Chapter Two Male Masochism

Goddess Dianna Vesta

Male masochism is a big problem for many academics, because we are told than man has always been the dominant sex.  Also because men are bigger, stronger and more aggressive than women, why would any man want to submit to women? This is why we get complex theories about male masochism to try and explain away this anomaly.  Mostly they claim that these men have low self-esteem but others claim the opposite and say they are men who are too bossy at work and want to have a rest from this, by allowing a woman to boss him about at home or in his leisure time.  Female teachers at school also get the blame, as most teachers for young children are women, and the young boys get used to female authority when they are young and this stays with them for the rest of their lives.
All these explanations are just speculation and what is very problematic for male academics is that male masochism points to an uncomfortable fact that men might not have always been the dominant sex.  We don’t have to look to complex theories for why we have male masochism; we can see it clearly in the behavior of other animals.
When male scientists write about the evolution of sex they never mention the clitoris and perhaps there is a very good reason for this.  The most famous clitoris in the animal kingdom is that of the hyena.  This is because the clitoris of a female hyena is nearly as large as a male hyena’s penis.  So much so, that even experienced Zoologists have trouble in distinguishing between which hyenas are male or female.  If that is not bad enough, the hyena’s social structure is also very suspect, as the females tend to be the dominant sex.  This has made the hyena very unpopular among male scientists.  As pointed out by Steve Kemper, writing in the Smithsonian magazine, May 2008. –
Spotted hyenas sometimes scavenge, but, contrary to popular belief, they kill 95 percent of their food. As hunters, alone or in groups, they equal leopards, cheetahs and lions. Yet the lion is considered noble, the cheetah graceful and the leopard courageous, while the hyena is seen as sneaky and vicious—a cringing scavenger, a graveyard lurker. Few creatures inspire such a queasy mixture of fear, disgust and disdain. Most zoos snub them—no public demand. Conservation groups do not use hyena photos to raise money. Across epochs and continents, from the Bible to African folk tales, from Theodore Roosevelt ("foul and evil ferocity...as cowardly as it is savage") and Ernest Hemingway ("devourer of the dead...sad yowler, camp-follower, stinking, foul") to Disney's The Lion King ("slobbery, mangy, stupid vultures"), our reaction to hyenas is the same: yech.
This reaction is probably caused by the way female hyenas treat the males. To quote the same article. –
Female spotted hyenas are bigger and more aggressive than males. Every clan is a matriarchy ruled by an alpha female. In the clan's strict power structure, adult males rank last. They must swallow abuse even from the most obnoxious juveniles or risk violent punishment from female coalitions. At a communal carcass, adult males eat last—if there's anything left. When a male kills dinner on his own, he must gorge quickly before female clan members shove him aside.
Nor do things improve much when it comes to mating. "With most animals, males duke it out and the winner gets the girls," says Holekamp. "But with hyenas, females have 100 percent say." They decide when and under what conditions they will tolerate deferential sperm donors. At age 2 or 3 a male leaves his natal clan and wanders off to beg acceptance into another clan. After vicious rejections, he eventually succeeds and reaps his reward: brutal harassment as the clan's nadir, one of the last in line for food and sex. This probation, which biologists call "endurance rivalry," is a test, Holekamp explains: "The guy who can stick it out the longest wins." The trial lasts about two years, after which some females may grant him access. "You do not want to be a male hyena," Holekamp says.
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/hyena.html

 

Hyena pack.

The assumption made about female hyenas is that their very large clitoris are just a by-product of their bodies producing large amounts of testosterone.  This also makes then slightly larger and far more aggressive than the male hyena, so what evolutionary advantage does producing more testosterone give the female hyena?  The answer seems to be that the hyena cubs are better protected and looked after than any other large predator.  For instance, the Lion has been known to kill and eat cubs and being bigger and stronger than the lionesses there is nothing they can do about it.  The male lion also tends to use its larger size and strength to push aside and eat first, any animals that the females have brought down and killed.  This is not a problem when food is plentiful but a real problem in time of scarcity, the cubs in lion prides tend to die first, as the lionesses cannot protect the cubs from the lion’s aggression, as it takes the ‘lions share’ of what food is available.
As previously mentioned, the reason why hyena females have such large clitorises, is because the hyena female’s bodies produce large amount of testosterone.  The same thing happens with female body builders or sportswomen that use steroids, they not only become physically stronger, but the size of their clitoris also grows larger.  (As well as their breast disappearing and their voices becoming deeper).  This suggests that the behavior of female hyenas has very little to do with human females, because women do not naturally have very large clitorises and their bodies do not produce large amounts of testosterone.  Yet there are other animals where the females are also the dominant sex and their bodies do not need large amount of testosterone to do this.  This is true of many species of primates, which is what human beings are.
Male masochism and submission to females has been observed in bonobo apes, vervet monkeys, macaques, olive baboons, patas, rhesus monkeys, grey langus, capuchins, prosimians and Madagascar lemurs.  So why would males of these species want to submit to female?  The reason is because in evolutionary terms, it is a powerful tool for survival.
All evolutionary theories concentrate on males, (mostly because male academic invented them,) and in some these theories the role of the female is not even mentioned.  Which is extreme male bias, because in evolutionary terms, the role of the female is far more important than the role of the male. This is because it is the female that give birth to the young and has the main role in caring for the young until they are fully grown. Therefore, the survival of any species is far more dependent on the female than the male, because it is the female that brings the next generation into being and nurtures them to adulthood.
This is why in evolutionary terms the males of any species are expendable. Simply because one male can fertilize hundreds of females, so even if most males were wiped out, it doesn’t matter, because only a few males are needed to keep the species going. Whereas if most of the females were wiped out, then the whole species would be in grave danger, because female are limited in how many young they can produce.  It is true in small rodents a female can produce up to 20 young or more in a year, but in larger mammals like human beings, one baby a year is the average woman’s limit. This means that in evolutionary terms the survival of females, is far, far more important than the survival of males.
This is also why, in the island of Madagascar all the lemur species live in female dominated societies.  Madagascar has a very long dry season of 8 months, where lemurs in the dry period find it very hard to find nourishing food.  Now, in this situation, if lemurs lived in male dominated societies they would quickly become extinct.  This is because during the dry season, the alpha males would grab all the available food for themselves and allow the females and their young to starve.  Which means the females wouldn’t have enough food to grow young in their bodies or have enough nourishment to suckle their young with milk or be strong enough to care and protect their young. So in these conditions, a male dominated Lemur species would quickly become extinct.

Lemur mother and young

http://www.exzooberance.com/virtual%20zoo/they%20walk/lemur/lemur.htm

Whereas what happens with Madagascar lemurs, is that even though females are smaller than males, the male always give way to the females in all disputes. This means that in the dry season alpha females get to feed first with any food the lemur communities find.  This ensures the females stay healthy and are more able to breed, once the dry season is over and if many of the males die of starvation through the dry season, it doesn’t cause any problems to the survival of the whole species.
Now, the human beings have also evolved through very difficult conditions. Scientists claim that we are 4 million years old. Which means that more than 99.9% of human existence happened in the Stone Age.  So we are still basically Stone Age people and what happened over the last four or five thousand years of recorded history has made very little difference to our true nature.  In our ancient past we have experienced ice ages and times of rapid climate change, causing the extinction of many animals like mammoths, saber-tooth tigers and even other species of humans like the Neanderthals.  This means in these times of rapid climate change, species of animals that are female dominated will have a decided advantage over species that are male dominated. More so for the human being, because unlike any other animal, the human baby is completely defenseless for the first few years of its life, and it takes up to 20 years before it is fully-grown.  So the human mother has to put in far more time and effort into caring for her young than any other animal.  This means that in times of rapid climate change it means that only female dominated tribes humans would survive.  Where the males would sacrifice themselves, allowing the women and young to eat first and not use their superior size and strength to take food away from women.  Which is what would happen in a male dominated tribe.
In is noticeable that patriarchy happened only after the invention of agriculture, which produced an abundance of food.  This allowed alpha males to dominate human society through violence without threatening the survival of the human species.  Yet we are all still Stone-Age people, so the desire within men to submit to women is still within us.  This is why patriarchy needs to degrade women in the eyes of men.
If men have within them a powerful desire to submit and even worship women.  Then for patriarchy to survive, it needs to counter this natural desire.  This is why in many strongly patriarchal societies women are degraded and subjected to male violence because it helps teach men to overcome their desire to submit to them.  This is because if a boy witnesses his father beating up his mother and forcing her to submit, then he will believe his natural desire to submit to women must be ‘wrong’. Whereas in western countries over the last hundred years where women are no longer degraded in the same way, men are getting in touch with their natural desires to want to submit to women, once again.
This means that male masochism is not a perversion or mental illness as many academic male physiologists will want you to believe.  It is a natural instinct that comes from our Stone Age past.  Men have only been taught to suppress this instinct by the alpha males who conquered the peaceful Matriarchal civilizations of the Neolithic age.  When men are no longer taught to degrade women and dominate them through violence, then women will once again take their true role of the dominant sex of the human race.
This means that there is an evolutionary advantage of women being able to demand sexual pleasure from men in the way she wants.  A matriarchal tribe where women can demand men put her sexual pleasure before his own, can also demand that women and children feed first before the males, in times of starvation.