Note also that male arousal and orgasm are necessary to procreation; female orgasm is not. Therefore, societies teaching males to be dominant and females to be submissive thrived, while competing societies that didn’t teach such values did not. The logical upshot was that nearly all societies that reproduced at a rate that enabled them to grow taught their girls to be sexually faithful and generally submissive to their husbands. Hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies, and industrial societies all grew steadily stronger under patriarchy.

In addition, these societies evolved toward augmenting their belief in female submissiveness with supporting values and morés that, in most matters, gave the community’s approval to male dominance. Other less patriarchal societies stagnated or were assimilated by expanding, land-seizing, patriarchal ones. Whatever increased male commitment to child nurture raised the tribe’s odds of going on. Again, note that little of the history of these societies was shaped by a race-and-gender-neutral concept of justice.

In today’s post-industrial societies with computer technologies (and the changes they have brought to our concepts of work and home), women can now contribute children and work other than child nurturing to most areas of their culture’s ongoing development and life. The imperatives of the past that dictated girls had to adopt submissive roles to ensure the survival of their tribe and its culture are evolutionarily obsolete. Advances in birth control technologies (e.g. oral contraceptives) and in child-rearing and nurturing technology (e.g., artificial insemination, infant-feeding mixtures) have made the chores and joys of child rearing possible for men, and for single women, who in earlier eras had little choice but to forego the joys and trials of parenting or else condemn themselves and their children to society’s stigmatization.

                                     

   

                      Dad with infant daughter (credit: Kiefer Wolfowitz, via Wikimedia Commons)