“If civilization had been left in female hands we would still be living in grass huts.” - Camille Paglia

Im not convinced about risk taking being a male characteristic. Recklessness yes but not risk. The women in my family are less risk averse than the men.

Someone who believes in 'erotic fondling at any age' and defends NAMBLA is certainly a realist...

Rosalind Franklin's DNA discoveries were great- re computers and the Internet, which women were you thinking of?

I've actually read an enormous amount of her work because I love her writing style. A lot of her ideas are nonsense and misogyny

oh lets.
Printing, Spinning and weaving, steam engines and everything they powered, electricity ditto, telephony, television & cinema….I could go on…

most technology is a result of armed conflict

[Citation needed]

Even gunpowder wasn't the result of armed conflict. I highly doubt central heating, ice cream machines, or wheels were either. Huge numbers of discoveries and inventions were accidental side effects of the search for eternal life or attempts to make gold. Telescopes, microscopes and other lenses were non-military inventions. I could go on.

Women invented computers and the internet and were the first to identify the structure of DNA. The reason why we do not see everything women invented is because men took credit for their inventions.

That’s a very questionable proposition.

A tool is anything that helps you to do a particular activity. So they absolutely are tools.

Then you haven't read her work!

Paglia is a realist. Don't forget that most technology is a result of armed conflict!

Those are not tools!

That's a telling example. Margaret Mead has been unfairly maligned I think. She did make mistakes but big revisionist claims that she got huge things wrong are now being questioned.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coming_of_Age_in_Samoa#The_Mead%E2%80%93Freeman_controversy

https://savageminds.org/2010/10/13/the-trashing-of-margaret-mead/

We don't actually know that.

But men and women aren't the same - testosterone alone makes a big difference in violent aggression, I think - so while a hierarchy would emerge of course, I'd venture a guess that it wouldn't be anywhere near as violent as our current society.

If you removed men and the power structures they dominate then all that would happen is the remaining women would fill that power vacuum with their own hierarchy that would also be based on status, power, control of resources etc and that new structure, like before would utimately be underpinned with intimidation and if needs be violence as well.

Also, when looking at the balance of male vs female hunting for chimps it's 80:20 so I bet that is where the figure comes from.

Would we have mainly eaten large game or small game? If we look at our history then large game hunting was mainly done by the aristocracy but poor people could fish, collect snails and shellfish, catch birds, insects and small mammals. All of which does not require a lot of upper body strength and therefore will not have been exclusively male.

If we look at the animal kingdom species that hunt in groups then both sexes hunt, varying from lions where the bulk of the hunting is done by the females, orca/dogs/wolves/hyenas where hunting is led by the matriarch, to chimps where the bulk of the hunting is done by males.

I'm not sure 'male high IQ = lots of patents' translates to invention. Patents are dependent on money to file a patent and for the invention to be 'patentable', e.g. you can't patent a recipe or clothing design. Male invention is more likely to be valued than female invention in a patriarchal society, e.g. male 'art' vs female 'craft'. Who created the Bayeux tapestry - we don't know any of their names but we know the man who commissioned it.

Oh, right! Sorry. And yes - I think 'feasting' is a little optimistic! I think hunter gatherers, whether men, women, or both, were never feasting. Surviving with occasional, brief gluts was probably as good as it got.

I imagine men were an advantage to have in regards to hunting - stronger, faster over short distances, filled with testosterone, and more expendable to the group as a whole - losing one man would have to be less of an impact than one woman, I'd think.

I have really been enjoying this conversation. Some really thoughtful and insightful contributions - this little corner of the interwebs is unparalleled in that regard.

One thing that (I think!) hasn’t come up is the concept of how “importance” of a task or skill is decided on, and who does the deciding. What I’m thinking of is the anthropological research of Margaret Mead (I know she has her detractors, but I think this example works even as a thought experiment). I’m going to quote @MyrtleLion from another thread here, because she describes it well:

[Mead] discovered two villages around 10-20 miles from each other, both of which had knitting cultures. In one village, knitting was women's work and was felt to be necessary for garment making for the villagers. It was disdained by men who refused to have anything to do with it except wearing the garments (and presumably whingeing if there was anything wrong with them).

In the other village, knitting was solely done by men. It was considered almost holy and precious and women were not allowed anywhere near the knitting, particularly if they were menstruating. Possibly they weren't even allowed to wear the garments.

Mead concluded that in both cultures, it wasn't about the knitting, but about the knitters, and male knitters were more revered than female ones.”

In other words, if women do it, it’s disposable and not important, if men do it it’s holy.

I think it’s not only important to look at the erasure of women in the world of innovation, but also to look at who is deciding what counts as innovative.

Oh, I agree with you that all women or all men would manage. I said the same upthread.

was referring back the poster who introduced the 80/20 guess that we have been discussion who had also said in the 80/20 post that without men, we would all be feasting.

What was a stupid argument was the pp saying that women would starve without men, which was what the commenter you replied to was responding to. I was just reiterating that women can both hunt and gather, of course.

And yes, I'm sure men would've managed to survive as well - although I must admit I have doubts about the quality of their society.

I didn't say we would. But I imagine we'd be alright, given that women have and do also hunt for both small and large game, especially if necessary.

Yes, but we would not be feasting.

Yes… some years ago I read or heard something about which human physical abilities are remarkable. In our modern world we tend to think it’s all about brains, opposable thumbs and speech, but compared to other animals we’ve also got a couple of other things relevant to hunting. One is that humans are really good at long distance running. We tend to compare ourselves negatively with a cheetah or gazelle but they don’t run marathons. And that’s something that many people of both sexes are capable of doing, with training.
The other one was throwing. Overarm throwing starting presumably with stones and progressing to spears is clearly a huge advantage to a hunter, and no other species can do it. And this is something where men’s bodies skeletons and muscles really do give them an advantage over women.

Sure, and men can (and did) gather the aforementioned berries, nuts and roots etc when required to do so and if they could somehow reproduce without women they would have managed as well. Its a stupid argument. Both groups were capable of hunting and gathering. It could be argued that men were better suited to take on very large game as their increased upper body strength and size allowed them to kill animals from a greater distance thus reducing the risk profile of such tasks but that did not mean women did not get involved.