Monogamy

No, man, that is a mistake.
It starts nice, OK, but soon you end up with the IRS
crawling your back, and her bonging your chief.

It is not a mystery that one of the many unknowns of human evolution is how our species came to monogamy and, through it, to its actual social arrangement.

In nature, while it is a basic fact that most species tend to produce roughly the same amount of male and female offspring, monogamous pairing is a minor state of affairs, being observed in a mere ten percent of the species with sexual reproduction.

Even among primates, which as a group tend to be more monogamous than many, it is used just by 50% of the species.

Anthropologists are uncertain about when the passage to (mostly) sexually exclusive pairings appeared in our species,  but more so they are perplexed about why human males have subscribed and stuck to the change.

The reason of females are clear - as the brain kept enlarging, so did the duration of development from child to adult and of the period of dependence from the parents.

While the ancillary duties of child rearing could be shuffled around in a purely female group, a situation quite common in primate species,  the sheer energetic cost - as in, amount of food required - was such that females were "forced" to find a way to get the males to collaborate to the costs of raising children.

This was obtained through a physical - humans are among the few species in which sexual mating is not limited to well defined and restricted periods - and a cultural adaptation - monogamy.

The first allowed females to have a mighty carrot to put in front of males, the second was the stick to it - essentially, a gender pact to punish the males that didn't contribute.

As the "innovation" made males in condition to have sex any time they wanted, without having to fight off  other males, as long as they stood by the side of their companions, the initial male's adhesion to the new paradigm must have been easily gained.

Probably, the "dominant males" had something to say about it, but by then the average man had already reached the conclusion that the classic "dominant male" could easily be disposed off by three friends with clubs and stones.

Anyway, monogamy is a cultural acquisition, and not something deeply ingrained in our biology (there are species for which it is so, to the point that the death of one of the couple spells that of its companion... it is not our case).

So, women has never had much compulsion to avoid shuffling-up genes with a  robust gene-bearer, from time to time - after all, preserving a mainly economic pact has not such a great importance.

Nor men have ever felt the need of keeping themselves closeted  and loyal to their women

(the old joke is ever valid... if men are pigs that shag everything that open her legs for them, a suitable proportion of the legs in question are willing to open up).

This cultural construct, in turn, fostered some very interesting consequences.

Among these, the first has been the birth of families and clans as sprawling social structures.

Before humans adopted monogamy, families were only matri-linear successions.... one could know who the great-great-grandmother was, and that was it.

After the adoption of monogamy, one could know who his great-great-parents were (or, rather, supposed to be)... all eight of them.

Families became, from the lines that they were, the trees that they are.

In turn this led to more closely knit and collaborative social groups and, over time, to what we call society.

At the base, though, below the cultural superstructures that were added over time (religious myths, "honour", etc.... ) the reason why the shenanigan worked kept being the same.

Women needed the males to do their part.

Men wanted the sex, without the stress of having to fight a mountain of muscles and violence (or, how would you describe a Silverback Gorilla?) to have it.

But that was all they got out of it, in the hand - some reduction in stress. 

And here is where things start chafing, I fear.

A perfunctory glance at the history of humanity shows that men were still encouraged to be as muscle-bound and as violent as possible, as much as possible, through the time honoured tradition of war - or, to put it as it really was, pillage-rape-arson to one heart's content - while the creation of a hierarchical society also meant that of plenty of stress to distribute to everybody, to compensate for that that was lost in not having to fight the pack´s leader to get some tail.

And, by the way, the war hero returning from the aforementioned pillage-rape-arson showing his manly propensity toward aggressiveness, was also often rewarded by some more sex on the side, from the wives of the few that didn't share their level of "manliness".


In other words, in the end men traded one source of stress and danger for a host of other sources of stress and danger.

It is not a surprise, then, that the inherent interest of males in creating and preserving what we call society is, has always been and will always be pretty low.

Give them an idea for getting more power, money and sex than they would get by sticking to the society's current rules and they'll jump on it - be it a bank robbery, a political revolution or a computer system that will trash the jobs of half the population. 

In other world, even the most paternalistic society ever was not a merely male construct... at best, it was a balancing act between alpha males and alpha females. 

If it was for men alone... we'd still be dangling from trees and fucking 24/7, like the Bonobos - you know it is true.

Many men feels society as a prison (more so when they are young... growing old, they usually learn to play the system to their advantage), and happily take any occasion to escape it.

Now,  technology has come to the point that modern women do not really need men to do their part as they used to... a Lamboghini tractor with AC and full servo on the commands can be driven by a 100 libs girl, ditto an 18wheeler.

And, in not many years, these machines will drive themselves most of the time.

Firearms also have made violence very democratic... using an AK-47 doesn't require the kind of sheer physical brawn, nor the lifelong extenuating physical training, that's needed to use a longbow or a claymore sword in combat (which is the reason why conquering a country is not what it used to be... a child soldier in a guerrilla army can kill a trained marine as well as anybody else, and costs way less to replace).

So while it may still be useful to be a boisterous bruiser, it is not all that necessary to the job of a modern policeman, or of a soldier.

In effect, there are practically no jobs that a woman can't do, a part sperm donor  - waiting fort the moment robots will do them... by the way, over time, even the sperm donor part will change.

So, it must not come as a surprise that some men  are, already, feeling pretty much redundant - they are - and "unattached" to society.


Being this the current mood, it must also not be a surprise that, when a choice is possible - in vitro fecundation, sperm filtering - the tendency seems to be to choose a female over a male offspring.