do you believe in the patriarchy?

At the gym, they call 'strength' power and 'endurance', which is another facet of strength, endurance.

I was jolly interested by your quote, dreaming. It reminded me that humans discovered agriculture during the Palaeolithic. This development meant people had to settle (to grow stuff in one place) and had more children due to more readily-available carbs. It's possible that this marked the start of our continuing problem with labour division: women were tied close to the homestead, doing babies and 'nurturing' tasks such as farming and house-building.

If the settlement wanted things brought (or fought) from elsewhere, men were more likely to be free to do it as women would be encumbered by babies. When they started trading with other settlements, same thing - leading to Men being In Charge Of Business while Women Tend The Home.

I'm not labelling any of them lazy or stupid. Farming by hand was a bastard job: they all, men and women, died with degenerative bone conditions from the work. The development of homesteading could easily, though, have marked the beginning of the blummin' patriarchy. 25,000 years. It's had a fair innings now, wouldn't you say?

Oh and "strength" has been traditionally described in patriarchal terms, i.e. men as the default. Even I am doing it.

Pure muscular strength isn't the only requirement to "defend families". Speed, agility and stamina are also necessary. I am not a historian or anthropologist but I am pretty certain that all wars/fighting did not come down to arm wrestling and chucking heavy boulders at each other. Flight would have been a much used defence for example.

Abigail,

I said stronger, not faster. Clearly, it takes less strength to propel a lighter body. In fact the strength required is proportional to the square of the speed. And stamina, again, is a completely different area and, due to women having more fat and being lighter, they are able to perform better in ultra events.

If men were the defenders of the family why were they the hunters which meant being away from the homestead for hours/days at a time? Surely it would have made more sense for them to stay at home to help defend?

garlic re: metal knickers etc

Just look at world records across the sports Larry. On average a woman's world record is about 10% less or slower than men's. It is a pretty well known fact. Take athletics, swimming, rowing for example. Weightlifting could be different as it requires much stronger upper body strength - I don't know much about it and I am not going to check as I am on my phone. For those areas requiring stamina women are even closer to men e.g. extreme marathons etc. If men are 50% bigger and stronger then it isn't translating itself into measurable terms. The doping argument is a bit erroneous and can be countered by the fact women's participation in sport no way matches men's. If more women competed then maybe gaps would be even closer.

As for defending families. If they weren't creating the violence in the first place then no defence would be needed.

Larry, where are you getting these ideas from? These are really sweeping generalisations you are making.

Nice layman's article in National Geographic:
news.nationalgeographic.com/news/pf/66610441.html

'Some research has suggested that the practice of dividing labor according to sex dates back as far as two million years. But the new study suggests the changes didn't occur until the upper Paleolithic period, which lasted from about 45,000 years ago to 10,000 years ago. "We argue that the typical patterns of labor division emerged relatively recently in human evolutionary history," Kuhn said...

As in hunter-gatherer societies of the recent past, men likely hunted large animals while women gathered small game and plants, enabling a more efficient use of available food sources. When small game and plant foods were scarce, women and older children were often involved in other vital activities, such as producing clothing and shelter...

The scientists point out in their study that gender roles were not always the same in early-human cultures, and there's nothing that predisposes either sex toward certain kinds of work. "That women sometimes become successful hunters and men become gatherers means that the universal tendency to divide subsistence labor be gender is not solely the result of innate physical or psychological differences between the sexes; much of it has to be learned," the authors write...

The findings, he added, should not be taken as a justification for the separation of roles for men and women in contemporary society. "We shouldn't look to the remote past for clues about how we ought to behave today," Kuhn said.'

In a nutshell: the fact that modern humans developed a sex-based division of labour may have given them an evolutionary edge over earlier humans, and perhaps this helps explain the embedding of patriarchy in early human societies. But this division was not based on physical characteristics, it was learned behaviour.

Why do 95% of dating ads from women specify "tall" as a desired characteristic (and I say that as a short man). Why are there so many threads on here where women speculate whether they could possibly date a shorter man? Is it really all conditioning? I don't know a single parent who brings their daughters up with the idea that tall equates to desirable. It strikes me as far more likely to be due to an inherited desire to be protected. If it is all nurture and societal pressures, I really don't see them in this area. Tons of films have short guys with tall women. So, the media is not to blame.

I would love to hear an alternative explanation of the above, other than evo psych??

Oh, be fair, Abigail. In mediaeval Europe they defended their wives by locking them in metal knickers while buggering off to rape other men's wives & break stuff for years at a time. That was only the posh men, of course. The poor ones defended their families by making the kids do the most dangerous jobs.

I've always been very slightly confused by how, in the Stone Age fantasy, the blokes managed to spend their time out in forest hunting parties and simultaneously defend the family cave from wolves. Did they have jeeps and rifles, so they could pop out for a couple of hours and come home with a skinned deer?

"Why is it pure speculation? As I said, how can you believe in evolution and not evo psych? Otherwise, what you would be saying is that every other part of the genome followed an evolutionary pattern, but not the brain. Of course, if you are a creationist, I can see why you would believe it were just a fairy tale.

It does not help to fight injustice. However, like any other form of history, it helps to understand where we have come from to know where we are going or would like to go."

I'm not saying that the human brain hasn't evolved. But no-one knows exactly how that process has worked. Evo psych is pure speculation, usually enlisted to support the status quo from what I've seen. Scientists do not yet understand much about the brain, so how evo psych can be considered anything other than speculation I don't know. There's no way of proving its claims, is there?

And yes, understanding where we have come from is helpful. But I don't think evo psych does that.

The great thing about feminism is that it starts with the reality of women's lives. Not speculation and unfounded assumptions. Male supremacy is not a speculation: it's a description of real, observable injustice. That's something solid to work from. Evo psych isn't.

Abigail,

I am prepared to stand my ground that, on average, men are about 1.5x bigger and stronger. Where do you get your 10% from. The best comparison event is probably weightlifting (in terms of pure strength). In that the mens and womens for snatch and clean and jerk are, respectively: 212 vs 140 and 263 vs 186. that is pretty close to 1.5X.

Additionally, a lot of female elite athletes (and males too) are on some form of doping. And that will make a far bigger difference to a female than to a male, as men are already quite heavy in testosterone.

Men always defended their families and then their tribes. It might have been against other men but that does not mean it is not the case. For an individual woman, being under the protection of strong men made sense. In totality, maybe had there been no men, they would not have needed the protection. However, that is a hypothetical. You are assigning moral weight to a fact.

As you were.

Men are not 1.5x bigger and stronger than women. If you look at Elite athletes performances, men are on average about 10% stronger than their female counterparts. That varies from sport to sport slightly but it isn't ever 50% stronger which is what you are saying larry.

And men defending their families. What a load of bollocks. They are the ones being violent, creating wars etc. That isn't defending families that is putting them in danger.

Garlic,

"Larry, there is no evidence whatsoever for that "women nurture, men provide" model of early Man. It was an assumption made by Victorian anthropologists/archaeologists, to whom it seemed obvious."

Really? I thought there was plenty of evidence. Certainly, men defended their families throughout time. They are physically on average about 1.5x larger and stronger. It would make no sense to have any other model. Of course, women did other things not reliant on a stronger body. I am not saying all they did was nurture.

Proles,

"Re: evo psych - what is the point of it? And how is it not pure speculation? That's an honest question - I really can't see what value there is in it. Does it in any way help to fight injustice?"

Why is it pure speculation? As I said, how can you believe in evolution and not evo psych? Otherwise, what you would be saying is that every other part of the genome followed an evolutionary pattern, but not the brain. Of course, if you are a creationist, I can see why you would believe it were just a fairy tale.

It does not help to fight injustice. However, like any other form of history, it helps to understand where we have come from to know where we are going or would like to go.

Quite clearly, the huge strides in technology over the comparatively recent past (say 200 years, not much more really) have made physical strength almost irrelevant. Hence why society is changing so quickly and so many questions are being asked now about division of labour etc.

Thanks GB, re-reading through what I've typed I haven't expressed myself correctly, mind wandering as I looked through various links.
I was meaning in the past, inhertance generally passed via males, and what a women had became her husbands. Thus you end up with males being seen as more important.

I think Saudi women have amassed great wealth and believe once they marry it does not become part of her husbands wealth.

Property and titles are passed via the male blood line - isn't that strict definition of patriarchy? There are cultures in which possessions pass through the female line - at least, there have been until very recent history; not sure about now - and some that do more complicated things like spreading assets between various defined family members. The female inheritance line (I think; haven't checked) strictly defines matriarchy. There, too, a woman would need to make sure she had children in order to pass down her property.

In our society now, though, this is no longer true, hurrah! Unless you count the landed classes ... who are hardly insignificant in the scheme of things.

My understanding of marriage is it's always tied to inheritance, passing wealth from one generation to the next legally. Property and titles are passed via the male blood line, hence they continue to control the wealth.

Monotheolistic religions, based on male founders in my belief also reinforce patriarchal societies. It controls the behaviour of females, puts males at the head of households and is given as the word of God. (The Catholic church banned priests from marrying a few hundred years ago to ensure all wealth went back to the church).

YY, Himalaya, and that is one of the most intractable problems of feminism. When I were a lass, it was thought (in a not-very-well-thought-out way) that free childcare for all would resolve the inequalities imposed by child birthing and rearing. Clearly things are both more complicated and more interesting than that. The proposal still laid the responsibility for childcare at women's feet - and, arguably, led to the impossible ambition for women to "have it all".

Since getting older, more experienced, and gaining a good functional understanding of wider issues like economics & social structures, I've become an advocate of altered working practices and radical restructuring. I even believe it will happen. "My" generation's feminism probably contributed to this possibility as, back then, few men would have considered themselves desirous of more involvement with childcare. People do become aware of the potentials of change; it just takes ... a ... long ... time.

By the way, before anyone jumps on me I'm not saying it happened like that -
I'm just answering dreaming's question about why 'male' (or productive vs reproductive) contributions to society might be valued differently, with a thought experiment.

Dreaming -

I think one key reason why activities that are not associated with reproduction/raising children became more influential and are seen as more important is that they are amenable to efficiency gains, so if one sex has has more time and freedom to concentrate on that other stuff they will tend to get accumulate more resources and that then translates into power.

Try this thought experiment to see what I mean:

A man and a woman with low technology work together to farm a field (or hunt, or gather or fish or whatever you like, it doesn't matter). They are equal in every respect.

They both produce 10 tonnes/year from their labour. Then she gets pregnant. So she has to take a bit of time off, carries the baby around while working, breast feeds etc....so the next year he produces 10 tonnes again and she produces 8 plus a baby.

But they are very fair and equal and he says I'll give you one tonne to make it fair because the baby is 1/2 my responsibility.

Then the next year someone invents a better hoe, so they can produce 20/tonnes each in the same time.

Next time she gets pregnant he produces 20 tonnes and she produces 16 plus a baby. The baby isn't any more or less work than the last one, but this time he would have to give her 2 tonnes to make things fair. The hoe has given him more advantage than it gave her (and perhaps he is therefore willing to pay more for it, and starts saying 'its my hoe', why do you need more of my grain this time etc...)

One of the main things that characterises humans is continually inventing stuff. On the other hand modern parenthood is no more efficient than ancient parenthood - it still takes 9 months etc...plus 16 + years of care, so if members of one sex do more of the parenting it gives members of the other more time and incentive to benefit from efficiency gains elsewhere.

Larry, the problem with that argument (among others) is:

1. It's a very limited view of traditional societies -- women are not just taking care of children, they are also involved in food production, they would have important roles as healers, etc.

1. Even if a certain division of labour is inevitable, why is it that the male roles came to be seen as more important? Such that they should rule society?

This to me is the limitation of evo psych stuff, sure go on and theorise about gender differences but I don't think there is anything in human neurological development that makes the higher valuation of male contributions to society inevitable.

Proles, I am interested in what I think you term evolutionary psychology. We are all everything we ever have been, in our physical and mental structures, so understanding 'what we have been' helps us understand what we are: both individually and as societies.

Them Victorians did a lot of damage by applying their constructed values to their foundational discoveries! It's not their fault, though. The problem is the strength of contemporary desire to hold onto their values.