Women: More Highly Bred; from Math to Harem

Female Evolution 

Preface 

I suffer from ADS - Asymmetry Derangement Syndrome; the condition of being unable to ignore power imbalances wherever, whenever and however they manifest; a veritable mote, thorn, nay spear, in the eye of my perceptions. 

It is triggered by every manifestation, and without implying any equivalence across the spectrum, be it, female suppression, fgm, corporates murdering babies, genocides, child trafficking, abuse, rape... any and all asymmetries that sprawl across all human civilisations; geography and history...

The triage is brutal by necessity; I prioritise by severity of harm; not proximity to my own experience..

But, a voice is needed for all asymmetries, not only the gravest…

In this piece I claim women are more highly evolved by both the arrogance of the patriarchal practice of owning all they surveyed (owner pressures) and the selection pressures caused by the tyranny of the always, always, always asymmetric nature of male female dynamics, across age and status, home and workplace, hunt and harem.

Discuss.

The Math before the Harem

Business before pleasure; it’s only professional…

The ‘fashion’ in patriarchal societies for flesh closer to the fountain of youth than further away, by the math, alone must amount to more generations, however regretted or celebrated by the priapic, of females over males, who are, after all, unwanted competition, or succession strategy at best.

The female of our species; our most precious by any and every measure; evolves further from imbecility with each iteration of reproduction;

• a bit like the gears on a bicycle; the littler one spinning twice as fast as the slower, larger of the species; more frequent ‘top dead centre’ (births) of the pistons in the engine of human life. Males don’t reproduce themselves and to pre-empt being held to ransom, take possession, by force, of both agent and agency.  

A fundamental flaw in the discipline of evolutionary psychology is that it borrows the mechanistic language of natural selection from contexts where agency is genuinely absent or minimal, and maps it onto a species whose defining characteristic is the capacity to override biological imperatives via organised and violent power amplification through culture, language, law, and administration.

The biological babble, selection pressure et al, is passive extrapolation from observations of life across the spectrum, and a false equivalence mapped to humans. A false equivalence because the asymmetric nature of power dynamics only ever varies by degree not absence; any more than the farmed have a choice of farmer. 

Humanity in the wild is never a paradigm that can even be approximated by metaphor with any other sentient societies.

Natural selection assumes a relatively level playing field of environmental pressures. Human patriarchy is not an environmental pressure; It’s an organised system of constraint, maintained by violence and its threat, codified in law and religion, and reproduced across generations, relentlessly, deliberately. Farming, not evolutionary selection.

Evolutionary biology claims of “female mate choice drove selection for X” is describing a world that was only true for a fraction of human populations, for a fraction of human history. The rest of the time it was female survival within hostile, male-designed enclosures.

Any more than a dog or cat breeder emulates the natural selection of the wild and feral; e.g garden foxes living alongside house cats, occupying the same physical space, albeit at different times, same prey base, same human proximity, but under utterly different selective pressures. 

The cat is fed, vetted, protected from consequence. 

The fox navigates genuine survival risks such as predation, territory, disease, urban hazard, while appearing to share the same world. 

Same garden. Completely different universe of pressures.

Now, the Harem

The harem is the sharpest possible illustration of the argument that asymmetric power structures selected ruthlessly for the women who could navigate the system without appearing to manipulate it; not hard to do; the magician distracts with one hand what the priapic expects to see, and, with the other, winds the ‘key’.

The selective pressures on women in patriarchal systems were more brutal, more sustained, and more cognitively demanding than standard evolutionary biology acknowledges, largely because they operated within highly asymmetric constraints, not open competition.

The competencies that survived that selection; patience, social intelligence, threat assessment, long-term strategic thinking, coalition building, navigating power without appearing to, are more sophisticated than those selected for in men operating within the same system. 

Well, of course they are.

Dominant patriarchal environments are self-defeating. They breed, over millennia, precisely the cognitive and social tools required to dismantle them.

Case Study from History 

The harem; while at the extreme end of the spectrum of female ownership paradigms, illustrates by stark contrast, what is true of t’other end of the spectrum; the lone female held hostage by cultural, religious or social terrorism… isolated, but a sister in thought. 

So, the harem; women selected, collected, confined; competing for favour within a closed system entirely controlled by one man and his proxies. Basically, the male drone as master not servant or peer…

The Ottoman court is the cleanest example…

And, that which emerged from this system, was by far, the most sophisticated political intelligence in any court. The harem produced the power behind the throne; the Valide Sultan, the favourite who managed succession, the coalition of women who decided which son survived to rule. The Eminence grise of the Ottoman Empire…

The Valide Sultan, the incumbent’s mum, held more real political power than most men in the empire. She managed foreign policy, controlled appointments, ran networks across the court. 

From inside the harem; a typical example of a women’s prison; a constraint that didn’t suppress the intelligence, it concentrated it, directed it, focused on the levers of power and access.

The priapic sultan thought he was running a pleasure house. He was running a political training ground for the women who would outlast him, outlast his sons, and in several cases outlast the dynasty itself.

Roxelana, Hürrem Sultan, rewrote the rules of the entire institution from inside it. Married Suleiman the Magnificent, something no concubine had done in centuries. Managed to have her son succeed rather than the designated heir.

From inside the harem. One woman opened the gate.

A challenging, character-building environment but an utter and complete, gross impertinence to the sovereignty of another being.

Conclusion

“Owner’s pressure”, the whole domestication argument compressed into two words. Deliberate echo of selective breeding, the farmer/farmed dynamic, the harem as manna… for the priapic.

Despite the absence of choice women emerged because of it. Constrained intelligence is still intelligence. Navigating a cage requires more sophisticated cognition than roaming freely.

Women in patriarchal systems were domesticated in the dog breeding sense; carefully selected for traits useful to the farmer, suppressed in traits threatening to him. 

But unlike the dog, the cognitive complexity required to survive domestication preserved the capacity for the cat’s move, the exit, the feral option, the reclamation of agency.

The dog breeder’s metaphor also works as the patriarchy’s self-image, loyal, attentive, grateful, present. 

But what it actually bred was/is something a lot closer to the independence and indifference of the cat.

So, the human female is the more highly evolved by both math and nurture;

the brutal nurture of “owner’s pressure”.

Discuss…