other,
more desirable social, economic and political goals.
Even in
this, however, we reveal just how little we understand ourselves. For by viewing
the decline in marriage over the last forty years or so as largely the result of
our society’s more enlightened attitude towards women – and therefore of our
own political will – we completely fail to recognise the far more fundamental
evolutionary forces at work in shaping society. In fact, we mistake ourselves
entirely. For as I aim to demonstrate in this second part of ‘Why We All Have
Twice As Many Female Ancestors As Male’, the revolutionary changes which have so
transformed society since the end of the second world war have had far less to
do with political philosophy than with the biological imperatives programmed into
our genes, the change in the relationship between men and women, in particular,
having been brought about by nothing less than what I aim to show has been a reassertion
of the MANS principle as instantiated through female choice.
To
understand this, however, we first need to understand why such a reassertion
was necessary, especially given the fact that at the end of Part I of this
essay, human beings were still living in hunter-gatherer communities in which
women’s sexual freedom was more or less guaranteed, both by the communal raising
of children within the matriarchal clan, and by the self-interest of the
dominant males at the head of the tribal hierarchy, who knew that by defending
a woman’s right to choose, they more or less guaranteed that they would always
be the ones chosen.
The first
question we need to ask, therefore, is: What happened to change this? And the
short answer, at least, is: The Climate!
Around 11,500
years ago, after a period of approximately
103,000 years during which the earth experienced its most recent ice age of
period of glaciation, the planet finally began to warm up again, sufficiently
extending the growing season in places like the Nile delta and the Mesopotamian
basin so as to permit the sowing and harvesting of certain varieties of grass,
the relatively large seeds of which could be milled to produce flour, which
could then be used to make bread. Over the next thousand years or so, as the
ice sheet retreated and temperatures gradually increased at latitudes further
and further away from the equator, human beings all over the world consequently
started to give up their nomadic, hunter-gatherer lifestyle and became settled
farmers instead, finding it both safer and more reliable to grow crops and
husband various breeds of domesticated animal than forage and hunt.
As fundamental as this thorough-going transformation in our
way of life may seem, however, it was what flowed from it that far more
significantly altered women’s position in society. For settling in one place
inevitably brought with it a whole train of other economic and social changes,
the first and most important of which was the creation of property.
I say this because, as hunter-gatherers, human beings had
had very few possessions and nothing that could really be described as
‘property’ in the way in which we normally use this term: just a few furs,
perhaps, along with a stone axe and flint knife. Now, as settled farmers, we
discovered the most important and fundamental property of all: land. For it was
only through the physical possession of land that farmers could farm and hence
provide for themselves. Moreover, it was only by providing for themselves that
they could maintain their independence. For anyone who did not physically
possess land had to work for someone else who did, thereby placing themselves in
a position of subordination. Land ownership, therefore, did not just mean
independence and personal sovereignty, it also meant power. And the one thing
every land owner who had such power wanted, therefore, was to pass it on, after
his death, to someone who was effectively a continuation of himself: a son and
heir of his own blood.
Thus it was through property that fatherhood now began to be
recognised, bringing into being a new ‘patriarchal’ social structure, in which
families were organised along the line of patrilineal descent: the very
development, indeed, which feminists now so much decry, not least because it
inevitably curtailed many of the freedoms which women had previously enjoyed. For
any man who wanted to pass on his land to his son, first had to ensure that his
son was actually his. This meant that the woman who bore him this son not only
had to be faithful to him throughout the duration of their union but had to be
a virgin when that union commenced. Thus property not only brought about the
recognition of fatherhood but the institution of marriage.
Worse still, with respect to current sensibilities, it also
brought about capitalism. For land is not fungible, in the sense that not all
land has the same value. Some land is simply better for growing crops than
other land, with the better land producing higher yields. Any man who owned
better quality land than his neighbours, therefore, would not only have been
able to grow more food than them but, assuming that, in most years, most
farmers grew enough food for their own consumption, would have actually been
able to produce a surplus: an additional quantity of food which he could then
trade or sell, providing him with the capital required to invest in more land,
while also, perhaps, hiring landless labourers to work it. This, in turn, would
have produced an even bigger surplus the following year, which, again, he would
have been able to sell, allowing him to invest in even more land. And so on and
so on. Indeed, it is this cycle of production and reinvestment which is the
very essence of capitalism, encapsulating its most essential truth: that, if
well managed, property tends to accrue to those who already have it, the
inevitable result being that the rich get richer while the poor get poorer, the
inequality becoming ever more exaggerated over time, particularly in societies which
practice primogeniture, where the eldest son inherits all of his father’s wealth,
as opposed to societies in which the deceased’s property is divided equally
among his surviving offspring.
Once accumulated wealth started being inherited in this way,
this then brought about another, even more profound change in the relationship
between men and women, especially among the rich. For while, in hunter-gatherer
communities, there had been no distinction between the men who commanded the
community’s resources and the men whom women found most attractive – the men at the top of
the social hierarchy generally being the fittest, strongest and most capable men
in the tribe – in a
land-owning society in which those who inherited their fathers’ wealth were not
necessarily of the same calibre as the fathers who amassed it, this was no
longer the case. Indeed, in this new society, it would have been perfectly
possible, and probably quite commonplace for a woman to marry a wealthy husband
purely for the standard of living he could give her, while not being physically
attracted to him in the least, very probably preferring the fit, young men whom
her husband very likely hired to guard his property, including, of course, his
wife. The inevitable result, therefore, was the emergence of a wholly new
crime: one which would have been unimaginable within a matriarchal society, but
which could now cause an adulterous wife and her imprudent lover to lose their
lives.
Nor was this new crime of adultery the only way in which the
new patriarchal order sought to control female sexuality and influence a woman’s
choice of mate, especially if the new institution of marriage involved the
payment of a dowry: a tradition which may well have come about as a hangover
from the matriarchal age when economic responsibility for a woman lay with her
matrilineal male relatives. In his study of the Trobriand Islanders, the
fieldwork for which actually took place during the island’s transition from a
matriarchal to a patriarchal order, Bronislaw Malinowski describes, for
instance, how the brothers and maternal uncles of marriageable young women
would sometimes quite literally lock their sisters and nieces away in order to
keep them from forming attachments to attractive but impecunious young men who,
on taking responsibility for the young woman’s material needs, would then demand
payment from those whose responsibility her welfare had previously been.
Not, of course, that we can be certain that this is how the
tradition of providing a bride with the means of her future support actually arose,
or indeed that, in every instance, the transition from a matriarchal to a
patriarchal society occurred precisely in the way Malinowski recounts. What I
have outlined above are merely the logical steps of such a transition. How long
it would have taken in a real world context and how much more complicated the
process may have been we have absolutely no way of knowing. For, of course,
there is no historical record stretching back that far. The one thing that
seems highly likely from Malinowski’s account, however, is that, in many
societies, the two orders –
the matriarchal and the patriarchal –
may well have coexisted, side by side, for quite some time – perhaps even thousands
of years – before
the transition was complete, with only the rich, or those for whom the passing
on of property was important, initially getting married, while the poor enjoyed
more flexible sexual relationships, with the women collectively rearing
children from multiple fathers in still largely matriarchal communities.
Indeed, it’s possible that this division may have continued right
up to the start of our recorded history and perhaps even beyond, the separation
of the two cultures being maintained by the ever-widening gulf between the rich
and the poor. For as capitalism developed, and more and more of a society’s
wealth inexorably accumulated in the hands of a few rich landowners, economic
logic dictates that most such societies would have become increasingly divided
into three main social classes: the wealthy few who owned all the land; a
middle order of landless but physically and intellectually capable men who
served the landowners as stewards, scribes, overseers and enforcers; and the
toiling masses who may have started out as hired hands or day labourers but who
were eventually reduced to a state of slavery. In fact, for at least the first
thousand years of our written history, and for probably some millennia before
then, most agricultural workers throughout the Middle East and much of
Mediterranean Europe –
indeed, almost anywhere where a fertile soil and temperate climate allowed wealth
to be accumulated in this way –
would have actually been slaves.
This is because extreme inequality, on the scale here
envisaged, would have created two very serious problems for the landed class.
Firstly, being in a very small minority, they had to keep the impoverished landless
majority in a constant state of intimidated oppression so as to stave off any
possible rebellion, which, should it occur, had to be suppressed with merciless
brutality. To accomplish this, however, they also needed to maintain the
loyalty of the men who would carry out this ruthless suppression: the men of
the middle order whose services had to be rewarded and whose aspirations needed
to be met. If the land owners were not to be forced to share their own wealth
with these men, therefore, the necessary rewards and opportunities for advancement
had to come from somewhere else: something which could only really be achieved
through military conquest.
The inevitable result was the age of ancient empires: an
almost unique period in human history in which the MANS principle was instantiated,
not by female selection, but by male force, not in single combat between
individuals competing for the right to mate, but in wars of conquest between
competing civilizations, in which the entire male population of an economically
and technologically less advanced culture could be removed from the gene pool,
either through death on the battlefield or a life of enslavement, while their
women were given out as rewards to the victorious soldiery in much the same way
as they had been following inter-tribal clashes between hunter-gatherers, only
now on a much larger scale.
Not, of course, that all ancient empires operated in exactly
the same way, the above model being largely confined to early empires, such as
that of the Assyrians, whose predations on neighbouring populations are well
documented. Extensive archaeological excavations in northern Israel, for
instance, have revealed dozens of ancient villages which simply disappeared around
800 BC following an Assyrian invasion, their entire populations having been
either killed or taken elsewhere .
The Assyrians’ successors as rulers of Mesopotamia, the
Babylonians, also seem to have followed this model. After their conquest of the
Kingdom Judah in the early 6th century BC, the Babylonian king,
Nebuchadnezzar, famously took large numbers of Jews into captivity. In doing
so, however, he also revealed what is probably the model’s most serious
drawback. For having taken a conquered population back to one’s homeland as
slaves, one then has to decide whether to keep the men and women together as a
viable breeding population, or whether to segregate the two sexes, putting the
men to work in the fields as agricultural labourers, while typically selling
the women into prostitution or
domestic service.
The problem, however, is that while both of these options
have something to be said for them, they each also have some seriously negative
implications. If one chooses to keep the men and women together, for instance, the
upside of this is that they will naturally reproduce and the empire’s slave
population will thus be self-sustaining. However, one will have also brought a
breeding population of foreigners into the heart of one’s empire, who, like the
troublesome Jews in Babylon, will always pose a potential threat. If, on the
other hand, one chooses to segregate them, one may forestall this obvious
danger, but only at the cost of constantly having to find more lands to conquer
in order to replenish one’s slave population from outside. For although most of
the captured women –
those sold into prostitution or domestic service – are likely to have children, most of them being
made pregnant by their new masters, it is unlikely that any of the male agricultural
slaves will ever replace themselves. What’s more, it’s also unlikely that many
of the children of the female captives will grow up to take their places either.
For while traditions in this regard may have differed between different
imperial cultures, being the illegitimate sons and daughters of their owners,
it is far more likely that these children would eventually be integrated into
the native population, with the boys, in particular, being trained as soldiers
in order to meet the army’s continual need for new recruits in order to conquer
new lands and thus obtain fresh supplies of slaves.
As a consequence, it was almost certainly to get off this
slave-driven treadmill that
the Babylonian’s successors as the imperial masters of Mesopotamia, the
Persians, took a completely different approach to empire. In 539 BC, the new Persian
king, Cyrus the Great, not only allowed the still intact Jewish community in
Babylon to return home to Judah, but set out a new policy with respect to
future conquests, in which conquered peoples would remain in their native lands
and would work there for their new imperial overlords, either directly on
estates taken from the defeated landed class, or indirectly through taxes.
This had two main advantages. Firstly, by not transporting
whole peoples back to one’s homeland, one did not end up with potentially
rebellious aliens in one’s midst. Even more importantly, however, the
administration of an empire’s foreign possessions quite naturally provided new
opportunities for its middle class to move up in the world, particularly if
part of the reward for their services comprised a share in the sequestered lands
in the conquered territory.
The problem, however, was that this also constituted one of
the new model’s major disadvantages. For in addition to the army of bureaucrats
required to administer these colonial possessions, the empire also needed a
huge standing army of actual soldiers to keep the conquered territories under
control and prevent rebellion, while also guarding an ever-expanding border.
This further meant that the empire’s homeland was increasingly denuded of young
men, with the result that, eventually, in the case of Rome, for instance, which
also followed the Persian model, the population of its Italian homeland was
almost entirely reduced to unmarried women, freedmen – who had effectively become the empire’s principal
domestic overseers and administrators, which is to say its new middle class – and the slaves who were
still, of course, required to work the estates of the landed aristocracy.
Moreover, these slaves still had to be imported. Which meant
that the empire still had to keep expanding. And while the threat of internal
rebellion from within the inner provinces could be mitigated by eventually
making most of their native populations citizens of the empire – thereby also enabling
them to be recruited into the army and the civil service – the ever-growing needs
of an ever-expanding periphery not only meant that the empire eventually became
overstretched and vulnerable, but that even this revised imperial model was essentially
unsustainable, as the Romans, themselves, eventually admitted, when, in the
middle of the 2nd century AD, the Emperor Hadrian started building
walls and fortresses along the Rhine and the Danube, thereby placing the empire
on a new defensive footing and marking the end of its expansion.
Over the next several centuries, therefore, as the Roman and
Parthian empires gradually disintegrated, wealthy landowners throughout Europe
and the Middle East had to find a more sustainable way of husbanding their
workforce, with the result that a new, modified form of slavery – generally referred to
as serfdom – began
to emerge, in which serfs were still tied to their masters’ estates, for which
they had to work a set number of days each year, but, in return, were allocated
plots of ‘common’ land which they could collectively work for their own subsistence.
More to the point, given the principal subject of this essay, they were also now
encouraged to marry and have children in order to replace themselves, thereby giving
rise to self-sustaining communities which, to some extent, were also self-governing,
at least with regard to such internal domestic issues as to who should marry
whom among a village’s young men and women, thereby allowing the instantiation
of MANS through female selection to, once again, assert itself.
That’s not to say, of course, that women instantly regained
the sexual freedom they had enjoyed as hunter-gatherers or, indeed, anything
like. For even though serfs owned no land and could, in principle, have lived
communally, in practice monogamous marriage had now become the only acceptable form
of union between men and women, at least in Christian Europe. Even without
owning any land, moreover, the question as to whom a woman should marry was still
as much determined by the economics of agricultural production as it was by the
woman’s own inclination. For the land owners weren’t the only ones with an
interest in the reproductive success of their workforce. The peasants,
themselves, also had a lot at stake. For above all else, they needed to ensure
that the young men and women who would comprise the next generation of their
community were as fit and strong as possible, not only so that they could fulfil
the village’s obligations to their feudal lord, but to ensure that they would also
have enough energy left over to work the village’s own land, in addition to producing
strong, healthy children of their own. The decision as to who was to marry whom
among a village’s young men and women, therefore, was as collectively important
to the village as decisions regarding any of their other breeding livestock and,
as Germaine Greer remarked in ‘The Female Eunuch’, was usually made in much the
same way.
As Germaine Greer also explains, however, for many women
this may not have been a bad thing. For even though they had still not regained
complete control over their choice of mate, in some ways, they were actually in
a better position than the women of later periods. For due to the very fact
that the economic implications of any marriage were communal rather individual – the well-being of the
entire village resting on each couple’s reproductive success – for the most physically
favoured women, in particular, the criteria which determined which unions should
take place almost always produced much the same pairings as the women,
themselves, would have chosen, with the fittest, strongest and most able young
men naturally being paired with the most reproductively promising young women,
leaving only the less favoured women disappointed with their match or unmarried
altogether. Indeed, medieval peasant marriages, as Germaine Greer’s describes
of them, probably get as close to being about pure natural selection as any
marriages in the institution’s history, and for that very reason were likely to
have been more acceptable to women than some later forms of marriage, which
became more and more determined by the economic circumstances and needs of
individuals.
For this next transformation in relations between the sexes to
take place, however, two further changes in the external environment were necessary.
The first of these occurred during the early 14th century, when the
Black Death wiped out whole swathes of Europe’s rural population, thereby
effectively increasing the value of agricultural labour. The result was that
land owners now had to compete for workers, usually by offering them small plots
of land of their own to work, rather than just a share in the produce of common
land. By luring peasants away from their former feudal masters, moreover, the
tie between a serf and his master’s estate was effectively severed, creating a new
mobility within the agricultural labour market, which had the further
consequence, therefore, of effectively ending the institution of serfdom altogether.
While this shifted some of the economic focus away from the
collective and on to the individual, however, it did not necessarily enhance
the individual’s economic circumstances to any great extent, at least not to
the degree that women might discern any real economic differences among
prospective mates and hence be guided in their choices by economic factors. For
this to occur, a second external or environmental intervention was needed: one
which came in the form of yet another change in the climate, albeit one which
was significantly smaller than 9°C
of warming which transformed the planet at the end of the last ice age.
While smaller in degree, the 2°C of cooling which occurred during the 17th
century, resulting in what is generally known to as the Little Ice Age, was
still, nevertheless, no trivial matter, with effects that were far more
catastrophic than is generally recognised. Throughout the world, a shortening
of the growing season led to widespread crop failures, especially at latitudes that
were already marginal for agriculture, such as those in northern Europe, which suffered
decades of famine and higher food prices. What made this even worse, however,
was the fact that the absolutist monarchs of the day, such as Charles I of
England and Louis XIV of France, didn’t realise or understand what was
happening and continued to levy taxes that were increasingly beyond what the
middle class, in particular, were able to afford. This, in turn therefore,
precipitated nearly a century of revolutions and civil wars in which it is
estimated that Europe lost around a third of its population.
This time, however, it was not population loss, itself, which
led to the social and economic changes which eventually led to the emergence of
modern marriage. Instead, it was rather the fact that, with so many crop
failures over the previous century, farming itself had become far too risky a business
for the land owners, themselves, to indulge in. Instead of hiring agricultural
labourers to work their estates, therefore, they decided that it was safer to
lease individual farms to these same labourers for an annual rent, thereby
guaranteeing themselves an annual income, while their new tenants – who had to pay the rent
regardless of the quality of the harvest – took all the risk.
This is not to say, however, that the advent of ‘rentier
capitalism’ – in
which the owner of an asset does not work that asset himself to produce a
return, but merely rents it out to someone else – was only to the benefit of the rentier class. For
although tenants had to pay the rent and did, indeed, take all the risk, a long
term tenancy, which could be passed down from father to son, was still,
nevertheless, an asset, which could be developed and improved, giving the
tenant far more economic control over his life than mere agricultural labourers
had ever had. Moreover, once the climate began to warm up again and farming
became inherently less precarious, these new tenant farmers now had something
far more tangible to offer prospective wives than the mere relative
attractiveness of their persons: they had more or less guaranteed incomes and hence
an almost guaranteed standard of living.
Even more importantly, they also had incentive. For by
shifting the responsibility for an individual’s economic security from the
community to the individual, himself –
as the creation of long-term tenancies now effectively did – it placed the
individual’s fate in his own hands, giving rise to a culture of competitive
endeavour in which marriage, itself, now became a major driver. For whether it was
in the countryside or in any of Europe’s rapidly expanding cities, where new
technologies and industries were providing ever more diverse opportunities for
enterprising young men to make their fortune, if a man wanted to marry he knew that
he had to be able to offer his prospective bride a future commensurate with her
expectations, or at least those of her family. Thus marriage, in what we might
now call its ‘modern’ form, became a goal which drove men on, fuelling the
agricultural and industrial revolutions of the modern era.
The problem was, of course, that while this was good for
men, providing them with achievable goals and a clearly laid out path towards
both success and happiness, for women, who are genetically programmed to select
men on the basis of their physical and personal attributes, it was far less so.
For as in the case of the very rich in the earliest patriarchal societies, the new
socially acceptable criteria for the selection of a mate, which women were now
forced to adopt, shifted the emphasis away from a man’s personal qualities and
onto his economic circumstances and prospects, such that the man who made a
young lady’s pulse race was not necessarily the man whom her family would urge
her to marry.
Moreover, as technological innovation and improvements in
productivity increased economic growth, this placed more and more men in the
position of being economically eligible, with the further consequence that,
statistically, more and more women found themselves in the unenviable position
of ‘choosing’ men who, from a purely personal perspective, they would probably
never have chosen before. And while this may not have always been something
they would later lament, in every generation throughout the modern era there would
always have been a number of women who, somewhere down the road – looking back over all
the men they could have chosen –
found themselves regretting the one for whom they had ‘settled’. Indeed, the idea
that they could have done better for themselves is a thought which has very probably
crossed the minds of millions of women over the years and which, in many cases,
has given rise to a level of disaffection which has eventually made the
marriage intolerable to both parties.
That’s not to say, of course, that men have never regretted
their own choice in this regard. However, a husband’s regret nearly always
reciprocates that of his wife. This is because men and women have very
different attitudes and expectations when it comes to marriage, which, in turn,
stem not just from the obvious biological difference between the two sexes, but
from the very different reproductive strategies to which these differences give
rise. For while women can only have a small number of children during their reproductive
years, making it entirely logical, therefore – as well as biologically conditioned – that they choose the father,
or fathers of these children with great care, a single man is biologically
capable of siring literally thousands of children during his lifetime, therefore
making a scatter gun approach the strategically best option for passing on his
genes.
Not, of course, that most men achieve this. For the
selectivity of women means that most men get very few opportunities to do much
scattering. Moreover, they are generally well aware of their limitations in
this regard, along with their relative standing in women’s eyes. It’s why, for
instance, they are usually very careful in their choice of women they ask out
on a date, steering well away from any woman they regard as ‘out of their
league’. It is also why traditional courtship, in which they could sell
themselves as good economic providers, suited them. For it allowed them to compensate
for any physical and personal shortcomings they may have felt they had by
demonstrating other attributes and abilities.
Being thus both generally quite realistic with respect to
their prospects with women and also less choosey than women, men also therefore
tend to be rather more passive in their approach to finding a mate, with very
few men having the courage to go up to a woman unless she has given him some
very clear signals that she would welcome his attention. Given that, to most
men, this happens very rarely, the result is that, as long as the woman who has
raised their hopes is a congenial companion, makes them feel good about
themselves and –
when the relationship has reached this stage – is enthusiastically happy to have sex with them on
most of the occasions on which they feel so inclined – three admittedly very important conditions – most men are more than happy
to therefore ‘settle’ for what fortune has seen fit to bestow upon them. It is
only when the women themselves, therefore, begin to regret their choice and
start to demonstrate this regret in a far less loving and companionable manner
that men, too, then typically start to regret it.
That’s not to say, of course, that there aren’t men who,
disappointed and frustrated by their own inadequacies and failures in life,
take their bitterness, resentment and anger out on their wives. The world is a
hard and unforgiving place and is consequently full of disappointed and unhappy
people. As I pointed out in ‘Women’s Liberation and the Monetarisation of the
Economy’, however, violent and abusive marriages can hardly have ever been the
norm or women, having watched their mothers go through hell, would have simply
stopped getting married.
A far more common impediment to a happy and successful
marriage, therefore, is almost certainly one which has its basis in yet another
evolutionary difference between men and women. This is the fact that, being
less choosey than women, men don’t need to be wooed or courted. By this I mean
that if a woman shows even the mildest interest in a man, as long as he finds
her moderately attractive –
though not so attractive, of course, that he is made to feel uncomfortable or
suspicious – he
will not generally require a lot of persuading to respond positively. After
all, most men don’t get that many offers. More to the point, once in a
relationship, they rarely need very much more from a wife or girlfriend than
the three requirements outlined above. They certainly don’t need or expect to
be continually romanced. In fact, most men are likely to regard any
over-attentiveness on behalf of their wives or girlfriends as a sign that they
want something or have already done something which the men, themselves, are
not going to like. And they’re usually right.
This, however, is not how it is for women. For having spent
far more of their evolutionary development in matriarchal hunter-gather tribes,
from which they selected a series of mates over time, than in patriarchal
societies which now confine them to a single partner for life, even within the
bounds of a monogamous marriage, women still consequently need to be courted
and wooed on a continual basis.
This is not something women demand of men in order to make
life difficult for them –
though it often has that effect –
it is rather an essential part of the mating process: something that women
require in order that they may continually renew their selection. For every
time a woman accepts a man into her bed, it is, in effect, a MANS instantiating
choice. And to justify that choice, the man in question must continually prove,
not just his merit –
though, importantly, that too –
but his love and devotion. And although men may never be able to truly comprehend
this – having no
such need themselves –
if they want a long and happy marriage, they nevertheless have to understand it
and act accordingly, remembering their wedding anniversary being generally a
good start, closely followed by taking their wives out to dinner to celebrate,
or arranging a romantic weekend away for just the two of them, so that they may
relive something of the closeness of their first days together.
The mere fact that marriage has to be worked at in this way,
however –
especially by men –
reveals its inherent weakness. For while, from a societal perspective,
monogamous marriage may have seemed the optimal solution to the problem of
instantiating MANS through female selection in a species with such potentially catastrophic
gender differences, the fact that this form of union does not come naturally to
either men or women –
requiring both of them, in fact, to work at it – meant that, for women in particular, a reversion to
something closer to that for which they were evolutionally prepared was more or
less inevitable once the social and economic conditions for it had been laid. And
that is precisely what has happened over the last sixty years or so, as two
further changes in the external environment once again transformed the
relationship between men and women.
The first of these occurred in 1960, when the US Food and
Drug Administration approved the sale and distribution of the first safe and
reliable oral contraceptive, thereby allowing women to engage in sexual
relationships without first securing a legally binding contract providing for any
children they might have as a consequence.
While this restored some of the sexual freedom that women
had enjoyed in matriarchal societies, however, on its own it still did not free
them from the requirement to marry altogether. All it really did was give them
a little more sexual license before making their final marital choice. In order
to free them from marriage completely, what they also required was economic
freedom from men, which not only required a much large societal transformation
but the active cooperation and support of society as a whole, including the two
most powerful economic agencies in the modern world: big business and
government.
Indeed, it was big business and government that really made
this whole transition possible, though not because either had any particular
regard for the women’s movement. For as I explained in ‘Women’s Liberation and
the Monetarisation of the Economy’, each had their own agenda for wanting
greater female economic independence.
Big business primarily wanted women to go out to work because
it wanted the increased purchasing power which this would give them, making
them better consumers. However, it also wanted the abundant cheap labour which
women could supply, women at that time being paid considerably less than men. Similarly,
governments wanted women to join the paid labour force, firstly because they
wanted the increased tax revenue which this would produce, but also because
they wanted to take credit for the apparent economic growth and increase in GDP
to which the monetarisation of what women had previously produced unmonetarised
in the home would seemingly give rise.
The result was that within just two decades, from 1960 to sometime
around 1980, women had not only regained their sexual freedom but had actually
secured a level of economic independence from men which they’d probably never
had before in the whole of human history, thereby freeing them from the need to
get married at all if that is what they wanted.
The problem, however, as I also explained in ‘Women’s Liberation and the Monetarisation of the Economy’, was that the monetarised
production of food, clothing and other goods and service which women had
previously produced in the home without monetary remuneration, introduced a
significant level of hidden inflation into the economy, which wasn’t reflected
in either the Retail Price Index or the wages that were negotiated on the basis
of official inflation figures. The result was that, whereas in the 1950s,
families with three, four or even five children could live quite comfortably on
the monetary income of a single wage-earner, it very soon became difficult for even
one child families to get by, even with both parents working.
Worse still, with both the husband and wife needing to hold
down full-time jobs, married couples now have far less time to simply be
together, and even less for a man to periodically woo and court his wife anew.
For even when they have finished work, the shopping still has be done, the
children have to be picked up from day care, supper still has to be cooked and
the house still needs to be tidied and cleaned. To many married couples, as a
result, the institution of marriage and the practicalities of bringing up
children has come to seem like an endless treadmill of demands from which they
simply want to escape, making it hardly surprising, therefore, that 42% of all
marriages now end in divorce and more and more men and women are putting off
marriage until much later in life or never getting married at all.
In the United States, for instance, the proportion of those
aged between 25 and 34 who are married declined from 55.1% in 2000 to 44.9% in
2009, while the proportion of the ‘never-marrieds’ – as distinct from the simply unmarried, which
includes both the divorced and the widowed – increased from 34.5% to 46.3%. What is even more
significant, however, is the change in the ‘dating’ behaviour of the
never-marrieds during this period. For with the marriageability of men – or even their potential
as a long term partners –
no longer featuring very highly among a woman’s criteria in choosing a date, the
basis upon which this choice is made has increasingly reverted to men’s
physical attractiveness: a trend which has been further accentuated by the use
of online dating apps and the very limited scrutiny given to most of the
candidates who upload their profiles.
The result is that a large proportion of the never-married male
population, like the many low status males in matriarchal societies, now effectively
find themselves outside the dating/mating pool. A recent study by the US
Institute for Family Studies (IFS), for instance, found that around 23% of never-married
men aged between 22 and 35 –
usually the most sexually active demographic – had not had any sexual encounters within the
previous twelve months: some by choice, but mostly not.
In fact, online, some involuntary celibates, or Incels as
they are called, are vociferously angry about their situation in a way that has
earned them something of an anti-social and even misogynistic reputation. For
most involuntarily celibate males, however, one suspects that the reality is
somewhat different. For resigned to the fact that they will probably never
marry or even have a girlfriend, it is far more than likely that most of them
keep their misery and shame to themselves, hiding it behind a semblance of
jovial camaraderie or an obsession with computer games.
Others, of course, attempt to find solace in alcohol or
drugs and, in so doing, very likely contribute to the epidemic of over-dose
deaths that is currently gripping America, with 70,237 fatalities in 2017, compared
to the mere 16,849 in 1999. Even more sadly, some are driven to go even further,
adding to the steadily rising US suicide rate which, in 2018, stood at 48,344,
up from 42,773 in 2014, with 70% of all suicides being carried out by white
males.
That’s not to say, of course, that it’s all doom and gloom
for men in today’s dating world. Because for every involuntarily celibate male
who is repeatedly rejected by women –
or has given up even trying –
there have got to be other males, at the other end of the dating spectrum, who
are repeatedly chosen by women. And, indeed, this is the case. For while, according
to the same IFS study cited above, the most-favoured 20% of men, based on their
attractiveness to women, may not be having quite the 80% of outside-marriage
sex attributed to them by urban legend, they get fairly close to it with 60%. What
such statistics imply, however, is a lifestyle that doesn’t come cheap in either
economic or emotional terms: one which not only involves dozens of hours in the
gym each week keeping their bodies toned to Chippendale perfection and a small
fortune spent on casual but fashionably expensive designer clothes, but a
superficiality in relationships and in their attitude to life in general which
is in stark contrast to the men who once built fortunes in order to be able to
marry.
Not that women emerge from the current dating environment looking
very much better, not least because unlike the women in hunter-gatherer communities,
who would seldom have had any difficulty in attracting a high status male – most of the women of
the tribe being, at any one time, either pregnant or nursing a small child – never-married women of
today, who rarely if ever have children, face much stiffer competition. In
order to attract a desirable mate, therefore, they too have to work much harder
and spend more money, not just on clothes, make-up, hair and accessories, but
even on having their bodies surgically altered, and all to secure the attention
of some latter-day Lothario who will have moved on to his next conquest by the
middle of next week.
Not, of course, that all women have the values of an
Instagram model. But given their genetically encoded predisposition to always
choose the ‘bad boy’ in the room, along with the fact that economic pressure is
constantly making marriage less and less appealing – giving them very little reason to look beyond mere physical
attractiveness –
they don’t really have a lot of options, other, that is, than to withdraw
themselves from the mating game altogether: a course which it would appear that
more and more women are actually taking, as they experiment with alternative
lifestyles which do not involve men at all.
The irony, of course, is that in severing themselves from
men in this way, women inevitably end up blaming men – their uselessness and toxicity – for the necessity of going
down this road, which, in turn, then more or less requires them to espouse the
very feminist and progressive causes which, in part at least, are actually responsible
for their predicament. For while it may have been pharmacology which separated
sex from reproduction, and government and big business which lured women out of
the home with the promise of financial independence, it was an ideology that
convinced them that this new order was not only right and natural but came
without consequences.
One such consequence, however – which may well turn out to be far more profound and
far-reaching than anyone has yet understood – is that, to many people, the loss of the common
purpose which men and women once shared in bringing up children, and which kept
them together through thick and thin, has actually left them bereft of any
sense of purpose at all. Yes, some women, like some men, may now be able to
find fulfillment in their career or a position in public life. But this has
always been the preserve of the few. For most people, meaning has always had to
be found in their private life, in the building of a home and the successful
raising of children, through whom both men and women could justly feel that, in
their own small way, they had made a contribution to the future.
Not only is this now being made more difficult to achieve
economically, however, but its value and legitimacy are being further
undermined by an ideology which finds it socially unacceptable for anyone – let alone women – to find satisfaction
and meaning in the mere biological function of having children. After all,
women are not just baby-making machines and have a right, therefore, to seek
meaning and fulfillment elsewhere. In fact, in order to assert this right, they
are more or less obligated to do just this, whether they want to or not. For
anything else would be a betrayal of the ideology, itself, which, for many of
its adherents has thus become the cause or purpose in life they would otherwise
lack.
Indeed, with marriage becoming less and less attractive to
both men and women, and fulfillment in our personal lives thus becoming ever
harder to find, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that so many young people today
are now looking to find their sense of purpose through just this kind of
political activism. The result is a world awash with youthful political
movements, nearly all of them trying to right the wrongs of the patriarchal,
capitalist system, whether this be by solving the problem of inequality or
saving the planet from climate change. The problem, of course, is that while
adherence to such causes may temporarily make us feel that we are part of
something bigger and more important than ourselves, not only is there little
that is personal in such crusades, but the virtue they bestow upon us is bought
at the price of condemning almost everything upon which our success as a people
was previously built: not the just patriarchy and capitalism, but the whole of
European civilization to which it gave rise, its art, literature, science and
philosophy, leaving us with even less to hold on to and believe in.
As the consumerist economics and big government welfarism of
the last sixty years now drive us inexorably towards what will almost certainly
be the worst financial and economic collapse in our history, the question we all
have to ask, therefore, is not just how, once the dust has settled, we should
rebuild our shattered economy on a sounder basis than the pile of irredeemable
debt upon which it currently sits, but whether, given our current social-sexual
malaise, we really want to continue down the same ideological path along which
the last sixty years has been leading us, or whether, at this moment of
civilizational reset, we might rather use our knowledge of our evolutionary
legacy, not to return to the past –
for knowing what we know, that is probably not an option – but to perhaps find
another, kinder solution to the MANS principle: one which might yet bring men
and women back together in some new form of relationship, in which, hopefully,
they might once again find purpose and happiness.
