Men are from Mars, women are a PITA
I have been accused of "saying that women are ***" in the following post. The text below the line is the entire original post. This preamble is a rebuttal to the accusation.
If you actually read it, I start with a cynical and not very flattering speculation on why men might originally have exhibited certain behaviours. Then I extend this into the modern world and use it to successfully predict a situation every man knows all too well. While I do say that in this situation women become insufferable, if the reader is paying attention it should be clear that I have attributed this to the situation - I am saying that both parties are victims of circumstance. I follow that with an oblique chuckle about men's venality, and change track to muse on past solutions to this conundrum, and how social evolution has deprived us of any relief. At no point do I suggest that any of this was right or fair or deserved, I merely comment on its social function.
If you're a feminist baying for blood you have a bit of a problem at this point, because in order to prove me wrong you'll have to be nice to me.
The great "men's secret" of hunter-gatherers was that hunting entailed a couple of days bushwalking with your buddies culminating with a bit of light trapping on the way back. Why come back at all? Laundry, sex and the opportunity to be the conquering hero. You leave again just before your exalted status expires.
We can't live like that any more. We're trapped with them. So we have to use other means to prevent familiarity from breeding contempt. A woman who holds you in contempt is a pain in the ass. Worse, she will not hesitate to badmouth you and deliberately run interference on any attempts to replace her with a younger model.
Curiously, a lot (most?) women like being dominated. While the evidence for this statement is anecdotal, it is also widespread. Anyone who doesn't think so is clearly a virgin.
The question, then, is how to dominate them. Traditional societies - including, until quite recently, our own - were very specific. Periodic beatings of his woman were regarded as an unpleasant duty necessary to the welfare and happiness of a man's household.
Administration of corporal punishment was strictly regulated to balance compassion with necessity. Who could do it, how and with what, how hard and how often were strictly governed by a mixture of social convention and law. This was hardly gratuitous violence. The whole exercise was regarded as an unpleasant chore.
Control of all but the most recalcitrant younger women fell to the wife, who might, if all else failed, ask her husband to apply corporal punishment. Vestiges of this remain: "You wait till your father gets home!" deliberately abstracts the punishment so that a child learns that there are rules and the enforcer is just the messenger. This is not domestic violence, it's a local justice system. Domestic violence is what you get when idiots dismantle a vital part of their social system.