What if Women Evolved to be Owned?

Our culture assumes that freedom is generally good, and that people should be free to pursue their own desires, unless that pursuit conflicts with the freedom of others. This view is so pervasive that most people would struggle to understand a critique of it. However, it is based on dubious assumptions.

One of those assumptions is that people know what is good for them. This assumption is linked to hedonism. If pleasure and pain are the ultimate good and bad, then you have direct awareness of what is good and bad for you. You could be mistaken about the consequences of your actions, but not about what is intrinsically good or bad.

Hedonism is taken for granted by our culture, even though the word “hedonism” is somewhat pejorative. When people use “hedonism” pejoratively, they often mean the short-sighted pursuit of pleasure with little regard for long-term consequences or effects on other people. They still assume that pleasure and pain are the ultimate source of value.

But we can apply other norms to human action. We don’t need to judge action by the happiness or suffering that it produces. Instead, we can view action as a means to a biological end: reproduction. Viewed in this way, we can judge human actions as adaptive or maladaptive. We can also judge human desires as adaptive or maladaptive.

This view is important, even if you reject it as subjectively normative. Biology is real. Evolution will determine the future of humanity, regardless of our ideologies or technologies. We can critique an ideology or technology as maladaptive. We can critique a society or civilization as a biological dead end, if it does not reproduce its human capital. Biologically, it doesn’t matter whether people are happy or unhappy. It matters whether they reproduce.

Having said that, I will now apply the biological view to a certain aspect of human nature in the modern world: the desires and behavior of women. I will consider the possibility that women evolved to be owned/dominated by men, and cannot function in the modern environment of sexual freedom.

Men and women are different. This is a heretical belief nowadays, but it is an obvious truth. If we are honest, we can understand sexual dimorphism. Males and females have different reproductive strategies. Males produce small, motile gametes. Females produce large, sessile gametes. All other sex differences are due to this initial dimorphism, which probably emerged by symmetry breaking more than a billion years ago. It explains why women gestate children and men don’t. It explains why women are the primary caregivers of children. It explains why men have a stronger desire for sex (because they have a lower investment in the sex act). Etc.

Humans evolved the pair bond, which is rare among mammals. The pair bond is a long-term sexual relationship between a male and a female, in which they cooperate to raise their offspring. The pair bond makes paternity more certain, and thus it creates a biological incentive for the male to protect and support the female and her offspring, because her offspring are probably his offspring too. The pair bond is what I call “the sexual contract”. The male provides protection and support in exchange for the exclusive reproductive services of the female.

Of course, this sounds very unromantic, but romance is based on this exchange. Our emotions evolved to create the pair bond, and ultimately to make us reproduce. Lust and love are evolved mechanisms. They did not evolve to make us happy, or to inspire songs and poetry. They evolved to make us reproduce.

The pair bond involves a sexual division of labor. In most mammal species, males just compete for females. They don’t help females and offspring to survive. Human males protect and support their mates and children, within the pair bond. Men evolved to play the role of fathers. Women evolved to play the role of mothers.

Men are physically stronger than women, and can easily dominate them physically. Men can get reproductive services from women by coercion (rape), or by cooperation (the pair bond). Because men are stronger than women, men control access to women. Men could seize women from other men by force (typically in war). Men could also arrange a pair bond by agreement with other men. In such cases, the woman might also agree to the relationship, but typically her male relatives would have to agree as well.

Traditional marriage was an explicit version of the pair bond. It had responsibilities for both sides. In a sense, the husband and wife owned each other. But this ownership was not symmetrical, because men and women are different. A woman needed the protection of a man to survive, so she was the de facto property of some protector: initially her father, and later her husband. The marriage ceremony reflects this power dynamic: the father hands over his daughter to her new husband.

Today, the state has replaced both the father and the husband as the “owner” of women. The state is the default protector and provider. The state gives women sexual freedom. Marriage has become a meaningless ceremony, devoid of biological or social significance. Unlike the father or the husband, the state has no biological interest in a woman. So, we should not expect the state to encourage her to reproduce. She is just another individual, pursuing her own desires.

Sexual freedom is a recent development, due to the industrial and sexual revolutions. Until modern times, women were owned by their fathers or husbands, not by the state.

Women were not powerless in this ancestral condition — far from it. Women had sexual power. They still have this power today. Arguably, a beautiful young woman is more powerful than any man. She can “launch a thousand ships”. Men are slaves to female beauty.

Women evolved to be successful in the ancestral condition, as did men. You could say that women evolved to live inside the “cage” of male ownership. Their emotions evolved to fit that cage: to push against it in some ways, but not to exist outside it. Modern civilization has removed that cage. Female emotions are not adapted to life outside the cage. As a result, female behavior has become extremely maladaptive.

The sexual cage is not the only cage that we are adapted to. Humans evolved to live in the “cage” of society. We depend on society to survive, and we must fit into it. Our emotions are adapted to that cage.

Scarcity is another cage that we are adapted to. We are not adapted to abundance.

The problem with liberation is that we aren’t adapted to it. We have not been pulled from our natural environment and stuck in a cage, like a zoo animal. It is the opposite. We have been taken out of our natural cage and released into the “wild” of modern civilization, with all of its freedoms.

What are the consequences of liberating women from the sexual cage?

In the ancestral condition, women were forced to sexually submit to men, just to survive. In war, they might be raped, or taken as sexual slaves. In peacetime, they would need to get married, to have a protector and provider. They were forced to have sex, and thus (without birth control) they were forced to have children. They were forced to do what was biologically good for them, even if they didn’t want to.

Now, women have been set free to do what they want, even if it isn’t biologically good for them.

In the ancestral condition, men and women were brought together by complementary desires. Sexual desire motivated men to seek women. Fear and necessity motivated women to accept men. A woman needed a husband. Her father could not protect and support her forever. The desire to survive was sufficient to motivate a young woman to enter a relationship. Female sexual desire was secondary. Of course, women have preferences in men, just as men have preferences in women. But the sexual desire of men is stronger, because female sexual desire was not necessary to bring men and women together.

In most cases, men play the active role in seeking a mate, while women play a passive role. Women wait for men to come to them. In some cases, the parents of a young woman would seek a husband for her, reversing the roles somewhat. But in most cases, men would come to her, not vice versa. She was not a “free woman”, roaming around, seeking a mate. She was sessile, like her gametes, relying on her appearance to attract potential mates. Rather than seeking a mate, she would attract as much attention as possible, so that men would compete for her. Eventually, a man would “win” her.

Now that women have been liberated from the ancestral cage, they still act in much the same way. They do not seek mates. They do not have a strong desire for sex. They are passive, rather than active. They display their wares, and wait for men to come to them.

In modern civilization, women have much greater sexual agency than men. Most women could easily find a good mate and form a pair bond. But women lack the motivation to pursue men. Instead, they wait passively for a mate. They also reject most men who try to connect with them. Women spend years waiting passively for “Mr. Right”. What they are actually waiting for, although they don’t know it, is to be forced into a sexual relationship. They are waiting to be owned.

The modern mating game is dysfunctional, because women instinctively expect men to “take” them, but men lack the agency to do that. Women are not willing to meet men halfway, as equals. Instead, women maximize their attractiveness and wait, while rejecting most overtures from men. They wait for a man who has the power to take them, but society has eliminated that power.

Women waste their fertile years waiting for men. They feel no urgency about getting a mate. A single man feels a desperate longing for a woman. A single woman does not have the same feeling. Again, female sexual desire was not the driving force that brought men and women together in the past. A woman needed a man, and she often had little choice in the matter. Today, a woman doesn’t need a man as a protector or provider. She is protected by the state. She can sell her labor in the market to support herself, or she can fall back on state welfare. Under those conditions, she does not have a strong desire for a mate.

Given the agency to freely choose a mate, most women don’t use it.

This is not the only problem with human sexuality in the modern world. There are others, including a reluctance by men to commit to relationships. Also, both sexes often choose to have few or no children, given the new agency of birth control. However, the desires of women (or lack thereof) are the biggest obstacle to sexual relationships.

Human nature is not adapted to sexual freedom. Sexual liberation derailed human sexuality.

It is a heresy to say this. Most people would recoil in horror (partially fake) at this violation of taboos and religious assumptions. But it is true.

We can understand the pathology of certain desires in the modern environment. For example, given abundant food, people will overeat. We recognize the need to regulate food consumption consciously, using explicit norms instead of instincts. We recognize the problem. But we don’t recognize other, similar problems that are caused by taking the human animal out of its ancestral condition.

One reason is that we lack an explicit theory of human purpose. We have only implicit, unexamined hedonism. We assume that liberation is generally beneficial, because it allows us to pursue our desires. But what if our desires are wrong?

I am not blaming women, or anyone else, for the current problems with human sexuality. I am not a reactionary either. I don’t want to RETVRN to a premodern way of life. I want modern civilization to succeed. I am not a traditionalist. We can’t solve the problems of modern civilization by restoring traditional religion and morality. Modern problems require new solutions.

To solve the problems of modern civilization, we need to expand our rationality to match the expansion of our agency.