Ha ha! Yeah, all of what you are describing is a brand new thing that humans only started doing in the past 3% of history. It's not timeless or inevitable - and that is my point - as I've already said twice. It is only with agriculture/patriarchy that women became second-class citizens controlled by men, and that took place only a few thousand years ago. It's 6-9 thousand years of programming. That's all. It's also when pervasive violence became an issue for the first time. Marriage (as we know it) was not invented to protect women - it was invented to control them. Prior to patriarchy, everyone in a tribe took care of everyone else.
It is only with excess food that needs to be stored, protected, and meted out during times of shortfall that hierarchy arises, women become second-class citizens under the rule of men, and only a few elites prosper at the expense of those lower down the hierarchy. It is also at this time that the notion of a “good provider” becomes important. Prior to that time, women were major contributors to the food of the tribe — and everyone took care of everyone.
“Labor roles became more gendered as well. Generally, men did the majority of the fieldwork while women were relegated to child-rearing and household work. Without contributing food (and by association, without control over it), women became second-class citizens. Women also had babies more frequently, on average once every two years rather than once every four in hunter-gatherer societies."
“The roles of an administrator, a servant, a priest, and a soldier were invented. The soldier was especially important because agriculture was so unsustainable compared to hunting and gathering.”
If sexual monogamy were natural and something that women gravitated to, there would have been no need of these new monitoring systems of female sexuality.
"Today, most anthropologists would agree, regardless of their stance on issues such as the universality of male dominance, that an entirely different order of male dominance became associated with the rise of the large and populous agricultural states organized in terms of classes. The patriarchal systems that emerged brought women for the first time under the direct control of fathers and husbands with few cross-cutting sources of support."
'Women as wives under this system were not social adults, and women’s lives were defined in terms of being a wife. Women’s mothering and women’s sexuality came to be seen as requiring protection by fathers and husbands. Protecting unmarried women’s virginity appears to go along with the idea of the domestication of women and an emphasis on a radical dichtomy between the public and the private sphere."
With patriarchy, not only do social classes emerge for the first time, but women’s sexuality is monitored and managed in a way that it had never been before. If sexual monogamy were natural and something that women gravitated to, there would have been no need for these new monitoring systems. Instead, women began to be tightly controlled and severely punished if they failed to reserve their sexual selves for only one man — their husband.
Certainly, infant mortality was a serious issue for our Paleolithic ancestors, but humans are also one of the most highly social species on the planet and we used this as a way to offset the dangers of early life for all the offspring of the tribe. “Homo sapiens could never have evolved if human mothers had been required to raise their offspring on their own. Human infants are too helpless and too expensive in their demands for care and resources. So human females have to line up helpers — sometimes extending beyond their own kin — to raise their young. That requires both males and females to invest heavily in social skills for bargaining with other members of their groups.” Source
This is what the anthropology, primatology, archeology and other science has to say. What you are talking about is patriarchy essentially justifying itself, and it's a fiction. Which is why I left the comment that I did on the OP - to point out that it is a fiction. I've got about 25 more stories on this same topic if you'd care to educate yourself. Marriage is not inherently violent, but as it is practiced in most of the world, it is a dominance-based hierarchy and not a partnership, and that's a problem.
"Patriarchy is a dominance hierarchy. Societal constructs that are entrenched in that lead overwhelmingly to power dynamics within them. We live in a culture where more than 50% of the people believe that the father is the lord and master of the household. "
Like it or not, that does contribute significantly to things like domestic violence, which of the "intimate terrorism" variety is overwhelmingly perpetrated by men against women.
I'm sure you are going to come back with more to say about this, but I'm not going to spend any more time debating this with you. This is my area of expertise and as I've already said, I have 25+ stories you can read if you want to. Just say the word and I'll link some to you. Otherwise, I'm out....
Here’s one to get you started….
