I appreciate the conversation and the book recommendations. One of the things that I write quite a bit about is the rise of patriarchy - a social system that is at it's core a dominance based hierarchy - of gender, but of other things as well. When this first came into existence only about 6k years ago it was when classes and gross wealth disparity first arose also - not just sexual and social control of women. We see pottery go from being decorated with goddesses and images of beauty to being decorated with kings subduing foes and dragging slaves in chains. In other words, the core ethos changed from one that was much more egalitarian and generally celebrates life to one that celebrates power and death - with some obvious differences from culture to culture, but over all this is a huge shift.
Rape is a method of domination that takes place via sexual means. That's why it is such a common weapon of war. First of all, recent findings are that women also rape much more than has been acknowledged in the past, and secondly, rape is a dominance display - it's a function of living in a culture that is both Might Makes Right and zero-sum (if you don't win, you lose). Since there will pretty much always be someone who has more power than you in the hierarchy, the tendency is to turn any resentment about abuse "from above" on those who are less powerful. But this is a quite recent element of our social system.
As for testosterone, most of what you have heard is another cultural myth. Here's a great short article that talks briefly about Fine's book and hits some of the highlights.
"The truth is, as Cordelia Fine puts it in her book Testosterone Rex: Myths of Sex, Science, and Society, “Although we’re used to thinking of certain kinds of behaviors as ‘testosterone fueled,’ in many cases it would make more sense to instead think of actions and situations as being ‘testosterone fueling.’” To understand what Fine is saying, just look at the research. It has consistently shown that testosterone cannot predict competitive aggression unless the levels are extremely high or low."
As for asking strangers on the street about sex, that one should be quite apparent that it is measuring what women are allowed as well as all their very real concerns about safety. Here's an illustrative quote from Untrue by Wednesday Martin - another terrific book if you want to understand just how skewed our cultural understanding of female sexuality has been.
"Context is everything. If women were told, “Imagine you are propositioned by this guy, and there is no way he will kill you and there is no way he’ll be a jerk and it’s guaranteed that he’ll be skilled enough to give you an orgasm and you won’t get pregnant or get an infection or disease, and your mom will never know and neither will anyone in your dorm or neighborhood. He won’t make disparaging remarks about your body or gossip afterward. He will text you after or not, and want to see you again or not, depending on what you wish he would do. And so on. These are the kinds of conditions we would have to engineer in order to get an accurate sense of what a woman’s sex drive might be like under circumstances conducive to actually feeling entitled to have and admit to having a sex drive. Until such a test exists, we need to consider the likelihood that we are only measuring men’s willingness to admit they are sexual compared to women’s willingness to do the same. Guess who wins that contest?" (emphasis mine)
I'm sure that culture and nature are indeed probably more intertwined than we tend to realize, but it's also important to acknowledge that our culture has changed fundamentally just a few thousand years ago and that it is also quite varied from culture to culture. I don't think we can say that it is "natural" that in Western culture men tend to spend less than 1 hour per day holding or interacting with babies, where the fathers in hunter-gatherer bands tend to be much more hands on.
The Aka, foragers who live in Central Africa, are some of the most hands-on dads in the world. “Fathers are within arm’s reach of their one-to four-month-old babies more than 50 percent of any 24-hour period and are nuzzling, kissing, hugging, or mostly just holding them a whopping 22 percent of the time they spend in camp. Even when Aka parents go on hunting expeditions in the woods, they take quite young infants and their other children along, being careful to remain in constant contact.”
“Almost invariably, fathers in hunter-gatherer societies spend more time with infants than fathers in most Western societies do, and much more time than fathers in farming societies. Indeed, in many farming societies fathers never hold their infants at all.” Hrdy, Sarah Blaffer. Mothers and Others (p. 128).
And, at the same time, I appreciate someone who is more interested in discussion and learning than in being right.
