Oh, you're quite welcome to disagree with me, but it makes you look really uneducated. Years of research into a pseudo-scientific discipline doesn't really count for anything.
Anthropologists and philosophers have asked whether agriculture could have been the tipping point in the power balance between men and women. Agriculture needs a lot of physical strength. The dawn of farming was also when humans started to keep property such as cattle. As this theory goes, social elites emerged as some people built up more property than others, driving men to want to make sure their wealth would pass onto their legitimate children. So, they began to restrict women’s sexual freedom.
The problem with this is that women have always done agricultural work.
The first clear signs of women being treated categorically differently from men appear much later, in the first states in ancient Mesopotamia, the historical region around the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in what is now Iraq, Syria and Turkey. Around 5,000 years ago, administrative tablets from the Sumerian city of Uruk in southern Mesopotamia show those in charge taking great pains to draw up detailed lists of population and resources.
“Person power is the key to power in general,” explains political scientist and anthropologist James Scott at Yale University, whose research has focused on early agrarian states. The elites in these early societies needed people to be available to produce a surplus of resources for them, and to be available to defend the state — even to give up their lives, if needed, in times of war. Maintaining population levels put an inevitable pressure on families. Over time, young women were expected to focus on having more and more babies, especially sons who would grow up to fight.
According to most historical analysis, the emergence of patriarchy is generally considered to have begun around 3000 to 4000 BCE, with the development of early civilizations in Mesopotamia, where the transition from hunter-gatherer societies to agriculture likely played a significant role in establishing male dominance over societal structures.
- Factors contributing to patriarchy:
Shift to agriculture, the formation of cities, and the rise of militarism are often cited as key factors that facilitated the establishment of patriarchal systems.
- Matriarchal societies:
While patriarchy is widely prevalent today, many scholars believe that earlier human societies may have been more matrilineal, where lineage was traced through the female line.
~AI Overview from Google
Anthropological, archaeological and evolutionary psychological evidence suggests that most prehistoric societies were relatively egalitarian,[7] and suggests that patriarchal social structures did not develop until after the end of the Pleistocene epoch, following social and technological developments such as agriculture and domestication.[31][32][33] According to Robert M. Strozier, historical research has not yet found a specific “initiating event”.[34] Historian Gerda Lerner asserts in her 1986 book The Creation of Patriarchy that there was no single event, and documents that patriarchy as a social system arose in different parts of the world at different times.[35] Some scholars point to social and technological events, notably the emergence of agriculture, about six thousand years ago (4000 BCE).[36][37]
First off, scientists who actually study human sexuality and mating (and don’t just concoct theories about it) agree that there are no single strategies that all humans use all the time, or that are native to human males or universal for human females. “We argue that human mating strategies are unlikely to conform to a single universal pattern.”
The pretense that we are somehow ‘hardwired’ for certain mating strategies commonly found in modern Western patriarchies is simply a way to justify the status quo.
Contrary to Evo Psych assertions, in many cultures, men not only have extra-marital liaisons, but they accept their wives’ infidelity. They also often willingly raise children that they did not father. In some cultures, it is believed that it takes more than one man to “make” a baby, and in others, partible paternity is common — where two men are considered the father of a child. All of this is good for children, ensuring that more of them live into adulthood.
Among the Lesu of Melanesia, not only are different styles of marriage possible (monogamy, polygamy, and polyandry), but extra-marital affairs are both expected and typical. A married man is a “father” to all of his wife’s children, regardless of actual paternity, and jealousy is not considered appropriate. So much for Evo Psych’s ideas about innate male proprietary feelings or the evolutionary imperative of only raising your own progeny.
The Evo Psych trope that all men naturally want to marry virgins or women with few previous partners and will only invest resources in such partners is yet another theory that is at odds with actual real-world dynamics. Where does the long history of men lavishing time, attention, and money on mistresses fit into this paradigm? Also, what about cultures where sexual experience is considered a plus — for men and for women?
“Married life, for most young women, begins with a series of provisional or trial marriages with older men. Due to the age difference, these marriages are rather unstable and easily break up in divorce, which is, as a consequence, quite common. Shostak observes that “[ n]o premium is placed on virginity — indeed, I could not find a word for virginity in the !Kung language. The divorced girl or woman simply re-enters the category of highly desirable potential wives, to be sought after by eligible men.” Among these hunter-gatherers, women’s extensive premarital and successive marital sexuality has no consequences for their subsequent marital status.”
— Neo-liberal Genetics: The Myths and Moral Tales of Evolutionary Psychology by Susan McKinnon https://a.co/f45HUuJ
In addition, there are many examples from around the world of women having great sexual and personal freedom. Nayar women aren’t the “property” of their husbands. In fact, once married, they have sexual access to all the men in their sub-caste who are not members of their family.
For the Lele of the former Belgian Congo, one in ten women will become a “village wife” — an honorable position where she can have up to five husbands and also have sex with any man she wishes by going into the forest with him. Any children born to a village wife will be cared for and claimed by all the men.
Read the rest of the essay for a more in-depth look at why Evolutionary Psychology is a joke.
