by Angela Saini
This phenomenon may seem bizarre—cruel, when seen through human eyes—but it’s common across many species, including our own. It’s known as “mate guarding.” It’s a vitally important piece of the puzzle when it comes to understanding relationships and the balance of power between females and males. Even though it might well harm the male to have his partner so distressed through the winter, leaving her with less energy come spring when she would need to reproduce and look after their offspring, he doesn’t stop pushing her away from the other males. It’s more important to him that he doesn’t lose her to another pigeon, even for a moment.
For Trivers, this is powerful evidence of intense male competition for females. But seen from a different point of view, it also casts the underlying assumptions of Charles Darwin and Angus Bateman in an alternative light. Male sexual jealousy, the fear of being cuckolded, and such vicious mate guarding suggest that females aren’t naturally chaste or passive at all. If they were, then why would their partners go to such extraordinary lengths to stop them getting anywhere near other males?
CHAPTER 7
Why Men Dominate
It cannot be demonstrated that woman is essentially inferior to man because she has always been subjugated.
—Mary Wollstonecraft,
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, 1792
“I asked my mum to be cut,” says Hibo Wardere, a forty-six-year-old woman from Mogadishu, Somalia, who now lives in east London. She was age six at the time, she continues, as we sit in a small, dark café near her home. She had no idea what she was asking for, of course, only that the other girls were bullying her for being the last one left. They told her she was dirty, that she stank. So she begged her mother for a procedure that, little could she have known as a small child, would cause her unimaginable pain and lifelong trauma: female genital mutilation.
Cutting of young girls is the norm in Somalia. There’s a belief, says Wardere, that the practice dates back to ancient Egypt, when male slaves were routinely castrated before they worked in the households of the pharaohs. Nowadays it’s common through large swaths of Africa and a few corners of the Middle East. The countries with the worst records include Egypt, Sudan, Mali, and Ethiopia, along with Somalia, where barely a girl escapes the knife. The United Nations World Health Organization estimates that more than 125 million women and girls alive today have undergone female genital mutilation in the countries where it’s most concentrated, and almost all became victims before the age of fifteen.
The mutilation itself can take many horrifying forms. But the most common cuts fall into three categories. The first is the partial or total removal of the clitoris. The second includes this, plus the partial or total removal of the smaller, inner folds on either side of the vaginal opening. The third is the wholesale narrowing of the vagina’s entrance by cutting and sealing the folds on either side, like a pair of lips being hacked and sewn shut. This final type, known as “infibulation,” is often the most damaging of the three, leaving women with only a tiny gap through which to pee and pass menstrual fluid. It can be so small that they sometimes have to be cut open before they can have sex or give birth.
Infibulation is what was done to Wardere.
It happened forty years ago, but she remembers it as vividly as if it had been this morning. She grew up assuming that being cut was something to be proud of. It was a feeling reinforced when her female relatives threw a party in her honor to celebrate the big moment. They cooked her favorite food. They told her she was about to become a woman. In her six-year-old innocence she excitedly imagined that this might mean finally trying on her mother’s makeup. “They made you feel like something amazing was going to happen,” she tells me. “It was not like that. It was the beginning of a nightmare.”
In Somalia, female genital mutilation is often carried out by a respected female elder, who’s likely to have cut hundreds of girls already. Wardere recalls the woman who did it to her. “Her eyes haunt me even today. She instructed my mother, my aunties, and other helpers to hold me down, and they did. My mother looked away, but the others did hold me down. Then she ripped my flesh as I screamed and struggled and prayed to die. She just kept on going. It didn’t bother her that I was just a child. It didn’t bother her that I was begging for mercy.” Wardere’s torn flesh lay on the floor. The life sentence had been served. The cut was cruel enough, but she would also suffer recurrent urinary infections and scarring. The flashbacks would haunt her forever.
An entire decade would pass before she finally understood the point of it all. She never stopped asking her mother why she had allowed her to be cut. When she was sixteen, she was told that it was to put her off having sex before marriage.
For many millions of women, the agony of infibulation is quietly absorbed as an unavoidable part of life. In this silence, the practice continues to be inflicted on the next generation, the one after that, and so on, as it has for millennia. But Wardere refused to accept what had been done to her. “I decided I can’t keep quiet,” she says. When she arrived in England in the late 1980s, age eighteen and alone, fleeing civil war in Somalia, one of her first decisions was to seek medical help so she could be opened up.
She went on to marry happily and have seven children. In the last few years she’s taken the brave step of speaking out about her experiences, and even detail them in an autobiography, Cut: One Woman’s Fight Against FGM in Britain Today. As a prominent activist, she talks regularly in schools about the risks of genital mutilation and to urge girls not to become victims like her. This hasn’t come without a price: Wardere has lost friends. When it was revealed that she refused to have her daughters cut, people warned her they would be considered impure. “They said nobody will marry them, that they’re sluts.”
The puzzling thing about female genital mutilation is that there seem to be no winners. Not men, not women. Wives have reported depression and domestic abuse because their husbands can’t accept that they don’t want to have sex. One young man admitted to her that he couldn’t bring himself to sleep with his wife on their wedding night because she had undergone infibulation and he was scared of hurting her. If men would accept brides who weren’t mutilated, she notes, the stigma might go away. Yet, however damaging it might be to their wives and their marriages, few men stand up against the practice.
And the reason for this is simple. The torture continues because it does what it was always intended to do. A woman who has been cut as a child will almost certainly remain a virgin when she’s older. It would be too painful for her to be anything else. And once she’s married, a husband can be confident that she’ll be a reliably faithful wife. Throughout history, mutilating a girl’s genitals has been the most viciously effective means of assuring a man that his children will be his own and not someone else’s. It’s as brutal a manifestation of sexual jealousy and mate guarding as anyone has ever seen.
The practice has been absorbed into some cultures so fully and for so long that women now have little choice but to give it their full cooperation. Without it, they risk being ostracized. Girls put pressure on each other to be cut, like they did when Wardere was six years old. Mothers take their own daughters to be cut, like Wardere’s did. And female elders do the cutting. “It’s all instigated by women. Men have nothing to do with it. But who are they doing it for? That’s the question,” she tells me. “It’s all about control. They don’t trust you with your own body.”
In the café where we’re meeting, older Somali men sit at neighboring tables sipping their coffees. She speaks loudly, refusing to be cowed. “They are doing it for him! It’s all about him, it’s not about you.”
“A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night.”
Female genital mutilation is only one way in which a woman’s sexual agency is repressed. There have been countless others throughout history.
The agonizing practice of foot binding, which is thought to have begun as a fashion fad in Imperial China in the tenth century
, persisted into the twentieth. Young girls’ feet would be so tightly wrapped in cloth that their toes would curve inward, leaving a pointed stump as tiny as three inches long. Historian Amanda Foreman has described how foot binding became a symbol of chastity and devotion in a society that prized obedience to men, centered on the teachings of the philosopher Confucius. “Every Confucian primer on moral female behavior included examples of women who were prepared to die or suffer mutilation to prove their commitment,” she writes in Smithsonian Magazine. Like infibulation, it became so integral to Chinese culture that women became the mistresses of their own oppression. It was finally eliminated under pressure from China’s Communist Party in the 1950s. There are a small number of older women alive even today with deformities caused by it.
As old forms of torture disappear, new ones swiftly roll in. In Cameroon and some parts of West Africa, girls between the ages of eight and twelve today suffer a procedure, often at the hands of their mothers, known as breast “ironing.” A grinding stone, broom, belt, or another object is heated, then used to press a girl’s budding breasts flat. The goal is to keep her looking like a child for as long as possible, so people assume she hasn’t yet entered puberty. Aside from the psychological impact and immediate pain, breast ironing can cause long-term medical problems including scarring and difficulty breast-feeding, according to Rebecca Tapscott, who documented the practice for the Feinstein International Center at Tufts University in 2012.
Some methods of control, meanwhile, are deceptively subtle. Women in traditional Dogon communities in Mali use “menstrual huts” to seclude themselves during their periods. Beverly Strassmann at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor and her colleagues discovered through field research, including many hundreds of paternity tests, that men who followed the traditional Dogon religion were four times less likely to be cuckolded than Christian men, whose wives didn’t use the huts. It suggests that menstrual huts have allowed men to covertly track their wives’ fertility.
Primatologist and anthropologist Sarah Blaffer Hrdy believes that all this—the systematic and deliberate repression of female sexuality for millennia—is what really lies behind the myth of the coy, passive female. She raised this, somewhat controversially, in her 1981 book The Woman That Never Evolved. Stepping outside the usual bounds of biology and viewing human behavior from a historical point of view, she asked whether scientists had approached the question of women’s sexuality entirely the wrong way. Could it be that women and their evolutionary ancestors weren’t naturally passive and monogamous, with a tiny sex drive, the way Charles Darwin and Angus John Bateman had assumed? Might it instead be the case that for thousands of years women had been compelled by men to behave more modestly?
Sexual jealousy and mate guarding are powerful biological drives seen throughout the animal kingdom, as biologist Robert Trivers learned in his observations of pigeons from his Harvard University window. If behavior like this had been exaggerated by humans, woven into society and culture, it might explain why women now appear to behave as modestly as they do. Like the female pigeon uncomfortably pecked back into her place by her mate, women may not be naturally passive and coy at all but just constrained in the ultimate interests of their mates. According to Sarah Hrdy, this explains the mismatch between science’s old assumptions about female sexuality and the broad range of sexual behavior we actually see.
Her point is reinforced by the ways in which women are treated around the world. Besides horrific practices like female genital mutilation, few places exist that don’t exercise a moral double standard. Passersby tut at the teenager who dares to bare too much flesh. Neighbors whisper about the single mother whose children have different fathers. From how she dresses and carries herself to how promiscuous she is, most societies expect a woman to behave more modestly than a man.
When this standard isn’t enough to limit her behavior, humans have gone to elaborate lengths to enforce it. The most aggressive include forced marriage, domestic violence, and rape. One member of the gang who violently raped and killed a student on a bus in India in 2012 claimed to the BBC in an interview from prison that it was her own fault for taking the bus in the first place. As far as he was concerned, she was the one who had transgressed. “A decent girl won’t roam around at nine o’clock at night,” he told the reporters. “Housework and housekeeping is for girls, not roaming in discos and bars at night doing wrong things, wearing wrong clothes.”
This double standard is even written into the laws of some countries. In Saudi Arabia, women’s sexual freedom has been effectively removed because of the long list of things they’re forbidden to do, including driving, mixing with men in public, and traveling without a chaperone or a man’s permission. Although this takes repression to an extreme, the expectation of female modesty runs through many major religions. The hijab and burka worn by some Muslim women are demonstrations of this. The orthodox Jewish concept of tzniut similarly requires both sexes to cover up their bodies, but for married women in particular to cover their hair.
For Sarah Hrdy, the way female modesty is so deeply entwined with human culture like this, even to this day, has its roots in the ancient sexual repression of women. When developing this idea, she originally took her cue from a feminist psychiatrist called Mary Jane Sherfey, who had studied in the 1940s under Alfred Kinsey, the sexologist famous for overturning popular assumptions about people’s sexual behavior. In 1973 Sherfey published an incendiary work of her own, exploring female orgasms. It was entitled The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality. Her conclusion was that the female sex drive had been vastly underestimated, and that women are in fact naturally endowed with an insatiable sex drive. Sherfey added that society itself was built around the demand to keep women’s sexuality in check.
She wrote, “It is conceivable that the forceful suppression of women’s inordinate sexual demands was a prerequisite to the dawn of every modern civilization and almost every living culture. Primitive woman’s sexual drive was too strong.” Its enormous strength was matched only by the incredible force that men through history had deployed to restrain it.
Unfortunately for Sherfey, she was largely dismissed by the scientific establishment, partly because her bold deductions went a little too far against the grain, but also because she made genuine scientific and anatomical errors. Don Symons, the anthropologist who has argued that the female orgasm didn’t evolve for a purpose and that females have no biological reason to want more than one mate, was especially unimpressed. Sherfey’s “sexually insatiable woman is to be found primarily, if not exclusively, in the ideology of feminism, the hopes of boys, and the fears of men,” he wrote.
Sarah Hrdy, meanwhile, believed Symons was being unfair and that Sherfey, while wrong on many counts, had hit upon something important. Females could be sexually assertive. “Understand, Sherfey was writing years before primatologists knew much about sexual behavior in wild primates, certainly before we guessed at the existence of orgasmic capacity in nonhuman females; yet Sherfey’s wild hunches anticipated future discoveries,” Hrdy wrote in Human Nature in 1997.
The females of some monkey and ape species, we now know from a number of different sources, do appear to experience orgasms. In 1998 Italian researchers Alfonso Troisi and Monica Carosi published a paper in the journal Animal Behaviour describing orgasms in female Japanese macaques. They spent more than two hundred hours observing the monkeys in captivity, in which time they recorded almost the same number of copulations. In a third of these, females showed what they described as a “clutching reaction,” which they interpreted as orgasm. This was associated with “muscular body spasms and, sometimes, characteristic vocalizations. When displaying the clutching reaction, the female arched her neck and/or reached back to the leg, shoulder, or face of the male and clutched his hair,” Troisi and Carosi explained.
In the summer of 2016, evolutionary biologists Mihaela Pavlicev, at the University of Cincinnati College of Medicine, and Günter Wagner at Yale
University, concluded that animal studies do indeed suggest that the female orgasm originated for a purpose. In their paper published in the Journal of Experimental Zoology, they outline how orgasms trigger a surge in hormones, which may in the past have been linked to ovulation—the release of eggs—as well as helping eggs implant in the uterus. Female cats and rabbits, for instance, actually need physical stimulation to release their eggs. In humans today, orgasms and ovulation aren’t connected, but according to Pavlicev and Wagner, they may once have been.
By this logic, if orgasms aren’t a vestige of male physiology and women really can have strong sex drives, then there must be another explanation for women being perceived as innately chaste and modest. Mary Jane Sherfey believed that something was holding women back from being the powerful sexual creatures they were born to be. This something was human culture.
Sherfey’s line of thinking wasn’t new. It stretched far back in feminist and political ideology.
“Couched in superstitious, religious and rationalized terms, behind the subjugation of women’s sexuality lay the inexorable economics of cultural evolution which finally forced men to impose it and women to endure it,” she wrote in The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality. “Generally, men have never accepted strict monogamy except in principle. Women have been forced to accept it.” From the smallest laws to the most sweeping religious doctrines, she argued, cultures everywhere had tried to burn away every last scrap of female sexual freedom. This subjugation was the root of the moral double standard, the punishments, and the violent brutality that women continue to live with today.