The Matriarchy Mystery

Why women always choose patriarchy

The Matriarchy Mystery

For my mother

The canonical position of anthropology is that over 1500 human societies have existed, but not one has been a matriarchy. As Gerda Lerner put it in her book The Creation of Patriarchy (OUP, 1986), 'defining matriarchy as the mirror image of patriarchy, I would conclude that no matriarchal society has ever existed' (p.31). This is because patriarchy is fundamentally matricentric, ultimately focused on women as a proxy for children.

But radical feminist ideology harnesses mankind’s evolved matricentric tendencies while removing children as the ultimate focus. It aims at creating instead a gynocracy: a political supremacy of women. This gynocracy is the real ‘matriarchy’ that has been a major canon of Marxist thought since its beginnings.

Paradoxically, it is misogynistic because it is an assault on femininity. As Ryszard Legutko wryly comments, now ‘a non-feminist woman is not a woman at all, just as a non-communist worker was not really a proletarian’.

It doesn’t count non-feminist women as women because it aims at destroying the family as the natural fulfilment of the complementarity of the sexes. But as George Gilder explained, ‘the crucial process of civilisation is the subordination of male sexual impulses and psychology to long-term horizons of female biology’.

To the extent that patriarchy is culturally shaped as well as being rooted in biology, it involves dignifying the male provider role in particular to encourage men to support women in raising children. Devaluing motherhood thus discourages women from fulfilling their crucial role of domesticating and civilising men, disempowering women and threatening not just civilised male identity but civilisation itself.

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What is a Woman?

Mankind seems to have developed an understanding and appreciation of womanhood first and manhood later. The abstract, symbolic representations of womanhood from 30,000 years ago known as Venus figurines ago - humanity’s earliest works of art, produced very shortly after all our ancestors on all continents possessed language - predate any male equivalents. Men were probably at first merely not-women.

Theories that these figures are proof of ancient matriarchies have been discredited, but they do show the matricentric basic of patriarchy and symbolise the nurturant female. Just as in no society has the protector role been mainly female, in no society has the role of caring for small infants been mainly male. The nurturant female is the counterpart and complement to the protective male

The potential for motherhood is the essence of womanhood. Unlike a fertile man, a fertile woman can bear a child. As Margaret Mead said, ‘women may be said to be mothers unless they are taught to deny their child-bearing qualities. Society must distort their sense of themselves, pervert their inherent growth-patterns, perpetuate a series of learning outrages on them’.

That ‘series of learning outrages’ has been perpetuated on women for the best part of a century now, distorting their sense of themselves and civilised male identity along with it. The existence of natural, real differences between the sexes has even been outright denied and cast as a right-wing conspiracy.

If everything is socially constructed, then everything can be socially deconstructed. But women cannot be redesigned from scratch, and only the mother is necessarily present at birth, so the mother-child dyad - the primary social relationship - has shaped the history of humanity from its origins and always will.

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Reproduction

Animals eat and breathe in order to reproduce: women who prioritise their careers during their most fertile years and later can’t have children often express regret. But animals have limited resources, time and energy to expend on reproduction, and females invest more in each offspring than do males because large ova bias organisms towards female nurture wherever fertilisation takes place inside one parent’s body.

Pregnancy - involving internal fertilisation, internal gestation and placental nurture - is an enormous commitment of a female’s resources. But it pays off massively in reduced offspring mortality. There is a tradeoff between fecundity and nurture. Some cod can release 5 million eggs for external fertilisation in one season. Many will be failures.

Most fish and amphibia have external fertilisation. There is often no postmating parental care. When there is, it is as likely to be performed by males as by females. And although internal fertilisation is universal in birds, the embryo is externalised early. Both parents can therefore care for it, so biparental investment is the rule.

But in most species with internal fertilisation, especially mammals, parental investment is female-dominated. Even at birth, the mammalian female doesn’t take a break: milk is another major maternal investment. So women are more limited by physiology than men are. About 20 pregnancies is the lifetime limit for a woman; the Sharifian emperor of Morocco, Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty, had 888 children.

Since the female’s greater parental investment is a scare resource, males compete for it, fighting and dying for the chance to inseminate females. According to Symons in The Evolution of Human Sexuality, ‘everywhere sex is something that females have that males want’ (OUP, 1979), p.253. Female prostitution is ubiquitous; its converse is extremely rare.

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Competition

As Darwin observed, ‘males are almost always the wooers’ - hence the prevalence of nuptial gifts in nature - and females are more selective in mating than are males. Mismating costs a female much wasted nurture and lost reproductive potential. Women are much less likely than men to engage in sexual contacts with nonhuman animals and inanimate objects; they are also less inclined to homosexuality.

Since females determine which males breed, males exhibit greater variance in reproductive success. In elephant seals, 4% of the males sire 85% of the pups. DNA analysis shows that, historically, 80% of women reproduced, but only 40% of men did. As Nietzsche put it, men are ‘the barren sex’. Biologically-speaking, the majority of males are dispensable.

Sex cannot persist at all unless there is more selection on males than on females, and mammals express more genetic variance from the father, so males function as a genetic filter. The male-male contest establishes the more reproductively fit males, and the females then choose those males, so the genetic quality becomes higher, as does the number of offspring.

Female selection of males according genetic quality is clearest in the lek system common in several bird families, some mammals, fish, and insects - a fixed geographic site where males of a species aggregate for courtship displays to females. In grouse, for example, the preferred males are the oldest: for years, they have to eat well, evade predators, stay healthy and win fights, thus giving females an honest signal of genetic quality.

But symmetry also honestly signals genetic quality because symmetrical bodies are harder to grow than asymmetrical ones. E. O. Wilson said that biology ‘keeps culture on a leash’, and women across cultures prefer more symmetrical males. Symmetry is associated not only with bigger, taller and more muscular bodies but also slightly higher IQ and better mental and physical health.

More symmetrical men bring their wives to orgasm more often, increasing the chance of pregnancy by opening the cervix. Symmetry is also positively correlated with sperm number per ejaculate and sperm motility. Attraction to more symmetrical men at the time of peak fertility is most evident in women married to less symmetrical men. In a short term partner, women value symmetry and dominance.

In a long-term partner, women value financial prospects more than men do, placing a higher value on success, earnings and status. Men value youth in women because female fertility peaks at about age 20. Teenage boys rate a woman five years older than them as the perfect partner; prostitutes can charge twice as much at 20 years old as they can at 30.

Men also value beauty and symmetry as indicators of genetic fitness. The 0.7 WHR is particularly desirable in women because a small WHR is associated with higher fertility and higher neonatal birth weight. But waist depth vs. waist circumference is an even stronger indicator. In the US, women spend twice as much time on makeup as books. Makeup mimics youth, corrects asymmetries and signals sexuality.

So whereas investment after sex is always greater for females, males invest very heavily in competition before sex. It is worth noting here that if males are the stronger sex, it is only in terms of physical strength. Yearling stags suffer twice the mortality rate of females, and they continue to die off faster throughout adulthood, mostly due to competition for females. Human males also die younger.

And male competition does not end when a fertilisation is won. Another male may still usurp the female’s reproductive capacity. Males continue to compete for reproductive opportunity, manifesting in humans as adultery law, violence between individual men and between kinship groups, and coercive constraint of women. Not only female fertility but also female fidelity is highly prized.

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Monogamy

Monogamy is often misguidedly presented as an oppressive tool of the patriarchy. But being the limiting factor in reproduction gives women significant leverage to determine their preferred mating strategy, and pair bonding benefits women significantly. Being sexually unavailable while either pregnant or lactating means women reduce supply relative to demand even more, further increasing their bargaining power.

Each woman wants to attract a male who will commit, providing the long-term assistance and resources that she needs to raise multiple dependent offspring simultaneously. Even where polygyny is legal, women rarely choose it. Disputes between co-wives centre on sexual and emotional jealousy; second and later co-wives have lower fertility than monogamous women, and their children are less likely to survive.

If a woman marries a man at her peak fertility, she also projects her fertility forward in time. She secures reproductive access to a male whose status (the proxy for his mate value) is likely to increase with age while her own youth and beauty (proxies for fertility) decline with age. Moulay Ismail the Bloodthirsty ejected women from his harem of 500 when they reached age 30.

For all pair-bonding species, however, male provisioning actually post-dates the evolution of pair-bonding. It also protects women from unwanted advances by low-status males. This is a risk because human ovulation isn’t entirely hidden: strippers’ tips, for example, peak at peak fertility. Pair bonding gives women a bodyguard. So why does extra-pair paternity still occur at the rate of about 1-10% in human beings?

Because while protecting them from low-status males, monogamy also leaves women free to pursue extra-pair sex with high-status males, who they are most attracted to while ovulating.  Raising their standards for affairs gives them superior genes to their partner’s while also making their partner unknowingly provide for the other man’s child. In this sense, monogamy is residual polygyny, but women get the best of both worlds.

Monogamy is always the predominant form of marriage in humans because women prefer it. Significantly, both sexes rank kindness, understanding and intelligence higher than earning power or physical attractiveness - all important factors in making a monogamous marriage work. And monogamy creates a more stable society by reducing the large number of involuntarily celibate men that polygyny produces.

Monogamy in fact demands a sacrifice from precisely the top-ranking males it would benefit most if it were a tool of patriarchal oppression: they would monopolise the majority of women under polygyny. Because of this sacrifice, men raise their sexual standards significantly when they give up quantity for quality. And so monogamy leads to assortative mating in that what you receive is connected with what you can offer.

And this leads to a female hierarchy in which women signal what men want. But this female hierarchy isn’t a dominance hierarchy. Dominance hierarchies - ranking in terms of physical prowess, belligerence and prestige - exist only among males. This is because ranking exacerbates conflict, and killing females through fighting would be disastrous because they keep children alive and are the limiting factor in reproduction.

The male and female hierarchies also do not overlap: men show deference to women, i.e., non-engagement in dominance-submission behaviour. From as young as five years, boys and girls view females more positively. This remains stable for girls/women but becomes more pronounced for boys into adulthood. As explained at the outset, mankind is naturally matricentric to ensure reproduction.

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Toxic Femininity

The traits that largely determine a male’s status within the dominance hierarchy - competitiveness, dominance, stoicism and aggression - are precisely the ones that the American Psychological Association has termed ‘toxic masculinity’. Similarly, much of what might be termed ‘toxic femininity’ relates to the female hierarchy.

Women’s risk aversion means that, although men and women experience anger roughly equally, but women have highly sensitised fear reactions. Only as the form of aggression becomes less confrontational and dangerous do females become more willing to use it, hence relational or indirect aggression peaking in the mid-teens. Maternal aggression is the exception.

Women also escape stressors by recognising them easily and experiencing a feeling of being stressed as a motivation to escape it. Women are more sensitive to low-level stress and unable to deal with high-level stress. Major depression is very much more likely to strike women than men, whereas men respond to stress as motivation and can override low-level stress as a distracting nuisance.

When competing with rivals, men compete mainly in the domain of sports and derogate other men’s financial resources, goals and achievements, but women criticise other women’s appearance. Physical attractiveness increases a girl’s chances of being the victim of indirect aggression by 35% but decreases a boy’s chance by 25%.

Girls who start their periods early are rejected by other girls but popular with boys, and girls also derogate each other’s sexual reputation. Female reactions to sexual behaviour escalate the status of permissive boys and decrease the status of permissive girls. FGM, veiling and foot-binding are mainly inflicted on women by women. By suppressing female sexuality, women maintain a chronic shortage and hence high prices.

The idea that oppressive males at the top of ‘the patriarchy’ would suppress female sexuality makes no sense because they would be the ones women would be likely to engage in extra-pair sex with. Controlling female sexuality actually gives women power, hence women - seeing men as weak, unable to resist women’s advances - usually direct physical attacks over sex to the other woman, not the errant boyfriend or husband.

Women are actually the controlling partner in 90% of couples, use male models of control at least as often as men do and are more likely than men to show high control. Stemming from control, domestic violence is about attempts to retain the partner, and physical violence is the preferred choice of aggression for women in sexual relationships.

In humans, oxytocin is released during sex. Associated with pair bonding and attachment, it causes a partner-specific reduction in a woman’s fearfulness, allowing an intimate relationship to be established. But by reducing women’s fearfulness it also increases their readiness to be aggressive towards their lovers. Women are responsible for three times the partner violence of men, and lesbian couples have the highest rate of partner violence.

Given men’s physical advantages, females should be 95% of injuries, but they’re only slightly higher at most: men hesitate to reciprocate hostility. Although men are as much as 10 times as likely not to report domestic violence, they still make up 40% of cases in the UK crime survey. As the violence gets more serious, women are as much as six times more likely to be the perpetrators.

Having to disperse also profoundly affected how women bond with each other: female bonding stems from blood relatives not being available. The female personal network is in fact like an extension of family relationships, suggesting that women are rehearsing family within a peer group, and this is most evident in studies of female prisoners.

In every sexually reproducing species, at least one sex disperses. Humans are patrilocal: males are tied to their natal community, so females disperse. This is also the case with our primate relatives. Like chimps, humans have a system of intense male-initiated territorial aggression, making it potentially lethal for a lone man to disperse and simply walk up to a strange group of men.

Women prioritise the intensity of their friendships over the number of them. Men have more friends in a sparser network, whereas women have fewer friends in a denser network, generally based on age, education, marital and work status. And compared to men, women are ruthless in being willing to dump anyone who loses complete trust - especially because they engaged in reciprocal childcare.

Hence women are more willing to use exclusion, use it more often, perceive it more rapidly and respond worse to it. Social rejection tends to spur men but make women give up; it also manifests as weight loss in men but obesity in women. And the paranoid dreams of male psychosis patients feature strange men, whereas those of female patients feature familiar women.

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Women’s Work

Based in biological adaptations that men do not have, the nurturant female role also necessitated women’s work being compatible with childcare and performed close to home. Human breastmilk is 88% water, so sustaining a baby on it involves very frequent feeding; ancestrally, lactation probably continued for up to four years. In modern hunter-gatherer societies, women spend 90% of their time in camp.

Men are much better at throwing and catching than women, especially when it comes to targeting projectiles. This is evident as early as age three and is systematically related to testosterone. Homosexual men aren’t much better at throwing than women are. Men are also better at movements directed at external space. But women are better at movements within personal space.

And women are more sensitive to external stimuli than men in all modalities except vision. Even in vision, however, the appreciation of depth - at least within personal space - may be better in women, and they have greater perceptual speed and are better at reading facial and body expressions. This makes them better at detecting the proximity, identity and intent of someone approaching them.

The pure tone threshold is lower in women than in men: their hearing is more sensitive throughout the range of sounds that humans can hear, and they find noises unpleasantly loud at lower levels of stimulation than men do. This makes them more sensitive to the noise of an infant, and women are more sensitive to non-verbal cues of another’s state of mind and experience more empathy with them.

Whereas men are better at imaginal rotating of objects, women are better at recalling the positions of objects in an array, useful in detecting evidence of an intruder in the home. And women are also better at remembering landmarks along a route. Men navigate with reference to the geometric properties of space, but women tend to use specific objects to find their way, useful when gathering food.

Women’s use of landmarks for navigating and locating food puts heavier demands on verbal memory than does a geometric strategy. And women have consistently better verbal memory than men do - for both unrelated lists of words and more meaningful material - and are better with language generally. This is evident by age 3 and persists into adulthood.

The origins of language are a speculative subject, but Alison Jolly notes it is ‘a hugely important skill claimed for the traditionally disadvantaged sex’. Since humans are the only animals that seek and get assistance when giving birth, one theory is that language has its roots in midwifery. Another is that early hominid mothers probably had to carry their children the entire time or else vocalise to them.

In the Late Paleolithic, roughly 30,000 years ago, there was a sudden, four-fold increase in the number of adults surviving long enough to be grandparents. Since this occurred at around the time humans developed the capacity for symbolic thought - a revolution even more powerful than the modern information revolution - female verbal ability and memory were probably crucial to it.

And around this time females among the early modern humans became gracile - less muscular, with smaller teeth - earlier than their male counterparts did, whereas female Neanderthals had remained equally as robust as the males. This suggests that life for early modern human females was becoming less stressful.

Verbalising the order of the sequence for traditional tasks such as basketmaking, sewing and cooking might also have been adaptive. The Venus of Willendorf, the world’s first symbol of womanhood, is naked apart from a woven basket hat. And weaving is a craft practised almost exclusively by women in the tribal world, requiring more ordering of movements into a preset sequence than throwing or tracking game do.

Women are generally faster than men on a series of movements, especially involving the fingers. And this is despite the fact that men have faster movement times such as repeating a finger tap. Women are also faster at coordinating the movements into a pattern, better at bending individual fingers in isolation and copying static hand postures requiring precise placements of fingers. This isn’t influenced by hand size.

Around 26,000 years ago, there occurred what Elizabeth Wayland Barber has termed the String Revolution, leading to the use of fabric for ‘snares and fishlines, tethers and leashes, carrying nets, handles, and packages, not to mention a way of binding objects together to form more complex tools’. She compares its significance to the invention of the steam engine, and women were behind it.

It is likely that hunting more often involved using nets made mainly by women to catch small animals such as hares and foxes rather than facing giant bears with spears. Far from being a master-slave model of oppression, men and women were complementary and interdependent. Universally, men are associated with stone, but a man might make his wife a stone needle for her to make clothes for him to hunt with.

Not only were 85% of stone tools scrapers and knives, probably helped with by women, but agriculture was probably invented by women. The domestication of plants started with barley about 10,500 years ago in the Near East, and it is thought that the ceramics made by women allowed grain to be kept safe from rodents during storage. They also allowed water to be stored.

Again, we see complementarity because the domestication of larger animals was probably men’s work, beginning with the dog 14,000 years ago in China and the goat 10,500 years ago in the Near East. Very little domestication of animals occurred in the Americas apart from the guinea pig in the south and the turkey in the north. It was a two-way process, and bison weren’t interested.

Michelle Rosaldo of Stanford, echoing the ideas of the early Marxist theorists, has said that the development of private property meant women could be and were seen as a form of valuable property in need of being controlled. But never in human history has there been a time without private property, and women have owned it rather than simply being it.

Among the Hopi Indians, for example, women own the fields. They are passed down through the woman’s maternal clan. She also owns the fruits of the field, given to her by her husband and son, who work the fields. After marriage, the husband moves into his wife’s house. And she owns it even if he built it for her. If his wife kicks him out, he moves back to his mother’s house.

The Tewa-speaking pueblos of New Mexico have three social spheres. The core one comprises women in charge of the household, overseeing cooking, child rearing, pottery and nearby farmland. Beyond that, there is hunting and gathering, participated in by both men and women. Further afield still, there is male-only hunting.

And from The Women’s Institute to The Townswomen’s Guild to the female support networks of the traditional working-class estate, women are at least as important as men - often more so - not the helpless victims of a purely socially constructed conspiratorial patriarchy oppressing them. Miners often handed their pay packets to their wives.

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Patriarchy Increases Female Control of Men

One element of the matriarchy mystery is that the more a society attempts to drift away from patriarchy, ironically the less control of men women have. Of the three pillars of masculinity - procreate, protect and provide - the protector role is the most exclusively masculine because it is the one most firmly rooted in biology. In pair bonding, the bodyguard comes before the provider.

Heavily emphasised by culture since it is less firmly rooted in biology, the provider role further encourages men to commit to monogamy by making them feel dignified and valued. Without it, their lives and shorter and nastier. And because a man focused on a family he loves works harder and better than a man focused on his next flippant sexual encounter, he benefits society more.

The more radical feminism seeks freedom from family for women, the more they free men from the provider role. Complementing female power in the private realm, male power in the public realm was bestowed on men by women in the first place to reward them for their services to women and, indirectly, civilisation. As Betty Friedan pointed out, feminists underestimated the power of the women’s sphere.

Research shows that men's sense of their 'in-group', unlike women’s, shows no same-sex preference, and male all-inclusiveness produces a whole community where males collectively feel protective towards women and children. This is also why only males are more cooperative when facing an out-group threat; this never applies to females. Enmeshed in families, men embrace the entire community.

Ancestrally, this would have been the travelling group, later the village, but in today's mega-society, it can be any symbolic community. Devaluing the nurturant female dethrones the provider male, risking the rise of the Incel and MGTOW movements by separating men from the women and children whose wellbeing, throughout human history, has been men's primary concern and value.

The pill suppresses women’s reproduction, making them prefer less masculine men, and porn not only pacifies the male sex drive but often leads to impotence and men no longer finding real women sexually attractive. Will this pair of scissors cut patriarchy’s matricentric bond as the basis of the nuclear family? We know the nuclear family works, but could a Brave New World work?

C. S. Lewis’s science fiction work That Hideous Strength, describes ‘an accursed people, full of pride and lust’, who live on the dark side of the moon: ‘The womb is barren and the marriages cold…There when a man takes a maiden in marriage they do not lie together, but each lies with a cunningly fashioned image of the other, made to move and to be warm by devilish arts, for real flesh will not please them, they are so dainty (delicate) in their dreams of lust. Their real children they fabricate by vile arts in a secret place.’

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Select Bibliography

Doreen Kimura, Sex and Cognition (MIT, 1999)

Anne Campbell, A Mind of Her Own (OUP, 2013)

Geoff Dench, Transforming Men (Transaction Publishers, 1998)

Steve Moxon, Sex Difference Explained (CreateSpace, 2016)

Adovasio, Soffer and Page, The Invisible Sex: Uncovering the True Roles of Women in Prehistory (Routledge, 2016)

Daly and Wilson, Sex, Evolution and Behaviour (PWS, 1983)