The First Political Order: How Sex Shapes Governance and National Security Worldwide

Confronted with the obvious, generally accepted, but frequently ignored fact that babies come out of females and female genitals differ from male genitals, people seek to solve the puzzle of sex differences by sorting out how and why the differences came about, what is to be done about the differences, and how the two kinds of people resulting from the differences are to relate to one another and to their environment.

—Peggy Reeves Sanday

Many impressive tomes have been written about the origins of political order, from Aristotle to Francis Fukuyama.¹ Very few of these works recognize that an intimate relationship may exist between the political order between men and women, on one hand, and the political order that develops within the nation-state, on the other.² Indeed, for the majority of such works, one looks in vain in the final index of the volume for the entries “women,” “woman,” or even “female.” Still fewer contemplate a relationship between these two political orders and the resulting stability and resilience of the nation-state. This book probes both propositions.

Gender performance varies widely across cultures. What does not vary is that roughly half of the population of a given human collective has the potential to be mothers (and not fathers) and the other half to be fathers (and not mothers) and that children require the interaction of both a mother and a father to be brought into being and thus are all of “mixed” heritage.3 This sexual parameter of human life, we argue, sets the stage for the origin of all politics.

Add to these foundational sexual facts the differential upper-body strength between men and women (termed “human sexual dimorphism”), differential bodily and time investment in reproduction, and readily observable anatomical differences and the political game is already afoot. Men and women are the originary “Others” for each other, and the politics between them will profoundly influence the socialization of the children born to them—and the larger society that forms as a result. Historian Karen Offen notes that “ ‘Biology’ may not be destiny, and indeed it may also be socially constructed, but physicality does pose constraints as well as opportunities. Difference does not, of necessity, imply dominance—or subordination.”⁴ Offen is suggesting that the political choices catalyzed by sexual difference need not result in female subordination, and we agree with that assertion. Unfortunately, they often do in practice, or to quote Yuval Noah Harari, “One hierarchy…has been of supreme importance in all known human societies: the hierarchy of gender.”⁵

To “see” the first political order—the sexual political order—consider the foundational societal decisions arising from the manner in which these two halves of any human collective relate. The first political order can be understood as having four dimensions, all of which are inherently political. We might conceive of a continuum between two polar extremes along which human societies might be arranged according to how they structure male–female relations, as shown in the following figures.

If that were the structure of male–female relations—if this was the sexual political order established—how would that shape the development of the collective’s societal political order? We argue that, in this case, the groundwork will have been laid for an inequitable political order ruled by monopolistic rent seekers prepared to ensure the continued flow of their rents through exploitation, corruption, and violence. Worse yet, such societal arrangements would seem “natural and right” given the original choices made with regard to the First Other—that is, the first B—woman. For good reason, evolutionary biologist Patricia Gowaty has asserted, “Women’s oppression is the first, most widespread, and deepest oppression…Sexist oppression is fundamental to—is ‘the root’ of—all other systems of oppression.”6

Furthermore, in such a context, it would seem unremarkable to use physical violence if necessary to effect that subordination. Gowaty continues, “The antithetical icon of autonomy for many women is rape…. The insight that violence against women is sexy (turns men on) provides a powerful proximate analysis that explains what many of us know in our guts—sexuality is the fulcrum of subordination/domination.”7 Philosopher Kate Manne states it simply: “She will give, and he will take, in effect; or else she may be punished.”⁸

An unsurprising consequence is that all “others” in the society—those of different ethnicity, religion, and ideology—thus also tend to be relegated to the same lower status accorded to females. In a sense, these others are “feminized” because their status, agency, and so forth correspond more to that of women in society than to that of men. Historian Gerda Lerner states that “the precedent of seeing women as an inferior group allows the transference of such a stigma onto any other group which is enslaveable.”⁹ Another way of putting it, as anthropologist Richard Alexander and coauthors suggest, is to see “culture as a gigantic metaphorical extension of the reproductive system.”¹⁰

In a sense, the sexual system represented by the left-hand side of the four political continua is, at its core, authoritarian in nature. We see, with philosopher Sylviane Agacinski, that “the question of the duality of the sexes was political from the start…traditional injustices connected to sexual difference are reproduced in the spheres of political, social, economic, and family life.”¹¹ We should not be surprised, then, if societies based on such a sexual system are at once both violent and fragile. She continues, “Isn’t the other sex, for each, the closest face of the stranger?…The way we think the other sex determines the way we think the other in general.”¹² Agacinski is asserting that how men treat women will come to be the founding template for how all minorities and out-groups will be treated. Indeed, the very act of male–female sexual intercourse will be interpreted in such a culture as supporting this treatment, or as the sociologist Theodore Kemper puts it, “sexual occasions are themselves importantly dominance or eminence encounters…there can be a dominance encounter even at the core of intimate interaction,”¹³ or as philosopher Michel Foucault suggests, sexual behavior is “an especially dense transfer point for relations of power.”¹⁴ Anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday concurs, suggesting an alignment of “social relations of male dominance and female subordination with sexual relations of male aggression and female passivity or masochism.”¹⁵ Politics’ deepest roots may well be found in our interpretation of the act of heterosexual intercourse.

In our thought experiment, we might also imagine a sexual political order based on the options presented on the right-hand side of the political continua, although it is challenging to find historical examples. In this alternative order, men and women would stand as equals even in the context of their sexual difference, decisions for the collective would be made jointly and without coercion, conflicts would not be decided by violence or the threat of violence against females, and resources would be frankly shared between the sexes. According to Sanday, some indigenous cultures come close to that ideal type, which she terms “diarchy,” and those cultures are characterized by significantly less violence and rent seeking as well as far greater stability and resilience in the face of environmental challenges (we return to these observations in later chapters).16 If such an alternative sexual political order were in place, Agacinski argues, the broader societal political order would change as well and new vistas would emerge: “the masculine monopoly on political power comes to an end and the time for a mixed democracy opens before us…the more a civilization establishes sexual equality, the more it respects individuals.”¹⁷

The idea that the sexual order and the political order are linked is not new, by any means. For example, Karen Offen notes Montesquieu’s observation that “under despotic governments, women were ‘in servitude,’ an ‘object of luxury’ while under republics, ‘women are free by the laws and restrained by manners.’ ”¹⁸ In the past, the sexual order was seen as dependent on the political order (e.g., “better” governments treat women “better”), but the present work considers the reverse proposition: that the broader political order is, in the first place, deeply molded by the sexual political order. In other words, “better” government is not in the offing, nor can it be, if women are subordinated.

If this is true, the character of relations between men and women in any society is critically important in shaping that society’s structures and processes. More specifically, it is important because the answers to the four dimensions given above concerning the first difference—that is, the nature of the sexual political order—may work to normalize inequity, violence, authoritarianism, and a parasitical and monopolistic rent-based economy within the broader societal political order. This, too, is not a new idea: from Friedrich Engels in the nineteenth century to Carole Pateman, Gerda Lerner, and Peggy Reeves Sanday in the twentieth, a handful of political philosophers, historians, and anthropologists have explored these foundational linkages. We will examine but a few major works here, noting that we would have reviewed other work as well, if space had permitted.¹⁹

A number of famous thinkers have lamented the subordinate place of women even in polities that called themselves democracies, the most celebrated being John Stuart Mill, who, writing in 1861, asserted that “from the very earliest twilight of human society, every woman (…owing to her inferiority in muscular strength) was found in a state of bondage to some men. Laws and systems of polity always begin by recognizing the relations they find already existing…and convert what was a mere physical fact into a legal right [and] give it the sanction of society.”20 Because Mill felt this conversion from physical right to legal right was unmindful, he concluded that the disconnect between the status of women and democracy remained unrecognized within the broader society.

Mill opined that because women will always be inferior in physical strength in relation to men, unlike other groups that contest societal status, women’s subordination

would be the very last to disappear. It was inevitable that this one case of a social relations grounded on force would survive through generations of institutions grounded on equal justice, an almost solitary exception to the general character of their laws and customs; but which, so long as it does not proclaim its own origin, and as discussion has not brought out its true character, is not felt to jar with modern civilization, any more than domestic slavery among the Greeks jarred with their notion of themselves as a free people.²¹

The remedy appeared to Mill, then, to be some type of morally based discussion or deconstruction of the subordination of women to bring it into line with democratic principles. Thinkers could lead the way, according to Mill, for “every step in [human] improvement has been so invariably accompanied by a step made in raising the social position of women, that historians and philosophers have been led to adopt their elevation or debasement as on the whole the surest test and most correct measure of the civilization of a people or an age.”²²

There is nothing wrong with this approach, and to read Mill’s The Subjection of Women even today is an inspiring undertaking. What we lack in Mill (or William Thompson, or Anna Wheeler, or Mary Wollstonecraft, or others), however, is an understanding of how the subordination of women produces a particular type of polity and a particular type of state behavior. It is not that there is a disconnect, à la Mill, but rather that there is a deep “connect.”

The earliest writer who we believe makes this connection is Friedrich Engels, who wrote The Origins of Family, Private Property, and the State in 1884. Engels’s inspiration came from Marx, who had written that “the modern family contains in germ not only slavery (servitus), but also serfdom…. It contains in miniature all the contradictions which later extend throughout society and its state.”23 Engels describes how wives were little more than slaves in most ancient households, calling them “his [the patriarch’s] chief female domestic servant.”²⁴ Wives possessed few rights and labored under a double standard of behavior between men and women in which women could be killed for daring to do things that men felt they were entitled to do, such as promiscuity and polygamy. Although there might be rhetoric against these things generally, Engels notes, “in reality this condemnation never falls on the men concerned, but only on the women; they are despised and outcast, in order that the unconditional supremacy of men over the female sex may be once more proclaimed as a fundamental law of society.”²⁵

But stepping back, what Engels offers that differs from thinkers such as Mill is the link from these domestic arrangements to the larger society. For example, Engels opines that “the Greeks themselves put the matter quite frankly: the sole exclusive aims of monogamous marriage were to make the man supreme in the family, and to propagate, as the future heirs to his wealth, children indisputably his own.”²⁶ Thus, to Engels, the form of household relationships and the form of economic power were integrally linked; the former made possible a particular form of the latter. Engels asserts that the family “is the cellular form of civilized society, in which the nature of the oppositions and contradictions fully active in that society can be already studied…. The modern individual family is founded on the open or concealed domestic slavery of the wife, and modern society is a mass composed of these individual families as its molecules.”²⁷

Furthermore, according to Engels, there were echoes of that household slave economy in the larger state. As such, the state becomes a machine for “bleeding its subjects,” militarized to provide order and protection, but “its order was worse than the worst disorder,” and it was “crippled by extortion” and immense societal inequality “by giving one class practically all the rights and the other class practically all the duties.”²⁸ How could it be otherwise, asserts Engels, given the nature of the household “molecules” that make up the state’s society?

Engels, in the end, does not give us much more than this, but if we skip forward approximately 100 years, political philosopher Carole Pateman fills in the blanks in her classic work The Sexual Contract, first published in 1988.²⁹ Pateman believes that “marital domination is politically significant,” for it means that the original contract—which is the marital contract—is “an exchange of obedience for protection,” creating “civil mastery and civil subordination.”³⁰ What Pateman is calling the original contract, we are calling the first political order: both concern the relationship between the two halves of humanity, and both are prior to and foundational for the relations that men establish among themselves in the more widely considered social contracts discussed by Locke, Hume, and others. Pateman asserts, “Sexual difference is of fundamental significance for political order,”³¹ and Lerner extends this insight: “Men learned to institute dominance and hierarchy over other people by their earlier practice of dominance over the women of their own group.”³² (Indeed, Lerner argues that slavery was based on the template of male treatment of women in their own group.³³)

Pateman does not emphasize father right, as Engels did, but rather fraternal right: “Women are subordinated to men as men, or to men as a fraternity. The original contract…creates modern fraternal patriarchy.”34 This fraternal right is in turn based on what she terms “the male sex-right” in the conjugal contract: “The original political right is a man’s right to have sexual access to a woman’s body so that he could become a father…. The law of male sex-right extends to all men, to all members of the fraternity.”³⁵ This fraternity is not politically neutral: “They also have a common interest as men in upholding the terms of the sexual contract, in ensuring that the law of male sex-right remains operative.”³⁶ More specifically,

Contract is seen as the paradigm of free agreement. But women are not born free; women have no natural freedom. The classic pictures of the state of nature also contain an order of subjection—between men and women…. Sexual difference is political difference; sexual difference is the difference between freedom and subjection. Women are not party to the original contract…. Women are the subject of the contract. The (sexual) contract is the vehicle through which men transform their natural right over women into the security of civil patriarchal right.³⁷

This originary contract has major implications for the polity created within the society, according to Pateman. For example, she argues that “modern patriarchy is fraternal, contractual and structures capitalist civil society.”³⁸ In particular, “Once woman has been enslaved and families formed, men held both the concept of slavery and the means to extend their mastery beyond the household: ‘he found himself free to limit and to conquer other human beings; and he is fully secure in that his “wife”—that is to say, his female slave—would roast his meat and attend to any other of his needs.’ ”³⁹ Pateman is suggesting that economic relations within a society based on the syndrome of the subordinative first political order on the left-hand side of our four spectra cannot help but be exploitative and predatory in nature: “Conjugal relations are part of a sexual division of labor and structure of subordination that extends from the private home into the public arena.”⁴⁰ Marriage arising out of a very different first political order—for example, based on the right-hand side of the four spectra—would be a very different relationship from what Pateman describes, and therefore, would create a very different economic system.

Furthermore, Pateman suggests that the nature of the original contract begins to contaminate contracts about nonsexual matters within the larger society, not just in economics but also in politics. For example, “The employment contract creates the capitalist as master; he has the political right to determine how the labour of the worker will be used, and—consequently—can engage in exploitation.”41 The parallels to the marriage contract become striking. Although conceived by classic political philosophy as the foundation of freedom, contract becomes, over time, something far more closely related to the nature of the sexual contract, which is subordinative and by no means an expression of freedom. What is contracted is an exchange of some type of support or protection, however piecemeal or even insincere, for almost full subordination and submission. Pateman explains, “Contract theory…justified subjection by presenting it as freedom.”⁴² This is highly ironic for men. Commenting on nineteenth-century political theorist William Thompson’s reflections on the matter, Pateman states, “Thompson…suggests that without the sexual contract, men would not have entered the social contract and created the state; men’s conjugal mastery looks as if it ‘compensate[s] them for their own cowardly submission almost everywhere to the chains of political power.’ ”⁴³ By insisting on the first subordinative political order in regard to women, men prime themselves to be subordinated. The polity created by such societies will tend toward autocracy, and the type of “democracy” found in such societies will be found to have a subordinative core of gross inequality.

Nevertheless, if female subordination is viewed as natural or as divinely mandated, it may be difficult to even conceive of a society that does not have this inequality at its core. Indeed, according to Pateman, even John Locke found the subjection of women through the sexual contract to be completely natural: Locke felt Eve’s subjection “can be no other subjection than what every Wife owes her Husband…[Adam has] a Conjugal Power…the Power that every Husband hath to order the things of private Concernment in his Family, as Proprietor of the Goods and Lands there, and to have his Will take place before that of his wife in all things of their common Concernment.”⁴⁴

As Pateman points out, this original contract between men and women is clearly not envisioned as one made between equals: “if one party is in an inferior position [such as a wife or woman], then he or she has no choice but to agree to disadvantageous terms offered by the superior party.”⁴⁵ Indeed, Pateman goes so far as to say,

If some individuals are assumed by nature to be significantly stronger or more capable than others, and if it is also assumed that individuals are always self-interested, then the social contract that creates equal civil individuals or citizens, governed by impartial laws, is impossible; the original pact will establish a society of masters and slaves [for] the strong can present the contract as being to the advantage of both; the strong no longer have to labour and the weak now can be assured that their basic needs will be provided for…. [And] when the strong coerce the weak into the slave contract, the obvious objection is that it is not really a “contract”: the coercion invalidates the “agreement.” [emphasis added].⁴⁶

And where did this concept of “slave” even originate? Commenting on Lerner’s classic work The Creation of Patriarchy, alluded to previously, Pateman notes, “Slavery came about because an example of subordination and ‘otherness’ had already been developed. Women were already subordinated to the men of their social groups…so men ‘learned that differences can be used to separate and divide one group of humans from another.’…The first slaves were women.”47 No wonder, then, that the idea of contract—twisted because of the nature of the marital contract under a subordinative first political order—is used to justify the notion that someone is free to be alienated from his or her own freedom. Lerner writes, “Civil slavery becomes nothing more than one example of a legitimate contract. Individual freedom becomes exemplified in slavery.”⁴⁸

From this analysis we see that a society’s understanding of ethics is molded—and may be warped—by the nature of the first political order. As Pateman notes, “Ethical life depends upon marriage because marriage is the origin of the family. In the family, children learn, and adults are continually reminded of what it means to be a member of a small association.”⁴⁹ When what marriage means is a natural subjection based on difference, the ethics of dealing with all others who are different in society—by race, creed, class, or language—become stamped with that same subordinative character. After all, Pateman explains, “sexual difference is political difference, the difference between mastery and subjection,”⁵⁰ and Lerner adds, “sexual dominance underlies class and race dominance [for] men had learned how to assert and exercise power over people slightly different from themselves in the primary exchange of women. In so doing, men acquired the knowledge necessary to elevate ‘difference’ of whatever kind into a criterion for dominance.”⁵¹

Even with the expansive vision provided by these thinkers, however, the full logic of how choices made on the left-hand side of figure 1.1 arise and persist, and conversely, how a society may begin to transition toward the right-hand side of the continuum, is not easy to tease out from this literature. At some point, terms like “patriarchy” and “hegemonic masculinity” become too vague to assist in that critical analytical task.⁵² Furthermore, the full societal consequences of veering to the left or to the right side of these political continua have not been adequately explored. What, precisely, are the ramifications of choosing the left-hand poles representing male dominance for the governance, stability, resilience, and security of the society? These theoretical and empirical tasks are the focus of the present volume, and they are of absolute importance in understanding and alleviating insecurity and instability at the individual, societal, national, and international levels.