- Location
- Britain
I will note that the idea that misogyny must have active malice behind it is rather an absurd one.
Except that some of the most unequal rules were enforced upon the relatively more comfortable upper class. I mean, it's not the Korean peasant woman who's going to be walking around with veils on her head, or be sequestered into the anbang, it's not going to be the lower-class Florentine girl who's getting married off at the age of 12, and it's not going to be the 19th-century working girl who's going to get committed to an asylum for being "hysterical".
*raises hand*Except that some of the most unequal rules were enforced upon the relatively more comfortable upper class. I mean, it's not the Korean peasant woman who's going to be walking around with veils on her head, or be sequestered into the anbang, it's not going to be the lower-class Florentine girl who's getting married off at the age of 12, and it's not going to be the 19th-century working girl who's going to get committed to an asylum for being "hysterical".
women paired with high status men are more likely to have male children than the rest of the female population is.
This. Still waiting on that citation, Avernus, because I'm not aware of any way that social status could affect the probability of the first sperm to reach an egg carrying an X or Y chromosome.
I'm fairly sure that it was always, like, 50% chance.This. Still waiting on that citation, Avernus, because I'm not aware of any way that social status could affect the probability of the first sperm to reach an egg carrying an X or Y chromosome.
As far as I know, it is, which is why Avernus' claim confuses me.
Hormones?As far as I know, it is, which is why Avernus' claim confuses me.
BBC article mentioning it. The gender ratio is roughly 50/50
We now know that bad weather makes for more baby girls, as does fasting for Ramadan or suffering from morning sickness. Meanwhile mothers with dominant personalities, a taste for breakfast cereal or billionaire husbands are more likely to have baby boys. Crucially, a predisposition to having more sons or daughters is encoded in our genetics – men with more sisters tend to have girls while those with more brothers tend to have boys. What's going on?
Except that some of the most unequal rules were enforced upon the relatively more comfortable upper class. I mean, it's not the Korean peasant woman who's going to be walking around with veils on her head, or be sequestered into the anbang, it's not going to be the lower-class Florentine girl who's getting married off at the age of 12, and it's not going to be the 19th-century working girl who's going to get committed to an asylum for being "hysterical".
Treating half of the population poorly is a luxury subsistence levels of society don't have. Whether that's peasants in an agrarian or industrial society or "barbarian" / hunter-gatherer or just harsh climates (Inuit), women need to work as much as men. Maybe different work - there are good evolutionarily reasons not to get your women killed in melee hunting or warfare - but still hard work. And there are obviously were cultures where women participated in warfare anyway. For that matter we don't strictly know that women didn't participate in hunting in prehistory.
This is one where the modern macho-to-overt misogynist fantasy of a post-apocalyptic era where women can go back to being passive chattle is completely ridiculous. We have firearms now. Not using half your apex predators as hunter-warriors when survival is on the line and they have completely fucking equal lethality and risk is fucking stupid. You could be the toughest badass in the state carrying two rifles, a machete and a baseball bat; Grandma over there can still kill you before you know it happened and there is fuck all you can do about it.
1632 is hilarious in that regard. West Virginia mining town ISOT'd to the Thirty Years War, if you don't know. World of vicious badasses. The person in that book with easily the highest personal kill count is a high school cheerleader. She's not particularly big or even mean but she is an Olympic-class rifle shot.
The degree to which ancient cultures were sexist varied wildly, but in general all sexism originally arose from men having greater physical strength and thus the ability to overpower women to get what they wanted should things come to that, as well as the fact that the way human reproduction works means that the bare minimum number of living people you need to preserve the gene pool safely is something like three times higher for women than for men, thus encouraging keeping women from doing life-threatening things.
Some ancient cultures were extremely sexist, others moderately sexist, and yet others were sexist in a more egalitarian way, holding up men and women as equal but with very different roles in life. It just so happens that many of the most sexist societies ended up being the most influential in the parts of the world that would one day give rise to colonialist cultures, and now here we are today.
That is an incredibly simplified summary of gender relations, to the point that it's borderline useless, but there ya go. This will probably be my only post here - I'm not gonna touch the bad takes in this thread with a hundred-foot pole.
This means that women are the ones who have to join their husbands' families, and take on their husbands' familial identity.
The answer to all of this seems to be "many different factors, depending on local environmental conditions, pre-existing customs/cultures in both that society and societies around them and the state of the people living in that area." Same with the various romantic/sexual/marriage customs and taboos. Making the whole discussion kinda pointless, as it's way too broad.
One society might have developed it to ensure that the females are around to reproduce due to harsh local conditions. Another might have had the bad luck of an upswing of aggressive males unwilling to take "no" pushing them in that direction. Another might have adopted such a thing over time due to interactions with another group of people. Another might have seemed to developed it for no reason, due many small, individual causes building up.
Doesn't even have to go back that far. There's been a lot of cultural inter-mixing and descendants cultures over the millennia. It's entirely possible that one group sufficiently far back developed it, and it just spread from them, "infecting" their peers and descendants with that particular cultural meme.or if it's something we inherited from the ancestral hominids.
Honestly, that possibility worries me. As it implies the issue will just keep reoccuring, it can't be truly beaten.So, we may be a naturally* patriarchal species, or we may have artificially turned ourselves into one somehow.
*Don't take this as an appeal to nature. "Natural" isn't a synonym for "good" or "right," and there's a lot of other stuff from our prehistory that we've chosen to rid ourselves of for better and for worse.
In general I find it problematic how people try to use foraging and prehistoric people, resulting in what can be called "caveman just-so stories".
I think that this the result of a pretty common tendency in people to want to look for a comprehensible, "rational" solution to questions that seem to lack them. People want to point to some inherent, primal reason that explains why human civilization turned out how it did.
They want to be able to say "Well, women became subservient because they're weaker than men and needed to have children" to make sense of it and to tie this into some sort of vaguely scientific understanding of humanity. So they don't to face up to the unsatisfying and scary (and probably true) alternative that humanity just happened to spat out that way out of a chaotic mess of causality stemming from millions of little factors and millions of individual human decisions over the course of thousands and thousands of years.
And the problem you run into is that there are a lot of people who actively want there to be some essential "human nature" explanation to gender inequality, because that makes it very easy to follow it to it's conclusion of being unchangeable and natural. And a lot of people will just fall into it because it's easier than following the more nihilistic alternative to it's conclusion and thinking about how things could have turned out different.
Why do you feel your incredulity here is a valid reason to think otherwise? And didn't someone in thread just remind everyone to stop acting like "pre-history" was this big long chain of events that we actually have mapped out when in reality we know next to nothing about large swaths of history for many areas?IDK about your first point. Patriarchy has been the overwhelming tendency in the vast majority of societies on both hemispheres for as far back as we can tell. If it "just happened" to turn out that way, it must have happened REALLY early on, and then STAYED that way for tens of thousands of years with only a handful of exceptions even as humanity spread out across the continents and diversified massively in culture.
It's possible, sure. But I find it much more likely that some sort of actual environmental pressure played a role. We can only guess and idly speculate about what those pressures might have been, but I'd be very surprised if there really weren't any at all.
Every time I hear that "men were hunters" thing I just start giggling.
It's well known that how misogynistic the past was is an overblown fantasy by misogynists themselves. But it's not just a fantasy, it's a false nostalgic one. Similar to how there's a large contingent of mostly men in America who idealise a mythical fragment of the 50's.
They want to be able to say "Well, women became subservient because they're weaker than men and needed to have children" to make sense of it and to tie this into some sort of vaguely scientific understanding of humanity.
Verywellmind said:Ironically, many batterers do not see themselves as perpetrators, but as victims. This reasoning is common among batterers. Most enter treatment programs heavily armored with elaborate denial systems designed to justify or excuse their actions.1
QZ said:Unmarried queens, however, were more frequently attacked than other types of rulers. This may have had something to do with perceived weakness of female sovereigns. King Frederick II of Prussia, for instance, declared "no woman should be allowed to govern anything" and, after Maria Theresa took the Austrian throne in 1745, promptly seized a chunk of her country. (She fought fiercely but never won it back.)2