‘Women Want Providers, Men Want Beauty And Compliance’
This isn’t sociobiology; it’s culture, and rather recent culture at that
I cannot even count the number of times that someone (usually a guy) has tried to feed me the story of how we are programmed by evolution. They tell me that women want a strong man who can protect and provide for them, and men want beauty, but also “sweetness,” aka compliance. It’s the trade-off for being the protector and provider, right? “That’s just evolution,” they invariably say because no-doubt, that’s what they’ve been taught. But this isn’t actually a timeless evolutionary dynamic or our invariable sociobiology. Instead, it’s a rather recent dynamic brought about by specific cultural conditions.
The idea of a provider for a family is a pretty recent one, beginning with plowed agriculture and intensifying with the Industrial Revolution. Prior to agriculture, both men and women contributed to the food supplies and the wellbeing of the family because until that time humans lived in small egalitarian hunter-gatherer bands where the survival strategy was for the entire group of 20–50 to feed and look out for each other. In some current hunter-gatherer bands, it is actually the women who provide most of what the tribe eats.
Sociologist Rae Blumberg has pointed out that it is only for less than 3% of human history and with one particular type of agrarian society, that women have become fundamentally dependent on men. Plowed agriculture turned on its head the prior dynamic of women as competent, self-sufficient primary producers who made their own decisions relatively autonomously.
For hunter-gatherers and in other types of agricultural economies, what women did was a huge contribution to the wellbeing of the family and the society, and this brought them both a lot of both status and a lot of freedom. In places where women historically worked outdoors in both paddy and hoe fields, female labor was vital, and a woman’s social status mirrored her indispensable contributions. Without her, there would be a lot less food.
Among the Juǀʼhoansi ǃKung of Namibia and Botswana, women generally collect plant foods and water, providing 60%–80% of the group’s sustenance, while men hunt. Depending on the climate, meat may be a relatively small part of the diet for any hunter-gatherer band. In some cultures, both men and women work together to obtain meat, such as the Agta tribes of the Philippines who hunt wild boar using dogs. It is primarily with those cultures who get their meat from large game, that men have a higher status than women, and women are more dependent on men.
A plow requires significant upper body strength, and cannot be easily set down to tend to children. Plowed agriculture (as distinct from rice paddies and those worked with hoes, which women can more easily balance with childcare) meant that men worked mostly outdoors and women became more and more relegated to the house and the care of the home. Patriarchy saw land being inherited through the male line — the first time that men began staying with their families of origin and women moved to them, which was another factor in the diminishment of women’s status. In societies where husbands join their wife's family and move to where they live, the status, safety, and autonomy of women tends to remain good.
When a group of brothers and patrilateral cousins stays put and women marry in from various other clans, it is not surprising that the position of the females is politically tenuous. In effect, they are merely “honorary” members of an all-male clan, and it is only toward the end of their lives that they begin to assume some authority. When people live in tribes, this kind of extended brotherhood is a rather frequent social arrangement. It fits well with warfare, raiding, and feuding, which almost always are male activities (Thoden van Velzen and van Wetering 1960). The social ideology tends to be patrifocal, and this proclivity is reflected in social reality (for a rather extreme ethnographic example, see Boehm 1983).
Boehm, Christopher (1999–11–30T22:58:59). Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior . Harvard University Press. Kindle Edition.
With the advent of the Industrial Revolution (around 1760), men left home to work each day for the first time, leaving women to completely care for the household and the children. Even when men did much of the outdoor work when the plow came into agricultural use, women still did many jobs that contributed to the overall success of the farm/homestead. This only truly altered to roles of provider/provided for with factory and other outside jobs becoming a common way to feed the family.
It is in this context that women’s desirability and worth becomes fully tied to their appearance. Symmetrical features have been thought to signal health, and therefore reproductive fitness, but recent research challenges this assumption, particularly as relates to women. There seems to be little actual correlation between beauty and health.
In a Paleolithic world where both men and women had to work hard every day to feed themselves and their tribe, women were apt to be muscular and wiry, with such low body fat that they only menstruated about 4 times per year. Their ability to find food and contribute to the wellbeing of the tribe seems a much more attractive feature than simply beauty alone. They also mated with two or three men at a time in order to guard against infertility, genetic incompatibility, and other unforeseen barriers to being a good genetic match.
If this were not the case, why were the strict controls of female sexuality that only came about with patriarchy even necessary? If women were naturally inclined to monogamy and to aligning themselves with only one man, these strictures which often came with severe penalties for breaching them would not have been needed. And if a woman could determine a man’s actual fertility, health, or genetic compatibility simply by looking at him and evaluating his external characteristics, why are we not able to do that now? Being handsome and rich is little indication of health or fitness to reproduce. It’s only attractive within a patriarchal paradigm.
Intelligence or skill in some area may indeed have contributed to attractiveness, but it seems unlikely that it was pure brawn alone, nor the ability to be a good provider, since the entire tribe took care of each other, just as they do in current hunter-gatherer bands. Similarly, being a beautiful woman is no indication of female reproductive fitness either.
William Lassek and Steven Gaulin, anthropologists from UC Santa Barbara, have reviewed the research on body shape, attractiveness, and fertility. As well as waist-to-hip ratio, they looked at the impact of body mass index (or BMI).
Men tend to prefer women with very low waist-to-hip ratios (whose waists are much narrower than their hips), but these women are actually less likely to conceive than women with a less pronounced hourglass figure. (emphasis mine) Younger women are more likely to have an hourglass figure, and age is related to fertility, but the most attractive waist-to-hip ratios are generally found in women in their late teens, whereas women’s fertility tends to peak in their mid to late twenties.
Patriarchy as a social system began about 6–9 thousand years ago, so it’s only been for about the past 3% of human history that lineage has gone through the father. This makes sense when there was no way to definitively determine fatherhood prior to that time. It is only with the coercive control of women that began with patriarchy that paternity becomes the way to determine family affiliation and inheritance.
It is about this same time that class and wealth distinctions come into being for the first time as well. Prior to patriarchy enforced egalitarianism was the survival strategy that kept our very social species alive and thriving. Christopher Boem, the anthropologist and primatologist who is head of the Jane Goodall Research Center, believes that suppressing inclinations towards hierarchy was the evolutionary strategy that allowed us to surpass our primate cousins. Extensive archeological excavations of proto-agricultural enclaves like Çatalhöyük also show that for most of its existence, this settlement was also vehemently egalitarian. It is only about 5,000 BCE that class and wealth disparity began to arise there.
In many places in modern-day South America and some parts of Asia, partible paternity and even polyandry are still practiced. Cooperative breeding, with several fathers taking responsibility for the welfare of children, doesn’t mesh with what we’ve been taught about 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.” It also dispels the notion that all women seek one mate who can take care of her and her offspring, regardless of culture.
This isn’t our actual evolutionary legacy. If it were, there wouldn’t be so many current cultures that do not practice strict monogamy or have family structures or support systems that don’t fit this narrative. We wouldn’t have such a long history of women being integral to growing and procuring food which is still a part of quite a few modern cultures.
Desirable men as good providers and desirable women as ornamental objects of status is a function of patriarchy, not of evolution. This is not sociobiology; it’s culture. It’s what you’ve been taught by a patriarchal system that is trying to justify itself by telling you that it’s always been this way. But it hasn’t; demonstrably, it hasn’t always been like this and is not universally like this even now. The Standard Narrative of Human Evolution is a story that fails to take into account all of the vast evidence to the contrary, evidence that is growing every day in the scientific community. Hopefully, someday soon the story that is told will be the one that the data and the evidence actually support and not this patriarchal myth.
© 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.
