Women’s Rights
An anthropologist friend of mine told me a set of interesting facts last night in a California hot tub.
First of all, if girls and boys live together before the age of about 6, they will tend not to be sexually attracted to each other. Kibbutz children, for example, raised communally, do not tend to marry each other. It’s all to do with smell, apparently–if a girl gets accustomed to the smell of any male during those formative years, she will consider him a sibling, and naturally exclude him from her pool of potential partners. This applies to males of any age–it’s the age of the female that’s key.
This is all very reasonable, in the light of genetics–if a male is around you when you are young, he’s likely to be a relative, and if you breed with a relative, your offspring will be less robust and more likely to suffer from maladies and conditions caused by reinforced genetic defects. Therefore it’s better to breed with individuals who have genes different from yours (exogamous mating).
Bonobo females, closely related to humans, will not mate with their sons, or with their younger brothers, for the same reasons. Obviously in a population of chimpanzees or early hominids, the only way to avoid interbreeding is via the sensitivity of the female–any female mammal can know recognise its offspring, but the father has no clue which young are his (unless females are captive).
The implication of this is that for most of our history, nubile females controlled who they mated with–otherwise this mechanism could not have evolved. Which provides counter-evidence to the notion that prehistory was an extended and violent reign of uncontrolled alpha males, galumphing through the jungle, while weaker females stayed close to the cave, doing a bit of dusting here and there–a notion which has been used, in a marvellously circular argument, to justify male violence and aggression in our era. Instead it seems that females initiated or at least controlled courtship and mating, for millenia.
This is another neat nail in the coffin of the ideology of patriarchy, which, far from being our natural state, seems increasingly clearly to be a relatively recent overlay onto a previous state of much greater male and female freedom.
Tags: culture, genetics, home, partiarchy, politics
Oct 29, 2008
Thanks for sharing this information, it’s quite interesting.
About male violence, it should be noted that female violence also exists in ways that aren’t as visible but in most instances, it’s equally or even more damaging.
It goes without saying that men need to fully respect women but for this thing to work, respect has to go both ways.
Oct 29, 2008
I wonder though is current female violence due to women feeling a need to maintain control in an aggressive “male” way. These violent females take note of what gets a man ahead in their environment and copy this behavior to get themselves ahead. Do females tear each other down because it is so hard for a women to get ahead in our modern world?
Just thinking off the top of my head here.
Oct 30, 2008
Recommended reading: “Jacobson’s Organ” by Lyall Watson. Popularized science reading on the twin smell senses (normal olfactory and pheromone) that have a huge and largely unconscious role in human social behavior.
There used to be a huge trade in ladies’ used handkerchiefs, and I hear that some men will pay a small fortune for disgusting old tennis shoes (ordered online and shipped discretely via UPS). It’s all pheromones. Watson even says that the incense burned at some Catholic services is a plant analogue of musky pheromones, making people feel ecstatic and elevated.
I keep telling my girlfriend to stop shaving and bathing so much, but she never listens to me. Oh well.
Oct 31, 2008
Just a little game I like to play…
I wonder though is current male violence due to men feeling a need to maintain control in an aggressive way. These violent males take note of what gets them ahead in their environment and utilize this behavior to get themselves ahead. Do males tear each other down because it is so hard for men to get ahead in our modern world?
Jun 22, 2009
i am wondering what the connection between the picture and the title is? i dont want to make assumptions or jump to conclusions about that because in light of today’s propaganda it would seem that the picture is there to make a point about supposedly oppressed women.
and there needs to be a more explicit connection made between the title “women’s rights” and the assumptions/hypothesis that women used to be in control. does having our rights mean we have to be in control?
and how does this factor in to your hypothesis/assumptions: the fact that many cultures around the world for millenia lived in extended families where cousins grew up together and married each other. and maybe someone should pull up some statistics to see what is the percentage of “defective” births from cousin marriages versus births in this country where children end up with autism or other types of “defects”. yes, too much interbreeding has consequences, but too much eating has consequences too. extremes are extremes. so my point is that there is a healthy range of cousin marriages.
i would say that the example you gave proves that people tend to get very socially indoctrinated and the global pseudo-culture (from media and corporate hegemony) of the day is that we want prince charming to come sweep us off our feet – and since we know the people we grew up with, and since no one is perfect they certainly wont match up to prince charming, so we pine for the new and mysterious. maybe this is why divorce rates are ridiculously high in our day and families are almost completely defunct!