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

In Post-Syndrome societies, it is true that marriage may no longer be viewed as an important rite of passage for men. In Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome societies, however, the existence of the patriline absolutely depends on the biological reproduction of the group—and that means legitimate male offspring through the patriline are an essential requirement for the group’s continuation. The ability to marry and sire legitimate male offspring thus remains a pressing concern for each and every male member of the patriline. Consequently, marriage will remain one of the most important rites of passage for the achievement of manhood within the male dominance hierarchy.

Consider that when ISIS conquered areas within Iraq, one of the first items on the agenda was the procurement of legitimate wives (i.e., not sex slaves). As Patrick Cockburn of The Independent reported in 2014 before ISIS’s defeat,

Reports from Mosul in 2014 likewise found reports of women kidnapped from their families and forced into “jihad marriages.”²

The stipulation that all men must marry and extend the patriline has important consequences for women. Laura Betzig cuts to the chase by asserting that kinship is created “as the result of a [man’s] success in obtaining women and having children,”³ but kinship is also one of the reasons an individual man is more likely to find such success. Reliance on male-bonded kin groups as a security provision mechanism renders the subordination of women persistent because of the patriline’s simultaneous need for and exclusion of women. As Fukuyama notes, “In agnatic societies, women achieve legal personhood only by virtue of their marriage to and mothering of a male in the lineage”; that is, women “exist” in these societies only in as much as they create the patriline because patrilines cannot exist without women creating them.⁴ He goes on to note, “we should not underestimate the importance of sex and access to women as a driver of political organization, particularly in segmentary or tribal societies that routinely use women as a medium of exchange.”⁵

The fierceness and the sensitivity with which the subordinate status of women in clan-based societies is guarded by the men of these societies testifies to the truth of Fukuyama’s assertion. Mounira M. Charrad cogently observes, “Women represent a potential source of rupture in the web uniting the men of the patrilineage,”⁶ which is why they are so strictly subordinated. This understanding that patrilineal clans can only be formed through the subordination of female interests, especially in marriage and sexual relations, suggests that mechanisms of control over female interests in sex, marriage, and reproduction may in fact be the most visible indicators of patrilineal clan governance. As we argued in part I of this volume, one of the most effective ways of seeing clan-based governance structures is by examining the usually very visible situation of women within the society, and in marriage more particularly. As David Jacobson puts it, “gender is the hinge…the role of gender in tribes and tribalism is foundational.”⁷

Although the consequences of the patrilineal imperative for women are profound and profoundly negative, as we recounted in chapter 3, the consequences for men are equally profound and also may be quite negative. The inability of a male member of the patriline to marry will engender a deep sense of grievance, and that grievance will extend to the established political order. In this, we again see how tightly intertwined the sexual order is with the political order. If the societal order is based around the patriline and its accompanying fraternity, and a man for whatever reason cannot assume his place in that patriline, both the psychological cost and the material cost to that man will be immense.

We assert that the patrilineal/fraternal sexual political order tends to catalyze the obstruction of marriage markets, because marriage obstruction has destabilizing effects on the societal political order in addition to those we described previously in this book. The Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome creates at least three structural goads that cause this obstruction to occur. The first goad to marriage market obstruction occurs through the elimination of females from the childbearing and future childbearing population as a result of the devaluation of female life. This devaluation is enacted by such phenomena as female infanticide, sex-selective abortion of females, passive and active neglect of females, high levels of violence against females, and high levels of female suicide. These practices serve to significantly alter the sex ratio of a society. The second goad to marriage market obstruction occurs through polygyny, which mimics the effects of a highly masculinized sex ratio by allowing dominant men to accumulate women, whereas nondominant males may face a scarcity of women. In essence, this simulates an altered sex ratio among women of marriageable age. The third goad to marriage market obstruction is through high brideprice and wedding costs that substantially raise the age of marriage for young adult men—or preclude it altogether—due to inability to accumulate the demanded sums. The overall effect of all three structural goads on patriline members is to delay marriage or make it altogether unlikely for a significant percentage of men in the society; in other words, the marriage market in the society cannot clear because it is obstructed. The astute observer cannot but note that the sexual order imposed by the Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome becomes one of the greatest threats to its preferred political order simply because that sexual order is chronically predisposed to marriage market obstruction through one of the three structural goads we have identified. The system is therefore structured to inevitably destabilize. We examine these three phenomena in greater detail to identify the sources of predisposition and their effects on the character of grievance that ensues (see figure 5.1).

Before doing so, it is important to disabuse oneself of the notion that if women are in higher demand, then their subordination will be lessened. Take, for example, abnormal sex ratios favoring males. Such sex ratio alteration serves but to amplify the Syndrome we have identified. When women are scarce, women’s lives do not, generally speaking, improve in quality. They are more likely to become victims of violent assault, kidnapping, and sale.8 There may be an accompanying rise in demand for prostitution, with associated impetus for trafficking. Violence against women in domestic settings may be heightened as well, for women are even more tightly controlled. The age of marriage for girls may drop even lower than before, as men seek marriage partners among increasingly younger cohorts. Suicide rates among women often rise significantly. All of these phenomena may have ramifications for stability and security of the group, as well. Even as it destabilizes society, the Syndrome becomes even more entrenched and vise-like.

Girls are culled from the population for other reasons as well. In the past, military invaders would forcibly “marry” daughters of local families in order to become their “kin,” thereby presumably easing the need to rule by direct military force. The presence of daughters represented, then, a real strategic vulnerability in the face of invasion by out-groups. Similarly, in chronically fragile subsistence societies, such as among the early Australian aborigines or Inuit in the far north, limiting the numbers of those who would bring new mouths to feed into the society seemed imperative.9 Future mothers, not future fathers, were seen as posing a threat to the survival of the group.

Furthermore, these culling practices often become reified over time, even after the initial catalyst has disappeared. For example, women in modern India are far from unproductive, yet the tradition of dowry persists. Likewise, the notion that the “wife-taker” is superior to the “wife-giver,” a relic from the time of the Mughal invasion, is still prevalent. Thus, even in twenty-first-century India, we find social and religious imperatives for hypergyny, where a daughter may be honorably married only to a man who comes from a higher-ranking family than her own. The cost of such a hypergynous marriage may be ruinous, and daughters born to the highest status families may not ever be able to marry at all. This explains why sex ratios among the most educated and wealthiest families in India may actually be worse than those among poor families.¹⁰

All in all, we can understand why historian William Sumner would assert, “Children add to the weight of the struggle for existence of their parents…. Abortion and infanticide are especially interesting because they show how early in the history of civilization the burden of children became so heavy that parents began to shirk it.”11 He’s right, but he’s missed the gendered aspect—it is first and foremost female offspring in these societies who create a perceived burden or threat, and it is first and foremost female offspring who are “shirked” by passive or active means of infanticide. This differential treatment stems from the nature of the first political order. Whether we speak of sex-selective abortion, female infanticide, differential feeding practices of sons versus daughters, or refusal to spend resources on the medical care of daughters, the result is that girls will begin to be culled from the group population, and natural sex ratios will become unnatural.

The relationship of these practices to reliance on the patrilineal/fraternal security provision mechanism is unquestionable. The encoding of the Syndrome predisposes the society to devaluing female life. Monica Das Gupta notes,

The more kinship rules exclude adult daughters from contributing to their parents, the lower the incentives for parents to raise girls…. The correspondence between kinship rules and son preference is striking. Within the same country, different levels of permissible contact between daughters and their parents (as documented in ethnographic studies) are mirrored in regional differences in child sex ratios in India, and in regional and ethnic differentials in China. Even within the same culture, variations in kinship system matter—in South Korea, the eldest son is primarily responsible for continuing the family line, and this is reflected in stronger son preference than that expressed by the wives of other sons.¹²

Lest one fall prey to the misconception that culling girls was only a practice of the past, remember that the number of countries with abnormal childhood (age birth to four years old) sex ratios is growing, not shrinking, in the twenty-first century. In 1995, only five countries had abnormal, masculinized sex ratios (not counting Hong Kong). In 2015, there were nineteen (not counting Hong Kong and Macau).¹³ The Syndrome’s logic is overpowering, even in an age of globalization and international human rights treaties. Over the past twenty years, only one country has seen a reversion from abnormal to normal sex ratios: South Korea. Interestingly, South Korea’s success in normalizing its sex ratios has a lot to do with its effective undermining of the dominance of patrilineal clans in its society (discussed further in chapter 8).¹⁴

A significant imbalance between the number of young adult men and young adult women in society—whether through offspring sex selection, high mortality rates for girls compared with boys or women compared with men, or polygyny—produces obstructions in the marriage market of such societies. There are simply not enough women for each male patriline member to marry and produce offspring. For example, historically among the polygynous Azande in Africa, as Betzig (quoting Johan Lagae) notes, in one locale, for every one hundred adult men, there were twenty-six bachelors, forty-seven men in monogamous unions, eighteen men in polygynous unions of only two wives, and nine men in polygynous unions of more than two wives.15 These “surplus” men become what in the Chinese vernacular are known as the “bare branches” of their societies; branches of the patrilineal family tree that will never bear fruit. In contemporary India, an estimated 12 percent of young adult men are surplus to the number of young adult women in society, and in China, that figure may be as high as 15 percent.¹⁶ The consequences for a patrilineal/fraternal society in which a substantial percentage of adult men will never marry are both predictable and profound.

First, men with advantages will marry; men without advantages, who are already at risk for antisocial behavior, will not. Indeed, this is the case in all three structural goads we discuss in this chapter—elite men will not suffer from the scarcity of women in their society. But those nonelite men who find themselves pushed out of the marriage market will feel a deep sense of grievance, as well as a determination either to obtain, one way or the other, the advantages that will allow them to enter the market and be successful, or, alternatively, to circumvent or upend the system that relegates them to outsider status.

Thus, we find a variety of fairly predictable strategies being employed by bare branches to better their position, none of which enhance the stability, security, or resilience of their society. The reason is that the one advantage that cannot be taken from bare branches is their comparative physical strength as young adult males and their willingness to use that strength, especially in male-bonded groups and even in illegal or sociopathic ways, to gain what they need to enter the marriage market. It comes as no surprise, then, that masculinized sex ratios correlate with property crime and violent crime rates in numerous empirical studies.

For example, using annual province-level data, economist Lena Edlund and colleagues find that for every 1 percent alteration of the sex ratio in favor of males, there was a corresponding 3.7 percent increase in violent and property crime rates in China. These are not white-collar crimes; these are bare branch crimes—the crimes of “bullies, bandits, and rebels.” They hypothesize that high sex ratios create this violent reaction because they act much like polygyny does; the society is “wrecked by the revolt of the mass of inferior men who are condemned to celibacy by it.”¹⁷ Other empirical studies have revealed similar results in other nations, such as India and Korea—that is, violent crime increases in tandem with an increase in sex ratios.¹⁸ Jonathan Gottschall senses the ourobouros-like nature of the equation: “Parents bias their investment in favor of males largely because the world is violent; the world is violent largely because parents bias their investment in favor of males.”¹⁹

Crime is not the only trend that corresponds to sex ratios: protests and demonstrations are also increasing in size and frequency. Writing in The Atlantic, Alan Taylor notes, “According to research by the Chinese Academy of Governance, the number of protests in China doubled between 2006 and 2010, rising to 180,000 reported ‘mass incidents’ ” in 2010 alone,20 a figure confirmed by other researchers as well.²¹ The types of clashes reported have been serious. For example, in 2011, parts of Inner Mongolia were placed under martial law, and in Guangzhou, after thousands of protesters set fire to cars and attacked government buildings, the police deployed armored vehicles.²² The 2019 crisis in Hong Kong, which also has highly abnormal sex ratios, is another violent example.

In addition, honor—with its laser-like focus on respect and disrespect—takes on heightened salience in cultures with a sizeable number of bare branches. As sociologists Allan Mazur and Alan Booth explain,

There may be a general hypersensitivity to insult in any subculture that is (or once was) organized around young men who are unconstrained by traditional community agents of social control, as often occurs in frontier communities, gangs, among vagabonds or bohemians, and after breakdowns in the social fabric following wars or natural disasters. When young men place special emphasis on protecting their reputation, and they are not restrained from doing so, dominance contests become ubiquitous, the hallmark of male-to-male interaction.²³

These dominance contests catalyze the “risky shift” among groups of young men, that is, the willingness to take greater risks collectively than individually. Thus, the behavior of men in groups—particularly young, single, low-status males—will not rise above the behavior of the worst-behaved individual. Collectively, they will take larger risks and be more violent than they otherwise would be. As one young male gang member in Australia expressed it, “Gang is your best friend. Your whole group, you can do anything. You’re happy, you want to do anything. You’re not scared of stuff.”²⁴ Fraternity is ever the sturdy friend of risky, violent behavior.

The governing powers of such a society find themselves in quite a quandary. Although they may turn a blind eye to predictable consequences such as the cross-border trafficking of women, they cannot, in general, alleviate the grievances of these young adult men, for even with such trafficking, the sex ratios of the country are likely to remain substantially abnormal. Vice will be winked at by the authorities, but violence will not, for bare branch collectives can at times pose a serious threat to the established order.

For example, the Nien Rebellion in nineteenth-century China originated in a province where, because of grotesquely abnormal sex ratios, 25 percent of men were unable to marry.²⁵ Sociologist Daniel Little writes, “Families adopted the practice of female infanticide to increase family income and security, but the long-term aggregate result was a skewed demography in which there was a large surplus of young men. These young men became natural recruits for bandit gangs and local militia—thus providing resources for the emergence of collective strategies of predation and protection.”²⁶

Governments may find they have no choice but to turn to “hard” tactics of authoritarianism, brutally suppressing violence internally, and perhaps exporting the agents of violence to other lands through military campaigns. Sociologist James Boone sums up the situation facing governments in this way:

A similar chain of events attends societies that select for prevalent polygyny instead of sex ratio alteration because of the value placed on women’s productive labor, as in sub-Saharan Africa. This is so because prevalent polygyny serves as the functional equivalent of an abnormal sex ratio. By marrying multiple women, elite men create an underclass of young adult men who are elbowed out of the marriage market because there are not enough women in that market: these women are alive—unlike societies with abnormal sex ratios—but they have been monopolized by men with far greater resources than these young men. For example, author William Tucker notes that in the 1950s in West Africa, as a result of polygyny, “at least a quarter of the male African population was permanently excluded from marriage, leaving a volatile class of unattached males.”²⁸ This does not bode well for peace within the society. Evolutionary psychologist Joseph Henrich and his coauthors assert, “Faced with high levels of intra-sexual competition and little chance of obtaining even one long-term mate, unmarried, low-status men will heavily discount the future and more readily engage in risky status-elevating and sex-seeking behaviours, [elevating] crime rates, including rape, murder, assault, robbery, and fraud.”²⁹

The authors go on to note, “Polygynous societies engage in more warfare…. When inter-group competition relies on large numbers of highly motivated young men to engage in continuous raiding and warfare to obtain resources, slaves, territory and concubines, groups with greater polygyny may generate larger and more motivated pools of males for these risky activities.”30 Psychologist David Barash comments, “Like the energy captured in a bow that is drawn back, ready to power an arrow, polygyny generates much of the background tension that erupts into violence.”³¹

Even ancient societies realized that polygyny could destabilize their societies. Tucker notes that in ancient Sparta³² every warrior was guaranteed a wife. This was done purposefully to retain the loyalty of the army, and he provocatively notes,

The Athenians were the first known urban society in which an alpha male was not allowed to take more than one wife, and was shamed if he divorced. They were also the world’s first democratic society…. It might not be the case that once a society establishes sexual democracy [among men] it goes on to extend political rights and become democratic. Rather it may be that once the people are given a voice through democracy, they impose monogamy on their rulers. Remember, it is low status men who resist polygamy at the top.³³

Although these same marriage market obstruction patterns and consequences attend polygynous societies as societies in which the sex ratio is altered as a result of the culling of females, the flavor of grievance is somewhat different, and somewhat more intense, than in societies with abnormal sex ratios. When girls are culled from the birth population, it is difficult to blame specific individuals for the dislocations that result. Indeed, many families within the society—perhaps even one’s own—may be practicing offspring sex selection. In polygynous societies, however, it is clear to everyone who has unfairly accumulated many wives: wealthy men. Thus, there is a more personal, more specific cause of the grievance in full view in polygynous societies than in abnormal sex ratio societies. One’s chances of overcoming this obstruction seem significantly better than in those latter societies—if the collective action problem among one’s similarly marginalized fellows could be solved.³⁵

So, for example, Barash notes, “the likelihood that a man will kill another man is much higher in societies with large disparities in wealth, situations in which men are particularly pressed to achieve the status needed to acquire and maintain relationships with women…polygyny [is] both a manifestation of inequality and a generator of it because it unbalances the sex ratio among marriageable adults.”³⁶ He concludes, “The connection between violence and polygyny is noticeably tight, just like the close coupling between maleness and violence.”³⁷ Interestingly, Barash also notes that men’s life expectancies are thus considerably shorter in polygynous societies than in monogamous ones.³⁸

No wonder, then, that some studies have shown greater ease of recruitment into rebel groups in polygynous societies. For example, development expert Esther Mokuwa and colleagues demonstrate significantly greater ease of rebel recruitment in areas with higher rates of polygyny within Sierra Leone compared with those areas with lower rates.39 As noted in chapter 4, anthropologists have found significant correlation between polygyny and the amount of warfare in which societies engage.⁴⁰ Some scholars have asserted that polygynous societies are more likely to engage in expansionist warfare to distract low-status mate-less males.⁴¹ In other words, polygyny has long been linked to societal instability and lack of resilience in the scholarly literature.

In an interesting study, Rebecca Nielsen finds that during the brutal civil war in Sierra Leone—a culture encoding polygyny and brideprice (and hence marriage market obstruction)—married men tended to join civil militias while unmarried men tended to join rebel groups.⁴² The “bet” taken by the unmarried men was that by joining the rebels they would increase their chances of marrying. In areas that experienced low levels of conflict during the civil war, that bet did not pan out. In areas that experienced high conflict, however, the average age of male marriage dropped by seven to fifteen years (from twenty-five to thirty-five down to eighteen to twenty), marriage markets cleared, and most marriages resulted from pregnancy (and thus with a smaller brideprice) than from negotiation with the bride’s family before sexual relations. In these high-conflict areas, joining a rebel group did garner tremendous payoffs in the marriage market for the young men who took that bet. Almost certainly, however, nothing changed for the better for the women.

Another relevant case is that of the Vikings. Ben Raffield and Mark Collard posit that the mix of polygyny, concubinage, and rising social inequality in Scandinavia during the late-eighth-century led to the famous Viking raids of this period. They explain:

With elite men monopolizing an increasing percentage of women, many low-status men would have found it difficult to marry unless they were willing to engage in risky activities to improve their wealth and status. At the same time, elite men were motivated to organize expeditions to acquire plunder and develop their reputations as war leaders. Raiding therefore represented a mutually beneficial means of achieving social advancement, success in the marriage market, and, for elite men, political power.⁴³

Polygyny also provides a standing mechanism for intrafamily resentment and fission. Goody notes that in polygynous societies, “the unit of consumption [is] the children of one mother. This unit, whose existence is dependent upon polygyny, is of central important in the fission of domestic groups.”45 In other words, polygynous patrilines were always on the knife’s edge of violent fissioning between the sons of different mothers. Historian Stephanie Coontz notes about medieval Europe that the Church’s prohibition of polygyny came as a huge relief to the continent, for when kings married polygynously,

they left Western European kingdoms vulnerable to the kind of instability and bloodshed [seen] in the Hellenistic dynasties of Asia Minor…. Rival heirs from different mothers schemed to further their own ends. Having too many heirs to the throne could be as much of a problem as having too few…. The Church’s insistence on monogamy and disapproval of divorce [had] the salutary effect of imposing the matrimonial equivalent of an arms limitation agreement.⁴⁶

In addition to intrasocietal grievance and conflict, this lack of resilience in polygynous cultures may manifest in more rigid, and therefore more fragile, governance systems. For example, as we noted, in an intriguing empirical study of 186 societies, Betzig finds the correlation between despotism and polygyny to be .72, significant at the .01 level.⁴⁸ Anthropologists Andrey Korotayev and Dmitri Bondarenko obtain similar results.⁴⁹ One of the causal mechanisms involved is the creation of a standing pool of marginalized and disaffected young adult men, in reaction to which authoritarianism appears useful as a counterweight. As Robert Wright puts it, “Extreme polygyny often goes hand in hand with extreme political hierarchy, and reaches its zenith under the most despotic regimes.”⁵⁰ Furthermore, societies practicing polygyny were shown by Rose McDermott and Jonathan Cowden to also demonstrate higher per capita arms expenditures and significantly lower respect for political rights and civil liberties.⁵¹ With the lenses provided by our theoretical framework, we see that it is not only polygyny, but any sustained marriage market obstruction that may well produce this effect.

Even so, polygyny holds a special place in this pantheon of obstructions. In chapter 4, we commented on Richard Alexander’s thoughts:

It is almost as if no nation can become both quite large and quite unified except under socially imposed monogamy…. Socially imposed monogamy inhibits the rise of the kind of disproportionately large and powerful lineages of close relatives…One of the correlates of the rise of nations, and a function of systems of law, is to suppress the right of responsibility to avenge wrongs done to kin, and to prevent subgroups and clans from attaining undue power.⁵²

The group also faces economic consequences in the case of prevalent polygyny. Henrich, for example, argues that a higher prevalence of polygyny may reduce national wealth (gross domestic product per capita) for two reasons.53 First, male economic efforts will be dedicated primarily to obtaining more wives instead of more productive economic investment, and second, there may be an accompanying increase in female fertility.⁵⁴ We add that underinvestment in children will also limit economic prosperity across generations. Henrich and his coauthors aver that polygyny also tends to increase the spousal age gap, and increases intrahousehold conflict, which in turn leads to higher rates of child neglect, abuse, accidental death, and homicide. They also propose that

In the most complex societies, where a society’s competitive success is influenced by its economic output, standing armies, innovation rates, trade, division of labour and offspring quality, higher rates of polygynous marriage reduce a society’s competitive success. Under these conditions, normative monogamy increases a society’s competitiveness because of how it influences crime rates, male motivations, paternal investment, fertility and economic production.⁵⁵

If polygyny produces negative consequences, Henrich and colleagues argue, the reverse is also true: select for monogamy—or ban polygyny—and good things start to happen. For illustration, economist Michele Tertilt has found that banning polygyny “reduces fertility by 40 percent, increases savings by 70 percent, and raises output per person by 170 percent.”⁵⁶ Peter Turchin points to an interesting paradox: in polygynous societies, men are incentivized to amass wealth, but polygynous societies perform poorly in an economic sense, at least in the African context he has studied. He notes,

Polygyny should induce males to make greater effort to become rich so that they can afford a wife, and then even richer so they can afford many. If this were so, polygynous countries with hard-working male populations should enjoy greater economic growth than monogamous countries. But the opposite is the case. A comparison of tropical developing countries shows that GDP per capita in monogamous countries is three times higher than in polygamous ones. Differences between individual countries can be staggering. Compare Botswana where polygamy is banned, with Burkina Faso, in which more than half of married women are in polygynous families. Botswana’s GDP per capita is 10 times that of Burkina Faso.⁵⁷

McDermott and Cowden similarly note that neither economic development nor increases in female literacy seem to be capable of reducing the prevalence of polygyny.58 Indeed, economic development may actually spur polygyny among the newly rich, increasing the national prevalence of the practice. Similarly, increases in female literacy seem not to lead to women’s emancipation from polygynous marriage norms, as we see in Gulf states with high female literacy rates, for example.

Because polygyny entails, bluntly, reproductive inequality for men, it can only exist in a social system in which inequality is normalized through the first political order. Betzig notes, “Polygyny, or reproductive inequality, requires economic and political inequality: a man with ten times as many women and children must either work ten times as hard to support them, or take what he needs from other men. Across space and time, polygyny has overlapped with despotism, [and] monogamy with egalitarianism.”⁵⁹ Polygyny requires an enormous amount of stratification and inequality, backed by coercion, to remain even somewhat stable. This can be seen even in U.S. FLDS polygamous communities in which a few elite families dine on lobster, whereas most endure starvation rations.⁶⁰

McDermott and Cowden summarize by noting that the societal choice to embrace and tolerate polygyny or ban it has fateful consequences: “Policymakers would have to change multiple laws across multiple domains to exert as much of an effect on these negative outcomes toward women and children as could be accomplished by the abolition of polygyny…. By prohibiting polygyny, we reduce social inequities, violence toward women and children, and the proliferation of single men and the violence they perpetuate, as well as increase political rights and civil liberties for all.”⁶¹

In patrilineal societies, it is common for a man to “buy a wife.”62 Another way to create the functional equivalent of a high sex ratio is a significant escalation in marriage and wedding costs for grooms in brideprice-practicing societies.⁶³ For example, an entire ethnic group in South Sudan was destabilized by rising brideprices among the group around the time of independence. Cattle theft rose precipitously as desperate would-be grooms sought additional livestock to meet the rising price of brides, and revenge attacks followed these thefts.⁶⁴ Jada Tombe, a young man in South Sudan noted, “We risk our lives to raid other communities so we can pay bride price.”⁶⁵ A U.S. Institute of Peace field study explained: “A government official provided an alternative motive for joining militia groups: ‘Some youth are joining the rebels [militias] to loot properties so they can marry.’ A recent Norwegian People’s aid report supports indications in the authors’ interview data that some young men in South Sudan join armed gangs, at least in part, because they believe it will help them pay dowries”⁶⁶ (note that they actually mean brideprice, not dowry). Societal stability and resilience are profoundly affected by the existence of a “brideprice economy.”

In Libya, those interested in the rebel militias that are the de facto enforcement power in the post-Qaddafi era might think on what the following exchange captured by journalists Scott Shane and Jo Becker might really be saying about the effects of marriage market obstruction:

Shortly after Colonel Qaddafi was killed, Mr. Sagezli had gathered a group of fighters in Benghazi. A businessman with degrees from Utah State University and the London School of Economics, he knew the rebel militias had been organized along Libya’s deepest fault lines: tribal divisions, regional loyalties and differing stances on Islam’s proper role. Yet the country could not progress unless the militias were reintegrated into civil society and replaced by a regular army.

“What do you need?” he asked the fighters. “What are your dreams?”

Their modest answers surprised and encouraged him.

“Some were very simple dreams,” he said. “Help us get married.”⁶⁷

Actually, as we have seen, that’s not a very simple dream at all. The Western journalists simply did not understand the significance of the answer. Consider Heather Murdock’s analysis of Egypt on the verge of the overthrow of Hosni Mubarak:

Young men say they want to get married, but can’t. They blame the former Hosni Mubarak government for keeping them financially incapable of marriage. They say as long as they have been alive, financial advancement has depended entirely on connections. Without those connections, many young men work ten years or more, just to have enough money to get married. During the 18-days of protests that lead to Mr. Mubarak’s resignation, chants of “We want to get married,” were heard along with more familiar calls to dissolve the government.⁶⁸

In Afghanistan, State Department officials did not understand the importance of the conversations they were having with their Afghan colleagues about brideprice and wedding costs. Following her service in Kabul, Alexandra Tenny, a foreign service officer, related this story about one of her Afghan colleagues in an interview with the authors:

This wasn’t an issue about whether a couple would be releasing doves at their reception; what Tenny’s Afghan colleague was trying to get through to her was that this was a security issue about whether would-be grooms would be joining the Taliban to meet brideprice and wedding costs.

Numerous scholars have commented on the destabilizing effects of a “youth bulge” within a country,⁷⁰ but the link to marriage market dynamics often is not explored. According to the propositions of this school of research, the “youth bulge” leads to grievance in contexts where the young experience high unemployment and diminished future prospects. What is left unsaid is that the young for whom such grievances may turn explosive are overwhelmingly male. Furthermore, to have a “youth bulge,” one must have a high fertility rate, and in only certain countries (i.e., predominantly Patrilineal/Fraternal Syndrome encoding societies) will one find such high fertility rates. If such destabilization is primarily found in these patrilineally organized countries, what is left unseen is that a close relationship exists between young male grievance and obstructed marriage markets in patrilineal cultures.

Such destabilization can lead to the crumbling of democratic institutions. Demographic researcher Hannes Weber, examining 110 countries over the period from 1972 to 2009, found in multivariate modeling that the proportion of young men in a country’s population had a strong, significant, and negative effect on indices of democracy.71 He comments, “Within the observed period of time, full or partial democracies with a share of young men exceeding 19.9 percent of the total adult population [i.e., the median global value] have a probability of 23.1 percent of becoming a dictatorship within the next five years, whereas this probability is 4.6 percent for democracies with less young men.”⁷² Weber notes that although male young adults (fifteen to twenty-nine years old) express as much support for democracy as any other subpopulation in the World Values Survey, “they express a significantly greater approval of extremist attitudes and readiness to violence and sacrifice, even when education and income levels are held constant. Young men justify political assassinations almost twice as often and support personal violence as a form of political action more than three times as often as the rest of the population.”⁷³ Weber suggests such behavior might catalyze authoritarian response to control the threat and also that as vocal young men become more numerous, the approval of political violence may be contagious within the rest of the population.

The structural goad of brideprice, with its consequence of obstructed marriage markets, may explain the linkage further. As one commentator observed in 2011, “U.S. diplomats identified delayed marriage as a source of discontent in Libya two years ago. Other scholars have called the problem a regional ‘marriage crisis,’ born out of low incomes, and the high cost of marriage. They point out that in conservative Middle Eastern countries, unmarried young adults are generally denied intimate relationships, and the social status that comes along with being an adult.”⁷⁴ In other words, the literature on grievance and destabilization is poorer for the omission of the patrilineal-based nature of these societies and thus the role of marriage market obstruction in producing that grievance. Being unemployed is never good, but being unemployed in a society in which you can become an adult man only by marrying and in which marriage requires significant financial resources produces a double dose of vexation and desperation.⁷⁵

Furthermore, rebel and terrorist groups are attuned to this source of discontent, and they openly recruit by promising to solve the marriage asset problem for young men.76 It is fascinating to see just how many terrorist and rebel groups are so very concerned about the marriage prospects of the young men in their ranks. For example, political scientist Diane Singerman notes, “To mobilize supporters, there were many reports of radical Islamist groups in Egypt in the 1990s arranging extremely low-cost marriages among the group’s members.”⁷⁷ More recently, “Hamas leaders have turned to matchmaking, bringing together single fighters and widows, and providing dowries and wedding parties for the many here who cannot afford such trappings of matrimony.”⁷⁸ The Syrian government also provides brideprices and weddings for its soldiers, including those who are wounded and those who lost brothers in the civil war.⁷⁹ ISIS was well known for providing its foreign jihadis with the opportunity to marry that they may not have had in their home country. In one such campaign, ISIS offered “its fighters a $1,500 bonus to go towards a starter home along with a free honeymoon in their stronghold city of Raqqa.”⁸⁰ Another report found that “ISIS foreign fighters paid $10,000 dowries to the families of their brides,” suggesting that the group was attracting foreign fighters by promising resources (and available women) to marry.⁸¹ Valerie Hudson and Hilary Matfess provide an in-depth case study of Boko Haram’s use of brideprice grievance to attract recruits through promises of facilitating marriage through the capture of young women.⁸² “In this crisis, these men can take a wife at no extra charge,” explained Kaka, a young woman orphaned, captured, and raped by Boko Haram. “Usually it is very expensive to take a wife, very hard to get married, but not now.”⁸³ Matfess met another young woman who told her story:

Bawagana, a shy 15-year-old living in Sanda Kyarimi camp, one of the official IDP sites, said that a Boko Haram fighter had come to her home in Dikwa, 90 kilometres east of Maiduguri, and asked “Do you love me?”

“Of course I answered, ‘no!’” she said, with her eyes fixed on the ground.

“The boy got very angry and said: ‘If you do not come with me, I will kill your father, but if you come with me I will let him live.’ I followed to save my father.”

The boy left 10,000 naira (about $50) on the floor. It was a bride price in Boko Haram’s eyes.⁸⁴

This logic applies outside the Nigerian context, as well. For example, commenting on the brideprices offered by ISIS, one commentator stated,

It’s particularly appealing to men, for example, from Gulf countries, who come from a very conservative society where dating is taboo and casual sex is essentially forbidden, and where marriage is off bounds to people who don’t have a lot of means. In order to marry, you have to be able to pay a dowry [brideprice], provide for your family, and have a house. Within those strictures you can see how this system, where you can come and essentially buy a poor girl for very little, would be a bonus.⁸⁶

In addition to rebel and terrorist groups stepping in to clear marriage markets for young men, we also have the phenomenon of political movements doing the same. In pre-war Yemen in October 2013, for example, two so-called charitable organizations sponsored a mass wedding of four thousand brides and grooms.88 It was paid for by the Orphan Foundation for Development, an arm of the Muslim Brotherhood, with funding provided by (in 2013) by Qatar’s house of Al-Thani. Farea Al-Muslimi comments,

In Yemen, the wedding of a wealthy young man may cost tens of thousands of dollars because of a social tradition to flaunt one’s wealth. Meanwhile, a poor young man may not be able to celebrate his marriage as required by the habits of the region. So charities—often religious associations for social cooperation—specializing in facilitating marriage for young people appeared. They gather money from philanthropists to hold mass weddings for poor young people…. Associations such as the Association of Righteousness and Chastity and the Orphan Foundation also have their conditions. The young person who is allowed to join the mass wedding is generally close to the organization’s religious and political orientations and those of its financiers.⁸⁹

States also step in as well, especially for young men at risk for extremism. Historian Robert Lacey recounts the following about Saudi Arabia:

In fighting its war, the Ministry of the Interior has resorted to a novel tactic—marriage…. One cornerstone of the extremist rehab program is to get the “beneficiaries” as they are called, settled down with a wife as soon as possible. The Ministry of the Interior pays each unmarried beneficiary 60,000 riyals (some $18,000), the going rate for a dowry, or bride price. The family arranges a marriage, and whenever he can, Prince Muhammad turns up for the wedding.⁹¹

Brideprice inflation is also strongly linked to male labor migration in search of greater resources to marry as well as to the rising age of marriage for men.95 Historically, as Julia Adams notes, younger sons (whose families may not have been able to accumulate brideprice for more than one or two sons) were often agents of military expansion.⁹⁶ Boone, for example, notes the tendency of younger sons during the Middle Ages to join the Crusades, joining themselves as soldiers loyal to younger princes, who themselves felt the same challenges.⁹⁷ Similarly, Goody observes about Saharan Africa, “The second of two brothers may have to delay his marriage while waiting for bridewealth cattle. [These second sons often] leav[e] the countryside to swell the growing population of the towns…there is a relationship between high bridewealth and labour migration.”⁹⁸

In modern days, migration to improve one’s luck in the marriage market may involve a new form of crusading, such as becoming a “foreign fighter” for a group that will pay well. It would be interesting to know whether the foreign fighters for ISIS, for example, were primarily younger sons. Unfortunately, sufficient data to test that hypothesis are lacking. Even so, it is worth pondering what Anthony Lopez and his colleagues assert:

Success in battle may benefit such men in at least two distinct ways. First, men who achieve heroic status through courage on the battlefield, and who may be able to bring benefits back to their community, gain status and wealth that may help them to increase their access and attractiveness to suitable mates. In addition, ancestrally, men were also able to find or kidnap brides from conquered territory, and secure mates in such a fashion. Given these selection pressures acting over human evolutionary history, male psychology should have adapted to implicitly regulate the willingness to engage in collective aggression based on the within-group availability of mates.⁹⁹

Other effects of brideprice have been covered in previous chapters; for example, because girls increase their father’s wealth in a brideprice society, while sons diminish it, a higher age of marriage for men is matched by a lower age of marriage for women—the age differential keeps the system afloat, as we saw in chapter 3. As we have previously noted, Jack Goody remarks, “men chafe at the delay, girls at the speed.”¹⁰⁰ This relatively high difference in marriage age between men and women is a hallmark of brideprice societies.

Delayed marriage because of the rise in costs for the groom’s family has become a new norm in the Middle East. For example, in Egypt, one study documents that families of young adult men must save for five to seven years to pay for their marriages. From 2000 to 2004, wedding costs in Egypt rose 25 percent. As a result, the average marriage age for Egyptian men has risen sharply, from the early twenties to the late twenties and early thirties. In one study, nearly 25 percent of young adult men in Egypt had not married by age twenty-seven; the average age of marriage was thirty-one.101 In poverty-stricken Afghanistan, wedding costs for young men average $12,000–$20,000.¹⁰² In Saudi Arabia, men usually are unable to marry before age twenty-nine; often they marry only in their mid-thirties.¹⁰³ In Iran, 38 percent of twenty-five to twenty-nine-year-old men are unmarried. Across the Middle East, only about 50 percent of twenty-five to twenty-nine-year-old men are married, the lowest percentage for this group in the developing world.¹⁰⁴ Whether in Afghanistan, Iran, Lebanon, or the United Arab Emirates, the exorbitant costs of marriage have delayed the age at which Muslim men marry.

Polygyny, practiced almost exclusively by men with means, has always been a strong contributing factor in the rise of brideprice costs for the rest of the men in society and increases the competition for available women. Polygyny feeds into brideprice in another way, as well: through escalation in the numerical count of wives. As a village elder in South Sudan noted in one field study, “One of the reasons for polygamy is that when you have ten daughters, each one will give you thirty cows, and they are all for [the father]. So then you have three hundred cows. That is why one marries very many wives: so that you can have very many daughters.”¹⁰⁵

The rise in brideprice leads to chronically obstructed marriage markets. Commentators have lamented the emergence of a new class of “old maids” (‘unoussa)—young adult men who cannot afford to marry and feel both ashamed and emasculated. One Egyptian commentator notes that these young men are seeking dangerous jobs: “The youth are seeking death. They’re already dead at home.”¹⁰⁶ Singerman comments, “We can infer that the notion that they are ‘already dead at home’ refers to both their financial situation, their political exclusion, and their unmarried status.”¹⁰⁷ This situation offers terrorist movements an opportunity they have been able to exploit successfully. The journalist Michael Slackman notes, “Here in Egypt and across the Middle East, many young people are being forced to put off marriage, the gateway to independence, sexual activity, and social respect…. In their frustration, the young are turning to religion for solace and purpose, pulling their parents and their governments with them.”¹⁰⁸ One Egyptian young man states, “Sometimes, I can see how it [frustrated marriage aspirations] does not make you closer to God, but pushes you toward terrorism. Practically, it killed my ambition. I can’t think of a future.”¹⁰⁹

In addition to deep grievance that might foster radicalism, outright conflict may be the result, as well. Consider the case of South Sudan, where brideprice has skyrocketed in recent years:

Emmanuel Gambiri said an educated wife in his cattle-herding Mundari tribe in South Sudan costs 50 cows, 60 goats and 30,000 Sudanese pounds ($12,000) in cash. “At that price, some men who otherwise can’t afford a bride turn to stealing livestock in order to buy a wife and gain status,” said Gambiri, citing a friend who is now a cattle rustler. A surge in “bride price” has fueled cattle raids in which more than 2,000 people are killed each year. “In his village of Terekeka, in the state of Central Equatoria, Gambiri recalls a time when wives cost as little as 12 cows and tribal chiefs wielded enough power to call the parents and set an affordable bride price.¹¹⁰