Food hierarchy

[Ava6]

Just when I thought I had learnt it all about the true nature of our males, here comes something that truly makes me lose it:

I had always assumed that the sky high mortality of mothers& babies in times past was due to lack of medicine, sanitation + too many kids for mums to look after them properly. Turns out that an even bigger factor was malnutrition due 2 men & boys hogging the food for themselves, leaving pregnant & breastfeeding women + growing girls 2 feed on their leftovers. Fetuses became too weak on such low nutrition, which would explain the staggering no. of stillbirths. This was probably the reason girls started growing so rapidly after WW II in the developed world: for the 1st time in history there was enough food to feed the females of the family sufficiently after the males took their fill.

For some reason this gutpunches me even more than all the other misogynistic evil men have perpetrated. I mean - can you really socialise someone to be this psychopathically selfish through conditioning alone??? (in terms of the male nature vs nature debate)

Dh is of Indian descent and there are various family stories of women not being fed. Mil had to travel to visit her parents house to get food for her and her 2 children because her inlaws refused to feed her when she was first married.

I can believe it was the same in the UK once

This is astounding nowadays.

Ava you have really hit upon something here.

This thread is fascinating. I'm commenting just to bookmark it for later.

I wish there were more Muslim women on here I could ask about my experiences. From what I have seen in the south east nowadays Muslim communities who still tend to be very poor and food is important, well they absolutely prioritise breast feeding and pregnant women. Is this a modern thing? Or does this come from historical reasons? Is this a result of modern women in the uk influencing things?

Another thing, historically men would have laughed at you for asking for a female perspective, but were women far less intelligent because not only were they denied education they were denied basic nutrition that would feed the brain?

How far does this go back? The celts disagreed with the Romans attitude towards women. In Celtic society and other societies at that time women were in positions of power. So when did penis portions come into force?

Blimey.

I have many memories of my grandmother playing up food for the males in the family on Sunday and then drinking the veg water in the kitchen.

My mum came from a poor irish background, but I can remember her being very proud of my capacity to eat every food going as a young child.

But gosh this is so messed up. I'm starting to think too as pp said that this is why men are attracted to very slim women. Women with 'self control' who eat less.

Someone clever needs to write about this! Yeah not me

Attitudes of man=meat woman=diet still prevail. Fat Monica is shamed whilst Joey is manly for eating a whole turkey!

this is why men are attracted to very slim women

What about all the men who don't go for slim women? What about all the women who like men with a 6 pack?

Thanks SmallClanger, for the reminder of what Barbara Pym wrote!

Yes, I have heard of this before. Some of it did come from the idea that an adult male who was bringing in a wage needed more food (and the fact that men, usually, need more calories than women) but in many cases it got all wrapped up in the idea that women are inferior and should put themselves last.

Women in the old days were pregnant or breastfeeding constantly, so they absolutely needed more calories then men. A pregnancy takes away half your nutrition. (Also because women worked round the clock unlike men who had downtime). I absolutely think that the lower intelligence for women as due to malnourishment in childhood and persistent lack of sleep in adulthood due to infant care (long term insufficient sleep causes brain damage). Same for physical strength and size - undernourishment of the females exaggerates sexual dimorphism.

As for being socialised psychopathic - it's a circular argument because the men created this socialisation and have enforced it brutally. I have been convinced for a while now that there is something chemically wrong with male neurology. It's like they got stuck in the dominance & misogyny & violence cycle which most mammal males experience only during breeding season. Chimps are also in this mode non-stop and make the lives of their females misery. 7 million years of evolution separate us and it's the same with our species. What if you could lower testosterone intake by men as they grow up (as a sci-fi though experiment because they'd never let it happen)? Could that work?

Overall it seems like the agricultural revolution is the worst thing to have ever happened to female humans. At least they could feed themselves by gathering before even if men hogged most of the meat, and weren't pregnant so often.

With that tragic pic: women are forced to wield the axe on their daughters because men won't even do the patriarchal dirty work themselves. In India it's women who are pushed into infanticide of their undesirable female babies when they are still raw from giving birth to them, so they can focus on producing a boy. Mothers and grandmothers are brainwashed into performing FGM on their offspring. A woman designed the corset. And then anti-feminists cry about how women do this horror to themselves...

Women's bodies also needed strength to recover from infections caused by childbirth, abortion, PIV and contraception-related health problems and the violence of men. So I will never accept that men ever needed more calories because their bodies don't carry the reproductive burden and the patriarchal abuse of it.

You know what's really disturbing? Vestiges of that are still around in Western culture I.e. how it's not manly to eat salads.

How could the mother do that to her wee girl. I couldn’t look at my thriving son whilst my wee girl is clearly slowly dying sad.

Do what, exactly? I don't think it's a good idea to read too much into one photograph when you don't have any background. She's feeding them both, not leaving her baby girl to starve to death in the corner.

And by the looks of it she's feeding the girl formula to fatten her up. In those days formula was considered superior as it was a thicker consistency and more calorific. An undernourished woman would likely have considered her own milk to be substandard and in her eyes formula would have been a godsend as it was guaranteed and consistent in its nutritional value. Plus she might have struggled to make enough breast milk to feed both twins adequately. If the bigger baby always ate more, (as a bigger baby would) it would be difficult to make sure the smaller/weaker baby got enough.

That woman probably spent money she could ill afford to buy formula for her underweight girl while feeding her perfectly healthy son with breast milk because he didn't 'need' the formula.

It's well known that with twins one is often bigger and more dominant in the womb, I know three sets of twins alive now where one has been born significantly healthier and stronger than the other, and that photo is old. It's probable that the woman didn't even know she was carrying twins until she gave birth. There would have been no pre or post natal medical care - it was in the lap of the gods whether a small, sickly or premature baby survived.It was very common then for the weaker twin to die, or to take literally years to catch up in size and weight with the bigger twin.

I am fully aware that that woman in the photo was from a very patriarchal culture where boys were revered and girls were often considered an inconvenience but I don't think we should necessarily be jumping to any awful conclusions about that mother prioritising the boy child and leaving the girl child to half starve.

Or "the key to a man's heart is through his stomach", or how women try not to eat a lot on a date. Corsets also prevented a woman from eating much, so even the upper classes that had food to spare limited females food intake. Also pregnancy brain is a factor in women's intelligence beliefs, which mattered greatly when they were pregnant all the time.

Men's manual labour: excuses, excuses. Women did plenty of hard labour - they just weren't paid for it. Giving birth needs the energy for a equal to a marathon run. Running a household before modern alliances needed an ox's strength, especially clothes washing and bread kneading. Carrying children is heavy lifting. Women also worked in the fields , farms, carried water, lugged home groceries.

Men haven't just hogged the food itself but the money for food. Aid organisations in developing regions have long figured out that the only way to make sure their donations translate into food in children's mouths is to give it to the mothers directly. Women supported Prohibition to prevent men from spending family money on drink ( and pub food for themselves I presume)

Did you hear the thing on Radio 4 about women and the Temperance Movement yesterday Ava ?

They were talking about the same thing.

You r right that we shouldn't presume in this particular case, but the fact of the matter is that girls do get dangerously underfed all around the globe. Women in those cultures are brainwashed into allocating more resources to the precious boys and don't have the power to equalise the scales even when they resist the brainwashing.

I'm just wondering how this can be helped seeing as the patriarchy isn't gonna disappear anytime soon. Perhaps the organisations focusing on girls' schooling in poor countries could focus on providing the girls with good meals while at school? Or give aid to families only on the condition that girls get fed equally (you could test this by their weight and general health)? Or would that result in even more girls being aborted if parents can't get away with starving them?

Overall it seems like the agricultural revolution is the worst thing to have ever happened to female humans.

This is another fascinating area of study.

Perhaps the organisations focusing on girls' schooling in poor countries could focus on providing the girls with good meals while at school?

I think there are great opportunities to deliver many services like this from such efforts. Maybe this is key bit of why they are so successful.

My MIL used to plate up Men’s Plates and Girls’ Plates. First lot always had bigger helpings, more meat and were served first. She was WC Londoner, born in the 20s.
It surprised me a bit when encountered it in the 80s, but as a 60s child it was common practice. Men fed first and more.

Ex H and his Dad used to have large steaks cooked for them every Saturday night by ex MIL. His sisters did not.

I'm 48 and grew up in NI. My family owned a farm and were also builders. There were 3 girls and 3 boys, plus parents. I grew up thinking it was normal, that the men ate first and the women got what was left. The females were thin and the men had stomachs. The meat was for the men and was piled high on their plates, far more than they needed. When I started working, while still at school I had become a vegetarian, under the circumstances not difficult 😒, I started buying my own food, which my oldest brother would take from my room. When I complained I was told by my brother and mother to shut up, Because he was a man and needed it more. So he got my food, plus a meal. This behaviour was not unusual in farming communities.