Manosphere Myths: What History ACTUALLY Says About Marriage, Gender & Obedience

Summary

History Uncensored - “Manosphere Myths: What History ACTUALLY Says About Marriage, Gender & Obedience”

Podcast: History Uncensored
Host: Wake Up Productions (Bianca Nobilo)
Episode Date: March 24, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Bianca Nobilo explores the persistent and resurgent “manosphere” myths about marriage, gender roles, and so-called “traditional values.” Through interviews with leading academics—including biological anthropologist Prof. Augustin Fuentes and legal historian Prof. Rebecca Prebert—the episode busts popular internet-driven narratives, demonstrates how ideas about obedience, male authority, and traditional marriage are pieced together from selective historical fragments, and reveals the messy, surprising, and varied realities of marriage, sex, and gender roles across cultures and millennia.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Myths of the Manosphere: The Claims and Their Appeal

(00:00–04:39)

• The manosphere and “tradwife” trend assert that:
  • Marriage was better and more stable when men led and women obeyed.
  • Men are naturally promiscuous; women are naturally monogamous.
  • Male value has always been about dominance, status, power, and wealth.
• These claims are not just fringe: a 29-country study found nearly 1 in 3 Gen Z men think wives should always obey their husbands.
• Such claims rest on the supposed "tradition" and "naturalness" of patriarchal marriage—but what does history and science actually say?

Quote:

“The obvious question is, ‘back to what exactly?’ ... Marriage as a stable, timeless model is a compressed fantasy made up from very different sources—biblical language, Victorian ideals, and mid-20th-century breadwinner households, all blurred into one.”
— Bianca Nobilo (00:44, 30:16)

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2. What Does Biology Actually Say About Sex & Gender?

(04:39–23:13)

a. Human Evolution, Pair Bonding, and Care:

• Prof. Augustine Fuentes debunks biological determinism:
  • Humans evolved as “cooperative biocultural caretakers”—families, not just couples, raised children (05:12–07:29).
  • Infants are unusually dependent, requiring support from clusters of kin, not just a “provider father” and “nurturer mother.”

Quote:

“At the heart of what it is to be human is to create these cooperative communities ... Human infants require a very specific kind of caretaking that is uncommon in much of the animal world.”
— Augustine Fuentes (05:12)

b. Sexuality, Myths, and Reality:

• Men and women’s actual numbers of sexual partners are almost identical; reports to the contrary are shaped by social expectations and self-reporting bias (07:51–09:37).
• Sex is not primarily about reproduction; most human sexual behavior is for social, relational, or emotional purposes, not simply making babies (09:48–11:16).

Quote:

“Most human sex and most human sexuality is not related to reproduction ... to only talk about making babies is to ignore the vast majority of sexual activity.”
— Augustine Fuentes (10:30)

c. Emotional Attachments and Social Needs:

• Both genders have fundamental emotional needs and seek emotional connection; claims that men need less connection or pair bonding are socially constructed (11:32–13:19).
• The modern “crisis of masculinity” is linked to lack of strong social bonds rather than some inborn male detachment.

Quote:

“How do you drive a human crazy? Isolate them... We need one another, and so to make an argument that men don’t need emotional connection ignores what people do and what the physiology says.”
— Augustine Fuentes (12:28)

d. Debunking the Hunter/Gatherer Gender Binary:

• New archaeological research (15:02–16:36):
  • Both men and women hunted and foraged; the strict binary is a myth.
  • Gender differences in tools, diet, and roles only appear in the archaeological record in the last 6–8,000 years, coinciding with the rise of surplus, property, and social hierarchy.

Quote:

“This whole hunter versus nurturer is garbage. It’s not supported by the archaeological evidence.”
— Augustine Fuentes (15:33)

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3. The Emergence of Patriarchy & Marriage as Social Institution

(16:36–30:16)

• “Wife” and “husband” are relatively recent terms; the power hierarchies they imply are not ancient human universals (17:09).
• Patriarchy, male-dominated public and family life, and polygyny (one man, multiple wives) appear with agriculture, storage, and social surplus (21:21–23:13).
• Polygamy in its broadest sense (having several partners over a lifetime) is far more common and natural than strict one-man-one-woman monogamy (18:29).
• "Alpha male" and "beta male" constructs lack universality or biological inevitability; attraction and successful relationships are highly culture- and individual-dependent (23:35–25:18).
• Many popular masculinity discourses serve commercial interests—selling products, not reflecting biological heritage.

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4. The Shifting Legal and Social History of Marriage

(30:16–57:08)

a. Marriage as Legal and Economic Arrangement

• Prof. Rebecca Prebert explains marriage as a legal/religious/economic institution emerges only around 2000 BC (30:16).
• Western-style “modern marriage,” regulated by church/state with defined rights and mutual duties, is a product of the last few centuries.
• Divorce was rare and practically unavailable before the 19th century; only with modern legal structures did divorce (and meaningful exit from marriage) become possible (33:49–36:24).

b. "Traditional" Marriage and Obedience as Recent and Variable Constructs

• The model imagined as “traditional”—male breadwinner, female homemaker, wife’s obedience—really hails from the 1950s, and was never universal nor as clear-cut as modern nostalgia maintains (36:39).

Quote:

“The percentage of wives in paid employment actually rises during the 1950s ... so it's still a minority, but a really quite substantial minority who are working during their marriage.”
— Rebecca Prebert (37:12)

• The breadwinner/homemaker model depends more on economics, class, and industrialization than timeless gender roles (43:48).
• In pre-industrial societies, households were "units of production"—husbands and wives both worked economically, often side by side.

c. Obedience, Property, and the Law

• The “obey” vow was required in the Anglican marriage service but was absent from state-regulated marriages (39:53–42:56).
• The idea that wives were literally their husbands' property is mostly a myth, not supported by law or by most social practice (47:01).

Quote:

“It was never literally true that a wife is a chattel ... there's no support in the actual law, and sometimes the metaphor is used both ways.”
— Rebecca Prebert (47:32)

d. Domestic Violence: Historical Reality vs. Myth

• Contrary to manosphere rhetoric, serious domestic violence was often prosecuted and condemned in England as early as the 1800s (49:53–53:27).

Quote:

“The jury immediately find this man guilty ... everyone is agreed this is completely not acceptable; this is not how we expect husbands to behave.”
— Rebecca Prebert (51:55)

e. Respect and Partnership as Enduring Ideals

• Mutual respect, not command or subservience, is described as the enduring core of successful marriages across history (54:01).
• Many couples navigated marriage as a partnership, regardless of legal language.

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5. Why Do Hierarchical Myths Appeal Today?

(53:27–59:56)

• Popularity of obedience and hierarchy narratives today is driven by:
  • Modern status anxiety, insecurity, and a desire for certainty.
  • Backlash against equality and feminism.
  • Online “grievance-based identities” (59:56).
• Manosphere/tradwife cultures monetize nostalgia, selling hierarchy as comfort in uncertain times.
• These myths "flatten" and commodify complex past societies into a narrow, imagined tradition.

Quote:

“What the manosphere and tradwife culture present as a timeless truth is actually something much narrower, purposely selected features of older systems completely stripped of their context and complexity.”
— Bianca Nobilo (59:56)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On the persistence of gender myths:

  “Step back, and stop saying there's one way to do this—we'd actually be happier with ourselves.”
  — Augustin Fuentes (26:59)

• On the 1950s housewife fantasy:

  “It's a very understandable choice because you've got great fashion and the benefits of modern technology … doing housework without a fridge and a vacuum cleaner is much less attractive.”
  — Rebecca Prebert (36:39)

• On physical beauty and attraction standards:

  “What looks good now was not what looked good 20 years ago or 40 years ago ... there's no correlation between these things and actual attraction in a physiological sense.”
  — Augustine Fuentes (29:19)

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Timestamps of Key Segments

• 00:44 — Breakdown of the “tradition” and “nature” claims behind manosphere rhetoric
• 04:39–07:29 — Augustine Fuentes on the evolution of human social and sexual behavior
• 09:48–11:16 — Overlap and variation in male and female sexuality
• 15:02 — Hunter/gatherer gender division debunked
• 17:09–18:29 — Origins of patriarchy and polygamy
• 21:21 — Agriculture/surplus as the key turning point for gender hierarchy
• 30:16 — How marriage emerges as an institution and its legal transformation
• 39:53 — History of "obey" in marriage vows
• 47:01 — The myth of wives as property examined
• 49:53 — Domestic violence, law, and social norms in history
• 53:27 — Modern nostalgia and the spread of obedience myths

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Conclusion: Episode Message in Context

History Uncensored exposes the major claims of the manosphere and online “trad” culture as selective myth-making rather than historical, biological, or anthropological fact. Instead of naturalizing gender hierarchy and obedience, real history and science reveal humanity’s diversity, adaptability, and the centrality of cooperation—offering many models for marriage and relationships, not one fixed path. The appeal of hierarchy today is fueled by uncertainty and social anxiety, but those who advocate a “return” to traditional values are rarely talking about history—they’re seeking power.

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For listeners and readers, this episode is a rigorous, sometimes eyebrow-raising, yet always engaging demolition of popular myths about gender, obedience, and marriage, armed with evidence, clarity, and humor.

Transcript

[A]

Humans have lots of sex. Humans like, take it to another level. Let's not pretend that male loyalty and female loyalty are the same thing.

[B]

Why is it not?

[A]

Because men and women are not the same. We see this huge difference between bodies, like men were out stabbing mammoths and women were like holding babies. No, you go 200,000 years ago and look at our ancestors and you just don't see the kinds of differences we see today amongst genders. It's a woman's job to obey her man.

[C]

Why is there anything in nature that suggests that things are more stable or better when women obey?

[B]

I'm trying to get to the bottom of this particular myth. Several of our female interviewees actually commented how surprised they were that they hadn't had to promise to obey their husbands.

[C]

When people say that, the answer is to go back. The obvious question is back to what exactly? Across the manosphere and tradwife culture, a claim keeps that marriage works best when men lead and women obey. This isn't just online noise either, because a growing number of young men are coming around to these ideas. In a recent 29 country Ipsos and King's College London study, nearly a third of Gen Z men agreed that a wife should always obey her husband. And a third said that the husband should have final say in important decisions, making Gen Z more likely than baby boomers or any other living generation studied to think so. The people pushing this usually argue two things at once. That this model is traditional and that it's natural. Traditional in the sense that marriage once rested on one stable, timeless model. The strong husband, the obedient wife, the orderly home. And natural in the sense that male authority, female submission, sexual double standards, and these rigid marital roles are said to flow from human evolution itself. So is this true or are they selective myths assembled from fragments of different periods? Because when people say that, the answer is to go back, the obvious question is back to what exactly? This is significant beyond intimate relationships, because marriage is never just private. For centuries, political thinkers have treated the household as politics in miniature, A model of order, authority, even obedience. Aristotle described the family as a building block of larger political life. And much later, French counter revolutionary philosopher Louis de Bernald reduced the household almost to a state in miniature. Father as power, mother is minister, child as subject. So in those views, arguments about marriage are also arguments about society. Strip it down. And there are really three main claims here. First, that marriage was better and more stable when husbands led and wives obeyed.

[A]

So God says to the man, die. And he says to the woman, submit. Submit to Your husbands. It says husbands, by the way, not boyfriends. Are you a man worth submitting to?

[B]

Your husband isn't supposed to ask your permission. Your husband can do whatever he wants with the money. True submission is giving him complete control

[C]

and not trying to control him. Second, one way monogamy. That men are naturally built for multiple partners, while women are naturally orientated towards one man.

[A]

Monogamy. A lot of the times, just not all the time. But for most men, it's going to weaken you. The girl's going to have leverage. She's going to. She's going to be like, oh, I'm his only source of sex. Like a lot of the times when women start to get leverage in relationships, like they're your only source of sex, they're your only source of intimacy or whatever. That's when they start, oh, you're not getting on tonight, or they start to pull back or whatever. The reason women can't cheat is because there's no way to ensure paternity of a female's cheating. Modern science in and of itself. Just because you can now find out who the dad is doesn't undo 5,000 years years of human evolution.

[C]

Third, that male worth has always rested on status, dominance, money and physical power. And that marriage or mating has always rewarded those traits above all else.

[A]

100% of women are all subconsciously competing for the top 1% of popular men. You think she won't leave you for that buff dude? Promise you, bro, she will. You think she won't leave you for that guy that makes a little bit more money? Promise you. If you look historically at the men who have multiple wives, it's the men who are favored in the Bible, the men who are favored in the Quran, and we. When you look in secular society, historically, it's the men who are the greatest leaders. The pharaoh had multiple wives, the emperor of China had multiple wives. And you can go on indefinitely.

[C]

So to find out what, if anything, is actually natural here, I spoke to Professor Augustin Fuentes, who's a primatologist and a biological anthropologist at Princeton. He specializes in how humans have evolved over the last 2 million years. Can you tell me a bit about before marriage existed as a concept, as a legal document? How did human beings organize themselves in relationships? Like, what did kinship bonds look like? A little bit about pair bonding.

[A]

So one of the most amazing things, or at least amazing to me, right, is that what we take for granted, the sort of contemporary notion of marriage and sort of legal as legal offspring, and the sort of religious and civil Structure of marriage. That's all extremely recent. And by extremely recent, I mean centuries, not even millennia. But putting that aside, what do we know about how humans form families, about how humans now and in the past sort of get together with one another? And the data are pretty clear. Humans form what we call these sort of large cooperative groups. You could call them families, you could call them groups, communities, what have you, who work together and who collaborate to raise young, to defend one another, to get food and share food, to build places to sleep and to live. At the heart of what it is to be human is to sort of create these cooperative communities. Now, how does that relate to marriage? Well, we know two things about humans that are central to our contemporary understanding of marriage and kin number one, humans evolved as cooperative biocultural caretakers, that is human reproduction, human infants, and I can go into detail if you want. Human infants require a very specific kind of caretaking that is uncommon in much of the animal world. That cooperation, that structure, reshaped how we got together to make babies, how we treated those babies, and how babies grow up. So that's one thing. The second thing is that humans have lots of sex. That's a lot of primates do. But humans take it to another level. And we also have lots of relationships. Sometimes sex and relationships come together in what's called a sexual pair bond, a special specific relationship between two individuals who prefer one another as sexual and social partners. But we also have social pair bonds, these incredibly strong ties, heterosexually and homosexual, that sometimes have sex and sometimes don't have sex. So the fact that humans love to get together with someone they really, really care about, that's part of human evolution. And the fact that humans have this very complicated caretaking, child rearing system that's also part of human evolution.

[C]

Picking up on your point about the voracious sexual appetites of humans, a common refrain that we see in modern Internet culture, particularly in the manosphere, is this notion that it is natural it's human nature for men to desire multiple sexual partners, where it is natural that women just want to be with one man. What does the evidence say actually tell us?

[A]

The evidence says that anyone who really believes that actually doesn't have much of a social life, I think that's important. What we know, what we know from the data are a couple very important things. First of all, most of these data about males wanting tons of partners, having tons of partners, and females wanting very few partners, that comes from self reports of particular societies and particular ages. But when you actually go beyond the self report and you get information, for example, how many sexual partners individual has had. You see that the average number for males and females is almost identical, right? Not exactly, but almost identical. Why is it not identical? Because a lot of guys, when you ask them, give you extremely high numbers that are lies. And a lot of women, when you ask them, give you lower numbers than their actual experiences because of social context. So let's actually just push that stuff aside. Those interviews, everyone knows when you ask someone about their sex life, you don't necessarily get anything approaching the truth. What do we know then about our bodies and the way in which humans behave? So the idea that there's a huge variance, like a big difference in how many partners men have and how many partners women have, and that's part of human nature, is rejected by data of sexuality, the data of family studies, the data paternity studies, and basically all of our lived experience. So when we look at bodies, when we look at history, when we look at archeology, when we look at how people actually live their lives, we see that it's pretty complicated. It's not that men want to have a lot of sex and don't care about partnering, and women just want to go find a good partner. That's not true. And anyone who's actually honest with themselves and looks inside them themselves or talks to their friends, knows that that's not true.

[C]

What are some of the other greatest myths that you see proliferated about sex differences and the way that males and females behave when it comes to relationships?

[A]

I mean, I think the thing to point out here is that there's huge gender differences in sexuality because those are imposed, those are expected. You're brought up believing you're a certain way. But let's, like I said, let's put the society off for one second. Let's talk about bodies. Right? It turns out, so the penis and the clitoris come from the same tissue. They develop in the same process, right? Human genitals don't develop into their two different tracks till about 8 to 12 weeks of age. So it's largely in these same tissues. So in fact, clitoral and penile reactions are very, very similar to one another. Things like that are important because when we step back and we ask, we forget. We think men and women are different biological creatures, different kinds of human. And that's not true. We're common variations on the human theme. Right? So males and females, when it comes to sexuality and just physiological, sexual response, yes, have some important differences, but overlap enormously. And we know that most human sex and most human sexuality is not related to reproduction. And I think that's something that's really important because the people were saying, well, men just want to inseminate as many females and female just wants a good man to protect their offspring. That's all about reproduction. That's not the way humans reproduce. And the vast majority of sex humans do has nothing to do with making offspring. It has to do with social relations, power relations, different kinds of emotional connections. And so to only talk about making babies when we talk about sex is actually to ignore the vast majority of sexual activity.

[C]

It's fascinating. I really know I'm not on CNN anymore when we have penis and clitoris up top in an interview. So it's a. It's a good, it's a good reminder when it comes to the emotional entanglements that ensue from sex. Do you see a big difference there between men and women?

[A]

So I think one of the most important things for us to keep in mind is how these data are collected. And so there's a bunch of different ways in which you talk to people about sexuality and emotional attachments. There's these sort of popular assumptions about them. And then there's people who study ethnograph, like what really happens. So it turns out this whole idea that men aren't emotionally committed or men want many, many partners or don't want a close connection is not true physiologically and psychologically. Men are frequently in the contemporary moment, for example, in a lot of the Western world, starved for attention and closeness. And we're seeing this whole crisis of masculinity which everyone is blaming on men, women, relation. It's actually largely about a disconnect from strong social bonds, humans right back to all primates. But humans, how do you guarantee to drive a human crazy? Isolate them, make them spend a lot of time alone? We are social creatures, and social connections and sexual relations and emotional relations, which are sometimes together and sometimes not, are sort of at the heart of what we do. So I know that was a very long answer to your question, but here's the point. It isn't that men and women want different things emotionally or need different things emotionally. It's that our society has structured and pushed them in different ways. The fact is that humans need emotional connection. And these things we call pair bonds, very tight close relations with other humans could be involved sex could be heterosexual, could be homosexual, what have you. But they need one another. We need one another. And so to make an argument that men don't need Emotional connection and women want emotional connection, ignores the actual evidence of what people do. And most importantly, I think ignores the physiology. Our neurobiology, our hormones, our physical reactions, those human responses to closeness, to emotional connection are central. So the idea, and many men have this idea that they don't need emotional attachment. It's actually hurting themselves physically.

[C]

This social context and social conditioning, which you've mentioned a couple of times, why did that arise? What individual social problem was that solving, and for who?

[A]

So there's two sides to this. One is, look, humans need this social context, social contact and connection. Human infants, and I'm sure all of you listening to this, have been around infants. So human infants are surprising because they can't do a thing right. Human infants are born like you. You watch a giraffe. A giraffe is born. Seven minutes later it's standing up. Twelve minutes later, it's running along with its mother. Human infants don't even stand up for over a year. They can't even hold up their head for the first few months. Human infants are the neediest infants in the animal kingdom, and we provide for them. The reason they need so much is because the vast majority of their brain growth, 60% of it, is outside of the womb. No other animal has that. So what humans do, what our bodies, our hormone systems, our physiologies are adapted to do, is to come together around caretaking of infants and each other. And that sets us up. That's where we have to start. Then you want to talk about these gender role differences in these different patterns. We have to ask what society, economic, political structures have been put on us and how does that fit or not fit with our biology, our bodies, and how we evolve to be.

[C]

I was researching for an episode a couple of weeks ago and came across some archaeological studies that were undermining arguments about men being hunters and females being gatherers. And that more and more research suggests that we don't have the evidence to definitively say that. What can you tell me from your research about that binary? How true is it?

[A]

Well, I think the work here you're probably relating to, referring to, is work by Cara Akerbach, Sarah Lacey, Carol Walshler. Incredible scientists, really good hardcore scholars who are showing that our assumptions about what women can and can't do and what men do is a little bit based on common gender assumptions and political ideologies today. So let's ask, what do we see in the past, right? Do we see this huge difference between bodies like men were out stabbing mammoths and women were like holding babies? No. We actually find the same kind of breaks and damages, you know, 50,0001-000002-00000 years ago in male and female bodies. More recently, in the last five, six, seven thousand years, we start to see some real differences, not around hunting, but around agriculture, around societies with resources. And when you start to get elites and hierarchies, then we start to see some real big gender differences. Do men hunt? Yes. Do women hunt? Yes. Do women forage? Yes. Do men forage? Are there some societies where men get together and go hunt big animals and women don't do that? Yes. Do most human societies do that today or in the past? No. So it turns out this whole hunter versus nurturer is garbage. It's not supported by the archaeological evidence. What is supported is a whole bunch of successful ways to be human. There are lots of evidence of men doing big game hunting, lots of evidence of women participating hunts or not participating in hunts. And it's not a clear cut picture. Man the provisioner, woman the nurturer is not true. Human's the provisioner, human's the nurturer, with a whole bunch of different ways to do that. That's what we're really talking about.

[C]

Yeah, that's fascinating. And that dichotomy seems to me to be underneath so many of the myths that circulate online. And we spoke via email initially and I shared with you that study that I was looking at from King's College London and Ipsos, which shows that Gen Z, more than previous generations, think that wives should obey their husbands and should consult husbands when it comes to any important decision that they make. Is there anything in nature that suggests that things are more stable or better when women obey?

[A]

No, absolutely not. And in fact, the term wives and husbands, those are recent inventions, don't even exist in the English language earlier on. So what we have here is this fascinating cultural, political, economic ideology imposed on bodies. Let's ask about bodies. Does it make sense? Take gender out of it for a second. Does it make sense if you have one person, another person, and that one person says, you know, you need to do this, this is what you do. This is what I do. Do you want to be that person who's ordered around and told what to do? Probably not. What we know humans do successfully throughout our entire history is figure stuff out, work together, collaborate. Yeah, sure, there's leaders and there's followers, but those positions change. There's complex relations and there's no evidence that being pregnant or having an infant should be thought about as a One person job. It's in fact always a family, a cluster, a cluster of kin. And so the whole idea that there's one person who like has babies and cooks and another person who gets food and like hangs out and drinks or does whatever they do is made up. It's a real social thing or it's an ideology. But there's no archaeological evidence that that ever characterized the human past.

[C]

Across human existence and different cultures, where do you see polygamy being more common?

[A]

I think we have to be really careful with monogamy and polygamy and polygony, all these different terms, because what we see across culturally recently is patriarchy, that is male power of economic and political control. And in those cases, we see both monogamy and polygyny, that is one man with multiple wives. And we see this emerging in the archaeological record in 4005, 6000, the last 4, 5, 6, 7000 years in many societies, but not in all. But what's really interesting is polygamy, which means multiple partners over the course of a lifetime. That's actually probably characteristic of humans past and present. If people are really honest. Most individuals have a number, maybe not a ton, but a number of very close social relationships that involve sexual relationships across their lifetime. And that's pretty typical. The legal religious thing of marriage, that's a separate category.

[C]

Now you brought up patriarchy. If we look at the micro again, is there anything in human nature which supports the idea of the male of the human species being in the dominant position in intimate relationships or in public life?

[A]

No, there's absolutely not. We don't see evidence of, for example, in the archeological record, like tools use or homes or store, you know, how would we measure this? Right? So there's a couple ways we can look at it. Like if we saw dominance difference, we could see like chemicals in the bones. Like if you're eating different foods, that shows up in the bones, right? Or if certain things, you need a certain strength to make a certain tool or that stuff shows up. We don't see those kinds of clear gender differences embodied right in the body until the last six, seven, eight thousand years before that. Like, we see no difference in tool use or tool manufacturer. So stone tools and things like that. So we always assume guys like wrenches and hammers and women like, I don't know, cooking things, not in any of our past evidence. There's no evidence that there was a gender or sex based cooking or tool use at all. And so that's really interesting because we do start to see it in the last six to 8,000 years, where we start to see differences in burials, differences in some of the chemical makeup of bones, showing different diets. And we start to see this with evidence of towns of storage, of, like, different kinds of economic and political systems and maybe the emergence of patriarchy. There's a lot of people who study this, but what's really interesting is you go to 20,000, 50,000, 100,000, 200,000 years ago and look at our ancestors and you just don't see the kinds of differences we see today amongst genders. That doesn't mean that gender wasn't there and there weren't different gender patterns. They just weren't the same as they are today.

[C]

And that moment, that turning point, is that attributed to the fact that you have the agricultural revolution and it's possible to have surplus, and that has to be organized and perhaps passed down, and structures are changing.

[A]

Yes, I wish I had a time machine, because we can theorize all we want, but without a time machine, it's really hard to tell. But you sort of hit it on, I think. Here's what we think. Once you start to settle down, once you start to have surplus and storage, you start to see different kinds of competition between groups. This is when we see the first sort of patterns of, like, organized things like warfare is when we start to see centralized control of goods, like, you know, grain or, you know, access to animals or resources. And this is when we start to see, like, certain people having lots of goodies and other people not having lots of goodies. So all of that stuff seems to come as a package. And that's also when we start to see not exclusive but more common patterns of male dominance in the social and political and economic sphere. So patriarchy as it's as measurable in the archaeological record emerges, you know, six to eight, 9,000 years ago in some societies, and today it's still pretty dominant. And we do have to ask the question, what's going on? One answer I can give you. It's not human evolution. It's not something that's pre described in our genes or in the ways humans succeeded in the past. This is relatively new. So trying to unpack or figure out why patriarchy is so common now is actually a good challenge. It's a great question. But let me stress, the fact that patriarchy is present now doesn't mean that it was present in our deep past, because we have no evidence for that. What we do know is that human bodies are not nearly as different, male and female, as we like to think there's some important differences, right? But they're not two different kinds of human, and they are certainly not biologically driven to different kinds of sexualities, different kinds of emotional relationships or different kinds of caring. Humans evolved a particular kind of sex social care system. It's the system we still have. We just mess with it with a bunch of cultural ideologies.

[C]

One of these cultural ideologies is the notion of alpha males and beta males and mate selection, that women are choosing men and have always chosen men because of what they can offer financially, how they can provide, being tall and strong and attractive. How true is that?

[A]

Well, let's pick this apart a little bit. I mean, my initial response is it's not true, right? It's actually much more complicated than that. What makes someone attractive? That's actually a really good question. In some contemporary Western societies, it's being tall, right? If you're a guy, not if you're a woman. In other contexts, it's like people with a lot of money are attractive in some ways. But ask everyone, what do they physically get turned on by? Who do they feel emotionally connected to in their own lives? What have the relationships been like that they've developed with people? And you're going to find it's very complicated and not uniform. People are attracted to all sorts of different kinds of things. But let's go to the data, right? Are there archaeological evidence that, like, some kings had lots of offspring? Sure. Are most human beings kings? Is there a genetic heritage to being a king? No, these are all social and historical frames. So when we really are interested in human relationships, emotional attachments, attraction, sex, we need to ask about the biology, we need to ask about the bodies, and we need to ask about what people actually sense. And the bottom line is there's no one right answer. There's no one way to be attractive. There's no one way to be reproductively successful. There's no one way. There's actually lots of ways to do this for people. And again, I implore you and everyone talking about this to sort of think, what about your own lives? You know, what, what's turned you on about someone? Or what kind of emotional relationships have you developed and why? And when you ask yourself that, you're like, oh, that's actually really interesting because that doesn't necessarily fit with like, what I'm supposed to be attracted to, or

[C]

like, do you think there's quite a loud performative aspect too, that people know what they should be attracted to and what society will reward them? For externally versus what they actually get turned on by?

[A]

Yeah. I mean, this is how culture works, right? We have cultural norms and expectations, and when you step outside of those expectations, you get punished, right? Or people find you strange. That's how culture works. That's not right or wrong, it just is. And so then you have to ask yourself, well, why are certain people making these masculinity arguments or femininity arguments, when in fact there's huge variation in successful ways to be a man or a woman? Why do they make these? And then you got to step back and ask, well, power, control, different kinds of things. Let me just put it really, really straightforwardly. If you look at the actual. Just evolutionary, biological measurements, reproductive success and things like that, being a star footballer doesn't. The contemporary mode, it might get you fame and maybe more access to something, but it's not genetic, right, in the sense of that opportunity. And it doesn't mean your offspring are going to be star footballers and have more of kids. This whole argument about the attractive male or the attractive female does all this stuff. It's not true. First of all, almost everyone reproduces and that's one of the things we have to remind ourselves of. And most people don't reproduce very much. So let's get back to the actual biology if we're going to make those arguments. But let's also recognize the power of culture, the power of sort of gender ideology and the power of advertising, right? I mean, half of this masculinity stuff is just trying to sell you something, sell you a way to be, or sell you some way to buy a product. And let us not forget that, because that's really important.

[C]

It's essential. Is there a modern belief that you hear repeated about relationships, sex or gender roles that frustrates you the most?

[A]

Oh, there are so many. But I think the one we started with here, the idea that males are this way and females are this way, to be a real man, you have to be this way. To be a real woman, you have to be this way. It's just really problematic for me because I know a lot of men and a lot of women, right? And they're really variable. They do their thing in different ways, their bodies are different and their ways of being beautiful, more ugly, are also different. And I think that's something we have to give ourselves. If we as a society, I mean, writ large, just opened up. Step back a little bit and stop saying there's one way to do this, right? We'd actually be happier with ourselves. Think of all think of, like, what's it called when these kids are hitting their face with a hammer or whatever and like breaking their faces and, you know, trying to. Or dosing up on testosterone at a young age. You know, these young looks. Maxing. Exactly. So, you know, think about that. So from a physiological perspective, let me just tell you, no, this is really a bad idea in so many ways. And I guarantee you it's not going to lead to higher reproductive success. So let's step back and ask, why would someone do that? It's a very strange thing. And I'm concerned. I'm concerned for young men, I'm concerned for young women right now because I study human bodies, their evolutionary history and how they work today in human societies. And I'm worried that people are trying to meet certain expectations or certain ways to be that are harming not just their psyche, but actually harming their bodies. And that's not a good thing. That's why I'm worried about these sort of ridiculous, oversimplified assertions about what it means to be human.

[C]

And there's so many pressures combining at once. You have the global exposure to all of these people and senses of comparison and competition. You have online ecosystems, you have these trends that are extremely new but like you say, are making people adjust themselves permanently, all combining at one time and impacting this generation, which does feel particularly scary. And I always used to. I always used to remark at school that the ugly teenagers. And I will just, I'll say this, I was definitely one of them. That you build character. Because if you don't feel like you have that, then you do invest more in your education. I think you do try and be funnier and you have other things going for you and that serves a purpose far later in life. Because everyone's looks are going to go,

[A]

yeah, I love this because you just sort of made the whole point that I'm trying to say here is that whatever that ideal is and it changes. Like, what looks good now was not what looked good 20 years ago or 40 years ago. Right? So that cultural ideology around good looks and all these people who say, well, no, there's a certain waist to hip ratio or certain waist or breasts or face that looks. That's not true. It changes all the time. And when you actually do the studies, there's no correlation between these things and actual attraction in a physiological sense. But let's put all that aside. What you said is that people who don't fit some ideal, just human, right? We just do our stuff. We're like hey, I'm going to learn, I'm going to navigate. And you know what? Many of those people are very successful, beautiful, engaged, very happy, regardless of what the societal appropriate way to look or be is. And I think that's our skill set, right? There's many successful ways to be human and that's beautiful.

[C]

If Augustine helped us answer what is natural, the next question is what is traditional or what is historical? Marriage first appears in the written record around 2000 BC in the ancient near east as a legal an economic arrangement tied to inheritance, property, legitimacy, not primarily love. Over time, religion helped to moralise and sacralize it, while states increasingly regulated it through law. Religion is of course a key ingredient here, but not in the simple way that online traditionalists sometimes suggest. A lot of language used in trad wife and manosphere spaces like headship, submission, wifely duty, male leadership draws quite openly on conservative religious ideas, from Christianity to Islam. In other periods and traditions, religion could also place limits on male behavior. From the 18th century onward, especially in the west, romantic love became more central. And in the 20th century, marriage shifted further towards companionship, ideas of consent, women's legal equality, easier divorce, and in many countries, same sex marriage. In other words, marriage has never been one fixed timeless model. It has continually changed. And that is relevant because when people online say traditional marriage, they are not usually picturing ancient Mesopotamia or medieval West Africa or early modern peasant households. They're usually imagining what seems to be a compressed fantasy made up from very different sources like biblical language, Victorian domestic ideals and mid 20th century breadwinner household all blurred into one. That flattening male breadwinner, female homemaker, domestic order is especially visible in the tradwife trend. My husband's been craving a milkshake for the past two days, and today I finally got around to making him one.

[B]

I was held captive by this one quote. Nothing tastes as good as feeling good feels. What we've been doing lately is we've been going out to the garden and picking everything that day that needs to be harvested. This was Sunday after church meal.

[C]

So that brings us to the real historical question. When the manosphere and tradwife culture talks about traditional values, are they reviving something genuinely old or assembling something new from fragments of the past? To answer that, I spoke to legal historian Professor Rebecca Prebert. When does marriage emerge as a legal thing to begin with?

[B]

That's a huge question. In its modern form, you know, it's sort of regulated by the Church in England and Wales, certainly from around the 12th century. So that's the point at which we see sort of marriage taking on a sort of distinctly modern form with a ceremony and certain rights and responsibilities flowing from it. So my research really sort of is from the 17th century onwards in England and Wales. And by that point, you know, marriage is very much in a sort of recognisable modern form. You have the Canons of 1604 setting out the sort of requirements for banns or alternatively for a marriage license, that the marriage will be in church, conducted by an Anglican Minister.

[C]

In the 17th century, what were the expectations that people would have of marriage?

[B]

So, I mean, one strong expectation was that marriage would be for life, mainly because divorce simply wasn't an option. You know, we often have this sort of idea that Henry VIII brought divorce to England and Wales, but. But his marriages to Catherine of Aragon and Anne of Cleves, and in fact, Anne Boleyn, were terminated by annulments rather than divorces in the. In the modern sense. So start of the 17th century, you do not have divorce in the sense of ending a valid marriage and allowing the parties to remarry. You have separations which are confusingly called divorces, and you have annulments which are also confusingly called divorces. But you don't have divorce in the. In that. In that modern sense. And you don't get that until much later into the. The 17th century when Parliament starts to grant divorces to individuals.

[C]

What impact does that have on society, men and women, their freedom, their insecurity?

[B]

Although you get the first parliamentary divorce in, in 1670, I think it takes a very long time before you could say that divorce actually becomes available. So the second divorce isn't until the 1690s. You know, we've not got this kind of sudden flurry of divorces. And all the way through to the mid 19th century, you've got around 300 divorces across that entire period. So it isn't available in any meaningful sense. Even after 1857, once you get the. The advent of judicial divorce, it's still only adultery that is the basis for divorce. And in the case of wife, a wife, she has to sort of prove aggravated adultery. So adultery plus some other matrimonial offense. And even when you get the sort of wide. Sorry, even when you get the widening of the. The grounds for divorce, it's only really once you get legal aid in the mid 20th century that you could say that divorce genuinely becomes available.

[C]

When people today talk about traditional marriage and this particular model of a wife obeying her husband, the husband being the breadwinner. What period do you think they're thinking about and does that actually exist?

[B]

I suppose the sort of immediate image that comes to mind is that the sort of 1950s, 50s marriage. And I think that's certainly very much the aesthetic that you. You get in the sort of the trad wife movement. And it's, you know, it's a very understandable choice because you've got great fashion and the benefits of modern technology. I think the idea of doing housework without a fridge and a vacuum cleaner is, is much less attractive.

[C]

Yes.

[B]

How far the 1950s were actually a sort of time when you had this traditional model is much more open to debate. So the percentage of wives in paid employment actually rises during the 1950s in England or Wales to just under 50% by 1959. So it's still a minority, but it's a really quite substantial minority who are working during their marriage.

[C]

What is marriage initially for in the mind of the public and people who get married? And does that change over the years?

[B]

So I think marriage has always performed lots of different functions over time. I think there is this idea that it's about the transmission of property and legitimacy and inheritance, but I don't think that really holds water because that implies that it's only relevant to those who had property and assets to inherit. And, you know, the work that I've sort of done reconstructing who actually got married shows that, you know, marriage percolates down the social scale. It's not just about. It's not just relevant to those who had property. If you look at it from the sort of church's point of view, you can see them sort of trying to corral and limit sexual activity within a socially approved framework. There's also something really valuable, I think, in the Anglican marriage service, which is something that you could see as transcending time, which is this idea that marriage is ordained for the sort of mutual help and comfort that one spouse has of the other. You know, it's basically saying there's somebody there who's. Who's got your back no matter what happens. So, you know, there's some purposes you can see as time specific and other purposes that still have value today.

[C]

Obviously I'm asking you about things changing over the course of several centuries and obviously different parts of society as well. But you mentioned having each other's back. Marriage is often described as teamwork today. But we also hear these refrains about the traditional model where a woman would obey her husband. How important or present was this notion of Obedience at the beginning of your research and then tracing it to a later period like today.

[B]

And we've actually sort of start at the end point, actually. So I think that the sort of. There's an exaggerated idea of how important obedience was and continues to be. So I was involved in a recent empirical project that asked people about their weddings and several of our female interviewees actually commented how surprised they were that they hadn't had to promise to obey their husbands. And for me it was their surprise that was completely surprising because these were couples who are getting married in a register office. And the words required by statute have always been completely symmetrical right back to 1837 when that option was first introduced. Yeah. So the idea of saying obey has never had any sort of traction within the sort of state approved words. Now the word obey is there in the Anglican marriage service, so that has been there since the early 17th century and before. Wife promises to love, honour and obey her husband. And until 1837, getting married in the Anglican church was pretty much your only option. So virtually every woman who got married before that date would have promised to obey. I don't think that necessarily means that wives were invariably deferential to their husbands. There's this great source from the 1790s which is the diary of a farmer's wife. And it's clearly a very sort of loving partnership. But she also teases him on occasion and when he gets in a. In a huff, she sort of describes him as a big silly in her. In her diary, which I think is just, you know, it's a lovely little insight into the way that sort of quite ordinary people are sort of navigating these, these ideas. And it's also quite telling that there aren't really any legal remedies available to a husband whose wife didn't obey him. So although you've got that kind of language there, it's not really carried through as something that's so central to the law and the legal concept of marriage that it has to be rigorously enforced. And then just one sort of final point, that actually even the Anglican ceremony no longer requires brides to promise to obey. So as long ago as 1928, there was a revised version of the service that allowed you to omit that word. And I suspect that most brides getting married in the Anglican Church today are choosing the alternative options.

[C]

My producer Louise asked me before this interview. She was curious if there are examples in the historical sources during the time periods that you look at, of women clearly leading marriage or making important decisions about the household.

[B]

I think the short answer to that is that you can find examples of every single type of marriage at every single point in history. Some will clearly be more dominant than others at different times. But so much comes down to the individual personalities of the parties. And yes, you've always had wives who've sort of been economically active. They might have been running a business before their marriage and continue to do so after their marriage. And that gives them kind of more clout then within the relationship.

[C]

This notion of the male as the breadwinner and the female as the stay at home mother or homemaker, how does that stand up to scrutiny and how does that depend on what class of society we're talking about?

[B]

Yeah, so really depends on economics and the sort of, the changing ways that work is organized over time as well. The breadwinner homemaker model basically assumes a separation between home and work, that you've got a husband who's actually going out to earn a wage or a salary. And it also assumes that that income or salary will be sufficient to support the whole family. So the first of those, that separation between home and work is clearly something that's changed over time. So one of my colleagues at Exeter, Jane Whittle, has done a lot of work on women's roles in early modern England. And in her recent book she discusses how the household is basically, you know, the basic unit of production in that period. So you'll have wives performing an economic role alongside their husband. She's got evidence not just of them sort of working in the dairy and taking responsibility for food production, but also helping out in the fields as well. So there's very much a sense of there, of, you know, this is a partnership. The husband and wife might be performing slightly different roles at different times, but they're both contributing economically because that's just necessary to make it work and sustain the family. And even as you sort of start to shift towards a more industrial society, a lot of work is still performed at home. You know, early sort of weaving and spinning industry isn't in factories, it's in individual homes. And it's only really with the Industrial revolution and the separation of home from work that it becomes harder for wives to combine both, at least while the children are young. And it's during that period in the 19th century where you also start to get campaigns for men to be paid a family wage that will allow them to support themselves and the, and the wife and children. But as I said at the start, you know, their ability to do so is not something that can be taken for granted. So, you know, throughout all of the centuries we're looking at, you've always had wives going out to work. The precise proportion may have fluctuated over time, but they've sort of definitely been providing sort of economic input into the household as well as care work.

[C]

I'm moving through the myths now. So we also have a commonly repeated idea that women were thought of as men, men's property. How true was that? And is that actually the, the best way to think of how they saw it?

[B]

So I'm trying to get to the bottom of this particular myth because you see a lot of references by 20th century judges saying, of course, we no longer regard a wife as a husband's property. I have yet to find an 18th century judge saying, of course we regard a wife as her, her husband's property. And I think a lot of

[A]

sort

[B]

of legal, legal remedies have been sort of reinterpreted through the lens of this idea of, of wives being the husband's property. So that, you know, it's never literally true that a wife is a, is a chattel. You find it being used sort of metaphorically quite often by those who are campaigning against women's very real legal disadvantages. There's kind of a lot to disentangle in sort of thinking about, well, you know, it's clearly not literally true, but what did people actually mean when they referred to wives as property? And of course, there is also some evidence that people did think about marriage in that way. There's evidence given to the Royal Commission in 1912 where some women are complaining that that is how the sort of husbands see the marital relationship. But it's not something that really sort of finds any support in the, in the actual law. And you do also find some examples of it being used the other way around as well, that the whole idea of marriage is about sort of ownership, but that applies equally. So a wife could equally talk about having some kind of ownership rights over her husband.

[C]

That's fascinating. Where do you see examples of that?

[B]

You see it in certain contemporary literature. You see it sometimes as a, as a criticism of marriage, that it sort of encourages this sort of idea of possession. But that criticism is equally leveled at husbands and wives.

[C]

Something which in my mind had always seemed to be linked to this notion of possession is whether or not violence was tolerated in a marriage and what was allowed by law, what was common practice? Could men beat their wives? Did wives have recourse? What can you tell me about that?

[B]

Yeah, so again, there's this really sort of common and persisting myth that it was legal for a man to beat his wife with a stick, as long as that stick was no bigger than a man's thumb. And I think Maeve Doggett wrote a book back in the 80s or 90s exploding that as a. As a myth, you know, and again, we know where that. That comes from. It's. It's a. It's a cartoon by gilray in the 1780s, picking up on some dictate by a. By a judge. From other sources, it's very clear that that isn't the law. When Blackstone was writing in 1760s, he. He refers to the old law that a husband might give his wife moderate correction. But even then he's emphasising that violence had always been prohibited and that, you know, even now this idea of moderate correction is outdated.

[C]

What do you think moderate correction meant at the time?

[B]

I think it's what we would today talk about as, you know, domestic abuse, quite frankly. But I think the more important point is saying that that isn't allowed anymore. And I think we always need to be slightly careful about accounts that say, well, this was allowed in the past, because that's quite a common tactic for making the modern law look better. Examples I've recently found that I'd just like to share. So there's one from around 1816 where it's a terrible case. This man has beaten his wife and his wife has died. And his counsel is sort of trying to get the judge to say that there's a defence because he was using a stick that wasn't particularly thick. And the judge is absolutely having none of this. He's saying there is absolutely no such defence in English law. And the jury basically immediately find this man guilty, which means the death penalty. So, you know, the stakes couldn't be higher there. And, you know, everyone is agreed that this is. This is completely not acceptable. I've got another example from a little bit later in the century which is happily not a fatal attack, but again, it's a nasty attack. This man hits his wife over the head with a poker. Now, when she takes him to court, his counsel is again trying to say, well, perhaps she just fell against the wall and hit her head. And surely that's a far more natural explanation. But again, the magistrates are having none of this. You know, they take her word over his in terms of what's happened, they send him to prison and they also condemn his conduct as unmanly, which I think is really emphasizing that, you know, this is not something that's good men do. This is not how we expect husbands to behave.

[C]

I find that really compelling, especially with all the discussion at the moment about masculinity and what it means. Exactly. Why do you think notions of hierarchy within marriage, cherry picking of these historical facts and hierarchies between husbands and wives, wives obeying their husbands. Why do you think these ideas have become much more popular now in a certain demographic?

[B]

So you can see it as being a sort of very modern reaction to the uncertainties of modern life and also perceived loss of. Loss of status. I think, you know, the sort of idea of obedience is quite a troubling one and also sort of from the man's point of view, I would have thought a profoundly unsatisfying one. What you can sort of see as underpinning that sort of narrative about obedience is really a kind of yearning for some kind of respect. And I think if we sort of couched it in those terms, that would be a much more positive way of framing the debate. Because you can say, yes, marriage should be about respect, but it's about mutual respect. And again, I think that's something you can see as an ideal across the centuries. So if I can bring in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice here, the saddest line in the novel is where Mr. Bennet is talking to Lizzie and wanting to really make sure that she does want to marry Mr. Darcy because she likes him and not because he's got a big house. And he says, let me not have the grief of seeing you unable to respect your partner in life. And those ideas. You know, this is written at the end of the 18th century, published in the early 19th century, and you've got those ideas of respect and partnership front and center as the ideal there.

[C]

Yeah, that's a really fascinating take. So what would you say, based on everything that you've encountered when you've been researching, would surprise people the most about the history of.

[B]

Of marriage?

[C]

Are there any particular myths that you think need debunking?

[B]

First and foremost, the one thing that would probably surprise people the most is how seriously domestic violence is taken in earlier centuries. I think, you know, we have this idea that it was just dismissed as, you know, just a domestic. But if you spend any time reading 19th century newspapers, you. You cannot help but fall over cases of women coming to court with tales of violence and being believed and the husband's being punished for it.

[C]

Debates today online seem to proliferate about the value of marriage for women, whether or not it is inherently additive or if it's disempowering. When you're looking at the period of history that you study, is marriage something that gives women power, takes it away, or does a bit of both at once?

[B]

It does a bit of both at once, basically. So if you're sort of thinking about it in, in economic terms, there will be cases where marriage is financially disadvantageous for women. But given that women's work has pretty much always been underpaid up until relatively recently, marriage generally strengthened a woman's economic position insofar as she was part of a household with more money coming in. Now. You've also then, of course, got to acknowledge that at least up until the sort of late 19th century, Wives were under certain legal disadvantages, that they might have been earning money before their marriage, they might have built up certain property, but on marriage, control of that passed to their husband. But, you know, feminist campaigns to reform that resulted in change, with married women gaining control of their own wages in 1870 and over the rest of their property in 1882. So, you know, a lot of the legal disadvantages of marriage have now been consigned to history. And it's probably worth noting that marriage today does provide more protection for women than cohabitation does. So again, it's not just are you comparing sort of single versus married, but also stages cohabiting versus marriage. There's no such thing as common law marriage in England and Wales, so cabinets don't have the same rights when a relationship comes to an end. And again, marriage has always been better for women in terms of the rights available upon breakdown. So the sort of corollary of a husband acquiring control over his rights assets is that actually the husband also had the duty to support his wife, and if he ran off, parish officials would pursue him and require him to support his wife or go to prison. So I spend a lot of time looking at the kind of records where officials are spending time and money making sure that men are fulfilling their obligations to their wives.

[C]

If marriage has moved, however unevenly, toward consent, companionship, and greater equality, why are some people reviving the language of obedience and command? Part of the answer is clearly certainty in an uncertain age. Scholars of the manosphere point again and again to social pressures like isolation, economic insecurity, status anxiety, feeling lost like less of a man, backlash against feminism and online platforms that turn grievance into identity and make massive sums doing it. That helps explain the appeal. It takes a difficult world, insecure work, shifting gender roles and confused expectations, and offers a very simple men lead, women follow order returns, and research on tradwife culture points to a parallel dynamic. Historically, though, this is not simply an older tradition being revived in the present. It's a modern repackaging of older domestic patriarchal ideals presented through aspiration, cute aesthetics, and monetization. It doesn't just sell a lifestyle, but an answer. And that's why this episode was never really just about marriage. It's about the use of history and biology to make a certain power dynamic look inevitable. Augustin Fuentes made clear that from his perspective, hierarchy is not hardwired. Rebecca Prabert showed us that traditional marriage was never the simple, stable institution that its modern defenders often imagine. The past doesn't give us one eternal template for marriage, it gives us so many. What the manusphere and tradwife culture often presents as a timeless truth is actually something much narrower, purposely selected features of older systems completely stripped of their context and complexity. So when people say they want to go back to traditional marriage, they're often not really talking about history at all. They're talking about hierarchy. Thank you for watching History Uncensored. Let me know your thoughts in the comments and I'll see you next time.