Manhood and Womanhood From the Evolutionary Perspective
The following is the perspective of an evolutionary biologist. It follows on earlier papers discussing ‘The Case For Full and Free Marriages in Law’ (http://shantanup.wordpress.com/2012/09/18/the-case-for-full-marriages-and-free-marriages-in-law/), ’The Law on Rape and its Circumstances’ (http://shantanup.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/658/), The Curse of Feminisim on Humanity(http://shantanup.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/the-curse-of-feminism-on-humanity/), and ‘An Analysis of Bertand Russels Views on Sex before Marriage’ (http://shantanup.wordpress.com/2012/09/11/an-analysis-of-bertrand-russells-view-on-sex-before-marriage/). Crucially, it must be made clear that this does not see the main purpose of an organism as being the propagation of its genes. We humans could not care about that, nor do any organisms that are less developed mentally than we are. That is not how we humans see our purpose. If there was a God on other hand He might want to see it that way so that He would want biological organisms to propagate and replicate themselves or else His creation would come to an end. We humans however must not give a damn about such a God’s perspective. We are humans and can solely appreciate human perspectives and live like human beings without feeling any directives from above. The question then is what is this human perspective, the ideal way of looking at life and all its meaning and provisions. The most important aspect of this is the way we see the two sexes evolve into the future. It is essential that we conduct a review of this now as we see greater and greater influences of the feminist agenda upon humanity.
A girl turns into a woman when she comes of age because her body has become primed for reproduction. Womanhood is characterised by the need felt by women to have their own children by experiencing pregnancy and giving birth to children and nurturing them through breast feeding. They exhibit this by showing a willingness to have sex and wanting to get married for having children. If they are not inclined to feel any longing for this they have not entered womanhood and may simply be regarded as the female component of the human species, but lacking in femininity. Similarly manhood is attained at puberty where the man develops the urge and ability to have sex and all his masculine attributes are present in this regard. Those who do not feel the need for this have similarly not entered manhood and are just the male component of the human species. They lack masculinity. Male and female sex anatomy and physiology has evolved together for compatibility such that sex between these two component of the human species is an inevitable consequence of evolution of the mind and body. By this token, lesbians are not feminine and male homosexuals are not masculine members of the human race. Thus, women must not trust lesbians to look after their interests in the same way that men must not trust male homosexuals to look after their interests. This is because they will develop their own agenda to channel their views thus harming the common cause of humanity.
However, we are not just reproductive machines. Men and women have both been endowed with brains, that can think logically and work out their solutions to perceived problems of society. There does not appear to be any scientific evidence that either sex is capable of greater degree of the understanding of reality so that both sexes deserve equal opportunities to think and design common policies for the progress of humanity.
Further, biologically we are not capable of being just reproductive machines. It takes up a very small proportion of our time and activities. But we need to understand biology if we are to optimise the potential that Nature has conferred upon us. We have different needs for different ages. If one passes by the opportunity for a particular age one has missed the boat and deprived himself or herself of an experience that is suited to that age. When we are at our most fertile we get the chores of our responsibility to ourselves and to society out of the way by following our natural instincts and urges to take part in sex and produce our children to make our family complete. Even great women leaders like Indira Gandhi of India, Mrs Margaret Thatcher and Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan did not give up their sexuality for the purpose of following a career or some other important pursuit. That is why they were great women leaders who are remembered long after their death.
We educate ourselves when we are very young and get that out of the way, then we procreate get that out of the way, and then we do the thinking and do something positive in life to make the most of life. That is my philosophy that I have learnt in my life from just personal experience and studying others in society.
Women who put their careers (whatever that career is) ahead of the need to experience and satisfy their own bodies of its potential are ignorant and will always remain so because they are not experiencing life as it is supposed to be and have not taken their readymade opportunities in life to do something great: having a child. What better pursuit can there be than creating such a magical being and see it grow up to adulthood. Many miss their fertile period in the idiotic pursuit of wanting to be equal to men in business, administration, sports, finance, military and politics. This is the western concept and leads to the break up of society. Immigrants need to be imported into the country to do jobs from menial ones to high-flying ones as a result. It is the consumerist society that has turned women into work-machines instead of being what comes naturally to them: womanhood.
The prime purpose of womanhood is child bearing and longing to have one’s own family. I do not say that there are no women thinkers who can do other things. If they pursue those things they will sacrifice their womanhood if they are not careful. Society must not encourage it. Womanhood traditionally means those who are willing to subject themselves to a family life with a relationship with a man or men and children. Having a career or becoming a Prime Minister as a single person has nothing to do with expressing womanhood. Those who are able to combine the two make excellent women. For men sex is largely mechanical and although I agree that when we love a woman we can make sex an intimate part of a loving relationship, at times sex can be a chore too: something to be done and out of the way. Men do not have the same problem as women of having to do it at a heightened state during their early years. That is just the way it is. Women have not shown themselves to be any less in thinking capacity than men are. In fact educational results might indicate otherwise. But the greatest women are those who have been able to combine family with careers and other interests.
We must not try and understand social system of the union of man and women that has evolved in human societies by drawing upon examples of behaviour from chimpanzee and gorilla primates. Since humans diverged from the Pan lineage 7 million years ago; and from the Gorrillini line 10 million years ago. How the chimpanzee and gorilla societies evolved has no lessons to teach us in the Homo lineage. It is not of much relevance on how the idea of marriage developed in human society. To argue against the whole concept of marriage as some feminists do so that women and men are free to do whatever takes their fancy is not sustainable. In a free world it would be the case that men and women go their separate ways. But we are not in a free world. It is a symbiotic world and with specific reference to humanity and a mutual understanding of needs is essential. This is because in a free world individuals are in competition with each other for resources and you will find that in that competition women are going to be the big losers because men are biologically stronger than women and will finish them off in a battle for resources from the environment. That will be the demise of the species. We would have become cannibals. The reason marriage developed is because men saw that to keep women alive by sharing resources was in their own interests as they got sex and children from the association and developed other social attributes of commonality. Men must have realised that they need children to care for their needs when they are old, to help with hunting and working on the fields. Who decided that this association was necessary, men or women? If one believes that it was men who forced women into the marital/family union to live as sex and children slaves in family groups because they were the stronger sex what is the evidence for this viewpoint? Women must have seen that it was in their survival interests that such an association exists. They must have been emotionally attracted to the idea of monogamous union as an evolutionary process that affected both men and women. Just because we are now in the 21st century with scientific and technological progress in reproductive activities such as sperm donor insemination and in vitro fertilisation this consideration has not gone away. It is therefore far more likely that marital union was a joint decision between men and women this still applies today, as women find their own sexuality and find men who can satisfy them orgasmically for example.
So feminist divisions of humanity is not good for them because men will win in any battle of the sexes if humanity went for separation of the sexes away from the idea of marital union. That is not the future that an enlightened evolutionary biologist will recommend. If one sees the future of the world as being a society in which women have become so liberated from the shackles of marital union that all the women would get their sperms from donor insemination agencies to whom men sell their sperms so that some of the women can have children, one has to have evidence that men are going to subject themselves to such an indignity that will leave them with no rights to their children. Even if the option was feasible, humankind will suffer. So there is a need for regulating male and female association as I have outlined in my proposal of Full and Free Marriages in society.
As to evolutionary biologists normally recognising that ‘males and females of a species have different reproductive interests and goals and that these affect their instincts and behaviour’ that is true only for the outliers or sexual deviants from the mainline of the population. Lesbians and male homosexuals come under that category of humans. The mainstream humanity progresses as a common union as a single species in which the anatomical and physiological reproductive functions of the male and female and associated emotional directives follow a common path by virtue of the fact that a state exists that will propagate itself and mutations are relatively rare occurrences that might affect the next generation and there then also has to be selection pressure in societies selecting for the new traits. Of course evolutionary biologists do recognise that the deviants may develop intelligence and traits that will lead to the formation of a new species altogether and what some women want as advantages for women is part of a speciation pressure that the current humanity is facing in the evolutionary sense. Radical feminists therefore have strong opposition to their desire for advantages. Such feminists will have to find men who we shall call ‘sissy’ or effeminate men that tow the feminist line to go into Free Marriages rather than Full Marriages. The human species will bifurcate along these lines if feminism gets stronger and results in the dismantlement of traditional marital basis for society across the world. But it seems to be a western idea so presently localised to these countries. If it spreads to high population nations like India and China then the social organisation of the entire world will be subject to irreversible feminist pressure. Women will become the stronger sex perhaps like in the cat family. That is evolutionary biology.
As to whether humans are social animals in the same way as ants, bees, chimpanzees and gorrillas, I would dispute the assertion on the grounds that we are strongly individualistic. Neighbours in our locality hardly talk to each other. We are all in competition for resources. If a woman does not provide me what I need and if I do not provide a woman what she needs we will not waste one moment of our time and breath over each other. Similarly there are multi-billionaires and those on the breadline in our very own country. There is very little altruism between individuals. There is hardly any sharing. Hence society has evolved through rulers as an organisation (State) to compel and regulate us individualistic human beings into submission by the law of might is right. In its own way it is exploitative. Aristotle was wrong therefore that man is a social animal wanting to live in groups. We just know how to use each other for our needs. We exploit what we can whenever we can.
One needs to forget about the organisation of chimpanzee, bonobo, and gorilla society when trying to understand human society. We humans have evolved away from that kind of social order and organisation which restricted the growth of those populations of primates to their original natural habitats, whereas humans evolved to spread throughout the world, living in in every habitat and increasing its population to levels that the environment had room for. It became a very successful species. How did it happen? It happened because humans became considerably more individualistic and family oriented from their social ancestors of 7-10 million years ago. We have plenty of evidence of how humans live now to know what kind of ‘social’ animals we are. We can live in total isolation and do not need big communities to help us sustain each other. We only need a family (and other one or two living in relatively close proximity to exchange genes with) where a male and a female have come together and that is how marriage developed. Individual men and women came together for love or like and disappeared to set up their own home away from the existing families. Human intelligence evolved to make the need for large social ordering redundant. Fragmentation of humanity has continued even in the last two generation where we turned from close-knit large families to individual family households showing that the intrinsic drive for small units was already in our genes. The eskimoes are an example as were the native Australian aboriginals until Europeans herded them into ghettos. We do not need nation states which are a convenient construct that came from historical developments when stronger people wanted to live on others as parasites by enslavement of the population. Without individual families moving out of their social order to find new territories in which to set up home the world would not have been colonised by humans. There was never mass migration at any point in human history. It was always gradual individual family migration. The family is not the full extent of our social ordering and organisation because human relationships became complex in an interrelated world where it was found to be more efficient to work together to generate greater comfort for a lot of people, but not for all. There is great poverty in the world and the system of world order is exploitative with plenty of slaves working to keep a minority in wealth and comfort that others can only dream about. So as I said earlier, this is not a social system but a dog-eat-dog world order where we tolerate others so long as we find them useful to us.
In the context of evolutionary biology there is no strategy by the organism of the population. There is no reproductive interest in passing on our genes. There is just interest in having sex for both males and females as a physiological function of the body and it just so happens that the product of this act is the generation of an offspring – sometimes. When that is known it becomes a human desire to see a young one in the family much like people own pets, and once humans see that this child has become an source of additional labour into the household who will enhance their chances of survival in the wild they continue to engage in sexual intercourse for enjoyment and offspring. Nothing to do with passing on of our genes. Most human males and females were always only concerned with producing the next generation so as to find young people who would do the manual work of hunting, gathering and agricultural, so look after the parents when they became old.
The success of the human species has been because reproduction evolved to a peak level of unison between the male and the female components of the species. And the question of why oestrus is nearly totally absent in human beings has nothing to do a strategy how a female invests in her offsprings with a particular objectives while males have other objectives of impregnating as many females as possible. We know that on the whole males do not impregnate as many females as possible to spread their genes as this takes a considerable amount of investement in new relationships with the opposite sex and male humans do not kill the child of another man in the same way as you have seen gorillas do in the wild. Whatever implicit reproductive ‘strategy’ there is in the reproductive behaviour it is a joint male and female united one that evolved with man and woman living together in the first place. The reason that it cannot be solely a independent female behaviour is that unless a feminine behaviour finds a male counterpart that fits into that behaviour, that behavioural element of life will quickly be selected against and become extinct. We would not be here if the two sexes were not working and developing together. The fact is that all round the world human beings have evolved to live more or less monogamously (with the exception of some societies). This is proof that man did not want ownership of a woman but they lived together because they complemented each other.
Specifically, the reason that oestrus is absent in female humans is there was no need for it on account of the fact that the male produced 400 million sperms per ejaculation and was able to produced this sustainably for 30-40 years way beyond the fertile ages of the female. In such a situation to have oestrus would be an investment of physiological energy in the body that would not pay dividends in terms of survival/fitness. It disappeared as a mutational event and was not missed as it served no useful function in humans because of improved male fertility. So it was not ‘concealed’ ovulation as a strategy. It had nothing to do with males and females wishing to know who their biological child was. I therefore disagree that human male attempts to have exclusive ownership of a particular woman are a male counter to the female ‘strategy’ of wanting to prevent men from knowing who their biological child was.
Female humans invest considerably more physiologically over the 9-month pregnancy period and subsequently in reproduction and there is therefore a cost in other ways for her. Biologically she will have deficits in other quarters in what she can do and cannot do both during the pregnancy and child nurturing period and in her entire life. She has to be looked after by the man during the periods of pregnancy, child rearing, before it and afterwards. That is why the male of the species evolved strongly to be able to provide for her and look after the needs of the child.