The notion of women as property is terribly widespread. What do women get out of it? Not a lot, obviously. But perhaps more from being private property than communal. Obviously a woman in a burqa is not valued for herself. But she is valued for something more than just sex. The common shore — the woman who is treated as property of a gang of men is even worse off than she who is treated as the property of one man and her children less likely to survive. So, if there were genes for male possessiveness, they would spread at the expense of (equally hypothetical) male lack of jealousy.
Of course, all this is wandering off into the question of “genes for” and back to my argument with Larry Moran. But I don’t mind talking about “Genes for” providing that we realise that the causality is all with the thing they are “for”.