The First to Fall

Domestication and the Warping of Sexual Dimorphism

Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: Civilization didn’t just domesticate us. It domesticated us differently, depending on whether we were born male or female.

In our pre-domesticated state, humans showed moderate sexual dimorphism (differences between the sexes in size, shape, and behavior). Men tended to be larger, stronger, and more prone to take risks, compete, and throw punches over territory or mates. Women carried broader hips for childbirth and bore the energetic costs of gestation, nursing, and food gathering. Nothing too extreme. It was a functional division…not a caste system.

Then came the leash.

If you want to understand what happened next, look at what domestication does to animals across the board…the males change more.

You get smaller bodies, smaller brains, softer jaws, lower testosterone, and a whole lot more docility. You don’t need to fight other males for access anymore…you just need to behave. Domestication tamps down that volatile, high-testosterone edge and replaces it with social compliance. The women change too, but less dramatically. Domestication is hardly an equal-opportunity employer.

What happens when this process is scaled up across hundreds of generations of humans?

Let’s take one of my favorite little detours: the Y-chromosome bottleneck…an evolutionary funnel that occurred around 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. Despite the population growing, genetic evidence shows that only a tiny handful of men were passing on their genes (think roughly 5 out of every 100 men). Why? Because systems of coercion (slavery, war, patriarchy) turned reproduction into a rigged game. And those systems selected hard for one thing: control.

Control doesn’t love testosterone. It doesn’t want unpredictability, brute force, or guys who flip tables when they lose status. It wants compliant, trainable males who can navigate symbolic ladders, defer to hierarchies, and follow rules. Over time, the male phenotype got reshaped: smaller, less aggressive, more socially performative. Instead of fighting for mates, men competed for power within abstract systems (religion, wealth, reputation).

Women didn’t experience this reproductive bottleneck, and therefore weren’t domesticated in a biological sense, the way men were. At least nowhere near the same degree. But they were domesticated culturally. Their roles were dictated by ideological control…veils, chastity cults, arranged marriages. inheritance laws, and lineage games. Woman as symbol. Woman as vessel. Woman as territory to be defended and exchanged. Arguably, as men become more civilized, women were controlled every more tightly (as was anything men saw as a “resource”).

And so sexual dimorphism got scrambled…intensified in the weirdest way possible. Physical differences shrank but role differences widened incredibly (differences that we still take for granted and fail to associate with domestication). Men became public actors, enforcers of systems they didn’t design. Women became private property, repositories of symbolic purity and repositories of symbolic purity and reproductive value. Both became performative shells…flattened into scripts civilization could use.

Now forget the anthropology textbooks for a second. This process we’re talking about…what’s happening on a psychological level? What do these changes mean? How do they feel? How do people begin to experience life differently?

Testosterone in utero shapes everything from brain lateralization to threat response. A civilizing system selecting against reactivity (for tameness) is selecting against certain kinds of minds…minds that question, that bristle, that break rules when rules break people. And so, over generations, you get men who are more verbal, more deferent, more emotionally masked. And because we live in the end product of that, we call it “progress”…as if there were a master plan to arrive at us, and…here we are! But you first need to acknowledge (at least) that there was no such plan, and that tameness was never anyone’s goal, it was simply something that the system rewarded. If you acknowledge that, we can have a conversation.

And though women may not have been suppressed biochemically…they were certainly suppressed. Their suppression was the visible one. Mythological. Ideological. Institutional. They don’t need to be reshaped from the inside out when they can be controlled from birth to death by symbols, stories, and ceremonies.

“Civilization made us peaceful.”

“Civilization turned brutish men into cooperative citizens.”

Right. These are nice Matrix-y narratives. Fairy tales. Statements that have just enough truth to squeak by as overarching explanations.

But what did civilization do? Where was intention? What was it trying to do? (and still trying) It neutered rebellion. It privatized violence. It engineered predictable humans. Manageable ones. And because we are those humans, we call the end product “better,” and the process itself, “progress.” Against all evidence, we insist that life in civilized systems is happier, healthier, safer, and sustainable. Insanity. An insanity made possible by the changes made to us by domestication. By the civilizing process. It bred a species capable of living in complete contradiction to the signals around it.

Docile males and constrained females. All marching toward a cliff’s edge to the beat of someone else’s drum. Marching peacefully. Unless they’re dropping nuclear bombs on each other. Or gassing each other. Or exterminating every other species. Or poisoning air, water, and food. Nice men and women.

Written by

Ken

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Here’s something we don’t talk about enough: Civilization didn’t just domesticate us. It domesticated us differently, depending on whether we were born male or female.

In our pre-domesticated state, humans showed moderate sexual dimorphism (differences between the sexes in size, shape, and behavior). Men tended to be larger, stronger, and more prone to take risks, compete, and throw punches over territory or mates. Women carried broader hips for childbirth and bore the energetic costs of gestation, nursing, and food gathering. Nothing too extreme. It was a functional division…not a caste system.

Then came the leash.

If you want to understand what happened next, look at what domestication does to animals across the board…the males change more.

You get smaller bodies, smaller brains, softer jaws, lower testosterone, and a whole lot more docility. You don’t need to fight other males for access anymore…you just need to behave. Domestication tamps down that volatile, high-testosterone edge and replaces it with social compliance. The women change too, but less dramatically. Domestication is hardly an equal-opportunity employer.

What happens when this process is scaled up across hundreds of generations of humans?

Let’s take one of my favorite little detours: the Y-chromosome bottleneck…an evolutionary funnel that occurred around 7,000 to 5,000 years ago. Despite the population growing, genetic evidence shows that only a tiny handful of men were passing on their genes (think roughly 5 out of every 100 men). Why? Because systems of coercion (slavery, war, patriarchy) turned reproduction into a rigged game. And those systems selected hard for one thing: control.

Control doesn’t love testosterone. It doesn’t want unpredictability, brute force, or guys who flip tables when they lose status. It wants compliant, trainable males who can navigate symbolic ladders, defer to hierarchies, and follow rules. Over time, the male phenotype got reshaped: smaller, less aggressive, more socially performative. Instead of fighting for mates, men competed for power within abstract systems (religion, wealth, reputation).

Women didn’t experience this reproductive bottleneck, and therefore weren’t domesticated in a biological sense, the way men were. At least nowhere near the same degree. But they were domesticated culturally. Their roles were dictated by ideological control…veils, chastity cults, arranged marriages. inheritance laws, and lineage games. Woman as symbol. Woman as vessel. Woman as territory to be defended and exchanged. Arguably, as men become more civilized, women were controlled every more tightly (as was anything men saw as a “resource”).

And so sexual dimorphism got scrambled…intensified in the weirdest way possible. Physical differences shrank but role differences widened incredibly (differences that we still take for granted and fail to associate with domestication). Men became public actors, enforcers of systems they didn’t design. Women became private property, repositories of symbolic purity and repositories of symbolic purity and reproductive value. Both became performative shells…flattened into scripts civilization could use.

Now forget the anthropology textbooks for a second. This process we’re talking about…what’s happening on a psychological level? What do these changes mean? How do they feel? How do people begin to experience life differently?

Testosterone in utero shapes everything from brain lateralization to threat response. A civilizing system selecting against reactivity (for tameness) is selecting against certain kinds of minds…minds that question, that bristle, that break rules when rules break people. And so, over generations, you get men who are more verbal, more deferent, more emotionally masked. And because we live in the end product of that, we call it “progress”…as if there were a master plan to arrive at us, and…here we are! But you first need to acknowledge (at least) that there was no such plan, and that tameness was never anyone’s goal, it was simply something that the system rewarded. If you acknowledge that, we can have a conversation.

And though women may not have been suppressed biochemically…they were certainly suppressed. Their suppression was the visible one. Mythological. Ideological. Institutional. They don’t need to be reshaped from the inside out when they can be controlled from birth to death by symbols, stories, and ceremonies.

“Civilization made us peaceful.”

“Civilization turned brutish men into cooperative citizens.”

Right. These are nice Matrix-y narratives. Fairy tales. Statements that have just enough truth to squeak by as overarching explanations.

But what did civilization do? Where was intention? What was it trying to do? (and still trying) It neutered rebellion. It privatized violence. It engineered predictable humans. Manageable ones. And because we are those humans, we call the end product “better,” and the process itself, “progress.” Against all evidence, we insist that life in civilized systems is happier, healthier, safer, and sustainable. Insanity. An insanity made possible by the changes made to us by domestication. By the civilizing process. It bred a species capable of living in complete contradiction to the signals around it.

Docile males and constrained females. All marching toward a cliff’s edge to the beat of someone else’s drum. Marching peacefully. Unless they’re dropping nuclear bombs on each other. Or gassing each other. Or exterminating every other species. Or poisoning air, water, and food. Nice men and women.

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