Woman: An Intimate Geography (49 page)

Read Woman: An Intimate Geography Online

Authors: Natalie Angier

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males unequivocally dominate females. Among bonobos, the fabricated sisterhood gives females the edge over males. Among chimpanzees, males wage war against other troops of chimpanzees, sometimes to the point of committing genocide. Among bonobos, warfare is quite rare, although not unheard of. Chimpanzees have a keen appetite for monkey flesh; bonobos eat little meat. On the face of it, then, chimpanzees sound more hominid than bonobos do, yet the fossil evidence suggests that bonobos rather than chimpanzees are most like the primogenitor species from which the three of us sprang. In other words, bonobos may be a more ancestral species, while chimpanzees and we are the derived apes. Many evolutionary and anthropological reconstructions of protohuman societies have relied extensively on analogies between us and chimpanzees, as though we evolved from a chimpanzee-like ancestor. This assumption is open to question. In our restless lunges at metaphor, it is arbitrary to choose chimpanzees and ignore bonobos. The bonobo phylogeny is a legitimate sister archive, worth rifling through to collate and comprehend our own. ''Our lineage," said Frans de Waal, who has written about bonobos, "is more flexible than we thought."
In the annals of our primate pasts, females are drawn to other females for strength. The females may be related or they may not be, and they may have to prove themselves or they may have been born to greatness, but the recurring theme is one of coalition and desire, of an aggressive need for female alliance. Here is the possible cradle of the fantasy best friend, and the reason that we care so much about girls and our position in the peerage, and that our female friendships feel like life and death as we steer our rickety little canoe through the breakers of childhood.
Female primates are not goo-girls, and they fight, and they're hierarchical and greedy, and they can be murderous toward each other. Nevertheless, the primate norm is a chronicle of female interdependence, of (dare I dip into archaisms?) female solidarity; and here is where we differ from most of our primate cousins. The question is, why? What does it mean, and does it matter? In the majority of human cultures today, and historically and presumably prehistorically as well, women do not live and have not lived in anything like a gynocracy. Nor do they inevitably rally to the cause of women's rights or think it is in their best

 

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interests to do so, with the result that, as the historian Gerda Lerner has noted, women are "ignorant of their history" and have had to "reinvent the wheel over and over again," the wheel being "the awareness of women that they belong to a subordinate group; that they have suffered wrongs as a group; that their condition of subordination is not natural, but is societally determined; that they must join with other women to remedy these wrongs; and finally, that they must and can provide an alternate vision of societal organization in which women as well as men will enjoy autonomy and self-determination." The subordination of women is not natural, not at all, and it is different in kind from anything seen in nature among other primates, who, as we've seen, join with other females on a habitual basis as well as spat with other females on a habitual basis, the predominant theme being barter and mutual, aggressively animated respect, gal to gal.
Evolutionary theorists such as Barbara Smuts and Patricia Adair Gowaty lately have emphasized the great efforts that the males of many species go to as they strive to control and monopolize female sexuality, to call it their own. The theorists have described the toll that the diverse forms of male coercion and male harassment take on females. Male chimpanzees slap, kick, and bite to force females to obey them, to follow them if they're going somewhere. If they see a female consort socializing with another male, they attack the female rather than the male. Male dolphins swim in violent synchronous patterns, slapping their flippers on the water and breaching the surface in unison, all to intimidate and corral fertile females for themselves. A female olive baboon can expect to be severely wounded by a male at least once a year her flesh gouged, a piece of ear bitten off. Males and females of many species, particularly primates, may also get along, form friendships, and be affectionate and gentle with one another over a lifetime.
Aggression, placation, no matter: male efforts to manhandle female sexuality are at best limited. Whatever the female suffers at the hand of a male, or whatever she doesn't suffer, she is still, in a basic sense, an independent operator. That is, she feeds herself. She is not fed. She is not supported. She is on her own. A male may try to control her movements and her sexuality, but he can go only so far. Really, how much can he restrain her or manipulate her when she, in the end, will be out there foraging for her lunch, and will be the exclusive parent for

 

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her young, and will not need him for her daily survival? A male chimpanzee may be dominant over a female in certain one-on-one encounters, and he may be able to chase her away from the best cache of fruit if the two of them are within visual and olfactory range of each other. Nonetheless, the female can and does move on, to find another source of food. A male chimpanzee may punish a female with kicks and grunts when he finds her pulling ticks from a lesser male's coat. He may want to dictate the terms of her sexuality, and why not? It is in his reproductive interest to try to do so. He is not being mean for meanness's sake. He wants to procreate, and he's not a yeast cell he can't just divide in two. He needs female chimpanzees if his genetic legacy is to survive, and if he has to beat them and squawk at them as he strives to get his way, he'll beat and squawk. Yet females are unfazed and unpersuaded. A recent DNA study of a group of chimpanzees in the Tai forest of Africa's Ivory Coast showed, to the astonishment of primatologists, that more than half the offspring in the clan had been fathered by males other than the males in residence. Primatologists did not expect to see such evidence of female restlessness. Female chimpanzees are hardly chaste, and when they are in estrus they are sexually quite active, but it was thought that they restricted their activities to the males within the group. They did not. Somehow, despite the vigilance of the local males and their regular use of intimidation, scowling, grunting, and slapping upside the head, the females had sauntered off and mated with outsiders. Who the outsiders were remains unknown. Presumably the females had their reasons for leaving home base and seeking foreign affairs. And when they returned, their lives were the same the daily grind, the daily foraging, the nursing of the young.
Only among humans have males succeeded in stepping between a woman and a meal, in wresting control of the resources that she needs to feed herself and her children. Only among humans is the idea ever floated that a male
should
support a female, and that the female is in fact incapable of supporting herself and her offspring, and that it is a perfectly reasonable act of quid pro quo to expect a man to feed his family and a woman to be unerringly faithful, to give the man paternity assurance and to make his investment worthwhile. "I am convinced that male control over productive resources needed by women to reproduce lies at the heart of the transformation from male-dominated male-

 

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philopatric primate societies to full-fledged patriarchy," Sarah Blaffer Hrdy has written.
We don't know when this transformation took place, when women found themselves butting up against a male breastplate every time they tried to locate food or a place to curl up and slumber. By the standard model of human evolution, the long dependency of children necessitated increased paternal investment in a child's welfare, and women wanted, needed, demanded male help in rearing children; males could provide that help by hunting and bringing home meat, which is rich in calories and appeals to the hominid tongue so smartly. By this scenario, the origins of marriage, the human pair bond, and of female dependency on males are ancient, hundreds of thousands of years old, from an inchoate epoch that evolutionary theorists refer to as the "environment of evolutionary adaptation," when we supposedly became us, genetically and predispositionally. And by this scenario a woman began seeking in a man the signs of wealth and prowess and the wherewithal to support her and her children, while a man began seeking in a woman the signs of fecundity, a youthful capacity to breed a large brood, as well as the signs that such fecundity would be reserved for him, the provider: if he was to invest in her and her offspring, he did not want to be investing in offspring that were not his.
Now the conventional model of man the hunter is under persuasive attack, called into question by Kristen Hawkes and many others, whose recent analyses of traditional foraging societies suggest that male hunting counts for very little in the daily sustenance of their families and that a network of women gathers most of the calories to keep the kinfolk fed. The new work suggests that among ancestral humans, women still had a strong degree of autonomy, as chimpanzee females do, as the females of all other primate species do, and that "the patriarchy," the "nuclear family" call it what you will, but it is the dependence of women on men for their bacon and bread is, at least on a large and codified scale, a fairly recent event in human prehistory. The transformation may be one of the fruits of the agricultural revolution, as a number of historians and evolutionary scientists have proposed. "With the advent of intensive agriculture and animal husbandry, women, by and large, lost control over the fruits of their labors," Smuts has written. "Foraging and nomadic slash-and-burn horticulture

 

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require vast areas of land and mobile females, making it more difficult for men to control women's resource base and to restrict women's movements. However, when women's labor is restricted to a relatively small plot of land, as in intensive agriculture, or is restricted primarily to the household compound, as in animal husbandry, it is easier for men to control both the resource base upon which women depend for subsistence and women's daily movements."
The real innovation, if you want to call it that, in the evolution of patriarchy was the perfection of male alliances. Among most primates, females form alliances and males do not. Among chimpanzees, males form rudimentary alliances with each other, and they sometimes control females, but the alliances are usually unstable, and females resist and they can resist, for they are self-supporting. Among humans, men are brilliant at allying themselves with other men, politically, religiously, intellectually, emotionally. Such alliances have served many purposes and have enriched and glorified and defiled our strut across this mortal stage, but not the least reason for male collaboration has been to extend and refine what chimpanzee males attempt in crude fashion, which is to control the means of reproduction, which of necessity involves the control of women. We think of male dominance as the corollary of male superiority in size and strength, but most male monkeys are larger and stronger than female monkeys and still they cannot subdue the females. Female alliances keep females free. When men learned the value of befriending other men, when they saw that their interests converged more often than they conflicted, whoops, there went female freedom.
The progression of patriarchy and its specific impact on women throughout prehistory and history is a long and involved tale, which has been explored beautifully by Gerda Lerner and others. It is a tale that will never be wholly understood. By the time written records first appeared, much of the social, economic, political, and emotional underpinnings of the fatherland already were in place and women had already accepted their secondary status. Three thousand years ago, for example, a Mesopotamian princess prayed not for her salvation but for the preservation of her lord, "that I for my part may prosper under his protection."
Women needed male protection because alliances among men were often military pacts, the combining of forces to capture what others

 

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have. And one of the earliest and most favored forms of booty to be seized was young women. When two tribes clashed, the victorious group killed the male prisoners and took the females back as slaves and breeders. The capture of females enhanced the reproductive potential of the triumphant males, and it enhanced their status as well. Wherever there are written records, the records describe the raping and taking of women in the aftermath of war. In Homer's
Iliad
, presumed to reflect social conditions in Greece circa 1200
B.C.
, the warriors haggle, sometimes petulantly, over the proper distribution of female spoils. Early in the narrative, King Agamemnon reluctantly agrees to give up his favorite concubine, Chryseis, a highborn war captive, when her priest father threatens to take his case to the gods. Agamemnon demands another woman in compensation for the loss, but his men point out that all the female captives already have been claimed. Being king, Agamemnon turns around and claims Achilles's concubine-slave Briseis for himself. That act very nearly leads to defeat for the Athenians, for Achilles spends much of the Trojan War sulking over the indignity in his tent and seeking the sexual sustenance of another of his concubines, "one he had taken from Lesbos, Phorbas's daughter, Diomede, of the fair coloring." Achilles shares the tent with another warrior, Patroklos, who has in his bed a gift from Achilles: Iphis, the "fair-girdled," whom Achilles captured when he conquered the city of Enyeus. Girls, girls, girls! We don't hear much from these captive women, of course, nor learn how they felt about being shuffled from man to man like baseball cards. Chances are they didn't raise a fuss. They were thankful to be alive. After all, there is no mention in the poem of enslaved men; the men of Enyeus, Lesbos, Troy, and other defeated poleis were slaughtered. Eventually, of course, men learned how to enslave other men as they did women, and to use men's muscle as they might use mules and oxen; but as a number of historians have argued and the evidence strongly suggests, the first human slaves were women, and the impetus behind slavery was the possession of nubile wombs.
The fact that female slaves were debauched by their abduction and that their humanity was peeled and shucked, as happens in slavery, and the fact that female slaves almost invariably served as concubines to their conquerors, helped to codify a distasteful mental association (which persists to this day) between the carnal female and the degraded

 

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