This is a response to a post called "Theory of Patriarchy". The op there mentions some interesting things but I want to add and correct to some of them. I don't claim whatever I write here is complete true.
This makes a lot of wrong assumptions. First is no, Women weren't the ones raising men. Until very recently, Children were normally brought up by multiple people in tribes. Women nowadays do select Men with "toxic masculine" Traits but there is no proof that women were always the choosers of sexual market.
Taking examples from our close relatives, In Chimpanzees, multiple Men fuck multiple women as they choose to. Women here choose to fuck with any chimpanzee. Among Gorrilas Women have no choice because only the top alpha Gorilla is allowed to reproduce. Humans in this case are more closer to chimpanzees but not completely like them. Even though violent un consensual sex will always exists, we don't know how common it was. Without the advent of patriarchy and agriculture, both Women and Men were equal in the Sexual market and hence both had an equal choice over each other. One important thing to note here is that patriarchy also started the process of making Women believe that male sexuality is corrupting, and it corrupts their bodies because women were property of some Men in those times and a poor man having sex with such a woman or their property offended the ruling class, hence the idea of women being teached to keep away from such men and hate them and conditioning the society to see male sexuality as corruptible unless you "own" The Woman. This is also why society started seeing rape as a very big offense not because of the victim but because of this idea that how dare these Men even touch these women, the obvious proof of this is the disregard for male rape where the victim is also traumatized but not regarded as a big offense by anyone. This is how the sexuality imbalance and hypergamy came. Here I'm defining patriarchy more like an economic system handling the means of (re)production. Similar to capitalism there is a priveleged ruling class of Men here but the oppressed are also Men. Women are also opressed here due to them being seen as the means of reproduction, however it should be noted that in most cases it didn't result in complete dehumanization of Women, just loss of their freedoms.
So before all this most Women and Men didn't have any qualms on fucking anyone they like and most women didn't consider most male sexuality or sexual contact with most Men to be a bad thing.
Hence natural selection > Sexual selection. The biggest proof for this is the lack of Fisherian Runaway effect in Human males. In some birds, due to the female birds choosing only specific type of Males, some qualities of males get very over exaggerated like the beautiful tail of a male peacock or some male birds having a very long tail which attracts females. These Long tails slowly turn out to be Disadvantageous for the animal and their population starts falling. Hence here sexual selection > Natural selection.
There is no such effect in Humans, most Human traits were shaped by natural selection. The only trait which is debated upon being exaggerated by sexual selection is the breasts of Human females. But this would mean that it was Men choosing women. But we also don't have any proof of breasts being considered attractive until we started hiding them. Hiding of Female parts is also because of the commodification of their body, The slight advantage they get from this though is that their bodies are seen as more valuable because of this. Hence women might commodify themselves if the conditions are right to get certain advantages.
One more fun fact I have learned or noted in my research for my degree is that In species which value quality of offspring over the quantity of it, will have stronger/bigger males or at least males equal to females. While in species which values quantity of offsprings over quality the females are usually bigger or maybe much bigger than males. I can't confirm this since I have to check more species and I don't know if this thing has already been mentioned by someone else. I don't exactly know why this might happen but I assume that Males in these species are great at gathering resources and maybe even taking care of the offspring while they also act like a guinea pig for natural selection to select the best genes, while Women are seen as preserving these genes (but might also preserve bad genes).
[–]a-man-from-earthleft-wing male advocate[M] 0 points1 point2 points (0 children) | Copy Link