The Invention of Gender Inequality
Ever since sex was first “invented” a little more than a billion years ago, it’s been the source of endless problems. For sure, it has been hugely beneficial for its practitioners. If it hadn’t been, there would not be such a broad variety of sexual species in existence today. It probably seemed like a great idea at the time (or would have done, if ideas had existed back then). Here was a mechanism that would greatly increase the diversity within species as well as the speed at which species could evolve. It was a revolution that would lay the foundation for another revolution, a few hundred million years later, the Cambrian explosion during which complex, multi-celled creatures suddenly appeared: our ancestors.
Sexual reproduction requires two creatures, one of each sex, to cooperate in combining their reproductive cells – gametes – in order to create new, completely unique offspring. The sexes could be arbitrarily labelled A and B. As with many revolutions, the immediate aftermath would have been egalitarian. The sexes would not have differed greatly from each other to start with. It probably was all going swimmingly, until one of the sexes – let’s say ‘A’ – accidentally pulled off a scam.
Gametes contain two essential ingredients: genes and nutrition. Genes code for the creation of the new individual (half are randomly selected from each parent) and nutrition is needed to keep the infant alive through its early, difficult stages of development. At some point, ‘A’s mutated to produce gametes that were smaller, and less generous in the provision of nutrition. As a result, ‘B’ gametes were forced to become bigger, to compensate. A feedback loop developed, with ‘A’s competing with each other to become ever more selfish while ‘B’s had to invest ever more into reproduction. Gender inequality had been invented: ‘A’s had become lazy and opportunistic (meaning they would basically shag anything), while ‘B’s had been forced to bear most of the reproductive effort.
We refer to the low-investor sex as male and the high investors as female. In other words, female sex is of greater value than male sex; or to rephrase again: males place a higher value on sex than females do. This ancient division is the basis for the differences between male and female behaviours, and defines the battle of the sexes in all sexual species, including humans. Men can—theoretically at least—father many thousands of children each; women, at the very most a few dozen. This stark imbalance leads to what is quite possibly humanity’s most awkward fact: as noted by the British grime artist and gender-philosopher Skepta, there are Too Many Men.
Too Many Men: The Sex Trade
Males may have “won” by opting out of the hard work of reproduction, but this gave females control of the world’s first, and biggest industry, the sex trade. If females were to carry the cost of mating, then they would naturally be more selective than males in who they mated with. The selection of “good genes” is of utmost importance to females in particular.
In countless species, including humans, this led to the rise of sexual commerce: if males wanted to mate, they would have to pay for that privilege in some way. Sexual commerce takes many forms. At its most brutal (in some spiders and insects), it involves the male offering himself as a post-coital snack. Males in such species are typically smaller and weaker than females, as strength would serve them little purpose. In many other species, males are expected to provide a “nuptial gift” before mating: a piece of food typically, or a token such as a stone. This gives us an alternative (and more controversial) definition of gender roles: in terms of sexual commerce, males are typically buyers, and females are in general sellers.
The great science writer and anthropologist Jared Diamond wrote an essay called Why Do Men Hunt?, which is published in his book Why Is Sex Fun?. This sets out to explore why, almost universally in pre-civilised societies, the hard and dangerous job of hunting falls to men rather than women. After rejecting various guesses and hypotheses, he reveals the likely answer: men hunt because women will accept meat in return for sex. Men, even when hungry, will trade food for sex; women will prioritise eating over copulation. Each choice makes perfect sense from an evolutionary perspective: eating is the sensible option when food is scarce (as it almost always was for our ancestors). But for men (like the poor male spiders), personal survival is less important, for the moment, than the chance to reproduce. So a man in possession of a tasty snack is likely to offer it to a woman. A woman is unlikely to do the same thing. The sex trade is encoded in our genes and our hormones.
The trade of meat for sex appears to have been vital in recent human evolution. Humans are not natural hunters, as illustrated by our relative lack of strength, speed, sharp teeth or claws; meat did not form a regular part of our ancient diet. One of our early uses of tools was the adoption of stones to break bones in order to extract bone marrow and brains from carcasses that had been left behind by predators. At some point, we developed the ability to throw stones hard and accurately (something at which men are significantly better skilled than women), which would have been useful in catching small prey. Once women had a taste for fresh meat, the best throwers would have been offered the most mating opportunities. In turn, men evolved and invented better hunting abilities, tools and techniques in competition with each other, and an evolutionary arms race developed. Hunting excellence required not just throwing ability, but inventiveness, cooperation and strategy development. Around 50,000 years ago, humans underwent a Great Leap Forward in cognition, and modern humanity was born, likely driven, in large part, by the trade of sex for meat.
If women select winners in the mating game, then it’s important to consider the losers. For every great hunter, there were inevitably several men that didn’t make the grade, and never got to reproduce. From a reproductive perspective, one could split society into three broad “classes”: women, winning men, and losing men. The ratio of male winners to losers has varied greatly from era to era. A recent study based on DNA discovered that 8000 years ago (following the Neolithic revolution in agriculture), women were 17 times more successful than men at mating (or in other words, for each man that mated, at least 16 did not). Interestingly, a study of Tinder users found that men have to swipe 17.5 times more than women to get the same level of response. These ratios have a huge influence on the shape of society, and on two aspects in particular: the amount of male-on-male violence, and the level of sexual violence.
The Rape Issue
In my book Porn Panic! I devote a chapter to looking at the relationship between pornography and sexual violence. There is a huge gulf between the popular feeling that—surely—porn must be problematic in some way, and the actual evidence, that suggests porn appears to be broadly beneficial. Study after study finds correlations between rising porn consumption and declining sexual violence, and these correlations are stark. In a renowned 2006 paper, Porn Up, Rape Down, Anthony D’Amato reveals that in the previous 25 years, the incidence of rape had fallen by an astounding 85% in the United States. In another 2006 paper, Todd D Kendal dug deeper into the broad statistics, and found that rising Internet usage in the previous decade had correlated with declines in rape, but (crucially) not with declines in other crimes. He discovered that high adopter US states saw greater declines in sexual violence than low adopter states, and that most of the decline was accounted for among “men ages 15-19, who typically live with their parents”. His data suggested that “pornography and rape are substitutes”. Kendal, like D’Amato, came to the conclusion that the masturbatory usage of pornography was making young men less likely to commit sexual assault.
Perhaps this discovery shouldn’t greatly surprise anyone, except that it clashes with an axiom of feminist ideology that has become accepted in the liberal mainstream: that “rape isn’t about sex, it’s about the imposition of male power” or even that “sex without consent isn’t sex”. In other words, feminists believe that men rape not for sexual fulfillment, but out of a misogynistic desire to hurt women. This idea is undermined by a great body of evidence. Most non-sexual male violence is directed at other men, not at women. By feminist reasoning (in which most violence descends from hateful “toxic masculinity”), this surely demonstrates that men hate each other more than they hate women. Furthermore, when gay men commit rape, they rape other men, not women; and likewise lesbian rape is committed by women against women. Most important of all, forced sex isn’t unique to humanity, but is ubiquitous across the animal kingdom, and is more widespread in other species than in humans, suggesting sexual violence is an ugly hangover from our primitive roots rather than some recent innovation of “Patriarchy”. Two species that are particularly admired by humans show high rates of forced sex: dolphins and orangutans (studies suggest half of orangutan pregnancies result from forced sex).
All this is backed by the discovery that traditionally polygamous societies (those with a high ratio of male losers to winners) tend to be more violent than monogamous ones. This leads to suggestions – most recently by the controversial psychologist Jordan Peterson – that monogamy is an ideal to be encouraged, because it results in more stable, safer and happier societies.
The Rise and Fall of Monogamy
Although traditional polygamy is often presented as the exercise of male power, this is inaccurate. Polygamy results from female choice. In pre-civilised societies, unrestrained by social pressure to leave attached men alone, women would select the best available mate, whether or not he already had other mates. This resulted in the imbalances mentioned earlier, and in the creation of a rigid class system that divided men into a minority of breeders and a majority of losers. This system broadly serves the needs of women, and of the winning male minority. It also serves the wider community, by selecting the best male genes in each generation, and so accelerating human evolution.
What began as an unfair system became even more so after the invention of farming in the Middle East 11,000 years ago. This led to the invention of private property and inheritance, and the increasing accumulation of wealth – and mates – by a male elite. As we’ve seen, by 8,000 years ago, a tiny minority of men were doing all of the breeding. This society would have been characterised by a seething discontent among the male majority, requiring draconian measures of control, including slavery, widespread castration, constant warfare, and religious laws declaring women to be the effective property of their husbands (with brutal punishment for transgressors).
Monogamy arose as a movement that spread out, along with western civilisation, from the Middle East and into southern Europe. When Rome adopted Christianity, monogamy became the official policy of the empire, and spread out ever further, in wave after wave of Christian empires.
The monogamous status quo was never absolute, but has dominated Christian, Jewish and other societies for centuries. European-led globalisation spread the system worldwide, and it is rapidly gaining popularity in sub saharan Africa, which has traditionally been highly polygamous. Since women control access to sex, so enforcement of monogamy was done by shaming women into withholding sex until marriage. Promiscuous women were stigmatised and shamed. Unmarried women—spinsters—were suspect, and a fear of being left-on-the-shelf beyond one’s early 20s, or—even worse—getting pregnant before marriage, was high. Women were encouraged to “value themselves” (the clues of the sex trade litter our language). For young men, casual sex was hard to come by. Prostitution was widespread, and probably more acceptable than it is today, but prices were higher, reflecting the risks and stigma involved for the women. And so young, horny men put rings on young women’s fingers and got married as quickly as they could.
In the 20th century, a series of social and technological shocks broke this status quo. In particular, the appearance of the pill and legal abortion led to an ongoing sexual and social revolution in which women rebelled against prudish morality. Liberated women, in turn, offered sex more freely than ever before, and men found sex easier to come by, and so were under less pressure to propose. From the 1960s, monogamy went somewhat into decline in the western world. In 2011, the Slutwalk movement appeared, pushing back against stigmatisation of female promiscuity, and reclaiming the s-word as a badge of pride. The price of commercial sex is a useful proxy for the general availability of sex. The Economist suggests that the price of sex has fallen by more than half in real terms over the past century, as free sex has become more widely available. In terms of individual liberty, this is great news, but for those of either sex who seek out married stability, it’s not so great.
As a campaigner for sexual freedom, I’m aware of a paradox. Sexual freedom means overturning the egalitarian tyranny of monogamy, and the risk of returning to a system that divides men into winners and losers. Indeed, this does appear to have been an outcome of the decline in monogamy, as illustrated by the rise of online “incel” (involuntarily celibate) communities of men, bemoaning their lower class status in society. Although these groups contain many members who are on the autistic spectrum, are mentally ill, disabled or just poor, they tend to be scorned and bullied as “losers” and “misogynists” by the liberal mainstream. Just as in past times, there is little sympathy for the male losers of the cutthroat mating game. “Incels” are dismissed as misogynists and purveyors of “toxic masculinity”. As so often these days, once the left has labelled a group of people as “problematic”, it can simply ignore anything they say. Male suicide and incarceration rates are ignored, or blamed on men themselves. When it is found that 24% of victims of US police shootings are black (compared to 12% of the general population), this is evidence of systemic racism. But 95% of victims are men, and this gender gap attracts little attention.
There is a disliked underclass, and it’s probably growing. It’s not men, but it’s that proportion of men who find themselves loveless, mateless and childless.
Before panicking and agreeing with Jordan Peterson that we must return to some state of culturally-enforced monogamy, we should take a step back and note that by most metrics, things aren’t falling apart. As previously noted, despite the western decline in monogamy in the past half-century, there has been a much steeper decline in sexual violence, rather than a corresponding increase. However, this decline seems to have levelled out, and there have been some recent signs of an uptick in sexual and other violence, although it’s far too early to say if this is a reversal in the trend or simply a blip.
Cultural enforcement of monogamy isn’t generally “nice”. Since it relies on changing female behaviour rather than male, it requires a return to some level of slut-shaming, or at least of putting chaste women on a pedestal as an example to everybody else. Such things have been attempted: for example, American virginity-pledge programmes like the Silver Ring Thing. But such programmes are based on making people pledge not to do what comes most natural. They attempt to suppress sexual behaviours by guilt and by peer pressure. This isn’t healthy, and it has distinctly fascistic overtones.
Just because monogamy has a clear record of reducing sexual violence in the past, this doesn’t mean it’s the right answer now. We know, for example, that mass incarceration in America has reduced violence. But there are better and more humane ways to reduce violence.
If bored, sexually frustrated young men are a source of violence, we already know some remedies, two of which have been covered above. Free and easy access to pornography has been shown to be beneficial. The falling price of commercial sex is also good news: both because it reflects declining stigma against promiscuous women, and because it provides a release for men, especially those who might have no other options. Increased migration further reduces the cost of sex (British sex workers were among the low-skilled workers who saw their incomes plateau or fall when eastern European countries joined the European Union). And then, we can factor in new technologies like sex robots, currently available for a couple of thousand dollars, and which will inevitably improve and get cheaper. Sex doll “brothels” are also beginning to open, lowering the cost of access. Non-sexual pastimes like gaming also offer an immersive escape from a harsh world, and it’s no coincidence that gaming is male-dominated, and that there is an overlap between incel and gamer communities.
If the technological outlook is positive, the political outlook is less so. Around the end of this year, the British government is planning to block many (possibly millions) of porn sites that don’t conform to tight regulations. This will be the first heavy-duty regime of Internet censorship in a democratic country, and certainly not the last. If free porn did bring down the rates of sexual violence, could porn blocks reverse this? I suggested so in 2016, in a submission to Ofcom (the UK state media regulator):
To put this simply: the government’s own research suggests that restricting sexual imagery to teenagers may result in a rise in sexual violence among that age group. We call on the government to abandon these plans until strong evidence can be presented that they will not increase harm.
The outlook for legal prostitution is also dark. The FOSTA/SESTA laws that passed this year in the United States led to a crackdown on online escort advertising services, and an almost immediate rise in street prostitution. Unlike in the US, prostitution is legal in the UK; yet British lawmakers are also calling for a ban on online advertising, and a study is underway. Elsewhere in Europe, sexual conservatism is back in fashion, with Sweden, France and Northern Ireland adopting a new, feminist model of prohibition, in which clients rather than sex workers are criminalised.
The political shifts towards authoritarianism, nationalism and conservatism means that outlets for single young men are likely to be restricted in the coming years. This is one reason why I campaign so hard for sexual freedom and free speech. We seem to have forgotten the old lesson that liberty is more than just a liberal luxury.