oopsiedoop said:
Also, regarding animals, ******* just stand there while one male after another has sex with her. No running away. And isn't it the female cats who cry so loudly all night in the alley while they're in heat? And not cause they're *******! Plus, the most important feature is that males don't usually, or as often, certainly, try to mate with females when the female is not in heat. And in most species, the male does something or has some feature to attract females. I haven't studied this, I've just noticed these things, so I may be interpreting things incorrectly. But I've noticed that it could be seen as female biology which determines or even initiates mating to a large degree.
Mishka is essentially correct, though.
While there's usually some form of estrous cycle in female mammals, but male members are always the gender that competes and pursues, often violently. Most male mammals don't show much interest in females not in heat indeed - there's no real biological reason for it; it'll be a waste of effort.
Unfortunately or otherwise, many evidently intelligent or 'advanced' mammals increasingly have males that essentially force females to have sex with them with visibly violent behavior. If new lion takes over a pride of lionnesses, he typically slaughters the cubs so that the females come into estrus again; lion males occasionally even attack and kill females outright, which is incredibly maladaptive behavior. Dolphin males often essentially practice a form of gang ****. Chimpanzees actually engage in a basic form of warfare to take over ownership of females. Even house cats fight over the female, and their penii is barbed such that the act of mating is painful for the female. Wolves are among the most lethal and simply kill off rival males - besides human beings, wolves are common intraspecies killers.
Pair-bounding isn't very common for social mammals; some form of polygamy often is and it rewards the 'most fit' male at the expense of 'less fit' males overall. The reverse, polyandry, is extremely rare. If its a social group with an alpha male, then he will typically mate with all or almost all females in the group.
Human females don't have an obvious estrous signals like most primates do, instead displaying markers of estrous at all times: secondary sexual characteristics such as breasts and hips(and perhaps why men are almost genetically programmed to find those fascinating). There are some theories why this is so; the one I lean toward is that by appearing 'available' at all times, primordial females gained the advantage of male protection and support by apparently being reproductively valuable at all times.
At any rate, early human societies do seem to affirm Mishka's thesis: bride capture is common in most tribal societies and in almost every patrilineal society(which would be most), it is also a patriarchy; basically, in other ways, in every society where men tend to claim ownership of their children, they also claim the majority of power. This patriarchy is usually exacerbated with increasing wealth: !kung-bushmen and hunting-gathering tribes that live on essentially a sustenance level of existence have division of labor but little gender structure, while chiefdoms and feudal states with higher overall wealth display vast gender inequalities while encouraging ambitious and aggressive men as can be witnessed in the appearance of social structures such as polygamy.
There are exceptions, but those are rare and often feature astounding ignorance: there's one tribe that does not connect conception with sex - sex is just practiced generally and birth is seen as a magical occurrence. Since men are not aware of their exact contribution to the descent nor of paternity of children, all resources are simply allocated to the general upbringing of children and their mothers.
tl;dr version: humans probably do have some biological programming in us, but we're very socially developed creatures as well. Essentially, expect us to all be rather confused with many different signals firing off in our brains
