Collected Essays 3: Why Women Conceal Estrus

By Kim Dong-ryul · Original publication: September 25, 2024

English translation · Original: https://gujoron.com/xe/notice/1639943

Dr. Park Moon-ho: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3rwDyE7RM6k

Dong-A Science: https://m.dongascience.com/news.php?idx=-50418

Dong-A Science offers various explanations, but most are nonsense. Whenever “in order to” appears, suspect a false explanation. Saying that something happens “in order to” pass on genes is absurd. What are the genes being passed on for? We must learn to think in terms of “because of.”

“In order to” looks at an event's outcome. We should look at its cause. We need cause-centered thought. There is always an engine of change; our thinking must center on that engine.

Human beings have an instinct to maintain the strength of their group, and a compulsive fear that isolation means death. We try to remain within a group, and mothers hold the group together. Generally, humans do not want to leave their mothers. Our juvenile period is exceptionally long. Other animals have no adolescence.

A mother keeps her daughters with her, forming a clan. All its members are close relatives, and they do not have sex within the clan. Early humans did not have married couples. Marriage is a product of civilization, less than ten thousand years old.

Most people start from a one-to-one relationship between a man and a woman. That is entirely mistaken. Men had no interest in a particular woman other than their mother. Early clan members were relatives, so they were not interested in sex.

Modern people's obsession with sex is motivated by power. As clans expanded into tribes, power struggles arose, and sex became a means of acquiring power. Early humans living in kin-based clans had neither power struggles nor sexual competition.

Sexual obsession is a modern compulsion, a disease of civilization. Early women were capable hunters, so why would they have needed to take an interest in men? The idea that women behaved a certain way because they needed men is male-supremacist thinking. The idea that men hovered around women is also a modern projection, and likewise male-supremacist.

False: women desire men and men desire women.

True: men protected women not because of sexual desire, but first because they followed their mothers in a mother-centered society, and second because they feared the weakening of their group. They feared that dwindling numbers would make it disappear. They were extremely wary of outside men, who might kill them.

Because they were not interested in one another, tribal people lived in separate male and female groups. Men went around with men, women with women. They did not spend most of their time in the same space. Women and children built houses; men had none. Men did not enter the houses where women lived.

Gorillas, orangutans, chimpanzees: males dominate females through violence.

Bonobos: several females form an alliance and a mother-centered society that subdues the males.

Male gorillas fight and kill one another; the few surviving silverbacks practice polygyny. This makes it difficult for the group to grow. A group consists of a dominant male, an assistant male, and three or four females. Only five or six are adults; the rest are immature. Counting adults, the group amounts to only a handful.

One male orangutan presides over several separate groups of females, again leaving few males. When chimpanzee females enter estrus, they leave together for other groups; males accept females arriving from elsewhere. This fails to preserve mother–offspring relationships, so no mother-centered society develops.

Among bonobos, relationships between females are homosexual rather than centered on male–female intercourse. Ultimately, humans differ from other primates because they have a mother-centered society. A male-centered society destroys itself through fighting among males. Gorillas can more or less sustain it because they eat vegetation; humans need men to hunt together to survive.

Women must conceal estrus to stop males fighting and preserve a mother-centered society. In a male-centered society, males kill one another and cannot hunt collectively, leaving them to graze like gorillas. Without a society organized around mothers, brothers cannot hunt as a group.

As with bonobos, the formation of a mother-centered society appears as an overall feminization. Compared with chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans, humans have become more female overall. Bonobos became too female to hunt. Concealed estrus is needed to maintain an appropriate balance: becoming more female while retaining masculinity.

1. Humans take sixteen years to become adults. That is extremely long. How is it sustained? How can a mother keep her son nearby for sixteen years? Through a mother-centered society.

2. How can brothers with the same mother hunt together without killing one another, while also preventing incest? If their mother comes into estrus, her sons are bound to cause trouble.

3. The idea that men and women marry and fall in love is nonsense when applied to early humans. They had no such arrangement. For men and women who are not in love to coexist in one group, estrus must be absent.

Because human immaturity lasts fully sixteen years, society becomes centered on mothers. A mother entering estrus would create a crisis, so estrus is concealed and overall feminization occurs. A matrilineal society is mother-centered, not simply woman-centered. The truth becomes visible when we examine the parent–child relationship.

Animals do not enter estrus while raising their young. Humans, too, do not become pregnant while breastfeeding. They are supposed to wean their children, make them independent, and then become pregnant, but instead they keep the children nearby. It is not a woman keeping a man with her; it is a mother keeping her son.

Rather than humans actively concealing estrus, raising children for so long has made the condition ambiguous. Human children remain semi-independent for more than ten years: neither fully independent nor wholly dependent. Human mothers likewise enter a state of semi-estrus, neither fully in estrus nor entirely out of it.

Wrong idea: women conceal estrus as a means of keeping men around.

Correct judgment: because children are semi-independent, mothers remain in semi-estrus.

A mother conceals estrus to keep her children nearby. More precisely, she maintains semi-estrus rather than concealing it. This is why human females are beautiful, unlike those of most animals. General feminization and self-domestication have also made human males considerably more beautiful.

Humans are interdependent animals. Men hunt collectively; women gather collectively. Killing strangers is the rule in early society, so elements that would destroy the group must be eliminated. Unless men are brothers born to the same mother, they will kill one another. If the mother enters estrus, the clan immediately disintegrates.

Imagine an early clan of around fifty individuals. Excluding minors, only three or four men aged twenty to forty may be available to hunt. Some members are ill, old, injured, incapable, or engaged in fighting. Such a group is on the verge of being wiped out by another tribe's attack.

The clan's fate depends on the matriarch's reproductive capacity. If she has eight sons, its future is secure. They can drive away neighboring clans and obtain extensive hunting grounds. Men feel compelled to protect women and preserve the strength of the clan. They protect their mothers and sisters.