ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to discuss the suggestion that the fear of women acts to regulate population size, to see the strands of meaning and argument which are involved in proving or disproving such a suggestion. It provides some of the problems which arise in giving evidence for population pressure and assesses for the sake of argument that there is population pressure. The chapter discusses whether horror mulberries would in fact control the population size. It analyses some aspects of explanation given in ecological terms, particularly the notion of adaptation, since these aspects are crucial to the validity of an explanation given in terms of population pressure. Several authors have proposed very ambitious explanations for large-scale societal phenomena as forms of population regulation. A comparison of groups for honor mulieris as a function of population pressure should ideally take these factors, as well as land- and people- redistributive mechanisms, into account.
