Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy (22 page)

But a study by Douglas Fry and Patrik Söderberg published in 2013 balanced the picture. They examined twenty-one mobile forager band societies in a worldwide sample. They tallied all cases of homicide reported by ethnographers. Most lethal events were one-on-one, and even when more than one perpetrator was involved in killing a victim, it was usually not between groups. Inter
group
lethal events were uncommon, and most were attributable to one culture, the Tiwi of Australia. But when hunter-gatherers settled in at higher population densities with rich resources this picture changed, and in some of these societies war became routine.

After
the transition to agriculture the evidence is abundant, and prehistorians have destroyed the myth that early farming cultures were peaceable. In fact, belief in this myth required blindness to evidence, which archaeologist Lawrence Keeley has called “interpretive pacifications.” Many skeletons have embedded spear and arrow points, fractures on the left side of the skull (from clubs and axes in the attacker’s right hand), and parry fractures of the lower arms from fending off those blows. Many excavations include graves with weapons and armor; fortifications are everywhere. Among the civilizations we looked at—Mesopotamia, Shang dynasty China, the Aztecs, and so on—power was more centralized and the military more effective. These emerged as states, not tribes or chiefdoms, and their social organization resembles that of the legendary rivals of the Homeric epics, the Bible, the Mahabharata, and other revered classics. Going from there to the wars of modern states is largely a matter of technology. History since hunter-gatherers settled down can be seen as ongoing, expansionist tribal warfare. Nationalism, historian Arnold Toynbee said, is “a sour ferment of the new wine of Democracy in the old bottles of tribalism.”

The great literary and religious works of all civilizations give a central place to war. “Sing, O Goddess, the ruinous wrath of Achilles,” begins the poet of the
Iliad,
and we soon find out why the superhuman warrior is angry—angry enough to take a long break from the Trojan War and watch his own Greeks go down. His rage results from a special theft: a beautiful concubine named Briseis—captured by Achilles after he killed her husband, father, and three brothers—has been seized by the Greek king to warm his own bed. Achilles, insulted, sulks on the shores before the walls of Troy while his fellow Greeks are slaughtered. The king can do what he wants, but the hissy fit of this single hero could cost the Greeks the war.

And why are they there? Because of an insolent theft of a more important woman: the fabled beauty Helen, the wife of the king’s
own brother, captured and taken from Greece to Troy by a young man—whom she did not, it seems, strongly resist. This nonetheless causes a war with many thousand deaths, recalled in poetry for almost three millennia.

Achilles’s anger is not eased, but it is pushed aside by a greater fury: his friend and lover Patroklos is killed in battle, a death that can be blamed on Achilles’s own pride. He cuts the throats of twelve captured Trojan boys on his lover’s funeral pyre, and when
his
grief turns to rage, Troy is done for. Little wonder that the philosopher and critic Simone Weil called the
Iliad
“the poem of force.” But however much the ancient Greek males loved and made love to men, they collected women. Achilles gets his prize lady back, although he is later killed. The Greeks win, and the king goes home with yet another impressive captured concubine, only to be laid low by his own straying, vengeful wife. The course of true love never did run smooth.

Yet, according to tradition, the face that launched a thousand ships was not Helen’s but that of the king’s daughter Iphigeneia, whose throat
he
slit in order to fill his fleet’s sails with wind. Her mother’s later slaying of her father will have something to do with his having traded their child for a salt breeze. But how did that lady become the king’s wife in the first place? He killed her first husband, raped her, and forced the marriage. Little wonder she took a lover during the king’s Trojan decade; together they did the king in when he came home with
his
special sexual prize—a former Trojan princess who was also a seer. She foretold the bloody sequence, including the queen’s later death at her son’s hands.

But of all these violent events, the only unusual ones were the killings within the king’s family. Slaughtering men to get their wives and daughters was routine in ancient war, and women were one main reason for war.

The great moral texts of the Judeo-Christian tradition send a clear message, shown first in the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib.
The patriarchs Abraham and Jacob each have multiple wives and concubines. In one of the odder Bible stories, Abraham’s nephew Lot gives his virgin daughters to a crowd that wants to sodomize (in Sodom) some guests thought to be angels, and later those daughters seduce their dad, citing their belief that he is the last man.

Jacob’s daughter Dinah is captured by the prince Shechem, who lies with and “defiles” her—but falls in love. The youth’s father tries to make a deal with Jacob, but Dinah’s enraged brothers play a prodigious trick on the men of the town. They say, Okay, marry Dinah, but you have to be circumcised first. The men agree, and while recovering from this delicate procedure are slaughtered en masse by Jacob’s twelve sons, who take captive “all their wealth, and all their little ones, and their wives.” Most of Jacob’s sons then spawn their own large polygamous broods—the tribes of Israel.

Moses himself has two wives, and he issues clear instructions about captives. Numbers 31 recounts, “And the children of Israel took all the women of Midian captives, and their little ones, and took the spoil of all their cattle, and all their flocks, and all their goods. And they burnt all their cities wherein they dwelt, and all their goodly castles, with fire.” Moses (whose senior wife is a priest of Midian’s daughter) is angry: “Have ye saved all the women alive?” This kind of munificence had caused a plague in the past—God’s wrath or, perhaps, a social disease? “Now therefore kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him. But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.” These numbered thirty-two thousand.

Chapters 19 to 21 of the Book of Judges—a book rife with wars—repeat some of these themes. A Levite man has taken a concubine who “played the whore against him,” returning to her father’s house. He retrieves her with a long visit and much persuading. While staying for the night on the way home, he finds men outside his door who want to have sex with him, but he gives them the concubine instead.
They rape her all night long, and the man finds her dead with her hands gripping the doorstep. Bizarrely, he cuts her in twelve pieces and sends them out to the tribes of Israel.

This leads to civil war: “And this is the thing that ye shall do: Ye shall utterly destroy every male, and every woman that hath lain by man. And they found among the inhabitants of Jabesh-gilead four hundred young virgins, that had known no man by lying with any man; and they brought them unto the camp.” Now, though, they have to heal the wounds of war and find wives for the surviving men of Benjamin: “Go and lie in wait in the vineyards; and see, and, behold, if the daughters of Shiloh come out to dance in the dances, then come ye out of the vineyards, and catch you every man his wife.” And so they did. The tale concludes, “In those days there was no king in Israel; everyone did that which was right in his own eyes.”

And when there
were
kings? David, pacing his palace balcony, catches sight of a bathing beauty: Bathsheba, married to one of his loyal captains. He summons her, has his way, elects to keep doing so, and sends her husband to the most dangerous part of the front, where the unsuspecting cuckold is duly killed. This adulterous, quasi-homicidal union produces the great, wise, and prolific King Solomon. The father had at least seven wives and ten concubines, but the son had seven hundred and three hundred, respectively.

I was raised on these Jewish biblical texts, and when I asked about the morality of all this sex and slaughter, the answer was usually some version of “Things were different then.” They certainly were, but the difference—fairly described as much greater violence between men over women
and
much greater abuse of women by men—persisted across the globe for thousands of years. As such it was reflected in the cherished literature and sacred texts of all civilizations. The stories were told in such a way as to justify what was done, and they served as excuses and models for ongoing conflict and abuse.

The Mahabharata, the great Hindu epic of rivalry and war, has
had sacred status for many centuries. The hero is Arjuna—a skilled archer, diffident but brave warrior, and morally virtuous leader—who is uniquely worthy to have the Lord Krishna teach him the path to goodness, just on the eve of a great fratricidal battle that he undertakes with reluctance and pain. The result is the Bhagavad Gita, perhaps the most essential Hindu scripture. But in the epic itself, the pure and gloried Arjuna has romantic and sexual adventures along with martial ones; he ends up with four wives and a son by each. Polygyny was certainly common among the nobility of ancient India, and it was explicitly allowed under Hindu religious law. Another important text in sacred Hindu law, the Manu-smriti, provides (among much else) detailed instructions about how the king should avail himself of the pleasures of his harem. For example, “The king may enter the harem at midday. . . . When he has dined, he may divert himself with his wives in the harem; but when he has diverted himself, he must, in due time, again think of the affairs of state.” No rest for the weary.

Confucianism praised polygyny and helped spread its acceptance from China to Korea and Japan. Buddhism allows it today as a secular matter in Thailand, Burma, and elsewhere, although Tibet also has polyandry—the only country where it’s official and common. In Islam, the Qur’a-n permits up to four wives, but the man must love them equally and they must have their own property; many Muslim countries permit polygyny today. Like Abraham and Moses, Muhammad was a highly successful and sometimes unforgiving warrior, and within a few generations his followers had conquered much of the world and were able to avail themselves of countless new mating opportunities. And, of course, the Mormon religion was founded in part upon polygyny; although it has long been forbidden by mainstream Mormons, people claiming to be Mormons (sometimes called Mormon fundamentalists) continue it, with many thousands of them in polygynous marriages in the twenty-first-century United States.

The only major religion to have officially opposed it from the outset was Christianity, which nonetheless tolerated it in important men. Charlemagne had three wives, five concubines, and twenty children; Martin Luther approved bigamy for a ruler; and priests and other clergymen, including some highly placed in religious orders, had access to multiple women throughout history. Nonetheless, as we will see in the next chapter, principled Christian advocacy of monogamy joined parallel Roman attitudes to eventually change the laws and customs of Europe and to some extent the world.

Evolutionary anthropologist Laura Betzig has long been interested in men who collect women. Her classic work
Despotism and Differential Reproduction
became a milestone of Darwinian social science by showing that throughout history authoritarian rulers in every part of the world accumulated scores, sometimes hundreds, of wives and concubines and fathered hundreds of children. We will return to these kinds of rulers and the implications of their prodigious breeding, but for now let’s look at polygyny and reproductive success in a much broader range of human societies, based on a 2012 update by Betzig.

Her goal in this research was to consider the mean, range, and variance—a statistical measure of variation—in reproductive success in different kinds of societies for women and men. The range starts with zero and goes up to whatever number has been found as the maximum. The variance is a subtler measure that avoids giving a single case too much weight. She compared three kinds of societies: hunter-gatherers, herders and gardeners, and intensive agriculturalists. In the first two groups, only societies with very good data were included. The third group is historical, based on documents, and she reported only the number of children for the top guy.

For women, the maximum number of children may be anywhere from six to eighteen, and in this hunter-gatherer women resemble herders and gardeners. Even in hunter-gatherers, though, men have
more children, as well as a greater range and variance than women do. For herders and gardeners,
all
the measures show a greater sex difference than that found in hunter-gatherers; in other words, although the maximum number of children for women is similar, the maximum number for men is greater. And in the historical cultures practicing intensive agriculture—the Incan, Mesopotamian, Hindu, Aztec, Egyptian, and Chinese cultures—the emperors had hundreds of children each. Other nobles—their associates and officers—also each had many wives.

Polygyny, we have seen, is allowed at some level in most human societies, while the reverse pattern is much less common, at least officially. Consider the chiefdom, a transitional stage between simple gardeners or herders and the grand historical empires. Berys Heuer, an authority on the women of the New Zealand Maori, writes that three of their traditional paramount chiefs had eight, five, and twelve wives respectively, while “lesser known chiefs had equally large numbers of spouses.” The English arriving at Jamestown, Virginia, in the early 1600s found that the paramount chief of the Powhatan had more than one hundred wives; he was depicted with many of them in a 1612 English drawing. Kamehameha I, who ruled in Hawaii in the early 1800s, had many wives, as did other traditional Hawaiian chiefs. And the currently reigning king of the Zulu people had six wives and at least twenty-five children as of 2012. Even among the matrilineal Ashanti of Ghana, where a man derived his status from his mother, a chief was expected to have many wives. These cases occur throughout the world, throughout history. Powerful men amass wives in proportion to their power.