From the beginning, humans have lived in tribes, which are somewhat akin to groups of chimpanzees, cooperating to provide food, childcare, labor and dissemination of information. The family, in its varied forms, was always subordinate to the tribe, and the tribe often in conflict with other tribes. Humans have competed with each other for resources and territory from the dawn of history and before, and they have usually done so through some sort of tribal conflict. Usually, the more numerous tribe would win, because it could summon more men and defeat the other by force of numbers, but because the ideal human group is relatively small – some 50-100 individuals – summoning a larger force required relatively complex rules and strong taboos to maintain any sort of social cohesion. Hence the seeds of civilization were sown through tribal competition.

Despite the addition of all this complexity, which has enabled humans to live in mass societies, the basic tribal tendency remains part of human nature. And in a tribe, the most important component has always been the men. Without them, there is only booty, free for the taking for any group of men willing to come along and claim it. In fact, this has been the case for so long that patrilocality is the norm throughout the world. Exogamy in primitive tribes is exceedingly common, but it is usually the women who leave one group and go to another — this is reflected in our modern practice of women and children taking the husband’s surname. The men stay, because without them the group would simply be swallowed up by others.

Because the tribe has been, if not the most basic, the most important unit of human society, it is highly likely that humans evolved to maximize the success of the tribe. This would include gender roles, and probably even gender phenotypes. Human females are particularly poorly suited to hunting when compared to other species that derive a similar portion of calories from meat, so division of labor has obviously been in play since at least the emergence of modern homo sapiens. Some have suggested that this division was not so clear for neanderthals, whose women may have come along on the hunt and helped bring down large animals, but the neanderthal physique was substantially different from our own.

The point is that the tribe is mainly defined by its men, and has been throughout recorded history, which suggests that this was always the case. Evidence from primitive tribes in the modern era supports this as well. And although it’s counterintuitive, the fact that men are usually targeted while women are often spared in tribal conflict even further confirms the importance of males. If it were true that tribes cannot survive without women, the most successful tribes would have been those that systematically exterminated their enemies’ female members, which would be far easier to do in any event. But this simply did not happen.

For the biblically inclined, I’d like to point to the story of the tribe of Benjamin, a particularly warlike Israelite tribe which was nearly exterminated after some mortal offense (inhospitality) prompted the other tribes to gang up on them. The other tribes were so angry at Benjamin that after defeating their men in battle, they slaughtered all the women and children, leaving the Benjaminites a tribe of bachelors. Finally, when the other tribes felt fairly certain that the Benjaminites had learned their lesson, the men were allowed to marry women from other tribes, and ultimately the tribe was reestablished.

Now, imagine what would have happened if every single Benjaminite man was slaughtered and the women spared. The women would have been distributed as spoils of war, and Benjamin would have been no more. From the tribal survival standpoint, who is more expendable?

It would be tempting to suggest that things have changed so much that tribal consideration no longer matter, but that would be a short-sighted argument. Civilization did not develop by repudiating humans’ natural tribal sentiments, but by incorporating them into a larger organization. Military organizations, today and in the past, are broken down into manageable groups that approximate the size of a tribe. The US Army Company, the Roman Centuria (which also means tribe), the Mongol Zuut and the Germanic Hundred are all examples of this. Churches have traditionally had about a tribe’s worth of parishioners, and large corporations are organized to take this optimal group size into account as well. Despite the sophistication of contemporary society, humans are still fundamentally tribal. It’s instinctive and reflected in how we organize our lives and tasks.

Therefore, one can see modern states, and civilization in general, as a massive confederation of tribes, between which there remains a great deal of competition. However, men are arguably just as important as ever to these basic social units to which they belong. Where would our businesses, our military and our public service organizations be without their men? Law and order, commerce, infrastructure and defense would fall apart within days.

So why are men so often treated as expendable within society? It goes back to competition, i.e. your men are expendable, but ours are not. Elites have always been perfectly happy to use other people’s sons as cannon fodder, while usually protecting their own from the battlefield. At the highest levels of society, sons are preferentially educated over daughters, and then these exact same people who favor their boys take steps to ensure that less fortunate sons are prevented from competing with them. Other people’s daughters, on the other hand, are no threat to their tribe — they are a resource to be exploited. In fact, support of feminism by elites only confirms that they see other tribes’ women as chattel, or perhaps tribute — either term would suffice. When men are given as tribute, it has typically been in one of two roles: the warrior or the eunuch. Hence, they want our boys as soldiers (including police) or femme homosexuals (the modern incarnation of the eunuch); for the rest of us they have little use except as peasants, to be kept in line with punitive taxes and overwhelming force.

The argument that men are expendable because of some biological mandate is perhaps the last vestige of the pseudoscience that emerged from 19th century anthropology and plagued humanity with various wrong-headed ideologies throughout the 20th century. In reality, men have always been the most essential component of the tribe, which has characterized human social organization since the dawn of our species. The world’s oldest and most successful civilizations have learned this over time, and have survived because they incorporated this truth into their law and governing philosophy. We have to recognize that men are targeted for abuse and dispossession exactly because they are essential to the strength and health of their tribes. When we live in a mass society without any sense of common values or interests, where discord, envy and greed are the norm, it is perfectly natural that men will come under attack. If one thinks of it as an inchoate civil war, it becomes all the more clear.

[Same fundie, posted in comments]

Something like that, but I don’t think it’s an articulated effort or policy so much as normal human nature. Those in elite “tribes” instinctively favor policies that limit the choices and power of those males who are part of upstart tribes. People naturally fear rival males — we are an apex predator after all, and have little to worry about from anything else. This, I think, is at the root of androphobic policies.

Civilization has been a constant effort to channel male resource competition into constructive effort, but here in the West we are currently failing at that, and men have turned on each other. It always seems to happen eventually, which is why war is a constant.

On the positive side, I think we have a very good chance of eventual victory, because never in the history of humanity has a state exercised its power over the people with a harem. Those of us who do not give up our men will eventually take the spoils.