The Out-of Expansions

There have been four major out-of expansions by Homo sapiens.

Source: Jared Diamond, Peter Bellwood, Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions, Science, 2003, Vol. 300, Issue 5619, pp. 597–603.

Four great out-of population expansions have widely dispersed Homo sapien populations. The out-of-Africa expansion of foragers; the out-of-the-river-valley expansion of farmers; the out-of-the-steppe expansion of pastoralists; and the out-of-Europe expansion of settler empires and states.

Out of Africa: the expansion of Homo sapiens

Whether an exit from Africa around 100,000 years ago was successful or not is still debated. From around 60-50,000 years ago, there was a sustained exit from Africa. Homo sapiens spread to occupy all continents except Antarctica, absorbing and replacing all other Homo populations. These foragers spread at a rate of about 10km a year, at least in areas without existing Homo populations.(1)

Homo sapiens are more gracile than other Homo, so likely lower in reactive aggression and thus more cooperative. Though the delay in the exit(s) from Africa, and the long period of coterminous occupation of Eurasia (maybe 20,000 years), suggest only a marginal advantage over Neanderthals, although this may have changed over time. This spreading of Homo sapien foragers concluded with the settling of southern regions of South America around 14,600 years ago.

Out of the river valleys: the expansion of farmers

Starting around 11,000 years ago, farming populations expanded across arable land, absorbing and replacing foragers. The process is still going on in Africa, Amazonia and elsewhere. In Oceania, farmers occupied islands without previous human habitation, reaching New Zealand probably around the year 1320.

The transmission from foraging to farming was a lengthy one. While not generally more productive per hour of effort than foraging, farming was able to extract many times more calories from arable land, lowered the cost of child-rearing and created an increased protection problem, encouraging the development of more coercive capacity.(2) Hence the continuing expansion, and dispersal, of farming populations.(3) Farmers and farming generally spread across arable land at a rate of around 1km a year.(4) The development of farming also had significant adverse health consequences, with deteriorations in dental health, loss of height, increased infectious disease and more signs of metabolic stress.(5)

Farmers seem to have traded-off less food-search time (food search being more difficult for child-minding) for more food-processing time (easier for child-minding) and more immediate access to energy (calories) (so quicker weaning of children) for less long-term access to nutrients. 

The flesh of plants are much more likely to be toxic to humans than is the flesh of animals while plant calories and nutrients are often significantly less bio-available than are animal calories and nutrients. Hence the increased need for processing to use plant foods. Hence also the existence of an calorie/nutrient trade-off when shifting from a more animal-based diet (as foraging diets generally have been) to the plant-based diet of farming. (Much of modern food culture has been systematically trading-off taste and calories against nutrient quality.)

With the development of farming and pastoralism, there was a dramatic narrowing in male genetic lineages. The rate of elimination of male lineages varied by region. Overall, only about 1-in-17 male lineages survived this harrowing of male lineages. (Female lineages were almost entirely unaffected.)(6) This harrowing of male lineages was a result of the expansion among agro-pastoral peoples of the (social) technology of aggression against fellow humans.

The development of pastoralism intensified the pattern of elimination of male lineages.(7) The harrowing of male lineages largely came to an end with the development of chiefdoms and states. That is, when the technology of exploitation overtook the technology of aggression — conquered males became providers of tribute and taxes, so were worth protecting. 

The biggest single thing states do after extracting surplus (taxing) is pacify: they don't want their taxpayers killing each other.

Out of the steppes: the Indo-European pastoralist expansion

Pastoralist populations from the Pontic-Caspian steppe domesticated the horse (though the Botai people further east may have domesticated horses earlier) and, from about 5,000ya, and continuing until about 3,000ya, expanded into Europe, the Iranian plateau, the Tarim Basin and Northern India. During these surges of settlement, Indo-Iranians develop the horse-drawn chariot (c.4,000ya).

The steppe-descended pastoralist population eventually expanded across all of Europe, interbreeding with the Neolithic farmers. Though not in the Basque Country and Sardinia.(8)

The original steppe pastoralist population had, like various other pastoralist populations have, developed a mutation for lactase persistence. This enabled much higher metabolic return from post-infancy consumption of milk. Different pastoralist populations in Afro-Eurasia have developed different lactase persistence mutations.(9)

Dairying broadens access to nutrients and enables the extraction of around five times as much calories from grassland as could be done via ruminant meat consumption.(10) This biological advantage likely enabled millennia of expansion, resulting in Indo-European languages, and cultural patterns ultimately derived from steppe pastoralism, covering Europe, the Iranian plateau and Northern India.

After the Indo-Europeans settlement surges had petered out, Indo-Iranian peoples also pioneered horse archers and heavy lancers (c.2,700ya). Later pastoralist peoples continued to periodically ravage, or even conquer, agrarian peoples. Only the Arab and Turkic dispersals resulted in large-scale demographic expansion beyond pastoralist heartlands. In both cases, settlement following imperial conquest.

Out of Europe: the empires-and-settlers expansion

Beginning c.1500 and petering out c.1960, European populations expanded across Siberia, the Americas and the Antipodes.

The combination of competitive jurisdictions, single-spouse marriage, the abolition of kin groups (requiring the development of replacement mechanisms of social cooperation), as well as being able to entrench social and political bargains in law (as law was not based in revelation, unlike Sharia and Brahmin law) meant that Europe had far more variety of political institutions than elsewhere. This gave the selection processes of history far more to work with, resulting in Europe developing more effective states. Christian Europe’s swift adoption of the printing press after 1450 greatly aided the dissemination and development of information and technology while reducing administrative costs.

With gunpowder, the compass, and ocean-going sail technology, Europeans spread out from Europe in a largely maritime out-of expansion. The out-of-Europe expansion included waves of settlement. (The Russian conquest and settling of Siberia did not need the maritime step, though riverine expansion was important in parts of Siberia.)

Settlement generally followed, sometimes preceded, imperial expansion. Both the Russian and American nation-building-through-settlement were also imperial projects, although animated by rather different ideas and institutions.

The Europeans acquired a portmanteau biota of supporting plant and animal species. Where their portmanteau biota became dominant, Europeans became the dominant human population, creating neo-Europes. Where the biota failed to do so, they did not.(11)

Being Eurasian, so resistant to the Eurasian disease pool, gave Europeans a disease advantage in the Americas and the Antipodes. Having much more effective states was their advantage within Afro-Eurasia and allowed them to exploit their disease advantage far more completely and speedily outside it. Their advantage in state (and other cooperative) organisation eventually (albeit temporarily) expanded their control across regions where they were systematically disease-disadvantaged (including Sub-Saharan Africa).

The Homo sapien advantage is non-kin cooperation. Medieval European Christian civilisation put non-kin cooperation “on steroids” and so Europeans equipped with compass, gunpowder, ocean-going maritime technology and the printing press created the Eurosphere across four continents plus Siberia and ended up dominating the planet — until other peoples learnt their tricks.

In general

The expansions have been getting faster: taking at least 35,000 years; 11,000 years; 2,000 years; 500 years.

The, currently underway, fifth great out-of expansion — the out-of-the-countryside movement to the cities — is a series of concentrations, rather than a dispersal.

Each of the out-of dispersals has its specific characteristics, but each represents Homo sapiens behaving like Homo sapiens. Indeed, behaving like any biological population with access to new resources, including new abilities to access resources.

[An earlier version was posted on Medium.]

Endnotes

1. B. Llamas, L. Fehren-Schmitz, G. Valverde, J. Soubrier, S. Mallick, N. Rohland, S. Nordenfelt, C. Valdiosera, S. M. Richards, A. Rohrlach, M. I. B. Romero, I. F. Espinoza, E. T. Cagigao, L. W. Jiménez, K. Makowski, I. S. L. Reyna, J. M. Lory, J. A. B. Torrez, M. A. Rivera, R. L. Burger, M. C. Ceruti, J. Reinhard, R. S. Wells, G. Politis, C. M. Santoro, V. G. Standen, C. Smith, D. Reich, S. Y. W. Ho, A. Cooper, W. Haak, ‘Ancient mitochondrial DNA provides high-resolution time scale of the peopling of the America’s,’ Science Advances, April 2016, Vol.2, №4, e1501385, suggests that it took 1.4kya to people the length of the Americas. As this is a distance of roughly 14,000km, that is an expansion rate of around 10km a year.
2. Samuel Bowles, ‘Cultivation of cereals by the first farmers was not more productive than foraging,’ Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, March 2011, 108 (12) 4760–4765.
3. Jared Diamond, Peter Bellwood, ‘Farmers and Their Languages: The First Expansions,’ Science, 25 April 2003, Vol. 300, Issue 5619, pp. 597–603.
4. Joaquin Fort, ‘Demic and cultural diffusion propagated the Neolithic transition across different regions of Europe,’ Journal of the Royal Society Interface, 2015, 12: 20150166.
5. Katherine J. Latham, ‘Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an Overview of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human Body,’ Nebraska Anthropologist, 2013, 187.
6. Tian Chen Zeng, Alan K. Aw & Marcus W. Feldman, ‘Cultural hitchhiking and competition between patrilineal kin groups explain the post-Neolithic Y-chromosome bottleneck,’ Nature Communications, 9 Article number: 2077 (2018), published 25 May 2018.
7. Patricia Balaresque, Nicolas Poulet, Sylvain Cussat-Blanc, Patrice Gerard, Lluis Quintana-Murci, Evelyne Heyer & Mark A. Jobling, ‘Y-chromosome descent clusters and male differential reproductive success: Young lineage expansions dominate Asian pastoral nomadic populations,’ European Journal of Human Genetics, January 2015.
8. Iosif Lazaridis, ‘The evolutionary history of human populations in Europe,’ arXiv 1805.01579, submitted on 4 May 2018.
9. Hadi Charati, Min-Sheng Peng, Wei Chen, Xing-Yan Yang, Roghayeh Jabbari Ori, Mohsen Aghajanpour-Mir, Ali Esmailizadeh and Ya-Ping Zhang, ‘The evolutionary genetics of lactase persistence in seven ethnic groups across the Iranian plateau,’ Human Genomics, (2019) 13:7. Scholarly discussions of lactase persistence in Europe often pay remarkably little attention to the same specific lactase-persistence mutation occurring in Europe, Iran and Northern India, so must have spread by a pastoralist, not a farming, population.
10. Latham, op cit. Morton O. Cooper and W. J. Spillman, ‘Human Food from an Acre of Staple Farm Products,’ Farmers’ Bulletin, №877, October 1917, U.S. Department of Agriculture. Gregory Cochran and Henry Harpending, The 10,000 year explosion: how civilization accelerated human evolution, Basic Books [2009] (2010) cite the Bulletin for their discussion in Chapter 6 of the Indo-European expansion, including the role of lactase persistence.
11. Alfred W. Crosby, Ecological Imperialism: The Biological Expansion of Europe, 900–1900, Cambridge University Press, [1986] (1993).

The existence of intersex people illustrates how sex is biological and binary

Folk are intersex because of how their biology is within complex and varied manifestations of two sexes.

Participants at the third International Intersex Forum held in Malta, December 2013.

There is this rather tedious game that is sometimes played where the existence of intersex people is somehow taken to indicate that either sex is not biological or that sex is not binary.

Any suggestion along the former lines is easily dealt with: a person is intersex if they have a specific type of pattern of biological features. That is, in the words of the UN OHCHR (the UN Human Rights Office):

Intersex people are born with sex characteristics (including genitals, gonads and chromosome patterns) that do not fit typical binary notions of male or female bodies.

Those sex characteristics are, of course, biological. It is the biological structure of their body that makes someone intersex.

Use-referent confusion

The wording typical binary notions of male or female bodies is a genuflection towards sex as a socially constructed category. That categorisation within a language is a social act does not make the thing being referred to thereby socially constructed. To act as if it does is to confuse use of a term with the referent of the term.

This use-and-referent confusion, this confusion between category and object, is not a case of failing to distinguish between use (“I like eating cheese”) and mention (“'cheese' has six letters”), but it is similar level of logical error. That the practice has evolved of calling a particular set of dairy products cheese does not mean those dairy products are socially constructed by that act of categorising. However socially embedded cheese-making may be, such dairy products are created by a series of physical processes and have a physical existence not dependant on the categorising conventions of particular languages.

Both types of logical error come from the aboutness of language and thought; from us using language to speak, and categories to think, about other things.

Sex existed long before anyone was developing categories about sex. Sex continues in the biological world all around us, regardless of what categories we may choose to use, and how.

It’s all about the gametes

If your body is structured to produce small, self-moving (motile) gametes, you are male; regardless of whether any viable gametes are actually produced. If your body is structured to produce large, not self-moving (sessile) gametes, you are female. Also regardless of whether any viable gametes are actually produced. A gun does not stop being a gun by removing its firing pin or filling in the barrel.

At its base, sex is defined by reproductive function. Such a pattern of only two types of gametes means that sex is, at its base, in its biological function, binary.

If the evolutionary die were to be thrown to generate new genetic combinations, there had to be at least two gametes. If there were more than two gametes, that would greatly increase the difficulty in successfully reproducing. If there was going to be two gametes, one that was injected (so was small and self-moving) and one that received (so was large and not self-moving) also maximised the chance of successful reproduction. Hence, male and female gametes.

Given certain basic conditions, if a species reproduces through the combining of gametes (i.e. reproduces sexually) then having two types of gametes — small, self-moving (motile) gametes and large, not-self-moving (sessile) gametes — is the only evolutionary stable outcome. Hence, in our biosphere, sex is binary because there are only two types of gametes.

Thus, there is no third sex at the level of gametes. There are neuter forms of females in eusocial insects. In some species, an individual can change sex. But there are only two sexes in the sense of only being structured to produce one of two types of gametes. Some individuals partake of characteristics typical of both sexes. That does not make them a third sex.

While, in its base evolutionary function, sex is binary, the manifestations of the binary nature of sex in organisms can get quite complex. That sex is binary doesn’t mean that bodies are. In a way, that is probably the evolutionary point. A widely accepted hypothesis among biologists about why species adopt sexual reproduction via gametes is that it was an evolutionary adaptation to deal with pathogens. By sexually reproducing, the genetic die are being thrown again and again, giving sexually reproducing species a much better chance of having genetic lineages that could survive a particular pathogen.

In us Homo sapiens, as mammals, there is a set of characteristics that are specifically typical of the male-body structure and a set of characteristics that is specifically typical of the female-body structure. If you have some characteristics from both sets, you are intersex. But it is precisely the existence of these two sets of sex-typical biological characteristics that creates (1) the possibility of being intersex and (2) enables identification as intersex.

So, the existence of intersex people does not confound either the biological or the binary nature of sex. On the contrary, it refers to a set of people with various patterns of biological characteristics that can only be identified as falling within the set of intersex people because of the binary and biological nature of sex. Human bodies are bimodally distributed, but with sufficiently fuzzy boundaries that some folk are intersex, they overlap the distributions somewhat.

Evolutionary pressure

Arguments about, for instance, the concept of binary being binary — something is either perfectly binary or it is not binary — are ways of avoiding grappling with the biology. For biology has lots of fuzzy boundary concepts (e.g. species). Defining binary in a way that means nothing biological of any complexity is likely to meet it is not a proof that sex is not binary. The small self-moving gamete/large not-self-moving gamete difference is binary in the sense that counts in terms of reproductive function. Reproductive function that is subject to, and shaped by, evolutionary pressures.

It is that evolutionary pressure that makes, sex, in its base evolutionary function, binary and its physical manifestation in human bodies bimodally distributed. 

If there were actual hermaphrodites in a species with males and females, there would be grounds for calling them a third sex, as their bodies would be structured to produce both gametes. That would not, however, change the binary nature of sex in its evolutionary function.

The key confusion is failing to grasp that the binary nature of sex applies to its evolutionary function. If conjoining gametes is how reproduction happens, and there are only two sorts of gametes in play, then sex is binary. It is that simple.

This is not a claim that individual organisms cannot have a mixture of features. It is not even a claim that individual organisms cannot move across the boundary from one sex to another. It is also not a claim about animals conforming absolutely to to two, and only two, rigidly distinguished physical structures. It does not even preclude an organism producing both types of gametes, either sequentially or simultaneously.

The binary nature of sex is not defined from structures of bodies inwards. It arises from reproductive function outwards. As a biological process, reproduction has consequences for physical structures, but these can be quite complex and varied. A complexity and variance that does not in anyway change the binary nature of sex, though it does considerably complicate its expression in biological structures.

Animals have sex roles: the behavioural manifestation of sex. The manifestation of sex in a deeply cultural species is even more complex, hence gender: the cultural expression of sex. With gender we are in much more varied, and culturally evolved, territory.

In summary, there are only two sexes at the level of basic reproductive dynamics, defined by there being only two types of gametes. There is no third sex at the level of reproductive dynamics because there is no third type of gamete. Hence, sex is binary, however complex the manifestations in bodies of that underlying only-two-types-of-gametes pattern may be.

So, when folk say that sex is binary, what they should mean is that there are two types of gametes. And when folk say that sex is not binary, what they should mean is that the biological expression in actual bodies of the binary nature of sex is bimodal rather than binary. Though it is a clumsy and misleading way of doing so.

The rest is just tedious word games, with more than a dash of logical confusion.

[Previous version posted on Medium.]

The vulnerability gap and the collapse of courtship

Much of contemporary feminism is engaged in an unfortunate game of let’s pretend.

In any sufficiently complex and mobile species that uses conjunction of gametes to reproduce, the only evolutionary stable outcome is to have one type of gametes be small and motile (self-moving) and the other type to be large and sessile (not self-moving). Reproduction then requires the conjunction of a small gamete with a large gamete.

If there are no neuters in the species, and the species is divided into two sexes, one producing small gametes (males) and the other producing large gametes (females), then the only evolutionary stable outcome is for equal numbers of each sex, as shortage of one sex would lead to it having an evolutionary advantage, leading to production of more of that sex until the chances of being a vehicle for successful genetic replication equalise.

The existence of a small-gamete (male) sex and a large-gamete (female) sex is likely to lead to courtship behaviour, as the large gamete sex incurs more risks in reproduction. So members of the small-gamete sex have to demonstrate sufficient fitness to members of the large-gamete sex to be worth the risks of reproduction.

Courtship behaviour occurs in many species. The most extreme version being the male having to offer his body for the consumption by the female in order to mate. Courtship does not occur in every species: it is not a feature of herd/harem species, for example. But it is a common pattern among species.

Homo sapien children are, in terms of required parental investment to raise children able to also achieve successful reproduction, the most biologically expensive children in the biosphere. Among contemporary foraging populations, children do not reach calorie break-even point (providing as many calories as they consume) until around age 20. They have to be fed and taught across that time and are particularly helpless infants.

This means that Homo sapien women have particularly high risks in reproduction. This includes elevated risks of dying in childbirth due to the large heads of human babies. They also have to care for particularly helpless infants, supervising and feeding dependant children, and help socialise juveniles. (Humans have a particularly long juvenile period.)

So there are lots of risks in reproduction for Homo sapien women. It is therefore hardly surprising that human societies have tended to evolve elaborate and/or lengthy courtship practices. Given that Homo sapiens evolved grandmothers (i.e. women with particularly long post-reproduction lives, so they could invest in their children’s children, having stopped having their own children) this courtship could be also, or even mostly, directed towards the parents of the potential bride.

Lots of foraging societies required the prospective groom to provide one or two years of bride service to the parents of the prospective bride. This compensated the parents for losing services of the daughter but also demonstrated ability to provide; that the prospective groom was able to perform the food provision needed to support future children.

Courtship

Courtship is therefore a product of the vulnerability gap. This vulnerability gap is not only the gap in the respective risks involved in reproduction, both child-bearing and child-rearing, it also pertains to men being about 7% taller and 13% larger, with women having on average 66% of the lower body strength of men and 52% of the upper body strength of men. (Despite the current trend towards fictional presentation of the contact-fighting capacity of men and women as equal.) In upper body lean body mass, Homo sapiens are almost as sexually dimorphic as gorillas.

Compared to other mammals and primates, Homo sapiens are relatively under-muscled for their size, with a relatively high fat content, even in healthy, lean Homo sapiens. We are the fat ape because our very expensive brains need a high base level of energy, and our higher fat stores buffer our energy-expensive brains against fluctuations in food intake. Women have higher body fat content than men at healthy weights as they also have to cope with pregnancy and lactation: i.e. feeding a second energy-hog brain while buffering both brains’s energy intake.

Compared to other primates, Homo sapiens have relatively low levels of differences between the sexes in size and strength (even if more than is often acknowledged nowadays). This suggests that human males have invested less in muscles for mating success and more in behaviour for parenting success. (A complicated interaction, if parenting effort can also aid mating success.) In contemporary foraging societies, on average, men dominate the provision of calories to the group and overwhelmingly dominate the provision of calories to children that have been weaned.

In farming and pastoralist societies, if women were not confined to women’s quarters, and otherwise largely kept out of public spaces, and the choices of women (rather than their parents and kin) had sufficient status, various mechanisms evolved for men to signal their respect for the vulnerability gap. This was particularly a feature of Christian societies, given that Church doctrine said that a woman had to consent for a marriage to be legitimate and strictly mandated only single-spouse marriages. In Western society, the socially evolved mechanisms to show respect for the vulnerability gap involved such things as opening doors for women, letting women go first, and so on.

Muslim observers in Christian Europe were often bemused by the way Christian men publicly deferred to women. For instance, in the C17th, famed traveller Evliya Çelebi reported of Vienna that:

I saw a most extraordinary thing in this country. If the emperor encounters a woman in the street, then if he is on horseback he halts his horse and lets the woman pass. If the emperor is on foot and meets a woman, then he remains standing, in a polite posture. Then the woman greets the emperor, and he takes off his hat and shows deference to the woman, and only when she has passed does he continue on his way. This is the most extraordinary spectacle. (Bernard Lewis, The Muslim Discovery of Europe, Pp287–8.)

With (1) the legalisation of the Pill and abortion, giving women unilateral control over their own fertility, (2) advances in modern medicine massively reducing the risks of childbirth, and (3) expansion in low-risk employment opportunities outside the household available to women, the vulnerability gap has dramatically shrunk.

The result has been the collapse of courtship across developed Western societies into a pale shadow of its former self. Indeed, the very notion became suspect. So did the everyday chivalric courtesies towards women. They were re-read as implying the incapacity of women, their lack of equality (viewed in terms of comparative anthropology, a rather extraordinary claim, as such deference was a function of the status of women being higher than in many societies), and had to go.

The decline of male enforcement

As women essentially demanded control over the policing of treatment of them, previous mechanisms whereby men enforced proper behaviour by other men towards women have largely fallen into abeyance. This may have led to a paradoxical situation of more public deference to women (and public repression of male assertiveness) yet a range of predatory behaviour by a relatively small number of men becoming less socially policed. It has been suggested to me that one reason for women adopting “non-binary” gender identities is that they are saying “I will not be prey”. (The evidence suggests that rape has generally become significantly less common. But rape was always a criminal matter and there are other forms of predatory behaviour well short of rape.)

The previous normative dispensation of connecting sex strongly to marriage was a fairly easy set of norms to enforce. The enforcement was somewhat random, and was not particularly effective at stopping rape, but it did operate to inhibit a range of predatory behaviour by men within social networks.

It is, however, hard to enforce norms that are in flux. It is even harder to enforce norms if one is not told, if men are left out of the information loop. The previous normative dispensation of sex and marriage being closely connected, with people living in relatively dense social networks, was rather simpler to enforce than one where sex and marriage had become decoupled and social networks have frayed.

Enforcement also varied with social circumstances. Lower down the socio-economic scale, people are more vulnerable to things going wrong and are more likely to deal with men with little to lose. So, normative enforcement tended to be more physical: taking the transgressing male out the back and giving him a belting.

One of the consequences of decades of feminism is that men have, on average, become happier than women. Given that (1) the obligation to provide for one’s family is increasingly shared between the sexes and (2) there are more acceptable sexual outlets, it is not surprising that male happiness has risen compared to female happiness. But being functionally relieved of the burden of enforcing norms against other men has probably also had an increased-male-happiness effect.

The other element in play is the fraying of social connections. This can be understood in terms of what I call the Granovetter effect, the importance of the pattern of connections (i.e. social capital or what anthropologists call relational wealth) for life prospects. The Granovetter effect is:

the less of other types of capital one has command of, the more important social capital, and particularly local social capital, is for life prospects.

The Granovetter effect is derived from sociologist Mark Granovetter’s classic paper The Strength of Weak Ties (~61,000 citations) and, even more, his follow-up paper The Strength of Weak Ties: a network theory revisited(~12,600 citations). The Granovetter effect happens to be particularly important in understanding the dynamics of forager societies, as patterns of connection are one of the two dominant forms of capital in forager society (the other being human capital, i.e. learnt skills).

Part of what social capital provides is enforcement of norms. As people become less connected, there is less bottom-up enforcement of norms. That gives more power to public signalling of norms but likely leaves women more vulnerable to a range of predatory behaviour.

Admitting, yet not admitting

While the vulnerability gap had shrunk, it has not vanished. Indeed, over time, the vulnerability gap has come to be (without direct acknowledgement of its existence) subject to waves of intense focus, in terms of risks of sexual harassment and assault.

On one hand, to admit the vulnerability gap seemed to be an assault on equality between the sexes. On the other hand, its reality has been the subject of intense public discourse in terms of sexual harassment and other forms of predatory or transgressive behaviour. Much of feminism seems to be playing a dual game of let’s pretend: let’s pretend there is no vulnerability gap but let’s also really talk up its (real and alleged) consequences.

Maybe the chivalric courtesies were overdone. But they were a workable way of dealing with something real. Including having men enforce them on other men. A contradictory game of let’s-pretend-there-is-no-vulnerabilty-gap-yet-let’s-also-really-worry-about-its-consequences is not the path to evolving a new, workable, way of dealing with the (smaller but still real) vulnerability gap. Nor is having such dealing being something women decide the rules for, while men just passively go along with without being invested in their enforcement.

Part of the problem is much of feminism is committed to a notion that there are no basic biological constraints, so we can write any social script we want to, if we apply enough harmonising social power to the problem. This is simply not true. There are basic biological constraints, the trick is to deal with them intelligently.

Yet there are clearly feminists who regard admitting that reality as somehow to compromise the promise of equality between the sexes. Despite many folk pointing out that moral equality does not require identity in characteristics. One suspects, however, that the real objection is the threat to the vision of being able to remake human society in any way one wants.

Sex is a biological reality. It is not a social construct. Sex roles, the behavioural manifestation of sex, has an element that is socially constructed, but only an element. Gender, the cultural expression of sex (i.e. narratives, framings and expectations about sex and sex roles), is even more socially constructed. Sex is binary at its base, and bimodal in its physical manifestations, but gender is neither, though it riffs off that bimodality. Nevertheless, such social construction is still an interaction between biological reality and social and other circumstances (such as technology, local ecology and the transfer of risks away from the care of children).

The basic biological constraints do not invalidate moral equality between the sexes, however large a problem they may be for over-reaching social visions seeking to achieve some transformative notion of social equality. But we will not achieve stable and effective ways of dealing with the vulnerability gap unless we acknowledge that biological constraints are real: that’s why the vulnerability gap persists.

So, the trick is to find ways to deal with its reality. Not spin around and around playing a contradictory game of pretending the vulnerability gap does not exist while being so ostentatiously concerned (from MeToo to “rape culture”) by the consequences of it existing. Especially as any effective way to deal with the reality of the vulnerability gap is going to have to be one that works for, and is enforced by, both sexes.

(An earlier version was posted on Medium.)

Being sensible about Patriarchy

Just because something is used propagandistically does not mean it is not a thing.

Patriarchy is authority being presumptively male. The more presumptively male authority is, the more patriarchal the society is. At its simplest, authority is competence + deference. The wider and more significant the realm of presumed male competence, and of expected deference to the same, the more presumptively male authority is.

That an area of life is presumptively male does not, of itself, generate patriarchy. Having presumptive sex roles is not patriarchal. The addition of expected deference is crucial. For without such expected deference, there is no authority, just things folk generally do.

To understand patriarchy, we need to start with the basics of sex and gender.

Sex
Sex is determined by what gametes your body is structured to produce. If it is structured to produce small, self-moving (motile) gametes you are male. If it is structured to produce large, sessile (immobile) gametes, you are female. This is so whether or not viable gametes are produced.

If your body is structured to produce both, you are both male and female. If your body is structured to produce neither, you are neuter. (As distinct from being deliberately stripped of the ability to produce gametes, which is being neutered.)

If your body has elements of both male and female sexual structuring, then your sex can be somewhat indeterminate (i.e., intersex), but normally your body will favour one type of structuring over the other. Such mixed cases do not mean that sex is not binary. It just means that a (very small) proportion of folk do not have bodies that are entirely on one side of the border between sex-typical biological structures.

[Sex is binary at the level of reproductive function, due to there being only two gametes, but, in humans, is bimodal rather than binary at the level of bodies.]

We cannot do sex-reassignment or sex-change surgery. We cannot shift the structuring of your body to produce different gametes. We can only do gender-reassignment surgery that changes the visible physical manifestations of biological sex. Hence hormonal supplements are needed by trans folk, as we cannot change your body to change the pattern of hormones it produces.

Children
Homo sapiens are mammals. Female mammals have mammary glands so that when the child emerges, their immediate food source is on-tap.

In most mammal species, that means the male plays no role in raising children, as the female is already committed (via the mammary glands) to feeding the children. This is the cad strategy for reproduction. The more the children have to be taught how to feed, and the longer they have to be fed before they can feed themselves, the more likely some male involvement in the feeding of the offspring is (the dad strategy).

Male provision is not to be confused with mate-guarding. Mate-guarding is about taking possession of the fertility of a female for one’s own use, excluding other males. It implies nothing regarding the care of children. Most mate-guarding mammal species have cad-strategy males. They are just possessive cads.

In contemporary foraging societies, on average, children do not “break even” in producing and consuming calories until about the age of 20. So, a Homo sapien child, on average, has likely represented about a 20 year-feeding-protection-and-instruction investment. This was not possible without provisioning males.

In contemporary foraging societies, men provide a majority of calories to the group, an overwhelming majority of the protein to the group and almost completely dominate provision of calories and protein consumed by post-weaning children. The only evolutionary stable way to get males to invest that much effort in provisioning children is having them feed the children that are presumptively theirs. That is, to go beyond biological paternity and create the social role of father. Especially given the level of teaching required to get Homo sapien children able to fend for themselves.

The need for provisioning males for the raising of children gave a powerful incentive for women to adopt and follow norms regulating their sexual behaviour so as to encourage such male commitment. This is interactive. The stronger the restrictive sexual norms, the stronger male provisioning is likely to be. The weaker the restrictive sexual norms, the weaker male provisioning is likely to be. A common cross-cultural pattern is for men to be willing to use violence to enforce fidelity norms, as their social standing, including their identity as a father, is at stake. Another common cross-cultural pattern is for women expressing aggression towards another woman to cast doubt on her adherence to fidelity norms.

A very common cross-cultural pattern is for a man’s mother to be concerned with policing the behaviour of his wife (or wives). She has an obvious interest in ensuring that their children are indeed (biologically) her son’s and in the protecting the reputation of her son. Remembering that propriety is, in this context, fidelity + reputation. Or, at least, preserving the presumption of fidelity.

All known foraging societies recognise the social role of father. A small number of (farming) societies do not have the social role of father. Instead, men invest in their sister’s children. As a genetic replication strategy, given one shares less genes with a niece or a nephew than with a son or a daughter, unclehood is inferior to fatherhood — provided males can be reasonably confident about the paternity of children.

The above patterns are the result of us being the big-brain ape and so the cultural ape. We are the fattest ape, as our energy-hog brains (our brains consume about a fifth to a quarter of our calorie intake) require a certain base level of energy to function. Hence we have more fat reserves than other apes. Women’s body naturally have significantly higher fat content than men’s bodies, as women regularly support two brains (the extra energy-hog brain being supported either in their womb, or via lactation).

Our brains need time to grow after birth, due to constraints on the size of a baby head’s able to emerge through pelvis (aggravated by bipedalism requiring narrower hips for physical stability). Hence how helpless our infants are, as far more of their development is after birth. They have to be fed and then taught. We have the fattest infants in the biosphere. Being the cultural ape, we have to learn to be effective occupiers of human niches by a mixture of being taught, observation and participation.

Risk and roles
Across this lengthy process of raising Homo sapien children, risks needed to be, where possible, transferred away from the care of children. Especially as if a mother died, her young children were also likely to die. This created human sex roles—sex roles being the behavioural expression of sex—that generally involved very different patterns of acquiring subsistence by males and females, hence quite different skill patterns.

In foraging societies, men would engage in the more dangerous forms of subsistence (hunting larger animals, getting honey). Women would engage in the less dangerous forms of subsistence that you could do while minding the kids (gathering plants, hunting small, relatively immobile, animals such as lizards).

A lot of the gathered plants would require significant processing, as plants (being immobile) evolve ways to discourage consumption of their flesh. This need for more processing of plant food tended to skew calorie and nutrient contribution in foraging societies to the energy-dense, highly bio-available nutrients in the food provided by men.

Men tend to form teams, because that is how they provided for, and protected, their women and children. Women tend to form cliques, as intimate emotional connections provided support for the long haul of motherhood. One can see this pattern in almost any schoolyard.

A complication is that the more disagreeable and less neurotic girls (“tomboys”) may gravitate towards team play. The more agreeable and more neurotic boys (“sissies”) may gravitate towards cliques.

Some cultures had explicit roles for “manly” women and “womanly” men. Generally, however, a male who attempted to adopt female patterns was rejecting the risks that males were expected to shoulder. This was not a way to be respected.

Gender
Being the cultural species, Homo sapiens do not only have sex roles. We also have narratives and expectations about sex. Hence, we have gender: the cultural expression of sex. To a large degree, the categories of man and woman are socially created.

Those who are same-sex attracted, or who are tomboys or sissies, are gender-dysphoric. They are somewhat alienated from standard expectations about sex. Trans folk are sex-dysphoria. They are alienated from the sexual structuring of their bodies.

Being sex-dysphoric is likely to also imply wishing to fit into the behavioural and cultural expectations of the other sex. Being gender-dysphoric does not imply alienation from the sexual structuring of one’s own body. Conflating sex-and-gender is a great way to engage in muddy, even disastrous, thinking.

The absence of matriarchal societies
While it is certainly true that families, and even groups, can have matriarchs, no known human society has been matriarchal. The requirement of men to take on higher-risk roles in order to support the raising of biologically-expensive children has meant that authority could not be presumptively female across a society. Hence the absence of matriarchal societies. Matriarchal families and figures are, however, entirely possible.

The non-universality of patriarchy
The absence of matriarchal societies does not remotely mean that all human societies are patriarchal in any strong sense. It is entirely possible to have a human society where male and female authority co-exists. That is, authority is not presumptively male across the society, so it is somewhat gender-egalitarian. Such societies are more common within particular patterns of subsistence, though a majority of societies known to the ethnographic record have been patriarchal. For instance, around 88% of traditional societies only had male political leaders (though political leadership is not the only manifestation of authority in societies). Nevertheless, even among generally patriarchal societies, the extent and intensity of the presumption of male authority has varied greatly.

There are relatively gender-egalitarian foraging and horticultural (hoe-farming) societies. If a society does not create the social role of fatherhood, then it is also likely to be relatively gender-egalitarian, as inheritance will be female-line and the connections of men to the next generation will be via their sisters. In many societies, men treasure the sister’s son relationship — they are males of the next generation a man is unambiguously related to.

Patterns of leverage
What determines how patriarchal a society is — i.e., how strongly authority is presumptively male in the society — is the relative social leverage of men and women. Women always have the leverage of sex and fertility. Men have whatever leverage comes from not being tied to the day-to-day care of children.

Any asset in a society that cannot be effectively managed while minding children, will be a presumptively male asset. Hence, while women have been very important for the transmission of culture, men have tended to dominate the creation of culture. Cultural narratives have thus tended to predominantly reinforce and validate male concerns. Hence also women have tended to be associated with nature (given their role in reproduction and child-rearing), men with the creation of culture. Such creation of culture is often conceived as a struggle for order against the more chaotic or resistant elements of nature.

The classic assets increasing male leverage are pastoralism (i.e., animal herds) and plough farming. In such societies, the predominant productive asset will be a male asset. This has been universally true in pastoralist societies. It is usually true in plough farming societies, with a few exceptions. One exception was Pharaonic Egypt, as land was re-allocated after every Nile flood. It was effectively Pharaoh’s asset rather than an asset of village males. Another is if the society does not recognise the social relationship of fatherhood, such as the in Mosuo of China. As there is no social role of fatherhood, land is passed down matrilineally and is not a male asset. (Men still do the ploughing.)

If the main productive asset in a society is presumptively male, this makes women largely dependant on male provision. This generates patterns of presumptive male authority, though the degree to which it does so can vary widely.

In low-population-density societies where the men are likely to be away, traditions of armed women are likely to develop so as to be able to defend hearth and home. This raises the leverage (and status) of women. In steppe societies, for example, while men owned the animal herds, women owned the dwellings; the yurts or gers.

Any pattern of periodic male absence tends to increase the status of women, as women will have to manage things in the absence of men. We can see this pattern operating in steppe societies, in Celtic and Germanic Europe, in Sparta (where men lived in the barracks for much of their life), in Rome (where elite men were often away in the service of Respublica) and in medieval Latin Christendom. This is generally an elite pattern, but elites disproportionately set social norms.

These were all, to varying degrees, single-spouse societies in that even an elite man would only have one wife, and a woman one husband. (There is some evidence that the original Indo-Europeans may have operated a single-spouse marriage system.) Celtic and Germanic societies often did, however, permit concubines able to produce legally recognised children. (In Brehon law, for example, it did not matter for your family identity who your mother was, merely who your father was.)

If elite males are required to have only one wife, then that tends to raise the status of women, as the natural thing to do is to have partnership marriages (united by care for their children), with the wife (or sometimes his mother) operating as their husband’s (or son’s) deputy when he is away and helping to manage the household when he is present. This is very much not the pattern in polygynous societies where wives competed for the prospects for their children. This meant that leaving one of the wives in charge in the absence of the husband was a recipe for disaster. (If concubines able to produce legally-recognised children were permitted, this tended to weaken the effect of having only one wife: mistresses are concubines whose children have no inheritance rights.)

Single-spouse marriage societies thus tended to make women managing assets a normal part of the society, even if the main productive assets were presumptively male. This tended to raise the status of women and lessen the degree to which authority was presumptively male. Though the effect was much stronger if there were patterns of male absence. Thus Sparta (where men lived in barracks for much of their life) was noticeably less patriarchal than Athens. Rome was also noticeably less patriarchal than Athens, with Rome become less patriarchal as its empire grew, increasing the pattern of elite male absence and so wifely management of assets.

Being a patrilineal society generates at least some presumption of male authority, as family identity is via the male line. If it is also a kin-group society, that means that family identity and kin structures will be organised around related males. This tends to increase male leverage within the society and the presumption of male authority. Especially if, as was commonly the case, the fertility of women is treated as an asset of their kin-group. (Treating women’s fertility as an asset of their kin group leads to honour killings, which are ways of enforcing commitment to the kin group.) As authority and wealth is typically transferred from father to son in patriarchal societies, such societies tend to be very controlling of female sexuality.

If a society permits polyandry (notably because of resource constraints where key productive assets lose value if divided), this tends to increase the potential leverage of women and to undermine any presumption of male authority. If a society permits polygyny, that tends to undermine the social leverage of women. This is particularly so if the main productive asset is presumptively male, as then the wives of (elite) males will be competing with each other for the prospects for their children, where the favour of the (shared) husband is crucial. Clearly, that will foster a general presumption of male authority.

Though it was true that even in societies that permitted polygamy, single-spouse marriages were the dominant form of marriage, again, elite patterns tended to dominate the generation of presumptions about authority.

Hoe-farming (horticultural) societies meant women having a (much) bigger role in food production than in plough (agricultural) societies, as hoe farming can be done while minding the kids. This permits much higher levels of polygyny (as it reduces the level of provision males have to engage in to support a wife) but also makes women less dependant on male provision. Hoe societies tend to have stronger patterns of female authority than plough societies. The question of the relative level of social leverage can become a complicated one.

In societies where assets are transferred between generations, there can be something of a trade-off between between transmitting genes and transmitting wealth. The stronger the incentive to minimise division of resources among children, the more likely single-spouse marriage systems are, bringing together male investment in high paternity-confidence children and female fidelity to her spouse so as to gain increased investment in her children. If such pressure is sufficiently strong all the way up the social system, polygamy may not be permitted.

The more important investment in the human capital of children, particularly sons, is for their prospects, the more likely it is that single-spouse marriage is going to be selected for. This likely helps explains why highly patriarchal Brahmin and Confucian societies had a wife and (maybe) concubine(s) pattern more than full-blown multiple wives. Indeed, the intense investment in memorisation required to raise a Brahmin child likely explains the rise of the Indian caste (jati) system.

Brahmin law was particularly insistent on male authority. It was, after all, the society that valorised widows burning themselves to death on their husband’s funeral pyre.

How well members of a sex can coordinate with each other also affects social leverage. In polygynous, patrilineal, kin-group, plough-farming societies the ability of women, particularly elite women, to coordinate with each other was often very limited. Conversely, it has tended to be very easy for men in such societies to coordinate with each other, especially if male-only cults develop. Such cults are very common across human societies. Greater male coordination tends to increase male social leverage.

Increases in population density, without a commensurate increase in applied technology, tend to reduce the status of women. As population density increases, there is likely to be less male absence, discouraging the arming of women and reducing the level of women’s management of resources. There is also likely to be more pressure on social niches, encouraging more rigid delineation of sex roles. England was significantly more patriarchal in the C18th than it had been in Saxon times, around a millennium earlier.

Precisely because social leverage matters, history is not simply a pattern of upward improvement in the status of women, but of shifts back and forth.

Raiding and warfare
How raiding and warfare operates in a society also affects social leverage. If raiding and warfare is sufficiently endemic, that generates a premium on male cooperation. That tends to favour patrilineal kin systems, as related males who have grown up together are likely to be more effective in combat operations.

In small-scale societies, especially patrilineal ones where women marry away from their natal kin, endemic raiding and warfare particularly tends to generate male cults as it is important for the men to be able to coordinate planned raids and attack without women warning their relatives. Such male cults often enforce their privacy through ferocious punishments. That increases male social leverage, generating a presumption of male authority and providing a social mechanism to establish and reinforce male authority.

Endemic warfare and raiding can, however, encourage single-spouse marriage systems. Polygyny means that some men are cut out of the local marriage market. If circumstances are such that a premium is put on local social cohesion, then single-spouse marriage systems can be selected for so as to maximise the number of local males with a commitment to the local social order via having their own wife and children. (Note, this does not imply that reducing reproductive variance among men is what is being selected for.) Such pressure for single-spouse marriage for greater social cohesion can also apply to minority religious groups, such as the Alevis.

Shifting social leverage
What is hopefully clear from the above is that patriarchy is not some nefarious male plot. It is a social phenomena driven by the relative social leverage of men and women in a society. The level of patriarchy can thus vary widely between societies. It can also vary in the same society across time, if the underlying social constraints change in ways that shift the leverage between men and women.

That the Christian Church sanctified single-spouse marriage (including no concubines), insisted on the importance of legitimacy (making it very important who your mother was and whether she was married to your father), insisted on female consent being required for marriage, strongly supported female testamentary rights (and the property rights entailed therein) and, in conjunction with manorialism, broke up kin groups, meant that the status of women was significantly higher in Christian Europe than was the case in Islam, Brahmin India or Confucian East Asia. As I have noted previously, feminism was only likely to arise within Latin Christendom-cum-Western civilisation.

Technological change since the emergence of mass-prosperity societies, starting with the development of railways and steamships in the 1820s, has tended to further increase the status of women. The increase in the number of low-physical-risk jobs, the development of domestic technology (reducing the time-and-physical-skill-burden of managing a household), and the development of mass education (reducing the time-and-attention burden of raising kids), as well as shrinking family sizes, have all greatly increased the capacity of women to earn income outside the home. The fall in transport and communication costs has also made it easier for women to coordinate and organise.

The most dramatic change, however, has been the legal and technological changes that have given women unilateral control over their fertility. This has decoupled sex and marriage, a huge social shift in itself. But it also meant that women have been able to invest in higher education, greatly increasing their employment as professionals, managers and other high-status jobs. These changes have also greatly increased women’s role in the creation of culture.

Hence we now have the first societies in human history increasingly without presumptive sex roles. This is a dramatic cultural and evolutionary novelty. Needless to say, gender expectations and narratives have been in considerable flux.

These changes also mean that men and women have fairly similar levels of social leverage. As biologist Bobbi S. Low notes:

...men’s value to women is no longer solely or primarily resource value, and women’s value to men is no longer solely or primarily reproductive value.

Women still have the leverage of sex and fertility, but that is strongly age-dependent, is somewhat weakened by the relative availability of sexual outlets and the undermining of the status and value (and so the appeal) of fatherhood.

The presumption of greater maternal involvement in child-raising is a universal human cultural pattern that, while it shows variations among cultures, is substantially driven by biology. It is not a manifestation of patriarchy. Due to the biological processes of pregnancy and lactation, cultural conceptions of motherhood, while they do vary, vary much less than do cultural conceptions of fatherhood, which (unlike biological paternity) is a socially created role.

Apart from some rapidly fading cultural traces, contemporary Western societies do not face the problems of patriarchy. Instead, developed societies face the problems of dealing with a dramatic level of evolutionary novelty. Such as the dramatic fading of presumptive sex roles.

Beating the patriarchy drum may be emotionally satisfying, and have some residual propaganda value, but it is mostly just a giant, self-indulgent, distraction from working through the continuing implications of these dramatic changes and the sea of evolutionary novelty we find ourselves in.

[Cross-posted, somewhat improved, from Medium.]

Is toxic masculinity a bullsh*t concept?

It is far more effective at attaching a negative adjective to masculinity than in helping to understand human behaviour.

I am using bullshit in its technical philosophical sense — statements made for rhetorical effect regardless of how factually accurate they are.

About violence

To understand the problems with toxic masculinity as an analytical concept, it is useful to start with looking at something that is highly patterned by sex: violence. Especially as the patterns of violence by sex are regularly linked to toxic masculinity.

A Swedish study found that 0.1 per cent of the population made up a fifth of violent crime convictions, 1 per cent made up almost two-thirds of violent crime convictions and 4 per cent were responsible for all of them. The offenders were overwhelmingly (87 per cent) male.

So, clearly violence is correlated with being male, right?

Wrong. Yes, violence is disproportionately male, but only 7 per cent of males were in the convicted-of-violent-crime group. Something that pertains to only 7 per cent of a group is not significantly correlated with membership of that group.

Conflating being disproportionately x with being correlated with being x is done all the time. Including, of course, by a lot of feminists.

If there is any group that the violent offenders are more than 7 per cent of, especially if such a group also includes the 1 per cent of women who were violent offenders, then membership of that group is going to be more correlated, potentially far more correlated, with being violent than is being male.

As it turns out, completely unsurprisingly, certain personality traits (often aggregated into the Big Five of Openness, Conscientiousness, Agreeableness, Extraversion and Neuroticism, or OCEAN) are way more correlated with violence than is being male. Given that no personality trait is only male, and no personality trait applies to all males, this is more or less bound to be true.

Once you starting asking about personality traits and behaviour, then biological sex becomes something that may generate patterns, but is not likely to be significantly causal.

Being of a sex changes the constraints one is facing. This, on its own, is enough to generate patterned behaviour.

As a general pattern, the small gamete sex (males) is likely to be more violent than the large gamete sex (females). This is for the obvious reason that violence is usually less risky for the small gamete sex than it is for the large gamete sex. The difference in the pattern of risk produces differences in the patterns of behaviour.

If the small gamete sex is also larger and stronger than the large gamete sex, this tendency to be more violent will be strengthened further. Amongst Homo sapiens, men are, on average 7 per cent taller and 13 percent larger than women: while women, on average, have 52 per cent of the upper body strength and 66 per cent of the lower body strength of men (in part due to male spines being more rigid and providing a better lever for strength) while women generally both have, and require for health, proportionately more fat as a share of body mass than men.

Given these biological realities (even without considering the risks of pregnancy and the constraints of child-minding), of course physical violence among humans is going to be disproportionately male. Of course aggression by human males is going to manifest much more as physical aggression than will aggression by human females.

That does not mean that men are more aggressive then women: actually, the two sexes are about equally aggressive overall. It is more the patterns of aggression that differ, due to the differences in risk patterns, with male aggression tending to be more physical and more overt while female aggression tends to be both more relational and more camouflaged.

Ask someone who went to a girls’ school whether they have ever experienced or witnessed toxic female aggression.

The patterns of aggression differ by sex, but they are not entirely separate. There is physical aggression from women and relational aggression from men. It is their relative distribution and ways of manifesting that differs. Those patterns of difference can also vary, depending on social circumstances. A result of us being so much the cultural species.

Arguing that biological sex matters is not remotely the same as postulating some deeply and pervasively essential differences between men and women (apart from the small-gamete, large-gamete distinction).

About domestic violence

While all this is enough to raise large questions about the concept of toxic masculinity, including tying any pattern of negative behaviour specifically to being male, it is worth looking at the use of descriptive terms in a particular arena of violence: domestic violence. There has been a strong (feminist) push to conflate domestic violence with intimate partner violence. In response, the term family violence is being adopted as the more general category.

Treating domestic violence as if it specifically means intimate partner violence is rhetorically very useful, because what form of domestic violence does conflating it with intimate partner violence leave out? Violence against children. And why is it useful for feminists to reducing the salience of violence against children? Because it is more often perpetrated by women than men.

This is partly because women have more opportunities to commit violence against children than men do. But it is also that children are generally smaller and weaker than adult women. That there is a pattern of (some) women engaging in violence against those who are smaller and weaker than they rather gets in the way of valorising women in general and deprecating men in general. Or otherwise essentialising violence or aggression along male-versus-female lines.

Acknowledging that intimate partner violence itself has two general patterns (1) violent men and women hitting each other, and (2) intimate terrorism, where one partner terrorises the other, also gets in the way of postulating some deep causal gulf between male and female. Especially as, while the pattern of intimate terrorism is wildly disproportionately a male partner terrorising a female partner, the reverse also occurs, just much more rarely. Much of the public discussion about intimate partner violence is, however, framed as violence against women, essentially writing any violence against men out of the social script.

Toxic aggression

Both men and women, both boys and girls, can and do engage in toxic aggression. While such aggression has patterns by sex — that is, the distributions differ by sex — no form of it is purely limited to a single sex.

The questions then become, is there any useful element of the concept of toxic masculinity that (1) is not about a form of toxic aggression, (2) is reasonably specifically tied to being male or to masculinity and (3) is to any significant degree characteristic of or, or caused by, either? Or are we, at best, dealing with a small sub-group of males who, due to specific personality traits and/or beliefs, choose to manifest their masculinity in particular ways?

The rhetorical value of the term toxic masculinity is obvious. It ties a negative adjective (toxic) to masculinity, it encourages the attribution of causality to being male and/or being masculine (as if it is what happen when masculinity “goes too far”, so masculinity is to be treated as potentially toxic) and it discourages attention to any analogous female behaviour.

So, it is excellent rhetoric, and it is excellent rhetoric regardless of its analytical soundness.

Given the above considerations, toxic masculinity is looking like a bullshit concept.

One reason toxic masculinity is excellent rhetoric, is that there is male behaviour based on a sort of hyper-masculinity that we are familiar with, and which is widely (often intensely) disliked. But, of course, it is disliked by a lot of men. That general dislike of such behaviour among both men and women gives toxic masculinity much of its rhetorical power.

Cultural phenomena

An objection to the above considerations is that the notion of toxic masculinity is not about violence and aggression as such, but pertains to a cultural phenomena.

One of the perennial problems of cultural analysis is that culture, and cultural patterns, can easily be turned into analytical “silly putty” — able to redefined to fit any analytical hole. Especially as culture itself is infamously so variably defined.

The overwhelming majority of human societies have had presumptive sex roles, driven by how expensive human children are to raise. This has led to very strong patterns of activities that could be done while minding children being presumptively female and activities that could not be done while minding being presumptively male. This is usually driven much more by relative risk and level of constant attention required than by strength.

Hence, in foraging societies, women generally gather, but they will hunt small animals, such as lizards. Meanwhile, men generally hunt, but they will gather more risky-to-get things, such as honey. In hoe-farming societies, women generally farm, as that can be done while minding the kids. In plough-farming societies, men generally farm, as ploughing cannot be done while minding the kids. And so on.

This very long history of presumptive sex roles probably has something to do with why Homo sapiens are so cognitively dimorphic. A recent study found that around 70 per cent of men have a mix of personality traits that no woman has and around 70 per cent of women have a mix of personality traits that no man has. Only 18 per cent of us are in the personality-trait-bundles overlap group. (An earlier study found even higher rates of cognitive dimorphism.)

We are, in fact, as a species more cognitively dimorphic than we are physically dimorphic (apart, from the mammaries-ovaries, testes-penis, small gametes versus large gametes pattern). Different patterns of risk-management behaviour, and associated interactions, can be expected between men and women, with both continuities and variations between cultures.

Dealing more with physical risk, men are likely be more drawn to philosophies such as Stoicism, or analogous outlooks. Declaring such stoicism to be toxic masculinity is just silly.

We live in the only societies in human history largely without presumptive sex roles. Thus, any implicit or explicit pathologising of the notion of presumptive sex roles is, analytically, pretty silly.

Similarly, tying any phenomena to masculinity that also manifests among women is pretty silly. it is, for example, fairly clear that the breakthrough for queer emancipation was a major shift in attitudes among women. The strictures against homosexuality being part of a moral order that raised the social exchange value of sex.

It is, after all, generally hard for any broad cultural patterns to persist, or to change, without significant numbers of both sexes “buying into” the persistence, or into the change. Hence second-wave feminism was as successful as it was because lots of men agreed with the goal of expanding opportunities for women.

Strictures against homosexuality have a complicated relationship to masculinity and patriarchy, because in some societies, the celebration of masculinity extended to celebration of male beauty and eroticism. They could be highly patriarchal societies (e.g. Ancient Athens) or rather more gender egalitarian societies (e.g. Sparta). If we are dealing with patterns that are specific to some culture or set of cultures, toxic masculinity is clearly a misleading label.

Unless we are dealing with attitudes and patterns of behaviour that are specifically male, are specifically tied to masculinity in general and are not tied to specific cultures (and would therefore have a specifically cultural source, not a generally masculine source) toxic masculinity is a misleading term.

It would also be helpful if the concept was, at least to some degree, quantifiable. How general is the pattern? If it is very much a minority phenomena, then it will be tied to something else more strongly than it will be to masculinity.

There is also a problem of context. Something that might be functional in one context may be much less so, or even dysfunctional, in another.

Drawing causal connections between specific behaviours and cultural patterns is also notoriously difficult. Especially as manifestations of cultural patterns can vary markedly between individuals within the same culture.

So, are we dealing with a well-defined concept, that is usefully quantifiable and tied to careful causal analysis?

Not really, we are dealing with something much more motte-and-bailey like. That is, there are discussions of toxic masculinity that have all the sophisticated trappings of careful analysis (the motte version) that defenders of the term point to. And then there is the much more blunderbuss rhetorical uses of the term (the bailey plays).

Any objection to the latter will be referred to the former. But the tying of toxicity to masculinity makes the concept of toxic masculinity ideal for such rhetorical games, given that the boundaries of the concept are so unclear. Or, at least, easily shifted. Especially as masculinity itself can mean or imply (1) to do with being male or (2) to do with conceptions of masculinity.

If the concept of toxic masculinity was part of a general taxonomy of masculinity, it may be of some interest. As a stand-alone pathologising tag, not so much.

So, yes some men choose to manifest their masculinity in particular, unfortunate or destructive, ways. Certain cultural milieus may encourage or discourage that. But it is not their masculinity that is driving that.

Ultimately, the giveaway is that toxic masculinity is a stand-alone pathologising tag. Part of a more general pattern of conflating disproportion with correlation and so treating disproportion as characteristic-of or specific-to.

So, toxic masculinity: rhetorically powerful, yes; factual or analytically useful, not so much.

(Cross-posted from Medium.)

Piling up pathology by pretending that biological sex is incidental

Treating disagreement as delinquent does not mean that things are working

Here’s a striking result: according to happiness research, since 1970 the pattern in Western societies has shifted from women being generally happier than men, to men being generally happier than women.

Given the triumph of second-wave feminism in changing law, social mores and public policy this may seem a surprising result. Actually, it makes sense.

First, men have less responsibility as providers. They are no longer expected to be the sole provider for their family. As part of feminism setting matching-what-men-do as the benchmark of female progress, women are now expected to do paid work, and so contribute to the income of the household.

Second, the price of sex has fallen dramatically. The moral language of virginity and chastity has almost entirely evaporated. Casual sex is much more respectable. Erotica and pornography is far more available. Since sex, as a social exchange, has usually been based on men doing things to earn sex from women, lowering the social price of sex is generally good for men.

Feminists have long advocated women taking control of their sexuality and being more sexually assertive. In other words, once again, setting matching-what-men-do as the benchmark of female progress. As is the standard pattern for setting matching-what-men-do as the benchmark of social progress, it implies having a uterus, ovaries and mammaries is incidental to being a woman.

Yet, as we shall see, men and women continue to display different patterns when it comes to sex. As Harper’s magazine put it: “Women are inclined to regret the sex they had, and men the sex they didn’t.” While former sex researcher and science journalist Debra Soh has suggested that the extraordinary surge in teenage girls identifying as trans might be, at least in part, them taking refuge from hyper-sexualisation.

About courtship and chivalry

In a huge array of species, the males display courting behaviour. That is, the sex with small, mobile gametes (males) court members of the sex with large, immobile gametes (females). In other words, the sex taking less risks, and with less intrinsic investment in the process of reproduction, has to prove their fitness/seriousness to the sex taking more risks and with more intrinsic investment in the process of reproduction.

As psychologist Marco Del Giudice points out:

The biological definition of sex is not just one option among many, or a matter of arbitrary preference: the very existence of differentiated males and females in a species depends on the existence of two gamete types. Chromosomes and hormones participate in the mechanics of sex determination and sexual differentiation, but do not play the same foundational role. Crucially, anisogamy gives rise to a true sex binary at the species level: even if a given individual may fail to produce viable gametes, there are only two gamete types with no meaningful intermediate forms. This dichotomy is functional rather than statistical, and is not challenged by the existence of intersex conditions (regardless of their frequency), nonbinary gender identities, and other apparent exceptions. And yet, anisogamy is rarely discussed — or even mentioned — in the social science literature on sex and gender, with the obvious exceptions of evolutionary psychology and anthropology (emphasis added).

Fancy that!

Homo sapien childbirth is unusually risky and, as I have previously discussed, Homo sapien children are unusually biologically expensive to raise. The combination has (until recently) created a particularly intense risk-differential by sex.

As a predictable consequence, human courtship has frequently been an elaborate process. Especially as it is often the parents of the bride (or of both bride and groom) who have to be convinced. A complication of being the cultural species. (A complication that evolutionary psychology often appears to fail to grapple with.)

Dowries (payment to the husband), dowers (payment to the bride), groom price (payment to the groom’s family), bride price (payment to the bride’s family) or bride wealth (some mixture of bride price and surety) can be part of, or substitutes for, the courtship process. As anthropologist George Dalton observed:

Bridewealth paid at marriage has different functions in different societies and may have several in the same society: to indemnify the girl’s family for the loss of her services, as an earnest of good intentions on the part of the groom and his family, to solidify the new affinal bonds created by marriage, and to legitimize children born to the union.

These transfers are often more an investment in connection (so gifts) than merely an exchange.

Given the dramatic drop in the risk-differential by sex due to modern medicine, welfare systems and unilateral female control of fertility (via the Pill and legalised abortion), some reduction in the level of effort in courtship was likely. Especially as unilateral female control of fertility permitted more female investment in human capital and in credentials, increasing women’s access to income.

The normative language of chastity and virginity, and the social rituals of courtship, were, of course, intimately tied together, as both imply a relatively high social-exchange price for sex. The circumstances that led to the evaporation of the former also led to the attenuation of the latter.

Setting matching-what-men-do as the benchmark of female progress led to an attack on the rituals of chivalry and courtship. They were re-interpreted as implying female incapacity or otherwise being affronts to equality between the sexes.

What the rituals actually did was to allow men to signal respect for women in situations of unequal vulnerability. While the vulnerability gap had certainly lessened significantly due to the above changes, it did not disappear.

Stripping away the rituals of acknowledgement without the vulnerability gap actually being eliminated created somewhat delusional social circumstances, where the vulnerability gap persisted but was not allowed to be handled by social mechanisms that had evolved to do so.

If the functional is not permitted, then the pathological will fill the gap. Much of the “toxic masculinity” nonsense is a response to the statistical evidence that the vulnerability gap persists while also attacking the socially-evolved mechanisms to deal with it.

To put it another way, of course the man should pay for the first date. Pathologising chivalrous politeness removes a whole set of socially-evolved markers of respect for women based on acknowledging the vulnerability gap. Of course trying to replace that by new norms that use evidence for the vulnerability gap to pathologise men and masculinity, while insisting that paying everyday attention to the vulnerability gap is an attack on equality, is not going to lead to good or sensible replacement mechanisms.

Nor is extending matching-what-men-do as the sign of female progress to matters of sex and dating. There is no reason to expect women to have the same attitude to sex as men and many reasons to expect rather different (if somewhat overlapping) patterns of response. This is an area where it is particularly silly to treat having a uterus, ovaries and mammaries as being incidental to being a woman.

One of the features of the modern dating market is massive inequality between (young) men and women. The dating-app data shows that (1) women’s rating of the sexual attractiveness of men is way more skewed than is men’s rating of the sexual attractiveness of women and (2) this female advantage in breadth of attraction is extremely age-dependent. That is, as they age, men can retain relatively high levels of sexual attractiveness much better than women do.

This is entirely predictable, flowing from the large-gamete sex (1) being comparatively more interested in the resource and status value of their potential mates, and (2) requiring a higher marks-of-attractiveness bar to peak their interest. While (3) the small-gamete sex is more interested in signs of fertility.

This creates a dramatically asymmetrical dating market, where women go from being in high demand followed by a dramatic drop-off in their sexual cachet as they age while most men struggle in the dating market but have the capacity to improve their relative standing as they age.

The pretence that having a uterus, ovaries and mammaries is incidental to being a woman — as female progress is measured by matching-what-men-do — makes it much harder to evolve mechanisms to sensibly cope with these asymmetries. Especially as the pressure to pretend all male-female differences are products of “patriarchy”, “toxic masculinity”, or some other sin-generating-secular-demon, creates a stilted public discussion.

About fatherhood

Homo sapiens evolved two primary mechanisms to deal with our biologically very expensive children. Grandmothers (females who live for decades after menopause) and fatherhood (as a social mechanism, not merely as sperm donor).

Grandmothers represented experienced females who stopped having their own children and so could invest in the children of their children. Fatherhood entailed men who invested in raising their children. (Or, in a few societies, unclehood — men who invested in raising the children of their sisters.) The paternal investment was presumptively in their own children, as otherwise it would have been very hard to stably select for such behaviour.

The rise of mass manufacturing led to the golden age of working-class fatherhood, as working-class men found it comparatively easy to take on the provider role. As manufacturing employment has collapsed in developed democracies, working-class fatherhood has also declined.

The growth of services employment has enabled many women to achieve a high level of income independence. The trade-off the loss of independence that marriage involves for the income advantages of live-in husband and father has significantly declined in value. The “cheaper” children are, the lower the woman’s reservation income and the more the connections of wife and husband overlap, the less value the husband-as-father has to offer. So lower-income-and-status men struggle to be accepted as fathers. Meanwhile, marriage and fatherhood is fine (indeed, never healthier) in the upper reaches of society. There, due to higher expectations, children are more expensive, reservation incomes are higher and the husband and wife’s networks are more likely to be complementary, hence the husband-as-father trade-off is much stronger.

State policy has tended to further undermine the advantages of the live-in husband and father. Both through tax and welfare policies that tend to penalise marriage (and so fatherhood) and through enabling women to get unilateral access, on behalf of their children, to the income of their exes through the garnishing of wages by the state.

The latter is a replacement for the social mechanism of shotgun weddings, which have collapsed. With the supporting rhetoric about “deadbeat Dads”, and supporting theory about patriarchal power, compulsory paternal child support though state garnishing of wages is a much more pathological mechanism than the shotgun weddings that it replaced.

Shotgun weddings traded-off the biological father stepping up to his paternal responsibilities with him getting the status and authority of being a father and husband. By contrast, compulsory paternal child support through garnishing his wages puts a man at the financial behest of his ex without any trade-off whatsoever. No paternal rights, no sex, no status, no authority. He is essentially turned into a bonded source of income.

The worse his income prospects, the more proportionately onerous such obligations become. To support the system, being gaoled for debt has been re-instituted. If he is gaoled due to failure to pay, his debt continues to accumulate. This fundamentally pathological arrangement is a systematic attack on working-class fatherhood.

In much of the US, such purely-financial fatherhood is a matter of strict liability. It does not matter if he was underage when the child was conceived (and so he could not form the legal intention to have sex). It does not matter if his sperm was harvested during a non-conceptive sex act and then used to impregnate the woman. The only thing that matters is that his sperm was used to conceive.

In some circumstances, it does not even have to be his sperm. DNA tests are rarely used to establish paternity and if, after some years, a man does find out it was not his sperm that conceived the child, he may be informed that does not matter, as he “accepted” (the compulsory) financial responsibility for the child.

By contrast, a mother can always give up her financial obligations to a child through adoption. Where, elsewhere, the benchmark of female progress is matching what men do, in this area the systematic exploitation of men, on the grounds of women’s greater vulnerability and superior parenting status, is public policy. So, in this areas, having a uterus, ovaries and mammaries really counts.

No dissent allowed

An approach that veers between pretending that having a uterus, ovaries and mammaries is incidental to being a woman — because the benchmark of female progress is to match-what-men-do — and justifying systematic financial exploitation of men on the grounds of women’s greater vulnerability and superior parenting status (so having a uterus, ovaries and mammaries really really matters) has, as we have seen, all sorts of problems.

But these problems generally lack any social or policy salience. The difficulty is straightforward: criticism of (establishment) feminism is regarded as inherently delinquent. If, for example, you start noticing the pathological nature of the child support system you are, clearly, a “men’s rights advocate” and so a misogynist supporter of patriarchy.

The combination of capture of public policy (and so the coercive capacity of the state) and dominance of the cultural commanding heights (so dissent is de-legitimised) permits pathological policy and social patterns to continue to entrench themselves. Such mechanisms do not, however, eliminate the consequences of such entrenched pathologies.

A situation that cannot continue, won’t. While the present level of social dysfunction in these matters probably has considerable life in it yet, it is very unlikely that these are stable long-term patterns.

In the very long-term, the replacing response is probably going to be a religious one, as the religious are consistently more fertile than the non-religious. In the shorter term, these pathologies will continue to generate alienation and eat away at the resilience of our societies.

Either way, the feminist pretence that female progress comes from matching what men do, and that having a uterus, ovaries and mammaries is incidental to being a woman, except when it is convenient to claim the opposite so as to undermine (working-class) fatherhood, is very unlikely to wear well.

(Cross-posted from Medium.)