One repeated accusation levelled against the Internal
Enslavement website is that we are in some way opposed to female dominance or
male submission.
This is simply false.
In attempting to understand relationships of Enslavement
between masters and female slaves, we have limited the scope of our work,
without claiming that similar relationships do not take place between people of
other genders and orientations.
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Part of the reason for this self-imposed limitation, is that
we suspect that different forces are at work in men and women, just as we
subscribe to the existence of the more "vanilla" gender differences
identified in Evolutionary Psychology and other fields. Consequently, we limit
the size of the field we're trying to understand at this stage.
This essay is a departure from that policy and is the result
of a recent discussion on the interplay between genetics and D/s, and outlines
some ways in which one candidate theory about D/s - that men are genetically
predisposed to submission - fails to measure up. Since the interactions of sex,
genetics and power naturally apply differently to men and women, these
arguments start to map how D/s might relate to Evolution (in this case, by
excluding one possibility.) As such, it provides one part of the wider
landscape into which an understanding of female internal enslavement must
eventually fit.
Are men naturally submissive?
(This essay mostly discusses Evolution, which naturally
deals with averages and statistically significant tendencies. So these trends
are observable in populations, even if some individuals choose to deviate from
how most behave.)
The assertion I'd like to discuss goes like this:
"Since men want sex, and can reproduce by getting a woman pregnant even in
a casual encounter with no commitment, men are more likely to be submissive,
since they will do anything the woman wants to get sexual access to her. This
leads to submission in men having a genetic basis - that is, as an adaptive
trait which has been selected for."
Human males use two reproductive strategies. First, they try
to get casual access to as many females as they can outside of a relationship
(the "mate once" scenario, or "Extra-Pair Copulations"),
since these are almost "free" (the effort required to generate a
table spoon of semen is negligible.)
However, their second strategy is more common: they form a
long term bond with a female and expend most of their own resources supporting
her and her offspring (in the hope that her offspring are also his.) They then
employ various control tactics to try to prevent other males getting sexual
access to her, and all of these tactics involve relationship skills (things
like love, but also threats of punishing infidelity, or forming coalitions with
family members or other men to enforce female fidelity [which ultimately leads
to institutionalised marriage, for example.])
If a human male can control his long term sexual partner, he
gains by being able to put resources into supporting her offspring with some
confidence they are also his offspring. If this isn't possible, then males and
females become solitary rather than mated because it's not in males' interests
to offer that support. The fact that humans, unlike many other species, haven't
lost this behaviour, shows that this confidence has largely been present during
the period of human evolution.
As long as a man is sure his partner is faithful, she doesn't
need to control him to get him to support her and her (his) children, since
that is in his reproductive interests too (of course, this is a statistical
statement, and specifics can kill a relationship too: for example, loss of
access to resources themselves ["When the wolf is at the door, love goes
out the window."])
Even more fundamentally, why do females want to engage in
extra-pair sex? (and risk losing their long term partner and his contribution.)
They do this when a "fitter" (in terms of long term reproductive
success) male comes along, that her genes will benefit from mixing with in her
pool of offspring.
(This is a bit like the man who asked his wife, after seeing
Indecent Proposal, "Would YOU sleep with Robert Redford for a million
dollars?" She replied, "Yes, but they'd have to give me some time to
come up with the money.")
In these encounters, the man is of higher status in the
"market" than the women, and he is exchanging his fitter genes in
return for access to her womb (and the resources of the poor sap at home who is
supporting her day in day out.) Consequently, he doesn't need to submit to her,
since he's in something like a seller's market.
And as I've outlined above, men in long term relationships
supporting women and their offspring need to control them (at least as far as
their sexual encounters with other men goes.) If they don't, their line dies
out, since other, higher status men, win out. (They are documented cases of
pre-industrial societies where 50% of each generation are offspring of the
village chief, one way or another, so this danger is very real.)
For these reasons, we argue that male submissiveness is not
an adaptive trait which has been selected for (that it "does not have a
genetic basis" and is "not part of human nature".)
Objections to an Evolutionary Psychological approach
This kind of attempt to understand the interplay between
genetics, human nature and behaviour offends some people's sense of Political
Correctness, even when the conclusion is in accordance with the PC orthodoxy of
"nurture not nature": we're saying that the male submissiveness we
see is a product of culture and environment, not of genetics.
In doing this, we suffer from the same kinds of objections
as are levelled at Evolutionary Psychology in general.
First, that if male submission is not genetic or part of
human nature, it is "Unnatural" and therefore Bad. This is a
restatement of the Naturalistic Fallacy, which claims that which is Natural is
Good, and that which is Unnatural is Bad. A brief look at the statistics of
murder in hunter/gatherer societies (where something like one third of all
young men are killed in fights, disputes or warfare) quickly dispels this
myth.
Consequently, we do not for a moment claim that there is
anything wrong with male submission, because (like brain surgery and web
design) it's not a genetic trait that evolution has selected for over hundreds
of thousands of years.
Secondly, that evolutionary arguments are meaningless,
because many things about humans have no genetic basis. This is a more subtle
argument, but it falls down when the predictions of evolutionary arguments are
looked at: if we are able to identify possible features of human nature which
have been selected for or selected against, we can make predictions about human
behaviour in general, and test our claims.
For example, it could be asserted that "masturbation
doesn't lead to offspring, but people masturbate, so leading to offspring can't
solely determine what behaviours people show. So presence or lack of male
submission in human nature tells us nothing about whether male submission
happens."
The most likely explanation of masturbation is as a by-product of human (mostly male) sexual
drives. By products themselves don't need their own explanation, since they are
perfectly well explained by something else which is adaptive (ie promotes
reproductive success) and they don't get in the way of success themselves. For
example, the utility of the umbilical cord provides a perfectly good
explanation of the belly button as a by-product.
This hypothesis predicts that if masturbation is a
by-product, sex with another person must be preferred over it in human nature
(as is indeed the case.) Therefore it's presence, like the belly button's, is
mostly safely hidden from the reproductive fitness of the individual. (For
example, if a man jerks off and then, to his dismay, immediately gets a chance
to have sex with an attractive woman, he's still usually got another "one
in him" for sufficiently exciting situations like this.)
However, as explained above, male submission isn't a neutral
by-product of this sort, because it interferes with both human male
reproductive strategies, and in particular, increases his risk of bringing up
other men's offspring instead of having children with his own genes.
Consequently, these issues are crucially important to
reproductive success. This importance naturally has a huge effect on how many
men exhibit these behaviours.
So one prediction of this conclusion is that if there was a
widespread genetic trait that produced male submissiveness, we would expect to
see that behaviour widespread in the general human population. We don't. There
is not one human society led by its women, as a class, rather than by its men,
as a class.
Conclusion
This is not to say that male submission doesn't exist: it is
merely a statement about how common it is in the wider human population. We
don't believe rubber or fur fetishes have a genetic basis either (other than
people's general ability to build up associations between sex and random
stimuli.) That doesn't for a moment mean that fetishes don't exist or that they
are wrong: just that a population that naturally preferred fur to sex would not
have survived for hundreds of thousands of years into the present day.
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