Dominance Displays

Carl Sagan once said that when people say "fuck you", there's an unspoken "I" at the beginning. As in "I fuck you". The reason for it is very much a feature in the animal kingdom. When animals want to show dominance over another of their species, often they will mount them. Not because they are overcome with lust, but to show dominance over them, as if to say "I can do what I want to you and there's nothing you can do about it." People do that too, both literally and symbolically. Sexual assault isn't about sex, it's about dominance. It's about power and control over another human being. It's also about insecurity, because dominance displays only happen when dominance feels threatened. It's something people do when they feel as if they don't have control over a situation or another person and they want to make themselves feel in control again. They have to make themselves feel bigger and stronger than they feel at that moment.


"We go to great lengths to deny our animal heritage, and not just in scientific and philosophical discourse. You can glimpse the denial in the shaving of men's faces; in clothing and other adornments; in the great lengths gone to in the preparation of meat to disguise the fact that an animal is being killed, flayed, and eaten. The common primate practice of pseudosexual mounting of males by males to express dominance is not widespread in humans, and some have taken comfort from this fact. But the most potent form of verbal abuse in English and many other languages is "Fuck you," with the pronoun "I" implicit at the beginning. The speaker is vividly asserting his claim to higher status, and his contempt for those he considers subordinate. Characteristically, humans have converted a postural image into a linguistic one with barely a change in nuance. The phrase is uttered millions of times each day, all over the planet, with hardly anyone stopping to think what it means. Often, it escapes our lips unbidden. It is satisfying to say. It serves its purpose. It is a badge of the primate order, revealing something of our nature despite all our denials and pretensions." 

- Carl Sagan, Shadows of Forgotten Ancestors

Posturing

A closely related term for this is "posturing" behavior. It's what we do to imply dominance while stopping short of physically enacting it. It's everywhere when you learn to spot it. Sometimes it's subtle like what are now termed microaggressions, small belittling remarks to put someone down while maintaining plausible deniability that anything negative was meant by it. Sometimes it's not so subtle and becomes actual aggression. The intermediate stage between these is posturing. It's things like someone getting into another person's face or blocking them into a corner. It's like a reminder that you are small and they are big. Posturing is done to intimidate someone into giving in. If that doesn't work actual aggression is the next escalation. 

Once you begin noticing these behaviors you start seeing how people assert their dominance over anyone they believe to be beneath them in the social hierarchy, like adults talking down to children or domestic violence or sports competitions. Bullying is a dominance display. It's a dominance display when countries rattle sabers at other countries. 

Power and Control

As mentioned above, sexual assault isn't about sex. It's about power and control. So is domestic violence. So is child abuse. So is elder abuse. So is bullying. Racism and sexism are about power and control too. What happens in the small scale in our homes and communities is applied on a larger scale between countries. The behaviors countries use to establish dominance over other countries are not very different from someone threatening their partner or withholding resources. It's simply a question of scale. Most of the time it involves creating an unfair advantage and then exploiting it, as in the case of nuclear weapons, for example. 

Competition

These behaviors are the product of the belief that resources are scarce and that we have to compete for them. They're the product of the idea that life is a competition and a zero-sum game in which there can be only winners and losers. It's the belief that there isn't enough of something to go around and that we operate according to the law of the jungle. It's the reason why those at the top don't stop when they have more than enough wealth or resources to last them and their children's and grandchildren's lifetimes. In spite of all they amass, they still believe that there won't be enough for them. 

What it actually amounts to is a denial of our humanity. It's saying that we don't believe that human progress is possible, that we're essentially still animals at heart. It's the belief that success and security can only come at the expense of other, weaker human beings. Because the people who do this almost always punch down. They don't go after people they think are stronger than they are. It's always asymmetrical. They do it to people they think of as weaker. It's this mindset that maintains social hierarchies and keeps people in their place. Some people even use animal behavior to say that this behavior is natural in humans. If it were natural, it wouldn't need to be enforced. Theoretically we're smarter than the other animals, but in practice, not so much. The harder we try to prove our superiority to them the more our behavior resembles theirs. Instead of applying our minds to cooperation, we focus our efforts on competition. 

Insecurity

A lot of the things we do are born of our insecurity. It makes us feel better to believe that someone is in control. If not ourselves, then God or the government or authority. It's why very insecure people gravitate toward authoritarianism, because it makes them feel safer. The random nature of life is frightening. There is so much we're not in control of no matter how hard we try to be. It led man to attempt to dominate nature and engineer it. We were trying to eliminate sources of insecurity. We were trying to be less frightened and afraid of the unknown and each other by creating systems of control. On a certain level I think we know how much we are at the mercy of chance and it scares the shit out of us. We know that we are probably the weakest, most defenseless creatures out there. We're naked and we don't have sharp teeth or claws. Trophy hunters are trying to prove their superiority over animals that are much bigger and stronger. The only thing we have going for us is our brains. The irony is that not only can we not think our way out of a wet paper bag, but we waste our mental resources on competing with each other instead of figuring out how to make what we have go around. We waste all that superior intellect on proving our superiority to each other. All to feel as if we have some control over our environment. 

Baboons

Take away the established hierarchy and something interesting happens. A culture change happens. There was a troupe of baboons in Kenya. Dominant males in the troupe would bully the other members of the troupe and block their access to resources like food and females in the troupe. They always ate first and most. This led to their demise. An resort kept an open garbage pit and threw hunks of beef into it which were contaminated with bovine tuberculosis. The dominant males of the troupe got in first and chased everybody else off. They ate the beef and contracted tuberculosis. It killed all of the dominant males. Once they were gone, the rest of the troupe abandoned the culture they had created. Instead of dominating each other they went for communal grooming. Stress levels in the troupe dropped dramatically for both the females and males. When baboons from outside joined the troupe, they adopted the troupe's culture. It went from a culture of violence and control to one in which the baboons were happier. 

I know, comparing human behavior to animal behavior again, but what if we tend to interpret animal behavior in a way that confirms our biases or we disregard variables like an artificial environment? The idea of "alpha males" for example comes from observing a captive population of wolves as opposed to wolves in the wild. It's kind of like observing human behavior in prison and assuming that it's normal human behavior and not unnatural behavior produced by stress. For years our ideas about addiction were based on rat studies in which the rats were kept isolated and caged with nothing to do but choose between regular water and water with heroin in it. They were self-medicating for stress but we interpreted it as natural behavior. A later study called "Rat Park" showed that when rats aren't confined to a bare cage and have space and abundant resources, they ignore the water with heroin in it. 

Behavioral Sink

Calhoun's Behavioral Sink Experiment

There was another study by a behaviorist named John Calhoun titled "Behavioral Sink" in one part of which rats were kept in a cage with four segments. The two end segments were easily defended. Rats that lived in those segments were healthy and not aggressive toward each other. The middle segment, however, was crowded and not so easily defended. There was an entrance at either side. Resources in the middle were fought over and aggressive behavior was the rule. Rat Park showed that when rats are given lots of room and abundant resources and hiding places for when they felt threatened, the rats were less stressed and showed almost no aggression toward each other. It turns out that insecurity and crowding create stressed creatures and stress in turn created aggression. Both environments were artificial, but it proved that an artificial environment which is engineered to reduce insecurity allowed for more natural behavior. Most animals will only fight if they see no other alternative, even the strongest of them. Create an environment in which they have no alternative and you produce aggression. We've created our own unnatural environment in a bid to control our surroundings but failed to see how our environment still controls us. 

At the peak population, most mice spent every living second in the company of hundreds of other mice. They gathered in the main squares, waiting to be fed and occasionally attacking each other. Few females carried pregnancies to term, and the ones that did seemed to simply forget about their babies. They'd move half their litter away from danger and forget the rest. Sometimes they'd drop and abandon a baby while they were carrying it.

The few secluded spaces housed a population Calhoun called, "the beautiful ones." Generally guarded by one male, the females—and few males—inside the space didn't breed or fight or do anything but eat and groom and sleep. When the population started declining the beautiful ones were spared from violence and death, but had completely lost touch with social behaviors, including having sex or caring for their young

The interpretation of Calhoun's study were that they demonstrated what people would do in conditions of overpopulation. The study was interpreted to reinforce the Malthusian theory that if the population got out of control that we would descend into barbarism and crime. The fact that the rats were being kept in an artificially stressful environment was overlooked as unimportant. The people doing the study thought that they were inducing and observing natural behavior. Maybe what we see in human behavior today is also a product of the environment we have made for ourselves and the stress caused by that.

And they knew it too. The Rockefeller Institute was America's premier eugenics laboratory. They funded and set up the eugenics program in Germany. They didn't just inspire the holocaust, they helped actively to make it happen. They cherry-picked their data specifically to support their eugenics agenda, and we used their study uncritically for two generations after it should have been consigned to the oubliette of catastrophically bad ideas.