Would matriarchy really be less sexually violent?

There’s a lot of psychological and epidemiological research on interpersonal violence in humans that can point us to the answer. In fact, I’ve written about the research on gender differences across several different forms of aggression previously, which consistently point to a male preponderance for harmdoing.

This time we’re exploring whether female-centred social structures are associated with lower violence, especially sexual violence, using three bodies of literature:

— Behavioural-ecological studies of female-dominant animal species

— Ethnographic and experimental work in matrilineal and matrifocal human societies

— Epidemiology work on gender and violence at the national level

Here’s what I found across human societies and the animal world. It’s a complicated picture, but one I think we can inravel.

You might be surprised to learn that strict male or female dominance structures are rare in the animal kingdom. In a paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, researchers examined intersexual dominance across 121 primate species and found that in 70% of populations power titled between males and females.

Females were more dominant when they gained control over reproduction, as well as when they faced more female-female competition. Males were more dominant in terrestrial, sexually dimorphic, and group-living species, and relied more on physical dominance.

Male-dominance is not the default, and neither is its mirror image.

The spotted hyena are the textbook female-dominant mammal. Decades of data from the Mara Hyena Project show that without provocation, adult females were more aggressive than both natal and immigrant adult males, and are less submissive than males. Yet, among cubs and subadult hyenas, differences between the sexes were less clear. As the propensity for aggression and submission emerged during adulthood, it is arguably socially learned behaviour.

In my research, I also found it interesting that the unusual structure of female genitals requires full cooperation from females during copulations.