Why Patriarchy Wins — Lloyd Taylor

What misogyny is actually solving

Misogyny is one of the most geographically consistent social patterns in human history.

It appears in societies that never contacted one another, in religions that disagree about almost everything else, and in legal systems built centuries apart. Ancient Mesopotamia, imperial China, medieval Europe, pastoralist tribes of Central Asia, modern nation-states - the surface details vary wildly, but the pattern itself repeats with unsettling regularity.

Hatred alone does not produce that kind of convergence.

Hatred is personal, contingent, uneven. It varies with temperament and circumstance. Yet misogynistic institutions - restrictions on women’s movement, dress, sexuality, property rights, and autonomy - appear again and again across otherwise unrelated cultures.

When a social pattern appears everywhere, the useful question is not who invented it.

The useful question is: what problem was it solving?

Because it was solving one. Until that problem is named clearly, the institution that grew up around it cannot be understood - and what cannot be understood cannot be effectively challenged.

The Biological Asymmetry

The first pressure is biological, and it is asymmetric.

A single act of sex carries profoundly different consequences for a woman than for a man. For a woman: the possibility of months of pregnancy, the danger of childbirth in any pre-modern context, and years of intensive investment in a child whose survival is uncertain. For a man, in the biological minimum: almost nothing.

This is not a cultural construction. It is the basic architecture of mammalian reproduction.

The evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers formalized this asymmetry in 1972 as parental investment theory. The sex that invests more in offspring evolves to be more selective about mating; the sex that invests less evolves to compete more intensely for access.

In humans this creates a predictable tension. Women, rationally cautious about the consequences of reproduction, evolve toward selectivity. Men, whose minimum reproductive cost is low, evolve toward persistence.

These are not moral categories. They are the statistical outputs of an underlying asymmetry, as reliable as many other consequences of natural selection.

But biology alone does not create institutions. For that, another asymmetry enters the picture.

The Paternity Problem

A woman always knows her child is hers.

For most of human history, a man could never be certain that a child was biologically his.

This uncertainty is not trivial. In societies where survival depends on kinship alliances and the transmission of accumulated resources - land, livestock, tools, status - paternity uncertainty becomes a structural problem. A man can father children outside his household without visible evidence. Female infidelity, by contrast, introduces uncertainty directly into lineage.

The logical solution, implemented independently across many societies, was to regulate the domain where that uncertainty arises: female sexuality.

The historian Gerda Lerner documented how this appeared in early Mesopotamian societies beginning in the third millennium BCE - restrictions on women’s movement, strict penalties for female adultery, and social systems designed to monitor women’s sexual behavior. To modern observers this double standard reads as hypocrisy. To the societies that constructed it, it functioned as a solution to a lineage problem.

Anthropologist Barbara Smuts later argued that patriarchy can be understood as a male mate-guarding strategy that became institutionalized - a behavioral pattern shaped by evolutionary pressures and later embedded into law, religion, and custom.

Across cultures the specific practices vary: foot binding in imperial China, female genital cutting in parts of Africa and the Middle East, honor killings in Mediterranean and South Asian honor cultures, dowry and bride-price systems, purity norms regulating female sexuality. On the surface these look like radically different cultural traditions. Functionally they often serve a similar purpose: reducing paternity uncertainty by limiting female sexual autonomy.

But this is not the only pressure shaping patriarchal systems.

The Warfare Pressure

One additional pressure deserves mention: warfare.

Societies organized around persistent inter-group conflict tend to intensify male coalitional structures, elevate male status hierarchies, and treat female reproduction as a strategic resource. In such environments, controlling women’s sexuality serves not only paternity certainty but also alliance management and demographic survival.

Anthropologists have long observed that pastoralist and frontier societies with chronic raiding or warfare often develop some of the most rigid patriarchal norms - seclusion systems, honor cultures, and strong sanctions against female sexual autonomy.

In these environments, women are not only members of households but also nodes in alliance networks and sources of future population growth. Controlling reproduction becomes part of managing the survival of the group itself.

Patriarchy, in this light, is not merely a property system. It is also, historically, a war system. When men are killed, the tribe can still make more warriors. When women are killed, the tribe cannot.

The Amplifier

Biological and ecological pressures explain the persistence of patriarchal structures. They do not explain why misogyny sometimes erupts with particular intensity. For that we have to look at amplifiers.

In 1998, surgeon and historian Leonard Shlain published The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, arguing that alphabetic literacy itself caused the rise of patriarchy. The neuroscientific foundation of that claim has not held up, and critics have pointed to significant factual problems in the book.

But Shlain noticed something real.

The most spectacular eruption of misogynistic violence in Western history - the European witch trials - coincided almost exactly with the rise of the printing press. Between the late fifteenth and early seventeenth centuries an estimated forty to sixty thousand people, the majority women, were executed for witchcraft. The 1486 manual Malleus Maleficarum, a guide for identifying and prosecuting witches, became one of the earliest mass-produced books in Europe.

Printing did not create misogyny. What it did was provide infrastructure. Ideas that had once circulated locally could now be reproduced identically, distributed widely, and cited as legal authority. The technology amplified existing fears and gave them bureaucratic form.

This pattern recurs. The internet did not create online misogyny. It gave pre-existing attitudes global reach, anonymity, and algorithmic reinforcement. New communication technologies rarely create social pressures. They scale the ones already present.

The Counter-Experiment

The strongest evidence for a causal explanation is not simply the presence of an effect where the cause operates, but its absence where the cause does not.

If patriarchy emerges from a combination of reproductive asymmetry and male-controlled wealth, then societies that structurally remove those pressures should look different. Some do.

The Mosuo of southwestern China are among the best-known matrilineal societies in the world. They practice what is often described as a “walking marriage” system in which partners do not form cohabiting households. Men visit women at night and return to their maternal homes in the morning. Children are raised within the mother’s household, and inheritance passes through the female line.

In this structure biological paternity becomes largely irrelevant to the child’s social life. The primary male figure in a child’s upbringing is typically the maternal uncle - whose genetic relationship to the child is certain. In effect, the Mosuo solved the paternity problem not by controlling women, but by redesigning kinship so that paternity certainty no longer mattered.

A 2020 study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences compared Mosuo communities with matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance structures. The researchers found a familiar global pattern in the patrilineal communities: women showed higher rates of chronic inflammation and hypertension than men. In the matrilineal communities that pattern disappeared. Women exhibited lower levels of both conditions than the men around them.

The significance of the finding is not that matriliny is a moral utopia. It is that the health costs women bear in many societies are not inevitable. They are the downstream effects of particular institutional arrangements.

What the Framework Asks of Us

Anthropologists have long observed that matrilineal systems emerge under specific ecological conditions - subsistence patterns in which women’s labor is economically central, relatively low concentrations of heritable male-controlled wealth, and social environments where large male war coalitions are less central. Change those conditions, and matriliny often erodes. The transition frequently accompanies shifts toward pastoralism, intensive agriculture, or market economies that concentrate inheritable property under male control.

Understanding this history does not excuse the violence, legal subjugation, or accumulated harm that patriarchal institutions have produced. Structural causation and moral responsibility operate at different levels.

What the structural view clarifies is something else: why persuasion alone rarely dismantles systems built around real constraints. Institutions that solve coordination problems tend to persist until a better solution appears.

Patriarchy did not win because men were uniquely cruel. It endured because it solved a coordination problem in a world structured to make that problem acute. The lesson is not that patriarchy was inevitable. The lesson is that institutions built to solve real problems persist until a better solution replaces them - and that building better solutions requires understanding the problem being solved, not only condemning the solution that won.

Misogyny is not the disease. It is the symptom of an asymmetry so deep it shaped the architecture of civilization - and the evidence that it can be otherwise is, quietly, already here.

References

Robert Trivers, “Parental Investment and Sexual Selection” (1972)
Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy (1986)
Barbara Smuts, “The Evolutionary Origins of Patriarchy,” Human Nature (1995)
Leonard Shlain, The Alphabet Versus the Goddess (1998)
David F. Aberle, “Matrilineal Descent in Cross-Cultural Perspective,” in Matrilineal Kinship, Schneider & Gough eds. (1961)
Adam Z. Reynolds et al., “Matriliny Reverses Gender Disparities in Inflammation and Hypertension Among the Mosuo of China,” PNAS (2020)
Kate Manne, Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny (2017)
David Gilmore, Misogyny: The Male Malady (2001)
Fern Elsdon-Baker et al., “When Does Matriliny Fail?,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B (2019)