Introduction
Of the 76 non-human mammal species that exhibit leadership, only seven have females that take charge. Patriarchy works, and so do hierarchies. So why do people spend so much time resisting what is obviously an evolutionary advantage? People have linked patriarchy to capitalism, to racism, to colonialism, but at the end of the day it’s just humans doing what humans do best. You can’t deny evolution and none of those 76 species ever swapped a patriarchy for egalitarianism, or for a matriarchy.
Wikipedia describes Patriarchy as a “social system in which men hold primary power and predominate in roles of political leadership, moral authority, social privilege and control of property. Some patriarchal societies are also patrilineal, meaning that property and title are inherited by the male lineage. Patriarchy is associated with a set of ideas, a patriarchal ideology that acts to explain and justify this dominance and attributes it to inherent natural differences between men and women. Sociologists hold varied opinions on whether patriarchy is a social product or an outcome of innate differences between the sexes.
Historically, patriarchy has manifested itself in the social, legal, political, religious, and economic organization of a range of different cultures. Most contemporary societies are, in practice, patriarchal. While the term patriarchy often refers to male domination generally, another interpretation sees it as literally “rule of the father”. So some people believe patriarchy does not refer simply to of male power over women, but the expression of power dependent on age as well as gender, such as by older men over women, children, and younger men. Some of these younger men may inherit and therefore have a stake in continuing these conventions. Others may rebel.”
Female writers associated with second-wave feminism would prefer to see patriarchy as a social system, because then the system could be changed to liberate women from male domination. Their explanation of patriarchy is designed to suit feminism, while others go still further and use terms like “hetero-patriarchal family” to explain their oppression. Quite how they’d even exist with two lesbian biological parents is not fully explained. The family then is seen as part of the problem because it is part of the patriarchal system of oppression. Families though, are the base unit of all human societies and dismantling families would antisocial in the extreme.
Other Species
OK, so Homo Sapiens is largely patriarchal. What about our evolutionary cousins? Well chimpanzees have a hierarchy and the males rule. Bonobos too have a hierarchy, but the females are in charge. Bonobos though have lower levels of testosterone than chimpanzees. Male gorillas are in charge of their families. What does all that imply? It implies that our common ancestor operated a hierarchy too, and that it was probably male-dominated. Not every patriarchy has males in charge:
Nearly all lemurs have females in charge. The females are often larger, select their own mates, and get first pick of food and territory.
“Female spotted hyenas are also dominant, choose their mates and are more aggressive than males. They also have a pseudo penis
Female elephants are in charge of the herd. The males live solitary lives, having been evicted when they were unruly adolescents.
“In basically all animal species, males and females do tend to behave in distinct ways, and these distinctions are largely presumed to be biologically hardwired rather than resulting from
acculturation — a presumption that is itself fairly safe because most animals don’t have complex cultures.” Suzanne Sadedin, Evolutionary Biologist,
Anthropolgists have described some human societies as matriarchal, and other smaller societies as largely egalitarian. It seems evident though that small groups of hunter gatherers can operate in a loose egalitarian collective, and that larger societies require a more formal structure. The larger or more complex a society is, the more rules it seems to have.
There is no firm evidence though that human society is biologically predetermined to be patriarchal, but no species is recorded as having shifted from Patriarchy to matriarchy, or vice versa. If changes did occur, they may have happened slowly over time. If homo sapiens is able to operate matriarchal, patriarchal and egalitarian societies, then it is a measure of his evolutionary adaptability. We’re hard-wired not to be hard-wired, but if we’re largely patriarchal and it works, then it works.
The Psychology
Evolutionary psychology offers an explanation for patriarchy. Firstly breeding carries a higher cost for females than for males. Females have to be fussy, because they are burdened with pregnancy and upbringing. They will therefore choose the mate best able to provide. That’s usually the one in charge, because he controls the resources. This creates pressure on males to be more successful and competitive. Testosterone features in competitiveness and aggression. So no surprise perhaps that new fathers experience a decline in testosterone levels as they adjust to a nurturing way of life.
There are posh terms describing how we came to be like this, such as “evolutionary neuroandrogenic (ENA) theory,” and the the Male Warrior hypothesis describes how aggressive males band together to war against other males in order to acquire more resources to attract women with. That’s probably why, on first dates, men pay for the meal. They’re demonstrating their resource capacity. Sociologists reject these ideas, because if the biologists were right, sociologists would be out of work and the biologists would be having sex with their women.
If you were in charge of your hierarchy, and your hierarchy was social one and not hard-wired, would you as a man do all the shitty low-paid, low status dirty work? I mean sewage farms, fishing, road digging, soldiering, bin men, labouring on building sites, mining and so on. I get it that the elite males get to enjoy the benefits without this, but they’re at the top of the tree. Beneath them are the women and beneath the women are the low status males.
Evolutionary psychologist David Buss, for example, attributes patriarchal social systems largely (but not entirely) to female choice: “My view is that women’s preferences for a successful, ambitious, and resource-capable mate co-evolved with men’s competitive mating strategies, which include risk taking, status striving, derogation of competitors, coalition formation, and an array of individual efforts aimed at surpassing other men on the dimensions that women desire. The intertwining of these co-evolved mechanisms in men and women created the conditions for men to dominate in the domain of resources.”
Links
I can’t help you on the 76 mammals too much. Only the seven exceptions are listed. The information is from a scientific paper by Jennifer Elaine Smith, a behavioural ecologist and evolutionary biologist. She is an Associate Professor and Chair of Biology at Mills College in California. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jennifer_Elaine_Smith
It’s in her paper – https://www.researchgate.net/publication/283548243_Leadership_in_Mammalian_Societies_Emergence_Distribution_Power_and_Payoff
And also referred to at https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/evan.21783 in the Introduction, and again referenced in an article in the New Scientist on 26 September 2018 by Chelsea Whyte and available at https://www.newscientist.com/article/2180434-the-7-non-human-mammals-where-females-rule-the-roost/
