Until the rise of patriarchy only about 6k years ago, none of this was the case. Cooperative, egalitarian cultures were the norm because that’s what was enforced and required by the people. In lots of primitive societies women do have power that balances that of men. Most of AmerInd cultures are like this, as well as plenty of other ones. Patriarchy is pervasive, but not universal and it reflects only a tiny fraction of human history.
“Western individualism tends to pit each person against others in competition for resources and rewards. It includes the right to accumulate property and to use wealth to control the behavior of others. In contrast, as Tim Ingold (1999) has most explicitly emphasized, hunter-gathers’ sense of autonomy connects each person to others, in a way that does not create dependencies. Their autonomy does not include the right to accumulate property, to use power or threats to control others, or to make others indebted to oneself.”
Women have been fighting alongside men since the inception of war. I've got a story coming out about this in a day or two. It's only within the past few hundred years that patriarchy prevented women from fighting by law (but they still did anyhow) that we see this dynamic.
Edit: this just got published
What does it even mean to say that humans are animals at their core in this context? And while we're at it, men have only been exhorted to suppress their emotions since the Industrial Revolution. It's not a long-standing historical dynamic at all.
“The Bible is full of crying men, and tears are plentiful among the Greek heroes such as Achilles in the Iliad. In mediaeval Europe the elite felt little obligation to conceal their emotions and that continued as late as the reign of Henry VIII, when we find his chief minister, Cardinal Wolsey, repeatedly weeping in public without embarrassment after his fall from power.”
In the 17th and 18th centuries in England, masculine men were expected to be in touch with their “sensibilities” by sharing and expressing their most profound feelings. In fact, weeping men were often the heroes of popular novels. There’s no definite agreement about when greater stoicism began to be required for men, but some historians believe that the Industrial Revolution was perhaps responsible when it is hypothesized that factory managers wanted their workers focused on productivity.
I encourage you to learn more about history and real world dynamics rather than simply passing on erroneous cultural narratives as if they were factual.
