In a previous post, I argued that a society better than ours would be one in which the female spirit is incorporated.  To advance toward that objective, we need to investigate further why men dominated the world so far. The key question may be: "How did we move from a nomadic and gatherer human kind, which lasted about 200,000 years, with men and women dividing tasks set by biological capacity and equal division of power, to a male-dominated society in the last 10, 000 years? “

This issue becomes critical if we realize that the domination of men over women is the primary form of domination, the most universal, and perhaps the mother of all others.

In a first part, this text will make general observations about the reasons that led to the domination of men in human civilization, listing fairly well known ideas. More boldly, it will also try to investigate the domination over the prism of less-explored themes such as male insecurity in the sexual and psychological fields. The second part of the text discusses the possibility of  some female acceptance of this domination. In addition to sources in literature, in interviews with some men interested in the subject and in my personal experience, I also interviewed the anthropologist Ordep Serra, who brought relevant observations on my subject.

The Neolithic revolution, which resulted in a sedentary way of life, in the development of agriculture and in the establishment of the first civilizations and the first cities, also brought the foundations for male dominance.

The first foundation is the institution of private property and the widespread practice of war for territories in human society. The exaltation of strength and masculine aggression was instituted to ensure territorial control, property defense, as well as self-defense and survival of the family and of the social group. The previous power-sharing -in which women had the symbolic power of generating life and men the power of force- became unbalanced.

The second foundation of male dominance is the institution of inheritance, which is the transfer of private property by blood. This led to the construction of moral rules to keep women under the control of men. From men´s point of view, to ensure the conviction of fatherhood on the family´s heritage beneficiaries, it was compulsory to prevent extramarital affairs, to avoid foreign-blood children to enter the line of succession. As physical strength does not guarantee continuous and sufficient domination, human males have created persuasive mechanisms and moral rules for women's submission, in order to maintain the control and feel safer, thus compelling women to a secondary place in society. Women´s strength was then kept for a long time within the private and family scope and in a mystery sphere.

A third basis concerns the comfort that the domination situation earns the rulers. The imposition of daily housework and other services, including sexual ones, to women made male´s life easier. One of the roots of unequal systems created by humans is this imposition of tasks considered minor, dishonorable or uncomfortable to others. Women may have been the first victims of the system. One way to improve the world is certainly by establishing equal relations between men and women in the domestic sphere. This would mainly turn out the inequality abnormal in the culture of the future generations .

All this seems to explain the reasons of male dominance, but also puts men as villains in human history. One way to overcome this Manichean view is to seek complexity and thus get closer to the facts and to the reality. Then, from another point of view, only one uncompensated person can base its existence on strength and aggression, or even competitiveness, to rule over others. Why other male attributes, which could have led to less aggressive and less competitive societies did not prevail? Men have ancestral qualities like -among others- the courage of confronting danger to protect the weakest, the enchantment with the beauty of the universe and with the feminine mystery, particularly in relation to pregnancy, as well as a strong team spirit.

The motives for desiring  dominance can be scanned from another side: domination could serve to mask the fear of relationships between equals. In such relationships, each one is valued by what he/she is worth and each one is also responsible for its own existence, without need of oppressing anyone. The domination may then hide a great weakness, lack of autonomy and even lack of self-esteem. What could be the reasons for the male´s insecurity? One of them may be men´s feeling of helplessness without women's presence at their side. Professor Ordep Serra -when commenting on a concept of Victor Turner, another anthropologist- refers to this feeling and says that a secret envy of "the powers of the weak" reaches the powerful. Some feminine qualities cannot earn men the power of command, but could empower them in privacy, giving them a symbolic status and make them indispensable.

Women generally mature earlier; they have a greater resistance to pain and a great adaptability inherent in their biology, greater empathy in social relations and a more developed intuition. Without going into details on the psychological relations of men with their mothers, spouses, daughters and even sisters, the female spirit may have emerged as a force that frightens men. From his research on native Indian tribes of the Xingu National Park, as well as his studies of Greek mythology, Ordep Serra believes that the myths, rituals and attitudes of so different people reveal an astonishing recurrence of male jealousy of women´s power. This issue may justify the domination over women.

Sexuality is another important thing to note for understanding male dominance from the perspective of his fragility. Biological conditions, evoked in the previous post, have helped us to understand masculine and feminine attributes and behavior induced by Nature herself. Some of these conditions and gender differences make the shape of the sexual organs -and the sexual act itself- show the following: the female hosts the male´s seed, which give women the ability to gestate life and keep men away of the process; in the sexual act, there is a greater passivity in women, while there is an exposure of his sexual organ and an active penetration in men; orgasm in located and visible (penis) in men while more diffuse in the whole body, with a peak in a hidden location (clitoris), in women.

In a way, we can say that men experience weakness and an exposed situation in the sexual field. The male desire is evident by the erection while female desire is mysterious and only she can fully identify it. The classic Kinsey and Hite reports on human sexuality, among others, provide important information with respect to this situation: the male desire is very diffuse, raised primarily by the sight; while for the woman the preferred mean to arouse desire is the touch, which takes place in the intimacy. These characteristics make the sexual mood more general and diffuse for men and more specific and focused for women. The fears of betrayal are also very different among men and women. This is perhaps the reason why, according to the same reports, men would be more jealous of the woman having sex with other men and women would be more jealous of affective demonstrations to other women. Similarly, the most common sexual fantasies for both sexes address dominance situations in men and subjection in women.

These data relate to the historical sexual roles of both genders to ensure survival of human race. Gene-survival instinct is the common principle of biological conditioning for all animals. The existence of the offspring and the subsequent breeding of this offspring guarantee this survival. In the case of human beings, cultural conditioning - the fear of death, and his "overcome" by offspring’s - further strengthens the biological sexual behaviors. To ensure their historical continuity, men - like other males - tend to be aggressive towards other men and protective to their life´s territory to conquer or maintain their wives, who guaranties the procreation. For the same motivation, women - as many other females do-  tend to take care of their babies, perceiving their emotional and material daily demands and attentively provide them with what they need. To keep their children-maintenance male-partners near them, women tend to fend off competitors by non-physical means, or by simply accepting them as accomplices. Among non-physical means of competition for the males, we can speculate about the use of communicative intrigue (gossip) or the various means of seduction.

As in the previous post, to better understand the conditioning of thousands of years, let´s go back to ancient times and observe some situations about the male / female ratio in the nomadic and gatherer societies. In these times, women were in the camp with children and the elderly, while men went in search of hunting or kept awake to protect the group. To make it simple, when a man was interested in a woman, or the other way round, this could end up in an acceptance -which generated a relationship and maybe children- or a rejection, which generated pain. Acceptance or pain similarly was true for the woman. In the midst of Nature, based on the natural physical conformation of males and females and on their everyday duties, however, the rejection and consequent  pain are quite different.

In the middle of the protected common place of the community, women fighting over the same man may have generated a lot of screaming and scratching. Meanwhile, amid a hunt or while confronting a predator, men in contention may have weakened the group or make them loose a prey. This would have raised larger consequences for the community. Perhaps male´s behaviors to prevent dispute consequences may have, long after, modeled the two biblical commandments that seem the strangest to our modern eyes: "Thou shalt not sin against chastity" and "Do not covet your neighbor's wife." Perhaps male´s behaviors to avoid the pain of rejection have also modeled aggressiveness in front of other men as well as domination over women, which persist up to day.

To avoid looking fragile, when exhibiting his desire or even his love, and to circumvent the fear of being betrayed or of being alone the domineering dominates by force and by imposing a patriarchal culture. For him, therefore, the mastered-one can be unfaithful, source of conceal and even source of hatred. Conquering is almost never enjoyable and brings not peace, but mistrust. Throughout history, many men secretly wondered on their wives : "Does she love me, or she suits me because I'm stronger?", "Does she agree with me or just submits to me?", "Does she take pleasure with me, or only pretends to, just to please me? "," In she  faithful or has other lovers? ". These, and other unanswered questions, may have tormented men throughout history because of the absence of an egalitarian relationship. Many men came to their women trying to understand them. Other more-fragile ones -and perhaps for that reason compelled to seek more power and wealth- used force, money and patriarchal power to surrender their wives and daughters.

The women acceptance of male dominance

Since women have historically had a leading role in the education of sons and daughters, we can say that the establishment of men dominance raised some acceptance from women. If at least part of the women had not applied the androcentric model when interacting with their offspring, machismo could have not diffused so much through generations.

On the one hand, in the early days of sedentary human civilization, women may have accepted that strong and aggressive men should dominate society in return for food and security for the offspring, i.e. in war conditions. Women may also have educated their sons to fear and suppress their own femininity because of the fear of losing land ownership.

In other situations, the male force itself -more than female's consent- may have imposed the dominance. In that case, the other women natural tendency -to  avoid conflicts, to be non-violent and to negotiate- may have taken them to avoid the confrontation and to submit them, in order to reach family peace. We can think that in the public space and in the community, perhaps predominates another type of submission: the one derived from the internalization of the oppressed stigma. Paulo Freire, referring to the poor in Northeastern Brazil and to their relationships with the rich colonels, explained this concept. The dominance takes such importance in the society´s culture that the oppressed one internalizes the system and sees it as the natural order of things. Thus, in most cases, he may not perceive the oppression even though he severely suffers from its effects. This phenomenon, the “internalization of oppression” by the mothers may have been one of the factors that led to the acceptance of dominance and to their differentiated ways of educating boys and girls.

Freire explains another aspect of the internalization of oppression, which is the "commitment to the oppressor". He exemplifies the passage of a handyman who becomes foreman: for having "stuck" to the dominant model, the foreman reinforces the system and overwhelms those who previously were his equals. In the case of the women's submission history, this factor may have played a very important role for having mothers, sisters and mothers in law control the system that oppresses other women and preserves the male dominance.

Another aspect can be perceived in the relations between men and women: it´s more usual to comment about conjugal and father-daughter relationships than about the liaison of men with their mothers. These latter can never be characterized as a dominance relationship, but rather quite the opposite since the devotion of men to their mothers is a widely known psychical and cultural fact. Human complexity has made subtle forms of power been developed by women and they play an active role in the game of family ties. Of course, these relationships are different in every stage and in every family and they also heavily rely on the personal characteristics of each woman: some of them have a real power, even if it is invisible to the men and to their families while others, more timid and peaceful, have almost no power.

Actually, male strength and fragility that led to male domination were not counterbalanced by an active feminine that would have given limits to the uncontrolled masculine power. It is also true that domination implies the responsibility to give directions, while submission discharges the dominated of this weight. As discussed earlier in this blog, if females tend to work in the back office, tend to share decisions and are less tempted by risk, they may have avoided taking forward alone the responsibility of the group/the family. At least, they may have not fought for this responsibility and may have rendered the male domination easier.

Overcoming the male dominance will require from men and women a profound self-knowledge and an understanding and acceptance of the existence of male and female spirits in each of them. Harmonization of individuals and society needs recognition and appreciation of Yin and Yang. Maybe more than in the field of laws and social policies, it is probably in the field of personal relations that a room to overcome the domination is being built. When women empower, they help men to "rest" from their commanding attributes and from the overly masculine and rough world they have built. When men become more feminine, they help women to find negotiated exits and to turn the world more welcoming. When men and women share tasks and responsibilities at home, at work, etc. they build a more feminine -less unbalanced by male supremacy- world. The feminine spirit can develop itself in the experience of every person, of every couple, of every family. Without the locks of dominance,  new generations will be favored. They will be able to build a more equal world, not only for men and women but also for white and black, rich and poor and for all the other victims of the inequalities that spread around the world.