…and this is a 
Student Post: More on Gender Dominance--An Evolutionary Psychological Approach
Category: Science
Posted on: October 7, 2007 11:01 PM, by Katie Glasrud
I have some thoughts on the topic of male and female dominance brought up by Blue_Expo.
In fact, it was the topic of a paper for my Evolution of Human Aggression class...
Females are under some different sexual selection pressures than males stemming from the fact that they are the limited sex. They can only produce a finite number of offspring and are heavily invested in their progeny. Perhaps this is the basis for the female dominance social hierarchies observed in bonobos (Parish et al., 1994) and hyenas (Jenks, 1995). In both these systems, offspring inherit their mother's rank and a mother is willing to engage in physical combat or establish social coalitions designed to elevate their offspring in rank. Because rank determined ability to procure resources, survive and reproduce, and females had high parental investment, there was sufficient evolutionary pressure for females to evolve the capacity to establish dominance even over males on their offsprings' behalf.
Human females develope social dominance hierarchies as well. Like primates and hyenas, females are the limited sex, but we don't see widespread examples of females establishing their dominance physically especially over males. It is important to observe that human females establish their dominance and social rankings in other ways than men (although not exclusively). Females might employ gossip or forge social ties to engineer the dynamics of a social situation. Evolutionary Psychologist D. Buss uses an example of female executives or women in positions of business power. He observes that they tend to assert dominance by delegating tasks and facilitating group productivity even if it puts them in a position to perform a more "menial" task or if it allows another group member to perform a more dominant function. Buss also discusses the importance of self-esteem as an individual's internal barometer in gauging social status, and he emphasizes the importance of belonging to a community in human evolution. In the past, ostracized individuals stood little chance of survival; acceptance in a community was vital. If females are able to manipulate social status by discourse, forming allegiances, speaking ill of others or praising others, and one's social status affects resource allocation, then this non-physical method of establishing social hierarchy may very well be a form of social dominance and one that may be employed better by human females than human males. Certainly there are examples in the primate world. Female bonobos establish close friendships and relationships among themselves. These allegiances prove vital in times of change when individuals seek to establish rank (de Wall, 1997). Female humans may use similar means to a similar end--by making friendships and alliances with words or favors, they can determine who is dominant in a community.
In short: human males and females can express dominance differently so it's not always clear cut to say one gender is dominant over the other (it would depend on the mechanism by which you define dominance).
Further more, there is an important cultural aspect to the expression of dominace and gender roles. We can identify a biological tendancy but can't predict how or the degree to which it's manifested in a group.
References:
Buss, D. 2008. Prestige, and Social Dominance, In: Evolutionary Psychology, New York: Pearson. Pp. 355-382.
Jenks, S.M., Weldele, M.L., Frank, LG., Glickman, S.E. 1995. Acquisition of matrilineal rank in captive spotted hyaenas: emergence of a natural social system in peer-related animals and their offspring. Animal Behaviour, 50: 893-904.
Parish, A. 1994. Sex and food control in the 'uncommon chimpanzee': how Bonobo females overcome a phylogentic legacy of male dominance. Ethology and Sociolobiology, 15: 157-179.
de Waal, F. 1997. Who's the boss? In: Bonobo, the Forgotten Ape. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp. 72 - 85.
Comments
Now one merely has to reconcile this with women's impotence in society throughout the ages.
Not that I disagree with any particular point, mind you, but once you describe it as a form of social dominance it seems that you over-reach the data before you. It would be better to describe it as a form of social leverage; dominance is dominance.
Posted by: James Stein | October 8, 2007 12:30 AM
You've opened a window in my brain. The implication, essentially, is that when we say "men are dominant", the reason we say so is because it's men that are asking, according to the way in which they dominate. And I always thought the whole "but the woman rules in the home" bakesale/gossip motif was just some sort of vicious cliché.
I guess this also gives me zero fitness on the social scale... but I guess I've known that for a long while. ^^; Ah me, I would have made a better man. I think I'll go find somebody to wrestle for a sandwich.
Posted by: ssjessiechan | October 8, 2007 12:33 AM
I have a big problem with the assumptions of evolutionary psychology - it tends to conflate biological forces with social forces. _People_ take power and control over their lives however they can. This doesn't mean that there's necessarily a direct biological connection between the friendship structures of female bonobos and the way in which female executives employ power. (And gender dynamics are not nearly as simple as the evolutionary psychologists would like to think - see the work of Olivia Judson or Anne Fausto-Sterling.)
To my mind, women use power in a non-physical way because there are ENORMOUS social punishments to women using power in a stylized physical way (stylized because executives don't actually wrestle to see who gets to be CEO) - for example, the trope of the bitchy woman vs. the assertive man. Or all of the movies featured the cold-heated executive married to her job who will never find love (say, Meryl Streep in the Devil Wears Prada).
Posted by: Miriam Goldstein | October 8, 2007 12:54 AM
I think Miriam raises a good point. Whatever biological reasons there may have been (or might even still be) for differences in dominance between male and female humans, we know for a fact that there is an enormous amount of social, cultural, and political forces working to keep it that way.
I'm not the sort of feminist who normally tosses around the word "hegemony." But I think it's applicable here. Whatever reasons there may have been initially for one group to become dominant over another, hegemony -- the systems with which a person or group in power keeps and/or expands their power -- is often all that's needed to preserve that dominance.
(BTW, hegemony doesn't have to be conscious. It probably works better when it isn't. There don't have to be smoke-filled rooms full of evil men plotting to keep women subordinate; in fact, the systems work better when everybody sincerely believes them, both the people on the bottom and the people on the top.)
Posted by: Greta Christina | October 8, 2007 1:38 AM
This ties into one of my observations, that if "competitiveness" is not arbitrarily defined in a fashion that ranks direct or symbolic physical intimidation higher than various forms of verbal aggression and social maneuvering, the supposed gap in "competitiveness" between males and females would probably disapper. That said, I don't think the evidence shows that women are in any meaningful sense "dominant" in most human social hierarchies, when you look at actual influence on, and representation of the individual or group's interests in, decision-making at various levels of the social hierarchy. This condition, being unjust, should be remedied, and this is true regardless of the ultimate source of that discrepancy.
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 8, 2007 1:42 AM
The problem with the culture argument is that many nasty traits are near universal across 100's of different studied cultures.
For example- rape occurs in probably every culture that's been studied to some degree or another. That strongly suggests that rape is a function of biology, not culture.
Similarly, comparative anthropology might show that gender dominance occurs in most societies, which would make it more likely to be genetic.
BTW- I'm a physicist- so everything I say in regards to this is probably naive and wrong! I don't claim any expertise, except what I read in books.
Posted by: Christian Burnham | October 8, 2007 1:45 AM
Christian - the argument that "rape is function of biology" is an old one, but in my opinion not a good one. The usual evolutionary argument is: less fit men who can't attract women want to reproduce, so they rape in order to pass on their genes. Sounds good, doesn't it? However, actual statistics on who rapes and who gets raped do not support this hypothesis. Successful men with wives and children rape, and prepubescent girls and old women are raped.
One biological drive that I do believe in, as I said before, is that _people_ take power however they can. And in the absence of social structures that forbid rape (like enforcement and jail), rape brings a LOT of power. Physical damage, psychological fear, and sometimes forced pregnancy, to name just a few. If you live in certain societies, you can force a girl to marry you or have her killed by her own relatives. There are lots of reasons to rape, but a purely biological urge does not seem to be among them.
Posted by: Miriam Goldstein | October 8, 2007 2:05 AM
Miriam- You're going to have to explain how the culture argument can explain the fact that rape occurs in every society (I'm assuming it does).
Also- something very like rape occurs in other species. That can't be explained by culture.
I'm certainly not denying that there is a strong cultural component, which accounts for the variation in rape statistics across different societies- but it doesn't seem possible that culture alone is the driving factor.
(Again- I don't claim to be an expert in any of this.)
Posted by: Christian Burnham | October 8, 2007 2:12 AM
You ignore the fact that women are strongly socialized against physicality and aggression. Thus women's lack of overt aggression is a symptom of male dominance, not a cause.
Personally, I see the fact that more men are sociopaths as more important to male dominance than anything else. Biology weights short-term gains much higher than long term gains. Thus the longer term negative effects of sociopaths on a society would be offset by allowing the group to survive the short-term more effectively.
It also bears noting that, historically (or is it pre-historically?), men did not regularly live past age 25. Women on the other hand, we know to frequently live past age 50 or else menopause would not be so wide spread. This gives a female sociopath more chance to do harm to a society, forming negative pressure on the trait.
Posted by: Jonathan | October 8, 2007 3:05 AM
My hypothesis is that male dominance is a byproduct of a social arrangement that made sense thousands of years ago for reasons that changes in the technology available, the structure of society, and the type of challenges faced in the course of everyday life have largely made irrelevant, which has been coasting on "tradition", legal codification, and perceived "naturalness" since those changes essentially because we as a society have not made a concerted, wholehearted effort to pitch it out.
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 8, 2007 4:06 AM
As for rape, I think the basic issue is that both mating/reproduction and acquiring power are biological urges (and rape can help to satisfy both), whereas respect and human rights are cultural concepts that people must learn, but not everyone does.
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 8, 2007 4:09 AM
This may be naive and crude, but I believe the average man can physically overcome the average woman. Is this not relevant?
Posted by: John Morales | October 8, 2007 4:31 AM
In what context?
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 8, 2007 4:38 AM
Azkyroth, you want a context?
Um, rape? I confess I didn't have any specific case in mind.
I just figure that, when it comes to dominance, strength is power.
Posted by: John Morales | October 8, 2007 4:58 AM
Since social dominance hasn't been based on actual physical combat, at least in our society, in most areas of it, for a very long time, I don't think greater physical strength is an issue there except as regards cultural inertia. With regard to rape, I think the greater average strength of men is the major reason rapists succeed, but I doubt, on its own, it's what motivates them to try.
Posted by: Azkyroth | October 8, 2007 5:43 AM
'strength is power'
Clearly not in the relation between a human and a horse, for instance.
And while rape is (I expect) found in all societies, so is abortion, which negates rape as a reproductive strategy.
Rape will work as a reproductive strategy of sorts if legal structures minimise the risk for men (revenge killing is inhibited by legal structures, but legal punishment for rape is rare or ineffective) while maximising the risk for women (abortion is difficult or expensive to obtain). These are contingent social decisions, which are handled differently in different cultures, rather than immutable facts of human biology.
Posted by: Alison P | October 8, 2007 5:45 AM
I admit this is not a topic I've really considered.
I posted because I noted the absence of any reference to the physical differences between the sexes, and that surprised me.
If this is not relevant now, because society and technology render this issue moot, was it not relevant back in prehistoric times and after?
If the issue of physical capacity is fully irrelevant to human dominance, just let me know and I'll do my own research.
Posted by: John Morales | October 8, 2007 5:57 AM
Alison #16, human:horse /= man:woman.
Posted by: John Morales | October 8, 2007 6:00 AM
human:horse /= man:woman
I understand your notation but not how you think you have refuted my argument. You said 'when it comes to dominance strength is power' I gave a counter-example.
Clearly there are also many other counter-examples within human society, but I thought mine was particularly clear.
Posted by: Alison P | October 8, 2007 6:19 AM
Alison, I concede dominance is established through many factors. But my issue is with man on woman, where I grant full equality, except in this factor.
I'm not arguing women are physically less capable overall, but look at sport. Why is there men's and women's tennis?
(So what if men become decrepit and die younger?)
--
Azkyroth #15, the post began
Isn't the overall context human (species) dominance? I think that should include the genesis of historical dominance patterns.
Posted by: John Morales | October 8, 2007 6:34 AM
Power within human society is clearly not closely related to physical strength. And it is easy to see why. Even in the sphere of brute physical force, what is possible is strongly limited by social context. And humans always live within a social context.
If a person tries to physically coerce or harm another person they may be stopped, or it may be tolerated (sometimes within agreed limits).
As a social group is always physically stronger than a single person, the exercise of physical dominance is always affected by issues of social consent. Occasionally a temporary opportunity will enable a person to commit 'socially prohibited' violence, but that person then faces social ostracism - they may even be killed by the group. This is the reality that humans have always, always, lived with.
There is no imaginary past when there was no restriction on human violence.
Posted by: Alison P | October 8, 2007 7:01 AM
Alison, your response seems rather general and abstract.
In a mixed group, in a pre-technological context, if the men gang up and decide to dominate the women, what is the likely outcome?
(And before you say it, if anything I'm dominated by women. But that's another issue.)
Posted by: John Morales | October 8, 2007 7:18 AM
Alison, on reading my own comment it occurs to me you might think I didn't get your point because I didn't directly address it.
I rebut it by pointing to existing Islamic societies.
Posted by: John Morales | October 8, 2007 7:37 AM
I'll have to add the same disclaimer as Christian Burnham, but social issues are things we all must take positions on. Which is what I think we can do here, I have a problem with taking evolutionary psychology seriously as it seems to fail to present tested hypotheses.
Primates seems to have all sorts of social solutions, comparing bonobos conflict solutions with chimps or humans. (I hear that results on bonobos can be dubious as they are mostly done in captivity, but if it is done on several groups I assume at least the behavior from biology will be general.) I don't see how we can test male to female differences against that background alone.
I suspect neuroscience tries to tell us biology isn't decisive. For example, males and females brains are differently organized and utilized. Yet the produced behavior is much more alike than comparing biological structures and processes would suggest. And IIRC a mix between biological and social factors correlating to behavior is what people see on individual level.
Agreed. IIRC UN statistics says that women own 5 % of Earth's resources. Having capital trivially means having easier to get capital (from game theory) and more so by way of the social power it lends. Still, you would expect more variance and an equalization over time by random factors, so there are other forces that keeps the situation asymmetrical.
As stated, here we can and should override any biological (and social) factors that are at work.
Posted by: Torbjörn Larsson, OM | October 8, 2007 8:08 AM
"Further more, there is an important cultural aspect to the expression of dominance and gender roles."
Exactly. Thank you PZ, for a discussion of evolutionary psychology that acknowledges its own limits!
And James Stein and his appeal to "women's impotence in society throughout the ages"? Thank you for encouraging even more lame gender history dissertations where the scholar goes looking for historical evidence of women in positions of power and (the shock! the surprise!) finds them.
Posted by: Paris | October 8, 2007 8:25 AM
Katie,
as #12 said: "This may be naive and crude, but I believe the average man can physically overcome the average woman. Is this not relevant?"
Surely this is the crux. In bonobos and hyenas I think you will find the female can beat up the male and thus ensure dominance. In animals with polygamous groupings the male is the big one.
So I would say any sense of human females dominating by devious means is more a matter of doing what they can with what they have. Since society has introduced rules about beating up, this has changed the landscape. Womens' roles at this time are changing rapidly. To give you an idea only 40 years ago in the society in which I was brought up, it was considered that a woman's job was to get married and be looked after by a man. If they had not got married by he age of about 23 they were considered "on the shelf" and pitied.
Right now men still tend to dominate in part because they have always been at the top and the role they are bought up with makes them more confident. I would be very suprised if this is true in 50 years in societies where women have equall rights under the law and it is enforced.
Posted by: sailor | October 8, 2007 8:40 AM
Sexual behaviour is used as a convenient channel for dominance behaviour. That doesn't make it sex.
Either that, or all dogs are gay, take your pick.
In a mixed group, in a pre-technological context, if the men gang up and decide to dominate the women, what is the likely outcome?
"Shut up and eat your mushrooms"
You aren't going to survive that until you have convinced the female (food preparing group) that this is the proper order of things.
Male tasks tend to be flashier, more "heroic" (kill the large angry beast, or enemy), whereas female tasks (collect the berries, make the clothes), require less physical confrontation. One can see how female tasks become/are ordinary, "background", not special, leading to a devaluing of female importance. IN fact, I would say that this was already to some extent established behaviour before we became fully human, there was no "Golden Age" of equality.
Posted by: Graculus | October 8, 2007 10:09 AM
Katie, one factor you don't mention that you might like to consider is the fact that human infants are born helpless and remain comparatively (with other species, including other primates) so for some years (because of the physical compromises required by our upright stance and enormous brains). Could mothers in the ancestral environment bring up such helpless young entirely without male support (as is the case with many species)? Possibly not. If so, males needed to stick around and help; but for them to get inclusive fitness benefits from doing so, they needed to have a fair degree of certainty about their paternity. This is one possible reason for (one sort of) male dominance over females.
This supports your suggestion that it's important to be clear about what we mean by "dominance" anyhow. Males get to eat first? Males get to rape? Males try to control females' sexuality? Males take all the decisions? And so on and so on..... All of these aspects need to be considered separately. Lumping them all together as "dominance" is actually not useful.
Posted by: potentilla | October 8, 2007 10:17 AM
Christian Burnham: Rape occurs in the majority of cultures, to one degree or another...but that degree varies wildly with how the culture regards it. Amongst the Na of China, arguably one of the most female-dominant cultures on the planet, it's almost entirely unknown, as far as anyone can tell. In the few Western, industrialised countries which punish it harshly under the law and are serious about prosecuting it, it's very rare. In South Africa, where it is legally a crime but almost never punished, and where there is a substantial proportion of the population who seem to regard it as being supportive of their social power, rape is incredibly common (by some estimates running as high as 40%+ of the female population being a victim at some point in their lives). And amongst the Yanomamo, where rape is an accepted "punishment" of "bad behavior" in women, as many as 60% of women will be raped at some point. Clearly there is more going on here than biology.
In most Western, industrialised nations the majority of rape victims are either prepubescent or very early pubescent, and the majority of rapes happen inside the family, indicating there is probably less to do with reproduction and probably more to do with vulnerability and availability.
People get sexuality tied up with all kinds of unlikely and non-reproductive sorts of things. People get sexually tied up with feet, BDSM, cars, guns, coprophilia, and straight-out murderous aggression at times. Clearly this is not all because sex is reproductive.
We have a several billion year evolutionary history of wiring brains to look for sexual gratification -- but then we go and muck it up with all kinds of behavioural complexity and psychology. That rape involves sexual behaviour is kind of part of the definition. That it is sexual gratification through power, pain and humiliation of another in order to establish dominance is probably the more relevant aspect. This has more to do with psychology of the individual than with species biology, I would say...incredibly dishonest arguments by Thornhill aside.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 10:59 AM
On the topic of female aggression and social dominance, I would suggest to people to take a look at "Odd Girl Out" by Rachel Simmons, and "Queen Bees and Wannabes" by Rosalind Wiseman. Jonathan's first comment ("You ignore the fact that women are strongly socialized against physicality and aggression.") and Alison P. are right on the money.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 11:16 AM
Wow, I come back to this thread, and Luna_the_cat has said it all so beautifully. I'll just second her, and heap a little more scorn on Thornhill. For those who aren't familiar with his work, he is one of the proponent of rape as reproductive strategy, which might be true for the insects that he studies, but is demonstrably not true in humans.
Posted by: Miriam Goldstein | October 8, 2007 11:18 AM
For the original poster: If you're studying dominance strategies, you might also look at how these interact with vertical vs. horizontal social control. Those are classically associated with male vs. female, but I think the link is dubious. Vertical controls depend directly on the pecking order ("because I'm the boss/biggest/mommy"), whereas horizontal control depends on exchange of favors and other alliances ("you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours" or "you'll never eat lunch in this town again!").
With regard to male/female dominance, I interpret the current situation as "males have a half-rank advantage over females". I'm not sure that this is historically universal, but I suspect it is. AFAICT, it is universal among modern societies, and there are few exceptions even among relict tribal groups. In any case, I'd look for how our behavior fits into general patterns among the primates.
On to the commenters.... (dang, this got long!)
Miriam: The usual evolutionary argument is: less fit men who can't attract women want to reproduce, so they rape in order to pass on their genes.
No, I'm afraid that's a fallacy -- attractive from a feminist viewpoint, but still a fallacy. "Rape" in a high-K species does represent a "cheater's path", but the point is that the rapist can reproduce without investing in support of the offspring. This is why you see the Biblical (inter alia) bit about rapists "getting to" (having to) marry their victims.
In this context the "rape->marriage" path shows up as an unpleasant but typical mating strategy. It may be unseemly to "modern" sensibilities, but in evolutionary terms, it's just a male "win" in a conflict between male and female mate-selection strategies. In a few species (mallard ducks, dolphins) this "win" has become entrenched as "normal", which would not happen if force was solely the refuge of failures.
The fact that we modernists do frown upon that strategy reflects the point that female mate-selection is indeed evolutionarily important, and (among humans) cannot be completely suppressed. "Honor killings" can be seen as sacrificing the victim's reproductive potential... in order to squelch the real payoff of rape! But that only "works" (is stable) if the group's supply of females exceeds their resources for raising young -- as in those classic "desert societies"!
Torbjörn Larsson: women own 5 % of Earth's resources. Having capital trivially means having easier to get capital (from game theory) .... Still, you would expect more variance and an equalization over time by random factors, ....
BZZZT! Sorry, feedback loops beat random factors pretty reliably. (Any sensible economic theory must take the status quo as an input!) I mostly agree with your other comments, but I'd say that extracting signal from ambient noise is just what science does.
The physical-strength issue may be a red herring; the whole point of a pecking order is that it's not just a matter of individual conflict -- it's also enforced by the group as a whole. Conflicts among closely ranked individuals are "spectator sport", challenging the "next guy up" is "ambitious", but challenging someone of much higher rank is just "out of line", and triggers a communal smackdown.
John Morales: ... look at sport. Why is there men's and women's tennis?
For the same reason that wrestling and boxing have weight classes, while many other sports have handicaps -- easy smackdowns are not "interesting", people want to see close matches. See also my previous paragraph about dominance....
Posted by: David Harmon | October 8, 2007 11:31 AM
Preface: In no way is rape excusable on the basis of biology, but it is (at least partially) explicable by biology.
Evidence for rape as a conditional reproductive strategy:
1. Rape occurs in animals other than humans.
2. If rape were motivated solely by the desire to do violence and oppress women, a graph comparing the age-distribution of female rape victims to match female murder victims. Instead, there is a spike of rape victims between the ages of 15-30, whereas the data on female murder shows the highest rates between 30-60. The murder line is also flatter than the rape line. (Source 1)
3. Rape is positively correlated with divorce rates. As older men divorce and marry younger women, fewer mates are available to younger men which increases the fitness benefits of rape (relatively). (Source 2)
This is likely only part of the answer, as rape is also likely to be a symptom of maladaptive misfiring of male reproductive traits (quick arousal, interest in many partners, interest in impersonal sex). This is also supported by the fact that males engage in many sexual activities with no chance of reproduction (pedophilia, homosexual rape, masturbation).
This information comes mainly from my animal behavior course, and the accompanying textbook (Alcock, Animal Behavior, 7th Ed.)
I plan on teaching this to AP Bio students in an unit on evolutionary influences of human behavior in the future. This sort of thing really puts a dent in the creationist perspective, because students must then accept that their creator approved of rape as a reproductive strategy.
Sorry for the length!
Sources:
(1) Thornhill, R., and N.W. Thornhill. 1983. Human rape: An evolutionary analysis. Ethology and Sociobiology 4:137-173
(2) Starks, P., and C. Blackie. 2000. The relationship between serial monogamy and rape in the United States (1960-1995). Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B 267:1259-1263.
Posted by: Jeff | October 8, 2007 11:40 AM
David Harmon: Equating some of the Biblical treatment of rape (some; not all) with all the phenomenon of rape, period, also does not lend itself to a good understanding.
Don't disregard the culture. In the culture described by the Old Testament, women were already well entrenched as property, and control over who got to stick what in them was a manifestation of the absolute importance of established paternity. A rapist wasn't forced to marry the victim because he needed to support potential offspring; it was more an economic issue, because if there could be any doubt at all about paternity (and all the "guaranteed virgin when you get her" baggage that surrounded that) the woman was damaged, soiled goods, and could not be given or sold to a better mate, and her father didn't want to have to bear that financial loss. Where the rapist couldn't be caught and/or the woman could not prove absolutely that she had fought back, she would be killed -- no point in supporting damaged goods that you aren't going to get a financial return on, is there?
As a reproductive strategy, frankly this sucks.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 11:42 AM
Miriam, Luna and co. I also agree that culture and society play their part in rape, but I was just showing that there is definitely a biological influence as well.
Posted by: Jeff | October 8, 2007 11:50 AM
Catching up with those who commented while I was editing:
potentilla: excellent points!
Miriam and Luna: The dominance aspect is certainly important, but it doesn't really cover predatory or stranger rape (rare in our society, not so much in those "desert" societies). I'd consider most of Africa as either "desert society" or heading that way due to resource depletion. The Yanomomo are infamously violent in other respects as well, so they may be an outlier in their context.
Graculus: That can be a limiting factor, but consider how husband-killing gets much more vindictively punished than wife-killing. A woman whose husband dies suspiciously can be ostracised or worse ("witch!"), even, or especially, if they could support themselves on their own.
Posted by: David Harmon | October 8, 2007 11:53 AM
"Shut up and eat your mushrooms"
You aren't going to survive unless you have convinced the female (food preparing group) that this is the proper order of things.
Graculus, I was thinking exactly this over lunch. Where plant lore is a female specialism and all food preparation is by women - I honestly wonder what used to go on. We will never know, and of course, as the rest of the discussion shows, there is no single 'human' answer, but multiple solutions and differing power relationships in different societies.
Posted by: Alison P | October 8, 2007 11:54 AM
Jeff: Please, do not use Thornhill as a good source for anything. I can't give the exact examples right away because I don't have my notes to hand, but Thornhill and Palmer, in their appalling little book, were not above manipulating data grossly to support their theses. For example (and if/when I find my notes I can give you the exact sequence of papers) -- one of the "supporting points" for their thesis was that "women of prime reproductive age who are raped are more traumatised than non-reproductive aged women who are raped". The cited source for this is an earlier paper by Thornhill.
On looking up that paper, I saw the same flatly asserted argument by Thornhill, with the source being an earlier paper by Thornhill.
On looking up that paper, I saw the same flatly asserted argument by Thornhill, no numbers or figures, with the source being an earlier paper by Thornhill.
On looking up that paper, I saw the same flatly asserted argument by Thornhill, no numbers or figures, with the source being an earlier paper by Thornhill. (Beginning to see a pattern here? I was.)
On looking up that paper, I saw the same flatly asserted argument by Thornhill, with the source being an earlier paper by Thornhill. This paper was dated well back in the early 80s.
On looking up that paper, I saw the same flatly asserted argument by Thornhill, with the source being an earlier paper by Thornhill, and an assertion that previous data had been "cleaned up" and run through "different analytical filters" -- but still, absolutely no numbers, figures, or explanations of what "cleaned up" meant, or what his "analytical filters" were. The cited source was an earlier Thornhill paper.
I looked up that paper, and found that -whoa!- he actually cited someone else's paper -- and lo and behold, that paper's conclusion, which he was so far accepting, was that women of different reproductive and non-reproductive ages were all equally traumatised by rape.
Looking up that paper, I discovered a piece of work done by a grad student consisting of one or two post-rape interviews with 27 women of ages ranging from 10 to (I think) 57.
Damn. I mean, how did THAT get lost? The original research? The small sample size? The different conclusion?
Unless, of course, Thornhill just wanted a "fact", and made one up where there wasn't one.
There were a number of other incidences of this -- including the manipulation of age ranges for rape victims, which in Thornhill's book do not match the age ranges documented in what he cites as his source (FBI statistics, was it?).
As for your source 2, this does not account in any way for the fact that more rapists are in an active, sexual relationship at the time of the rape, than any other group of criminal -- and yes, somewhere I have the exact source of that, too, but it is from a DOJ report on rape and other violent crimes. If you look at how many rapists are in active sexual relationships already, it is clearly not about lack of a mate -- this is another rape myth, and has actually been debunked a lot.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 11:58 AM
David Harmon: do you have evidence that predatory stranger rape is more common in any culture or circumstance than victimisation within the family? Do you have evidence that it is more common in desert cultures?
Aside from in situations of warfare, of course, where mass rape is used as a weapon and overt tool of humiliation and cultural destruction.
Jeff -- you can equally say that there is a biological component to murder, theft and bullying in schools, but in terms of dealing with all these there is limited usefulness in this explanation, compared with dealing with cultural and individual-psychology components.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 12:06 PM
Luna, I don't have time to independently check up on Thornhill so I'll take your word on him as a source.
My question to you, why would humans differ from other animals in using rape as a conditional reproductive tactic? Chimps rape, doesn't that hint that there may be at least some biological influence on this behavior in humans?
Again, I'll emphasize that this is not excuse or mitigation.
Posted by: Jeff | October 8, 2007 12:16 PM
Luna @#34:
At not point did I identify the Biblical rules with rape as a whole, I used them as a well-known example. The economic issue is my point:
1) A potential husband would not be willing to support a child that might not be their own.
2) the group as a whole (especially the woman's family) would likewise not want to support a child which would not "carry" the resources and alliances associated with paternity.
Again, scarcity of resources is key to that pattern. With plentiful resources, a "bastard" firstborn could be accepted in light of the woman's proven fertility!
Posted by: David Harmon | October 8, 2007 12:19 PM
Luna, just saw your last post, I think we're on the same wavelength here, just coming at it from different angles.
Posted by: Jeff | October 8, 2007 12:19 PM
I can't say that rape is never a reproductive tactic -- but when you consider the entire spectrum of "sexual aggression" and sex offenses, you begin to go a bit wonky if you try to put it forward as a primary or even an important aspect of it.
First, looking at the DOJ statistics for sex offense/molestation victims (I can refer you to http://www.ojp.usdoj.gov/bjs/pub/ascii/saycrle.txt as one source), 34% of sexual molestation/forcible rape victims were younger than 12. This is not "reproductive age" by any stretch of the imagination. Another 33% were 12-17, which are more viable reproductive ages, but one can't ignore the possibility that the more controlling factor is accessibility, risk-taking behavior which exposes them to danger, and inability to defend themselves.
Forcible penetration with the penis resulted in ejaculation apparently less than half the time that it occurred, and it occurred in a broadly overlapping spectrum with things ranging in seriousness from "forcible fondling" to penetration with an object, and deliberate harm and humiliation such as beating, urinating on or smearing the victim with feces. Not only do other animals not do this, it's clearly not reproductive!
Chimps rape, and they do beat up on females in order to control them at times (thinking of Goodall's profile of Goblin). However, the profile of targets is completely different -- solely females in estrus. This alone makes it a different phenomenon.
David Harmon: You are missing the point. The woman's family see her as property, with her value being reproductive, and THEY see rape as a purely reproductive issue. This does NOT mean that the rapist sees it as a reproductive issue, especially given how seldom it will be successful! The issue is why do men rape, and so far the fact that women are penalised for being the victim doesn't support your thesis.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 12:40 PM
Jeff, it is entirely possible we're just coming at this from different angles. I do have all my stuff in notes -- somewhere-- if you want them, give me a day or so and I will give you precise references.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 12:43 PM
Humans are unlike other animals in that human females know how to procure abortion and in most ancient cultures they also practised infanticide. The two together effectively destroy rape as a reproductive strategy.
My overall point is that strength is not a biological constant, which may be limited by human culture, but that the cultural context itself determines what is power, and what strategies are used to gain advantage.
Thus male power over women isn't an objective eternal fact of nature, it is a cultural phenomenon. As Hobbes said, every tyrant must sleep, and he is vulnerable at that point to the weakest person. Every man is as vulnerable as every woman.
We must care for each other, because we are all equally weak - or put it another way, equally strong.
Posted by: Alison P | October 8, 2007 12:43 PM
Luna @#39: do you have evidence that predatory stranger rape is more common in any culture or circumstance than victimisation within the family? Do you have evidence that it is more common in desert cultures?
The first query is a flat misreading of my statements, as I made no such assertion. (Indeed, I would read within-family rape as a nearly pure dominance act.)
The "desert" discussion was a reference to the "desert vs. jungle" idea which started circulating a few years ago, basically attributing a lot of societal differences to different patterns in resource distribution. The "jungle" pattern is comparatively flat, so while the rich can still accumulate resources, the poor can still survive. The "desert" pattern has resources concentrated in critical locations, or otherwise subject to centralized control. Thus, whoever controls those resources decides who gets to survive. I'm not fanatical about the idea, but it does make sense to me, and there has been some support from primate research (comparisions of chimp groups in different environments).
The comparision between modern societies vs. the present Middle East and Africa (which I'm dubious about calling "modern") is an extension of that theme, but a reasonable one, based on the idea that modern technology and social patterns tend to produce a "jungle" style distribution of resources. (Of course, the U.S. is busily trying to go back to the "desert" pattern, but that includes establishing central control over said resources!)
And do you really want to assert that there's no difference in the prevalence (or toleration) of (extra-familial) rape, between the Western societies and the Middle Eastern or African societies? I think there's plenty of evidence that there is.
Posted by: David Harmon | October 8, 2007 12:58 PM
David Harmon: I apologise for misreading your statement about stranger/predatory rape being more common than in-family/acquaintance rape, since that is not what you meant. My misinterpretation.
I see what you are saying about the "desert culture" thing...but I'm not convinced it has absolute relevance here. Going by the modern cultures in the Middle East, India, Pakistan and many areas of Africa -- and I include Afghanistan here as being one of the more "backward" and mysogynistic of these -- there is no doubt that non-familial rape is heavily penalised, to the point of women being killed for "shaming" their families. However, this makes it even more likely that the stranger/predatory rape of a woman is done in order to carry out a grudge against the family, by "ruining" their economic resource, than it makes it a strategic attempt by the rapist to reproduce.
Your argument seems too much like an extension of the "rapists rape because they can't get sex" myth which has had such great currency in the West, and which has so little factual support.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 1:09 PM
Also, David Harmon -- Do you have evidence that non-familial/stranger rape is more common in proportion to family/acquaintance rape in these cultures? Because as far as I can tell from the various women's advocacy groups in those parts of the world, the issue is more one of reporting vs. the woman's need to keep the victimisation a secret than it is of occurance vs. non-occurance. If the woman has not left the home and is able to hide evidence of the assault, then she will be strongly motivated to hide that it ever happened. Otherwise the blame will more likely fall on her than on her assailant.
Sorry for the multiple posts. Will now be offline until tomorrow, anyway.
Posted by: Luna_the_cat | October 8, 2007 1:16 PM
Luna @#43: Chimps rape, and they do beat up on females in order to control them at times (thinking of Goodall's profile of Goblin). However, the profile of targets is completely different -- solely females in estrus.
I beg to differ -- as I recall the reports, chimps "beating up" on females specifically included victims who were not yet in estrus -- strongly implying a strategy of establishing dominance prior to the critical period. Human rape (and forced marriage) of prepubertal females would fit much the same strategy, and the business of a girl or woman having having to marry their rapist is a direct social endorsement of that strategy. Incidentally, I'd bet that those statistics about failure to ejaculate etc. are specifically derived from violent-rape incidents, and primarily stranger rape. It's likely to be a very different story for forced sex in an ongoing power relationship.
It's also worth remembering that our instincts don't fully match our current social environment, in that before long-range travel became commonplace, there more-or-less were no strangers. (That would also apply to the tribal milieus of Old-Testament times.) For that matter, even intra-familial rape could be linked into that -- consider another difference between humans and other animals, namely that human parents can influence or outright control the mate-selection of their children! (That is, a child who's been trained to submit to rape would be more likely to submit to an arranged marriage, as opposed to pulling a Romeo-and-Juliet routine.)
As far as "missing the point", I will admit to wandering far afield from the original poster's query about dominance strategies, but.... As you and others have noted, rape is indeed strongly linked to dominance; I contend that the link also runs from dominance to reproductive strategy, and back again from reproductive success (family alliances) back to social dominance.
If not for those links, rape would universally be considered a simple crime of violence; it's those very connections that allow for social toleration of rape, especially victim-blaming. The great innovation of modern society (in this context) is that we now consider mate-selection to be a basic right of women as well as men, rather than the perogative of their parents. The problem is that our instincts haven't caught up with our society!
Indeed, the Stockholm-like syndrome commonly affecting rape victims is an expression of the underlying "instinctual calculus", and failing to recognize that point leads to such victims hearing "well, you ought to feel differently" from their nominal supporters! (Incidentally, this is also a limiting factor w.r.t. Allison's comments about abortion and infanticide. BTW, animals can resorb fetuses and/or kill their young, at considerably lower cost/risk than human infanticide or pre-modern abortions.)
The best way to squelch rape long-term would clearly be a few generations of consistently castrating rapists (and aborting any resulting pregnancies). Unfortunately, fair enforcement of that would be very difficult, for all the same reasons that current laws against rape are unevenly applied, and slanted toward the powerful. Here too, dominance factors connect to reproductive-success factors, and back again.
Posted by: David Harmon | October 8, 2007 3:19 PM
Graculus: That can be a limiting factor, but consider how husband-killing gets much more vindictively punished than wife-killing. A woman whose husband dies suspiciously can be ostracised or worse ("witch!"), even, or especially, if they could support themselves on their own.
The woman could easily turn around and accuse the last *male* that pissed her off of using witchcraft to murder her beloved husband.
My argument is not that this happened, but that a sudden "hostile takeover" was not likely, because women would be in a position to fight back. I don't see any evidence that male dominance didn't precede human status. Baggage.
Posted by: Graculus | October 8, 2007 4:05 PM
Luna @#47: Also, David Harmon -- Do you have evidence that non-familial/stranger rape is more common in proportion to family/acquaintance rape in these cultures?
No, but I also don't see how the point is relevant. I already agreed that intrafamilial abuse is primarily dominance-based, with the caveat about it supporting arranged marriages. (Of course, in cultures where virginity is required for marraige, intrafamilial rape as such becomes actively destructive to the family's welfare.)
I would definitely not aggregate intrafamilial rape with aquaintance rape! The former, as I said above, represents dominance (and likely some misfiring of instinct); the latter combines dominance with reproductive strategy, and I'd consider it the "primal" form of rape. (Remember, no strangers within a tribe.)
Stranger rape would be closer to the "war rapes" you mentioned earlier, and both of those seem much more closely based on (pre-modern) reproductive strategy. And it seems to me that "aquaintance" plus "stranger" equals "non-family".
Your argument seems too much like an extension of the "rapists rape because they can't get sex" myth
Not quite -- no matter how many kids a rapist has (or not) by their "official" partner(s), the rapes give an extra chance of fathering more kids, but without having to support them. Strictly a numbers game at that point....
Just to cover some of your other points: I consider that social factors are ultimately a superstructure over more fundamental drives. Specifically, dominance may be a fundamental social drive, but it's still "higher level" than the biological drive for reproduction. Thus, dominance exists entirely in service to reproductive success.
It's been an interesting argument, albeit confusing due to interleaved posts. We'll have to see if the thread's still alive when you get back!
Posted by: David Harmon | October 8, 2007 4:11 PM
Yeah, because consistently hanging murderers and jailing robbers has had a **huge** effect on the number of murderers and robbers too.. Seriously, you don't have a clue. Its well known that rape isn't about sex, its about control and power. There have been cases of rapists using *objects* to rape, because they where incapable of sex. What do you do with them, start cutting off hands, in the hope that that will stop them? It sure works for theft in countries where they do that, not!
How is it that, in this day and age, with all we know of the psychology of rapists, there are *still* people that think that "sex" is the main factor and that chemically or physically castrating them will do anything at all?
Posted by: Kagehi | October 8, 2007 4:13 PM
I think the premise is that if there's a genetic component to the propensity to be a rapist, by ensuring rapists have no children, you would decrease the frequency of the raping alleles.
If everything else about male and female biology were the same, except that female genitalia was doing the penetrating during heterosexual intercourse, do you think female rape would be as common?
Posted by: Elizabeth | October 8, 2007 6:06 PM
That's the marriage effect! Women are most likely to be married in that 30-60 age range. Women raped within marriage (ie by their spouse) often don't get included in statistics. It wasn't even counted as a crime at all until recently. Meanwhile, a married woman is likely to be murdered by her spouse - for being annoying or merely in the way when they want another woman (for love or money, eg dowry). Even with marriage occurring somewhat before 30, it takes a while (hence 30) for the circumstances leading to rape or murder to occur. After 60, the man is more likely to be dead or less able / willing to attack.
Posted by: SEF | October 8, 2007 6:19 PM
Elisabeth: More or less, with the addendum that it doesn't necessarily need to be a specific allele. There's also the point that if the penalty is "certain" enough, it would replace the reproductive payoff that I've been talking about with a drastic reproductive penalty, which would apply also to the other types of rape. Even so, my "few generations" was certainly optimistic -- it would take more than a few, and have other liabilities.
The biggest problem with the idea is in fact that pointed out so impolitely by Kagehi: There is a more basic link to aggression here, and we can't breed that out, because aggression in general is fundamental to our society. What could eventually be done is to breed constraints into our sexual behavior, but in practice we humans tend to handle that sort of thing by social indoctrination and learned constraints.
Incidentally, jailing robbers for a few years isn't that much of a penalty from an evolutionary standpoint, and we've hardly been "consistent" about killing off murderers -- especially when counterbalanced by the ongoing practices of war and other legalized violence.
But yeah, this is not a particularly quick solution. On the other hand, I suspect that there is no "quick" solution to something like this -- the problem is in our wetware, which derives from millions of years of evolutionary adaptation. There would also be the hazard of unintended consequences -- say, an overall decrease in aggression, which might leave the implementing society vulnerable to conquest. The original idea was a trailing toss-off, meant to highlight the interrelations I was discussing. On consideration, I have to admit it's not very practical.
Posted by: David Harmon | October 8, 2007 7:49 PM
Fundamental to our society? Not exactly. It would be more correct to say that aggression is fundamental to our biology. And it can't be separated from sexuality because testosterone, the same hormone that regulates aggression, also regulates sexuality.
Of course, testosterone alone does not tell the whole story, but I am pretty sure that that is why there even exists rape; something that combines sex and aggression into one coercive, violent act.
So unless human are genetically modified such that different hormones are involved with sex and aggression, or the aggressive behavior is almost completely suppressed, I don't think rape is going to go away.
That having been said, it would indeed be interesting to find out what hormones are involved in bonobo interactions. What's going on there, anyway?
Posted by: Owlmirror | October 8, 2007 8:34 PM
Miriam Goldstein,
With all due respect, you don't know what you're talking about. Here is a summary of some of the evidence indicating that rape, though a crime of violence, is primarily motivated by the (biological) urge to have sex:
Coerced copulation is widespread in animal species. It is found in many species of insects, birds, and mammals, including orangutans, gorillas and chimpanzees.
Rape is found in all human societies.
Rapists generally apply as much force as is needed to coerce the victim into having sex. They rarely inflict serious or fatal injury, which would preclude conception and birth. Only 4% of rape victims sustain serious injuries, and fewer than one in five hundred is murdered.
Victims of rape are mostly in their peak reproductive years. The age distribution of rape victims is very different from that of victims of other violent crimes, and is the opposite of what would happen if rape victims were selected for their physical vulnerability or their likelihood of holding positions of power.
Rapists are not demographically representative of the male gender. They are overwhelmingly young men, the age of the most intense sexual competitiveness. The young males who allegedly have been "socialized" to rape mysteriously lose that socialization as they get older.
Many rapes result in pregnancy, and the proportion would have been even higher in prehistory, when women did not use long-term contraception.
Posted by: Jason | October 8, 2007 9:05 PM
If everything else about male and female biology were the same, except that female genitalia was doing the penetrating during heterosexual intercourse, do you think female rape would be as common?
No. The difference between men and women that makes men much more sexually promiscuous than women is the minimum investment each sex makes in reproduction, not the shape or operation of their genitalia. If male sperm were the limiting commodity, rather than female eggs, and if it were the man who gestated the fertilized egg for nine months, rather than the woman, and if it were men who produced milk to feed their infant offspring, rather than women, then we'd expect male and female sexual psychologies to be reversed. Women would compete aggressively for sexual access to men, and men would be much more discriminating in their choice of sexual partners.
Posted by: Jason | October 8, 2007 9:15 PM
@David Harmon
You're really not getting this, are you? If there's any biological basis to rape, it's about dominance, not reproduction. Most rapes do occur between intimate partners (boyfriend on girlfriend/husband on wife) or are perpetrated by acquaintances of the woman/girl who is raped. (This is in no way meant to imply that men are never raped, but is simply working off the fact that rape is a far greater problem for women.) In these cases, it's a way of establishing dominance within the relationship, and exploiting the weaker group members while simultaneously strengthening the power of the rapist's group.
In occurrences of stranger rape, sexual predators have been well documented. Most begin as late-teenage males (17-18) raping elderly women (50/60+) who live alone and are generally weak and vulnerable. How on earth is this related to reproduction? It's about power, pure and simple. As they grow older, and their self-confidence increases, their victims become younger, though they are still selected for their weakness and vulnerability.
For an even clearer example of the power/dominance dynamic, consider prison-rape. This is generally male on male rape the sole purpose of which is to establish one man's dominance over another, and by extension the rest of that prison group, in an intensely traumatizing and humiliating way. (I haven't heard of female prisoners raping each other, it's not impossible but usually it's male guards who rape female prisoners, AGAIN an act of dominance)
Posted by: KP | October 8, 2007 9:34 PM