How about popular culture? I don’t know if these guys’ depiction of the first person cuckold perspective:
actually stopped anyone from cheating, but at least they put the meme out there.
The ironic interpretation also serves the op…
Most come from religion. And keep in mind that most religions were before publishing controlled by religious officials, so people were dependent on their interpretations. And also that most folks’ understanding of the intent and nature of religious rules is somewhat unexamined. And that religious texts are often used to justify whatever is in fashion rather than interpreted literally. And that we don’t really know how or why most of these ancient rules came about.
So it’s a mix of things - useful rules, things which perpetuate the power of those in power, mythologizing based on poor understanding of nature, and mutated understandings of the original text.
In any case, whether it’s inheritance, jealousy, or social embarrassment, I agree that men have traditionally wanted to keep other men away from their wives and still do. If there is a hard and fast rule with penalties (like you will be stoned to death if you commit adultery), that rule no doubt was made by male rulers. On the other hand, I still don’t see why men would care about chastity or modesty in women who aren’t married yet. Unmarried men might care a little, but they would have had little power compared to older married men who would normally make the rules.
I don’t see how virginity or child marriage helps much unless you’re concerned that the woman will get knocked up within a few weeks before first sex with her husband. Adultery and seclusion, I agree.
These are interesting cases, but are they typical? My impression is that ancient Hebrews, and more recently Arabs and Somalis were primarily nomadic herders, but they have/had restrictive sexual taboos. It would be interesting to see a broad study of how cultures compare.
Farming may have declined, but inheritance is still important, so it doesn’t seem like that explains much. My thought about the modern reduction in taboos is that it’s based more on women being able to earn a living independently of their husbands, birth control, and the increasing power of single women to make themselves heard. Public schools may also be a factor, since children aren’t so tied to their mothers.
jackdavinci
Obviously religion picked up the ball and ran with it. What I don’t understand is why it would have been helpful to the religious leaders unless they were echoing cultural traditions otherwise in place.
I don’t think they picked up the ball so much as they’ve always been there. Before institutionalized religion there was mythmaking as man’s early way of understanding the world. Sex being one of the more important and interesting things in their lives, people would have focused much of their myths/stories/theories on it. Probably the two biggest factors are power disparities between tribal members whether between leadership and followers or age or genders, and association with unfortunate events.
Part of it is simply establishing the idea that “good women don’t have sex with several men” and that “women don’t like sex.” Another is making sure women don’t form attachments to other men that might continue into marriage. Finally, treating virginity as a woman’s “most precious gift” encourages women to police themselves. They learn to really internalize these things, to the point where women who grow up in sexually repressive cultures show diminished physical response (for example, difficulty reaching orgasm.)
Nothing is typical. Every society has developed systems suited to their circumstances. But the simple fact that there are so many different exceptions shows that this is clearly not a strongly ingrained thing.
Let’s take an example. A Somali herdsman who would normally practice female seclusion, genital mutilation, etc. moves to Las Vegas. Do you think his American-born son is going to value these things? Or his grandson? Of course not- these practices will fade within a generation or two. Because they are culturally instilled values, not inherent ones.
I think most of us expect to inherit some money that will help us out in our life, but that is a completely different beast than inheriting the land that you will rely on for food for the rest of your life. Few of us live or die based on our inheritance.
We’ve also come to recognize new ideas, such as women inheriting property, step-parents having obligations to non-biological children, etc. And birth control allows women a better chance to decide who they have children with.
Of course women working, etc. are a major part of why our sexual taboos are changing. But that is what I’ve said to begin with- our sexual taboos are a result of our material circumstances.
**jackdavinci
**
I agree with what you say. I do think we still need some other explanation for the specific kinds of taboos we usually see, since the priesthood would pick sexual traditions that were self-serving, and female modesty and chastity seem highly unlikely to be what they would pick.
These are good points, but seem to depend on the idea of men deliberately contriving to develop a culture that over the long term might be what they would like. I can’t imagine the culture has ever worked that way. People are self-serving and primarily interested in the short term. They also aren’t brilliant social engineers who would be calculating the likely future effects of women having a certain self image. The immediate thing most men want is sex now, and female chastity isn’t going to help this.
I agree completely.
[quote=“truthpizza, post:38, topic:506980”]
Is your point that older women don’t have any reason to be concerned about younger women diverting their husband’s attention? I don’t find that plausible. While they may have some other defenses, that certainly doesn’t eliminate the threat.
[quote]
No, I’m saying that it’s hardly the driving force that you seem to think it is. There is far more evidence both in the human and nonhuman kingdom that suggests that males are far more invested in controlling the sexuality of women than other women. Not that other women won’t eventually see reason to help support this system at some level, but that males have a more vested interest.
You are completely wrong. A male who is primarily interested in sex might have a lot of sex, but he won’t be leaving a lot of children. Just like capuchin monkeys, human females do not have an estrus cycle, therefore, if you want to be sure you are producing children with them, you have to have some control over them. Otherwise, you’ll just end up caring for other men’s children. While some non-human primates and some human groups allow this to happen (in some societies, women are encouraged to sleep around to confuse paternity), in most human societies, men chose attempts at paternity certainty over promiscuity. For obvious reasons, it works. There is every reason to suspect it is a biological urge because those who practiced it left more children.
As I said earlier, the reason why capuchin males don’t go for as much sex as possible is because it lessens their chances of actually fathering babies. That’s why we have a male who hangs around just two females in one of our study group. He could have a chance to slip away and join one of the other groups (he is friends with the males in a group that has a much larger concentration of females), but he knows that if he leaves his two females, he will not be able to father their offspring. The interesting thing is, there is a female from that large group who comes over to hang out with him and we suspect that he is the father of her most recent baby. She has an advantage for slipping away and sleeping around. The males do not.
For most of human and our non-human evolutionary history, we lived in small groups that didn’t have much social stratification. It is only when social stratification arises that you have males who have much better resources than some and then females seek out those males. Before that, there is evidence that we lived in more egalitarian socieities. Furthermore, the attraction to young females is also new in our evolutionary history and rises primarily out of pairbonding and paternity certainty. If you are expected to chose one female to spend the rest your life with and provide for her offspring, you want to be damned sure that all of those offspring are yours. Notice how the more social stratification there is and the more restrictive divorce is, the younger and younger the desired wives become. It is all due to control of female sexuality and access to female sexuality. It seems the prevailing norm mainly because societies in which this form of sexuality was the most common came to dominate. It develops mostly out of herding societies which are ones in which a person’s wealth is very tied to capital and capital can be controlled. These societies overwhelmingly skew the preference and, for the most part, without these relatively new in human history constraints, men and women tend to be paired more to age partners.
It is due to cultural which you can tell based on studies with non-human primates. For more information on this, read the excellent book, Female Choices by Dr Small about how that ‘biological evidence’ has absolutely no support in nature. As I’ve said before, males are far more concerned with paternity certainty than wracking up partners (which makes evolutionary sense) and females have a vested interest in sleeping with more than enough males than it takes to make a baby.
Females sleep around for more reasons that just producing a single offspring. As was show in the amazing book Female Control: Sexual Selection by Cryptic Female Choice, females have a lot of methods of sleeping with multiple men, but controlling who exactly fertilizes their offspring. For example, in my capuchins, the females have a lot of non-conceptive sex. We see them have sex with lots of males, many when it is impossible for them to become pregnant. But, without fail, for the most part, the children produced are of the alpha male. How they control this, we have no idea.
There has also been a ton of evidence that shows that females will often sleep with strange males, even to the point of prefering strange males over the males in their troops. The major explanation given for this drive which causes females to sometimes leave their home group and go out is protection against infanticide. Infanticide is a huge danger in primates that have long lactation period and interbirth intervals and it was undoubtedly a driving force for humans as well. By confusing paternity, a female reduces the risk of infanticide by these other males. I have a friend who is working on a paper now in which he argues that male chimps prefer a certain level of female promiscuity because it confuses paternity and helps protect their babies.
Honor killings have everything to do with the sexual control of the women. The women are being killed because they have dared to take control of their own sexuality. As for those message boards, go reddit.com, fark.com, digg.com and read the comments. Women are constantly put down and called sluts for showing sexual interest.
Women do oppress each others and their own sexuality, but that system developed after male control did. Male control has been long in our evolutionary history–female control of females has not.
Economics plays a HUGE role in sexuality. In a Biological Differences of Sex class I took, we looked at the role economy played in producing sexuality and we discovered clear divisions based upon whatever the subsistence or original means of subsistence was. The worse ones for female rights? Herding societies. Guess which type of society our society received its values from.
This is a myth and is not supported by any primatological data. The female capuchins I study are far more likely to sneak away and have sex with other males than the males are to do the same with females. Where the males do have the females beat is in a high level of homosexual sex (of course the females tend to be all interrelated, so a high level of homosexual sex would be very strange). In other words, females will go out and seek matings with other males. Males will just fuck other males and hang around the females in order to be sure of paternity certainty.
You don’t understand evolution and how it works. A lot of what develops is a conflict between basic evolutionary forces. An individual in a society might gain a lot from a society which represses his sexuality even though it causes the repression.
Think of warfare. From a very basic, strict evolutionary point of view, warfare makes no sense. It shouldn’t have developed. You have groups of people going off to fight and die for strangers. Anyone who does this is destroying their own gene pool and the people who agree to such things should be selected against. The animals who go to war share a high degree of genetic relationship, such as ants who share over 75% of their genes with their fellow warriors. However, anyone joining a society that will do warfare will be better protected. It’s a rare case of group selection–bad for the individual, good for the group, and thus the group grows.
But from an individual point of view, male control of females makes sense. Let’s look at an example. You have three individuals, Joe, Bob, and Fred. Joe takes the “let’s fuck any woman I can” strategy. Human infants are costly. Women might fuck him, but they won’t bother to raise his offspring. Bob takes the “let women sleep around but care of the offspring” strategy. Bob might be raising the kid of Joe. Fred takes the “paternity certainty attempt strategy”. The more Fred emphasizes this, the more likely he will be raising children who are his own. His children will survive, grow and prosper and continue on in his sted. Even though he might loose out on sex, he will win evolutionary by producing more offspring. THAT’S what matters. Not mating opportunities, but number of surviving, reproducing offspring who are produced.
Not if people are using evolutionary arguments to explain human behavior. We are not so set apart from our ancestory that we aren’t influenced by them or we can’t see how ideals about what females and males “should” do are often misguided. We can also use them as long as we understand WHY chimps and bonobos are different in their sexualities and don’t reduce them to sound bites. As to why they are different, as with everything, it all comes back to resource distribution and ecology. Just as human sexuality varies depending on ecology and resource distribution, so does non-human primate sexuality. We can see very clear parallel between the two and it is this understanding that gives us greater insight into our own sexuality.
Using them to explain “shoulds” or “oughts” are entirely misguided and I see no one in this thread doing that except for those who are doing so incorrectly based on wrong facts and assumptions.
Oh yes, because polls and people’s responses to polls aren’t culturally influenced at all. :rolleyes: There are so many problems wrong with that study that I won’t even begin to discuss it. That’s part of the problem with much of the studies of human sexuality, but luckily, we have some good research going on now which is destroying a lot of evidence from the past.
And this is not true. In quite a few societies, male children are taken away from their mothers and raised primarily by the men. In almost all societies, peers, authorities, etc have a HUGE influence. I think the primary flaw in your argument is that you think that mothers had way more influence than they did.
Sorry for all these posts. I’m posting from a hostel in Nicaragua where the power is known to randomly go out and I don’t to have a big post eaten while the electricity dies.
No, males are very, very concerned with paternity certainty, moreso if the species leans towards monogamy (which ours does) and costly infants (which we do by far). In our modern day and age with paternity tests and birth control, this is difficult for us to conceive of, but just look at what all these sexual repressions of women are designed to do.
Tough as it may be, your ancestors chose greater paternity certainty over more sex and it worked because of the ecological conditions. If we had lived in environments more like the bonobo, a different patern might’ve developed.
This is not to say that all sexual repression comes from control of women. Religion has had an effect, but for different reasons. In order to tease everything apart, it might be more helpful to divide what we are talking about into several groups. There are different types of sexual taboos and different reasons for why they developed.
The phrase “controlling the sexuality of women” this has the flavor of militant feminist rhetoric rather than science. If it makes you feel any better, I am 100% in favor of women being free of all laws, customs, and stereotypes that would discriminate against them in any way, anyplace in the world. If women compete with men, I cheer for the women. However, I don’t look at feminism as a conflict between men and women. I look at it as a struggle with progressive men and women on one side and backward, traditional men and women on the other. It is not a betrayal of the female gender to consider that women may have played a part in some of bad traditions we have inherited. It makes little scientific sense to talk about “controlling the sexuality of women” because this is far too vague, telling us nothing about the kind of control or the reason for it. It works for political purposes if the point is rally women against men, but that shouldn’t be the point.
This makes no sense. Certainly males of many species, including humans, try to prevent other males from having access to their mates. On the other hand, if they have a chance to have sex with other females, at least some of the time that results in more offspring, an obvious genetic advantage. Some of the time a male’s mates will already be pregnant, so there isn’t even a need to guard them.
“If he leaves his two females…” – do you mean if he leaves them forever or just long enough to try to knock up another female? If it’s just a concern for missing their window of fertility, I would think he’d only have to mate with them every day or two and would have plenty of time to do some others. As to the advantage for the female of sleeping around, I’d think she’d get pregnant by some male one way or the other. If she prefers the male you’re talking about, perhaps it’s because there’s some indication of better genes, but this would be only a slight advantage to future offspring, not nearly as much as having extra babies.
This is a very interesting observation. It may be that she “knows” (not as factual knowledge but based on hormones that affect her behavior after ovulation) when she’s fertile and seduces her preferred male at that time, but since the other males have also had sex with her, they’re more likely to act favorably toward her offspring.
“The women are being killed because they have dared to take control of their own sexuality.” This reeks of politics and not science. The fact that her parents didn’t pay her husband means she took control of her sexuality? That makes no sense.
I’ll look at those message boards when I get the chance. Sounds like there are some real assholes out there.
I do understand group selection but I don’t understand what your comment had to do with my statement it was supposedly refuting.
“Women might fuck him, but they won’t bother to raise his offspring.” What are you talking about? Do they carry the baby to term and then throw it off a cliff? I have no idea what you could be thinking here. Men who fuck a lot of women have a lot of offspring. Some are raised by the woman alone, some with the help of the woman’s partner who may or may not know he’s not the father. If they’re raised alone their survival chances are less, but if Mr. Stud impregnates lots of women, quite a few should survive. Plus he can have his own family. Happens a lot with athletes and politicians.
Quite a few societies? I’ve never heard of any unless you’re talking about boys after age 10 or so. Do you have examples? What are their sexual taboos like? I’m sure the girls aren’t raised by the men. Sure peers and authorities have a lot of influence. Children’s peers generally have the same upbringing as they do, and don’t have any chance to pass stuff from generation to generation. Authorities might feed you dogma at religious services and the like, but usually transmit stories and rules rather than implicit values. But the main point is, male authorities get no benefit from female purity – mothers do. There are lots of sources of influence, but we have to look at who’s likely to promote what.
Males today are only marginally concerned with paternity, and, at least for unmarried ones, they’re mainly hoping to avoid it. Yet they seek sex all the time. You seem to be talking about genetic traits, and these haven’t changed since modern technology. I still can’t see how limiting the sexuality of women other than their mates is something males would want.
Why wouldn’t the women raise Joe’s offspring? They’re still the women’s kids, and evidence suggests that women don’t particularly find providerness sexually attractive. Their higher cognitive processes might favor dads over cads but that’s a higher level of evolution and still isn’t that reliable. In a society of sexual anarchy the equilibrium is of men being unsure of their children’s paternity and not investing much in children; in that situation women will go for the quality hot-stud sperm rather than the conscienious provider who probably doesn’t exist.
I don’t see why you insist that monogamy is an attempt to control women. I see it more as an attempt to control would-be Genghis Khans. In sexual anarchy, a very sexy man can father hundreds of children while a woman can at most pop out a kid once every nine months, and is saddled with raising the kids. Thus sperm is cheap and eggs are expensive, and men are going to want to sleep around more than women do. Monogamy is a harsher restraint on the male libido than on the female, and forces would-be studs to stay put and help raise kids, to his detriment but to the benefit of women as well as less sexy men.
And this has salutary social effects as well. By ensuring that men can be reasonably sure that their kids are their own, this encourages greater investment by dads in their children, which allows for better childcare and education. By redistributing male reproductive success towards the lower-status males, this lowers the stakes of sexual competition and may channel male energies towards more productive endeavors, which would explain why in great civilizations monogamy is the rule, at least for the non-aristocrats.
There are not enough roll-eyes in the world for this. I have a degree in Evolutionary Anthropology and I’ve done research on rhesus macaques and I am currently doing research on capuchin monkeys. I’ve also linked to excellent books written by prominent researchers. What are YOUR qualifications? Where have you offered anything but speculation and inaccurate facts?
YOU say you can’t see any reason why men would want to control female sexuality. I offer up plenty of examples and then YOU accuse me of being a non-scientific feminist. I have given examples on why males would be interested in controlling women. I can give hundreds more.
They still need to guard them, especially if they have young babies. How long they need to guard them depends on the lactation period and the interbirth interval. Having sex with other females only works if you actually impregnate the other females and have successfully surviving offspring with them.
If he leaves them to go try to knock up another female. You don’t understand how sexuality works. He’s missing more than just a window of opportunity for mating, he’s also missing his protection of the young offspring he’s already produced. He needs to stick around and make sure his babies survive.
Again, you assume that pregnancy is the only reason for females to sleep around. This is completely and utterly false. The threat of infanticide is a huge driving force in female sexuality.
Furthermore, you seem to be under the mistaken impression that we are a r selected species. We are not, we are a K selected species. If we were an r selected species, then the male strategy would be for having as many offspring as possible. Because we are a K selected species, both females and males attempt to have high quality offspring rather than high quantities offspring.
Have you studied honor killings? Have you seen the reasons given by the men responsible after these crimes occurred? Have you read reports by the women in those cultures?
[quote]
I do understand group selection but I don’t understand what your comment had to do with my statement it was supposedly refuting.[/qoute]
You are under the mistaken impression that a behavior that hurts the individual would never evolve. There are tons of circumstances where things have evolved in humans where the individual and his/her genetic advantage is worse off due to the fact that the group is better off. This is not the case here, but I wanted to correct that notion since I see it often.
If a female has a baby with no support what-so-ever from the male, then she might decide to allow the infant to die. Or, should a better male come along, allow that male to kill her unsupported offspring. There is a reason most female primates chose to mate with the new-coming male who has killed their infant. He’s (typically) of much better quality than the old male. If she doesn’t regard him as high quality, then she won’t mate with him.
Human females conceal their ovulation and do not have estrus cycles. This means that men cannot know when the female is going to get pregnant unless they STICK AROUND. This also means that a female can fuck and fuck and fuck a guy and never once have his offspring. Just like with other non-human primates, humans also have a lot of non-conceptive sex. Human females are sexually receptive long before they are ever able to procreate. Just as with my capuchin monkeys, the amount of sex a male received is not necessarily correlated with the amount of offspring produced!
The athletes and politicians of which you speak are a relatively recent aspect of our evolutionary history. There were men who were able to have large amounts of offspring because they had large amounts of wealth, but a lot of those men still took measures to control the sexuality of their females. Think about how a lot of rulers kept their wives in harems and used other measures to ensure that they weren’t raising the children of other men. Not that a single male didn’t have the chance to have multiple females bearing his offspring in the past and that those females didn’t compete with each other–that certainly happened. However, what we see now is not how it was for a lot of our evolutionary history and, even though a lot of human societies throughout history tolerated polygyny, most individuals were paired monogamously.
This is not to say that males never have an advantage to seeking extra-pair copulations. True monogamy is very rare. In both birds and non-human primates, we see males and females being socially monogamous, but both males and females will see extra-pair copulations. However, they tend to do so discreetly. A human male who has been fucking around with a lot of females and has a lot of children will been known by the other members of his social group.
I assume that’s because you’ve never studied anthropology. I’m more biological than socio-cultural, so I haven’t studied as many as a socio-cultural major, but I’ve looked at more than a few different cultures and how they treat sexuality. An example I’ve studied extensively is the groups in Papua New Guinea. Several of these groups are famous for their level of male-male homosexual behavior. Just like in capuchin monkeys, we can predict high levels of male-male homosexual behavior when unrelated males are forced to band together and fight. This is a method of male bonding which helps cement ties (also explains homosexuality in female bonobos). In some of these groups, boys were removed from their mothers as soon as they were weaned. Female sexuality was seen as ‘polluting’ (a view shared in parts of China as well), and young males were restricted in their diets as to ensure that they wouldn’t be polluted by ‘female’ foods and that they would eat plenty of ‘male’ foods. There are many different cultures within this geographic area and the amount of male-male sex and view of male-female sex varied a lot, so I hesitate to draw too many generalizations (and I also don’t have the books on the subject in front of me). However, in some of these groups, the males and females had an almost antagonistic relationship with each other. Women live in different huts and take care of pigs while men engage in other tasks. If you want to read all the details, then get the excellent book: http://www.amazon.com/Ritualized-Homosexuality-Melanesia-Melanesian-Anthropology/dp/0520080963 on the subject.
Yes, they do, because the males in charge are most likely the richest and they want to make sure that the babies they are supporting are their own and that the young males can’t get in there and impregnate their women. The rich men make a lot of efforts to control the sexuality of young men and their wives. That’s why in a lot of African pastorialist societies, the boys will have long rites of passage that keep them the females and having access to the females. In many societies, men weren’t permitted marriage unless they had accumulated a certain amount of wealth. WHen you have levels of authority, you have social stratification, and when you have social stratification, you have some individuals who can have more wealth and resources than others.
Again, this all comes back to paternity certainty.
Study on matrilateral biases in the investment of aunts and uncles due to paternity certainty.
promiscuity, paternity, and culture
Father-child relations: cultural and biosocial contexts
Discusses how male parental care could have developed as an evolutionary strategy by males to gain access to females. In other words, males will stick around a female and care for her offspring (rather than run around and try to wrack up as many copulations as possible), in order to be ensured of fathering her offspring in the future.
Certainty of paternity covaries with paternal care in birds
Primates aren’t the only species where the males are concerned with paternity certainty. This article talks about male birds punishing female partners who they suspect might be tempted to stray. Male control of female sexuality has been going on for a long time in our evolutionary history.
Unfortunately, most of the best articles require you to have access to a university or pay a fee.
Actually, in many species, there is evidence that they do. In lots of primate species, males trade various things in order to obtain future mating opportunities. The two most common ones are meat and infant care. Moreover, the males are doing this because they know they are going to get in with the females later. Studies in the laboratory have shown that males give more care to infants when they know they mother is watching them than when they think they are alone.
This society never existed.
I never have. Monogamy is a system which benefits males, females, and the entire society. I blame the current chaos and destruction of the Middle East as a consequence of not enough monogamy.
What I am responding to is the idea that men have no reason to control female sexuality in general and wouldn’t wish to restrict it. That was the charge and I am arguing against it. As I’ve said before, this doesn’t mean that this system helps males far greater than it helps females or that females have no part in it.
But such a situation has never existed in our evolutionary history except way, way back in the past or extremely recent. Primates are K selected, not r-selected, and the type of men you speak of have only come about within the last 10k years.