1. Why We All Have Twice As Many Female Ancestors As Male
It used to be call ‘The Battle of the Sexes’ and was thought to be due to fundamental differences in the way in which men and women think and in what they most value and want in life.
Today, of course, in this post-feminism age, this view is no longer fashionable. For if there are such fundamental differences between men and women, not only might they give rise to discrimination, but they might even be used to justify it. Even obvious physical differences, as a consequence, are now downplayed, while sex, itself, in terms of both gender and sexuality, are regarded as mere social constructs.
The question this immediately raises, however, is what then caused the battle of the sexes, if it ever existed? For if there are no fundamental differences between men and women, why, on occasion, do we get so exasperated with each other? Nor is this question answered simply by blaming men for their old-fashioned, sexist attitudes towards women. For not only does this fail to address male exasperation, but the suggested solution, that men should amend their ways and become more like women, is more or less an admission that men and women are, indeed, different.
More to the point, by continuing to deny that this difference exists, we make no progress towards understanding it. And if we do not understand it, we can do very little to either avoid or resolve the problems to which it may give rise. Indeed, it could be argued that by continuing to deny its existence and simply blaming all the consequent problems on toxic masculinity – a clear admission, in itself, that fundamental differences between men and women do, in fact, exist – we may actually be making the problems worse, as is clearly demonstrated by the well-documented rise in misogynistic online trolling. Because we do not understand such behaviour, however – and cannot understand it as long as we persist in our denial – the only way in which we can respond to it is by labelling it a hate crime, as if this in any way explains what is actually going on.
There is, however, a fairly simple explanation as to why, under certain circumstances, men can, indeed, come to hate women, which, once we accept that there are fundamental differences between the sexes, does not require any detailed psychological analysis of the individuals concerned or, indeed, any theoretical underpinning at all. For it stems almost entirely from an asymmetry in the relations between men and women I first noted in ‘Why We All Have Twice As Many Female Ancestors As Male’, an essay I wrote a little under four years ago after coming across a couple of scientific studies carried out by completely separate research teams at the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology in Leipzig and the University of Arizona, both of which compared the genetic diversity of male Y chromosomes and the genetic diversity of men’s mitochondrial DNA.
Although both studies thus used the same basic methodology, making the congruence of their findings slightly less compelling than it would have been if they had arrived at their conclusions from different directions, the fact that the studies were completely independent of each other nevertheless makes it more or less certain that what they each discovered is correct: that all human beings alive today, with some small regional variations, most notably in East Asia, do, in fact, have twice as many female ancestors as male.
The question to which this naturally gives, however, is why this should be so: a question I did not think was adequately answered by any of the explanations offered in the literature at the time, all of which either relied on anthropological assumptions which could not be verified or seemed to me intrinsically implausible. I therefore decided to explore an explanatory theory of my own, one which did not rely on unsupported assumptions for the simple reason that it was based on a single undeniable premise: that while it is to the advantage of any species that reproduces sexually to have as many of its females bear children as possible – thereby ensuring that the next generation is as well populated as it can be – there is no such advantage to be gained from having all the males reproduce. On the contrary, there is actually a distinct evolutionary benefit to be gained from restricting the number of males who become fathers so that only the strongest, fittest and best adapted pass on their genes, thereby using this otherwise largely superfluous male side of the mating equation to weed out genetic weaknesses.
I called this theory Male Accentuated Natural Selection (MANS) and went on to describe the two main mechanisms by which it is achieved. The first and most commonplace is simply to have the males of the species fight each other for the right to mate the females, a strategy which works particularly well in species in which the breeding males do not need to play any significant role in either rearing their offspring or in providing for their offspring’s mothers. Fairly obvious examples of this are grazing herbivores such as deer, cattle, buffalo and antelope: species in which the females suckle their young and where their own food is both plentiful and easily obtained.
In species in which the females do not suckle their young, in contrast, and where both parents are required to hunt for less easily obtained food – both for themselves and for their offspring – a slightly different mechanism has to be employed. The males still compete with each other for the right to mate, but in order to avoid the males being injured or driven off, the emphasis is placed on the females then choosing from among them. Good examples of this are to be found in most species of bird, where the males demonstrate their health and fitness by displaying their often elaborate plumage to the far less gaudy females, or by showing off their skills in nest building.
The biggest consequential difference between these two mechanisms is the fact that those species in which the males actually fight each other for the right to mate usually have far lager ratios between their female and male ancestors than those species in which the females select their mates. It wouldn’t surprise me, for instance, if the ratios in many species of deer weren’t in the hundreds, while many species of bird mate for life and have only one mate each. Although the MANS principle still applies in this case, with unfit males remaining unselected, each unselected male also results, of course, in a non-breeding female, thereby keeping the ratio of female to male ancestors down at 1:1.
There are, however, some species in which both of the MANS selection mechanisms can be found, either singly or in combination. This is especially true in the case of predators that hunt in packs, such as most canine species and some species of primate, including homo sapiens, where the males still, on occasion, fight each other for the right to mate with the females, but where female choice is the primary or dominant selection mechanism for the very good reason that, for the pack to be successful in hunting, unsuccessful males must still remain within it and cannot therefore be severely injured or driven off. As a result, the females of most successful species in this category are usually able to hold their own against the males, particularly against weaker males, enabling them to fight off the attentions of unwanted suitors while acquiescing in the attentions of the males they select. In this way, the successful males, while perhaps asserting their authority with the occasional growl, seldom have to actually fight off rivals and risk injury.
This, however, raises the question as to why the instantiation of the MANS principle through female choice in humans should lead to a ratio of 2:1 in the number of female to male ancestors rather than the ratio of 1:1 it leads to in birds. There are, however, a number of significant differences between birds and pack animals in other aspects of their lives. While, in the case of birds, the need for both parents to collect food for their offspring leads to pair-bonding, for instance, this is not quite the same in the case of pack animals, where the whole pack is required to work together in order to mount a successful hunt and where no special relationship is therefore required to bind together any two individuals. What’s more, all pack animals suckle their young, which means that the males do not need to play any part in rearing their offspring. Most important of all, however, is the fact that during the later stages of pregnancy and while they are nursing their young, the females of most pack animal species are unreceptive to sexual advances, with the result that the males which fathered their offspring now turn their attention towards other, more receptive females, who are willing to accept their advances for exactly the same reason as the female who has just given birth to their progeny: because they are fit and strong and highly attractive to females who want the best mate they can get. The result is that highly attractive, high status males end up fathering offspring on multiple females while lesser males are continually rejected.
It may, of course, be objected that this is not how things are in the case of human beings. After all, most of us do pair-bond and mate for life, just like birds. There are, however, a number of highly persuasive reasons for supposing that this is a relatively recent development in our history, one which only dates back to the end of the last ice age, around 11,000 years ago, when a warmer climate allowed us to switch from being nomadic hunter-gatherers to settled farmers, making the ownership of land critical to our whole way of life. Fathers who wanted to pass their land on to their sons, therefore, also wanted to be sure that their sons really were their own and not somebody else’s, a requirement which could only met through the institution of marriage, in which women were not only required to be virgins before they married but then had to stay faithful to their husbands for the rest of their lives, with severe punishments meted out to any woman who strayed, strongly suggesting, therefore, that women, just like men, are not naturally disposed to being constrained in this way.
If the institution of marriage was only introduced when we started owning property, as seems highly likely, this then has the further implication that hunter-gatherer families or clans were almost certainly ‘matriarchal’ in structure, a term which is very often misunderstood. Many people assume, for instance, that it means that the ‘matriarch’ or women in general were somehow in charge: they weren’t. It was just that all familial relationships ran through the female line, with fathers not actually being recognised.
This does not mean, of course, that children did not have biological fathers or that the biological function was not understood. Without a rigorously enforced institution of marriage, however, one could never be absolutely sure who the father was, with the result that no familial relationship between a man and a child was ever assumed unless it was mediated or transmitted via a woman. While most children would have had brothers, for instance – male siblings born to the same mother – and maternal uncles – the brothers of their mother – they did not have paternal uncles, for example – the brothers of their father – because their father simply wasn’t recognised as such.
This then had the further implication that, because a child’s biological father was not recognised as having any familial relationship to the child, he also had no role or responsibilities with respect to looking after the child. That role, in fact, fell to the child’s maternal uncles who, in the absence of fathers, were responsible for providing both for their sisters and their sisters’ children: a familial responsibility which led to some very strange taboos, as anthropologists studying matriarchal societies in the late 19th and early 20th centuries discovered.
Even when a woman was in a sexual relationship with a man, for instance, she was not allowed to share meals with him. This was because, had she done so, the man’s family would have been entitled to demand some form of payment from the woman’s family for supporting her: something upon which her brothers and maternal uncles would not have looked kindly and which they therefore did everything possible to prevent. The result was that even when a woman became pregnant, she still remained within her matrilineal family, which meant that, in the later stages of pregnancy in particular, she very often lost touch with the child’s father. By the time the child was weaned and she was ready to become sexually active again, therefore, the chances are that, even had she wanted to resume relations with the father, just like the males of other pack animal species, he would have already moved on, especially as, having already fathered a child, he is likely to have been a male of high status and value.
I say this because, from puberty onwards, most women in matriarchal societies would have spent most of their lives either pregnant or nursing a small child. While most fit and able men would have been ready for a sexual relationship at almost any time, most women, therefore, would not. This meant that those women who were available had the pick of the men and could always choose the strongest, fittest and most attractive, even if they were only of average attractiveness themselves. The result was that the same high value, high status men were chosen every time, with the further consequence that most men never got to mate and thus pass on their genes, thereby explaining why, today, we all have twice as many females ancestors as male.
2. The Pros & Cons of Marriage
In fact, 10,000 years ago, when the gradual introduction of monogamous marriage started to bring down the ratio, the number of females to males in our ancestry would have probably been even higher. When I first started researching this subject, in fact, I came across one article which estimated that the number could have been as high as 17:1, which would have had some seriously negative consequences for most hunter-gatherer clans.
I say this because while most women and a small number of men may have been perfectly happy with this situation, the vast majority of men, of course, would have been frustrated, angry and resentful, and would have almost certainly tried to force themselves on women whenever there was an opportunity. This is because, unlike female wolves, for instance, which are about the same size as their male counterparts and can therefore fight off unwanted male advances, on average, human females are much smaller than men and are thus relatively easy for men to subdue.
This disparity in size is due to the fact that the evolutionary success of human beings is almost entirely due to our large brains. For women, however, this comes at a very high price. Not only is the gestation period of a human baby much longer than that of a wolf, but human babies are much larger at birth than a litter of cubs. This means that human females have to cope for much longer with a much larger distended belly than female wolves, making it almost impossible for them to join their men in hunting. What’s more, human offspring are dependent on their mothers for much longer than most other species, further curtailing what their mothers are able to do even after the physical restrictions of pregnancy are over. Thus, while there is an evolutionary advantage to be gained by human males being as large, strong and fast as possible – in that it makes them more capable hunters – there is no such advantage to be had from human females being large, strong and fast, in that, for most of their lives, they wouldn’t be going hunting anyway.
In fact, there is actually an evolutionary advantage to be had from women being small. For the greater one’s lean body mass, the higher one’s metabolic rate: the amount of energy required to maintain the body in its current state. At a time when the amount food available was never certain, there was a far greater chance of a woman and her unborn child surviving, therefore, if the woman was small and her own nutritional requirements commensurately low.
The problem, of course, was that this put women in an extremely onerous position. For while they were required to select the men with whom they were willing to mate – in order to prevent men fighting and possibly killing each other for that honour – they were not equipped, in the way that other pack animals are, to defend themselves against the men they reject. In fact, it is unlikely that we could have evolved in the way we did if, in addition to men posing a threat to women, women hadn’t also had the protection of men, which would have been provided, not by the males within their matrilineal families, who are more likely to have been among their abusers, but by those fit, strong, alpha males whom they regularly selected as mates, and who would have had a vested interest in ensuring that the small number of women who were available to them at any one time were not removed from the mating pool for any significant period as a result of being made pregnant by men whom they regarded as their inferiors.
In fact, this would have been another reason why women would have always chosen the strongest, fittest and fastest men with whom to mate, in that they would then have fallen under their protection. It would, however, have created a considerable amount of tension and incipient violence within the clan: so much so, in fact, that a shrewd clan leader would have understood that, in order to maintain his position, he needed to channel the aggression of his fellow clansmen in the direction of other clans, keeping them loyal to himself by offering them the prospect of abducting another clan’s women, who, in the short term, at least – until they were assimilated into their new clan – would have then been used to keep the clan’s lesser males happy. In fact, so essential would this have been to the stability of the clan that it would have almost certainly been standard practice, especially as it was also standard practice for hunter-gatherer clans to split into two groups each day, with the men going off to hunt while the women and children went foraging, making them very easy targets.
Far from the peaceful, pastoral existence it is so often depicted as being, the life of a hunter-gatherer was thus extremely violent. In fact, another reason why we all have twice as many female ancestors as male would have been the very high mortality rate among men, with males not only being killed while hunting and in wars between clans over women but during the abduction of women, itself, when the male children within a foraging group would have been killed to prevent them growing up to wreak revenge upon their captors.
For men in particular, therefore, the transition from hunter-gather to settled farmer and, with it, the transformation of the entire structure of society would have been a great improvement, not least because it also transformed what had once been a purely physical competition between men into an essentially economic one, thereby enabling far more men – and men of a very different calibre – to win the favour of women. For in order to marry and have a family, it was now no longer enough for a man to be fit and strong and therefore able to fight off his competitors, if he wanted to lure a woman away from the relative security of her existing family, he now had to provide her with a home and a means of support: a new and additional requirement on men which was eventually to become the biggest economic driver in human history, incentivising men not just to work hard and scrape together a living, but to be inventive, resourceful and capable of building the kind of life a man could ask a woman to share.
Not, of course, that this happened over night, not least because, in any property or capital owning society, some men are inevitably more successful than others, with the result that throughout most of our pre-industrial history, wealth tended to accumulate in the hands of a small number of families, who then very often used it to prevent others from improving their economic position, thereby maintaining the status quo. Because this also had a tendency to lead to economic and social stagnation, however, it also led to such societies being regularly taken over – often quite violently – by a technologically more advanced society, which would have been more technologically advanced precisely because it allowed those inventive and resourceful individuals who were capable driving the society forward to rise within it.
A perfect example of this is ancient Rome, which came to dominate the Mediterranean world very largely because, during its republican period, it fostered a highly dynamic and entrepreneurial middle class, which, among its many other technological achievements, invented a hydraulic-setting cement which, when added to an aggregate, formed what the Romans called opus caementicium but which we now know as concrete. This, in turn, allowed other middle class entrepreneurs to build aqueducts and sewers, apartment blocks up to seven stories high and, of course, Roman roads, which allowed Roman generals to move armies at far greater speeds than any of their competitors and hence conquer most of the known world. Thus, while it may have been aristocratic members of the senatorial class who led Rome’s armies, it was middle class engineers and businessmen who, by continually striving to improve their station in life in order to marry and have a family, made it all possible.
The entrepreneurial inventiveness of competitors, however, was not the only driving force by which restrictively conservative and hence socially and economically stagnant societies could be overturned. Throughout history, this has also happened as a result of natural disasters, one of the most historically significant of which was the bubonic plague pandemic of the mid-14th century which effectively brought centuries of feudalism to an end. Up until then, the vast majority of people in Europe had been bound for life to their feudal lords, whose estates they were required to work in exchange for being allocated small strips of land which were barely large enough to keep them alive, let alone yield a profit. Because they neither owned the land on which they worked nor had the right to leave it, this meant that they were trapped in a state of serfdom for their entire lives without any prospect of economic or social improvement.
With respect to marriage, this meant that women were more or less in the same position they were in as matriarchal hunter-gatherers. For unable to choose a mate on the basis of his position or prospects, they ended up once again choosing the biggest, strongest and fittest man they could get, not only because his very fitness made him physically attractive but because it also made him capable of both fulfilling his duty to their feudal lord and producing as much food as possible from their own meagre plot of land.
This all changed, however, between 1346 and 1353, when the black death swept across Europe killing an estimated fifty million people – roughly half the population – leaving most feudal lords with insufficient serfs to work their estates, thereby creating a demand for labour which eventually brought feudalism to an end. For while some feudal lords tried to maintain the traditional feudal order – often by making terrible examples of any serf who tried to run away – others somewhat predictably adopted the more devious and temporarily more successful strategy of poaching what serfs remained from their neighbours, usually by offering them more land.
The problem with this strategy, however, was that it was therefore the aristocracy, themselves, who first broke the rules binding serfs to their masters: a contravention of the supposedly unalterable because divinely ordained social order which the serfs, of course, couldn’t help but notice, making them realise that they were not, after all, bound for life to a single master, that they could move from one master to another or, indeed, from one master to no master at all.
Again, of course, this did not all happen overnight. To varying degrees, the emancipation of their serfs was resisted by the aristocracy all across Europe. Once the idea of the sanctity of serfdom was broken, however, in the minds of free men it could not be easily reinstated, especially when its beneficial economic effects began to be seen. For it wasn’t just that peasants could now move from one landowner to another, they could actually leave the land altogether and make their way to the cities where, as a result of more and more men being willing to risk their live on voyages of discovery for the chance of making their fortunes, they could obtain paid employment in any one of the growing number of industries involved in foreign trade.
In 15th and 16th century London, for instance, they could always find work on the docks, or in ship building, or in sail or rope making, or in one of the many iron foundries that were then springing up across the city in order to supply the growing number of factories producing both tools and weapons. Then there were all the trades required to clothe, feed and house all this industry: the butchers, bakers, brewers, tailors, carpenters and stonemasons. Even more importantly, with the economy expanding so rapidly, there was always the possibility that, having learnt a trade as an apprentice or even as a mere labourer, an enterprising young man could go into business for himself, thereby adding to the burgeoning middle class which, just as in ancient Rome, was rapidly becoming the economic driver for an entire civilization. And just as in ancient Rome, what ultimately lay behind all this enterprise was, of course, the desire of most men to get married.
If there were any negative aspects to this revolution, in fact, it was with respect to women themselves. For while marriage was a major goal in the life for most men, for women it was somewhat different. I say this because for many women, especially middle class women, for whom there were very few employment options, it was more of a necessity. For having been removed from the matrilineal families, in which they had previously spent their entire lives, enjoying the freedom to have sex whenever they wanted it with the assurance that their children would be looked after by their mothers, brothers, sisters and maternal uncles, women who now failed to find husbands were condemned to a sexless and childless life in their parental home, where they would eventually be considered ‘old maids’. If a woman had a brother, who would one day inherit the family home, the prospect was even worse. For she would then end up living with him and his wife, who, being mistress of her husband’s household, quite naturally took precedence over her.
Faced with this prospect, it is hardly surprising, therefore, that many women undoubtedly accepted proposals of marriage from men they certainly didn’t love and possibly didn’t even like, an arrangement which would then have been further soured if the husband turned out to be less good at providing for his wife than he had made out in his suit, causing the marriage to spiral into a loveless pit of mutual recriminations and reciprocated disaffection, from which neither husband nor wife could ever escape.
Not, of course, that things were very much better for working class women. For while they could find employment and manage on their own if they had to, in many cases they had no choice. I say this because, except in the countryside, where landless farm labourers often received ‘tied’ cottages as part of their remuneration and could at least, therefore, provide a wife with a roof over her head, throughout most of the 16th, 17th and even 18th centuries, few working class men could actually afford to get married. In cities like London, in fact, the best chance most working class men and women had of marrying was to work in service in a household where they could either gain employment as a married couple or meet and get married with their employer’s consent. For many working class women, however, the only way they could survive in many of Europe’s larger cities was by resorting to prostitution, which flourished in Elizabethan London, for instance, precisely because there were so many working class men who could never afford to support a woman on a full time basis and whose only chance of ever getting one was to therefore pay for her by the hour.
It wasn’t until the industrial revolution started to dramatically increase overall wealth throughout the economy, therefore – not only elevating more people into the middle class but also making it possible for more working class people to marry – that marriage actually began to fulfil its potential, not only as an economic driver, but as a satisfactory solution to both men and women’s sexual needs. For as more men could afford to marry, women had more men to choose from. With more men to choose from, they therefore had less need to fear being ‘left on the shelf’ and could consequently take more time and care in making their selection. The more careful they were in their choice, the more likely they then were to end up in a happy and fulfilling marriage. And with happy wives, men, too, were happy.
The only problem was, of course, that women still didn’t really have a choice as to whether to get married or not. Even by the first half of the 20th century, employment prospects for women were still poor, not least because, fearing that women would cease working when they got married – if not immediately then when the first child came along – employers were reluctant to invest time and effort in training female staff. Because they couldn’t risk getting pregnant unless they had someone they could rely on to provide for them if they couldn’t work, this then more or less forced women to get married if they wanted to enjoy either a decent standard of living or a sex life.
Then, in 1960, the first reasonably safe, reliable and easy to use oral contraceptive came on to the market and the world changed as profoundly as it had done when we stopped being matriarchal hunter-gatherers and became patriarchal farmers.
3. The Need for a New Relational Paradigm
Again, it did not happen overnight, not least because, in this case, it proceeded in a series of cyclical feedback loops. The introduction of the pill meant that women could delay getting married and having children until much later than had previously been the case. This in turn meant that employers were more open to employing women in positions that were previously closed to them, thereby giving them more economic independence and allowing them to extend their period of sexual freedom still further. In this way, incremental increases in both sexual freedom and economic independence continually reinforced each other. They did so, however, in a way that was so gradual that hardly anyone would have noticed had the transformation not been so well publicised.
Even then, for those of us who lived through it, it seemed strangely remote: something that was happening somewhere but not wherever we were. When I was a teenager in the 1960s, for instance, swinging London, hippy culture and the summer of love were things we only watched on television. In small towns all across Britain, young men and women still assumed that, one day, they would get married and have children, just like their parents. Even when we went to university, for most of us ‘free love’ seemed more like a sensationalised projection of the media than anything real, especially as, by that time, a new socially conscious feminism had arrived on university campuses, which not only regarded hedonistic promiscuity as sexually exploitative of women but took the view that any man who didn’t take feminist politics seriously was a male chauvinist pig who wouldn’t, as a consequence, be getting any kind of love at all.
The result was total confusion. Most of us didn’t have a clue what was going on or how we were supposed to behave, and those who did were beginning to question whether the sexual revolution wasn’t a two edged sword, especially for men. For while there were some men who were undoubtedly enjoying the benefits of being serially selected by a whole procession of women eager to exercise their new sexual freedom, these were the same men they had always been: fit, attractive and self-confident, with all the trappings of success which such attributes brought with them. Most ordinary, averagely attractive, run-of-the-mill type men simply weren’t in that league. Worse still, traditional marriage, which had been the average man’s salvation for hundreds of years, allowing him to win a woman’s favour simply by proving to her that he would be a reliable, hard-working father for her children, now appeared to be slipping away from us. For if women were economically independent, they had no need for such a man or, if they did, it would be on radically different terms. For most men, therefore, it looked like we were heading back to the bad old days of matriarchal hunter gatherers, or would have done if we had actually thought in those terms.
The one thing in our favour – if a favour it actually was – was that the cycles of social transformation were not yet over. For as I have explained elsewhere, the fact that more and more women were now going out to work meant that the huge amount of goods and services they had once produced in the home without financial remuneration – from home cooked meals, to homemade clothes, to the care of both children and the elderly – were now being produced by the same women in paid employment. This meant that although there was no great increase in production – in that there was no great increase in the amount of these goods and services being consumed – there was an enormous increase in the money supply, resulting in massive but hidden inflation, which was not picked up by any price index due to the fact that all such indices only measure increases in the price of the same or similar goods and services over time, not the increased monetary cost of substituting home produced goods and services with their new commercially produced equivalents.
The result was a massive reduction in the real value of people’s wages, which meant that while a family with three, four or even five children had lived quite satisfactorily on the pay packet of one wage earner in the 1950s, by the 1990s, a family with just one child could barely manage with both parents working. This also meant that the economic independence of young women didn’t actually last very long. For over the same period, it became increasingly difficult for a single wage-earner, living on their own, to cover the cost of both their accommodation and all their other living expenses. The result was that most young people – both men and women – either had to share accommodation, dividing the rent between them, or remain at home, living with their parents in a kind of enforced extended adolescence, which has been getting steadily longer ever since.
This is largely because the devaluation of money and the need for both partners in a marriage to go out to work also resulted in increased government expenditure, particularly on things like child care and care for the elderly. This, in turn, naturally led to increases in taxation which then put up the cost of just about everything else. The result was that corporations throughout the developed world started relocating whatever production they could to countries with lower overheads. And although this was primarily restricted to large scale manufacturing operations, it inevitably had an effect on traditional supply chains, which often consisted of small to medium size businesses in the vicinity of the now relocated factories. These too, therefore, disappeared, along with thousands of highly paid jobs in both engineering and management, effectively hollowing out the middle class across both Europe and America.
Not, of course, that all such high paid jobs in industry were lost. Some, like those in construction, transport and the utilities, simply couldn’t be offshored and have therefore continued to provide the kind of employment which can still more or less support a traditional family. In most western countries, however, most of the employment that remained was in the service sector, where the jobs could be roughly divided into three main categories: high end service sector jobs such as those in finance, the media and central government; mid-tier service sector jobs such as those in law, medicine and higher education; and low end service sector jobs such as those in retail, hospitality, healthcare and social services.
Like the remaining well paid jobs in industry, the mid-tier service sector jobs in law, medicine and higher education are also sufficiently well paid to support a traditional family and, together, these two sectors of the economy constitute what is left of the middle class, which has remained relatively unchanged in its values and lifestyle over the last sixty years. The difference in pay between the high end and low end service sector jobs, however, represents a massive polarisation of society between those at the top and those at the bottom which has also given rise to a huge divergence in the values and approaches to life of the two groups, including their approaches to relations between men and women.
Of course, it could be argued that there has always been a substantial difference between the values of the upper class or aristocracy and those of the working class, and that this difference has always extended to the relations between men and women. After more than a century in which all layers in society subscribed to what was more or less the same social paradigm, however – one based on traditional marriage and the traditional family – for which the British Royal family was actually required to be a role model, forcing Edward VIII to abdicate in order to marry a divorcee, the divergence between the millionaire class and the rest of us, not just in wealth but in social attitudes, has never been so stark.
One sees this most clearly in the attitudes of the two classes towards money, with those at the top placing considerably more emphasis on its acquisition than those struggling to get by: a difference in attitude which may initially seem somewhat counterintuitive in that one would have assumed that it would be those without money who would place more emphasis on it. For those at the top, however, neither money, itself, nor its conspicuous expenditure on everything that can be tastefully bought with it, has anything to do with the pleasure or satisfaction to be gained from owning material possessions. For both men and women, in fact, it has far more to do with the social status such possessions bestow on those wealthy enough to afford them. After all, one does not buy a Rolex because it is a good watch, but because it is a Rolex.
If it is status, rather than money, that both men and women in the upper echelons of society primarily seek, however, the value they each place on it is slightly different, with women nearly always regarding status as an end in itself – a sign in a feminist age that they have ‘made it’ – whereas for men, its value lies predominantly in what it brings them: the interest of women. In fact, for women, having a high status may actually have a negative effect upon their personal lives, in that, due to our evolution as pack animals, most men will not approach a woman with a higher status than their own. A high status woman who wishes to have a sex life, therefore, either has to find herself a ‘toy boy’ – a lower status male who is willing to accept the disdain of other men and, indeed, of many women, for trading on his good looks and physical fitness to obtain other benefits – or attract a mate of equal or higher status than her own: something which is not impossible – one does occasionally come across ‘power couples’ who are celebrated for their almost fairy tale relationship – but is very rare. This is largely because, by not committing to such a relationship, high status males can of course allow themselves to be serially selected by an endless procession of attractive women who have been drawn to such men ever since our species first drew breath.
No matter which category they fall into, for most women at this top end of society, therefore, the result is less than satisfactory. A high status woman can always, of course, bask in her achievement and focus on her career; but she will very probably end up doing so alone. Similarly, those very attractive women who are able to serially pursue high status males may well have a lot of fun in doing so, enjoying all that life has to offer; but at some point, as I have heard many of these women complain, they hit what is known as ‘the wall’. As their biological clocks tick down and they start to feel the need for a more serious and permanent relationship, the high value males they pursue simply stop asking them out and turn their attention, instead, to younger models.
The mistake this second group of women make, however, is not merely that of failing to realise that the men they pursue have no reason to change their behaviour, it is more that the change they want from these men is not merely behavioural: it is rather a change in the paradigm upon which the relations between men and women in this group are largely based. I say this because, at the risk of stating the obvious, up until the point at which these women discover that it is no longer working for them, the paradigm upon which they had been basing their lives was clearly a modern version of the matriarchal paradigm in which both men and women enjoy serial affairs without commitment, the main difference being that, whereas in the prehistoric version, it was the men in a woman’s matrilineal family who were responsible for supporting her, in the modern version, the women have to find some way of supporting themselves, even if part of the means by which they achieve this is provided by whoever picks up their hotel and restaurant bills and pays for the flights to their latest holiday destination. The problem is that, while women may still expect men to pay for them in this way, it is quite another thing for them to expect men to actually revert to the traditional patriarchal paradigm in which men commit to taking economic responsibility for women in return for what, for the price of a shopping trip to Dubai, they are already enjoying, especially as the eventual and highly predictable termination of this commitment is likely to be very expensive.
More to the point, these two paradigms do not merely characterise two different ways in which sexual relations between men and women may be conducted, they are actually the bases of two completely different social orders – those of the matriarchal clan and the patriarchal family – which are not only incompatible but are highly inimical to each other, making it very difficult for them to stably coexist. What this suggests, therefore, is that, in the higher echelons of our current society, their present coexistence represents what is still very probably a transitional phase, in which either of the old paradigms may yet prevail or an entirely new paradigm emerge.
Nor are things significantly less complicated at the other end of the economic spectrum, where those in low end service sector jobs have no choice but to form stable, long term economic partnerships if they are ever to escape the parental home or the accommodation they share with friends and establish a home of their own. The problem in their case, however, is that, after going to university and obtaining a degree which adds nothing to their earning potential while saddling them with a whole load of debt, most of them don’t realise the truth about their situation until they are in their early thirties, when they may then have a great deal of difficulty finding the right economic partner.
This is partly due to the fact that, in going to university, they may well have become separated from the group of friends with whom they grew up, especially if they did not return to their home town on completing their degree but found a job elsewhere. Without an existing network of friends, this then makes it very difficult to make new friends, a problem which is not significantly ameliorated by social media and online dating apps, not least because online dating apps, in particular, tend to promote dishonesty and superficiality.
When choosing a photograph for our online profile, for instance, we always choose the most flattering. Similarly, when providing our personal details and a list of interests, we tend to emphasise those activities which make us seem more interesting, even if we have only ever watched them on television. Worse still, when it comes to making our own selection of other people’s profiles, we give most of them about two seconds consideration before moving on with a dismissive swipe.
Is it any wonder, therefore, that most people are generally disappointed by the whole exercise? More to the point, this is not the way to meet the economic partner we are going to work with and rely on for the rest of our lives, who is far more likely to be found in a social setting which, initially at least, has nothing to do with dating. For it is only when we interact and converse with others in a less artificial context, in which we are not actually trying to impress anyone, that we tend to reveal our true selves while simultaneously discovering qualities in others which we would never have gleaned from an online profile.
Even if people are lucky enough to find the right partner for themselves in this more informal and old-fashioned way, however, this is only the beginning of a couple’s uphill economic journey together. For even with their two salaries, they are probably going to have to work all the hours they can, not only to cover their current living expenses, but to put money aside for a deposit on a home of their own, something which can take years and will probably require them to make considerable sacrifices, like not going out at weekends, for instance, or taking holidays, all of which will put enormous strain on their relationship and may eventually lead them to ask the all-important question: ‘Why are we doing this? What is it all for?’ questions which would once have prompted the simple and unequivocal answer: ‘For the children’, but which is now less and less applicable or relevant. For having only met in their early thirties and spent years saving up to put a deposit on a house, many couples today will never actually have children.
In fact, the cost of buying a home and the need for couples to put off having children for as long as possible is one of the main reasons why the fertility rate in most developed countries is well below the global population replacement rate of 2.1, with the UK’s fertility rate currently standing at just 1.56. While this may represent a serious demographic problem for national governments, however, for married couples it can actually be disastrous. For while children can put additional strains on a marriage, forcing couples to work even harder, they also provide a common purpose without which many couples may simply drift apart or even come to the conclusion that there’s just no point in carrying on.
One possible solution, of course, is for couples to find some other project they can work on together, one very obvious candidate being that of starting a business, which, if successful, would have the additional benefit of improving their economic position. Indeed, it’s possible that, just as the lure of marriage was once our civilization’s biggest economic driver, motivating men to succeed in business so as to be able to afford a wife, so the need for married couples to find an alternative purpose in life may now not only help reverse the West’s economic decline but may actually come to constitute a new paradigm for relations between men and women: marriage not just as an economic partnership but as a business partnership.
Not only does starting a business require a high degree of business acumen, however, as well as a huge amount of determination and hard work, but it also requires a great deal of sacrifice, which, if the business is run by a married couple, may mean them giving up having a family, which they may then come to regret, especially if the business is a success and they have no one to leave it to. While starting a business may be a solution for some couples, therefore, it is probably not a universal panacea.
Another purposeful activity to which it seems that couples have increasingly devoted themselves in recent years is therefore political activism – especially with respect to issues such as climate change – which may well have proliferated over the last two decades precisely because it not only binds couples together in shared values but fills the vacuum created by them not having anything more personally meaningful in their lives. What this really tells us, however, is just how big a loss the decline in traditional marriage has been to many people. For while the freedom to have sex without having children may have given us far more choices in life than we ever had before, not only does this make making a choice that much more difficult, but the one choice which most of us always had and which made life that much simpler – that of getting married and having kids – has now been largely taken away from us, leaving us with an empty space which many of us are now struggling to fill.
4. Hatred and Other Mental Illnesses
One of the groups which struggles most in this respect, of course, is that comprising men who are never selected by women partly because they have no direction in life: a man with neither goals nor the energy and determination to achieve them being the last thing a woman looking for an economic partner needs. In one of the most vicious of all vicious circles, however, one of the reasons these men have no direction in life is because they know that they are never going to be chosen by a woman, making their whole lives seem rather pointless. This, in turn, not only drains them of all ambition but of all confidence, making them doubly unattractive to women and sending them into a spiral of lethargic despondency in which they don’t even try to get a place of their own or make progress in their careers, seeking comfort instead in the solitary pleasures of video games, online pornography and over-eating, thereby putting on weight and further confirming them in their self-fulfilling belief that they have no chance of ever getting a woman.
While most men in this position simply succumb to a life of loneliness and quiet despair, however, given a little encouragement, some men can start to project the cause of all their woes onto others, specifically women, whom they can come to hate not merely because it is women who deny them what they most want and need, but because the denial alters the nature of the desire, turning it into a desire to destroy the desired object in order to overcome the humiliation of being denied it.
If this seems slightly contradictory or paradoxical it is because hatred, itself, is slightly contradictory. I say this because, as I have explained elsewhere, far from being what most people think it is, hatred, like envy, to which it is closely related, is an essentially upward looking emotion. That is to say that we can only hate someone or some group of people if we consciously or unconsciously look up to them in some way or regard them as in some sense superior to ourselves. Consciously or unconsciously, we may admire them, for instance, or want to be like them. In some cases, we may even feel that we have relationship with them. We see this most clearly, for instance, in the way some fans feel that they are in some kind of relationship with their idol, or the way a stalker may feel that he is in some kind of relationship with the woman he is stalking. Then, one day, we discover that far from having any relational ties to us, or even any regard for us, the person we so admire has never even noticed us or, worse still, looks down on us with contempt or disdain. Not only does this therefore reinforce our conscious or unconscious sense of inferiority, but it also makes us ashamed, both of what we are and for being so foolish as to think that we could ever be accepted as equals by these people: a painful realisation of the truth which, if we let it, can then gnaw away at us, turning our former admiration into resentment and hatred.
Importantly, this is not an inevitable or necessary reaction. Most people, in fact, simply crawl away somewhere to hide their shame from the world. In order to transform it and redirect it back towards its proximate cause requires either a predisposition towards blaming others for our own failings or, perhaps more commonly, the prompting of a third party: a friend who, in coming to our defence, asks ‘What makes that bitch think she’s any better than us?’ a question which, once we have thought about it, enables us to channel our hurt feelings into vengeful indignation which seems not just justified but righteous.
In another slightly odd twist, another important characteristic of hatred is that its cause does not have to be real. Not only may the slight or offence we feel we have received have been entirely unintentional – indeed, if someone has merely failed to notice us, it can hardly have been deliberate – but it can also be entirely imaginary. The misogynist who hates women, for instance, does not have to have been repeatedly rejected by women to feel that they look down on him. In fact, he may never have even had the nerve to approach a woman to find out. Based on his sense of inadequacy, however, he believes that he would be rejected if he were to approach a woman and hates women precisely because it is this belief that makes him feel inadequate.
An even more important attribute of hatred, however, is that it loves a crowd or, more precisely, a mob. That’s not to say, of course, that individuals cannot hate. When they do so, however, the hatred tends to be personal in the sense that it is directed at another individual rather than a group. Hatred directed against groups, in contrast, tends to be generated by groups, who continually remind each other of their grievances against those they hate, thereby not only continually rubbing the sore, but making it virtually impossible for group members to dwell on their own inferiority or inadequacy, as this would necessarily involve projecting this inferiority or inadequacy on to the group as a whole, which other members of the group would staunchly reject as being offensive and hence hateful.
Just as importantly, mobs also give people the freedom to indulge violent emotions which they would not be allowed to indulge in everyday society. This is especially the case if the mob also confers anonymity on its members, as is commonly the case with respect to most social media platforms, where men are now increasingly posting misogynistic comments of which they would be ashamed if they appeared under their own name. I say this because even though we try to deny it, even to our ourselves – or more especially to ourselves – everyone who hates knows that their hatred is fundamentally based upon a sense of their own inferiority or inadequacy and that the expression of this hatred consequently reveals them to be what they are, of which, of course, they are inherently ashamed.
My point in explaining all this, however, is not merely to answer the question I tangentially asked at the beginning of this essay as to why misogynistic online trolling is on the increase, or even to explain why merely labelling it a hate crime completely fails to explain it if we do not first understand what hatred actually is, which most people don’t. My point has rather been to explain why, even if one does understand the nature of hatred, one cannot understand why men hate women unless one also understands the role women play in natural selection. For unless one understands that women are genetically programmed to always choose the fittest and strongest men with whom to mate and that they are programmed to do this because it gives them the best chance of having strong, healthy children who are more likely to survive and hence pass on this very same genetic programming to their own children, one cannot understand why those men who do not make the grade should feel so humiliated by what is, in effect, an evolutionary rejection by their own species that they actually hate women as a result.
Even more importantly, unless we understand all this and can also make the misogynist understand it, we have no chance of making him realise that women are not to blame. After all, evolution is not a cognitive process: women don’t choose to be genetically programmed in this way. If there is any fault to be assigned here, therefore, it belongs squarely on the shoulders of the men, themselves, for not coming up to scratch. Even this, however, is a little unfair. For it is not only nature that has dealt men such a lousy hand, we too – which is to say society – must also take some of the blame for the invidious position in which many men now find themselves, which is at least partly due to the fact that, in recent years, we have conspicuously failed to teach them how to be better at being men: a responsibility which was once seen as a priority in the education of boys but which has now more or less disappeared from our education system.
That this is something to which I can personally attest is due to the fact that, during the 1960s, I attended an all-male grammar school where the all-male teaching staff imposed on us a highly disciplined regime specifically designed not just to turn us into men but men of certain character. Each week, as a consequence, we had six periods of physical education, which, for most of the year, consisted in playing rugby, an extremely physical sport which not only made us physically fit but also taught us courage, confidence and fortitude. I say this because I know from experience that it is only when one has tackled someone larger than oneself and successfully brought them down that one acquires the courage and confidence to do it again and again and again. Even more importantly, it is only when one has been kneed in the face a few times while making such tackles that one eventually learns, not only how to keep one’s head out of the way of galloping knees, but how to shrug off such knocks and get on with the game.
Being an all-male school, another important lesson we were taught was how to be gentlemen: how to always treat others with politeness, courtesy and respect, thereby making the world what I like to think is a slightly more civilized place in which to live. We were also taught never to lie, in that, in lying, we render our word worthless, and never to cheat , in that, in cheating, we pretend to be better than we are instead of actually working to make ourselves better, thereby doing a disservice to ourselves. Most importantly of all, however, we were taught that when we did something wrong and were subsequently confronted by it – as we usually were – we didn’t try to weasel our way out of it, which only worsened our offense, but owned up to it ‘like a man’, which is also how we took our punishment.
Of course, many people today would say that this was a very harsh regime. And, in many ways, it was. I, for one, however, would not have had it any other way, in that nothing else could have so prepared me – physically, intellectually and morally – for the life I have lived or made me the man I like to think I became. For, in this, of course, the post-feminists are correct: men don’t come out of the womb fully formed; they have to be made. The mistake the post-feminists make, however, is to suppose that this making of a man starts with a blank canvas, when, in fact, the starting point is already the result of thousands of years of evolution, upon which one can work to bring out the best of those attributes with which nature has endowed the males of our species, but which one cannot simply ignore or deny. For if we deny that there is something that it is inherently like to be a man, which differentiates men from women, not only have we absolutely no chance of instilling in our young men those very qualities of fortitude, honesty and gentlemanliness which most women almost certainly want in their men, but we risk storing up a whole heap of troubles for ourselves when men do not then act in the way we want them to. Indeed, a society which does not train its young men to be the best men possible has only got itself to blame when it all goes horribly wrong.
If our failure to teach men how to be men results in misogynistic online trolling, however, this is a relatively minor issue when compared to some of the even more profound problems that can occur as a result of our underlying refusal to differentiate between men and women. For hatred is not the only mental illness that can arise when we do not have a strong and robust sense of who and what we are, especially in the case of children, who invariably prefer clarity and certainty to ambiguity and vagueness, especially with respect to such fundamental issues as their gender. After all, whether one is a boy or a girl tends to determine many other things in one’s life, from the clothes one wears to the games one plays. To be told, while still a child, therefore, that one’s gender is a matter of choice, rather than one of life’s absolute certainties, can be both confusing and unsettling, much like being told that one’s mum isn’t one’s mum.
Not, of course, that I know for certain what is actually being taught in schools these days. I am not a parent of school age children and, even if I were, most parents only get occasional glimpses of what goes on beyond the school gates. It is also highly likely that what is reported in the media is greatly exaggerated. The mere fact that a transgender debate concerning prepubescent children exists, however, and that teachers can lose their jobs for misgendering a child, suggests that something very disturbing is happening. In fact, it reminds me of what is probably the most famous aphorism of the now not quite so famous leader of the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s and 70s, Dr. Ronnie Laing, who wrote in ‘The Divided Self’ that ‘for every disturbed person in the world, there is usually at least one disturbing person’, someone who, despite appearing perfectly normal, is usually the more profoundly disturbed of the two.
What makes this comment not just highly relevant, however, but slightly ironic, is the fact that, as well as being the leader of the anti-psychiatry movement in the 1960s and 70s, Laing was also a researcher and clinician at the Tavistock Clinic in London, an institution that is now heavily embroiled in the transgender controversy, the irony being, therefore, that, from Laing’s point of view, those who are currently disturbing children by telling them that they can be whatever gender they want to be – including clinicians at his own former institute – would almost certainly be regarded as, themselves, suffering from a mental illness. What is also highly relevant is the fact that it is one of the most prevalent mental illnesses in the world today. For in its most generic form, it is nothing other than the mass delusion of our era that there is no immutable reality, that reality is whatever we want it to be, such that if a boy wants to be a girl, he can be a girl.
What really makes this particular delusion so dangerous, however, is not just how much damage it can do to those who are adversely affected by it, such as children who are led to believe that they were born with the wrong genitalia, but the fact that it remains largely undiagnosed and is regarded by most people as entirely normal. The result is that it is on the rise almost everywhere, in almost every sphere of thought. Nowhere is it more conspicuous, for instance, than in the kind of economics that has brought us to the point where we can no longer afford to have children, unless, of course, they are paid for by the state: a recourse which, far from being a solution, is actually the cause of the problem, stemming as it does from this same delusion that reality is whatever we want it to be. The only difference, in this case, is that the new reality we believe we can wish into being simply by declaring it so is not a different gender but an entire fantasy world in which the state can and therefore should be the universal provider, conjuring money out of thin air to pay for everything we need.
The inevitable consequence of this fantasy, however, is a massive rise in the UK’s national debt, which currently stands at £2.98 trillion or 108% of GDP. The fact that no one seems to be alarmed by this, moreover, is yet another sign of how detached from reality we have become. For the reality, of course, is that, eventually, the lenders of all this money will not only realise that it can never be repaid – which they probably already know – but will actually start to worry that, at some point, the UK Treasury will not even be able to pay the interest on it and will therefore stop lending us any more money, thereby causing the UK government to default and the entire economy to collapse.
Nor is the UK alone in this regard. Just about every country in the western world is in a similar position, which, given the interconnectedness of all our economies, means that, once one economy fails, the rest are likely to follow suit. In fact, we are almost certainly heading for the worst economic collapse since bubonic plague first arrived in Europe in the 6th century and proceeded to decimate the continent’s entire population: a demographic and economic disaster which is perhaps most startlingly illustrated by what happened to the population of Rome, which fell from around a million to just 10,000 in little more than a century.
Indeed, so difficult is it to grasp the magnitude of this catastrophe that it is actually quite helpful to look at it purely through the lens of some of its more extraordinary economic consequences, one of the most historically interesting of which is the fact that, by the middle of the 7th century, there was no one left who remembered how to make cement, which had the further consequence that concrete was not used in the European construction industry for the next five hundred years, until it was effectively reinvented in the 12th century. Even then, it was not as good as the concrete Roman engineers had used and didn’t meet Roman standards again until the 17th century, a thousand years after it had disappeared.
The reason I mention this little known historical fact, however, is not just to point out how fragile and precarious all civilizations are or even to reinforce the point I made earlier in this essay that natural disasters, such as the return of bubonic plague in the 14th century, are one of the primary causes of economic upheaval. My reason for resorting to yet another historical illustration – which I realise I tend to do quite frequently – is rather to emphasise a point I have been trying to make throughout this essay: that, whatever the cause of a particular economic change, whether it be a pandemic or the invention of a new technology such as the contraceptive pill or, indeed, a wishful delusion about what is economically sustainable, economic changes almost always lead to social changes, including changes in the relations between men and women. Given the magnitude of the economic storm that is currently heading our way, it is highly unlikely, therefore, that the economic and social changes we have witnessed over the last sixty years, enormous though they have been, have yet come to an end.
Not, of course, that I or anyone else is in a position to say what relations between men and women will look like when the dust has finally settled. Given that most national governments will be bankrupt, however, and that the state as the universal provider will have ceased to exist, the one thing of which we can be absolutely certain is that we are going to be served a massive dose of reality, not just with respect to the economic facts of life but, more particularly, with regard to relations between men and women, which it will no longer be possible to base on what either men or women may wish, but will have to be grounded, once again, in what evolution has handed us and the unforgiving reality of the world in which we find ourselves. The question, of course, is whether we can make a better job of it this time than in our last two attempts.
