This is part 2 of a series of blog posts. Please read part 1 first.
If women are so much more valuable than men, why does nature not produce more of them? Only a small percentage of men (like 2%) would be totally sufficient to get all women pregnant. This would almost double the reproductive capacity of any species and therefore offer a huge advantage over other species with „classic“ 50:50 ratio. The reason for this is rather simple: Let‘s assume that a female individual has a genetic mutation which makes her produce 90% girls. After a few generation this advantage would make her genes certainly dominate the population. But now, when the population consists of mostly females, it would be much more advantageous to create a gene variant which can produce males at a higher rate.
Because of these two opposing „forces“ on genes, the ratio must always remain close to 1:1.
The only option to avoid this problem would be asexual reproduction (i.e. females cloning themselves. This has huge disadvantages an makes such mutations getting extinct rather quickly).
Therefore the huge losses made on unproductive males is a necessary price to pay for the huge long term advantages offered by sexual reproduction.
But why, if women are biologically so much more powerful, do we still see patriarchal structures everywhere?
Isn‘t this whole view simply wrong?
A first hint that it might be not can be found in the following quote:
“Power and violence are opposites; where the one rules absolutely, the other is absent. Violence appears where power is in jeopardy.”
― Hanna Arendt
But, to understand the current situation better, we must study a bit of human history.
Please note that, for reasons explained in the manual to my blog, I present the following theories as usual as certain facts (which they are - of course - not!).
In ancient hunter gatherer societies women were mostly free to „use“ their reproductive organs as they wanted. The reasons for this were the following:
- Not letting them do so would have reduced the efficiency of sex. Reproduction guided by incompetent humans quickly leads to undesired side effects (like inbreeding).
- Men were, from a biological point of view, almost equal. Hunter gatherers owned no land (by definition) and, as they were often traveling, only very few possessions. Therefore female choice was much less significant for long term reproductive success than today.
- Therefore any culture of controlling female sexuality would offer only disadvantages and no benefits.
Women in these societies maintained sexual relations to several men. This helped them to receive resources from from more than one man (men could never be sure which of the many kids in the group were from themselves, so they had to support them all) and reduced chances of infanticide by men (same reason).
Note that this was totally OK for the men of this time: women never promised to be faithful and accordingly men never expected them to be.
Because of this sophisticated „socio-sexual“ networks in ancient societies, human sexual behavior has evolved to be extremely complex. Needless to say that all the sophisticated activities related to this were also great entertainment for everybody.
The first important change happened around 12000 years ago when humans invented farming. Of course people now suddenly wanted to own the land they cultivated with hard work. This very quickly gave rise to the custom of inheritance which was required to preserve the value of the huge investments for future generations.
The impact on sexual culture were profound and, as we will see soon, devastating for women. Now mothers of girls faced a serious challenge: while it was normal before to let them choose their partners as they liked, this was not an option anymore. To make inheritance work, it must be completely clear who the father of the child is. Only a man who is sure about his fatherhood would make the required future investments and it would also make no sense to devide the land for several fathers.
This new circumstances gave birth to the modern family.
Now a young woman was not only the owner of her body anymore, but responsible for preserving family wealth (created possibly by many generations!) far into the future.
It is obvious that this was a huge responsibility which would easily overwhelm a young girl who had just become sexually mature. Therefore young girls could not exert power over their bodies freely anymore. It was mostly in the interest of the mothers to restrict this power of their daughters, as it was only them who could be 100% sure to be parent.
In the next blog post we will explore using which measures their power was restricted and how it impacted women‘s lives.
Image on top: Shutterstock
Follow me on X to get informed about new content on this blog.
