Depends on the definition of “superior”. I would opine that a perfectly peaceful society that knows not nor understands the very concept of violence is superior to the shit we’ve got to deal with. Yes, it would fall within minutes to any bloodthirsty cunt with a handful of mates ; but that’s not to say it’d be *inferior *to them.
On the contrary, it follows. As competition for resources between tribes and groups increase, so does the societal bargaining power of the humans who do the actual competing. In short, “Ug could crunch head of Zog tribe man, but only if Ug’s woman does things with Ug’s penis that make Ug’s woman hate herself a little. Otherwise Ug joins Zog tribe”.
And H-G societies were, and are, hardly egalitarian. The typical division of labour is that guys hunt (which is a very physical activity for short stretches of time) whereas women gather or cultivate (which is consistently hard work). Which is one half of why women tend to be shorter and frailer than men. The other half is that men simply starve women by getting first pick at food and resources, in the majority of cases ; for rather straightforward survival reasons : if there’s a famine, for one thing it’s because the mainstay of food has failed (i.e. gathering and agriculture) which prompts people to seek more of the other thing ; for another a good hunt is a quick and immediate solution to a famine whereas gathering/growing stuff takes time. So there’s an incentive to keep the hunting half of society at peak at all times. Which physically weakens the other half, which compounds the whole thing.
And why is it that men hunt and women do the painstaking shit ? Because men punch women in the mouth if they object. It’s an egg/cock thing.
Not really circular since surviving in a hostile world is part of doing well.
The answer is simple. Men are vastly stronger than women. Men are more aggressive.
And if you want a society to thrive you have to protect the critical link in reproduction. That is women with their long gestational period. So in that case it makes sense for men to be the warrior class. And with men being stronger and more aggressive how are women going to physically usurp that domestically?
Not sure I’d say that male domination has worked “well,” but there are some gender factors that may make patriarchy more sustainable or likely to persist than matriarchy. For instance, men are typically more likely to be attracted to subservient women than women are to be attracted to subservient men.
Oddly enough, actual anthropological research does not support this intriguing scenario. 
It is widely acknowledged that more primitive societies were more egalitarian.
This study claims that the roots of patriarchy lie in men being able to accumulate multiple wives, with the advent of agriculture. Interesting, but has nothing whatsoever to do with primitive brutishness.
Exactly right.
The repeated mantra that being strong and aggressive = social power simply flies in the face of reality.
Fact is, in many times and places soldiers were little better than slaves - prior to the advent of nationalism, “conscription” often looked a lot like “enslavement”. It is hard to argue that soldiers, by definition the most ‘strong and aggressive’ men around, had lots of social power.
Agreed, and it is a good question to ask as to why. One not satisfactorily answered by the notion that men “naturally” rule because they are strong and aggressive.
Straw man. I did it say non-agricultural societies were better. I said their gender roles are different. And this goes for hunter gatherers, pastoralists, industrialized economies, and any other variations.
Different economic systems lead to different types of social organization, including the role of gender. The reason the particular set of gender roles we are so familiar with seems so universal is because smallholder agriculture- and the social organization around it- has been the norm through so much of the world across such a long time span.
that’s a fair point, Rwanda is not the worst, it was used as a shorthand for the general problem, I withdraw that example and invite you to pick your own. though I should point out from that link that…
…and it goes on to make precisely the same points that I’ve been making. i.e. the reasons for contraception not being available and the benefits of giving women control over their reproductive cycle.
Again, nothing that you’ve said above is in opposition to what I said. I’m not sure that you’ve understood my point at all. I’m not saying that there is a perfect correlation or that it is an immediate flick of the switch to greater gender equality. Cultures and behaviours take time to change and this a very recent change indeed.
I read it, I was already aware of everything in there. No real surprises. However there was nothing in there about how effective such methods were, that is key and you’ll remember that I stressed “reliable” and “accessible” birth control. a 50% success rate is better than nothing but hardly a reliable method. Of course if such ancient and natural methods were as good as modern methods then I don’t see why there would be an unmet need in so many countries as shown in my link further up in this post.
Do you actually agree with me that women had less control and access to reliable birth control in the past?
Do you agree that historically women have had a lesser status in the majority of societies.?
Do you agree that giving women reproductive control is a necessary part of improving their lot?
It hasn’t worked badly. Despite the horrors of the 20th/21st century humanity as a whole has never been healthier, wealthier or wiser. Sure, there is much to do but it’s hard to argue that we’re not going in the right direction. Would the world have been a better place if women ruled the roost? I doubt it. Women are as prone to error, as impassioned and as territorial as men. To think otherwise is totally sexist, to fall into the Victorian idea that woman is some sort of angelic creature, full of love, mercy and goodness. They’re not; they have exactly the same capacities, intellectual abilities and fallibilities as men.
You know, it doesn’t have to be one or the other. It’s possible to have a society where one’s opportunity to reach one’s full potential is not determined by plumbing.
I disagree; Japan aside - it’s not really the West anyway - I think you’re mistaking equality of opportunity with equality of result.
Since survival is what objectively matters for biological genes, in a hostile world, being able to dominate is important.
(I am presuming the highlighted is a typo, because otherwise what you say is contradictory.)
As for the rest, that again is conjecture and has little evidence to support it. Same economic systems have had different social outcomes in time and space. Agrarian communities have been egalitarian, and oppressive. At the start of the Industrial Revolution, women tended to work heavily in factories and the mines and were the majority in many sectors (textiles for instance), by the later half of the 19th-century social reformers and progressive had ensured that women mostly (but not totally) left the factories (which makes post 1970’s feminist/progressive protestations about women being kept in the home, deliciously ironic),
Secondly, a lot of what is called “egalitarian” or “equality” is in the eyes of the observer, and is not necessarily what the person being observed would say. Most assessments of hunter-gatherers are made from looking at modern hunter-gatherers, which are not necessarily representative, several groups who are now Hunter-Gatherers are descended from farmers-: they returned to that lifestyle as the land became less fertile.
I do agree that saying one or another systemj is “natural” is misplaced.
Emphasis added. I think people are tending to overlook the fact that all modern humans are descended from a relatively small number of prehistoric humans existing around a hundred millennia ago. Patriarchal patterns in human societies were probably firmly established by then.
Remember, when it comes to species survival, a particular trait (be it biological or societal) doesn’t have to be “best” or even “good”: it just has to be good enough to make survival possible.
And once a societal trait is established, there is a hell of a lot of cultural investment in maintaining it. Think about all the vast human heritage of law, religion, family structure, tradition, and general social mores that have supported and strengthened the pattern of male domination for many thousands of years.
It’s not as though human societies are naturally experimental with such patterns. We don’t just spontaneously say “Hey, let’s try changing this core fundamental assumption about the right way to live and see if that’s an improvement!” We need to see a potential benefit right there in front of us—such as the increased mobility provided by the wheel, or greater food yields in agriculture—before we do things differently.
Circular argument. Naturally, in a society where male dominance and female subservience have been inculcated for hundreds of millennia, most people will find female dominance and male subservience to be unnatural and repellent. That tells us exactly nothing at all about whether patriarchy has any innate existence in any kind of biological “gender factors”.
The OP might as well have asked, “Why has religious belief worked so well for human societies?” A lot of us around these parts aren’t particularly fans of religious belief, and feel that having less of it in the modern world is arguably a net improvement. Same with male domination. But there’s no denying that everything that humans have accomplished while being overwhelmingly patriarchal, we have also accomplished while being overwhelmingly believers in supernatural entities and moral/social codes ascribed to such entities.
If you’re not willing to accept the assumption that religious belief must be intrinsically natural and right for human societies because we’ve had such overall success as a species being mostly religious, then you might want to take a closer look at the assumption that male dominance must be intrinsically a good fit for humans because we’ve done so well being mostly male-dominated.
Not really: it only sounds like that because you’re seriously distorting what actually happened. Second-wave feminists around the 1970s were primarily middle-class white women, not the working-class women whom earlier reformers had striven to “rescue” from the dire conditions of industrial labor. Working-class women in the 1970s were mostly still working for wages.
So no, there isn’t anything “ironic” about middle-class second-wave feminists wanting the financial independence and self-determination provided by good jobs and careers, such as their husbands and brothers had. The fact that for many years working-class women had been exploited and endangered by much worse jobs does not turn your little “Haw haw libbers I guess you didn’t realize how good you had it, amirite?” “gotcha”-ploy into a valid argument.
Cite?
Or perhaps give the definition of “egalitarian” you’re using - because all the really “primitive” societies I know of are very non-egalitarian - for a start, I don’t know offhand of any HG or horticulturalist societies that don’t have gender-based division of labour.
:rolleyes:
Ah the old, attack the man, not the argument ploy. Disappointing, if not unexpected. I mean, at least some analysis could have been done instead of witty mimicing. Maybe, you could have pointed out that the exodus of women from the workplace in the 19th century took place at the same-time as the development of widespread mass transit vide railways, which led to the separation of work and home? Or that the progressive movement was in may ways reactionary? Or that skilled labour tended to become more expensive and necessary at that time. Or really any argument, would have been far less boring that you potshots.
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
…for a start, I don’t know offhand of any HG or horticulturalist societies that don’t have gender-based division of labour.
[/QUOTE]
Is that not one hypothesis as to why we out performed the Neandrathals, our division of labour amongst genders (very roughly, hunting men, gathering women).
Uggggg…Please ignore the above post, the board ate half of it
here is what I was trying to say
You cannot compare the 19th century withe the 20th centiry. In 1950, the percentage of women of working age in the work force was 30 % (cite : http://www.bls.gov/opub/mlr/2002/05/art2full.pdf). However, in the 19tth century, the % of middle class was small, in 1950, it had grown enormous, and infact was IIRC, the largest cohort. Most women at the time (and unlike today and the 19th century) tended to cluster around high end (professional) and low end jobs (domestics, farm workers). Teaching and Secretarial jobs, which had been mostly male dominated in the 19th century saw a lot of women, but most were expected to leave when the married by 1950.
:rolleyes:
Ah the old, attack the man, not the argument ploy. Disappointing, if not unexpected. I mean, at least some analysis could have been done instead of witty mimicing. Maybe, you could have pointed out that the exodus of women from the workplace in the 19th century took place at the same-time as the development of widespread mass transit vide railways, which led to the separation of work and home? Or that the progressive movement was in may ways reactionary? Or that skilled labour tended to become more expensive and necessary at that time. Or really any argument, would have been far less boring that you potshots.
[QUOTE=MrDibble]
…for a start, I don’t know offhand of any HG or horticulturalist societies that don’t have gender-based division of labour.
[/QUOTE]
Is that not one hypothesis as to why we out performed the Neandrathals, our division of labour amongst genders (very roughly, hunting men, gathering women).
[QUOTE=AK84]
You cannot compare the 19th century withe the 20th centiry.
[/quote]
Well, you might want to point that out to the guy who tried incoherently to argue that the exploitation of 19th-century working-class women in industrial slave-labor jobs somehow makes it “deliciously ironic” for mid-20th-century middle-class women to have complained about being kept out of middle-class jobs. :rolleyes:
[QUOTE=AK84]
Ah the old, attack the man, not the argument ploy.
[/quote]
? Your “argument” is exactly what I was attacking. Your “argument” was indeed a distorted picture of historical reality, besides being a feeble and ill-thought-out attempt at a “gotcha” that was quite faithfully paraphrased by “Haw haw libbers, I guess you didn’t realize how good you had it, amirite?”
Mocking the remarks you made doesn’t constitute in any way an attack on you personally, as opposed to the argument you were attempting to put forth.
If you can’t handle having your arguments made fun of without reacting as though it’s somehow some kind of ad hominem insult to you as a person, maybe this is not the board for you.
You think they’ve never faced discrimination for being women? Starting with how many of them have had to hear and read “she only got where she is because she’s Mrs. her-husband”? If Hillary Clinton had been a Harry, there might have been a President Rodham years ago.
I grew up being told it didn’t matter if you were a boy or a girl. Sadly, that wasn’t even true in school (where the same handwritting was OK for a boy but unacceptable for a girl) and it got worse as soon as I entered the workforce.