On Violence Against Women

I came across a repost of someone’s article here: https://kolyan.net/index.php?newsid=31632 It was written in response to an article by a moralizer about how one should treat women. In his opinion, women should be treated only with gentleness and persuasion, and never offended through violence. By the way, the issue of violence toward women is not that unambiguous. Women have not only consciousness but also a subconscious. In women, the subconscious is said to be more involved than in men. Example: famous female intuition and the notorious “female logic,” which causes many problems for the stronger sex. At the conscious level, all women are feminists and all are for equality. They are taught in school that this is good. You know, “Katerina, a ray of light in a dark kingdom, breaks out of the gloomy family lair toward freedom and happiness,” etc. So they read all that, broke out of the gloomy lair, and now do not know what to do. But a woman’s subconscious is aimed at giving birth to a healthy child and raising it. Healthy children come from healthy men. And the healthiest male is the dominant male. In a woman’s subconscious, an image of the dominant male is genetically set, an ideal against which she constantly compares her man. And the dominant male is always an insolent, rude, and tactless brute—basically a disgusting type. But supposedly the healthiest and most viable children come from him. If a man is kind, compliant, and does all the household work, at the conscious level a woman may be satisfied. But subconsciously she no longer sees him as a dominant male worthy of her, and begins subconsciously searching for another—an insolent, rude, and tactless male. This is presented as an explanation for why women allegedly often leave good husbands for various scoundrels. Second: it is not enough to obtain a suitable male for reproduction. The male must preserve his qualities while children are growing to adulthood and must be able to protect woman and children from predators and inhumans—the most dangerous predators. (“Inhumans” are described as people of another species, with whom one cannot negotiate, only destroy. They are dangerous because they are intelligent. The text claims humans long shared the planet with several other Homo species and synanthropes, who ate each other over two million years, targeting women and children because they were easier prey. This image supposedly remained in the human subconscious and is now used in fantasy depictions of goblins, orcs, trolls, and other man-eating nonhumans.) A woman and her offspring were allegedly protected primarily by her man, and for this he had to remain strong, fearsome, and fierce. Therefore, according to the article, a woman constantly tests her man for these traits. She does this by nagging and provoking aggression. She herself allegedly does not understand why she does this but cannot stop. The “correct” male response is to tolerate a bit, then abruptly become enraged, growl, grab her roughly, and shake her so she gets scared. She must be frightened; if not, it gets worse. Otherwise, she subconsciously concludes her male is not fearsome and cannot protect her from predators. She then feels danger everywhere, no safety, and becomes increasingly aggressive. The text claims that if a woman is frightened, she paradoxically calms down instead of escalating conflict, because her sense of danger recedes. (It adds that this is also genetically programmed: the woman behaves like a child—crying, capricious—and the man should respond like to a child: pity and feed. It gives an evolutionary explanation of kissing as feeding offspring mouth-to-mouth in primates and interprets this behavior as another unconscious test of paternal instinct.) The woman may even, if her biological cycle favors conception, wish to have sex with her man because he appears strong and fierce, and therefore likely to produce strong healthy children and protect them. Of course, instincts are involved to different degrees in different women, so behavior differs. In modern conditions, instincts may work improperly and not always effectively (example in text: the mother-in-law calls the police before the husband escalates, and instincts cannot compete with police intervention). But, the author says, no one should claim their relationship is so “high” that ethology does not apply, or that they are guided only by logic. Psychiatry has shown, the text says, that if instincts are switched off (for example by brain surgery), a person becomes an apathetic “vegetable.” Instincts tell us what to do; intellect tells us how. Intellect also helps us rationalize our actions to ourselves and others. So, according to the text, violence against women is “not so unambiguous.” I am interested in your Computerra articles concerning male-female relations from an ethological perspective. If possible, please comment on this article. Thank you in advance.