This episode is also on Bilibili too.
Today, let’s talk about a bizarre Aboriginal tribe in Australia—the Tiwi. The Tiwi were a tribe that treated women as currency, literally using women as money. It’s an unusual, extreme cultural case, but from this extreme example we can grasp a general rule—a deeper rule about why gender conflict exists between men and women.
We know that men and women both love each other and fight each other. Outside of all the lovey-dovey stuff, men and women also regularly complain about, control, and hurt each other. Of course, more often than not, it’s men hurting women, rather than the other way around. Historically, for example, men generally treated women as property. Even today, some men manipulate women through PUA tactics, while others use their positions of power to take advantage of them. In this episode, we’re going to use the Tiwi case to explore whether there’s a deeper psychological root to this “loving and fighting” side of gender relations.
I learned these little facts about the Tiwi from the new English-language book When Men Behave Badly, published in late April 2021. Its subtitle is Sexual Deception, Harassment, and Assault, and it explains from the perspective of evolutionary psychology why men impose all kinds of sexual coercion and sexual violence on women. The author is the legendary evolutionary psychologist David Buss. In this video and others, I’ll pick out some of the book’s more interesting and thought-provoking highlights to share with you. Reading and interpreting new English-language books will become part of our channel’s regular routine.
All right, let’s begin the story of the Tiwi.
The Tiwi live on several islands off northern Australia. They are among Australia’s earliest Indigenous peoples, having arrived there at least 20,000 years ago. Today, the Tiwi population is only about 2,000, and it probably wasn’t much larger historically—a sizeable tribe, but not a huge one. A large portion of the Tiwi have now integrated into modern society, but just a few decades ago, the Tiwi still retained a remarkably traditional way of life.
What shocked the anthropologists who went to study them most was the marriage system of the traditional Tiwi. In Tiwi society, there were almost no unmarried, single women! You might say, “Wait, what? Do baby girls get married the moment they’re born? Do 80-year-old grandmothers have to remarry the moment they bury their husbands?”
Yep. Exactly.
Tiwi women, regardless of age or circumstances—from the tiniest baby girl, to a widow whose husband had just died, to the oldest grandmother—were expected to end their single status and get married immediately, whenever the male head of the household demanded it.
Of course, quick is one thing, but you couldn’t be vague about whom she married. The male head of the family had to consider all sorts of factors. He might promise his newborn daughter to the tribe’s most influential big shot in exchange for benefits, or marry off his recently widowed sister-in-law to a potential ally in order to expand his social circle.
The obvious result of this system was extreme polygyny. Among the Tiwi, high-status men—often old men—could have dozens of wives. After all, lots of people would marry the women in their families off to these men in exchange for benefits.
Like our emperors with their three palaces and six courtyards, they had harems. The problem was that these tribal emperors lacked the high walls around a palace harem, so they couldn’t lock away all their “three thousand beauties.” The tribal emperor and his dozens of wives were actually surrounded by dozens of vigorous young bachelors.
So you can imagine what happened: affairs between the wives and the young bachelors were common, and the tribal emperors often had very green hats on their heads.
And whenever an affair was discovered, the tribe held a grand ceremony to punish the lover. The wife who had cheated was not punished; only the young bachelor was. In cultures that view women as men’s property, the logic is often the same: if a woman is merely property, adultery is mainly a matter between two men—the young bachelor has offended the tribal emperor.
During the punishment ceremony, the young bachelor stood at one end of the field. At the other end, the older man whose wife had cheated would gather several of his older friends, and they would throw spears at the young bachelor. This was no joke. It was nearly impossible to dodge the entire rain of spears, and some men were simply speared to death. Others, perhaps through long experience, had somehow developed a special skill: catching the spears with nonvital parts of their bodies. The rules said that being hit was enough to count as punishment. So they would use an arm or a thigh to catch a blade with their bare hands, using a hole in the arm or thigh to wash away the tribal emperor’s green hat—and save their own lives in the process. Yet even with consequences this terrifying, the Tiwi bachelors kept lining up. The tribal emperors’ hats grew greener and greener, while the young bachelors accumulated one hole after another.
Those are some details of the Tiwi marriage system, along with the social institutions that grew out of it, such as the punishment ceremony for lovers.
So why did the Tiwi develop such an unusual system and culture? Why did they hate single women so much?
Because under the Tiwi social system, women actually served the function of currency. Women were the Tiwi’s money.
We know that any group of a certain size has to engage in exchange. And once there’s exchange, you need currency. But the Tiwi lived on islands relatively cut off from the rest of the world, and there were no local resources that could serve as money. So this very unusual environment gave rise to a very unusual solution.
The Tiwi ancestors, deliberately or otherwise, grasped what economists today mean by currency. Something only needs to meet three conditions to become money. First, it has to be scarce—not lying everywhere underfoot. Second, it can’t be too scarce: if the whole village has only one giant diamond, it can’t function as currency no matter how scarce it is. Third, it has to last for a reasonably long time. Fresh fish won’t work as money, though dried fish might. Scarce, but not unique beyond all possibility; durable, but not too perishable. Such things may be hard to find in a poor natural environment, but there was actually one right nearby—the women.
Once you look at women as currency, the Tiwi’s bizarre system makes perfect sense. In a poor place with low productivity, most people can’t hold on to money; they spend it right away to obtain other benefits. That’s why the Tiwi did not allow single women to exist. This currency perspective also explains some of the Tiwi men’s other “confusing behavior.” Since women were treated as currency, a Tiwi man who wanted to maintain his status would try every possible way to acquire more wives. Once he had many wives, he also had to father lots of daughters and give them to other people, thereby expanding his circle of allies. It was a lot like wealthy people constantly trying to increase their fortunes—and then cross-owning shares with other wealthy people.
At this point, the “face” of the Tiwi story is more or less complete. But what’s more intriguing is what lies underneath.
The key question in the Tiwi story of women as currency is this: if men and women were equally numerous, why weren’t men treated as currency? Why were women “scarcer” than men? What, exactly, was scarce about them? Why did Tiwi men compete so desperately for women as precious resources, rather than the other way around?
And if you think about it more carefully, is the Tiwi system really that unusual? I said at the beginning that treating women as property was once the norm in every culture and society around the world. In some places, for example, if a married woman was raped by another man, the law regarded it as an offense against her husband, not against the female victim; if the woman was unmarried, it was seen as an offense against her father. In short, women were treated either as their husbands’ property or their fathers’ property.
In When Men Behave Badly, the evolutionary-psychology giant David Buss says that although Tiwi culture and institutions look highly unusual at first glance, they are identical to most cultures in one core belief: women are often the most important resource men desperately compete for. Men are filled with desire for this resource called “women,” and they engage in fierce competition over it.
So why do we so often see men treating women as precious resources and competing desperately for them, rather than the other way around?
If we want to trace this question back to the absolute beginning, the answer takes us more than a billion years into the past—to the moment when sexual reproduction emerged. The reason men compete for women, rather than the other way around, was almost determined from the moment the two sexes came into existence.
How did that happen?
What we really need to ask is this: when organisms evolved sexual reproduction, why did two sexes appear at the same time? Why couldn’t there be just one sex? Imagine organisms that were both fathers and mothers. Two of them take a liking to each other, each contributes a reproductive cell, and the two more-or-less identical cells merge like two drops of water. That cell then slowly develops into the next generation. Why didn’t organisms evolve that way?
Mainly, we have mitochondria to blame.
We know that the cell destined to develop into an embryo can’t just be a bag of genes. Outside the genes, it needs nutrients and cellular components that can run its metabolism, so it can actually begin developing.
The most important of these metabolic components is the mitochondrion, which supplies energy to the cell. The trouble is, mitochondria have genes of their own. Like all genes, mitochondrial genes keep replicating. That creates a problem: mitochondria from both parents, trying to survive inside the cell, would wage a brutal war and kill each other, putting the tiny embryo in danger.
So organisms eventually evolved a solution to stop this “mitochondrial war.”
The solution is for one side to “agree” to unilaterally “disarm”: it contributes a cell that provides no mitochondria, no metabolic components, and contains almost nothing but DNA; the other side does exactly the opposite. It provides not only the other half of the DNA, but also almost the full set of metabolic components, along with all kinds of nutrients. The first side, the one that disarmed, was the earliest male reproductive cell—the earliest sperm. The second side, the one that armed itself to the teeth, was the earliest female reproductive cell—the earliest egg.
That is where the two sexes—male and female, man and woman—came from. And those were the ancestors, more than a billion years ago, of all the Tiwi men and women.
Once life took that first step toward unequal development, the imbalance kept deepening, step by step. Sperm are basically just little bundles of DNA: small and cheap. So an organism might as well make lots of them, then attach “motors” to let them reach the egg quickly. It could even provide an organ to launch the sperm partway there. That, of course, is the male reproductive organ.
Eggs, on the other hand, are large and precious, so organisms are better off wrapping them in all sorts of nutrients and protection. That makes eggs even more valuable. So, to protect such a major investment, organisms eventually evolved an organ that lets the fertilized egg grow inside the body for a while, absorbing more nutrients, until the offspring is big enough and capable enough of surviving—and only then releases it outside. That, of course, is the female reproductive organ.
And that is how the basic forms of the male and female animals we see today evolved.
So, that first act of disarmament and armament at the dawn of sexual reproduction created the deepest physiological difference between the sexes: sperm are numerous and cheap, while eggs are scarce and precious. In my view, eight or nine out of ten conflicts, frictions, and awkward tangles between human men and women can be traced back to that one sentence.
The Tiwi’s bizarre culture is no exception. Why were women, rather than an equal number of men, treated as a scarce resource? Because what is actually scarce is not the female individual, but female reproductive capacity—the few, precious eggs.
Sperm are numerous and cheap, produced in abundance with hardly any effort. So, in theory, one male can get a great many females pregnant. Eggs, however, are limited in number. Once one powerful male monopolizes a large number of females and gets the whole harem to have children only with him, all the other males can do is wait to die out without offspring.
So the males launch into fierce competition. A male can try to defeat other males and stop them from approaching a female—for example, male deer lock antlers when the rut begins. Or they can desperately court a female and get her to choose them—for example, many male birds use their feathers, calls, and even dances to please the female bird. Males can also monopolize more of the resources needed to produce and raise offspring in order to attract females—for example, humans love doing exactly that.
There is a technical term for these behaviors: “male competition.”
Male competition is extremely common throughout the animal kingdom. It is practically the fate of every male animal, and naturally, we humans are part of it too. That is why men fighting over women is everyday life, while women fighting over men is news. That is why, for a very long time in human societies, women were regarded as property. And that is why, in extreme cases like the Tiwi, women rather than men were used as scarce currency. Ultimately, in the most life-and-death undertaking of all—human reproduction—the scarcest factors are eggs and female reproductive potential. With this perspective, we can also understand more details of the Tiwi marriage system. For instance, although all women were treated as “currency,” an 80-year-old grandmother, a 20-year-old young woman, and a newborn baby girl did not have the same “face value.” Which one had the highest value? Which had the lowest? You can think about it.
What I just described is the inner logic of the Tiwi story.
Why do men rack their brains trying to compete for women and treat women as a scarce resource, rather than the other way around? The answer is not at the cultural level, nor at the level of social institutions. The answer is, in fact, deeply biological: women’s scarcity ultimately comes down to the scarcity of eggs. Eggs are few and precious, and that is what drives men who want to copy and pass on their genes to fight tooth and nail.
Of course, the story’s “inner logic” is really only a starting point. The conflict between the sexes sparked by the basic fact that sperm are numerous and cheap while eggs are scarce and precious has plenty more stories to tell. Tune in next time and I’ll break it down.
I’m Zhichao Wei. If you enjoy my show, please follow, like, save, and leave a comment. I’ll keep updating this channel with all kinds of serious—and not-so-serious—psychology knowledge. See you next time.
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