The one human activity, other than sex itself, for which male specialization is indispensable is armed conflict involving hand weapons. On the average, men are taller, heavier, and more muscular than women. Men can throw a longer spear, bend a stronger bow, and use a bigger club. Men can also run faster—toward an enemy in attack and away from one in defeat. To insist along with some women’s liberation leaders that women too can be trained to fight with hand weapons does not alter the picture. If any primitive group ever trained women rather than men as its military specialists, it made a big mistake. Such a group surely committed suicide because not a single authentic case is known from any quarter of the globe.
Warfare inverts the relative value of the contribution made by males and females to a group’s prospects for survival. By placing a premium upon maximizing the number of combat-ready adult males, warfare obliges primitive societies to limit their nurturance of females. It is this, and not combat per se, that makes warfare an effective means of controlling population growth. As every Maring knows, the ancestors help those who most help themselves by putting lots of men on the fight ground and keeping them there. So I am rather inclined to the view that the entire ritual cycle is a clever “trick” on the part of the ancestors to get the Maring to breed pigs and men instead of women, in order to protect the forest.
In further pursuit of the practical conditions that lead to primitive warfare, I still have to confront the question of why less violent means for keeping the local group’s population below carrying capacity weren’t used. For example, would it not have served the Tsembaga better and their habitat equally well had they simply limited their population through some technique of birth control? The answer is no, because prior to the invention of the condom in the eighteenth century there were no safe, relatively pleasurable, and effective contraceptive devices in use anywhere. Previously, the most effective “peaceful” means for limiting population, other than infanticide, was abortion. Many primitive peoples know how to induce abortion by drinking poisonous concoctions. Others instruct the pregnant mother to wrap a tight band of cloth around her belly. When all else fails, the pregnant woman lies on her back while a friend jumps full force onto her abdomen. These methods are fairly effective, but they have the unpleasant side effect of killing the mother-to-be only slightly less often than they kill the embryo.
Lacking any safe and effective means of contraception or abortion, primitive peoples must focus their institutionalized means of population control on individuals who are already alive. Children are the logical victims of these efforts—the younger the better—since number one, they can’t resist; number two, there is less of a social and material investment in them; and number three, the emotional ties to infants are easier to cut than those between adults.
Anyone who finds my reasoning depraved or “uncivilized” should read about eighteenth-century England. Gin-soaked mothers by the tens of thousands regularly dropped their babies into the Thames or wrapped them in the clothing of smallpox victims, left them in trash barrels, rolled over on top of them during drunken stupors, and otherwise contrived to shorten their babies’ lives by direct or indirect means. In our own times, only an incredible degree of self-righteous pigheadedness prevents us from admitting that infanticide is still being practiced on a cosmic scale in the underdeveloped nations, where first-year infant mortality rates of 250 per 1,000 births are commonplace.
The Maring make the best of a bad situation—the universal plight of mankind before the development of effective contraception and safe early-term abortion. They induce or tolerate a higher proportion of female infant deaths than male infant deaths. If there were no discrimination against female babies, many male babies would fall victim to the need for population control. War, which places a premium upon the rearing of the maximum number of males, is responsible for the higher survival rate of male as compared with female infants. Or to sum it all up, war is the price that primitive societies pay for raising sons when they cannot afford to rear daughters.
The study of primitive war leads to the conclusion that war has been part of an adaptive strategy associated with particular technological, demographic, and ecological conditions. We need not invoke imaginary killer instincts or inscrutable or capricious motives to understand why armed combat has been so common in human history. This being the case, we have every reason to hope that when humanity stands to lose more than it can possibly gain from war, other means of resolving intergroup conflicts will take its place.
The Savage Male
FEMALE INFANTICIDE is one manifestation of male supremacy. I think it can be shown that other manifestations of male supremacy are also rooted in the practical exigencies of armed conflict.
To explain human sexual hierarchies we must again choose between theories that stress unmodifiable instincts and theories which emphasize the adaptiveness of lifestyles with respect to modifiable practical and mundane conditions. I am inclined to the women’s liberationist view that “anatomy is not destiny,” by which it is meant that innate sexual differences cannot account for the unequal distribution of privileges and powers between men and women within the domestic, economic, and political spheres. Women’s liberationists do not deny that the possession of ovaries rather than testicles necessarily leads to different kinds of life experiences. What they deny is that there is something in the biological nature of men and women that by itself destines human males to enjoy greater sexual, economic, and political privileges than females.
Apart from childbearing and related sexual specialties, the assignment of social roles on the basis of sex does not follow automatically from the biological differences between men and women. Knowing only the facts of human anatomy and biology, one could not predict that females would be the socially subordinate sex. This is because the human species is unique in the animal kingdom for the lack of correspondence between its hereditary anatomical equipment and its means of subsistence and defense. We are the world’s most dangerous species not because we have the biggest teeth, sharpest claws, most venomous sting, or thickest skin, but because we know how to equip ourselves with deadly tools and weapons that perform the functions of teeth, claws, stings, and hides more effectively than any mere anatomical device. Our primary mode of biological adaptation is culture, not anatomy. I no more expect men to dominate women simply because they are taller and heavier, than I expect the human species to be ruled over by cattle or horses—animals that outweigh the average husband by an amount thirty times greater than he outweighs his wife. In human societies, sexual dominance is not settled by which sex is bigger or innately more assertive, but rather by which sex controls the technology of defense and aggression.
If I had knowledge only of the anatomy and cultural capacities of men and women, I would predict that women rather than men would be more likely to gain control over the technology of defense and aggression, and that if one sex were going to subordinate the other, it would be female over male. While I would be impressed with the physical dimorphism—the greater height, weight, and strength of the males—especially in relationship to hand-held weapons, I would be even more impressed by something which the females have and which the males cannot get—namely, control over the birth, care, and feeding of babies. Women, in other words, control the nursery, and because they control the nursery, they can potentially modify any lifestyle that threatens them. It is within their power of selective neglect to produce a sex ratio heavily in favor of females over males. It also lies within woman’s power to sabotage the development of “masculine” males by rewarding little boys for being passive rather than aggressive. I would expect women to concentrate their efforts on rearing solidary and aggressive females rather than males. I would further expect the few male survivors per generation to be shy, obedient, hardworking, and grateful for sexual favors. I would predict that women would monopolize the headship of local groups, that they would be responsible for shamanistic relations with the supernatural, and that God would be called SHE
. Finally, I would expect that the ideal and most prestigious form of marriage would be polyandry—one woman controlling the sexual and economic services of several men.
Female-dominated social systems of this type were actually postulated as the primordial condition of mankind by various theoreticians who lived in the nineteenth century. Friedrich Engels, for example, who got his ideas from the American anthropologist Lewis Henry Morgan, believed that modern societies had passed through a matriarchal phase during which descent was reckoned exclusively in the female line and women were politically dominant over men. Many modern-day women’s liberationists continue to believe in this myth and its sequel. Supposedly, the subordinate males banned together and overthrew the matriarchs, took away their weapons, and have been conspiring ever since to exploit and degrade the female sex. Some women who accept this kind of analysis argue that the balance between male and female power and authority can be righted only by a militant counterconspiracy equivalent to a kind of guerrilla war between the sexes.
There is one thing wrong with this theory: No one has ever been able to authenticate a single case that is representative of true matriarchy. The only evidence for such a phase, aside from ancient myths about Amazons, is that about 10 to 15 percent of the world’s societies trace kinship and descent exclusively through females. But the tracing of descent through females is matrilineality, not matriarchy. While the position of women in matrilineal kin groups tends to be relatively good, the principal features of matriarchy are absent. Males rather than females dominate economic, civil, and religious life, and men, not women, enjoy privileged access to several spouses at once. The father is not the principal source of authority within the family, but neither is the mother. The authoritarian figure in matrilineal families is another male: the mother’s brother (or mother’s mother’s brother or mother’s mother’s sister’s son).
It is the prevalence of warfare that ruins the logic upon which the prediction of matriarchy is premised. Women are theoretically capable of resisting and even subduing the males they themselves have nurtured and socialized, but males reared in another village or tribe present a different sort of challenge. As soon as males for whatever reason begin to bear the burden of intergroup conflict, women have no choice but to rear large numbers of fierce males of their own.
Male supremacy is a case of “positive feedback,” or what has been called “deviation amplification”—the kind of process that leads to the head-splitting squeaks of public-address systems that pick up and then reamplify their own signals. The fiercer the males, the greater the amount of warfare, the more such males are needed. Also, the fiercer the males, the more sexually aggressive they become, the more exploited are the females, and the higher the incidence of polygyny-control over several wives by one man. Polygyny in turn intensifies the shortage of women, raises the level of frustration among the junior males, and increases the motivation for going to war. The amplification builds to an excruciating climax; females are held in contempt and killed in infancy, making it necessary for men to go to war to capture wives in order to rear additional numbers of aggressive men.
To understand the relationship between male chauvinism and warfare it is best to examine the lifestyles of a specific group of primitive military sexists. I have chosen the Yanomamo, a group of about 10,000 American Indian tribesmen who inhabit the Brazil/Venezuela border. The Yanomamo have been labeled the “fierce people” by their principal ethnographer, Napoleon Chagnon of Pennsylvania State University. All observers who have ever been in contact with them agree that they are one of the most aggressive, warlike, and male-oriented societies in the world.
By the time a typical Yanomamo male reaches maturity, he is covered with the wounds and scars of innumerable quarrels, duels, and military raids. Although they hold women in great contempt, Yanomamo men are always brawling over real or imagined acts of adultery and broken promises to provide wives. Yanomamo women are also covered with scars and bruises, mostly the result of violent encounters with seducers, rapists, and husbands. No Yanomamo woman escapes the brutal tutelage of the typical hot-tempered, drug-taking Yanomamo warrior-husband. All Yanomamo men physically abuse their wives. Kind husbands merely bruise and mutilate them; the fierce ones wound and kill.
A favorite means of bullying one’s wife is to yank on the sticks of cane that women wear through their pierced ear lobes. An irritated husband may yank so hard that the lobe is torn open. While Chagnon was in the field, a man who suspected his wife of committing adultery went further and chopped off both her ears. In a nearby village, another husband chopped a hunk of flesh out of his wife’s arm with a machete. Men expect their wives to serve them and their guests and to respond to all requests promptly and without protest. If a woman does not comply quickly enough, her husband may beat her with a piece of firewood, take a swing at her with his machete, or put a glowing stick of wood against her arm. If he is really angry, a husband may shoot a barbed arrow into his wife’s calf or buttock. In one case recorded by Chagnon, the arrow went astray, entered the woman’s stomach, and brought her close to death. A man named Paruriwa went into a rage when his wife moved too slowly to suit him, grabbed an ax, and swung it at her. She ducked and ran out screaming. Paruriwa threw the ax but it whizzed past her head. He then went after her with his machete and split her hand open before the village headman could intervene.
There is also a lot of completely unprovoked violence against women. Chagnon thinks that some of this has to do with the need for men to prove to each other that they are capable of deadly assault. It helps a man’s “image” if he publicly beats his wife with a club. Women are also simply used as convenient scapegoats. One man who really wanted to vent his anger on his brother shot his own wife instead; he aimed at a nonvital part, but the arrow went astray and killed her.
Women who run away from their husbands can expect only limited protection from their male kinsmen. Most marriages are contracted between men who agree to exchange sisters. A man’s brother-in-law tends to be his closest and most important relative. These men spend long hours in each other’s company, blowing hallucinogenic powder into each other’s nostrils, and lying in the same hammock together. In one case reported by Chagnon, the brother of a runaway wife became so irritated with his sister for disturbing the comradely relationship he enjoyed with her husband that he struck her with his ax.
An important aspect of Yanomamo male supremacy is the monopoly which males exercise over the use of hallucinogenic drugs. By taking these drugs (the most common, ebene, is derived from a jungle vine), men get supernatural visions which the women cannot experience. These visions enable males to become shamans, to visit with demons, and to control malevolent forces. Inhaling ebene also helps the men to ignore extremes of pain and to overcome their fears during duels and raids. The apparent immunity to pain exhibited during the chest-pounding and head-clubbing contests that I will describe in a moment probably results from the analgesic side effects of drugs. Men who have been “tripping” present a formidable sight before they pass out or lapse into a stupor. Green snot drips from their noses; they make strange growling noises, walk on all fours, and converse with invisible demons.
As in the case of Judeo-Christian traditions, the Yanomamo justify male chauvinism in their origin myth. At the beginning of the world, they say, there were only fierce men, formed from the blood of the moon. Among these early men was one named Kanaborama whose legs became pregnant. Out of Kanaborama’s left leg came women and out of his right leg came feminine men—those Yanomamo who are reluctant to duel and who are cowards in battle.
Like other male-dominated cultures, the Yanomamo think menstrual blood is evil and dangerous. When a girl has her first menses they lock her up inside a specially constructed bamboo cage and force her to go without food. Thereafter, she must isolate herself at every menstrual period and remain squatting alone in the shadow of the house.
Yanomamo women are victimized from childhood on. When a girl’s little brother h
its her, she gets punished if she hits back. Little boys, however, are never punished for hitting anybody. Yanomamo fathers howl with delight when their angry four-year-old sons strike them in the face.
I have considered the possibility that Chagnon’s description of Yanomamo sex roles reflects in part the ethnographer’s own masculine bias. Fortunately, the Yanomamo have also been studied by a woman. Professor Judith Shapiro of the University of Chicago also emphasizes the essentially passive role of Yanomamo women. She reports that as far as marriage is concerned, men are definitely the exchangers, and women the exchanged. She translates the Yanomamo term for marnage as “dragging something away” and divorce as “throwing something away.” She reports that at eight or nine years of age, girls already begin to serve their husbands; they sleep near them, follow them about, and prepare their meals. A man may even attempt intercourse with his eight-year-old bride. Dr. Shapiro witnessed terrifying scenes in which little girls pleaded with their kinsmen to be taken away from their assigned husbands. In one case, the arms of a reluctant bride were pulled from their sockets as her own relatives tugged one way, and her husband’s relatives tugged the other.
Cows, Pigs, Wars, and Witches Page 7