Issues of evolution and gender were popularized through the nineteenth-century feminists, followed by the debate of “women question”: what roles should women be afforded in Anglo-American society? (Montgomery 2012). Darwin’s Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation (1871) was significantly influenced by the social discussion on evolution and gender in the Age of Victoria, and the theory of sexual selection originated from the book is widely employed by both antifeminists and feminists to promote their diverse views of women in the process of evolution (Montgomery 2013). The problem of sexuality and social norms fall within the scope of evolutionary studies when the perspective of sexual selection are applied to it.
Indeed, …show more content…
When an agent dies, the site he/she used to occupy will be empty, and the empty sites are scarce reproductive resources for which the agents compete. The rule of reproduction varies according to the types of social systems. Hereby we propose two types of society: the patriarchy and the matriarchy. The definitions of these two social systems vary for different scholars and disciplines, and we are not going to continue the theoretical debate on it (Beechey 1979; Young 1981; Kandiyoti 1988; Walby 1990). A simple but general definition for patriarchy depicts the concept as a system of social structure and practice in which males dominate, oppress and control females with a solid material base (Walby 1990, Della Giusta & Scuritti 2005). For simplicity, we model the patriarchal society in the perspective of the dominance of reproduction: in a patriarchal society, male agents have the priority to compete for the empty sites in order to place the offspring. Males without a dominance over at least one empty site cannot successfully mate with others or reproduce offspring. The contest for an empty site follows the rule as follows: the empty site is dominated by the neighboring male agent with locally (i.e. within the von Neumann neighborhood) the highest total sexual attractiveness. If all the neighbors of the empty site are females, then the dominance goes to the female neighbor with the highest total sexual attractiveness. The agent who controls an empty site then takes the power of choosing mates among his/her neighbors of different gender according to his/her preference. Specifically, if a APM or APF controls an empty site, he then chooses mate by equation (4). The chosen mate cannot refuse the mating invitation not only because of the male oppression of women (in most cases the dominant agent is male) but also due to the scarcity of the reproductive chance (i.e. the empty