NoCalOwner
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ORIGINAL: Leonidas
I see, a nefarious plot, was it? Well, I certainly can't fault you for something that worked.
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We do have a past full of male domination. It's hard to say where genetics leaves off and traditions begin -- it could be that the genetics were gone by the dawn of history, but that the environment encouraged male dominance. Wherever it came from, we've had it for quite a while.
Apply Occam's Razor. a) There was a massive worldwide conspiracy among 99.9% of the peoples in the world to create male dominated traditions to slight females. We have no idea how these cultures communicated with each other, but somehow, they did.
There is a great corollary to this among the social scientists who debate the hot topic of matriarchal societies. The argument (from the anti-matriarchal side) goes like this: A researcher takes an initial glance at a society and says that it's hard on its women and treats them very unequally. The anti-matriarchal social scientist says that that's a bunch of claptrap... feminist propaganda to try to get people riled up. A later researcher studies the same people, and finds that the first researcher was mistaken, that women have something approximating equality. The anti-matriarchal social scientist says that the claims of female equality is a bunch of claptrap, feminist propaganda, because of course ALL societies have ALWAYS been dominated by men. This is exactly what has happened with studies of Australian Aborigines over the last few decades, and a number of other cultures as well.
I don't buy 99.9%, though. My family spent a few generations on Hawaii, where men did most of the work (including the agriculture and cooking), and where early explorers talked to women who said that they'd had over 40 husbands, often several at a time. As the saying of the era went, "moe aku, moe mai" ("sleep here, sleep there"). But they were not an isolated phenomenon, and such societies sometimes became powerful empires. As Herodotus said of the Egypt of the pharoahs, "it was ordained that the queen should have greater power and honour than the king and that among private persons the wife should enjoy authority over her husband." (Book I, 27) A short list of non-patriarchal societies would have to include at least the following:
Africa
(Pre-Islamic) Berbers
The Tuareg
The Bijagos Islanders
The Hausa, until recently
The Bedouins
(Pre-Islamic) Egyptians
The Meroë of Nubia
Europe
The Saami of Lapland
The Etruscans
Some would add the Celts
Asia
The Malabar, India
Lakshadvip Islanders, India
Minicoy, India
Khasi, India
Garo, India
The Tibetans
The Mosuo of Yunnan, China
The Minangkabau of Indonesia and Sumatra
The Okinawans, at least until Japanese annexation
Oceania
The Hawiians
The Samoans
The Tongans
The Marquesas Islanders
North America:
The Cherokee
The Zuni
The Hopi
The Iroquois
The Tehuantepec Zapotec
The Huron
The Pueblo
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b) Only a woman can be sure that the baby that she is carrying is hers. Until very recently there was no way to prove paternity. Evolution favors those who successfully reproduce themselves. Evolution favored men who could both keep sexual control over their mate, and warn off (or fight off, if need be) rivals. Males of our species evolved to be bigger, stronger, more naturally agressive, and with a stonger instinctual drive to assert dominance and control than females.
The most parsimonious explaination is?
Gorillas, orangutans and baboons have harems, and the males usually try to limit female sexual outlets. Their sexual dimorphism is 100%, i.e. the males are twice as big as the females. This makes sense, since the males must compete with each other to get and hoard the females. Most males of these species never have sex.
Gibbons are monogamous, and have no sexual dimorphism at all.
Chimpanzees are much closer to us genetically, and are promiscuous. Males sometimes try to limit female sexual opportunities to within their group, but are miserable failures at it. Best guestimates are that 20% of baby chimps are fathered by low status males, 25-30% by high status males within the group, and 50-55% by males who don't belong to their group at all, who the females met while cruising through the jungle on their own. Bonobos (our very closest relatives) are, if anything, female-dominated, and both genders are extremely promiscuous. Sexual dimorphism among chimps and bonobos is 6-30%.
Human sexual dimorphism is 6-23%, averaging 15%. If we followed the gorilla model of sexuality, the average American male should be about 6'7" and 270 pounds. Instead, we appear to be like those slutty little chimps.
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It's really a little more complex than that, but not much. There are competing reproductive strategies. Less dominant males have always been able to get sex (to a degree) by sucking up to women. Women have two competing priorities when it comes to men. They want to mate with the "champion", but they often can't keep that guy around to care for their young unless they are an "alpha female" type (read beautiful, and smart). He'll fuck them willingly enough, but that's about all they'll get from him. Then there is the male that they can keep around. The one that will provide for their young. Think that this is "frozen science"? In my state 10-20% of babies born were fathered by a man other than their mother's husband or the man who thinks he's the father. It's against the law here, by the way, for the hospital to tell hubby he's not the dad (which they often discover when they do routine newborn blood-tests). The only study that I've ever seen done on this showed (shockingly to everyone but someone like me, probably) that the dad was fairly consistantly someone of higher socio-economic status than hubby. The study didn't show it, but he was probably stronger and better looking too. He's the champion that the woman instinctively desires, but also instinctively knows that she probably won't convince to stick around.
Most of the studies I've seen reach similar conclusions, I've heard 10% of UK babies aren't the husband's, and that in the US it's closer to 20%. Studies which showed that women didn't sleep around were found to be inaccurate, because the women would understate their sexual activity. Studies on men found that men exaggerated their sexual activity. The conclusions now being reached are that women and men both sleep around quite a lot. It would be roughly a draw, but prostitution skews the numbers enough to give women a bit of an edge.
As for status-related issues, I haven't seen any formal study on that subject, and examples I can think of from my own experience seem too random to show a clear trend. So I'll take a "pass" on that issue.
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As a historian, you might recognize this pattern, though, as far as I know, Sparta was the only culture where men actually thought it was a good thing for their wife to fuck the "champion". It made for a stronger Sparta. A man would be proud to raise the son of the best sprinter, or the hero in war.
The Spartans were a very interesting bunch. Dorian traditions, in Sparta and Crete, strongly suppressed the importance of the individual in favor or the society and the state. Customs and laws enforced a great deal of equality between citizens, and much greater equality between the sexes than seen in neighboring states. But if you were a Spartan, male or female, you were, in many regards, no more free than the tens of thousands of slaves who worked Sparta's fields. At the age of 6, boys (who had not been killed at birth as seemingly weak or inferior) were taken from their mothers and put into what amounted to the world's strictest military academy, where they stayed for 14 years. After that, they were essentially soldiers for life, eating and sleeping in a sort of barracks. The women were raised to be extremely fit and healthy, with the intention that they keep the ever-sagging Spartan population up. Both sexes regularly exercized outdoors, in the nude -- so anyone who was out of shape would be mocked by their neighbors. In essence, everyone was the property of the community, and had virtually no personal life as we understand it.
There are also endless debates about Spartan sexuality. Not over the bisexuality of the women, that's undisputed. But it was expected that a Spartan man, as he entered his 20s, would select a boy of 12 or 13 to form a special relationship with. (Men were allowed to marry at age 30, when they would usually go through a mock abduction of their bride from her house -- this same ritual was performed by Cretan men when they would choose their boy, but in Sparta it was done differently since no Spartan boys remained at home.) He would then act as the boy's mentor in many regards, was expected to love the boy and develop a lifelong relationship with him, and in many cases it is quite certain that they were having sex. While the sexual part of the relationship eventually became officially forbidden (after one Spartan king was betrayed by his boy love), it is very clear that the Spartans (and other Dorians) were very sexually conflicted. Apollodorus credited Prince Hyacinthus of Sparta with being the first mortal male to engage in gay sex, and at times Spartan men might be mocked for having heterosexual sex. After the man was 30 and might marry, he was required to resort to having sex with his wife on the sly -- she would have her hair cut off, would put on men's clothing, and would slip into his barracks where she would wait for him in a dark room. After they had sex, she would sneak back home. It was said that sometimes Spartan men went without seeing their wives in daylight between their wedding and the birth of their first child. Supposedly this sexual ritual was to make the rendezvous more exciting, but one cannot escape the impression that (1) they were somewhat ashamed of heterosexual encounters, and (2) they weren't so squeamish about it when the woman looked like a man. One contemporary writer claimed that the Spartan version of courtship was for the women to beat their choice of husband about the head until he was subdued, then to bodily drag him around the altar. Because Sparta was constantly struggling to keep their population up, they tried to encourage reproduction by methods like parading all bachelors, naked, through the marketplace in the dead of Winter, where they were forced to sing a song about how they had broken the law and were being justly punished. Even so, the number of Spartan citizens rarely hit the 10,000 mark.
There is no doubt that a Spartan man might sometimes share his wife with a man who he respected, and that Spartan men would sometimes approach the husband of a woman who he fancied, and ask permission to try to father a child with her. There is also evidence that Spartan women would sometimes take lovers on their own. Because marriages were not necessarily love matches, the participants not necessarily heterosexual or living together, and because the duty to the state (including reproduction) overcame all other considerations, I don't think Spartan custom at all surprising. If an adult saw a child misbehaving, it was his or her duty to beat the child, as they were considered more a child of Sparta than of any individuals in particular. Marriage and family structure, as we know them, barely existed. Spartan hoplites rarely declined suicide missions, why should Spartans mind sharing spouses? Everyone belonged to the state from the time they, as newborns, were brought before the government inspectors, who would decide whether they should be allowed to live or left out to die.
A few other places allowed their King or other top officials great liberties, which might be regarded as a similar practice. While the droit de seigneur/jus primae noctis may have been almost entirely fictitious in Europe (sorry, Braveheart fans), it did exist in Uruk. "So Enkidu came then to know of Gilgamesh who harshly ruled and was not loved by those men whose girls he often played with all night long... And Enkidu stood before the gate where new lovers go and stopped Gilgamesh from coming with nighttime girls." (Epic of Gilgamesh, tablet 2)
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That our higher, "rational" minds govern what we do sexually is largely an illusion. We're still obeying what we are (as best we can).
I never claimed to act rationally when it came to my sexuality, only my social conduct. The only rationality to my sexual conduct is in observing the local age of consent.
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Human teachings about good and evil conduct have varied a lot over the centuries, as a result of changes in conditions and technology. In 1000 BC, it made sense to tell people that eating pork was a sin, because people didn't always cook it well and they got trichinosis.
As a historian, you are surprisingly off base about these traditions. Even the most learned rabbi will tell you that he has no idea why the dietary laws (kashrut) exist. It doesn't have anything to do with trichinosis. Land animals have to both have cloven hooves and chew the cud to be kosher, and they have to be slaughtered in a specific way. Horses aren't any more kosher than pigs, though their meat is no less healthful than beef when cooked similarly. Aquatic animals have to have both fins and scales. Sharks aren't kosher and neither are catfish, though again, their meat isn't any less heathful than that of a salmon or halibut (which are kosher).
I'd be the last one to say that all religious rules make sense. I was merely pointing out that some of them make sense in the context of their time and place. And in that case, I happened to be thinking both of kosher and halal rules. If slaughtered in the allowed manner, all land animals are halal except for carnivores, reptiles and pigs. All fish and non-carniverous birds are halal if slaughtered properly. I do think it noteworthy that both systems ban pork.
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Adam and eve were told to be fruitful and multiply in the bible, but that isn't where the prohibition against birth control comes from. It comes from a passage where a man "spilling his seed on the ground" after fucking a woman was displeasing to god. A fundamentalist reads that passage and proscribes all birth control. An ethicist like me looks at it and sees it (I think) for what it is. At the time, baring an important man's child was the ticket to higher status for a woman. Fucking her and "spilling your seed on the ground" was, in effect, cheating her. God, from the quotes acribed to him, seems to think that cheating is uncool fairly consistantly.
Interesting. I see it as denying her offspring, you see it as denying her the status of her offspring. Personally, I find the whole thing a bit confusing. She seems to have wanted offspring, but the fact that she later prostituted herself to her father in law in order to conceive makes me doubtful that she was doing it to increase her status.
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... and in Western religions they were forbidden from leading or teaching
Shakyamuni (the historical Buddha) also forbade women from teaching, even though one of his earliest and most devout followers was a woman. It isn't just western traditions. When you see something repeated over and over in widely different cultures, NorCal, it is a good idea to look for a common (and parsimonious) cause.
If I remember correctly, what you're referring to went like this:
The Buddha's aunt approached him and asked to become a nun. Tradition in India had been for many centuries that only men be clergy, so he refused her fairly revolutionary request, saying that the time was not yet right for allowing female clergy. She returned with 50 other women, all of whom wanted to become nuns. He relented and compromised with them, allowing them to be nuns but putting a number of restrictions on them, one of which was a prohibition against teaching. In even compromising with them, he would have been considered a fairly radical feminist, and I doubt that he wanted to start complete social upheaval by treating the sexes identically. So I do not think you should attribute that rule to the Buddha, but rather to 900 years of Indo-European restrictions on the role of women in religion.
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as well as being incapable of making contracts due to their deceitfulness, being almost invariably slutty.... [snip] “Who can find a virtuous woman?”
See the 10%-20% of babies statistic above. Since we were "dragging our knuckles" we have been selected to be suspicious of the sexual motivations of our mates, and not without reason. Traditions don't form in a vacuum, NorCal.
The statistics also show that the sexes are approximately equal in their promiscuity, and Diogenes never found any honest men, either.
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I see the human race as having huge challenges ahead of it, and I am very fond of the hope that our species might survive. Great ideas may come from individuals, but great works are the result of the skills of many.
I too hope that our species survives, but I'm not overly optimistic. I don't trust intellect to save us as much as you do. I simply don't think that we are wise enough to abandon the evolutionary forces that shaped us. These processes may well be too complex for us to comprehend fully. Our ethical notion of what is right, and good, has evolved to be honoring the desires and heroically defending the welfare of each and every individual. What if this way of thinking is a disaster that will destroy our species in the end? Through heroic (and costly) interventions, children survive to adulthood and reproduce today that would have died in infancy just a couple of generations ago. As a species, we're getting fat, and soft, and in many ways fragile. Maladies are common today that were rare in my grandfather's time. Like you, most trust our intellect and technology to save us in the end. What if it can't? What if the ugly, irreducable truth is that for a species to survive there have to be winners and losers? What if it can't be fair for everyone, and when you meddle and try to make it so, you do so at the peril of your species as a whole?
OK, we differ on what may improve the race's chances of survival. I can live with that.
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So, while male domination might or might not be natural to our species, I don't think we can afford to perpetuate it any longer
And I think it's quite possible that we can't afford not to. See above.
See above.
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What of forbidding women from leading?
What of it? I'm not any more for it than you are. What I am vehemently against is "toning down" men so that women have a better shot at it. For the reasons that I stated above, I think that men are evolved to be more interested in asserting dominance than women are. It's just how we are built, and for good reason. We should encourage both our men and our women to express what they are, fully, and with pride. I don't think that men have to forbid women from doing anything that they can do. I think that in an environment that celebrated the differences between men and women, rather than treating them with distain as part of our unworthy "simian" past women leaders would be rare. They would exist, but they wouldn't be the rule. Male leaders are the rule today. Women leaders are the exception, our social agendas not withstanding. I think it's just part of our inate humanity to look to strong men to lead. Many people think it's some repressive cultural conspiracy. That is the basic difference between us.
You are arguing that by excluding (or even failing to encorage and prefer) women as leaders you would lose whatever contribution that they would make. It's not so. Though women lead relatively rarely, they have always been the confidants and and counsel of strong men. Even some men are spectacular councelers, but would never be accepted as a leader. Henry Kissenger is the best example that comes to mind. He would never have been elected president, and he knew it, but he made a tremendous contribution nonetheless.
Just an OT aside, I loathe Henry Kissinger. He played a major role in the deaths of hundreds of thousands of civilians in various parts of the globe, and I hope that the foreign courts that are trying to extradite him succeed. May we never have a woman leader who is that bad.
Time for me to get out of the office, so I'll have to pick this topic back up later.
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