This is part 3 of a series of blog posts. Please read part 1 first.
Young girls power was restricted using various methods. The simplest was controlling a girls social relationships with boys („chaperone“). The most sophisticated was crippling the girls socio-sexual skills by preventing their natural development. The most cruel was the surgical removal of the clitoris (usually executed by women!).
To be able to understand these measures, we need to understand where these socio-sexual skills come from.
Only intelligent animals (bonobos, dolphins, humans) show complex sexual behavior. This means that only the females of such advanced species need to develop socio-sexual skills too. This is important as otherwise they would easily fall prey to predatory male sexual strategies. And the only way for women to understand male sexual behavior is to be able to experience it - at least to some extent - too! This is why for such species, the female clitoris is able to create feelings of lust too and why women can have orgasms too [1]. Therefore, the female clitoris‘s purpose is not to let women enjoy an orgasm during intercourse (which does not mean that they can‘t have one!). The organ is obviously anatomically not well positioned for such an effect. It's actually designed for masturbation only, to let girls explore their sexual nature (i.e. promising sexual strategies) long before they become mature. In ancient societies young boys would actually do the same in (generally accepted) homosexual relationships (etc.). And this was once even encouraged by parents to give their kids of both sexes a knowledge advantage in the sexual arms race.
Therefore, parents (and particularly mothers) were now, in order to inhibit the development of socio-sexual skills, suddenly forced to forbid their daughters to masturbate and to have playful sexual relationships with other kids. Society also developed a culture of leaving girls as much as possible in the dark regarding all aspects of sexuality.
The future broom‘s parents would even demand this kind of crippling from the bride‘s family to ensure their son will be able to control his wifes sexuality to enforce her faithfulness (as required by the modern family model).
But by doing this, following generations of women also lost the power which comes with inhabiting the body variant containing the „baby factory“.
This power is only effective when used skillfully! It requires excellent socio-sexual skills to be enabled.
The loss of this power is therefore directly related to the invention of agriculture.
Another (sad) effect of this development was that most women lost interest in sexuality (beyond basic reproduction) as all the complex socio-sexual networks had vanished and with them 99% of the related fun activities. Consequently, marriage sex turned for most women into frequent duty (or worse: rape).
The next important human invention which directly impacted human sexual life was - of course - „the pill“ (oral contraceptive pill) which was sold first time around 1960.
It's hard to underestimate the significance of this invention: it gave women back their power!
As young women could now be given the pill to „protect“ them from „unwanted“ (by the parents!) pregnancy, the pressure to control (and therefore cripple) their sexuality was lowered substantially. Together with the need for long education (way past the age of first sexual maturity) it allowed to delay marriage to a much older age while still maintaining control over who will be the father of the child.
Of course this meant that women (and men!) could now gather sexual experience before marriage. This even became a necessity as soon as most potential partners for marriage were sexually experienced now: without such experiences, young people were no match for their more experienced partners later.
Of course this development also let women finally enjoy their sexuality again (at least in the time before marriage).
Altogether, women are today in full possession of their sexual power again.
But, of course, the situation today is not at all the same anymore like in the times of hunter gatherers: agriculture is still practiced. And after agriculture came a huge number of additional inventions which deepened our culture of owning: all kinds of products, gold, money and even cryptocurrencies and many other immaterial goods (like patents, software, copyrights etc.).
And the invention of electronics and computers (i.e. the unfolding of the information age) quickly lead to a very unequal distribution of wealth. How does this impact human sexuality today?
If owned resources have become the main factor determining reproductive success into the far future, women are forced to consider a man‘s wealth almost above all other factors when choosing a partner. They might prefer to be one of many women of a very rich man instead of having a single faithful poor man (which happens typically sequentially and not in parallel: rich men can marry several times in their lives).
This introduces substancial social stress into society. It means that todays men must invest huge amounts of energy into acquiring resources which make them competitive on the partner market. It ultimately lead to phenomenons like incels, misogyny and the manosphere.
Therefore, the current culture regarding inheritance (and possibly even owing) in our society could indirectly be the most important driver for the destruction of ecosystems, resource depletion and devastating wars!
In the next blog post we will explore some ideas how the problem could be solved.
[1] Of course both the male and the female sexual organs evolved simultaneously (not one after the other, co-evolution)
Image on top: Shutterstock
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