Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (24 page)

Also, states exported violence to foreigners on the margins even at times when they eased up on abusing their own citizens. This included slave capture—universal in the ancient world, not abolished in Britain until the 1700s, and persisting illegally
everywhere
today—and deployment of women’s reproductive capacities more or less at will. Thomas Jefferson’s African-American descendants are just a hint of the genetic legacy of male slave owners. In Hobbes’s England, in the decades after
Leviathan
helped establish an illegitimate stability, women were tortured and burned as “witches,” and there were an estimated 62,500 prostitutes in London, one in five women and girls, some as young as eight or nine years old. This was survival sex, hunger-driven slavery. Many women died horrid syphilitic deaths.

Of course, an authoritarian ruler must punish treason, including religious opposition. Women found guilty were burned at the stake; men were hung but cut down, castrated, and disemboweled
while conscious, then quartered. Many Catholic priests met this fate. Executions were public, and the body parts were sent around the country for display. This was extreme state terrorism, but structural violence was routine under almost all regimes in the last few thousand years. Witch hunts targeting women—75 to 85 percent of the victims, who over the generations numbered scores of thousands—joined rape and forced prostitution as a warning against an independent spirit.

Two examples from very different parts of the time line reveal the structural violence that kept control of lower orders of women and men.

The tribes of ancient Canaan—farmers and herders before, during, and after the biblical Kingdom of Israel—were dominated in turn by many empires. The Egyptians took notes. In the valley east of the Carmel Mountains, thirty-five hundred years ago, the pharaoh laid siege to a large town from May to December one year, after which the local princes crawled on their bellies to kiss his feet; then they and their wives and children carried their own wealth to Egypt. The take included 11,000 tons of wheat, 20,500 sheep, 1,929 cattle, 2,041 horses, 924 chariots, 200 coats of leather mail, and 502 bows. From three towns farther north, the Egyptians picked up 1,796 slaves (plus their children), 235 pounds of unworked gold and silver disks, and a lot of finely crafted furniture, bowls, utensils, clothing, and statues. Many men died in battle, so most of the slaves must have been women.

Those allowed to stay home in Canaan faced confiscatory taxation and brutal reconquest. Another Egyptian note: “The scribe arrives. He surveys the harvest. Attendants are behind him with staffs, Nubians with clubs. One says to him, ‘Give grain.’ ‘There is none.’ He is beaten savagely. He is bound, thrown in the well, submerged head down. His wife is bound in his presence. His children are in fetters.” But the Canaanites or Hebrews were not special
victims. Soldiers were recruited from among them to carry out similar taxation at the other end of the empire, where they did the same to the Nubians.

Fast-forward to nineteenth-century Britain. The gracious and cultured Queen Victoria is on the throne, as she will be for sixty-three years, watching over a vast empire. But consider the streets she looks down on from Buckingham Palace, where 222 offenses are punishable by hanging, including such crimes as damaging Westminster Bridge, begging without a license, picking pockets, stealing from a rabbit warren, being in the company of “Gypsies” for a month, being out at night with a blackened face, and “strong evidence of malice” in a child seven to fourteen years old. Lesser offenders were often reprieved, but more than ten thousand people were hanged in that century. Prostitution was still ubiquitous.

This Victorian structural violence style mirrored the ancient form. Extreme inequalities cannot be maintained without armed police and soldiers, who, on command of the most advantaged, brutalize, imprison, torture, kill, and terrorize the least.
Leviathan
limited violence by making it routine and turning it over to fewer and fewer men. As for the least among women, Daniel Defoe’s 1722
Moll Flanders
and Dickens’s 1839
Oliver Twist
were among the English novels that sympathetically depicted the plight of prostitutes, but both fell well short of revealing the worst about their lives and deaths; the full truth was probably too sad and gruesome for the popular press.

Yet by the time of that “Bloody Code,” which punished so many minor offenses by hanging, some cruel and unusual punishments had been abolished. Chattel slavery—the formal ownership of a person—had been abolished in the British Isles in the 1700s and was banned throughout the empire in the 1830s. On the other hand, sex trafficking and sexual slavery continued and, as we will see, is perhaps more prevalent worldwide today
than ever before; labor slavery also continues. And every war up to the present has included widespread rape and other sexual violence, often including large-scale sexual slavery.

In World War II, Jewish girls and women were forced to serve as sex slaves by Nazi soldiers, Korean and Chinese girls and women were coerced into serving as “comfort women” for the Japanese army, and Soviet soldiers raped German women in numbers estimated from tens of thousands to over a million, including extreme gang rapes resulting in women’s deaths. Stalin declared rapes understandable and forgivable after the long march to Germany. American soldiers are estimated to have raped “only” 11,000, but their army was much smaller. Only a few men (mainly African-Americans) were punished. There were rules against “fraternization,” but a U.S. field commander supposedly said, “Copulation without conversation does not constitute fraternization.”

Not just by rape but also by fraternization all occupying armies have left children behind. Lower estimates of babies fathered by German troops in occupied Europe are in the hundreds of thousands. Allied troops fathered an estimated 66,000 children in Germany in the decade
after
the war, and larger numbers during it. In the Pacific war and after, including the wars in Korea and Vietnam, American men left an estimated 100,000 Amerasian children behind, most condemned to be ostracized along with their seduced and abandoned mothers.

Given all this, it is hard to believe that the twentieth century was, proportionately, the least violent of all centuries for which we can estimate deaths, but it is true. It is much harder to estimate sexual violence during war, but probably this too has declined; even if it stayed the same, the decline in war would mean a decline in rape. We are talking not about absolute but relative numbers, and the denominator in the equation has grown exponentially, while the numerator has not. This proportionate decline has been shown in every form of violence that has been measured, and Steven Pinker, in his
masterful 2011 book
The Better Angels of Our Nature,
brought all the facts together and made the strongest case. We will return to this surprising and welcome trend, but suffice it to say for now that two of the main explanations Pinker offers for it—after the structural violence of
Leviathan—
are democracy and “feminization.” That is, the slow and incomplete empowerment of women, and the consequent rise of women’s values, has made life much safer for women and men both.

But we can’t consider trends in the status of women without thinking about monogamy. When Christians boldly declared that having more than one wife blocks the spiritual communion that is the goal of marriage, it may have been a new philosophy, but it was not new law. Greco-Roman codes had established it much earlier. Both the ancient Greek lawmakers and the fathers of the Christian church were building on hundreds of thousands of years of evolved human nature, which, as we saw, left us a mostly pair-bonding species. Hunter-gatherer marriages were about 90 percent monogamous in principle—although, as in all societies, subject to some infidelity.

Recall that no pair-bonding species has ever been perfectly so; stolen copulations belie the romantic ideals people project on pairing animals, from geese to gibbons. A small but significant minority of hunter-gatherer men had two wives, and either sex might stray in many marriages. But compared to settled hunter-gatherers and the chiefdoms that followed, not to mention ancient civilizations, even high-status hunter-gatherer men had modest ambitions; later cultures’ chiefs, kings, and emperors had wives by the score and awarded harems to their friends.

Even royal women often had to be co-wives, and captives could only hope they were desired enough to be concubines rather than other kinds of slaves, who were more brutalized. As for men, those at or near the top did as they pleased until displaced. Even the king of the Greeks, we saw, might have to settle for
this
young beauty rather than
that
. But the men at the base of the social pyramid—a
wide base—were spear fodder or otherwise out of luck in the game of evolution roulette.

How this changed in ancient Greece is debated, but it wasn’t that women became empowered; two thousand years of European monogamy would go by before
that
. And it wasn’t because rich and mighty men gave up their carnal perks. Like Athenian democracy, to which it was only loosely related, Greek monogamy rested on a base of slavery and a stark double standard of sexual freedom. As historian Walter Scheidel put it in 2009, “monogamous” men kept concubines. “They were supposed to draw the line at cohabitation. . . . At the same time, married men’s sexual congress with their own slave women or with prostitutes was free of social and legal sanction.”

Rome was similar, and recognition of the children of extramarital dalliances was optional. Moreover, ease of divorce underwrote a degree of “effective polygyny”—men couldn’t have two wives at a time but “could marry several in a row, thereby raising reproductive inequality overall.” We’ll consider how this works in our own culture, but in ancient Greece and Rome, men had options. As for the Judeo-Christian tradition, Jews allowed polygyny in the Kingdom of Israel, but in the diaspora they followed local laws. In the Roman Empire, where most Jews then lived, they did as the Romans did, but it was only around a thousand years ago that they officially prohibited polygyny, and that did not apply to all Jews.

Jesus speaks against polygyny in the Gospels, but Paul is silent on it, and Augustine, in the fifth century, explicitly allowed it. Many Christian men of means had multiple wives, and some church leaders had liberal access to women. But formal polygyny was forbidden, and this ban strengthened in modern times. Divorce—serial monogamy—was also against early Christian teaching and even today defies Catholic doctrine. The stance of Christianity grew out of Greco-Roman anti-polygyny, but as Christianity went, so did Europe, and because Europe conquered so much of the world, monogamy is now the norm in most of it. In other words, it was partly historical chance.

Scientists, however, don’t like historical chance, so there have been many studies comparing cultures, nations, and species, seeking adaptive reasons for this trend. Some hypotheses: the need for social coherence among males; the social chaos caused by single men; their potential to overthrow the elite who hog the women; the need for fathers to invest more in children; male choice of females who can make high-quality offspring; female choice of monopolizing an average man who invests more over sharing a rich one who won’t; male mate guarding to block cuckoldry or infanticide; conflict among co-wives; blackmailing by bystanders when they discover stolen couplings; and, in modern times, a negative impact of polygyny on economic development.

So monogamy is not going begging for explanations. Each has something for and something against it. Mathematical models are elegant and can clarify thinking but are only as good as their assumptions, not to mention the data. Cross-cultural and cross-national correlations are real, but the causal conclusions drawn are rarely proved by the correlations. Is economic development a cause or an effect of monogamy? Did reducing cuckoldry or preventing infanticide come first? Was it male choice or female that started the trend toward pairing off?

We don’t know. One or more of these causes began to urge mating systems toward monogamy; after that, growing synergies reinforced it. Nonetheless, it is revealing to consider the deep history of monogamy, which seems ultimately to improve the status of women—but not automatically.

Recall that something resembling monogamy emerged at least twice in our past. First, an ancestral species that was polygynous, polyandrous, or (like bonobos) both had to become mostly pair-bonding. As we saw, some fossil experts put this first change some five million years ago, others not until the dawn of our own species around 200,000 years ago. This transition to pair-bonding at the
species
level
is called social monogamy, as distinct from perfect monogamy, which never was. Humankind at the hunter-gatherer stage was mostly monogamous, partly polygynous, and imperfect in all cultures—a strong tendency with great adaptive flexibility.

The second shift is historical, beginning with ancient Greece but picking up speed in the past few centuries: “imposed” monogamous marriage. Almost all human cultures have
marriage,
defined as a stamp of social approval on the union, which legitimizes children; it is something no other species has. There are few possible exceptions—the Na of China (discussed in
chapter 6
), the Nayar of southern India (a warrior caste with an official symbolic marriage followed by permanent separation and unofficial polyandry with visiting men), and the intriguing feature of partible paternity common in the Amazon basin (
chapter 5
). But of these, only the Na and the Nayar really challenge the definition, and identifying the father or fathers matters in all.

In any case, most people during the hunter-gatherer phase of our history were involved in pair bonds in a group context—not necessarily permanent or exclusive but socially recognized and meaningful. The first shift made by our remote ancestors probably resembled the evolution of pair bonding in other species. When some of our ancestors, much later, went through the second, it was uniquely human and historical, not genetic or evolutionary. But in between was a time of greatly increased reproductive inequality, the second-class status of co-wifery for many women and the complete reproductive exclusion of countless men. The human male bent toward polygyny got out of hand.