Women After All
Stephanie Ferrera
I am reading Melvin Konner’s new book, Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy. As the title suggests, Konner has a point to make. He introduces it with his opening statement: “This is a book with a very simple argument: women are not equal to men; they are superior in many ways, and in most ways that will count in the future.” From this, one might expect that the book will be a battle-of-sexes polemic in support of women, but within the first chapter, Konner defines the broader, more nuanced, science-based case he will make. He covers the subject of sex and reproduction from the cellular to the societal level, offering colorful descriptions of the array of mating systems in other species before dealing with the human case.
As part of his discussion on how humans evolved toward male supremacy, Konner introduces “an old distinction in sociology between gemeinschaft and gesellschaft—community and society.” Until about 10,000 years ago, the predominant mode of life was hunter-gatherer. These were the “ultimate communities.” Population density was low, people knew each other for life, women had a strong position as contributors to the group and had a voice in collective decision-making. Sexual relations were relatively monogamous. The turn from “community” to “society” came with the advent of agriculture which brought a dramatic increase in food production, accompanied by population growth, the ability to accumulate wealth, and the emergence of political hierarchies. “Organized violence became far more important and so, accordingly, did male aggression and complex male hierarchies.”
These changes dramatically altered relations between the sexes. High-ranking men began to “collect” women, with those at the top holding large harems. Women were coerced into this system and adapted to it, a percentage of women benefiting from the opportunities they and their children had through ties to high-ranking men. The worst off were the lower-ranking men who had little or no chance of having a wife or children, and were easily relegated to slavery. Polygyny became widespread, accepted in most societies, and remains in practice today in parts of the world.
Konner focuses on the community level and societal level but has almost nothing to say about the family level. I assume that families across all eras of human evolution functioned as emotional systems. I also assume that men and women co-evolved, so that women played an active part in the societal-level changes. I am trying to think about how polygynous families worked as emotional systems. What happened to personal relationships between men and women? How were father-children, mother-children, and sibling relationships changed? What was the functional position of the husband, the co-wives, the children of different mothers? It would seem that each position in the polygynous family carried a set of constraints and a set of pressures to fit into the larger systems of family and society.
I welcome ideas from Fest-wg members.
Interesting post. I have been thinking about how sexual selection contributed to the differences between women and men. In many birds, like the peacock or the male cardinal, it is the male who is more colorful, but in the human it is the female. Although there are differences culturally, across the world women tend to choose beautiful colors and when young are more sexually alluring with their curves than males in general. As people age, it seems males remain sexually alluring longer, however, probably related to males remaining able to reproduce into old age. I have found it interesting to see that many highly successful even older women continue to emphasize sexual beauty, for instance, Angela Merkel wearing a very low-cut dress. When I was coming of age, there was a resistance in the women’s movement to women being viewed as sex objects, and being viewed as sex objects was seen as part of women’s oppression. Is it the case, or not, that women can express sexualized beauty and not be oppressed by being viewed as sexual objects? One last point, I have read that the animal societies with more equality between the sexes have males and females who are similar in size, and that the human is not in that category. It seems that sexual selection has, until now at least, led to females choosing males who are large and strong, and males choosing smaller females with large hips and breasts (good for childbirth and nursing, respectively). Young females in general go to a lot of effort to be sexually attractive. Barbara McClintock, however, chose to wear the male clothes of other scientists. Is this kind of choice no longer necessary, or are females still vulnerable to being seen as sexual objects? Is that a problem? If a female is viewed as a sexual object, can she also be viewed as a highly functioning person?
You ask a lot of good questions, Laurie. One thing is for certain, there is a huge amount of variation within and between human societies about the expression of sexuality.
American women wear bikinis, Middle Eastern were burkas. What interests me in studying Konner is that he is a biological anthropologist and bases his study of human behavior in
biology, as did Bowen. I understand that sexual dimorphism–size differences–are related to parental investment. Humans, compared with other mammals, have high paternal
investment, and human body size differences are much less than baboons, orangutans, and gorillas, but more than gibbons. Your example of McClintock makes me wonder if women
(and sometimes men) exaggerate or minimize the differences according to the nature of the relationship they are seeking. Do you want to be seen as a potential mating partner,
or a science colleague?
1.Stephanie, you have piqued my interest in Melvin Konner’s book. I’m interested in why he thinks the future is dependent on female strengths what are the particular female strengths he is thinking about.
2. Question that comes up for me is, Were males and females actually more equal before agriculture stimulated more territoriality increasing the value of male aggression in the competition between groups? I’m sure Konner marshals evidence, but we are so dependent on interpretation in understanding the past.
3. I perused a book a few years ago by a cultural anthropologist writing about an indigenous African ethnic group or tribe in which there was polygamy. I found his analysis interesting, again how much is fact and how much is interpretation, but it seemed to him that each successive marriage served a different function – kind of a birth order effect for each successive marriage in the polygamous family. This is my memory of what the different functions were : the first marriage was arranged between the families for the purpose of consolidating wealth and status and having children that would inherit the wealth and status; the second marriage was for lust; the subsequent marriages had something to do with consolidating relations between the families and for the personal predilections of the spouses, maybe companionship. I don’t think I’ll ever find that book again, but there’s a lot of anthropology studies out there that document the marriage practices of different cultures and family relations. Reading the book, I didn’t get the impression that this was just a male dominated process, I think the wives had multiple liaisons as well but I did get the impression the practices were regulated by a well defined cultural code – that were modified by the forces of European colonization.
Laura,
Regarding your first question, Konner says: “Women are fundamentally pragmatic as well as caring, cooperative as well as competitive, skilled in getting their own egos out of the way, deft in managing people…builders rather than destroyers.” In contrast, he attributes most of the aggression, egotism, and violence in the world to men, especially “when men get together in groups
that exclude women.”
2) Konner makes a strong case that agriculture and all the changes that it brought were a major turning point, moving away from egalitarian communities to hierarchical societies. I found the same argument made in Jared Diamond’s book, The Third Chimpanzee. Your point that we are so dependent on interpretation is important. I am trying to see how Konner’s data can be
looked at from the perspective of Bowen theory. That’s my mind-bending project for the next few months.
3) It makes sense that, if polygamy has been widespread, it would have had some strongly adaptive benefits. I need to look into other studies as well as Konner, since he emphasizes the aspect of oppression of women.
My husband Tom who as an older brother of sisters likes women, says the same thing about women as Konner, that they are better than men and would make a better world if they were dominant. I always kind of resist that view – maybe as an older sister of brothers itf goes against my grain that way. As well as the fact that there are examples of horrible, genocidal women despots – that woman Pauline in Africa is a recent example. Also coming of age during the women’s movement of the 60’s and 70’s, so much was invested in the move for equality to downplay the sex differences. I still believe, and I think Bowen did as well, that men and women are more alike than different.
Laura, I agree with you (and Bowen) that the common humanity outweighs the differences between men and women. At higher levels of differentiation, supremacy becomes a non-issue, and
the differences are mutually enhancing more than a source of conflict. The extreme male-dominated societies that Konner describes may fit with Bowen’s concept of societal regression.
A female-dominated society would also, I think. But I think there have been far fewer female despots in history. Konner states that there have been matrilineal societies, but never
a matriarchal society. In the end, it is really equality that he is recommending, and he gives a couple of chapters to examples of how we are moving in that direction.
Stephanie,
I like your observation that supremacy is a nonissue at higher levels of differentiation.
Both sexes seem to produce equal amounts of low differentiation jerks.