 |
| QUEEN HATSHEPSUT SMILING |
THE REVOLUTION IS HERE
The men don't know
But the little girls understand
- Willie Dixon
Saturday, August 8, 2015
Thursday, July 30, 2015
Revolution XX Is Here, PART ONE
Revolution XX Is Here: A Long Story (PART ONE)
INTRODUCTION: IN THE LOST TIME
Once there was an old, old house, with the blackened ceilings of paleolithic fires and the painted walls of Gravittian hunters. In this house lived a small young woman and a bigger young man. Her first baby came at thirteen, her tenth at twenty-five, and then she died of a hemorrhage. The young man took another mate and hunted for all who survived. When he came home with meat, he was celebrated, respected, as a hero. But his life, too, was short. He died of cold on a hunting trip.
They were fully modern humans, having developed bipedalism a hundred thousand years before. They did speak together, and there is no reason to believe that the biological musth called Love did not come upon them as they shared in each others' tribulations and triumphs.
We are their descendants, and in many ways we still follow the ancient ways. These ways were ancient even when they lived. These ways stretch back to the other primates and further, to the period when reptiles and mammals split and the mammals developed sex chromosomes.
We are ancient, and we live in a long continuum. But our lives are short: a mean life expectancy of twenty-five or younger when that old house was built, and a brief eighty revolutions around the sun today.
The young woman in that smoky house was mated to a boy very early in her life, though we don't know the social institutions that led her to mate, whether she chose to or was forced to. Once she entered a stable sexual relationship, though, her life was narrow and predictable from then on. She would be pregnant or lactating so often that menstruation would be an exception. She would never know menopause. There would always be a baby on her hip or her back. She would gather tubers or the local vegetables, she would stay close to home, and she would be responsible for the children as her mate was responsible for the meat.
3000 generations went by. The old family was lost in time, leaving only a jawbone perhaps, or a high-arched footprint turned to rock from African river mud. In this new time, archaeologists, paleontologists, geneticists and other scientists dug for clues as to their own origins. Ethologists and zoologists and anthropologists joined in the search. Biologists became interested. The speculations of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had to guess at the state of humans before civilization, were no longer accepted at face value. The folkorists and mythologists and ancient historians stepped back. Empirical evidence began to flow from the burial-mounds, the cave bones, the hunting sketches.
Scientists presented their findings, argued and fought, and added to the work until vague shapes began to appear. The shapes were the real outlines of ancient human societies. And the most significant findings, almost all could agree, revolved around sex; the differences between men and women, the development of male dominance in human society, and the silence of women and the conversation of men.
Very recently a new theory of biology has come to dominate the science, developed by a genius named Charles Darwin. This Theory of Evolution was revolutionized and strengthened in the twentieth century by the science of genetics. The human genome, and its effect on evolution, became as important a revolution in human thought as quantum physics was having on Newtonian physics at about the same time.
One theory of evolutionary biology and genetics posited that men and women, as groups, have different evolutionary goals. For men, with less of an investment in parental duties, the goal remains to inseminate as many females as possible, to the benefit of their particular genes. For women, with far fewer eggs than males have sperm, the goal is to be inseminated only by a male who would invest more parental time, who could hunt for meat, and who would protect the baby and her when she was temporarily disabled due to pregnancy and lactation. The woman, then, did not want to be inseminated by random mating, coerced mating, or any other way of mating than a carefully-considered mating chosen by her.
Women had another concern, namely, their own well-being. Left to themselves, without pressure to mate, they might not have produced children at all, because of the dangerousness of childbirth, mating relationships, and being committed to caring for a helpless human being.
These evolutionary goals were in direct conflict. It was to the advantage of men to prevent women from choosing their own mates or choosing not to mate at all. Because of their ancient biological advantages, men prevailed in their evolutionary goals, and male domination began. Its most important characteristic from the beginnings of human culture was to systematically deprive women of control over their bodies, especially control over whether they would have intercourse and with whom.
Soon enough, though, women, who had been silent (or silenced) ever since, began to ask questions. They wanted to know why, after all this time, they still had to contend with the ancient traditions derived from biology in a new world with conditions that would have been unrecognizable to the ancient couple. They asked how the ancient arrangement had turned into a rigid and hypertrophied system that held them to caveman days. Let us explore a way of life based on our current conditions, they said.
These women, who called themselves feminists, and the scientists (some of whom were feminists too), identified at least six biological causes operative at the dawn of human history which still controlled their lives, even in these new conditions, and also two cultural processes which were so old, no one could say when they began, with our animal sisters or with us.
Of course, we can't know the full story. We can't know the details. There are many fascinating evolutionary theories that can't be detailed here, such as the theory that women who were not amenable to sexual access, i.e., refused to marry or refused domination, did not survive the selection process, which would meanthat women of today have been selected for passivity and compliance.
All this is theory, but it is theory overwhelmingly supported by the weight of empirical evidence to date. Because the evidence and theory cannot be detailed in a less-than-book-length essay, extensive footnotes including further reading are provided instead:
BIOLOGICAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Testosterone/androgens, leading to relatively greater aggression and use of violence in men.
Men have on the average about fourteen times more testosterone in their blood than women. It is an androgen, a crucial hormone for fetal masculinization, and the hormone of aggression. Biological studies point out that testosterone does not act alone and is profoundly influenced by environmental conditions.
In paleolithic times, aggression was certainly important to hunters and in territorial battles. It was valued, and in the warrior societies to come much later, venerated. It had another impact on society. The relative lack of aggression of women disadvantaged them in fighting. The potential for violence (acting as a coercion) and violence itself were advantageous to men in their evolutionary goal of maximum sexual access to women.
2. Sexual Dimorphism
Human males are about 15% larger than females, putting them on a spectrum of primate sexual dimorphism which correlates with moderate polygyny (as opposed to monogamy). They are more muscular, with larger and stronger bones. They are taller, with a greater reach. Females are at a relative disadvantage in attempting to fight off rape or violent coercion.
3. Reproduction Consequences
Girls were disabled and hampered by childbirth, lactation, and the helpless infant for the first five years of its life. Childbirth may lead to infection, chronic pain, tearing of tissues, and death. Chronic sequelae of constant childbirth disadvantaged women physically.
For those who survived childbirth, there was lactation, which seems to last about one to three years. During this period the mother and baby must be in constant close contact. The mother is the adult available when her infant is attacked by animals, illness, or other humans, and therefore is more vulnerable to attack herself as she is slowed down. This would work to the advantage of male evolutionary goals, not female. It is true that lactation usually prevents a new pregnancy - but this could be got around, and is in many primate species, by killing the infant.
Pregnancy has many physical characteristics which disable women, from illness (nausea), vulnerability of carrying a child, center-of-balance problems, weight gain, and slowness. All these things disadvantaged women who resisted sexual access.
Human women are the only primates who not have a specific period of estrus. Their times of ovulation are hidden, even usually from the women. Other primate females have long periods of time when they are left alone by males, but the human female would have been approached constantly, wasting her energy and requiring constant vigilance.
4. Lifespan
Death, on average, occurred before either young man or young woman could develop wisdom, reflect, or memorialize their lives. Traditions must have been slow to develop and hard to pass down. Most women never experienced the long afternoon of life without fear of pregnancy which modern women find after the age of fifty. Mating occurred at puberty, so the disabilities of reproduction were constant.
5. Omnivorousness
Some primates, like gorillas, are vegetarian. But humans and our sister chimps also eat meat. The hunt was the province of the strongest members of the tribe, so men were the hunters. Meat is more calorie-rich than plants, so the meat-bringers were celebrated, and their power to distribute their kill added to male power generally.
6. Bipedalism
Combined with children's long period of helplessness, our ancestor's move to standing up meant that babies could not cling to their mothers' backs. Human mothers had to hold their children on hips or in their arms, or constantly adjust to the weight of tying them on their backs, hampering them.
CULTURAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Territorialism/Population Pressure
Territorialism is probably a mix of biology, since chimpanzees are fiercely territorial, and the pressures of environment which probably led to cultural traditions of defense and limited warfare. The subject of territorialism has been extensively studies and only a brief and focused mention can be made of it here. However, it appears that territorialism would have been engaged in by the physically stronger members of a family, kinship group, or "tribe", namely, the men, and would have valorized those who were most aggressive and violent. Sexual access as a "reward" of war is a custom so old we find not trace of its beginnings, but it may have some biological basis overlaid with cultural tradition. The sexual access thus granted would not necessarily be voluntary.
2. The Taboo on Incest and the Practice of Exogamy
The incest taboo, which seems also to be almost universal in ancient human societies (with a few exceptions such as noble sibling marriages in ancient Egypt), according to experts like Claude Levi-Strauss, encouraged the also almost universal practice of exogamy. In such systems girls married only men outside their kinship group and left their own groups. Sometimes the girl was then "disowned" by her native group; she was "dead to them", and other times the group she married into became allied with her native group. But her physical movement meant that she left her female relatives and lifelong alliances behind. The married women in a group, then, would not have lifelong ties and their ability to resist sexual access as a group would be hampered, while the men and boys in the same group would have organized in childhood. It further led to the practice of female infanticide, as females were just mouths to feed who would leave the tribe and never contribute t it as adults.
Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), in contrast have a system of sending their young males outside the group to mate. Females retain their lifelong alliances and may as a group restrain adult males. Bonobo "society" is seen by ethologists and zoologists as having a more equitable balance of power, with less sexual coercion, than human society.
3. The Discovery of Paternity and the Practice of Hoarding of Surpluses
Paternity was not obvious and other primate groups seem unaware that a particular act of coitus may lead to the female's pregnancy. This may have worked to women's advantage, but at some very early point, paternity was discovered. The current theory is that this increased fathers' investment in their own children, also an advantage to women.
But with the settlement of humans into agricultural societies beginning about 8,000-10,000 years ago, some people (almost always men, for many reasons) were able to accumulate surpluses of food and animals. The cultural tradition grew, and is still also almost universal today, that the surplus accumulated during the fathers' lifetime was his "property" to be distributed as he wished, with tradition ascribing the distribution to his male children (since girls would leave the group). The increasing strength of this tradition caused men to adopt as goals the accumulation of a surplus to make their kinship group strong, and the evolutionary biologists would say, to ensure their genes were passed on. The hoarding of surpluses by men translated into the power to lead the group and to make the rules, which would have advanced men's evolutionary goal, not women's.
For all these reasons and many more, all known human societies became male-dominated before the discovery of writing, which brings into history. It is true that there were Ice Age fertility cults of the Goddess which left figurines all over Europe, but in spite of the important work of M. Gimbutas and R. Eisler in this area, there is little evidence of any matriarchal society in human history. This is not to say that the status of women was invariant across the world; far from it. In some societies, there were relatively egalitarian arrangements in which the elders, while they were men, exercised little real coercive power. The few matrilineal cultures appear to have been far more egalitarian as the practice of expgamy of females was not so marked.
Culture very importantly mediated biology early in pre-history, but original biological and evolutionary roots of male domination appear to be strongly supported by science. This fact has many consequences today as women continue to struggle for liberation from male domination in societies unimaginably more complex and mediated by culture.
Once there was an old, old house, with the blackened ceilings of paleolithic fires and the painted walls of Gravittian hunters. In this house lived a small young woman and a bigger young man. Her first baby came at thirteen, her tenth at twenty-five, and then she died of a hemorrhage. The young man took another mate and hunted for all who survived. When he came home with meat, he was celebrated, respected, as a hero. But his life, too, was short. He died of cold on a hunting trip.
They were fully modern humans, having developed bipedalism a hundred thousand years before. They did speak together, and there is no reason to believe that the biological musth called Love did not come upon them as they shared in each others' tribulations and triumphs.
We are their descendants, and in many ways we still follow the ancient ways. These ways were ancient even when they lived. These ways stretch back to the other primates and further, to the period when reptiles and mammals split and the mammals developed sex chromosomes.
We are ancient, and we live in a long continuum. But our lives are short: a mean life expectancy of twenty-five or younger when that old house was built, and a brief eighty revolutions around the sun today.
The young woman in that smoky house was mated to a boy very early in her life, though we don't know the social institutions that led her to mate, whether she chose to or was forced to. Once she entered a stable sexual relationship, though, her life was narrow and predictable from then on. She would be pregnant or lactating so often that menstruation would be an exception. She would never know menopause. There would always be a baby on her hip or her back. She would gather tubers or the local vegetables, she would stay close to home, and she would be responsible for the children as her mate was responsible for the meat.
3000 generations went by. The old family was lost in time, leaving only a jawbone perhaps, or a high-arched footprint turned to rock from African river mud. In this new time, archaeologists, paleontologists, geneticists and other scientists dug for clues as to their own origins. Ethologists and zoologists and anthropologists joined in the search. Biologists became interested. The speculations of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had to guess at the state of humans before civilization, were no longer accepted at face value. The folkorists and mythologists and ancient historians stepped back. Empirical evidence began to flow from the burial-mounds, the cave bones, the hunting sketches.
Scientists presented their findings, argued and fought, and added to the work until vague shapes began to appear. The shapes were the real outlines of ancient human societies. And the most significant findings, almost all could agree, revolved around sex; the differences between men and women, the development of male dominance in human society, and the silence of women and the conversation of men.
Very recently a new theory of biology has come to dominate the science, developed by a genius named Charles Darwin. This Theory of Evolution was revolutionized and strengthened in the twentieth century by the science of genetics. The human genome, and its effect on evolution, became as important a revolution in human thought as quantum physics was having on Newtonian physics at about the same time.
One theory of evolutionary biology and genetics posited that men and women, as groups, have different evolutionary goals. For men, with less of an investment in parental duties, the goal remains to inseminate as many females as possible, to the benefit of their particular genes. For women, with far fewer eggs than males have sperm, the goal is to be inseminated only by a male who would invest more parental time, who could hunt for meat, and who would protect the baby and her when she was temporarily disabled due to pregnancy and lactation. The woman, then, did not want to be inseminated by random mating, coerced mating, or any other way of mating than a carefully-considered mating chosen by her.
Women had another concern, namely, their own well-being. Left to themselves, without pressure to mate, they might not have produced children at all, because of the dangerousness of childbirth, mating relationships, and being committed to caring for a helpless human being.
These evolutionary goals were in direct conflict. It was to the advantage of men to prevent women from choosing their own mates or choosing not to mate at all. Because of their ancient biological advantages, men prevailed in their evolutionary goals, and male domination began. Its most important characteristic from the beginnings of human culture was to systematically deprive women of control over their bodies, especially control over whether they would have intercourse and with whom.
Soon enough, though, women, who had been silent (or silenced) ever since, began to ask questions. They wanted to know why, after all this time, they still had to contend with the ancient traditions derived from biology in a new world with conditions that would have been unrecognizable to the ancient couple. They asked how the ancient arrangement had turned into a rigid and hypertrophied system that held them to caveman days. Let us explore a way of life based on our current conditions, they said.
These women, who called themselves feminists, and the scientists (some of whom were feminists too), identified at least six biological causes operative at the dawn of human history which still controlled their lives, even in these new conditions, and also two cultural processes which were so old, no one could say when they began, with our animal sisters or with us.
Of course, we can't know the full story. We can't know the details. There are many fascinating evolutionary theories that can't be detailed here, such as the theory that women who were not amenable to sexual access, i.e., refused to marry or refused domination, did not survive the selection process, which would meanthat women of today have been selected for passivity and compliance.
All this is theory, but it is theory overwhelmingly supported by the weight of empirical evidence to date. Because the evidence and theory cannot be detailed in a less-than-book-length essay, extensive footnotes including further reading are provided instead:
BIOLOGICAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Testosterone/androgens, leading to relatively greater aggression and use of violence in men.
Men have on the average about fourteen times more testosterone in their blood than women. It is an androgen, a crucial hormone for fetal masculinization, and the hormone of aggression. Biological studies point out that testosterone does not act alone and is profoundly influenced by environmental conditions.
In paleolithic times, aggression was certainly important to hunters and in territorial battles. It was valued, and in the warrior societies to come much later, venerated. It had another impact on society. The relative lack of aggression of women disadvantaged them in fighting. The potential for violence (acting as a coercion) and violence itself were advantageous to men in their evolutionary goal of maximum sexual access to women.
2. Sexual Dimorphism
Human males are about 15% larger than females, putting them on a spectrum of primate sexual dimorphism which correlates with moderate polygyny (as opposed to monogamy). They are more muscular, with larger and stronger bones. They are taller, with a greater reach. Females are at a relative disadvantage in attempting to fight off rape or violent coercion.
3. Reproduction Consequences
Girls were disabled and hampered by childbirth, lactation, and the helpless infant for the first five years of its life. Childbirth may lead to infection, chronic pain, tearing of tissues, and death. Chronic sequelae of constant childbirth disadvantaged women physically.
For those who survived childbirth, there was lactation, which seems to last about one to three years. During this period the mother and baby must be in constant close contact. The mother is the adult available when her infant is attacked by animals, illness, or other humans, and therefore is more vulnerable to attack herself as she is slowed down. This would work to the advantage of male evolutionary goals, not female. It is true that lactation usually prevents a new pregnancy - but this could be got around, and is in many primate species, by killing the infant.
Pregnancy has many physical characteristics which disable women, from illness (nausea), vulnerability of carrying a child, center-of-balance problems, weight gain, and slowness. All these things disadvantaged women who resisted sexual access.
Human women are the only primates who not have a specific period of estrus. Their times of ovulation are hidden, even usually from the women. Other primate females have long periods of time when they are left alone by males, but the human female would have been approached constantly, wasting her energy and requiring constant vigilance.
4. Lifespan
Death, on average, occurred before either young man or young woman could develop wisdom, reflect, or memorialize their lives. Traditions must have been slow to develop and hard to pass down. Most women never experienced the long afternoon of life without fear of pregnancy which modern women find after the age of fifty. Mating occurred at puberty, so the disabilities of reproduction were constant.
5. Omnivorousness
Some primates, like gorillas, are vegetarian. But humans and our sister chimps also eat meat. The hunt was the province of the strongest members of the tribe, so men were the hunters. Meat is more calorie-rich than plants, so the meat-bringers were celebrated, and their power to distribute their kill added to male power generally.
6. Bipedalism
Combined with children's long period of helplessness, our ancestor's move to standing up meant that babies could not cling to their mothers' backs. Human mothers had to hold their children on hips or in their arms, or constantly adjust to the weight of tying them on their backs, hampering them.
CULTURAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Territorialism/Population Pressure
Territorialism is probably a mix of biology, since chimpanzees are fiercely territorial, and the pressures of environment which probably led to cultural traditions of defense and limited warfare. The subject of territorialism has been extensively studies and only a brief and focused mention can be made of it here. However, it appears that territorialism would have been engaged in by the physically stronger members of a family, kinship group, or "tribe", namely, the men, and would have valorized those who were most aggressive and violent. Sexual access as a "reward" of war is a custom so old we find not trace of its beginnings, but it may have some biological basis overlaid with cultural tradition. The sexual access thus granted would not necessarily be voluntary.
2. The Taboo on Incest and the Practice of Exogamy
The incest taboo, which seems also to be almost universal in ancient human societies (with a few exceptions such as noble sibling marriages in ancient Egypt), according to experts like Claude Levi-Strauss, encouraged the also almost universal practice of exogamy. In such systems girls married only men outside their kinship group and left their own groups. Sometimes the girl was then "disowned" by her native group; she was "dead to them", and other times the group she married into became allied with her native group. But her physical movement meant that she left her female relatives and lifelong alliances behind. The married women in a group, then, would not have lifelong ties and their ability to resist sexual access as a group would be hampered, while the men and boys in the same group would have organized in childhood. It further led to the practice of female infanticide, as females were just mouths to feed who would leave the tribe and never contribute t it as adults.
Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), in contrast have a system of sending their young males outside the group to mate. Females retain their lifelong alliances and may as a group restrain adult males. Bonobo "society" is seen by ethologists and zoologists as having a more equitable balance of power, with less sexual coercion, than human society.
3. The Discovery of Paternity and the Practice of Hoarding of Surpluses
Paternity was not obvious and other primate groups seem unaware that a particular act of coitus may lead to the female's pregnancy. This may have worked to women's advantage, but at some very early point, paternity was discovered. The current theory is that this increased fathers' investment in their own children, also an advantage to women.
But with the settlement of humans into agricultural societies beginning about 8,000-10,000 years ago, some people (almost always men, for many reasons) were able to accumulate surpluses of food and animals. The cultural tradition grew, and is still also almost universal today, that the surplus accumulated during the fathers' lifetime was his "property" to be distributed as he wished, with tradition ascribing the distribution to his male children (since girls would leave the group). The increasing strength of this tradition caused men to adopt as goals the accumulation of a surplus to make their kinship group strong, and the evolutionary biologists would say, to ensure their genes were passed on. The hoarding of surpluses by men translated into the power to lead the group and to make the rules, which would have advanced men's evolutionary goal, not women's.
For all these reasons and many more, all known human societies became male-dominated before the discovery of writing, which brings into history. It is true that there were Ice Age fertility cults of the Goddess which left figurines all over Europe, but in spite of the important work of M. Gimbutas and R. Eisler in this area, there is little evidence of any matriarchal society in human history. This is not to say that the status of women was invariant across the world; far from it. In some societies, there were relatively egalitarian arrangements in which the elders, while they were men, exercised little real coercive power. The few matrilineal cultures appear to have been far more egalitarian as the practice of expgamy of females was not so marked.
Culture very importantly mediated biology early in pre-history, but original biological and evolutionary roots of male domination appear to be strongly supported by science. This fact has many consequences today as women continue to struggle for liberation from male domination in societies unimaginably more complex and mediated by culture.
Tuesday, July 28, 2015
Revolution XX Is Here: A Long Story (PART ONE)
INTRODUCTION: IN THE LOST TIME
Once there was an old, old house, with the blackened ceilings of paleolithic fires and the painted walls of Gravittian hunters. In this house lived a small young woman and a bigger young man. Her first baby came at thirteen, her tenth at twenty-five, and then she died of a hemorrhage. The young man took another mate and hunted for all who survived. When he came home with meat, he was celebrated, respected, as a hero. But his life, too, was short. He died of cold on a hunting trip.
They were fully modern humans, having developed bipedalism a hundred thousand years before. They did speak together, and there is no reason to believe that the biological musth called Love did not come upon them as they shared in each others' tribulations and triumphs.
We are their descendants, and in many ways we still follow the ancient ways. These ways were ancient even when they lived. These ways stretch back to the other primates and further, to the period when reptiles and mammals split and the mammals developed sex chromosomes.
We are ancient, and we live in a long continuum. But our lives are short: a mean life expectancy of twenty-five or younger when that old house was built, and a brief eighty revolutions around the sun today.
The young woman in that smoky house was mated to a boy very early in her life, though we don't know the social institutions that led her to mate, whether she chose to or was forced to. Once she entered a stable sexual relationship, though, her life was narrow and predictable from then on. She would be pregnant or lactating so often that menstruation would be an exception. She would never know menopause. There would always be a baby on her hip or her back. She would gather tubers or the local vegetables, she would stay close to home, and she would be responsible for the children as her mate was responsible for the meat.
3000 generations went by. The old family was lost in time, leaving only a jawbone perhaps, or a high-arched footprint turned to rock from African river mud. In this new time, archaeologists, paleontologists, geneticists and other scientists dug for clues as to their own origins. Ethologists and zoologists and anthropologists joined in the search. Biologists became interested. The speculations of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had to guess at the state of humans before civilization, were no longer accepted at face value. The folkorists and mythologists and ancient historians stepped back. Empirical evidence began to flow from the burial-mounds, the cave bones, the hunting sketches.
Scientists presented their findings, argued and fought, and added to the work until vague shapes began to appear. The shapes were the real outlines of ancient human societies. And the most significant findings, almost all could agree, revolved around sex; the differences between men and women, the development of male dominance in human society, and the silence of women and the conversation of men.
Very recently a new theory of biology has come to dominate the science, developed by a genius named Charles Darwin. This Theory of Evolution was revolutionized and strengthened in the twentieth century by the science of genetics. The human genome, and its effect on evolution, became as important a revolution in human thought as quantum physics was having on Newtonian physics at about the same time.
One theory of evolutionary biology and genetics posited that men and women, as groups, have different evolutionary goals. For men, with less of an investment in parental duties, the goal remains to inseminate as many females as possible, to the benefit of their particular genes. For women, with far fewer eggs than males have sperm, the goal is to be inseminated only by a male who would invest more parental time, who could hunt for meat, and who would protect the baby and her when she was temporarily disabled due to pregnancy and lactation. The woman, then, did not want to be inseminated by random mating, coerced mating, or any other way of mating than a carefully-considered mating chosen by her.
Women had another concern, namely, their own well-being. Left to themselves, without pressure to mate, they might not have produced children at all, because of the dangerousness of childbirth, mating relationships, and being committed to caring for a helpless human being.
These evolutionary goals were in direct conflict. It was to the advantage of men to prevent women from choosing their own mates or choosing not to mate at all. Because of their ancient biological advantages, men prevailed in their evolutionary goals, and male domination began. Its most important characteristic from the beginnings of human culture was to systematically deprive women of control over their bodies, especially control over whether they would have intercourse and with whom.
Soon enough, though, women, who had been silent (or silenced) ever since, began to ask questions. They wanted to know why, after all this time, they still had to contend with the ancient traditions derived from biology in a new world with conditions that would have been unrecognizable to the ancient couple. They asked how the ancient arrangement had turned into a rigid and hypertrophied system that held them to caveman days. Let us explore a way of life based on our current conditions, they said.
These women, who called themselves feminists, and the scientists (some of whom were feminists too), identified at least six biological causes operative at the dawn of human history which still controlled their lives, even in these new conditions, and also two cultural processes which were so old, no one could say when they began, with our animal sisters or with us.
Of course, we can't know the full story. We can't know the details. There are many fascinating evolutionary theories that can't be detailed here, such as the theory that women who were not amenable to sexual access, i.e., refused to marry or refused domination, did not survive the selection process, which would meanthat women of today have been selected for passivity and compliance.
All this is theory, but it is theory overwhelmingly supported by the weight of empirical evidence to date. Because the evidence and theory cannot be detailed in a less-than-book-length essay, extensive footnotes including further reading are provided instead:
BIOLOGICAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Testosterone/androgens, leading to relatively greater aggression and use of violence in men.
Men have on the average about fourteen times more testosterone in their blood than women. It is an androgen, a crucial hormone for fetal masculinization, and the hormone of aggression. Biological studies point out that testosterone does not act alone and is profoundly influenced by environmental conditions.
In paleolithic times, aggression was certainly important to hunters and in territorial battles. It was valued, and in the warrior societies to come much later, venerated. It had another impact on society. The relative lack of aggression of women disadvantaged them in fighting. The potential for violence (acting as a coercion) and violence itself were advantageous to men in their evolutionary goal of maximum sexual access to women.
2. Sexual Dimorphism
Human males are about 15% larger than females, putting them on a spectrum of primate sexual dimorphism which correlates with moderate polygyny (as opposed to monogamy). They are more muscular, with larger and stronger bones. They are taller, with a greater reach. Females are at a relative disadvantage in attempting to fight off rape or violent coercion.
3. Reproduction Consequences
Girls were disabled and hampered by childbirth, lactation, and the helpless infant for the first five years of its life. Childbirth may lead to infection, chronic pain, tearing of tissues, and death. Chronic sequelae of constant childbirth disadvantaged women physically.
For those who survived childbirth, there was lactation, which seems to last about one to three years. During this period the mother and baby must be in constant close contact. The mother is the adult available when her infant is attacked by animals, illness, or other humans, and therefore is more vulnerable to attack herself as she is slowed down. This would work to the advantage of male evolutionary goals, not female. It is true that lactation usually prevents a new pregnancy - but this could be got around, and is in many primate species, by killing the infant.
Pregnancy has many physical characteristics which disable women, from illness (nausea), vulnerability of carrying a child, center-of-balance problems, weight gain, and slowness. All these things disadvantaged women who resisted sexual access.
Human women are the only primates who not have a specific period of estrus. Their times of ovulation are hidden, even usually from the women. Other primate females have long periods of time when they are left alone by males, but the human female would have been approached constantly, wasting her energy and requiring constant vigilance.
4. Lifespan
Death, on average, occurred before either young man or young woman could develop wisdom, reflect, or memorialize their lives. Traditions must have been slow to develop and hard to pass down. Most women never experienced the long afternoon of life without fear of pregnancy which modern women find after the age of fifty. Mating occurred at puberty, so the disabilities of reproduction were constant.
5. Omnivorousness
Some primates, like gorillas, are vegetarian. But humans and our sister chimps also eat meat. The hunt was the province of the strongest members of the tribe, so men were the hunters. Meat is more calorie-rich than plants, so the meat-bringers were celebrated, and their power to distribute their kill added to male power generally.
6. Bipedalism
Combined with children's long period of helplessness, our ancestor's move to standing up meant that babies could not cling to their mothers' backs. Human mothers had to hold their children on hips or in their arms, or constantly adjust to the weight of tying them on their backs, hampering them.
CULTURAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Territorialism/Population Pressure
Territorialism is probably a mix of biology, since chimpanzees are fiercely territorial, and the pressures of environment which probably led to cultural traditions of defense and limited warfare. The subject of territorialism has been extensively studies and only a brief and focused mention can be made of it here. However, it appears that territorialism would have been engaged in by the physically stronger members of a family, kinship group, or "tribe", namely, the men, and would have valorized those who were most aggressive and violent. Sexual access as a "reward" of war is a custom so old we find not trace of its beginnings, but it may have some biological basis overlaid with cultural tradition. The sexual access thus granted would not necessarily be voluntary.
2. The Taboo on Incest and the Practice of Exogamy
The incest taboo, which seems also to be almost universal in ancient human societies (with a few exceptions such as noble sibling marriages in ancient Egypt), according to experts like Claude Levi-Strauss, encouraged the also almost universal practice of exogamy. In such systems girls married only men outside their kinship group and left their own groups. Sometimes the girl was then "disowned" by her native group; she was "dead to them", and other times the group she married into became allied with her native group. But her physical movement meant that she left her female relatives and lifelong alliances behind. The married women in a group, then, would not have lifelong ties and their ability to resist sexual access as a group would be hampered, while the men and boys in the same group would have organized in childhood. It further led to the practice of female infanticide, as females were just mouths to feed who would leave the tribe and never contribute t it as adults.
Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), in contrast have a system of sending their young males outside the group to mate. Females retain their lifelong alliances and may as a group restrain adult males. Bonobo "society" is seen by ethologists and zoologists as having a more equitable balance of power, with less sexual coercion, than human society.
3. The Discovery of Paternity and the Practice of Hoarding of Surpluses
Paternity was not obvious and other primate groups seem unaware that a particular act of coitus may lead to the female's pregnancy. This may have worked to women's advantage, but at some very early point, paternity was discovered. The current theory is that this increased fathers' investment in their own children, also an advantage to women.
But with the settlement of humans into agricultural societies beginning about 8,000-10,000 years ago, some people (almost always men, for many reasons) were able to accumulate surpluses of food and animals. The cultural tradition grew, and is still also almost universal today, that the surplus accumulated during the fathers' lifetime was his "property" to be distributed as he wished, with tradition ascribing the distribution to his male children (since girls would leave the group). The increasing strength of this tradition caused men to adopt as goals the accumulation of a surplus to make their kinship group strong, and the evolutionary biologists would say, to ensure their genes were passed on. The hoarding of surpluses by men translated into the power to lead the group and to make the rules, which would have advanced men's evolutionary goal, not women's.
For all these reasons and many more, all known human societies became male-dominated before the discovery of writing, which brings into history. It is true that there were Ice Age fertility cults of the Goddess which left figurines all over Europe, but in spite of the important work of M. Gimbutas and R. Eisler in this area, there is little evidence of any matriarchal society in human history. This is not to say that the status of women was invariant across the world; far from it. In some societies, there were relatively egalitarian arrangements in which the elders, while they were men, exercised little real coercive power. The few matrilineal cultures appear to have been far more egalitarian as the practice of expgamy of females was not so marked.
Culture very importantly mediated biology early in pre-history, but original biological and evolutionary roots of male domination appear to be strongly supported by science. This fact has many consequences today as women continue to struggle for liberation from male domination in societies unimaginably more complex and mediated by culture.
Once there was an old, old house, with the blackened ceilings of paleolithic fires and the painted walls of Gravittian hunters. In this house lived a small young woman and a bigger young man. Her first baby came at thirteen, her tenth at twenty-five, and then she died of a hemorrhage. The young man took another mate and hunted for all who survived. When he came home with meat, he was celebrated, respected, as a hero. But his life, too, was short. He died of cold on a hunting trip.
They were fully modern humans, having developed bipedalism a hundred thousand years before. They did speak together, and there is no reason to believe that the biological musth called Love did not come upon them as they shared in each others' tribulations and triumphs.
We are their descendants, and in many ways we still follow the ancient ways. These ways were ancient even when they lived. These ways stretch back to the other primates and further, to the period when reptiles and mammals split and the mammals developed sex chromosomes.
We are ancient, and we live in a long continuum. But our lives are short: a mean life expectancy of twenty-five or younger when that old house was built, and a brief eighty revolutions around the sun today.
The young woman in that smoky house was mated to a boy very early in her life, though we don't know the social institutions that led her to mate, whether she chose to or was forced to. Once she entered a stable sexual relationship, though, her life was narrow and predictable from then on. She would be pregnant or lactating so often that menstruation would be an exception. She would never know menopause. There would always be a baby on her hip or her back. She would gather tubers or the local vegetables, she would stay close to home, and she would be responsible for the children as her mate was responsible for the meat.
3000 generations went by. The old family was lost in time, leaving only a jawbone perhaps, or a high-arched footprint turned to rock from African river mud. In this new time, archaeologists, paleontologists, geneticists and other scientists dug for clues as to their own origins. Ethologists and zoologists and anthropologists joined in the search. Biologists became interested. The speculations of philosophers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who had to guess at the state of humans before civilization, were no longer accepted at face value. The folkorists and mythologists and ancient historians stepped back. Empirical evidence began to flow from the burial-mounds, the cave bones, the hunting sketches.
Scientists presented their findings, argued and fought, and added to the work until vague shapes began to appear. The shapes were the real outlines of ancient human societies. And the most significant findings, almost all could agree, revolved around sex; the differences between men and women, the development of male dominance in human society, and the silence of women and the conversation of men.
Very recently a new theory of biology has come to dominate the science, developed by a genius named Charles Darwin. This Theory of Evolution was revolutionized and strengthened in the twentieth century by the science of genetics. The human genome, and its effect on evolution, became as important a revolution in human thought as quantum physics was having on Newtonian physics at about the same time.
One theory of evolutionary biology and genetics posited that men and women, as groups, have different evolutionary goals. For men, with less of an investment in parental duties, the goal remains to inseminate as many females as possible, to the benefit of their particular genes. For women, with far fewer eggs than males have sperm, the goal is to be inseminated only by a male who would invest more parental time, who could hunt for meat, and who would protect the baby and her when she was temporarily disabled due to pregnancy and lactation. The woman, then, did not want to be inseminated by random mating, coerced mating, or any other way of mating than a carefully-considered mating chosen by her.
Women had another concern, namely, their own well-being. Left to themselves, without pressure to mate, they might not have produced children at all, because of the dangerousness of childbirth, mating relationships, and being committed to caring for a helpless human being.
These evolutionary goals were in direct conflict. It was to the advantage of men to prevent women from choosing their own mates or choosing not to mate at all. Because of their ancient biological advantages, men prevailed in their evolutionary goals, and male domination began. Its most important characteristic from the beginnings of human culture was to systematically deprive women of control over their bodies, especially control over whether they would have intercourse and with whom.
Soon enough, though, women, who had been silent (or silenced) ever since, began to ask questions. They wanted to know why, after all this time, they still had to contend with the ancient traditions derived from biology in a new world with conditions that would have been unrecognizable to the ancient couple. They asked how the ancient arrangement had turned into a rigid and hypertrophied system that held them to caveman days. Let us explore a way of life based on our current conditions, they said.
These women, who called themselves feminists, and the scientists (some of whom were feminists too), identified at least six biological causes operative at the dawn of human history which still controlled their lives, even in these new conditions, and also two cultural processes which were so old, no one could say when they began, with our animal sisters or with us.
Of course, we can't know the full story. We can't know the details. There are many fascinating evolutionary theories that can't be detailed here, such as the theory that women who were not amenable to sexual access, i.e., refused to marry or refused domination, did not survive the selection process, which would meanthat women of today have been selected for passivity and compliance.
All this is theory, but it is theory overwhelmingly supported by the weight of empirical evidence to date. Because the evidence and theory cannot be detailed in a less-than-book-length essay, extensive footnotes including further reading are provided instead:
BIOLOGICAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Testosterone/androgens, leading to relatively greater aggression and use of violence in men.
Men have on the average about fourteen times more testosterone in their blood than women. It is an androgen, a crucial hormone for fetal masculinization, and the hormone of aggression. Biological studies point out that testosterone does not act alone and is profoundly influenced by environmental conditions.
In paleolithic times, aggression was certainly important to hunters and in territorial battles. It was valued, and in the warrior societies to come much later, venerated. It had another impact on society. The relative lack of aggression of women disadvantaged them in fighting. The potential for violence (acting as a coercion) and violence itself were advantageous to men in their evolutionary goal of maximum sexual access to women.
2. Sexual Dimorphism
Human males are about 15% larger than females, putting them on a spectrum of primate sexual dimorphism which correlates with moderate polygyny (as opposed to monogamy). They are more muscular, with larger and stronger bones. They are taller, with a greater reach. Females are at a relative disadvantage in attempting to fight off rape or violent coercion.
3. Reproduction Consequences
Girls were disabled and hampered by childbirth, lactation, and the helpless infant for the first five years of its life. Childbirth may lead to infection, chronic pain, tearing of tissues, and death. Chronic sequelae of constant childbirth disadvantaged women physically.
For those who survived childbirth, there was lactation, which seems to last about one to three years. During this period the mother and baby must be in constant close contact. The mother is the adult available when her infant is attacked by animals, illness, or other humans, and therefore is more vulnerable to attack herself as she is slowed down. This would work to the advantage of male evolutionary goals, not female. It is true that lactation usually prevents a new pregnancy - but this could be got around, and is in many primate species, by killing the infant.
Pregnancy has many physical characteristics which disable women, from illness (nausea), vulnerability of carrying a child, center-of-balance problems, weight gain, and slowness. All these things disadvantaged women who resisted sexual access.
Human women are the only primates who not have a specific period of estrus. Their times of ovulation are hidden, even usually from the women. Other primate females have long periods of time when they are left alone by males, but the human female would have been approached constantly, wasting her energy and requiring constant vigilance.
4. Lifespan
Death, on average, occurred before either young man or young woman could develop wisdom, reflect, or memorialize their lives. Traditions must have been slow to develop and hard to pass down. Most women never experienced the long afternoon of life without fear of pregnancy which modern women find after the age of fifty. Mating occurred at puberty, so the disabilities of reproduction were constant.
5. Omnivorousness
Some primates, like gorillas, are vegetarian. But humans and our sister chimps also eat meat. The hunt was the province of the strongest members of the tribe, so men were the hunters. Meat is more calorie-rich than plants, so the meat-bringers were celebrated, and their power to distribute their kill added to male power generally.
6. Bipedalism
Combined with children's long period of helplessness, our ancestor's move to standing up meant that babies could not cling to their mothers' backs. Human mothers had to hold their children on hips or in their arms, or constantly adjust to the weight of tying them on their backs, hampering them.
CULTURAL CAUSES OF MALE DOMINATION
1. Territorialism/Population Pressure
Territorialism is probably a mix of biology, since chimpanzees are fiercely territorial, and the pressures of environment which probably led to cultural traditions of defense and limited warfare. The subject of territorialism has been extensively studies and only a brief and focused mention can be made of it here. However, it appears that territorialism would have been engaged in by the physically stronger members of a family, kinship group, or "tribe", namely, the men, and would have valorized those who were most aggressive and violent. Sexual access as a "reward" of war is a custom so old we find not trace of its beginnings, but it may have some biological basis overlaid with cultural tradition. The sexual access thus granted would not necessarily be voluntary.
2. The Taboo on Incest and the Practice of Exogamy
The incest taboo, which seems also to be almost universal in ancient human societies (with a few exceptions such as noble sibling marriages in ancient Egypt), according to experts like Claude Levi-Strauss, encouraged the also almost universal practice of exogamy. In such systems girls married only men outside their kinship group and left their own groups. Sometimes the girl was then "disowned" by her native group; she was "dead to them", and other times the group she married into became allied with her native group. But her physical movement meant that she left her female relatives and lifelong alliances behind. The married women in a group, then, would not have lifelong ties and their ability to resist sexual access as a group would be hampered, while the men and boys in the same group would have organized in childhood. It further led to the practice of female infanticide, as females were just mouths to feed who would leave the tribe and never contribute t it as adults.
Bonobos (pygmy chimpanzees), in contrast have a system of sending their young males outside the group to mate. Females retain their lifelong alliances and may as a group restrain adult males. Bonobo "society" is seen by ethologists and zoologists as having a more equitable balance of power, with less sexual coercion, than human society.
3. The Discovery of Paternity and the Practice of Hoarding of Surpluses
Paternity was not obvious and other primate groups seem unaware that a particular act of coitus may lead to the female's pregnancy. This may have worked to women's advantage, but at some very early point, paternity was discovered. The current theory is that this increased fathers' investment in their own children, also an advantage to women.
But with the settlement of humans into agricultural societies beginning about 8,000-10,000 years ago, some people (almost always men, for many reasons) were able to accumulate surpluses of food and animals. The cultural tradition grew, and is still also almost universal today, that the surplus accumulated during the fathers' lifetime was his "property" to be distributed as he wished, with tradition ascribing the distribution to his male children (since girls would leave the group). The increasing strength of this tradition caused men to adopt as goals the accumulation of a surplus to make their kinship group strong, and the evolutionary biologists would say, to ensure their genes were passed on. The hoarding of surpluses by men translated into the power to lead the group and to make the rules, which would have advanced men's evolutionary goal, not women's.
For all these reasons and many more, all known human societies became male-dominated before the discovery of writing, which brings into history. It is true that there were Ice Age fertility cults of the Goddess which left figurines all over Europe, but in spite of the important work of M. Gimbutas and R. Eisler in this area, there is little evidence of any matriarchal society in human history. This is not to say that the status of women was invariant across the world; far from it. In some societies, there were relatively egalitarian arrangements in which the elders, while they were men, exercised little real coercive power. The few matrilineal cultures appear to have been far more egalitarian as the practice of expgamy of females was not so marked.
Culture very importantly mediated biology early in pre-history, but original biological and evolutionary roots of male domination appear to be strongly supported by science. This fact has many consequences today as women continue to struggle for liberation from male domination in societies unimaginably more complex and mediated by culture.
Saturday, July 25, 2015
Neolithic Times: The Deal, and How It Falls Apart
The Revolution comes in on little bound feet.
Modern humanity stands up on two feet about a hundred thousand years ago. An asymmetrical division of labor in which women trap and kill small game and concentrate on foraging, animal skinning and dressing, cooking and caretaking, while men hunt larger game, develops from the necessities of biology. These necessities of biology include the vulnerability in women of more or less constantly, in adulthood, carrying a child on the belly, on the hip, or on the back.
The small foraging family groups develop alliances in a deferred gift-giving system that decreases starvation in lean times, and join larger clans.
By 2500 B.C. women are the most valuable objects of raiding and exchange among clans. The reasons are manifold: they are valuable to keep the tribes' population up and they become the raiders' servants. Witness the maternal lineage in Iceland in the 15th century.
The cultural arrangements of hunting, exchange of women, writing, animal husbandry, religion, slavery, class, private property, agriculture, and raiding for women, cinch the deal women end up having to make: they and their children subordinate themselves to the most powerful man they can find in exchange for not being abducted, raped, degraded, enslaved, and/or killed. Sounds reasonable to me. MRAs call it hypergamy and pretend women just naturally do this sucker-attack-parasite-degrading activity (marrying an old ugly man with money). Naturally it is the men who have put women in this dependent position, because how else will young girls marry old men?
An enormous array of cultural institutions, practices, and symbols develops on top of this devil's bargain, entrenching and obfuscating the deal, including the outrageous hypertrophic crippling of Han women as a status symbol for their husbands.
Are you wondering what "hypertrophic" means? It means overdevelopment, like a peacock's tail or an elephant's tusk. Unnecessary swirls and furls, gigantism, general institutionalized hubris.
For almost five thousand years women and men accept the deal and its hypertrophic manifestations come to feel natural. Civilization lurches along male-sidedly as a florid warrior culture, developing ever-more-lethal weaponry for the endless wars and insatiably accumulating surplus.
Women don't exist in History except in the sense that slaves, horses, and spoils of war exist. Rarely, a woman acts as a temporary stand-in for a royal husband or son. And then there is Hatshepsut.
Some women serve the supernatural masculine icon in nunneries, rather than husbands. Women are kept from literacy, knowledge, economic independence (their work is unpaid), authority, control of their reproductive capacities and sexuality, ownership, custody, mobility, and a public voice. An ideology grows around their degraded status justifying the degradation. And that's not good.
True, they resist here and there all the way through. Individual women try to become independent. A few manage the feat because they are so useful to men; madam/owners of brothels, for instance. And true, their general dependence has not always resulted in absolute tyranny, because their men have a duty of support for them and the children, develop a fondness for them sometimes, and must sometimes answer for mistreatment to women's birth families. But running away inevitably only leads women to another waiting male, a father, brothers, lovers, male control in any case. (I realize women's history in the west sounds like modern Pakistan).
Also true, civilization is not just weaponization; there are beautiful pictures and fine palaces, epic poems and divine music for a few, and for the many, with exceptions, enough food and sex and reproduction. A few women once perched uneasily in those palaces and lorded it over their servants just like their men, but their whereabouts are currently unknown to history, and their social status was contingent anyway. Most women were too busy groaning in childbirth to notice the palaces.
No one is saying the patriarchy is a picnic for most men, either, for those of you who are vociferously wondering. They are sub-classes in the male hierarchy, exploited harshly. They are expected to give their labor and their lives when called upon. Their deal is that they are rewarded with women, as wives, slaves, spoils, or prostitutes. Needless to say, they prefer the deal they have to women taking their jobs plus not becoming wives any more. It must be admitted that there's nothing in Women's Liberation for Western men.
The Patriarchy lasts for a couple of millennia. It works, one might say. The species is still here, right? Right, Wrong? Good? Bad? Just Darwinism at work? After History is read and understood to an adequate extent, does it matter? These folk are dead, bless them, and now we are here for our brief trial on earth. An epic paradigm shift began to flow fifty measly years ago, and has continued to flow like magma. We can make out a new social structure accreting itself like a new volcanic island on the stratified sea-bottom.
Glorious overwriting has always been the purview of men. Let us continue to write, badly, but with our customary verve.
Modern humanity stands up on two feet about a hundred thousand years ago. An asymmetrical division of labor in which women trap and kill small game and concentrate on foraging, animal skinning and dressing, cooking and caretaking, while men hunt larger game, develops from the necessities of biology. These necessities of biology include the vulnerability in women of more or less constantly, in adulthood, carrying a child on the belly, on the hip, or on the back.
The small foraging family groups develop alliances in a deferred gift-giving system that decreases starvation in lean times, and join larger clans.
By 2500 B.C. women are the most valuable objects of raiding and exchange among clans. The reasons are manifold: they are valuable to keep the tribes' population up and they become the raiders' servants. Witness the maternal lineage in Iceland in the 15th century.
The cultural arrangements of hunting, exchange of women, writing, animal husbandry, religion, slavery, class, private property, agriculture, and raiding for women, cinch the deal women end up having to make: they and their children subordinate themselves to the most powerful man they can find in exchange for not being abducted, raped, degraded, enslaved, and/or killed. Sounds reasonable to me. MRAs call it hypergamy and pretend women just naturally do this sucker-attack-parasite-degrading activity (marrying an old ugly man with money). Naturally it is the men who have put women in this dependent position, because how else will young girls marry old men?
An enormous array of cultural institutions, practices, and symbols develops on top of this devil's bargain, entrenching and obfuscating the deal, including the outrageous hypertrophic crippling of Han women as a status symbol for their husbands.
Are you wondering what "hypertrophic" means? It means overdevelopment, like a peacock's tail or an elephant's tusk. Unnecessary swirls and furls, gigantism, general institutionalized hubris.
For almost five thousand years women and men accept the deal and its hypertrophic manifestations come to feel natural. Civilization lurches along male-sidedly as a florid warrior culture, developing ever-more-lethal weaponry for the endless wars and insatiably accumulating surplus.
Women don't exist in History except in the sense that slaves, horses, and spoils of war exist. Rarely, a woman acts as a temporary stand-in for a royal husband or son. And then there is Hatshepsut.
Some women serve the supernatural masculine icon in nunneries, rather than husbands. Women are kept from literacy, knowledge, economic independence (their work is unpaid), authority, control of their reproductive capacities and sexuality, ownership, custody, mobility, and a public voice. An ideology grows around their degraded status justifying the degradation. And that's not good.
True, they resist here and there all the way through. Individual women try to become independent. A few manage the feat because they are so useful to men; madam/owners of brothels, for instance. And true, their general dependence has not always resulted in absolute tyranny, because their men have a duty of support for them and the children, develop a fondness for them sometimes, and must sometimes answer for mistreatment to women's birth families. But running away inevitably only leads women to another waiting male, a father, brothers, lovers, male control in any case. (I realize women's history in the west sounds like modern Pakistan).
Also true, civilization is not just weaponization; there are beautiful pictures and fine palaces, epic poems and divine music for a few, and for the many, with exceptions, enough food and sex and reproduction. A few women once perched uneasily in those palaces and lorded it over their servants just like their men, but their whereabouts are currently unknown to history, and their social status was contingent anyway. Most women were too busy groaning in childbirth to notice the palaces.
No one is saying the patriarchy is a picnic for most men, either, for those of you who are vociferously wondering. They are sub-classes in the male hierarchy, exploited harshly. They are expected to give their labor and their lives when called upon. Their deal is that they are rewarded with women, as wives, slaves, spoils, or prostitutes. Needless to say, they prefer the deal they have to women taking their jobs plus not becoming wives any more. It must be admitted that there's nothing in Women's Liberation for Western men.
The Patriarchy lasts for a couple of millennia. It works, one might say. The species is still here, right? Right, Wrong? Good? Bad? Just Darwinism at work? After History is read and understood to an adequate extent, does it matter? These folk are dead, bless them, and now we are here for our brief trial on earth. An epic paradigm shift began to flow fifty measly years ago, and has continued to flow like magma. We can make out a new social structure accreting itself like a new volcanic island on the stratified sea-bottom.
Glorious overwriting has always been the purview of men. Let us continue to write, badly, but with our customary verve.
Friday, July 24, 2015
The Killing of Sandra Bland
She wouldn't look at me though
I was talkin to her
looked straight ahead
wouldn't put out her cigarette though
I tole her to put out
to show who's boss
wouldn't get out of the car
til I had to shout and man that's humiliating
that hurt me and my badge
to have to shout at a black gal
who should know better
and I saw rad I saw Black I yelled
I'll light you up
pulled out my lighter
put it in her face
I'll
light
you
up
She babbled like a citizen like
she could hire a lawyer
and I said she kicked me and they nodded
arrested her
put her in solitary
things happened for three days
that I don't have to know about
after three days
left her a plastic bag
All I did was take note
when I pulled up fast behind her
that she turned out of my way
without signaling
and I am not
responsible
ever
I was talkin to her
looked straight ahead
wouldn't put out her cigarette though
I tole her to put out
to show who's boss
wouldn't get out of the car
til I had to shout and man that's humiliating
that hurt me and my badge
to have to shout at a black gal
who should know better
and I saw rad I saw Black I yelled
I'll light you up
pulled out my lighter
put it in her face
I'll
light
you
up
She babbled like a citizen like
she could hire a lawyer
and I said she kicked me and they nodded
arrested her
put her in solitary
things happened for three days
that I don't have to know about
after three days
left her a plastic bag
All I did was take note
when I pulled up fast behind her
that she turned out of my way
without signaling
and I am not
responsible
ever
Thursday, July 16, 2015
Can Pluto End Male Violence?
Look at that glorious thing. It's not pitiful at all. It's not even lonely, spinning around at the edge of the Solar System with her homies Charon, Styx, Nix, Kerberos, and Hydra, and a million Kuiper cousins not so far away. The Sun is not just a distant star there; it radiates light that is possibly 250 times brighter than the full Moon radiates on Earth. It has water ice frozen into mountains; Charon has a Grand Canyon. Judging from the lack of craterization, there has been geologic activity. It's a a very long way from Earth; it took two years for the New Horizons satellite to reach Jupiter, and eight more years to reach Pluto. nothing that happens there will ever involve Earth.
I also see that there are no sentient beings on that planet, or at least it's very unlikely. Also, I see that water way out there could be quite useful in about 2000 years when people start to arrive, and there must be a lot of minable material there. A few quarries, a little extra methane; who's to complain if we show up and re-fuel and do a little mining, except the Goddess? And she has her own ways of getting even. She'll let us know if she doesn't like us using Pluto and all the other planets as terraria for us.
If we keep on like we are here on Earth, we'll be a heavily-armed brinksmanship fractured society awash as always in ferocious ideological war in a few hundred years, but somehow, like now, we'll be pulling it together enough to continue exploring space. It's logical to think that we will begin to import our wars and feuds out there along with out colonists and miners. Maybe one group of men will war with another group of men over the especially luscious prospects, like Europa and Mars. Is it cruel of me to say that I would prefer to see an unpopulated Europa sacrificed in the next apocalyptic war, instead of Earth? or is it just Realpolitik?
The Earth might have an opinion here. She might say, Great! I need the relief. Human women might echo that, because it is increasingly looking like male violence will never be ended on Earth so long as there are human men - it is part of the XY makeup, and they will continue to make women (and themselves) suffer. This is the large conclusion of scientists and thinkers from every field of knowledge, the best understanding we have, notwithstanding the ideological pressure to pretend violence can be entirely socially engineered away.
We do all agree that biological predispositions can be partially ameliorated, minimized, with social engineering. Freud seems to have argued that this is primary reason for "civilization" and its institutions. One function of human marriage has most certainly been to manage male violence by keeping men as busy and satisfied as possible, offering them their own women servants and sex partners, a chance to reproduce, along with the honor of working for the Man from sunup to sundown, not to mention channeling young men who haven't entered that institution yet into war service as desired by the Man. Add to the rewards of marriage, the duties of family support, conscription, the necessity of working, and the easy availability of prison, and you pretty much have covered the efforts we have made.
It's still not enough, though. One pillar of marriage has crumbled: women's cooperation in these faulty systems of controlling violence. Women are sick of war, sick of being under the thumbs of their masters, sick of an economic system that gives the Man all surpluses and keeps their families artificially poor, resulting in massive crime and misery, and sick of life-destroying crimes like rape and murder that never, ever stop.
None of the mutifarious theories of violence I have read about seem to fully grasp the sources of violence (which to my mind is a stop on the aggression spectrum) or offer a real solution. There is no single cause that explains kicking a cat, dropping Agent Orange on Vietnam, trash-talking the challenger in your next boxing match, shooting your neighbor because his fence impinges on your plot of grass, torturing a fellow student with electric shocks in a research context because you can, shouting down your wife, and fantasizing a horrible revenge on your boss that you don't act on.
It must be admitted too, and this must not be minimized, that aggression in the broad sense is what has brought us bridges and airliners, advanced surgery, and the birth control pill. I am expanding the definition of aggression now to include that driving force to expand outward, to build, to dominate and develop Nature for human benefit. It's Shiva's conundrum; aggression is Creator as well as Destroyer. I think it's safe to say that men will never agree to let go of aggression (with future medicine, for instance) in this larger sense because the loss of the creative aspect of their Aggro God would be too much. If they know they will end both the creation and the destruction, I think we all can assume that humanity will be packing it in as a whole.
Many women may reluctantly agree. Aggression (which, again, becomes violence in its more intense form) will always present these two faces.
What are women to do about this intolerable situation for them? Many men too are well aware that violence is directed more at other men than at women, and would gladly find some very narrow solution other than locking up every able-bodied man from the ages of eighteen to twenty-four.
I have an idea, but first I would like to make one more observation.
In my lifetime (and I still have living to do), my country, the United States, has experienced a speeding-up of technological and social progress that causes us all to live barely holding on by our fingernails. I saw the Equality Revolution; I was there as animal rights, children's rights, Earth's rights, women's rights, disabled people's rights, and yes, trans people's rights, became serious issues of human discourse for the first time. I saw the Information Revolution lurch into being and rapidly smooth itself into a whizzing marvel that has changed every traditional social paradigm I can think of. I saw the Globalization Revolution begin and develop despite the resistance.
And I saw in my lifetime, I believe more importantly than any of these revolutions, every single planet in our Solar System explored by human-made instruments. I have looked upon the surface of Pluto this week.
So here is my idea: make this exploration humankind's mission. Stop wasting money on Earth wars, extracting depleting ores from an exhausted planet, playing stupid resource-wasting consumer games. Spend all our spare money on the future. Spend it on getting us out to the other planets. Spend the money used for bomb research on looking for a faster-than-light drive. Colonize. Dominate. Extract. Rape. Do your thing, Aggro God. Focus men on something huge and wondrous, the aggressive conquest of space. Space won't mind (at least not our local planets, they're unpopulated).
And we, the collateral damage in the old wars, the inferior sex, the unaggressive, the haters of suffering, the historical objects of the sadism that comes from frustration and unsatisfied longing, will benefit. Point men toward space and away from controlling and dominating this planet and its inhabitants, who really can't take much more. Get started now, because with the way progress is speeding up, those new weapons currently in development will swiftly put an end to men and their exploits (and collaterally, women).
The only way out is Outside this little box of domestic violence, rape, control, discrimination, and all-around dominating that will otherwise only get worse.
Many women may reluctantly agree. Aggression (which, again, becomes violence in its more intense form) will always present these two faces.
What are women to do about this intolerable situation for them? Many men too are well aware that violence is directed more at other men than at women, and would gladly find some very narrow solution other than locking up every able-bodied man from the ages of eighteen to twenty-four.
I have an idea, but first I would like to make one more observation.
In my lifetime (and I still have living to do), my country, the United States, has experienced a speeding-up of technological and social progress that causes us all to live barely holding on by our fingernails. I saw the Equality Revolution; I was there as animal rights, children's rights, Earth's rights, women's rights, disabled people's rights, and yes, trans people's rights, became serious issues of human discourse for the first time. I saw the Information Revolution lurch into being and rapidly smooth itself into a whizzing marvel that has changed every traditional social paradigm I can think of. I saw the Globalization Revolution begin and develop despite the resistance.
And I saw in my lifetime, I believe more importantly than any of these revolutions, every single planet in our Solar System explored by human-made instruments. I have looked upon the surface of Pluto this week.
So here is my idea: make this exploration humankind's mission. Stop wasting money on Earth wars, extracting depleting ores from an exhausted planet, playing stupid resource-wasting consumer games. Spend all our spare money on the future. Spend it on getting us out to the other planets. Spend the money used for bomb research on looking for a faster-than-light drive. Colonize. Dominate. Extract. Rape. Do your thing, Aggro God. Focus men on something huge and wondrous, the aggressive conquest of space. Space won't mind (at least not our local planets, they're unpopulated).
And we, the collateral damage in the old wars, the inferior sex, the unaggressive, the haters of suffering, the historical objects of the sadism that comes from frustration and unsatisfied longing, will benefit. Point men toward space and away from controlling and dominating this planet and its inhabitants, who really can't take much more. Get started now, because with the way progress is speeding up, those new weapons currently in development will swiftly put an end to men and their exploits (and collaterally, women).
The only way out is Outside this little box of domestic violence, rape, control, discrimination, and all-around dominating that will otherwise only get worse.
Monday, July 13, 2015
Will men Really Benefit from Feminism?
We feminists have promised men, at least the toilers who also suffer under the elite, better conditions after Revolution XX, but these conditions have remained vague. Will they really benefit from feminism?
Let me begin by saying that What About Teh Menz has not exactly been Topic Numero Uno for Radfems. However, it has been important to mainstream feminists to tell men that feminism benefits everybody, including right-wing reactionary men. Radfems should weigh in on this topic.
We (I speak for feminism in general) have promised to support their ideal of classlessness, and it is true, we know class divisions and inferiority must be abolished so long as the shame of being low on the totem pole of male hierarchy causes so much male violence. We plan to put a stop to that, especially when directed at women and children. But men may say that all that will happen is that they lose one time-honored likkered-up avenue of lashing out, because we can't deliver on the classlessness. We will try, but if men themselves insist on keeping their male hierarchies, there isn't much we can do about it, we can only prevent them from hurting women and children when they feel inferior and can't get at the elite. So working men may lose their scapegoats and battering-objects and still be stuck. We ought to admit it. They will, if they don't rise up also and overthrow the class system. We can't do that alone, and shouldn't pretend we can.
We have promised a caring new world in which social welfare, rather than dethndestruction, will become the norm. We say that old and disabled men in particular will benefit. True, we will have excellent hospitals and social services in the New World. There will be food clothing and shelter for all. No one will be homeless or commit suicide because she or he is being evicted. But this caring labor won't come free. No longer will there be a daughter or wife to do the daily grunge work for such men out of loyal servanthood rather than a living wage. And there will be no prostitutes to make up for the difficulty of finding sex partners. Further, all this caring will divert the money traditionally spent for war, and the old guys are proud of their warrior pasts and support war in general. Therefore they may take this new caringness as a net loss.
We say men need to cry more and deplore their lack of emotion, empathy, tears, and other outlets which are currently denied to them. We want to make it perfectly acceptable for men to weep. However, it appears that testosterone is the main reason men cry less, and male anger would have to give way in favor of the new male tenderness and soft emotiveness. And what man wants to give up his anger? So I am not sure men will choose this option even when they are free to do so.
We explain that equal women are much more intellectually interesting. However, painting ourselves each morning and wearing crippling accessories and suffocating clothing items would have to go. We are not actually sure men would prefer us to be discussing the possible return of the drachma by Skype, on the screen as feminists and her new girlfriend.
We all know it's not a win-lose situation. But yes, there are only 100 U.S. Senators, and it is correct that we women would insist on being 50 of them. The men at the top of world power eased out would be a considerable number, but we argue that they can now have the privilege of entering elementary school teaching and correcting feminist bias against boys. It does cross our minds that individual men like Dominique Strauss-Kahn might feel they were losing a privilege or two, even so.
Rape, too, would no longer be an outlet against either men or women. The prisons will just have to muddle along without their main correctional device. The same goes for the most popular method of harassing lesbians in South Africa. These methods will be replaced by ameliorating poverty, supporting education, making liberal use of severe social stigma, and punishments more suited to the crime (see, Clockwork Orange). Most men would agree that rape must go, and applaud its disappearance in prisons, but may perhaps feel it is a deprivation to also, in consequence, get rid of the two other social institutions which most strongly support rape culture, namely, prostitution and pornography.
We also promise that men will be able to see their little ones grow up, if they so choose (and whether they want to or not as regards the concomitant housework). Yes, they will have equal parental leave when a new baby comes. Yet I see a certain shrinking back in many men from the prospect of leaving their outside jobs and staying home to maintain the household and sacrifice their time 24/7 to a squalling bundle. Perhaps this benefit we promise is not really something they will rush to take advantage of.
In addition, with women's equal sexual freedom and control over our bodies, we ask men to imagine a world of sexual access that was previously denied them. Of course, many more women will immediately turn lesbian or celibate or vow never to have PIV again, once they figure out it's not what men held it out to be. So this may be a two-edged benefit.
But wait. Look what we have been holding back, this huge and beneficial change! Women will no longer be economically dependent on men! We will make our own money. We will cease our devious ways of wangling money from men's wallets, we will stop marrying hypergamously, we will no longer be gold-diggers, we will not provoke and frustrate because we will no longer need to dress like hookers -- we will lose all those annoying stereotypes that drive men mad! We will become people who buy dinner! Then again, nothing will now compel us to become involved with a man other than the man's merit as a companion and lover, but we're sure men will rise to the occasion.
As for those family courts in which ex-wives get custody and spousal support, with women's moneymaking parity, spousal support will become a non-issue. Both sexes will get to contribute to their beloved cheatin' lyin' ex! As for child custody, men will be encouraged, delivered, even, kicking and screaming, to insisting on equal physical custody rights. We are sure they will break down the doors of family court and we will be there to cheer them on!
Then there are men's inflated images of themselves. Little girls will no longer have any reason to be jealous of little boys' genitalia, making the Oedipus Complex an anachronism. Men will be reminded, all in good humor, that not only are women as competent in the public arena as they are, we give birth. The re-valuing of women may be taken as a loss to a few, a very few, egomaniacal men.
Virginia Woolf was reflecting on such benefits to men upon the liberation of women, when she ran across another example of the gazillions of historical pronouncements of women's natural inferiority, a rather too strong pronouncement by a distinguished (male) professor, one with a familiar rancor (now called misogyny) detectable in it. Her thoughts ran this way:
"Possibly when the professor insisted a little too emphatically upon the inferiority of women, he was concerned not with their inferiority, but with his own superiority...because it was a jewel to him of the rarest price. Life for both sexes...is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything...it calls for confidence in oneself.
" ...And how can we generate this imponderable quality...most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself."
"...Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size...Whatever may be their use in civilized societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic action. That is why both Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge.
"That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be, without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism.
"For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment, civilizing natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and dinner at least twice the size he really is?"
Well, we believe and say that women can enlarge without men having to shrink. But we may be dissembling, as still-unliberated women do, we aren't sure. We trust that we can all come together and find some inferior, non-human being who doesn't care to enlarge both sexes, to praise us and witness our bravery and need us and curry our favor and suffer our blows.
If not, we must admit: men will shrink to meet our enlarging. They will be eye-to-eye with their equals, and that, as Gertrude Stein no doubt said, is that is that is that.
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