They all want to subordinate women
Peter Beinart says the authoritarian nationalist wave has one commonality:
[B]esides their hostility to liberal democracy, the right-wing autocrats taking power across the world share one big thing, which often goes unrecognized in the U.S.: They all want to subordinate women.
To understand global Trumpism, argues Valerie M. Hudson, a political scientist at Texas A&M, it’s vital to remember that for most of human history, leaders and their male subjects forged a social contract: “Men agreed to be ruled by other men in return for all men ruling over women.” This political hierarchy appeared natural—as natural as adults ruling children—because it mirrored the hierarchy of the home. Thus, for millennia, men, and many women, have associated male dominance with political legitimacy. Women’s empowerment ruptures this order.
But then you pause to ask why “the hierarchy of the home” seemed natural. Maybe it’s just because of the dimorphism: male humans dominate female humans just as male gorillas dominate female gorillas. Then again humans aren’t gorillas, and bonobos do things somewhat differently, so maybe it’s not that simple.
Because male dominance is deeply linked to political legitimacy, many revolutionaries and counterrevolutionaries have used the specter of women’s power to discredit the regime they sought to overthrow. Then, once in power themselves, they have validated their authority by reducing women’s rights. In a 1995 paper, Arthur Gilbert and James Cole of the University of Denver observed that French revolutionaries made Marie Antoinette a symbol of the immorality of the ancien régime and that Iranian revolutionaries did the same to Princess Ashraf, the “unveiled and powerful” sister of the shah. After toppling the monarchy, the French revolutionaries banned women from holding senior teaching positions and inheriting property. Ayatollah Khamenei made it a crime for women to speak on the radio or appear unveiled in public.
And the Arab spring “revolutions” went the same way.
In their book, The Hillary Doctrine, Valerie Hudson and Patricia Leidl note that when the Muslim Brotherhood leader Mohamed Morsi replaced the longtime dictator Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, Morsi quickly announced that he would abolish the quota guaranteeing women’s seats in parliament, overturn a ban on female circumcision, and make it harder for women to divorce an abusive husband. After Muammar Qaddafi’s ouster, the first law that Libya’s new government repealed was the one banning polygamy.
On the one hand women must be kept away from any kind of power, on the other hand their fathers and husbands must be empowered to treat them like shit. No to seats in parliament, yes to female genital mutilation.
Commentators sometimes describe Trump’s alliance with the Christian right as incongruous given his libertine history. But whatever their differences when it comes to the proper behavior of men, Trump and his evangelical backers are united by a common desire to constrain the behavior of women.
To be honest, that’s putting it too mildly. Trump doesn’t want to just constrain the behavior of women, he wants to degrade them, grind them into the dirt, monster them, put targets on them. His contempt for women is visceral and intense.
Beinart concludes that to break this pattern it’s necessary to start with the hierarchy at home.
Compare the United States, the Philippines, Brazil, Hungary, and Poland with the countries of northern Europe, where women’s political power has become more normal. In 2017, women made up 48 percent of Iceland’s parliament. In Sweden, the share was 44 percent; in Finland, 42 percent; and in Norway, 40 percent. In the countries that have recently elected gender-backlash authoritarians, the rates are lower, ranging from Italy’s 31 percent to Hungary’s 10 percent. This doesn’t mean a Nordic Orbán or Bolsonaro is impossible: Northern Europe has its own far-right parties. But it’s harder for those parties to use gender to delegitimize the existing political order, because women’s political empowerment no longer appears illegitimate.
It no longer appears illegitimate, in large measure, because gender equality has become more normalized in the home. In 2018, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development published the amount of time per day that women and men spent doing unpaid household chores such as cleaning, shopping, and child care. If you calculate the gender gap in each country, a pattern emerges. There is a striking correlation between countries where women and men behave more equally in the home and countries where women are more equally represented in government.
Feminists have always known that.
My feeling has always been that humans are caught somewhere between the psychology of chimpanzees and bonobos as far as sexuality and interaction between the sexes.
These are our closet relatives and, please correct me if I’m wrong, I believe we share equal number of genes with each species, so it’s not surprising that we are mentally somewhere between the “make love not war” more matriarchal bonobos and the sometime extremely violent, male dominated chimpanzees.
To most observers, these two species look nearly identical. However, if you look at gender mixed groups, one thing becomes clear, the size and muscular difference between males and female in bonobos in nearly negligible, but the size difference between male and female chimps is very apparent. I think that may have made a large difference in their development.
No matter what the reason, it seems our species oscillates wildly between societies where social power between the sexes is relatively equal and societies where males dominate completely.
So what? I don’t know, these are just my observations.
Yes that’s what I meant by “maybe it’s just because of the dimorphism” – if you’re bigger you dominate, because you can. Religion comes in handy here because it says there’s a god who did it that way on purpose so obviously that god wants men to dominate (and is male himself).
When I was growing up, my home was strongly gender divided; my whole family believes that is right. It never took with me, because I knew that everything my brothers were doing I could do at least as well as they could, and most of it better (except beating other people to a pulp; one of my brothers was great at that. Me? Not so good).
In my first marriage, I was sort of sitting on the edge. I did all the housework, most of the child care, all of the shopping, laundry, ironing, cooking, etc. He helped occasionally. I also made 60% of the money coming into the house, worked 20 hours a week more than he did, and had a college degree. I still did almost everything.
My current marriage is mostly gender neutral, in the sense that we don’t play those games. He is retired, so he dusts and cleans and does dishes and cooks (I’m still a better cook, so I do a lot of the cooking, but he washes the dishes). In this relationship, both of us are happier than in my first marriage, and way happier than anyone else in my family, all of whom still hew to traditional gender divisions.
I think women having equality leads to better marriages, better homes, better countries, and just…better. Not just for women, but for men, as well.
cazz, I’m not a scientist, but I’ve spent some time reading about our closest relatives, so I’m gonna be presumptuous enough to fact-check you.
This is true.
This is not true. Bonobos are more gracile than chimps, so it may not be as obvious, but their sexual dimorphism is actually a bit greater.
https://carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/sexual-body-size-dimorphism
Bonobos owe their female dominance to female bonding. Presumably it isn’t even kin-selected bonding, because the females are exogamous.
Sisterhood is powerful.
You are correct, LM
I now see the “..ratio for bonobos and chimpanzees is more moderate (1.36 and 1.29 respectively) “… (carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/sexual-body-size-dimorphism)
So perhaps the difference is brain chemistry, or the slighter build is less prone to violence?
The sisterhood idea is intriguing, though I can think of non-primate examples of strong ‘sisterhood’ at both ends of the male dominance spectrum (lionesses vs. elephants, for instance – although those species are so dissimilar to ours, there can’t be a tight comparison).
At any rate, it still seems that this species is extremely variable when it comes to the hierarchy between the sexes (and any other hierarchy as well) and it seems to me that we oscillate between the extremes. Unfortunately, ‘sticking’ to one extreme more frequently than than the other.
It amuses me to try to figure out why.
Nature selects in what works in any given environmental situation, and selects out what does not. Sexual dimorphism will be selected in where competition between males for mating rights is strong. But the situation cannot get too dimorphic: weakling females are selected out too. In many arthropod species (eg spiders) where females mate only once in their lives and store sperm from that event for all the ova they will ever produce, males are smaller, and sometimes much smaller than the females. For those males, mating is commonly suicidal. But they pass their genes on, which is what it is all about.
We all know about Jordan Peterson and lobsters, I’m sure, but it can be useful to look across the animal kingdom.
In solitary species, females often get larger than males, because they have to make bigger gametes than males do. For instance, mantises and spiders are arthropods that prey on arthropods, and as a result, female ones are dangerous to their mates.
But in more social species, males often compete with each other for females, with females being choosy. This is because males usually have less investment than females, and can more easily afford fighting rivals. This is evident from gender reversals that sometimes happens. In some crickets, the males produce big spermatophores or sperm capsules that the females like to eat. So the females compete for males with the males being choosy. Among phalarope birds, males sit on the eggs and females compete for them.
Another kind of competition is to have flashy features or “ornaments”, as they are called, with females choosing the flashiest males. This has been shown in experiments, like with tail-feather lengths of male African widowbirds (females prefer longer ones), and with lion-mane color (females prefer darker ones).
Turning to social groups, a common one is a male animal with several female ones. These are traditionally interpreted as the male being dominant, but careful observations show that that is often not the case, that the male is sometimes not much more than a sperm donor, with the extent of his dominance being keeping rival males away. That is evident in wild horses, for instance, where the dominant one is not the stallion but one of the mares, and the stallion mostly follows the mares. Yes, female animals often have dominance hierarchies, just as male ones do.
Let’s now look at our own species. We are more sexually dimorphic than our pets, it must be noted. Greater male size suggests male competitiveness, and men’s voices being low seems like a way of faking great size. Male facial hair and baldness seem suspiciously like ornaments. On the female side, breasts also seem like ornaments — female monkeys and apes are flat-chested.
A big problem with trying to discover human nature is cultural variation — we have a lot of it. Consider fashions in male facial hair. Long beards, short beards, vandykes, sideburns, mustaches, and none at all. But there seems to be some cross-cultural evidence of women’s appearance getting more interest on average than men’s appearance. Note “on average”, because some men have a taste for looking flashy. This causes trouble for evolutionary psychologists, because it is very atypical. Which sex has the manes, the antlers, the flashy tail feathers? So all they can do is think of Just So Stories, it seems.
Another big problem with assessing gender differences is a tendency to treat the two sexes as two different social castes, something that also seems to be cross-cultural. That can make it difficult to recognize when the two sexes are much alike, like in intellectual capacity. It can also disguise the true nature of what differences in temperament may exist, because there is plenty of overlap between the sexes.
I must say I like the book “Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence” (Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson, 1997). The authors propose some differences in temperament, and they propose that male dominance is due to greater male pugnaciousness — greater on average. That theory may also explain why male dominance has often been very bad for women.
Do they take into account that assertiveness and aggression are encouraged in male human beings from infancy, and strongly discouraged in female humans?
Humans show the LEAST sexual dimorphism of all the great apes.
Like feudalism or anarcho-capitalism, patriarchy concentrates ‘property’ (women) under the control of a tiny elite. Other males are coerced to the will of the elite by the promise of mates. We are not gorillas anymore than we are lobsters.
LP
We are not more sexually dimorphic than our pets. Our dogs, perhaps, but not our cats. Toms are quite a bit larger than Queens. Canines in general, not very sexually dimorphic. Felines, way more sexually dimorphic. And if you have chickens fore pets, well, go look.
In fact, most domestic livestock is largely sexually dimorphic., with the exception of equines.
Now, as far as great apes go, humans appear to be the least sexually dimorphic of the lot size wise (again carta.anthropogeny.org/moca/topics/sexual-body-size-dimorphism). And we are wildy variable within the sexes. Sure, there are non-obese 300lbs males and there are non-anorexic 80 lbs females, but there are also non-obese 200+lbs females and non-anorexic 100lbs males (in fact there’s a sport that features adult men whose natural weight would be < 125lbs).
And honestly, if you take away the costuming and the grooming and the plastic surgery and let us all run around naked, we pretty much look the same. If I were an alien, I'd have a hard time telling male from female at first glance, except for the fact we walk upright, which puts male genitalia on display (and even there, nature gives us pubic hair to try to conceal it – an oddity in the animal world). 'Natural' breasts that haven't been supported for years in slings, droop and go flat with nursing, and massive upper body development in males is rare outside of the gym.
I am one of the less dimorphic outliers, and perhaps that has colored my thinking.
But the lionesses in a pride, and the female elephants in a herd, are close relatives–mothers and daughters, aunts.
Bonobos, as I said, are female exogamous. That means the females in a group leave to find mates, and join a new group. So the adult females in a given group are not necessarily related to each other.
And bonobos are not, really, all that pacific. They have their group tensions, and they can be aggressive. They’re famous for using sexual behavior to ease tensions, but when a male gets aggressive with a female, other females will join together and give him hell.
This is not speculation, it’s observed behavior.
Lack of body hair, qualifying us as ‘naked apes’ is I think best explained by the Hardy-Morgan ‘aquatic ape’ hypothesis. Pubic hair then emerges as a secondary sex characteristic, signalling reproductive maturity.
Elaine Morgan (I went on a pilgrimage to visit her at her home in Wales once) filled in one helluva lot of detail to the original suggestion by Sir Alistair Hardy. We are the only great apes inclined at all to swimming and diving under water, and are capable of learning to hold our breath while under water for quite long periods of time. (I think the Japanese ‘diving women’ hold the world record in this.)
One consequence of this, I suggest, is the well-known squaring of the shoulders in humans in comparison to the other great apes. This arguably helps maximise chest volume and thus underwater swimming capability, but hinders one’s ability to brachiate: the skill spectacularly on display when chimps and gibbons go swinging through the treetops. (Tarzan would always swing by grabbing a handy vine. He was no brachiator to write home about.) The other great apes, in other words, are slope-shouldered.
Square shoulders also came in handy when it was time for our species to start the Agricultural Revolution and the need to do a lot of serious carrying of produce and building materials. Apes, when so inclined, carry heavy and bulky objects underarm, where we tend to shoulder them, one way or another: eg the Asian carry-pole, which is flat, for comfort.
Female apes, having body hair and young with a strong grasping reflex can swing through the trees with young hanging on for themselves, and able to hang on tight to their mother from an early age.
Note also:
–Frans de Waal
“Bonobo, the Forgotten Ape” (1997)