What is the species characteristic that is the basis for misogyny in human kind?

I’ll give you two hypotheses:

1. People in positions of power often use it in cruel and awful ways. Men have traditionally been in positions of power, and once upon a time that could be attributed to their larger physical size.

2. Alternatively, perhaps women are just inferior and deserve it.

Take your pick.

I always assumed women were a little pickier with their partners. That causes some major resentment in the people who aren’t picked. Get a bunch of resentful guys together, they are going to start reinforcing each other bad mouthing women.

I think it has to do with power imbalance and belief systems.
Many moons ago women were seen as goddesses, the givers of life, revered for their feminine gifts.
Somewhere along the way the revered female energy was dismissed by an increasingly patriarchal mindset.

@Coloma
Clearly
But why?

^Heard that theory as well. Mionian eruption.
The Minoans worshiped Female Gods, after the eruption, all the tribes around decided that the male gods had decided to punish them, and Male Centric Gods were the only way to go in Western Civ from that point on.

@josie I can’t say with certainty, just somewhere in our “evolution” the male of the species became seen as the more dominant. Maybe as the human population became more expansive and less close knit in an intimate tribal fashion, the “warrior” “king of the castle“mentally got hardwired in.
From goddess to property akin to livestock…fuck that! lol

@Imadethisupwithnoforethought Get a bunch of resentful guys together, they are going to start reinforcing each other bad mouthing women. Or…they could really “get together”. Lol.

Species characteristic? How about something as simple as getting to put food in one’s mouth first. The rest just follows.

If you are willing to include the Bible stories in your arguments, maybe men have been trying to get even with Eve for getting them booted out of Eden.

@Sunny2
But what I am talking about precedes the Biblical stories. Those stories exist because of something in the nature of humanity.

I believe the explanation from Sex at Dawn. The authors argue that before agriculture, work was divided equally, with men hunting and women foraging. People were always on the move, so nobody really had many posessions, and they lived in small communities where everyone knew each other and helped raise children together.

With the advent of agriculture, people started settling down in one place and building cities. There was a new incentive for people to claim and protect their own land, because the best land grew the most food. Then they needed places to store their harvest, laws to protect ownership, etc.

Also, people lived in larger communities, so you didn’t necessarily know all your neighbors, or trust them. Child-rearing went from being a shared community job to the responsibility of individual families. It became much more important to know that your child was your own, because they would inherit all your stuff. Labor became subdivided, and men ended up controlling land and property- with land and property being keys to survival in these new agricultural societies.

Marriage, and rules governing womens’ sexuality, came out of these all this. Marriage became womens’ surest route to survival. Misogyny came from mens’ disproportionate control of resources. History has shown again and again that when one group has power over the other, they abuse the shit out of that power. Over the 10k years or so, those attitudes became deeply entrenched in most societies. But they’re not part of human nature. Humans have been around for much longer than that, and in evolutionary terms, ten thousand years is a blip on the radar.

@Haleth I bow to your masterful and eloquent explanation!

@Haleth
Over the 10K years or so, those attitudes became deeply entrenched in most societies. But they’re not part of human nature
How can human social structure NOT be part of human nature. Since they were organized willfully by humans, they must be an expression of human nature.

@josie “How can human social structure NOT be part of human nature.”

What I said was “those attitudes became deeply entrenched in most societies. But they’re not part of human nature.” “They’re” in the second sentence refers to “attitudes,” as in, sexist/ misogynistic attitudes.

Humans are social animals, and the tendency to form societies does seem to be part of our nature. Not all societies are the same. Patriarchal societies are the prevalent type now, but there are plenty of examples of egalitarian or matriarchal societies. We might be hardwired to band together with other people; that doesn’t mean we’re hardwired for misogyny.

Also, there’s a big difference between expressing/creating something, and that product being a part of your nature. All the different art movements over time were created willfully by people as a means of expression (and literature, music, etc.) They’re all so different from one another, with different aesthetics, values, and philosophies.

The urge to create things might be part of our nature, but that doesn’t mean the individual things we create are a part of wider human nature. People have free will, and that includes the freedom to express different ideas.

(I mean, just the fact that I’m able to argue this point shows that misogyny isn’t part of human nature. If it were, the status quo would be part of my psychological makeup, and I wouldn’t see anything wrong with it.)

Since they were organized willfully by humans, they must be an expression of human nature.

Social structures are an expression of the individual people who create them. That’s why there are different types of societies.

Patriarchy is the dominant type of society, but that’s not because of patriarchy. Modern Eurasian culture has spread to all corners of the globe, from its origins in the fertile crescent. That’s not because patriarchy is more natural to us; it’s because of agriculture.

Agriculture meant food surpluses; that meant that not everybody had to work on getting food for the society to sustain itself. Some people could work on other things, like developing technology or being a full-time fighting force. The first agricultural societies had a huge tactical advantage over their neighbors, and their culture spread. Patriarchy and cultural dominance go hand-in-hand, but they’re only side-effects. Agriculture is the cause of both of those.

Things are becoming more equal nowadays because we’re moving away from an agriculture economy and into an information economy. That levels the playing field.

@coloma :D thanks!

No disrespect intended at @josie but I believe the premise of your question is wrong. I do not believe misogyny is a species characteristic in humans. For that to be true it would be a universal concept, which it never has been and it would not be a trending factor either.

Here is an admittedly biased paper that closely reflects my take Beyond Patriarchy
which I want to highlight these two passages from,
”all archaeological evidence indicates that these matriarchal cultures were egalitarian, democratic, peaceful. But female-oriented agricultural societies gradually gave way to a male-dominated political state in which occupational specialization, commerce, social stratification, and militarism developed.”

Four components of society have consistently held women back: “These four establishments are: the classical empires, the ecclesiastical establishment, the nation-state, and the modern corporation. The four are exclusively male-dominated and primarily for fulfillment in terms of the human as envisaged by men. Women had minimal if any consistent role in the direction of these establishments.”

An incomplete list of women leaders throughout history but brief descriptions of their role in history followed by a more complete list of women who held power

Getting more in line with your question. Early societies were thought to hold women in esteem and were depicted in their art and culture. Minoan culture is an example of this as is early Egypt, sorry I lost my source for that, they also worshiped female deities and the Iroquois.

There are current examples of gynecocracy, admittedly these are generally small tribal systems. But they fall under my point that there is not a consistent overall universal acceptance of misogyny.

Add that to the slow shift in dynamics to a more feminist era where the potential has yet to unfold and I would say it is a trend. Possibly a necessity or viewed as such. But once the dynamic shifted the harder it became to shift back to a more balanced and equal approach.

As the pendulum swings.

Regardless of my take I enjoyed the question. Thank you.

Darn it I forgot to emphasize my tie in. Misogyny in my opinion happened as a result of the power shifting unequally. People like power and want to keep it. If you can eliminate over half the population as threats to that power why not. Over time it became self reinforcing and led to a divorcing of aspects of self which may be attributed to the opposite gender.

Acorndick syndrome.

Great question, @josie. I have given this one much thought! I am pretty skeptical of primitivist arguments that posit that everything was rosy and equitable before the advent of settled agriculture. I feel like, if that were true, then societies who did not adopt sedentary agriculture would still be egalitarian utopias… But the Mongols and other steppe nomads, just for one example, were neither egalitarian or feminist…! For a long time in Western civilization, there has been this thread of primitivism that holds that everything was glorious before settled societies, and I just don’t buy it. Primitivism has always been a critique of Western institutions far more than it is a realistic reflection of pre-sedentary human society. I guess it might come down to whether you believe that humans are always naturally good before social institutions, and while I consider myself a humanist, I am just not so blindly idealistic as to accept that premise.

Before I transitioned, I experienced misogyny and sexism, and now that I’m on the other side of things, I often get male privilege and am sometimes privy to “guy talk.” And I still hold to my suspicion that misogyny and sexist attitudes result from the simple statistical likelihood that testosterone gives males more muscle mass and aggression… I am NOT saying that these attitudes are justified because of biology (holy CRAP do I ever hate evolutionary biology…). Rather, I am saying that the fact of usually having more physical power has made it possible and desirable for males to be misogynistic, and enforce social structures that express misogyny. Just like how the statistical likelihood of traits that we associate with the sexes, and which fuel sexist attitudes, homophobia, etc., are hormonally derived. (E.g. “Men don’t cry.” Testosterone makes it more difficult to cry, which is not to say that there should be any normative judgement in there that “Men shouldn’t cry,” or that they are “pussies” if they do, etc.)

@bookish1 Why does one have to make the argument that social institutions were bad or societies predating them were better?

Would it be fallacious to say that Society took that route, other options could have and did exist, it simply happened that way, perhaps the path of least resistance. But the nature of that path dictated exclusivity and other societal mutations had the choice of falling in line or choosing isolationism resulting in smaller and poorer societies. Misogyny was a side effect or an earmark of those choices. But now we are at the point where we need to reevaluate our concepts of society in order to continue progressing?

@rosehips: Yeah, I think the path of least resistance is a good way to characterize the process I was trying to describe. I think the question of social institutions is often a necessary one that serves to express how people conceive of humans in “the state of nature.”

@josie This is an excellent and engaging question. Unfortunately to answer it adequately I’d need to write a book! There is just no simple answer.
I do think we need to differentiate between misogyny and oppression. Dominance doesn’t need to be of the hateful sort, it could also be the chivalrous, velvet glove approach. So then it boils down to what emotional reaction or self interested motivation or unconscious dynamic leads to male hatred of women. The hatred wouldn’t have to come before the wish for dominance, it could come from frustration at inability to dominate or a fear that need would not be satisfied or an anger at rejection, real or imagined.
This question called to mind an intriguing book that I have come back to again and again. I still have trouble quite absorbing all of it and it raises more questions than it answers. That book is Dorothy Dinnerstein’s The Mermaid and the MInotaur:Sexual Arrangements and Human Malaise
Her theory is that misogyny is born of the male resentment and need to escape the female mother figure which dominates childhood as primary caregiver. Dinnerstein felt that if we were going to evolve as a society and eliminate this resentment and have better, more equal relationships, men would have to share equally in the burden of raising children. I don’t fully subscribe to her theory but I do think that misogyny has an element of resentment to it. For whatever reason, it often consists of resentment of female power and a wish to downgrade women thus breaking their power and demeaning and dominating them.

I found a great synopsis of other theories concerning misogyny here. Some of them concern envy. Perhaps they are right in that penis envy is a secondary response to the primary male envy of inability to birth children. At any rate, interesting ideas to think about. I don’t think it’s an innate aspect of human nature. There must be many reasons for it but I can’t help but think that many of them are rooted in the (for now) inescapable nature of our biology. Only women become pregnant. Men are physically stronger.

@Earthgirl : Biology is inescapable only if you are talking about cis people ;)

@bookish1 Ah! you have a good point there! I stand corrected. Oh my, modern love !!