Inferior: The True Power of Women and the Science that Shows It

by Angela Saini

The key to making this possible was cooperative breeding. Agta women would take nursing infants with them on the hunt, and leave older children in the care of other family members. Or a woman might nurse her sister’s baby while she was out hunting. ‘Even young adults could do the babysitting or keep an eye on the smaller children, cousins or siblings, left behind at the camp. Cooperative breeding is, I think, a very important component.’

His research reveals a connection between the social structure of hunter-gatherer communities and high levels of sexual equality. This is evidence, he suggests, that equality was a feature of early human society, before the advent of agriculture and farming.

‘We have the ability to cooperate with unrelated individuals, which is different from what we see in primates, which are very wary of interacting with individuals they haven’t met before.’ This is crucial to complex societies. If people couldn’t cooperate with people they weren’t related to, civilisation as we know it simply couldn’t exist.

Society isgriefable because of this trust worm computer virus like propagation of payload from griefer

This all points to the possibility that the way the Palanan Agta and Mbendjele live may have been usual in our past. Historical investigations may have failed to uncover good evidence for the existence of matriarchal societies, in which women held the reins of power. But that doesn’t mean humans weren’t egalitarian.

Michael Gurven and Kim Hill, who have catalogued the reasons women don’t hunt, suggest that they tend to avoid it as the risk of death rises. This is important to a group’s overall survival, because losing a mother is far more dangerous for a child than losing a father.

‘In most circumstances, hunting of large animals is not a very productive thing to do,’ says Bliege Bird. ‘I would guess that the majority of subsistence for most hunter-gatherers in most environments is the small animals. And women are going to be the major procurers of small animals.’

There’s some research indicating, in other species at least, that when a female gets to choose the male she wants, her offspring are more likely to survive.

If there is enough contradictory evidence, it should put the underlying theory in doubt. The principles can’t be considered principles if there are so many exceptions. The problem is that Bateman’s and Trivers’ ideas have taken on such a life of their own that this does not appear to make much difference. ‘I think people are hung on Bateman’s principles. They say that the principles stand whether the data are right or not,’ says Gowaty.

She describes his principles as a box. As time wears on, fewer species – including humans – seem to fit inside it. Indeed, it’s possible to argue that if ever there was proof that females aren’t naturally chaste or coy, it’s the extraordinary lengths to which some males go to keep them faithful.

It’s known as mate-guarding, and is a vitally important piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding relationships and the balance of power between females and males. Even though it might well harm the male to have his partner so distressed through the winter, leaving her with less energy come the spring when she will need to reproduce and look after their offspring, he doesn’t stop pushing her away from the other males. It’s more important to him that he doesn’t lose her to another pigeon, even for a moment.

Male sexual jealousy, the fear of being cuckolded and such vicious mate-guarding suggest that females aren’t naturally chaste or passive at all. If they were, then why would their partners go to such extraordinary lengths to stop them getting anywhere near other males?

Throughout history, mutilating a girl’s genitals has been the most viciously effective means of assuring a man that his children will be his own and not someone else’s. It’s as brutal a manifestation of sexual jealousy and mate-guarding as could be imagined.

When developing this idea, she originally took her cue from a feminist psychiatrist called Mary Jane Sherfey, who had studied in the 1940s under Alfred Kinsey, the American sexologist famous for overturning popular assumptions about human sexual habits.

is aithor aware of problem with kinsey

concluded that animal studies do indeed suggest that the female orgasm originated for a purpose. In their paper published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology, they outline how orgasms trigger a surge in hormones, which may in the past have been linked to ovulation – the release of eggs – as well as to helping eggs implant in the uterus. Female cats and rabbits, for instance, actually need physical stimulation to release their eggs. In humans today, orgasms and ovulation aren’t connected, but according to Pavlicev and Wagner, they may once have been.

With the domestication of animals and agriculture, as well as denser societies, specialised groups emerged. ‘For the first time you had a critical mass of men who could exclude women.’ Systems of male control – patriarchies – emerged that exist to this day. And as they accumulated land, property and wealth, it would have become even more important for men to be sure their wives were unswervingly faithful. A man who couldn’t guarantee his babies were his own wasn’t just being cuckolded, but also risked losing what he owned. Mate-guarding intensified.

Married, respectable women in the Assyrian empire in northern Mesopotamia, which existed until around 600 BC, were expected to cover their heads in public. Slave girls and prostitutes, on the other hand, were forbidden from wearing veils. If they broke this rule, they faced physical punishment.

The father had the power of life and death over his children … He could give his daughters in marriage … or he could consecrate them to a life of virginity … A man could pledge his wife, his concubines and their children as pawns for his debt; if he failed to pay back the debt, these pledges would be turned into debt slaves.’

According to research published in 2007 by a team of prominent anthropologists including Martin Muller, then at Boston University, more aggressive male chimps manage to mate more often than less aggressive ones. But even a low-ranking male will get aggressive when a female refuses him.

Incels

‘For forty years, the chimpanzee researchers had the corner of the market on man’s closest living relative,’ explains Parish. ‘We built all our models of evolution based on a chimp model. Patriarchal, hunting, meat-eating, male-bonding, male aggression towards females, infanticide, sexual coercion.’ Bonobos turned all this on its head.

Pair-bonded tamarins and titi monkeys, for instance, share childcare between males and females. Titi monkeys don’t seem to have any kind of dominance hierarchy. In other monogamous species, such as gibbons and simiangs, male coercion of females is hardly seen.

That yes, females can be in charge. They can control the resources. They don’t need to go through males to get them. They don’t have to be subjected to sexual violence or infanticide, all because they have the upper hand. And they do that by staying loyal to their female friends.’

Women may be the one group that grows more radical with age. Gloria Steinem, Outrageous Acts and Everyday Rebellions (1983)

Of the women admitted to Bethlem Hospital for menopause-associated mental illness, fewer than half recovered, according to data in 1912.

If fertility represented youth and health, society assumed, then infertility was exactly the opposite. It wiped out the entire point of being female. It turned a woman into something else. And this was reflected in the ways older women were treated, especially by science and the medical profession.

The focus on grandmothering also casts the menopause in a new light, suggesting that it isn’t some biological blip or routine curse of old age, but that it’s there for a distinct evolutionary purpose. The image of the useless crone is replaced by a useful woman. Rather than being a burden on society, retreating into a quieter life, she is front and centre. She is propping up her family. Indeed, such is our need of her that her very existence may be living proof of it.

‘That was paramount for me going to the Hadza,’ explains Hawkes. And it was there that she saw hardworking grandmothers. ‘There they were, right in front of us. These old ladies who were just dynamos.’

One young widow and her two children were too sick to leave with the group when it decided to shift camp in search of more food. ‘But her mother was there. This small, rather elderly woman took her daughter on her back, her infant grandchild in a sling across her chest, and her four-year-old grandchild on her hip. She carried them thirty-five miles, to her people’s new camp.’ The superhuman efforts of this grandmother meant her daughter and two grandchildren recovered from their illness and weren’t left behind.

A mother killer whale with a son focuses her efforts on him throughout her life. Indeed, such is the connection between them that data have shown that when a mother killer whale dies, her son is more likely to die far younger. Incidentally, this is just a son thing. The link between the lifespans of mothers and daughters is weaker.

‘When you add helpful grandmothering, at the beginning, almost nobody is living to past their fertility,’ explains Hawkes. ‘And yet just those few, those few who are still around at the end of their fertility, that’s enough for selection to begin to shift the life history from an ape-like one to a human-like one.

In summary, older women become infertile because men don’t find them attractive. One reporter has described this account as putting the ‘men’ in ‘menopause’.

the patriarch hypothesis is about powerful men. Specifically, men powerful enough to be able to have sex with younger, fertile women even as they get old. ‘Once males become capable of maintaining high status and reproductive access beyond their peak physical condition, selection favoured the extension of maximum life span in males,’ Marlowe explained in his paper, which was published in the journal Human Nature. Even a few high-status old men spreading their seed would have been enough to produce a difference in how long humans lived, he argued.

Running computer models to simulate how humans might have evolved in our early history, they found that adding a few genetic mutations for infertility into the population didn’t have much of an effect on overall fertility as time wore on. The mutations just died out: ‘Fertility and survival remained high into old age. There was no menopause.’ But when they added the critical element of older men preferring to have sex with younger women into their simulations, the female menopause did pop up.

Grandmothers may be hardworking, but in the end it just comes down to sexual attractiveness.

‘The one I’m betting on really does make grandmothering the key to this special characteristic of our longevity,’ states Hawkes. For the patriarch hypothesis to work, she explains, there would have to be at least a few old men alive in the beginning to make these patriarchies happen in the first place, and the fact that our primate cousins don’t have any elderly chimps or apes among them raises the question of where on earth these older men might have come from in large enough numbers. ‘The problem with his patriarch hypothesis is he has to somehow get to the place he wants to start,’ she says.

‘Man is himself a problem in search of a solution,’ he writes. ‘When men understand that the best way to solve their own problem is to help women solve those that men have created for women, they will have taken one of the first significant steps toward its solution … The truth will make men free as well as women.’ It’s a message that was as timely then as it is now.