Historically Women Had Sexual Freedom

And patriarchy is less than 10 thousand years old

As someone who has spent the past 20 years or so studying our current social system and the ones that came before it, it disturbs me to no end when I read things that indicate the belief that all cultures have always been this way, with men as the head of the family and that patriarchy is ubiquitous. Quite often these comments are being made by progressive people who are advocating for a more egalitarian world. What they don’t seem to realize is that for most of human history, that is exactly what we had.

For 97% of human history, paternity was not that important, and consequently, women had a lot of sexual freedom. Descent was marked through mothers and not fathers. Even though pair bonding and marriage were part of the social structure, strict sexual exclusivity was not expected for women. That only came into being relatively recently when our social system became patrilineal. That’s not what we were taught, but what we were taught was wrong.

How do I know that? Well, let’s start with biology first. There is indeed a strong biological impulse to propagate ones’ DNA. The head of a man’s penis is shaped the way that it is in order to displace any other viable semen that might be in the vaginal canal, where it can live for up to 48 hours. The reason that men tend to lose most of their erection after they ejaculate is to keep them from displacing their own semen.

The head of a human penis would not have evolved to serve this function if the theory that women only want one provider for their offspring were true. If it were, she would only desire to mate with that one promising provider. And with the onset of patriarchy, there would have been no need for the coercive control of women, if they were actually inclined towards monogamy as the theory suggests. But that isn’t the case. Women are actually less inclined towards monogamy than men are, and patriarchy did require strict new controls of female sexuality in order to ensure paternity.

Partible paternity is still practiced in some indigenous cultures in South America, wherein a woman has sex with several men and names them all as fathers for her child. This is contrary to the Standard Model of Human Evolution, which says that “A woman having sex with another man is always a threat to the man’s genetic interests, because it might fool him into working for a competitor’s genes.”

However, even in present times, partible paternity is a cultural phenomenon that occurs in South American tribes that are spread throughout the continent. It has also been found in other parts of the world. Based on the extensive study of modern partible paternity, “It is difficult to come to any conclusion except that partible paternity is an ancient folk belief capable of supporting effective families, families that provide satisfactory paternal care of children and manage the successful rearing of children to adulthood. The distributional evidence argues that it is possible to build a biologically and socially competent society — a society whose members do a perfectly adequate job of reproducing themselves and their social relations — with a culture that incorporates a belief in partible paternity.”

In other words, families and societies, both in the past and in current times, do fine without adhering to the Standard Model, which says that women favor monogamy as a way to best ensure the health and wellbeing of their children and that men are disinclined to provide for offspring that are not their own. The Standard Model essentially comes out of a patriarchal outlook that does not take the existence of these other ways of creating families and societies into account.

There are 6 current matrilineal societies, where inheritance and family descend through mothers and not fathers. This includes the Na of China, who do not have even have formal marriage and where paternity is not recognized at all. Everyone lives in the home of their mother or grandmother and helps to raise the children who reside there. Men help to raise the children of their sisters and cousins, but not their own biological children because they do not live with them.

For most of human history we lived together in small nomadic clans of 20–50 where the wellbeing of the whole tribe was the focus. “Small bands of hunter/gatherers with strong kinship bonds would have cared for all children born into that group, regardless of paternity, which would have been unknowable without the sequestering and control of women.

Because all food acquisition would have been done in groups and shared communally, there is no biological incentive to mating with the best provider. It was only with patriarchy that the role of a provider becomes important. Women no longer had any autonomy and had only one mate upon whom they were entirely dependent. It is only within this context that a good provider begins to truly matter.

If you are prohibited from providing for yourself and your children and must rely on only one man to do that, then it is in your best interest to find a man who can do that well. Whereas, if you had been an adept gatherer, you might not have even needed a hunter at all. Neil Gaiman’s poem about the first scientists, The Mushroom Hunters, speaks to this.”

An alternative evolutionary model has now been proposed by scientists like Nancy Tanner, Jane Lancaster, Lila Leibowitz, and Adrienne Zihlman. This alternative view is that the erect posture required for the freeing of hands was not linked to hunting but rather to the shift from foraging (or eating as one goes) to gathering and carrying food so it could be both shared and stored. Moreover, the impetus for the development of our much larger and more efficient brain and its use to both make tools and more effectively process and share information was not the bonding between men required to kill. Rather, it was the bonding between mothers and children that is obviously required if human offspring are to survive. According to this theory, the first human-made artifacts were not weapons. Rather, they were containers to carry food (and infants) as well as tools used by mothers to soften plant food for their children, who needed both mother’s milk and solids to survive. This theory is more congruent with the fact that primates, as well as the most primitive existing tribes, rely primarily on gathering rather than hunting. It also is congruent with the evidence that meat eating formed only a miniscule part of the diet of ancestral primates, hominids, and early humans. It is further supported by the fact that primates differ from birds and other species in that typically only mothers share food with their young. Among primates we also see the development of the first tools, not for killing, but for gathering and processing food.

So, as Tanner writes of the still much earlier time that provided the foundation for the Old Society we have examined, “woman the gatherer,” rather than “man the hunter,” seems to have played a most critical role in the evolution of our species.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade . HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

“Patriarchy as a pervasive social system is only about 6–9 thousand years old. The prevailing hypothesis is that it came about as a result of warlike, Proto-Indo-European Northern tribes overtaking the settlements of “Old Europe.” Prior to that time, most humans lived in peaceful, largely egalitarian communities that were matrilinear (heredity passed through the female line). Both archeology and anthropology indicate that Middle and Upper Paleolithic tribes were overwhelmingly like this, although this same way of life also continued into the Neolithic and early Chalcolithic eras (copper age).”

It (Indo-European peoples) characterizes a long line of invasions from the Asiatic and European north by nomadic peoples. Ruled by powerful priests and warriors, they brought with them their male gods of war and mountains. And as Aryans in India, Hittites and Mittani in the Fertile Crescent, Luwians in Anatolia, Kurgans in eastern Europe, Achaeans and later Dorians in Greece, they gradually imposed their ideologies and ways of life on the lands and peoples they conquered.

Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade . HarperOne. Kindle Edition.

Pre-patriarchy, sexual exclusivity did not have the same importance and was not culturally demanded for women. These too were matrilineal cultures and a central part of the worship of the primary deity involved sacred sexual customs in the temples run by powerful priestesses.

“The temples of the Queen of Heaven often owned most of the arable land and kept the records for the community. In many ways, they were central to the life of their respective cultures. In most of the cultures that revered the Queen of Heaven, both married and single women lived for some period of time in the temples of the Goddess and they were honored and esteemed for doing so.”

The sacred sexual customs of the female religion offer us another of the apparent ties between the worship of the Divine Ancestress as it was known in Sumer, Babylon, Anatolia, Greece, Carthage, Sicily, Cypress, and even in Canaan. Women who made love in the temples were known in their own language as “sacred women,” “the undefiled.” Their Akkadian name of qadishtu is literally translated as “sanctified women” or “holy women.”

The legend of Innana and Enki listed the sacred sexual customs as another of the great gifts that Inanna brought to civilize the people of Erech. The Queen of Heaven was most reverently esteemed by the sacred women, who in turn were especially protected by her.

When God Was A Woman, Merlin Stone, page 154

The Standard Model of Human Evolution has myriad data points that do not support it. From the shape of the human penis to the fact that women are not naturally monogamous; from our history as primarily matrilineal cultures, as well as the thousands of years when female sexual non-exclusivity was actually a part of religious worship — the world has only been arranged as it is now for the past 3% of human history. It is neither biologically nor evolutionarily necessary.

We need to understand that in order to have a true understanding of our biology, our evolution, and the social system that we currently live under. Patriarchy is a system of widespread stratification that is much deeper than just a historic power differential between men and women. It is predicated on fear, coercion, and the threat of violence in order to maintain rankings and perceived order and is present in all aspects of society.

Our false beliefs that these have always been the organizing principles of society are an impediment to creating one that is more egalitarian. Humans evolved in order to better care for offspring and the tribe. Sexual exclusivity for women is a new concept and not a fundamental evolutionary precept. Even though 10,000 years is a long time, it’s still important to understand that other ways of living other than patriarchy have and do currently exist.

© Copyright Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love. If this story is appearing anywhere other than Medium.com, it appears without my consent and has been stolen.