https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IKiZm9RzO24
So I missed this when it first came out, but an alert reader by the name of Rebecca Solnit recently alerted me to an eloquent Harper’s Magazine takedown of the “myth of man the hunter,” by, well, Rebecca Solnit.
Solnit, you may recall, is the writer who came up with the idea of “mansplaining” after a dude mansplained one of her own books to her.
In her “Man the Hunter” piece, which you should all go and immediately read, she lays out the assorted sexist assumptions underlying the notion that our cave dude ancestors basically did all the real work while their prehistoric wives sat on their asses back at the cave eating prehistoric bon bons.
Yep, it’s the old “we hunted the mammoth” thing. Solnit describes it, quite aptly, as “the story of the 5-million-year-old suburb.” Every day, the story goes, cave men put on their grey flannel suits mammoth-hide shorts and trudged off
carrying their spears and atlatls to work and punching the primordial time clock. Females hang around the hearth with the kids, waiting for the men to bring home the bacon. Man feeds woman. Woman propagates man’s genes.
The reference to prehistoric suburbs is especially apt, because, as Solnit points out, the myth of man the hunter is actually a pretty new myth, as myths go, gaining widespread currency only in the 20th century, the century of the suburb.
In what we might call The Flintstones Era, anthropologists as well as TV producers set forth a vision of prehistoric life that
trace[d] the dominant socioeconomic arrangements of the late Fifties and early Sixties back to the origins of our species.
But it turns out that The Flintstones wasn’t a documentary.
I’m tempted to keep quoting until I quote virtually the entire article, but you should just go read it.
Oh, and while I’m talking Solnit, she’s also got a great new article up titled “Men Explain Lolita to Me,” discussing the reaction she got from the dudes of the internet after taking on an exquisitely dudebro Esquire list of “80 Books Every Man Should Read” — all but one of them written by, you guessed it, dudes.
Our old friend Scott Adams makes a cameo in the Lolita piece, BTW.
PS: If you’re doing any last minute Christmas shopping, or just looking for an interesting read, might I suggest Solnit’s Men Explain Things to Me
If you read the comments under the ‘Men Explain Lolita to Me’ article, you will see men explaining Lolita to her. Splainception.
It’s worth pointing out that Solnit got people talking about mansplaining but she not only didn’t coin the word, but isn’t even a huge fan of it (she thinks it makes it sound like an inherently male thing to do, which she doesn’t agree with).
Big fan of Solnit. She’s known as a sort of internet-famous feminist polemicist – which is great, of course, but it’s good to note the breadth and erudition of her work overall. I’m currently reading her essay collection “Storming the Gates of Paradise,” where she writes about anthropology, religion, contemporary art, literary history, nationalism, public policy, etc. etc. – it’s really something.
So criticism = censorship applies to all feminist critics, not just video game feminist critics? Consider me more shocked than Capt. Renault.
Funny how when a dudebro game reviewer says a specific video game sucks, it’s not treated as an act of censorship, I wonder why!
Moocow,
When any person of any marginalized identity criticizes something, it’s censorship and it’s bad.
When any person of any marginalized identity gets threatened with rape or death or swatted because they said something a bunch of cishet white dudebros dislike, it isn’t harassment. It’s criticism. Which is suddenly good and not very, very bad censorship.
ManLogick at its finest!
I downloaded this book earlier in the year with a few other feminist books and loved it. In fact I gave it to my daughters to read. Looking forward to reading the Lolita article. That should be interesting!
The hour or so that I just used reading those articles was an hour very well spent, and I thank you very much for linking to them.
Interesting article. I’m not particularly interested in archeology or pre-historic people in general, but when I learned about it in school I was always taught that men and women did a lot of hunting and gathering together. I was never taught that men hunted while women just sat at home. I understand how that fits into the limited world view of MRAs, but I’m curious as to how it gets any kind of cultural traction outside of that sphere.
LindsayIrene: did they think the article title was an imperative?
I honestly thought the idea of the male Hunter was something only straw men said, since I understood it was bullshit in middle school. I didn’t realize it was a serious argument until I first found this site a year or two ago.
Also, I might be wrong, but I read that Lolita was supposed to be about the fact that it’s just an asshole trying to make himself look better? Am I wrong and Lolita is even more creepy than I thought?
I haven’t actually read it myself, I’m just curious.
Well, Lolita is told from the POV of a pedophile, so, yeah, creepy.
Lolita is creepy, but that’s the whole point: Humbert lets things slip through that you might not notice till the second reading, but that really get across how awful he is. Nabokov himself consigned Humbert to hell.
Well, hell with a tiny bit of parole: comparing him to the protagonist of one of his other novels, Despair, he mentioned that Humbert was allowed out of hell once a year for one hour of walking in a nice garden, while Hermann will just never be let out. I think the difference is that towards the end, Humbert starts to get a vague sense of what he’s done, while Hermann remains an unrepentant and delusional asshat to his death. Bit of an MRA, actually, now that I think of it; at least, he shares their incredible self-regard and belief in his own intelligence, as well as being a gaslighting shit. It’s another first-person novel, but a lot funnier than Lolita because the gap between how Hermann sees the world and how the world actually is is so broad and very, very obvious. I’m fairly certain manospherians wouldn’t notice the gap, though, if only because Hermann’s wife’s cousin is such a total beta white knight.
Lindsayirene,
I’ve looked through some of the comments and who did I find? Our sometime friend Divided Line! Some of you may remember him as a sad boner troll who most egregiously chose a post about a feminist activist who was murdered to whine about how bad men have it. Every once in awhile he comes around to piss and moan about how men are oppressed because they aren’t entitled to women’s bodies and affections on demand.
I’m not at all surprised he’d be drawn to trolling a feminist article about Lolita. Humbert’s probably his hero.
LindsayIrene:
Ultimate Splainception would be if a bunch of women got in the comments section and splained things to the mansplainers, kind of the way I’m splaining ultimate splainception to you, for the complete mirror within a mirror effect.
@Rabid Rabbit
Ok, good, that’s what I thought. The article’s tone kinda gave me the impression that might not be the case. Glad to see I was wrong.
@ Josh, @ Walter
I took a psychology course as an undergraduate that had a brief section on evolutionary psychology; the first thing that happened was the professor showed a video of several women backing into cones while trying to park with a voice-over explaining that women never had to hunt so that’s why they might be worse at driving. I repeat, this was in an institution of higher learning, in a rather conservative state mind you, but still.
I just looked for the video but couldn’t find it; if anyone else has ever seen it let me know
@DepressedCNS
Seriously? Wow. Just… Wow.
I mean, I’m from West Virgina, which isn’t exactly the most liberal state (except for economic issues, especially unions) but even I never heard anything REMOTELY close to that level of sexism in my education.
Adrienne Zihlman and Nancy Tanner blew the man as hunter out of the water in like 1978. http://deanfalk.com/human-brain-evolution-what-fossils-tell-as/
Amazing how persistent this myth is!
In the liberal side of the State of Washington, I had one (public) school teacher tell the entire class that “boys were simply better at math,” and another tell me, in response to a question before class started, that we weren’t going to study any women’s works in College Prep English because “women don’t write at the college level.”
Right? A literal they hunted the mammoth. It took me years to warm up to anything even remotely evo-psych after that. This same professor used Gender Studies classes as an example of “transference”, like what can sometime happen when a psychologist and client begin to relate in a way that is unhealthy, akin to what happens between female professors and female students in a Gender Studies class. He gave me the most condescending and skeptical “Really?” when I raised my hand and told him my Gender Studies professor was a man.
@ Hippodameia
That’s… egregious, really.
Yeah – this was 1985-1988, so I hope things have gotten better . . .
DepressedCNS — it’s not that hard to add a soundtrack to a video, so I’m thinking/hoping the video was just one of those boring old drivers ed ones that some ass made (more?) sexist.
As for Lolita, it seems I will never finish it unless I decide to actually sit down and read it. My plan of reading it while waiting for me ride after aerials fell through when the studio moved and ride plans changed (love the new place though!). Even the very beginning though, starts very “yes, that is an acceptable way for a teenage boy to talk about his teenage girlfriend” and then transitions straight into “but not about a young girl who reminds him of her some decades later!!!”… I suspect the “wtf did you just say” must fade fairly fast, since I’m like 30 pgs in and already to the point where if you don’t consciously remind yourself of her age, it seems like one of my mother’s love stories (aka “another trashy romance novel mom?”)
I had a couple misognistic teachers and came across some misognistic students as well.
I’m so ashamed that I didn’t say anything to them. I was just so shocked to say anything.
And about Lolita I love the outfits but the meaning I don’t like it at all.
I read Lolita when I was a teenager, maybe 15. I felt like I was sinking into a swamp of evil. I hated that book.
Thag go see family just moved into cave three over, one down.
Us get one more hunter, us use carpool lane.