Sexism Promoted Farmer Monogamy?

Compared to farmers, foragers were more egalitarian and had more communal property, food-sharing, and child-rearing. Their work was less specialized, and their male-female pair bonds were shorter, though highly variable, most lasting not much more than the few years until a kid or two were old enough to be cared for by the community. Sexually, foragers were relatively promiscuous.

In contrast, the farming world had higher fertility and strong life-long parent-bonds, enforced in part by stronger pro-monogamy social norms and more distinct gender roles, and also less social sharing of food and child-rearing. All of which allowed children to be cared for by their parents for much longer. But as these causes seem insufficient to the huge effect, we should still wonder how exactly the farming world managed to successfully promote lifelong partners. Especially as that seems to be unraveling in our world today.

Today, women seem to initiate breakups about twice as often as men. And the largest proximate cause of those breakups, as far as I can tell, seems to be respect. Compared to male attraction, which seems to be more about beauty and intimacy, female attraction seems to be more about respect. Women today seem to lose respect for their male partners, and to gain respect for potential new partners. A few decades ago poorer US women would often have kids with men they didn’t respect enough to marry, and now the main cause of US fertility decline seems to be those women having fewer kids in such situations.

Why does female respect for their men decline so fast today? One obvious cause is that respect is often based on illusions that can’t be sustained over long durations of close contact. Another is that attachment, the process by which people come to need each other more over time, makes men more attached to their women and want to stay with them longer, but that attachment also makes men seem weaker to their women.

How did the farming world prevent such respect decline? Stronger pro-monogamy social norms shamed and punished women who left men, and stronger gender roles also limited their exit options, but just making women stay with men they don’t respect doesn’t seem enough for healthy long-term bonds. What sustained respect?

The main thing I can think of is role and status sexism. Farming society greatly limited the social roles that men and women could take, and then said that the status markers limited to men counted for more status than those limited to women. Furthermore, old men status markers counted for more than young men markers. Which induced women to see their aging men as deserving more respect than they themselves did. Which maybe was enough to keep women respecting their men.

Plausibly the farming world also similarly shaped men, telling them to value beauty and intimacy, but denying those features to men via their acceptable roles, so that men would value it more in their women, and for much longer than a few years.

If true, this suggests that it will be hard to sustain lifelong monogamy in our world today, if we continue to oppose role and status sexism.

Added 24June: Today education is a huge status marker where the median woman does better than the median man. And women also consider agreeing with them politically as a big status marker where most men look worse than them. These are two big ways that men now have an uphill battle to gain female respect.