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
I caught part of the movie once and felt the same way.
@hippodameia
With regard to the novel, I kept hoping that it would get better so that I could feel better. No such luck with Lolita! At least for this reader.
@ Falconer
🙂
How hard is it for the splainers to understand that your reactions to Lolita will be affected by your lived experiences? Are you supposed to maintain a lofty detachment while reading? That doesn’t sound like a very rewarding approach to literature.
I was about to declare that ephemerides had won the thread and then Falconer goes and says that, making me guffaw out loud.
Ah well. Falconers gonna Falcon.
The Lolita essay is fantastic. I’m so glad I clicked on it, even though it is so late and I should be sleeping — or trying to, at least.
Solnit says:
Yes.
And when women protest that, or strive to have their stories heard and receive a modicum of attention naturally accorded to those of men, they are still accused of “rebelliousness,” “penis envy,” or other such nonsense, further deepening the denigration and censoring their voices. Still, and perhaps even more so today than, say, some 30 years ago, as I see it. Today’s misogyny is the same as it ever was, but it is greatly amplified and “legitimized” — or it appears so — by the Internet.
@newbie
That “Lolita” essay does sound fantastic. Maybe I’ll read it next month for my “one free article” at Harpers.
So many myths about prehistory out there that act to essentially justify current social organization. Even the “cave man” trope is mostly fictitious as many hunter/gatherer groups were nomadic traveling according to the cycle of seasons. Also the “might makes right” and “men protecting their women/resources” myths are mostly false as low populations spread out across vast territory would’ve meant little conflict among groups. Evidence regarding organized war and mass violence doesn’t really start popping up in the archaeological record until around the agricultural revolution when settlement and surplus population becomes common. But of course, this is just cultural marxist brainwashing right?
@Rick
Quite right, quite right. SJW Redacting of history, spurred by cultural marxisms!111111111!!!!!!!!!!!!!111
Hey, do you remember the early 1990’s, when all the great thinkers and media moguls of the day were saying that The Internets would enable understanding, acceptance, and equality among the genders and the races.
Ha! ha!
HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!
HAAAAAAAAAAA!
One might say that they were right, inasmuch as websites like this one – WHTM – exist.
But compare WHTM to something like fuckin’ STORMFRONT.
That website has hundreds of thousands of members and is a fucking money-mill.
Can you imagine if WHTM had a hundred thousand members, and if David was able to raise half a million dollars from them? It would be glorious.
Basically, what I’m saying is that the forces of good on the Internet appear to be much smaller than the forces of Evil, but that doesn’t make me lose hope.
Those are my kinda odds!
Is there an article who focus more on the lifestyle of the prehistoric men ?
The story was that, because you can’t see gender or race through the Internet, people would interact with other people of other genders and races without even realizing it, and therefore racism and sexism wouldn’t happen, nor would any other -isms.
Only someone who never experienced racism or sexism (or other -ism) except second-hand would think that racists would stop being racist on the Internet just because they can’t see that the other person is black. It’s an idea that would only be true if racists are caused by blackness, and therefore removing blackness from the other person would stop racism from being a thing. IOW it’s a kind of victim-blaming (if you weren’t so black, I wouldn’t be so racist) and only someone who doesn’t comprehend racism or sexism would come to this conclusion.
Back in the 1990’s it was exceedingly difficult to put a picture of yourself on the internet for most people. Obviously, if you were computer-literate, it was easier, but you still required extra equipment – a digital camera or a scanner, and so on.
Nowadays any chucklehead can take a picture of themselves and upload it, with one single device – their phone. Most websites practically require it. So now all doubt is removed as to what race the other person is.
Also, in the 1990’s, it was kind of frowned upon to declare your race on the Internet. Thank God that shit is over. That is one aspect of Ye Olde 56kbps Internet we can do without.
I’ve been using the Internet for nearly as long as I’ve been alive – practically grew up with it – and I must say that things have violently changed, and not necessarily for the better.
I recall when being anonymous was a good thing – now, on FaceTwitterInstaBook, if you’re not loudly broadcasting every single detail about your life, and taking one million ‘selfies’, you’re ‘creepy’ and ‘hiding something’.
People use their real names as their handles, which is very far removed from the good old days of making something up or using mythological or from fiction.
PolicyOfMadness, you have this knack for writing amazingly true things. I can’t do anything but point at this and shout “This! THIS!” Be honest: are you a sorcerer?
@DepressedCNS
It wasn’t this video, was it? 🙂
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x2z6unh
@Ohlmann
…You mean the same portion of the human population that has traditionally ALWAYS been the focus for the most part? Try googling.
It’s not like you need to share pictures or excessive details about your personal life to be treated online the same way or worse as you are IRL. In the 90s all it took was an AOL profile identifying me as 15f to receive a steady stream of creepers. No picture required. I once had a guy in OK who was certain I was his ex girlfriend. Why? I don’t know. When I said I was certain I wasn’t her, he called me a bitch.
@ WWTH
Didn’t that study that showed poor performers on video games were more likely to be mysogynists also find that people with feminine sounding nicknames got more abuse regardless of actual gender?
“@Ohlmann
…You mean the same portion of the human population that has traditionally ALWAYS been the focus for the most part? Try googling.”
No, I mean the emphase on prehistoric. As in, something more or less up to date on how mankind lived before writing was invented, which tend to be hard to find because Google return 99% of old, outdated ideas on how they lived, like the very concept Solnit expose as lies. It’s like using google to find up-to-date vulgarisation articles on quantuum physics.
Your post do look like someone who try to purposefully understand what I say in the worst way possible.
I don’t really think there is anything to add to Solnit’s article on the topic of how the classic representation is a myth inspired by the archetypal lifestyle of the time, but I would very much want to know more about thoses old societies. Like if scientists have refined their hypothesis on the religion back then, if they have informations on the role of the elderly and handicaped people, and certainly a lot of other topics.
Alan,
Yeah, I remember that. It was no surprise!
I also wonder if there’s a study showing that men who are insecure about their appearance are the ones who are more likely to denigrate a woman for not looking perfect at all times. Anecdotally, it seems that way.
@Ohlmann:
If you want up-to-date content on fast-moving fields I think you might have to look in the scholarly press, which means going behind paywalls and reading papers in learned journals. Free content on the web and popularly available texts are always going to be behind the times and tantalisingly light on details.
I don’t know anything about the culture of archaeology, but if you wade through papers in astrophysics then you’re going to find a lot of feuding, a lot of disagreement, a lot of refutations, and very few clear explanations. It takes time for the consensus to settle down and for science-communicators to take over from scientists. Scholarship is hard: Anyone who approaches it hoping for simple truth will be disappointed.
If you’re up to a little reading, the following books are all recent and look to be good popular science on the matter:
Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind, by Yuval Noah Harari
The Great Paleolithic War: How Science Forged an Understanding of America’s Ice Age Past, by David J. Meltzer
Cro-Magnon: How the Ice Age Gave Birth to the First Modern Humans, by Brian Fagan
Either way, please don’t be an entitled asshole about it. msexceptiontotherule was pretty much spot on in what she said.
Ohh, I just started reading Sarah Blaffer Hrdy’s Mothers and Others, which relates to this. It’s good so far (although she talks about mirror neurons, which were later found to not do the thing people thought they did) as is The Woman That Never Evolved, but that one’s rather old. Both good books if you are interested in reading about actual early humans and not some dude’s made up explanation for why the 1950’s was perfect.
Oh, also Marriage a History by Stephanie Coontz. All good books to wash the taste of just-so-stories out of your mouth.
@DepressedCNS, @EJ: Thank you! Wouldja believe I got back out of bed to post that?
Ohlmann, we would have understood you better if you’d asked about prehistoric people or prehistoric humans, rather than prehistoric men.
I recently heard a talk by this woman, who studies disability (particularly autism) in prehistory, and has a lot to say about how any image of prehistoric people basically shows a group of young healthy fit men.
https://www.york.ac.uk/archaeology/news-and-events/news/external/2015/spikins-empathy/
I was lucky enough to see this exhibit in person, but if you missed it the book is well worth a look:
http://www.amazon.com/Ice-Age-Art-Arrival-Modern/dp/0714123331
I’m going to caution people about Sapiens–there is a surprising amount of subtle poison in it. In it I learned, for example, that the taxes from nuclear power plants pay for basic physics research, that non-Western societies did not develop technology (because they didn’t have a ‘drive to know’), that liberty and equality are incompatible, that capitalism reduces violence and promotes the rule of law, and that poor people ‘stuff themselves’ and are incapable of money management, unlike rich people.
Thanks guest, that’s worth being mentioned.