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

Genealogical invisibility is but one example of how a societal emphasis on the male bond distorts reality, laying the groundwork for insecurity and instability. In this volume, we propose a theoretical framework suggesting that a sexual political order exists that crosses space and time in its manifestation, an order that is focused on building fraternity through the systematic subordination of women and that often uses patrilineality to facilitate the creation of that fraternity. We refer to this order in terms of what we argue is an interlocking pattern of institutions, processes, and norms that enforce it.1 More specifically, we refer to this interlocking system as the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome. This Syndrome embodies the left-hand side of the four political continua illustrated in figure 1.1, and we assert that this societal structuration requires—and can be identified by—the frank subordination of female interests to that of the fraternal alliance. Furthermore, we argue that the instantiation of this Syndrome through specific and nearly universal enforcement practices has profound direct and indirect effects on a society’s levels of stability, resilience, and security, mediated by the type of societal political order that emerges from this first sexual political order.

To identify this Syndrome at work in the contemporary world and study its effects, we further assert it is most useful to view the Syndrome as being promulgated, in the first place, as a security provision mechanism. In other words, we propose the Syndrome’s existence is justified by its practitioners by the need to provide physical security for group members from external or out-group threats, which, in the view of its practitioners, necessitate the creation of a strong fraternity that is typically deemed incompatible with equality between men and women.

More justifications are always available for this sexual order than the need to meet external or out-group threats. When individual men subordinate women in their household, they receive tangible and quite personal goods and services, including sexual services; services to maintain the household, such as water, fuel, and food gathering; elder care for the man’s parents; and bearing and rearing of children.² Deprivation of such expected goods and services is a strong goad for maintaining the first sexual political order, whether or not external threats exist. Justification on the basis of out-group threat, however, seems foundational in the rise of the order subordinating women, even though that rise is shrouded in antiquity.

Scholarly work, including that of Gerda Lerner, Peggy Reeves Sanday, and Richard Wrangham, among many others, provides suggestive evidence for this stance; we know that violence and conflict arose quite early in human history, as did slavery, and human sexual dimorphism has been a constant during recorded history.³ The continual threat of violence, perpetrated almost exclusively by men, has indelibly shaped humankind.⁴ Indeed, new research has shown that human male genetic diversity collapsed in the Neolithic era around 5000–7000 BCE, almost to the point at which one would think there was one man per seventeen women. Biologists Tian Chen Zeng, Alan J. Aw, and Marcus W. Feldman present findings that suggest warfare between groups of genetically related males was the cause. They note,

Throughout history, then, humans have sought security in the face of such potentially existential threats. Furthermore, the fact that Zeng and collaborators find this genetic collapse for men and not for women suggests the existential threats may have been felt most keenly among men. Additional research by geneticist Inigo Olalde and colleagues finds a similar collapse of male lines on the Iberian Peninsula between 2500 and 2000 BCE. At this time, nearly all Y-chromosomes were replaced by those from males of Russian steppe ancestry, whereas local female ancestry did not collapse.⁶ These historical findings suggest, then, that the security dilemma is, first and foremost, a male security dilemma.

We propose that there are two primary security provision mechanisms among humans and that one is extremely old—that is, the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome—whereas the other is relatively new. The relatively new mechanism is what we now know as a “state,” meaning a centralized governing authority with a monopoly on the use of force and legitimated more or less by the consent of the governed. In contrast, the old mechanism for providing security for individuals and groups is the extended male kin group, sometimes called clans or tribes or lineages. Legal scholar Mark S. Weiner comments, “For most of human history, the primary institutions of legal and social order have been kin groups…The origin of the lineage form of political organization lies deep in human history, in the transition between the Paleolithic and Neolithic eras.”⁷ He further explains that “a state protects its citizens; clan members protect their cousins…These groups [clans] are highly cohesive, and they provide many tangible benefits to their members, including the physical and material security that comes with solidarity and the dignity that accompanies an unshakable feeling of personal belonging.”⁸ This form of security provision mechanism may resemble, but is not identical to, clientelism, patronage, and similar systems.⁹ Rather, as political scientist Kathleen Collins defines such clan groups, they are “informal organization[s] comprising a network of individuals linked by kin-based bonds [that] are both vertical and horizontal, linking elites and nonelites, and they reflect both actual blood ties and fictive kinship.”¹⁰

Historically, states arose by utilizing the more ancient governance structure of clans to govern far-flung territories. Although some people might consider that modern, developed, democratic states are the antithesis of clans,11 it is also true that states never could have originally emerged without cooperating with and using clan governance structures to rule (and in many countries, they still do). As anthropologist Steven Caton notes about primitive states, clans and tribes were “responsible for collecting taxes, conscripting young men into the state’s army, and implementing policies; in short, [they were] the state’s indirect ruler. However, the [tribal] elite also acted to safeguard the interests of its constituents in the face of encroaching state power; and having been elevated to power by the state…could become its potential enemies…Tribes and the state have never lived in isolation from each other but have always been interdependent.”¹² The sociocultural anthropologist Lois Beck is even more eloquent on this point: “tribes and states…did not function as two separate, opposing systems. They represented alternative polities, each creating and solving political problems for the other.”¹³

Indeed, anthropologist Richard Tapper argues that the first states emerged in cases in which one tribe ruled over and by means of other tribes. In the next stage in the evolution, a nontribal entity would rule with the support of tribes, and in the final stage, a state would attempt to eradicate tribes and claim nationality for all.¹⁴ In a sense, then, clans and states are not necessarily opposed, and in many if not most states, they will coexist, although some states are no longer reliant or coopted by these kin networks. As we shall see, we assert that for states still reliant on kin networks, the horizon is far more limited in terms of the provision of public goods, including human rights and national security, than states that are not so reliant (we more fully explore this in part II of this volume).

Despite the existence of states no longer reliant on extended kin networks, these networks are still powerful worldwide. Kathleen Collins states, “Clans are not pre-modern phenomena, but socially embedded identity networks that exist in many societies and states, even in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.”¹⁵ We further posit that even in the twenty-first century, when seemingly non-network-reliant states fail to provide security for groups and individuals within the society, these groups and individuals are poised to naturally and swiftly fall back on the ancient security provision mechanism of extended male kin groups for that security. This means that the relevance of kin networks can easily resurge in the face of exigency. As political scientist Edward Schatz notes, “We should not hastily conclude that clan politics will shortly fade away under the pressures of market-style urbanization and industrialization,”¹⁶ for as political scientist Bassam Tibi explains, “nation-states have failed to cope with the social and economic problems created by rapid development because they cannot provide the proper institutions to alleviate these problems. Because the nominal nation-state has not met the challenge, society has resorted to its pre-national ties as a solution.”¹⁷

In other words, the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome, as we define it, is alive and well, for it can provide the physical and economic security that many nation-states are incapable of providing. Furthermore, when such networks resurge, the problems associated with that security provision mechanism resurge as well. As Schatz points out, “For many populations across Central Asia, the Caucasus, the Middle East, Africa, and Southeast Asia, clan politics propels real-world challenges to governance, economic performance, and, in some cases, stability.”18

Furthermore, we assert that some present-day “states” are actually a façade behind which extended kin groups hold true power. Mark Weiner comments:

Across the world today, naturally, the rule of the clan is a great deal more than a romantic memory. In highly tribal societies like Yemen, semi-autonomous tribal regions like Waziristan, weak states like Kenya or South Sudan, and even in the midst of more advanced democracies such as India and the Philippines, it is a basic fact of life…. Likewise, the principles of clannism influence nations that long ago ceased to be organized along tribal lines but that still afford a prominent role to lineage or ethnicity, such as Bosnia, or that hold patriarchal family authority in especially high regard, such as Egypt or China.¹⁹

Clan networks—not to be confused with non-kinship-based networks and thus by nature more situationally defined patrimonialism²⁰, patronage, or clientelism²¹—may flourish in the absence of state authority or in the presence of a state. Clans may undergird state rule or may profoundly weaken it depending on their interests.

This would be purely academic were it not for the fact that the choice of security provision mechanism determines, in large part, the horizon of possibility for things that the majority of human beings value deeply: democracy, human rights, rule of law, peace, and prosperity. We argue that although states not reliant on clan networks may or may not provide these goods, they are capable of producing them. In contrast, in part II of this volume, we argue that governance by extended male kin groups, whether embedded in state structures or not, is generally incapable of providing these goods.

It is our contention that reliance on extended male kin groups for security always produces a dysfunctional, corrupt, violent destiny for any society. The primary reason it does so is due to the character and structure of the first sexual political order. When that first order, encompassing as it does the two halves of the human race, is predicated on violence, predation, oppression, coercion, and exploitation experienced by one half at the hand of the other half (to which it has given birth, ironically enough²²), the die is cast. It would take an extraordinary assault on the components of that subordinative first political order for society to escape its fate. Weiner notes “the anti-individualism of the rule of the clan burdens each and every member of a clan society, but most of all it burdens women. The fate of women lays bare the basic values of the rule of the clan, and as outsiders, citizens of liberal states often find their own values clarified when they confront the lives clans afford their female members.”²³

Figures 2.1 and 2.2 present the highest level abstraction of our argument. We offer these visual aids because what is depicted, in large measure, has been made invisible in existing theoretical work on the development of political order. We felt we must foreground these links to be able to see them at all. We encounter feedback loops at every turn, so a more elaborate diagram would feature those connections as well (which we show in figure 2.2).

Before proceeding with this larger argument linking choice of security provision mechanism to group outcomes in part II, we must pause to explicate how the security provision mechanism that is the male-bonded kin group arises and persists over time and space. Rather than discuss terms we feel are more vague, such as “patriarchy” or “hegemonic masculinity,” we are much more interested in the specific means by which the subordinative sexual order is implemented and enforced.²⁴ This will aid in our understanding of the linkages between certain practices and their rationale, on one hand, and their consequences and the possibility for change, on the other. It will also enable us to see the Syndrome as it manifests across space and time in different contexts, as it will enable us to see similarity in means of implementation and enforcement. Examining this Syndrome of interlocking practice-based components will illuminate not only how the Syndrome functions to provide perceived security and actual insecurity but also how it persists and is replicated through time. This examination reveals the Syndrome’s dual character as, in the first place, reflecting a particular sexual political order, as well as, in the second place, creating the larger societal political order in that first order’s image.

The clearest way to “see” the structure of these relationships between men and women, we assert, is to examine law and customs about their interaction, especially those governing marriage. Marriage or its equivalent represents, if you will, the first social contract struck within any human society, indelibly shaping the evolution of the larger political order.²⁵ This was recognized even in ancient history, with Confucius noting, “This ceremony [marriage] lies at the heart of government.”²⁶ Evolutionary biologist and psychologist David Barash updates this principle, asserting, “The husband-wife sociosexual contract is thus the governmental social contract writ small.”²⁷ In this same vein, international relations scholar Rose McDermott and colleagues explain that “scholars of international relations tend not to recognize marriage as a fundamentally political institution; in fact, marriage is the single most universal of political institutions, existing as the bedrock of family structure, and thus the foundation of national political unity, in essentially every country in the world.”²⁸

The characteristics of the marriage contract as enshrined in law and custom—and enforced through coercion if necessary—will be, we argue, a strong determinant of societal governance, stability, resilience, and security observable at the nation-state level of analysis. This is so because this sexual order cannot persist unless it is reproduced, which explains the deep importance attached by the clan to biological reproduction as the fountain of social reproduction.29 How the society forms households that produce the next generation matters deeply, and only if that household formation is structured consonantly will the subordinative first sexual political order be recreated from generation to generation.

To keep the fraternity of the first sexual political order alive, it must be birthed in a way that facilitates its ongoing re-creation. In practice, this often means a focus on agnatic lineage. Although we will delve more deeply into the subject in the following sections, in essence, fraternity is created from a deep sense of belonging to that agnatic line, or what would be termed “patrilineality.” As sociologist Mounira Charrad perceptively observes about the function of patrilineality in creating fraternity: “The socially meaningful ties unifying the network thus bind men together and bypass women.”³⁰ Thus, clans can reproduce themselves only in a relatively exclusionary manner emphasizing the male line or else the fraternity will wither. Consider the following assertions by clan scholars:

We argue that clan exclusivity can be reproduced only by restricting the agency of clan women in marriage, or as Charrad explains, “The central questions [for clans] concern procedures for marriage, rights and obligations of each spouse, polygamy, conditions for divorce, custody of children, and inheritance.”³⁴ Arguably the most vulnerable family members in status societies are the women whose role it is to reproduce the patriline, because the subordination of female interests, reproductive or otherwise, is how patrilineal clans are formed in the first place. Schatz is correct when he states, “Whether clan divisions persist or not hinges on identifiable mechanisms of identity reproduction.”³⁵ Identity reproduction will thus mirror the character of biological reproduction.

Female subordination, specifically in marriage, thus is the basis not only of biological reproduction but also of identity reproduction for agnatic clans. Patrilineal authority must define the parameters of marriage choice for women to strengthen the male kinship bond, or else the clan as a demarcated group will disappear. Lerner expands this idea by suggesting that “the ‘exchange of women’ is the first form of trade, in which women are turned into a commodity and are ‘reified,’ that is, they are thought of more as things than as human beings. The exchange of women…marks the beginning of women’s subordination. It in turn reinforces a sexual division of labor which institutes male dominance…men became the reifiers because they conquered and protected.”36

This suggests, then, that to “see” the security provision mechanism choice made by a society, one should examine the situation of women at the household level. That is, reliance on extended male kin networks may be concealable, or as Schatz puts its: “While kinship divisions often remain below the researcher’s field of vision (since they are less observable than other identity categories to which states give positive sanction), they may be more politically important than more visible divisions…the most important inherent quality of clan divisions [is] their concealability…like watching bulldogs fight under a carpet.”³⁷

What is not concealable, however, is the subordination of women. Therefore, observation of household-level phenomena is key to lifting that carpet under which the bulldogs fight, we assert, because it is the site of identity reproduction. Schatz extends the point by commenting, “Groupness does not survive merely by definition; rather it survives (if and when it does) because of identifiable mechanisms of identity reproduction [emphasis added]…If we can identify the mechanisms of identity reproduction, we gain exceptional purchase on both identity persistence and identity construction.”³⁸ “Consequently,” and hopefully, as Schatz also asserts, “if such mechanisms are disrupted or changed, we can expect concurrent changes in the shape, meaning, and salience of associated group identities.”³⁹

Where, then, should we look to gain the sight we need?

Western language can be an impediment when discussing a syndrome-like phenomenon, for the cultural style of language is quite linear, implying a starting point leading to subsequent points, leading to an ultimate point. Truly, however, this ancient syndrome we describe is more of an ourobouros, and we feel it is futile to denote its beginning and end in such a linear manner (figure 2.3). The characteristics of the sexual political order that we describe—these mechanisms of identity reproduction—hang together in such an integral fashion that it is almost impossible to put forward a sequence to them, which is why we refer to them as a “syndrome.” Even so, the linear language of our culture is all we coauthors have, and so we warn the reader not to focus on the sequence we outline, but rather to focus on the interlocking nature of these phenomena. In other words, notice how well these things fit together, and how they prop each other up in an almost seamless fashion.

Because we do need a starting point, let’s start with sexual dimorphism—that is, the different body structure between men and women—in humans. The upper-body strength, height, skeletal mass, and muscle mass of human males of a given human collective is—on average—significantly greater than that of human females of the same group.40 Barash comments, “when fat is discounted…men are 40 percent heavier [than women], with 60 percent more muscle mass and a whopping 80 percent more muscle in their arms.”⁴¹ This means that human males can, if they so choose, rather effectively physically coerce human females of their group, on average, even if women also display aggression.⁴² We argue that it is this choice to use the capability for effective physical coercion of women by men as a result of sexual dimorphism that lies at the heart of the Syndrome’s sexual order.⁴³ Indeed, Patty Gowaty suggests, “Female-male competition over control of female reproduction is an untested, viable alternative to the male-male competition explanation for “males larger” in sexually dimorphic species.”⁴⁴

Questions of status, decision-making, and resource access can be “resolved” fairly definitively by men in regard to women through the use or threat of violent coercion. Rebecca Katibo, married as a child in South Sudan, puts it simply, “In my husband’s house everything is by force—there is no request. If I refuse there will be a problem. My husband will beat me.”⁴⁵ As economists Jean Dreze and Reetika Khera express, “One can argue that…the subjugation of women is intrinsically based on violence or at least the threat of it,”⁴⁶ or as primatologist Richard Wrangham suggests in his book with Dale Peterson, “Patriarchy has its ultimate origins in male violence.”⁴⁷

This predisposition for male-on-female violence is commonly enacted; men are overwhelmingly the perpetrators of violence in their communities. As military historian Azar Gat notes, “Perpetration of serious violence and crime is in fact the most distinctive sex difference there is, cross-culturally.”⁴⁸ Barash adds that “the male-female difference in perpetrators of violent crime is about 10 to 1, consistent across every state in the United States, and true of every country for which such data are available…The overwhelming maleness of violence is so pervasive in every human society that it is typically not even recognized as such; it is the ocean in which we swim.”⁴⁹ Wrangham and Peterson note that female behavior among most primate groups, including humans, revolves around their need to protect themselves and their children “against this one terrible threat that never goes away,”⁵⁰ or as anthropologist Barbara Smuts puts it, “in many primates, hardly an aspect of female existence is not constrained in some way by the presence of aggressive males.”⁵¹ Reproductive scientist Malcolm Potts, writing with journalist Thomas Hayden, observes, “For female chimpanzees, the most practical strategy for survival is usually to join the troop of males that is most successful at killing its neighbors and expanding its territory. Human females through history have been confronted with similar choices.”⁵² The battering that women suffer from the men with whom they live is the price paid for such protection, and occurs “in species where females have few allies, or where males have bonds with each other.”⁵³

Why is human male dominance so much more pervasive and elaborate than male dominance in other primate species, then? Smuts theorizes the differences have to do with how effective or ineffective female resistance to control by men is within a given collective. The more ineffective that resistance, the deeper and wider will be male dominance—and social structures and processes that systematically decrease the effectiveness of female resistance, in general, will be chosen by men for just such purposes. We submit that these structures and processes are, in the first place, what we call the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome.

That is, given the background threat of male violence, more effective and less costly means of sexual coercion could be developed that did not require constant one-on-one violence. Indeed, Smuts argues that “gender ideology” was the first product of human speech.54 Men created codes of conduct for women, including marriage patterns, which would favor their interest in male control over any female autonomy interests. Furthermore, women can easily be coerced to adopt and enforce such codes: “women’s adoption of cultural values that appear to go against their own interests may in fact be necessary for survival.”⁵⁵ Over time, the ideology is naturalized; political scientist Francis Fukuyama observes, “Many women in traditional societies accept and even celebrate their subordinate position to men; while the norm legitimizing patriarchy may have been rooted in coercion, it was not always seen as coercive.”⁵⁶

Although battering or its threat may bring reproductive rewards for men, its use also guarantees primary access for the batterer to all useful resources, even the most basic. Indeed, philosopher Kate Manne has proposed that women are tagged as “givers” within human societies, and when women fail to give or are perceived as not giving enough, they will be punished. In her words, the giver or woman “is then obligated to offer love, sex, attention, affection, and admiration, as well as other forms of emotional, social, reproductive, and caregiving labor…A man may be held to be entitled to lay claim to them from some women. Moreover, if he is not given his due, he may then be permitted to take such goods, that is, to forcibly seize them from her with impunity.”⁵⁷ This asymmetrical support relationship between men and women, ultimately based on the threat of physical coercion or other punishment such as abandonment, can be found worldwide, and often in day-to-day living. In many societies even to this day, for example, women are expected to eat last after men and boys have eaten, and to eat less, especially less protein. Men may feel entitled to rape their wives, or take an additional wife without their current wife’s consent, or to be unfaithful to their wives with impunity. Women may need the permission of their father or husband to even leave the house, whereas men enter and leave as they please.

Furthermore, male-coded privileges in such an asymmetrical support relationship are out of bounds for women; privileges such as “leadership, authority, influence, money,”⁵⁸ or whatever societies may deem valuable, from land to gold to livestock to children. The threat of physical violence in a sexually dimorphic context means, perforce, that men will ensure themselves greater access to and control over all such resources compared to women. Thus, in many societies in which male battering of women is normalized, we also find tremendous economic inequality between men and women, with women prohibited, for example, from holding land or property in their own name. Even children become an asset subject to seizure; women in numerous cultures automatically lose custody of children upon their divorce.

Such economic dependency and emotional vulnerability are purposefully created to ensure women’s compliance. In particular, it is after the development of agriculture and animal husbandry, in which land and animals belonged exclusively to men, that the complete economic dependence of women could be effected.59 As Smuts notes in a survey of empirical results, the lower the share of female contribution to subsistence, the higher the level of wife beating and rape within the society.⁶⁰ Anthropologist Barbara D. Miller concurs, observing that “human gender hierarchies are one of the most persistent, pervasive, and pernicious forms of inequality in the world. Gender is used as the basis for systems of discrimination which can, even within the same household, provide that those designated ‘male’ receive more food and live longer, while those designated ‘female’ receive less food to the point that their survival is drastically impaired.”⁶¹

Even in a context in which the use of physical violence between the sexes is normalized, men find the game of politics does not end there. As Hobbes commented on the state of nature “red in tooth and claw” in chapter 15 of The Leviathan, “there is no man who can hope by his own strength, or wit, to defend himself from destruction, without the help of confederates.” That is, a man will need to ensure his safety in regard to other men who are similarly prepared to use violence, because these other men also have been socialized to see violence as effective for men in relation to women within their own households. Sanday observes, “By displaying their ferocity against women, men show other men that they are capable of violence and had better be treated with respect and caution,”⁶² or as the feminist activist Robin Morgan expresses it, “whatever cruelties men visit upon one another they have first tested and refined on women.”⁶³ Because of the threat of violence that underlies the first political order, men ironically create a vicious security dilemma for themselves with respect to other men.

This security dilemma creates a male need for confederates, as Hobbes put it, and also for signaling a deterrent message. With respect to deterrence signaling, the need is addressed by the concept of “honor,” which legal scholar Ivan Perkins defines as “the proud, aggressive, forceful, physical, anger-laced, testosterone-based, masculine demand for respect.”⁶⁴ “Honor” functions as a signaling mechanism between men in the quest for male security in such societies; it denotes that men are ready to use violence against anyone, male or female, insider or outsider, who seeks to curtail their prerogatives.⁶⁵ Sociologist David Jacobson notes “if women in these tribal societies are the promise of reproduction of family and culture, men are the bedrock of security. The honor of virginity and fidelity is matched by the honor of the martial courage of men.”⁶⁶

Deterrence signaling aside, the key problem for men in this context, then, is finding male allies, for a lone man in the context of many men socialized to use physical violence through household-level use of male-on-female coercion cannot but be profoundly insecure no matter how much signaling he undertakes. The importance of this task in the lives of each man in such societies cannot be overstated; men desperately seek a way to feel and to be more secure within a group of men. This, almost above all, drives male behavior. As security studies scholar Stephen Rosen argues, unless a sense of security can be achieved,

Therefore, to relieve their constant anxiety about this need for security, men seek a regularized security provision mechanism. In other words, they seek to establish a male-based alliance that persists over time without the need for constant re-creation. As Smuts notes, “Male reliance on alliances with other males in competition for status, resources, and females is a universal feature of human societies.”⁶⁹ They need a trustworthy fraternity, for men can feel secure only if the men within the group are not liable to suddenly turn on them. That is, any male allies must be men who will find it to their advantage not to be disloyal; they must be dependable allies. The male alliance must create an in-group in which each man feels their individual physical safety becomes a group interest.⁷⁰

Historically, this existential conundrum for men has been resolved through kinship ties. Male kin, bonded by blood ties, become preferred alliance partners, for biologists tell us, “the more closely related individuals are, the more willing they are to take risks for one another.”⁷¹ As sociologist Ivan Ermakoff explains,

Kin networks afford the kind of power—and security—that lone males lack. Gottschall notes, “might is determined not only by one’s physical prowess, but by the number, age range, and sex ratio of the kin network.”⁷³ Larger kin networks, it follows, are better suited to exercise influence in a given community. In a fascinating empirical study of Viking-era Icelandic histories in the journal Evolution and Human Behavior that bears out these propositions, anthropologists Markel Palmstierna, Anna Frangou, Anna Wallette, and Robin Dunbar find that despite the finite amount of land on the island nation, “not a single close biological relative (r ≥ 0.125) was killed in a dispute over land in any of the sampled sagas…the wider kin circle acts as a lineage-based alliance for protection.”⁷⁴ They also find that killers in the Norse sagas were significantly more likely to come from larger kin groups than their victims.

Male-bonded kin groups are ubiquitous in human history. Richard Wrangham and Dale Peterson note that out of “4,000 mammals and 10 millions or more other animal species” only two species (humans and chimpanzees) live in “patrilineal, male-bonded communities wherein females routinely reduce risks of inbreeding by moving to neighboring groups [to mate]…. with [these communities having] a system of intense, male-initiated territorial aggression, including lethal raiding into neighboring communities in search of vulnerable enemies to attack and kill…. The system of communities defended by related men is a human universal that crosses space and time” [emphasis added].⁷⁵ While noting this universality in human systems, they also note that “we quickly discover how odd that system really is, [making] humans appear as members of a funny little group that chose a strange little path.”⁷⁶

One’s male kin can provide a robust physical security provision mechanism for the group’s men, or as the old Bedouin saying goes, “I against my brothers. I and my brothers against my cousins. I and my brothers and my cousins against the world.” Weiner comments,

In tribal societies the bonds of kinship are exceptionally strong. Members of a lineage possess powerful feelings of fellowship with each other—and under the principle of unilineal descent the lines and boundaries of solidarity are exceedingly clear. At the same time, members of distinct lineage groups that are related through a common ancestor will share strong feelings of opposition to any group to which they have mutual reason to be hostile. In theory each lineage group will join with all the other lineage groups to which it is related to fight against an enemy common to them all.⁷⁷

Thus, while it is entirely possible to create a fraternal alliance among men who are not kin or only fictive kin, such as in military units or criminal gangs,78 and these non-kin-based fraternities may also engage in Syndrome practices, the most reliable form of fraternity for men is produced, historically speaking, by kinship.⁷⁹

Furthermore, kinship allows specifically for control of younger men by older men, otherwise the generational divide would threaten to tear apart the fraternity, diminishing its usefulness as a security provision mechanism for men. As Fukuyama comments, “Broadly speaking, the central problem that any society faces is controlling the aggression, ambition, and potential violence on the part of its young men, directing it into safe and productive channels. In most human societies, this job almost always falls to the older men in the community, who seek to ritualize aggression, control access to women, and generally establish a web of norms and rules to constrain young men’s behavior.”⁸⁰

In addition to providing security, however, it is easy to see how predation arises as a collective strategy for powerful male kin networks. Such a network could not only protect its members but also take from nonmembers. Anthropologist Luke Glowacki and colleagues found that in the traditional pastoralist societies they studied, men with more social connections went on more cattle raids against neighboring groups.⁸¹ The male alliance can take assets useful for survival and increased dominance, such as food, land, other valuables, from out-group populations. Journalist Brooke Adams notes, “men killed each other less frequently where such [fraternal] agreements were in force—they could now take their collective capacities for violence and begin to project them outward, onto other groups, subject populations and civilizations.”⁸² Thus, there appears to be strong selection in humans and chimpanzees for aggression: “Although warfare is a high-stakes collective action problem, warriors are willing to participate because over evolutionary time the dividends have tended to outweigh the costs.”⁸³ After all, the idea that women owe men goods and can be justifiably harmed if they demur⁸⁴ provides a robust template for a more general strategy of extortion, predation, and plunder by men, and suggests that other things (e.g., the earth) or other human groups may easily come to be seen in the same light as women.

Team aggression, which is pronounced among chimpanzees and is echoed among their human cousins, is facilitated by men staying in the collective while women leave for other troops through exogamy, because exogamy of females ensures the men in such groups are all blood relatives.⁸⁵ Exogamous marriage produces patrilocal marriage, in which wives move to their husbands’ households. Marvin Harris suggests the logic at work linking exogamy, patrilocality, and warfare:

Let us explore this last observation further. For a male kin network to provide the sought-after physical and material security, the extended kin group must solve the social cooperation dilemma facing all human (and primate) collectives. As we have discussed, the first priority in managing group security requires managing male propensity for risk-taking, violence, and aggression—and harnessing these forces for pro-group ends, lest these propensities destroy the group.⁸⁷ As the aforementioned fraternal alliances develop among male kin, a hierarchical ranking of men within the group—a male dominance hierarchy—is increasingly selected as a way to dampen male–male competition within the group (although such competition can never completely be eliminated).

The threat of such competition is real. As Stephen Rosen notes, “Members of high-testosterone groups that have not established a stable status hierarchy are even more likely than isolated high-testosterone individuals to engage in dominant behavior.”⁸⁸ But with a stable male dominance hierarchy in place, dominant men police nondominant men, corralling their propensities to better ensure the interest of the larger male kin group, which may be defined in terms of their personal interests.

This structure is clearly observable in several primate species, such as chimpanzees, and it is also observable in humans. As Johnson and Thayer comment,

As Johnson and Thayer comment, a species that lives communally could have two broad forms of social organization:

The group can accept organization with some centralization of power (dominance hierarchies), or it can engage in perpetual conflict (“scramble competition”), which incurs costs in terms of time, energy, and injuries, as well as depriving the group of many benefits of a communal existence, such as more efficient resource harvesting. Among social mammals, and primates in particular, dominance hierarchies have emerged as the primary form of social organization.⁸⁹

Within such a kin-bonded male dominance hierarchy, inter-male competition and hostility—although present—can be dampened.⁹⁰ As Rose McDermott and colleagues note,

Johnson and Thayer add, “A dominance hierarchy is created competitively, often violently, and is maintained forcefully, but it can serve to prevent or reduce conflict within a group because it establishes a pecking order that is generally respected.” It is respected for it benefits both elites and nonelites, providing “an organized social structure [that] can help promote the harvesting of resources, coordinate group activity, and reduce within-group conflict.”⁹² In a sense, these dominance hierarchies tamp down the effects of anarchy within the group, while potentially maximizing violent competition between groups.

Relatedly, although dominant men police lower-ranking men, all men police women. Indeed, the deal struck for the lower-ranking men to submit to the male hierarchy is that in addition to being able to share in the benefits of the male alliance, they will be able—even encouraged—to enjoy and display dominance against “others,” with the first Others being women. Interestingly, researchers have found that it is lower-ranking men who are the most active and most brutal at policing women who push back against subordination, for they feel the most threatened by any rise in women’s status.⁹³ As evolutionary biologists Michael Kasumovic and Jeffrey Kuznekoff comment, “the increase in hostility towards a woman by lower-status males may be an attempt to…suppress her disturbance on the hierarchy to retain their social status,” and also to maintain the boundary between those who have the perceived right to dominate (i.e., men) and those who do not (i.e., women).⁹⁴ The bargain appears to be that men agree to be ruled by certain other men in return for all men ruling over all women.

Furthermore, predation and plunder of out-groups not only are useful as economic strategies but also become an expedient means of maintaining harmony in the context of hierarchy among men in a group. To maintain elite male privilege without engendering rebellion in the ranks, it may be necessary to provide booty and plunder for nonelite men within the group. Anthropologist James Boone, in describing the mechanisms of expansionist warfare, explains that such warfare assists elites in maintaining control:

As we have noted, throughout history, we find evidence that human groups have typically established hierarchical fraternal alliances, usually based around patrilines. Indeed, anthropologists William T. Divale and Marvin Harris note that “patrilineality occurs five times more frequently than matrilineality,” and our theoretical framework helps explain why.⁹⁶ (Note that matrilineality says little about female power in a society, for as they also observe, “In matrilineal societies no less than in patrilineal societies, males dominate the allocation of domestic resources, labor, and capital.”⁹⁷)

The genetic imperative for exogamy, recognized at least thirty-four thousand years ago, provides a natural springboard for the development of such patrilineal norms, with its accompanying patrilocal marital residence.⁹⁸ That is, although patrilineal groups have strong endogamous predispositions⁹⁹—which explains why close cousin marriage is often associated with patrilineality—the genetic costs of endogamy become plain over time, forcing exogamous marriage.¹⁰⁰ As we have seen, the logic of the fraternal alliance as the security provision mechanism of groups will ensure that men stay in the collective, while women marry “out” of it exogamously. In other words, to comply with the genetic demands of exogamy in a way that preserves resources and alliances for men, female children will be made to leave upon marriage, and male children will stay.¹⁰¹ Postmarital residence determines comparative power, for “postmarital residence is closely associated with control over access to, and the disposition and inheritance of, natural resources, capital, and labor power.”¹⁰²

Furthermore, as Weiner notes, exogamy can be an asset to a male kin group in search of alliance partners, for it “creat[es] a network of political alliances that contribute to social integration and stability in a given geographic area. The norm of exogamy also provides the basis for a lean anthropological definition of a clan, a term for which there are many conceivable meanings, namely: the largest group of lineage members to whom principles of exogamy apply. If as a Nuer man you are allowed to marry a Nuer woman, then by definition the woman is not a fellow clansman.”¹⁰³ This understanding is echoed across time and space. Economists Tanika Chakraborty and Sukkoo Kim note that in northern India,

In this exogamy-of-females context, a more structured patrilineality thus often develops as a strategy for men to more reliably husband both male allies and resources in the context of out-group women providing children for the group. Friedrich Engels noted the importance of this development in world history, stating, “The establishment of the exclusive supremacy of the man shows its effects first in the patriarchal family…[in] the organization of a number of persons, bond and free, into a family under paternal power for the purpose of holding lands and for the care of flocks and herds.”¹⁰⁶ That this strategy was found, in general, to be effective is demonstrated by the high percentage of cultures that anthropologists have found to be patrilineal in nature. As we have noted, the vast majority of lineage-based groups trace descent through the patriline, practice patrilocality, and inherit land and property through the patriline.¹⁰⁷ The agnatic lineages thus become the “basic political building-blocks” of these societies.¹⁰⁸

Once patrilineality is enshrined as the security provision mechanism for the group, many ancillary customs will naturally arise. Inheritance only through the patriline from father to son is one such custom, ensuring that the men of the kin group maintain control over resources that are key to ensuring goods, such as survival, security, and reproductive success. Another custom is stripping women—even those born to the patriline—of any meaningful property rights. Land and livestock are conceptualized as male-only resources, and other rights, such as the right to conclude contracts, may also be invested in men alone. Men—and not women—must control the clan’s assets, whether these are children or land or cattle, or the power of the clan will dissipate. For example, Fukuyama observes, “While widows and unmarried daughters may have certain inheritance rights, they are usually required to keep the lineage’s property within the agnatic line.”¹⁰⁹ The marriage of a daughter thus becomes a type of disinheritance: early legal systems, such as Roman law, included the maxim, “Mulier est finis familiae…none of the descendants of a female are included in the…family relationship.”¹¹⁰

These twin strategies of cementing male control over group resources through differential inheritance and property rights become the hallmarks of patrilineality, even when state law or, less frequently, religious law inveighs against such a practice. Anthropologist Jack Goody gave an example of the Bedouin:

Historian Adrienne Edgar similarly chronicles how in Soviet-era Turkmenistan, the customary code called adat was held to supersede Islamic law, especially as it provided fewer inheritance rights for women than Islam.¹¹² In addition to keeping resources in the hands of men, as noted, effecting the complete economic dependence of women ensures female compliance with male demands.

Extending the logic of this male-kin-based security system, patrilineality also implies, or even fairly demands for its efficacy, the norm of patrilocal marriage. Men, their kin, and their goods stay together—it is women who typically are made to move to the household of the groom’s family to effect human exogamy. As anthropologist Monica Das Gupta puts it, “Thus it is that only men constitute the social order, and women are the means whereby men reproduce themselves.”¹¹³

Smuts suggests that the more ineffective female resistance is, the more effective male dominance will be, and says that men will select for social structures and processes that tend to render female resistance ineffective. Smuts hypothesizes that several near-universal social structures and processes in traditional human societies preclude effective female resistance. Not surprisingly, first and foremost is patrilocality, which deprives a woman of female kin networks that could potentially prohibit sexual coercion. Evolutionary psychologist Anne Campbell claims this arose fairly early in human history, with hunter-gatherer societies adopting patrilocal mating patterns in which women left their natal families to mate with men outside their kinship system, thereby weakening women’s natal bonds.¹¹⁴ This is the first example Smuts offers of how “male aggression has influenced not only female behavior but also the form of the social system itself.”¹¹⁵ Patrilocality undercuts female resistance to this emerging sexual order by making female solidarity much more difficult to attain than male solidarity.

Patrilocal marriage has historically been far more common than matrilocal or neolocal marriage, being found in approximately three-quarters of human groups.116 Patrilocality and patrilineality reinforce fraternity as the security provision mechanism for the group, or as Divale and Harris explain, threat “leads to the establishment of, or reinforces the prior existence of, solidary groups of males who have a joint interest in the exploitation and defense of a common territory. Patrilocality is the cross-generational objectification of these male-centered interest groups; and patrilineality is the appropriate kinship ideology for enhancing the sentiments of solidarity within the co-resident core of sons, fathers, and brothers.”¹¹⁷

Defense of the patriline’s territory—its “patrilocale,” if you will—is the first order of business. As economist Avraham Ebenstein notes:

The strength of patrilocal norms is…intimately related to the fertility of land to support a dense population, as is found in many fertile areas of China and India. Patrilocal norms will also emerge in response to intensive agriculture as a result of the increased importance of local defense when land is valuable. Since intensive agriculture requires repeated cropping of land, it generates a fixity of settlement that necessitates defense of one’s land. Attacks by nomads and groups looking to expand their territory would have led to both the need for sons for defense and also patrilocal norms, as these sons would need to remain nearby for defense. Therefore, rigid patrilocality and having a history of clan-based conflict are likely to be correlated.¹¹⁸

We argue that patrilocal marriage has even a more important effect. It tends to produce a profound devaluation of daughters and a deep suspicion, bordering on animosity, toward wives. As Sanday puts it, “Cross-cultural research demonstrates that whenever men build and give allegiance to a mystical, enduring, all-male social group, the disparagement of women is, invariably, an important ingredient of the mystical bond…The degradation of women [is] a prerequisite for masculinity…Compassion for women implies castration.”¹¹⁹

Daughters in such cultures are often considered not to be kin, but rather merely guests who will leave the family within a dozen years or so. They are considered burdens, like “watering a plant in another man’s garden,” as the Indian saying goes. They may not even be reckoned in the family’s genealogy, as noted in this chapter’s epigraph, although they are full siblings of their brothers who may be prominently featured in the family lineage. The birth family considers that the girl’s “true” family is her future husband’s family.

Her future husband’s family, however, is quite unlikely to view her as family, either. She comes from another kin group, and thus represents a threat to the established social order within the home; in some cases, wives may come from subjected groups, so that men marry the women of their enemies, and the resulting marriage is viewed as more than a figurative conquest. As Sanday notes, “Wives are treated as if they were enemies.”120 Anthropologist Charles Lindholm offers the following observation from the Swat Pukhtun of northern Pakistan:

Relations between husbands and wives tend to be warlike. Even in sex, tenderness is said to be absent…The problem of sexual relationships is understandable given the ideology that all women are, in themselves, repulsive and inferior, and have the potential to shame men. The repulsiveness of women is linked to the conundrum they pose in the social structure as the foci of the contradiction between the necessity of exchanging women and the social ideal of the self-sufficient [patrilineal] family. Also linked is the prevalence of homosexuality among the men, who find a relationship with a boy less demanding and more pleasurable than with a woman. Yet, though women are despicable, men know they cannot survive without them. A woman can chase her husband from the house by simply refusing to cook for him. Women are powerful, despite the ideology of their inferiority. This ambiguity further stirs the disgust of the Pukhtun…A woman not only exposes the contradictions of the patrilineal pose of splendid male isolation and domination, but she is also in herself a contradiction, embodying both weakness and strength.¹²¹

New brides, even if from a friendly group, will almost always occupy the lowest rung on the hierarchy within her husband’s family. The full weight of the male-imposed sexual political order, including violent coercion, lack of decision-making power, and lack of access to resources may be quite explicit within families with respect to wives and daughters.

It goes without saying that the devaluation of daughters and wives is matched by open son preference in patrilineal societies. Passive or active female infanticide can not only be found in the history of all geographic regions but also—augmented by the technology enabling sex-selective abortion—in at least nineteen nation-states today.¹²² Public health economist Priya Nanda and colleagues found a strong link between gender unequal attitudes and son preference, finding that “a comprehensive study of several thousand men and women across seven states in India shows that combining two vectors of masculinity—controlling behavior and traditional gender attitudes—predicts both son preference and intimate partner violence.”¹²³

A cascade of effects emanates from this devaluation of female life in the patrilineal kin group context. Age of marriage for girls will be depressed, as natal families attempt to rid themselves of burdensome daughters as quickly as possible. At the same time, the rights of wives in marriage will be severely circumscribed. Wives may have virtually no right to divorce, whereas husbands may divorce at will for no cause. Wives may have no access to their children after divorce. Marital property may default to the groom’s surviving brothers and parents upon his death. Crimes such as adultery may be punished by death if committed or suspected on the part of a wife, but may incur no punishment at all if committed by a husband. Husbands may have the right to control the movements of their wives, even whether they may go to school, visit relatives, work, or leave the house for any reason. Husbands may control any property belonging to the wife, such as her wages, or her dowry. Goody asserts, “The presence of strong patrilineal groups [is] directly linked to the weak nature of the conjugal bond, to the prevalence of polygyny, the ease of divorce, and more generally the low position of women.”124 Physical battering of wives may not even be considered a criminal act in such contexts, but rather as a property right held by men.

Ironically, in these societies where it is seen as so important to control women to reap reproductive and productive benefit, women may be seen as burdens. As Rebecca Solnit notes, “Patriarchy—meaning both male domination and societies obsessed with patrilineal descent—has, in many times and places, created many versions of dependent, unproductive women, who are disabled by dress or body modification, restricted to the home, and limited in their access to education, employment, and profession by laws and customs backed by threats of violence. Some misogynists complain that women are immobile burdens, but much misogyny has striven to make women so.”¹²⁵ Women’s voice in such societies is purposefully suppressed; they are generally excluded from household and larger group decision-making. In addition to this state of affairs within the household, Goody also notes that patrilineality entails “separation of the sexes and exclusion of women from public life.”¹²⁶

Interestingly, this sexual order can evolve in a couple of different, but ultimately parallel, directions, depending on whether women’s labor is considered essential for food production (in which case brideprice will be established), or not (in which case dowry will be established). That is, no matter which of these two paths is taken, assets will be exchanged upon marriage, for as Divale and Harris argue, “Almost all cases of brideprice and dowry are associated with patrilocal, patrilineal systems.”¹²⁷ What Divale and Harris mean by these terms is that in the case of brideprice, assets flow from the groom to the bride’s father upon marriage; in the case of dowry, assets flow from the bride’s father to the groom upon marriage.

These alternatives depend on how valued women’s productive (not reproductive) labor is. If women’s labor is seen as valuable, such as we see in Sub-Saharan Africa where women do the lion’s share of agricultural labor in societies that are primarily agricultural, we often see polygyny, or the practice of men having several wives, and brideprice together, with little alteration of normal sex ratios. As Goody puts it, “Bridewealth and polygyny play into each other’s hands.”128 In these cultures, a father finds himself in possession of a valuable commodity—the productive and reproductive capabilities of his daughter, who will gain for him a brideprice. One’s daughters thus become goods on which one may gain a handsome profit, so even though they are less valued in familial terms than sons, one will not see passive or active female infanticide. At the same time, men with greater wealth will be in a position to purchase more laborers, and thus polygyny will become a predisposition of those with means.¹²⁹

In contrast, if women’s labor is not considered valuable, a second type of marital system may develop, in which the woman’s family may have to pay the groom’s family a dowry to take her off their hands. Faced with the loss of what is typically a substantial amount of money for an individual who is not even considered a real part of the family and who is moving away in patrilocal marriage, the temptation will be strong to alter sex ratios to dispense with unwanted daughters through female infanticide or its contemporary alternative of sex-selective abortion. In this case, hypergyny, in which brides marry upward in the social hierarchy as a result of their relative scarcity, becomes the societal tendency.

These two paths suggest to anthropologist Stanley Jeyaraja Tambiah that, “Bridewealth and dowry have different potentialities in the way they can link up with the politico-economic institutions of the society in which they are found.”¹³⁰ Goody explains the alternative trajectories in this way: “Bridewealth is more commonly found where women make the major contribution to agriculture, whereas dowry is restricted to those societies where males contribute most…dowry tends to be found with monogamy, bridewealth with general polygyny.”¹³¹

Both paths—dowry/sex-ratio alteration and polygyny/brideprice—are but variants of the same male-imposed sexual political order of the society. Anthropologist Joseph Manson and colleagues explain it eloquently: “Human females are often subject to unusually intense male coercion as a result of uniquely elaborate male-male cooperation to control their sexuality and male control of resources.”¹³² The subordination of women in each marriage system is actually quite similar in its effects on their daily lives.

Stepping back to view the entire picture (figure 2.4), all the sequelae we have discussed reinforce the entire Syndrome. Once set in motion, the pieces interlock closely and support each other in a never-ending cycle of the serpent devouring its tail. If a group chooses the male-bonded kin group as its security provision mechanism, then male control of resources, patrilocal marriage, lack of women’s property rights, and devaluation of female life click together like a bracelet of magnetic beads. What kind of women the Syndrome produces is easily understandable and will be explored more fully in the next chapter. What has been less discussed, we believe, is what kind of men the Syndrome produces. We turn to John Stuart Mill for a cogent description:

As Valerie Hudson and Patricia Leidl wrote in The Hillary Doctrine, this warping of the human souls of males is tragic for the men involved and tragedy-producing for women.¹³⁴ Journalist Ann Jones perceptively notes that those “in charge”—overwhelmingly men—are profoundly, and thus humiliatingly, dependent on those who are “not in charge,” that is, women.¹³⁵ It is not the powerful who are indispensable, but the powerless. In traditional societies, it is primarily women who till the soil, provide for a man’s next meal, and give him his very future in the form of children, even though he too often deems the women in his life to be inferior beings.

Indeed, a man knows that his very existence originates from what he may consider to be the deformed and unclean body of an inferior, a woman. Furthermore, his cherished customs and values and beliefs would simply evaporate if that inferior woman refuses to cooperate in socializing his children to accept his belief system, or if she is persuaded by other ways and other beliefs. It is an awful psychological state to find oneself in—to feel oneself as powerful and entitled to be so, but also simultaneously know one is powerless. It is a recipe for the deepest shame and humiliation and thus for the cruelest abuse based on the fear that those who are inferior will not forever accept that status.

Thus, one can argue that an overwhelming imperative to contain and ultimately obliterate female agency lies at the very core of the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome. Men know that a woman who is left to her own devices and is free of fear is also more likely to reject his need of her, whether that need be for temporal sustenance, for children, for socialization of the young, or even for sex. Indeed, a woman’s sexual autonomy may threaten his very self. He may be the rapist, but she is to blame. He wants her, but he loathes that he wants her and he hates her even more for not wanting him. Furthermore, he hates that he desires a body that he considers so polluted, one that bleeds and is so very unlike his own. Fraternal love is rather to be preferred, for it carries with it no such inherent threat.¹³⁶

Although women fear that men will kill them, men fear that women will humiliate them by repudiating their control, which casts into doubt men’s “manhood.” Even today, many courts consider humiliation a mitigating factor when men beat or murder women. This control can be subtle or overt, but it is woven into the daily lives of women. While working in Cote d’Ivoire and Liberia, Jones gave cameras to the women and asked them to record the scenes of their daily life:

This deep pathology of male resentment is literally surreal. For, literally, to despise women is to despise your own life; to attack women is to attack your own life. You can beat her, rape her, kill her, control her, but you will always need her. That need means that in actuality you are not powerful and she is not powerless. She is not, in the end, “yours.”

Pace John Mearsheimer,¹³⁸ the tragedy of great power politics has nothing on the tragedy of this sexual political order. Indeed, we would argue that the tragedy of great power politics actually derives from the tragedy of the Syndrome. That is, the subordinative, exploitative, predatory, and violent first sexual order cannot but reproduce itself at the community, national, and international levels of analysis.

But how does this happen? How do the practices of the Syndrome create this insecurity and instability? We will first take a closer look at each of the component parts of the Syndrome in comprehensive fashion in the next chapter, and then in part II examine in detail the overall and specific effects of the Syndrome on the societies in which it is encoded.