Thoughts
from the Savanna: Female Safety
Our
evolutionary history designed us for life on the savanna...
Female chimpanzees mate
with any male around – including their own sons. Males have no role in
child-rearing. For a male chimpanzee, sex is a pleasurable act without
consequences – so he does not care who does what to whom, sexually.
In contrast, an
alpha-male gorilla goes ballistic if another male sniffs around his
females. Powerful hormones trigger feelings of insane jealousy. He flies
into a terrible rage and mangles the intruder.
In a state of nature,
the human species is closer to the gorilla. In our Pleistocene past,
mothers needed a man to protect them and their children. But the man
needed to be sure about paternity; otherwise he won’t make the
investment. So, instinctively, he has a visceral horror of being duped
– of unwittingly raising another man’s genes.
Why is this reticence
programmed into male brains as a deep instinct? As I wrote in an earlier
article about stepfathers, it is a logical paradox that men who are
altruistic and raise another man’s genes, do not therefore have any
(or as many) offspring of their own. Therefore, genes that promote
generous feelings for investment in another man’s children die out. On
the whole, we are all descended from a line of men who fiercely
protected their own offspring and were less caring about another
man’s.
It follows from this
that there is an advantage for the man who can cause another man to do
the work for him. That is why husbands have evolved to be such jealous
guardians of their wives’ sexuality. In some later societies this
jealousy has reached paranoid proportions. We all hear of traditional
communities where womenfolk can only go outside the home in the company
of a male member of the family. Often they have to be covered
head-to-toe in shapeless and unattractive garments.
In our Pleistocene past,
the fertile women (some fifteen of them) went foraging together in a
loosely knit group. They chatted to each other the whole time about
inconsequential matters. They did so, not so much to exchange
information as for reassurance. Each one needed to feel the comfort that
other members of the group were nearby: they needed to feel the safety
of numbers.
That way they made sure
that they had not strayed too far away from the others. They stayed
together not because they were worried about snakes and lions – oh no!
Their greatest danger was from marauding ravishers from an out-group –
a nearby band.
In addition, every woman
had a minder – her man. Should anything untoward happen to her, her
man would deal out terrible retribution to the defiler.
The upshot was, in this
balance of power, women were pretty safe from violation.
Today we have
unwittingly upset this equilibrium. Women expect to be able to walk the
streets on their own; women do not expect to need a male protector.
Moreover, our laws forbid men from carrying out fearful retribution.
Today, the vast majority
of men behave themselves. Nevertheless a small percentage either cannot
do so, or do not see why they should. The temptation of a free lunch
overwhelms social conditioning. As with the recent Worboys case in
London, we hear every day of rapists being caught only after years of
molesting females.
I have no answers to this example of
modern society malfunction except to observe that the female rape
victims were, without exception, alone. They were not in a group with 15
other women; they did not have a male protector.
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