by Angela Saini
In the nineteenth century, the German philosopher, journalist, and socialist Friedrich Engels, who famously collaborated with Karl Marx, had already drawn connections between the economic and political dominance of men and their control of female sexuality. He described it dramatically as “the world historical defeat of the female sex.” He went on, “The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude, she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.”
Just when in human history societies might have shifted from being fairly egalitarian to no longer equal is hard to pin down. Melvin Konner, anthropology professor at Emory University in Atlanta, tells me that when hunter-gatherers began to settle down and abandon their nomadic ways of living, between ten and twelve thousand years ago, things would have changed for women. With the domestication of animals and agriculture, as well as denser societies, specialized groups emerged. “For the first time you had a critical mass of men who could exclude women,” explains Konner.
Systems of male control—patriarchies—emerged that exist to this day. And as they accumulated land, property, and wealth, it would have become even more important for men to be sure their wives were unswervingly faithful. A man who couldn’t guarantee his babies were his own wasn’t just being cuckolded but also risked losing what he owned. Mate guarding intensified.
Historian and feminist Gerda Lerner explored the subject in her landmark 1986 book The Creation of Patriarchy. Studying women in ancient Mesopotamia, a region spanning parts of what is modern-day Iraq and Syria, one of the cradles of human civilization, she pointed out that there was a strong emphasis on virginity before marriage. After marriage, a wife’s sexual behavior was heavily policed. “Male dominance in sexual relations is most clearly expressed in the institutionalisation of the double standard in Mesopotamian law. . . . Men were free to commit adultery with harlots and slave women.” Wives, by contrast, were expected to be completely faithful to their husbands.
Women, in no small way, were treated as the property of men. “Women’s sexual subordination was institutionalised in the earliest law codes and enforced by the full power of the state,” concluded Lerner. This included wearing the veil. Married, respectable women in the Assyrian empire in northern Mesopotamia, which existed until around 600 BC, were expected to cover their heads in public. Slave girls and prostitutes, on the other hand, were forbidden from wearing veils. If they broke this rule, they faced physical punishment.
Lerner suggested this subordination of women may even have given ancient civilizations their first model for slavery. “In Mesopotamian society, as elsewhere, patriarchal dominance in the family took a variety of forms,” she wrote in The Creation of Patriarchy. “The father had the power of life and death over his children. . . . He could give his daughters in marriage. . .or he could consecrate them to a life of virginity. . . . A man could pledge his wife, his concubines and their children as pawns for his debt; if he failed to pay back the debt, these pledges would be turned into debt slaves.”
Anthropologist Sarah Hrdy tells me, “Sexual jealousy is everywhere, even in nonpatriarchal societies. But it’s so exaggerated in patriarchal societies because they’re defending all these other interests.” She has firsthand experience of how this feels. When she wanted to marry, Hrdy was forced to elope because some members of her conservative Texan family disapproved of her choice of husband. “Men still thought they had the right to tell me who I should marry. They thought they had the right to control my inheritance. They assumed that they owned me. Really it was about property, with women included as property.”
Over thousands of years, this has had profound consequences for how women behaved and how they were then perceived. As patriarchies grew and spread, women gradually lost the power to earn a living, own property, lead a public life, or have much control over what happened to their children. The only freedom they were afforded were within the cages that had been created for them. So they were left with little choice but to behave in ways that served the system. A modest, coy woman who appeared to be chaste would marry well and prosper, while the less modest woman would be shunned.
As Sarah Hrdy shows in her own writings on the subject, there’s plenty of evidence for this. Throughout recorded history, virginity and faithfulness have been universally celebrated as female virtues, and rigorously policed. In her 1999 book Mother Nature, she spans the globe with her examples. In India, there was the centuries-old Hindu practice of sati, in which widows sacrificed themselves (through choice, or not) on the funeral pyres of their husbands. Among the indigenous Maya people in southern Mexico and Central America there were terrifying tales of a demon who seizes and rapes women who behave immodestly. And in ancient Greece, women were taught to behave self-consciously through their dress and the way they carried themselves, their eyes downcast in the presence of men. “For the ancient Greeks, a woman’s animal nature lurked at the core of her being. It was deemed necessary to ‘tame’ her,” Hrdy writes. Aristocratic women, whose families had the most to lose by way of property and wealth, had practically no freedom at all. They were kept indoors, veiled, and in the shadows.
The shadow cast over women has never gone away. From the Mesopotamians to the ancient Greeks all the way to the present day, societies have restricted and punished women who have dared to breach the moral standard. By Charles Darwin’s time, thousands of years into this regime, ideas of female nature had thoroughly adjusted to the new normal. Humans began to see women through a lens of their own creation. The job was done. Victorians, including Darwin, believed that women really were naturally coy, modest, and passive.
Female sexuality had been suppressed for so long that scientists didn’t even question whether this modesty and meekness might not be biological at all.
“One of the first things that I noticed was that females were attacking males.”
Even if humans once lived egalitarian lives long ago, was male domination of women inevitable? That’s the question our complicated history and biology leave us asking. Does the biological drive that men have to guard females, combined with the fact that they’re on average bigger and have greater upper body strength, mean that human societies would have always ended up with men in charge? Is patriarchy hardwired into our biology?
This may be impossible to answer, but science does have a perspective on it. The clues, some researchers believe, may lie in our primate past.
“The evolutionary perspective. . .reminds us that patriarchy is a human manifestation of a sexual dynamic that is played out over and over again, in many different ways, in other animals,” writes anthropologist Barbara Smuts at the University of Michigan in a 1995 paper in the journal Human Nature. Smuts was known for her detailed field studies of monkeys and apes. She was a female pioneer in primatology, with many of her students themselves going on to have important careers in the field. This paper is particularly special, though, because it explores one of the thorniest aspects of our past: the possible evolutionary origins of patriarchy.
In her paper, Smuts details how far male monkeys and apes often go to sexually restrict the females of their species by force. Across the primate world, she explains, you can see evidence of male domination. When females are in the fertile phases of their sexual cycles, males tend to be far more aggressive. One example is the rhesus macaque, which lives in large troops. Males are about 20 percent bigger than the females. Researchers have observed that when a female macaque tries to mate with low-ranking males in the hierarchy, higher-ranking males try to block her by chasing or attacking her. Sarah Hrdy’s observations of infanticide among Hanuman langurs in India are another example of males using violence to coerce females into mating with them. Mountain gorillas, according to Smuts, use the same tactic.
Hamadryas baboons in northern Africa are even more aggressive and “try to maintain control over females all the time,” she writes. “When a female strays too far from her male, he threatens her by sta
ring and raising his brows. If she does not respond instantly by moving toward him, he attacks her with a neckbite. The neckbite is usually symbolic—the male does not actually sink his teeth into her skin—but the threat of injury is clear.” Orangutans provide another striking example of male coercion. For them, resisted mating appears to be the rule rather than a rare exception. Half of matings take place after long and brutal struggles with females.
But one of the most interesting cases for those who want to better understand humans is the chimpanzee. Along with bonobos, chimps are our closest genetic relatives in the primate world. Different estimates have dated our last common ancestor to be living eight to thirteen million years ago (the last ancestor shared by humans and dogs, by contrast, was possibly as far back as a hundred million years), which means we have a great amount in common. Researchers have noted that chimps are hierarchical, and males can be ruthlessly vicious toward other males when they’re trying to establish themselves at the top of the order. Males show aggression toward females, too, although this aggression is about sexual coercion and mate guarding.
According to research published in 2007 by a team of prominent anthropologists, including Martin Muller, then at Boston University, more aggressive male chimps manage to mate more than the less aggressive ones. Even a low-ranking male will become aggressive when a female refuses him. Barbara Smuts has noted that the primatologist Jane Goodall once saw a male attack a female six times in five hours in the desperate effort to get her to mate with him. “Chimpanzees have been characterized in terms of their intercommunity warfare, meat eating, infanticide, cannibalism, male status-striving, and dominance over females,” according to Craig Stanford, a professor of anthropology at the University of Southern California, in a 1998 paper in Current Anthropology. He adds that female chimps can be described as “essentially reproductive commodities over which males compete.”
If a scientist had only ever studied chimpanzees, he or she might conclude that this is the natural order of life for the great apes. It’s alluringly easy to draw parallels between patriarchal humans and macho male chimpanzees.
But according to Barbara Smuts, scientists have to be careful about this. In her 1995 paper on the evolutionary origins of patriarchy, she points out that, despite all the male aggression we see in the primate world, females aren’t helpless victims. They rarely submit willingly to male control. They actually have their own clever ways of exerting power over males. “Although male primates typically are larger than females, this does not mean that they always win when they have conflicts of interest with females,” she writes.
And there’s one particularly strong example of this. It’s the other primate with which we share as close a relationship as we do with chimpanzees.
The bonobo enclosure at the enormous San Diego Zoo in California attempts to approximate as closely as possible conditions in the wild where these creatures are from: the forests of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. There’s a high waterfall, steep canyons with sunny and shady corners, and ropes that mimic hanging branches. The baby of the group, a fluffy, black two-year-old, leaps from one end to the other, following her mother. One of the older females sits comfortably, chewing on a long twig and occasionally peering at visitors through the glass barrier. To my eyes at least, the animals seem content.
All, that is, except one.
“I think he’s traumatized,” says Amy Parish, a primatologist who teaches at the University of Southern California. She has been studying bonobos in captivity for twenty-five years, starting her career at the University of Michigan in the 1980s as a student of Barbara Smuts. Parish tells me that the unhappy bonobo is a male named Makasi. We watch him a little longer. He’s crouched alone to one side, with an arm resting on his knee. He softly licks his hand, which seems to be hurt. When he slopes off after a while, looking somewhat cowed, he keeps his injured hand protectively close to his head.
Bonobos are unusual in the ape world for being a species in which females dominate, with the oldest females appearing to be highest in the pecking order. Attacks by females on males are quite common.
“In bonobos it’s very important for males to have their mothers with them for life,” explains Parish. “We have this pejorative idea that when males are especially close to their mothers, that they’re momma’s boys and that’s a bad thing. But in this case, unlike chimps—where males separate really clearly from their mothers at adolescence in order to join the male dominance hierarchy—in bonobos, males maintain their relationship with their mother for life. She intervenes in his fights, protects him from violence; he gets to mate with her friends; he gets access to otherwise exclusive female feeding circles. So there’s a really big upside for males.”
Makasi’s injuries were caused by a female called Lisa. “A good portion of his finger is completely raw and the skin is gone. Several of his toes have parts missing, and apparently he has other injuries. . . . But it’s not uncommon that when males are injured that also there are injuries on the testicles or penis or anus,” she tells me. “Poor Makasi here was nursery reared. He doesn’t have a mother in the group who’s willing to protect him, so he’s vulnerable all the time. So he has very good reason to be cowed and afraid and to keep his distance. To be careful.”
Parish originally began studying bonobos to understand the role of friendship between male and female primates. Barbara Smuts had done similar work in baboons, but bonobos were something of a mystery. Until 1929 they weren’t even understood to be a separate species from chimpanzees. Many decades later, when they were finally studied up close, bonobo behavior turned out to be utterly different from that of their chimp cousins. “For forty years, the chimpanzee researchers had the corner of the market on man’s closest living relative,” explains Parish. “We built all our models of evolution based on a chimp model: patriarchal, hunting, meat eating, male bonding, male aggression toward females, infanticide, sexual coercion.” Bonobos turn this all on its head.
“One of the first things that I noticed was that females were attacking males,” Parish continues, as we sit on a bench next to the bonobo enclosure. “Every zoo would have some explanation. Like, oh, this male bonobo was ill when he was a youngster, and a female keeper took him home to nurse him back to health. And she must have somehow ruined him, made him soft or spoiled him. There was a zoo in Germany that didn’t even believe human females were suitable keepers for apes. Every zoo had some kind of folkloric explanation for what was ‘wrong’ with their male, because it didn’t seem like that was the proper way for males to behave, or for females for that matter. It seemed like a reversal of the natural order of things.”
Parish decided to look through veterinary records at different zoos to see how widespread this phenomenon was. Serious injuries are always recorded, making it easy to spot any patterns. “It was just astoundingly in one direction,” she tells me. In a group where there were multiple females, “females were systematically. . .inflicting routine, blood-drawing injuries on the males in the group.” Evidence from the wild backs up the idea that bonobo females tend to hold the balance of power. As well as being dominant, they seem to mate freely with males from other groups, without fear of males in their own.
“I realized that these kinds of folkloric explanations in the zoos were probably not the real explanation,” says Parish. “That maybe the ‘natural’ pattern in bonobos would be that females are dominant over males, and that instead of a patriarchy it was a matriarchy.”
It was a radical suggestion. The word matriarchy has to be used advisedly. In bonobos, there are strong connections between unrelated females, and a matriarchy usually refers to networks of females who are related to each other. “When I proposed this idea in my paper, particularly the chimpanzee researchers were reluctant to accept that it might be true,” she says. Some still resist the idea that females can be dominant in the same way males are in other species. Female bonobos have been labeled as “troublesome,” Parish laughs, while males have
been called “henpecked.” Others have told her that bonobo males aren’t dominated by females at all, but that they’re somehow deferring to them in exchange for benefits like sex.
It’s now widely accepted, though, that bonobo females do tend to dominate males. In this, they aren’t alone in the animal kingdom. Female elephants are another more well-known example. They make up stable, core groups into and out of which males move transiently, depending on the breeding season. Spotted hyenas also live in clans ruled by an alpha female. Adult males rank lowest and eat last and are smaller and less aggressive than the females.
Aside from dominance, another way in which bonobos mark themselves apart from chimpanzees is in their sexual behavior. For the relatively brief time that I watch them at San Diego Zoo, I see three or four brief, casual copulations. This is quite normal. Bonobos seem to use sex as a kind of everyday social glue. Males have sex with males, females have sex with females.
Dutch primatologist Frans de Waal, based at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia, who has worked closely with Parish, has described how bonobos also engage in oral sex, tongue kissing, and genital massage. “Sexual interactions occur more often among bonobos than among other primates,” he writes in an article in Scientific American in 2006. “Despite the frequency of sex, the bonobos rate of reproduction in the wild is about the same as that of the chimpanzee. A female gives birth to a single infant at intervals of between five and six years. So bonobos share at least one very important characteristic with our own species, namely, a partial separation between sex and reproduction.”
One more difference is hunting. Female bonobos are usually the ones who hunt for meat, often forest antelope, Parish tells me. “They flush the young ones out amongst the tall grass, while the moms are off feeding, and they eat them. There are some reports of males under the branches of females, throwing temper tantrums because they so desperately want some of the meat and they can’t have any of it unless one of the females, usually the mother, wants to give them some. Or they can offer females sex in exchange for food.”