My joke on this point is primal envy, that somewhere deep down men know they are a genetic mutation that serves a purpose and becomes useless. Look back at the old deities, or, rather, the fecund mother goddess. There is an assertion that is somewhat consistent though not absolute, that men rose to power after they figured out they had a role in reproduction; the anthropologist putting this forward cited an ethnological report from Australia about a tribal group where women happened to be in charge and the belief just happened to be that something about the wind made them pregnant.
I'm no psychologist, so my outlook is more direct: the story of sex precedes man and in a fair number of primates males rape because they're strong enough to get away with it, which they're strong enough to do because they have to fend off other males. Other species, though, even with size advantage, display. Black widow females eat their male mates. Why? Because they can. Simple exploitation of the size advantage. Angler fish males attach to their females. I don't think they do it because they're fulfilling some kind of inferiority complex, it's just biology and size differential. In humans, we have a complicated forebrain riding over our based impulses - and
my joke on that is that it rides, amusingly, literally over the 'lizard brain' - like a social lubricant, by which we connive and justify. I'm not sure where the mass of the 'person' resides - again, no psychiatrist - but the point of Trooper's cite above:
"That is, evolutionary theory not only considers how men exercise power over woman, but also investigates the deeper question of why males want power over females in the first place, which feminists tend to take as a given."
is interesting and conceivable. The relation or its potential is essentially uniform in humans - there are exceptions; matriarchal populations here and there, which stack up with such an hypothesis I'm not sure how - and so it has the semblance of a framework which, as I said previously, I think I had touched on in my blind graspings.
There's a line of thinking in quantitative genetics regarding the architecture of life-history traits: the heritability of such traits is normally estimated to approach zero because simple and direct selection on what is effectively the finalised expression of fitness means that the genes underlying life-history should be fixed, uniform. If you show up at the breeding group too early, the predators eat you. Too late and there are no mates or spots left. One theory at least is that the general genetic invariance of fitness traits may be underlain by that of other traits, such as morphology: this might give life to alternate evolutionary strategies, with larger, stronger individuals having strategy X and smaller ones Y, which is in fact observed in other taxa. Maybe the essential inequality of the sexual dynamic in humans is related to that. Maybe the psychology of man enables one or the other; those who think they can exercise sch power, do. It doesn't
excuse it - the element of essence to the sociologists among us - because these same forebrains are capable of quite a lot of social rendering; personal taxes, wedlock, Facebook, etc. I don't think anyone's genetics is incapable of handling
do not rape any more than they are capable of handling
do not murder or
do not steal. And by that measure, circumstances permitting, perhaps anyone at all is capable of any crime at all - there are various sensationalist examples here and there. The devolution of the entire issue to 'power' like a totem seems almost to deny all causation. But, in the case of such a 'biological imperative' in humans, such causation is probably unprovable anyway - and unimportant since it would be the unity of the male-female social narrative. It would also be unimportant in the legal sense: "the genes made me do it" (which is a statistical nonsense) is answered by "well, everyone is that way, then, so why are you so special?". We do not, for instance, invoke biological urges to theft in defense even though if it could ever be so argued for sexual assault it could
surely be argued for theft. Why? Because no one has established such a precedent. Our slippery forebrains have not invented such a specific defense, probably because it would not be believed. Yet. But more miscomprehension is surely coming. Bells centres - I think - her responses around the Pandora's box such a concept would create. Maybe it would, because simple points are not really understood anyway. For years, people really believed that lemmings actually threw themselves off cliffs rather than being herded off them by Disney executives, or fired from a turntable.
None of which is definitive, but I've been making the joke more in the last few years because human beings can now create mammalian offspring using the genetic material from two ova. Men are damn near officially useless.
Well, with enough technology, anyone is replaceable. (Or perhaps that's the lizard brain; see below.) But while we're on the subject, it's time for the biologist to ask the penultimate question of the sociologist: why do you examine all phenomena from the workings of the human mind, using models derived from the likes of Freud? You might answer
well ask yourself the same question and you'll have your answer but the conception you give in your first paragraph - a joke but you do throw explanatory elements into it - is essentially psychosexual, is it not? But surely the problem must precede mankind, not to any practical point. This also:
And look at the changes we bring to the world; while modern civilization can often assert to rely less on violence to effect change than its societal ancestry, the fact remains that minority control over communal affairs (i.e., men are the statistical minority but also the empowered majority)
As a statistician, I'd say that the wealthy or truly empowered minority is the real empowered majority, since the 52-48 split on sex in humans isn't a great majority, but I take your point.
thrives on competition, which, in turn, would in a reckless psychoanalysis suggest we're still overcompensating for the primal disappointment of being a utilitarian adaptation. The possibility of obsolescence would not sit well with men. But who knows, if we go "pneumatic" as Huxley depicted, maybe the warring men will finally chill out.
It's conceivable. Do I feel a chill in my bones at the suggestion that we are tools only? If I were an IPA, or some other (actual) misogynist, would my forebrain now rush to recalculate a response at the insistence of the baser urges? But perhaps my resistance to psychological explanations is my training.
Right. Anyway, in a more realistic context, there is still the proposition that the male evolutionary specialization includes competition; it isn't enough simply to have, but must instead be won. The rape phenomenon and rape culture would, in this framework, be symptomatic.
Agreed. Or perhaps 'winning' is employed when 'having' is interfered with. Can complete conversion of the human psyche be achieved in this matter? Probably; I'd say yes, even. There are systems by which this could be accomplished, but that is the work of politicians, the electorate and the law. So, no.
I thank you for your succinct and eloquent summary.