'Men are the secondary sex'

[ArabellaScott]

https://designmom.substack.com/p/males-are-the-secondary-sex

I'd call this a bit of a thought experiment.

Author describes the 'drone behaviour' of men, and considers a shift in how we see men and women's roles.

I've not looked deeply into the assertions she makes, some of them seem a bit wild, but thought it may be of interest.

I LOVE this. I reposted it on my instagram, and loads of my friends read it and said it was great.

Spot on if you ask me

I have thought this for years.

Sad times for men, eh?

I used to have a certain amount of respect for her - she wrote a lot about the cure for unwanted pregnancies being to stop unwanted ejaculations, not to police women’s bodies. But then she started spouting this sort of nonsense and, well…

designmom.substack.com/p/the-existence-of-trans-people-is

The first assertion made me raise an eyebrow: on hunter -gatherer societies:

'Social structure was simple and egalitarian. Groups needed all hands to ensure an adequate food supply, with men responsible for hunting large animals and women, for gathering plants and small animals. The ubiquity of so-called Venus statuettes and the central position of female figures in Paleolithic caves indicates that hunter-gatherer societies roughly balanced gender power.'

It does? Would like to see a wheen more evidence and reasoning.

One thing that springs to mind is Elaine Morgan's 'Descent of Woman', which also had.some kind of whacky hypotheses, but did, I think, make the very strong point that the primary unit and strongest bond in humans is not the man-woman, or father-mother, but the mother-child dyad.

Ha! And turned comments off, I see.

Like I said, some of it seemed pretty wild. I doubt she's the first feminist to come up with the idea - although she's not cited any references, afair - but still maybe an interesting premise for a thought experiment.

Y chromosomes are passed down virtually unchanged from father to son. Mitochondria are thought to be bacteria that got included in the human germ line early on - so obviously they have to be stored in the larger gamete. Their dna is dedicated to cellular energy processing, and nothing to do with directing development of the host organism, unlike Y chromosome dna.

In nature, males are interchangeable and somewhat disposable laborers, while females are primary, and essential for a community to thrive and grow. Females are so essential that human DNA perpetually preserves the maternal line—females pass down an unbroken genetic chain that is traceable by lineage, while “interchangeable” males do not. Mitochondrial DNA is passed from mother to child without recombination. Autosomal (or nuclear) DNA is contributed by both parents, but every generation it gets recombined, so it doesn’t preserve a single unbroken ancestral line.

Mitochondria are only an unbroken genetic chain through your exclusively female line. My daughter might one day pass on my/our mitochondria but my son will not. He might pass on his Y-chromosome which is an equally unbroken genetic chain via his father and their male ancestors.

I have just come back from India and one of the things I found interesting was that certain communities in India have traditionally had matrilineal lineage. This system is where descent, inheritance, and family identity are traced through the mother’s line. Matrilineal societies often exhibit high levels of women's empowerment, with women often managing businesses and holding property, leading to better health outcomes for women and children. Not surprisingly these cultures were degraded by European and British occupation that imposed western values and laws.

I only managed the first dozen or so paragraphs then I decided that life was too short to waste on such pervasively wrongheadedness.

One of the first clues to how determinedly she is imposing a frame on diverse phenomena in order to sell her own Great Idea/cognitive earworm, is her abuse of the notion of "what nature tells us". Pointing to elephant matriarchy, or bee behaviour to work out essential truths about human society is as respectable as citing clownfish to prove that humans can change sex.

One of the things that makes me angry with her fantasy of female supremacy is that it plays into an incel narrative; it almost seems like the flipside of the same narrative.
Incels are angry because they imagine a huge female power that crushes them in their mediocrity (or some such bullshit); She basically says "Yep, that's right." Presumably this makes incels say "See, I told you so. So its fine for me to manipulate, rape, humiliate, whatever, just out of a kind of psychological and sexual self-defence. It's my destiny."

The main reason for giving up on the article, though, was that it goes wrong in lots and lots of minor ways. If there was one key mis-deduction, or whatever, it would be interesting to analyse it. But it's just a pile of crap.

I thought that the first article posted by the OP made some very interesting points.
Patriarchy certainly doesn’t seem optimal / compatible for the long term survival of the human species .
Could ride the proverbial coach’n’horses through the nonsense of the second one obviously.

Total bunk. See: The consequences of fatherless homes.

Are outcomes bad in comparison with motherless homes? They tend to be compared against two parent families to their obvious detriment.

Thanks! That was one of the points that seemed somewhat questionable.

It does read a lot like the flipside of.incel theory. I find it interesting that 'incel' is a whole recognisable movement, while female.supremacy is not.

Afaik, she is an interior designer who gained a following during the “mommy blog” era. She is an intriguing contradiction - a Mormon with a large family who nonetheless has a very liberal East-Coast US take on things. There don’t seem to be any credentials behind her musings - some of them are clever and eye-catching, many profess to come from a feminist pov, but I don’t believe there is any hard, on the ground research behind any of it.

And I have a sneaking suspicion her “Ejaculate Responsibly” book came from a place of wanting to support banning abortions (though I don’t think she ever came out and said that).

I think this is a whole heap of bullshit, frankly - and only sounds feasible from the point of view of someone living in an industrialised society where food, shelter, defence needs are all taken care of.

But there is something about the idea that men's evolutionary roles are not as relevant as they once were. And what that means for men in our societies.

I hate all this pitting the sexes against each other like this. Men and women have different strengths/weaknesses and play different, crucial evolutionary roles. We need to focus on that, not who is dominant.

The argument is a fantasy novella dressed up as faux science.

There is zero evidence that patriarchy was invented only 10k yrs ago. Loads of evidence human hierarchies have usually been patriarchal even before we were modern humans.

Summing up the last 10k years of prehistory and history as a ‘very quick path to pervasive violence and destruction via climate change, nuclear bombs, oppressive religion, forced starvation, preventable disease, etc.´ is totally ridiculous.

DNA is traceable in both maternal and paternal lines.

Using spiders, whales and elephants- cherry picking to try and say the norm on nature is matriarchy is laughable.

Ooooh poor little menz being forced to be in charge. They don’t like it. Utter bollocks here.

I stopped here. This is complete nonsense and should be marked as fiction along the lines of Utopia.

This is it in a nutshell.

'Social structure was simple and egalitarian."

Impossible to know. Extrapolating from modern hunter gatherer societies living nomadic lifestyles, it's hard to accumulate material goods so individual status is possible (gained by skills, strength, or knowledge,) but hereditary status is harder to accumulate (harder, not impossible - see other primates). Heierarchies therfore tend to be small and simple.

Likely; not proven.

"Groups needed all hands to ensure an adequate food supply,"

Yes. But

"with men responsible for hunting large animals and women, for gathering plants and small animals."

This bit's woolier. Again, extrapolation from modern hunter gatherers tends to support some sex-based specialisation. But it's not complete or universal, or necessarily based on size (in some communities women and children do fish and frogs; men do birds and mammmals - but the sizes of the prey species aren't that different). Often plant gathering is both men and women. And some archaeological finds are now providing suggestions that prehistoric women were also involved in large animal hunts. A lot of this will depend on habitat and types of prey available - historically humans had a wider diversity than modern hunter-gatherers, with more big game that lends itself to whole-ccmmunity hunting efforts.

Unproven, verging on dubious.

"The ubiquity of so-called Venus statuettes and the central position of female figures in Paleolithic caves indicates that hunter-gatherer societies roughly balanced gender power."

We all know archaeologists are fond of describing everything of unknown purpose as a 'ritual object'. Doesn't mean they were. Prehistoric venus statues may have been objects of worship. Or they could have been early PornHub. Who knows? Even if goddesses were worshiped, that doesn't necessarily translate to the status of living women. See the treatment of women in societies that venerate the Virgin Mary.

And the gene stuff is nonsense, as already described by PP.

When I read Don't Sleep There are Snakes by Daniel Everet - in which he talks of his time living with a tribe in Brazil ( I think) still living a hunter gatherer life, what struck me was that the men spent their time ' hunting' largely by lounging around in fishing boats on the river all day, - and only occasionally hunting larger animals in the jungle - whereas the women spent their days in hard physical labour of digging up deeply rooted root vegetables with primitive tools. If the men returned at night when the women were sleeping, the women were woken up to cook the fish. Of course, the women would also have been responsible for the children all day, and all other domestic tasks. So egalitarian hunter gatherer society, my arse. Its pretty clear that the women did the bulk of the work, and the hard work, whilst the men took the easy jobs for themselves.

Eww

I thought I was going to agree with this (males as dispensable, world changing makes them (us: I’m one) much less useful, society in for big shifts), but I found it pretty tendentious.

Sounds a bit like lions/lionesses. Lions only hunt when the lionesses are tending newborn cubs.

Its similar to how labour is divided all over, no? Largely, men have jobs outside the home, aiming to earn money, while women are small scale farming, slogging at housework, child rearing, and engaged in non stop domestic labour in the home.

Thanks for sharing. I like her even more now!