animist wrote: . . . . that male domination is largely due simply (well not really simply, but ultimately and complexly) to greater physical size and strength.
This is 'not even wrong'. . .
Some factors contributing to the current situation, in which men maintain very considerable power over women include
1. Historically, women have been confined to homestead and childrearing, while men have claimed control of territory, and have engaged more directly in trade, power-politics, and other suchy competition for social status.. Pre-historically, males tended to hunt while females foraged, keeping the children with them. (Probably because the children were too noisy to take on stealthy hunting for relatively small game, and too little to take on the less stealthy long-distance chases after larger game).
2. A major driver of evolutionary intelligence in primates has been the use of social skill in gaining social status, and thereby access to mates. This is true in almost all primates, and applies equally to males and to females. In the human, this striving for social status has taken the form, over the last few millenia, of control of land and other property.
3. The male human has no instinctive means of distinguishing between 'his own' offspring and the offspring of other males. This has led to a need to control women's sexual activity, as the only (or at least the simplest) way of minimising the 'risk' of expending energy on raising 'someone else's' child. Once male property began to be significant in establishing social status, the question of inheritance brought with it a further requirement to ensure that property, particulary land, went to one's own sons.
In human violence, the difference in physical size is less significant than testosterone aggression, and in modern technological societies size is rendered less significant still by the availability of weapons.
It is true that the males of most herd or group species tend to be more aggressive than the females. This has an evolutionary benefit. In mammals, males and females are born in roughly equal numbers, but most of the males are unnecessary for reproduction. Species survive more successfully if the males perform some other useful role which counterbalances their consumption of so much of the available food.
In some species, particularly those that move in herds or groups, this compensatory role has been a tendency to move towards danger, instead of away from it. If a herd loses 20 percent of its females, it loses 20 percent of its reproductive capacity. If it loses 20 percent of its males, the reproductive rate will probably not be affected. One consequence of this has been that males engage in competitive displays of aggression, with the 'winner' being selected by ovulating females. Larger males would have a considerable advantage over the smaller in these combats.. The sons of such mating are likely to continue their father's self-risking behaviour, to the benefit of the whole group. They are also likely to become, over the long term, noticeably larger than the females.
This sexual dimorphism continues in some species, even when direct combat has been replaced with other, more complex selection processes, such as primate status-play. Consider the male gorilla.
PS: Among many species, (for example raptors) the male is often noticeably smaller than the female. Any of your proposed biological explanations for increased sex-drive in the male would apply to these species also. Size is really quite unimportant. (I would say that, wouldn't I?)
