Will women always be more 'vulnerable'?

[rosabud]

The news yesterday that the woman who escaped Boko Haram reported that these groups are raping women as a matter of course is horrible and frightening but not unexpected. Also in the news yesterday the focus was on Saudi Arabia and its appalling human rights abuses but, most especially, how women are simply not allowed to do ordinary things like participate in sport or drive cars.

It seems that although governments like ours agree that this all "terrible" there is not much we seem to be able to do about it. There is an implication, therefore, that the rights women enjoy here are a "privilege" and a "lucky" result of living in a rich, Western country. A bit like having good drains. Or not dying from hunger.

This makes me wonder:

1. How much do the men around me believe that I should only be treated well in certain contexts? In other words, if Armageddon occurs tomorrow, will all the men in my lovely Western society start raping me etc?
2. Are women only ever going to achieve equal rights in certain contexts - so is the progress women's rights have made over the last century or so a very flimsy, easily withdrawn concept?

I am thinking aloud here. Does anyone else know what I mean??

It's worth remembering too that in a situation of extreme hardship we might all kill another person in order to steal their food. Physical strength will definitely play a part in that, but cunning will also come into it.
While stealing food may be essential for immediate survival, rape is not. It is just wanton violence, taking advantage of the situation to hurt others. While we might accept that violence is a pretty much unavoidable consequence of a desperation to survive, to me, sexual violence seems like opportunistic cruelty.

I think in a pre or post technological society that pregnancy for a species with our brain size is always going to be actively or potentially crippling. With survival requirements on a group level being directly linked to the number of fertile births women will become regarded as incredibly valuable: sadly, this would be linked directly to youth, health and other factors that in our modern society we regard as discriminatory and disempowering. As a result we would be likely to see a repeat of those times of history when an urge to protect women would become expressed as controlling behaviours and gradual infantilisation.

My great hope in that scenario would be that the modern sexual revolution would have broken the desire to protect our individual genetic heritage at the expense of others. If so, then it is hopeful that women would not find their sexual behaviour returned to the control of men, but would instead become the gate keepers of reproductive access, which would definitely improve the species as a whole. It is my belief that women only ignore their instincts and engage with abusive or otherwise damaged individuals as the result of overt or covert patriarchal pressure. If women were sociologically militarised before the collapse began (the IDF clearly demonstrates that this is achievable) then it is possible that a society more equal than pre-industrial structuresevolves might evolve.

I'm just not sure the optimal scenario would be likely if population dropped too far and if too little medical knowledge survived. Getting an oversized primate brain out of a bipeds birth canal is still incredibly traumatic. If we're smashed back to wandering tribes of hunter gatherers I think things would get sexist fast, but a Warlord able to gather the remnants of military forces could potentially be a woman.*

Spare a thought for non-warrior males. Unless some remnant of social or technical civilisation survives for us to try and specialise in, we are utterly without value.

Oh and I'll join your bunker Buffy, as long as we prioritise coffee production.

*If sufficient women in pre-apocalyptic society were willing to participate in military duties.

Males and females make up the species they are both required and equally depend on each other. So yes women would be dependent on men but equally men would be dependent on women there is no weakness in that.

Highly unlikely that there would be a situation where it's men vs women. It will be groups of people made up of both males and females against other groups of people.

Whilst it would nice to think that it would be like the stone age but with greater knowledge that's unlikely. Due to the way we live now (excluding our brethren that live more traditionally.) people would be rubbish at surviving the average brit has 0 survival skills and that would be after mass starvation followed by disease. The pursuit of knowledge is reserved for those with plentiful resources and not busy with just surviving. In all likelihood we would lose much of what we know.

Of course it depends on what happened.

I'm not really understanding why people are so quickly discounting collaboration and working together and immediately going straight to violence directed at each other. I can imagine that happening initially, but it wouldn't be sustainable, would it?

I was overly simplifying, Greysanderson.

Yes the dependency between men and women would exist. But surely that would bring greater collaboration, rather than Warlords?

But why would be working against other people? Would we have the time/energy/resources to actually do that?

It would depend on the situation scallops. In a world with extremely scarce food and water, violence would be inevitable I think.

Scallops this is slightly off-topic but I know exactly what you mean about going straight to violence

In sci-fi films where there is the theme of taking some sort of pill or genetic mutation that means a character uses "the whole of te brain" this often means super-strength, super-violence, super "logical" intelligence (computer-like). It's rarely a super-developed sense of empathy for example. Not that that is necessarily the pinnacle of human achievement either, but the implication is often that super-ability is aligned with stereotypically masculine qualities. Though I'm not a massive afficionado of sci-Fi so I'm aware there may well be films that do depict these things that I'm not aware of

Scallops we would probably compete with others due to scarcity of resources. Some groups may join up if there is enough to go round others will probably just take what they can if there isn't, if they have the ability to do so. Although some people might be able to survive fine if they have vital skills which promote survival which others can make use of.

Yy Petula. Exactly what I was meaning.

Is there a lot of violence in those areas of the world where food and water is scarce (or was there before so-called 'western civilisation' took root)?

I am just trying to think outside the patriarchal constraints we currently live under whilst acknowledging those constraints would still exist post-apocalypse. Perhaps the need for survival would override that, eventually.

Or maybe I am just looking at how I'd like society to behave. How I think we could behave. And being terribly naive .

This is a thought exercise though. So shifting the Overton Window is part of that.

Yes scallops, in tribal societies where different groups compete for scarce resources, there is an extremely high level of violence, such that whole tribes have been wiped out by intertribal wars.

The term 'endemic warfare' was coined to describe the constant state of tension that builds up between tribes, regularly escalating into conflict.

Oh wow. That's depressing .

It's also not universally true. In pre-conquest Australia for example, most tribes lived in relative harmony with their neighbours. There are some notable exceptions, of course, but it was because resources were so scarce that peace had to be maintained. It was also cultural, but I doubt anyone wants to get into an anthropological discussion here

No probably not yes I would but may be not the right thread for it . When I posed the question I was thinking of inuit tribes as I thought they had lived relatively peacefully along side each other.

I think, actually, that the idea of the pregnant or newly-delivered woman as helpless is a bit of a patriarchal exaggeration (which, once again, works for men: if women 'need' a male protector then they will be willing to please and obey one. And this ever-so-special helplessness is also an excuse for preventing them from doing various things they might want to do...) I'm not dissing any woman who had a difficult pregnancy/traumatic birth/SPD or whatever: there will always be a percentage of women for whom pregnancy and birth are more debilitating. But there has also always been a percentage of women who (particularly in cultures where it is expected) work hard while pregnant, deliver quickly and easily, stick the baby to the tit and get back to work.

These Mad Max scenarios invariably discount the food/water requirements of an individual human so a rampaging band of mauraders would need a very wide ranging territory, with many communities producing food/water.

They also need to leave those producing groups with enough to sustain themselves. Otherwise everyone dies out.

These rampaging bands by necessity need to be small, so you end up needing a rhetoric, philosophy or religion to control the numerically superior farmers.

I think our current society as it stands is too invested in ideals of democracy/Liberty to truly fall that far, as such there is no compelling reason I can see for woman's rights to be quite as tenuous as it might appear.

Dervel

You're forgetting the predations of, for instance, the Huns and other pre-mongolian steppe nomads. They were quite happy to exterminate agricultural societies and destroy any infrastructure they found (irrigation ditches, wells etc) because they could live in wilderness quite happily. Those marauding bands were large enough to defeat the Chinese and Roman armies that tried to stop them and those were only single tribes - when the tribes united they destroyed whole civilisations and literally desertified where they passed - the Kushan Empire being just one example.

Nomadic herders do need wide territories, but they can muster enormous numbers and do not in any way require the support of settled societies. As their numbers expand they will by necessity turn to violence.

I agree our society has too much in the way of cultural wealth to fall further, but it's the iron discipline of our military subcultures that will survive rather than the virtues born of material wealth.