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
Whenever The Flintstones comes up, I think of this video:
@EJ (The Other One) 🙂 thank you, I could go on–I didn’t even mention his take on feminism…just quoting a few things from my rather angry set of notes. For a book that had got a lot of positive notice in my social circles, by someone who seems to be a pretty smart guy, it’s shockingly retrograde and in some places just plain dumb.
@ Guest
Well, you lived in Yorkshire long enough to know that Western societies (i.e. Lancashire) would still be looking in awe at stone tools if it wasn’t for the civilising effect of their East Pennine neighbours 😉
I think any research institution that gets any public funding at all should be required to publish their research free online. It’s important for democracy to make knowledge accessible IMO.
@Alan Robertshaw and eating stones instead of parkin and puddings and decent cheese…. Oh, I saw this on Twitter the other day, here it is if you haven’t seen it:
JUST TER SEH
Av etten parkin
Tha kept
In’t pantry
That tha woh
Savin for
Thi tear.
Soz.
It looked reyt grand.
Tha noz: moist, like.
@ guest
Ah, parkin! I was trying to explain to a friend recently why we celebrate an attempted terrorist outrage by eating gingerbread pigs 🙂
@WWTH:
It’s an interesting point of view. The downside of it is that it makes the peer review process very difficult, and peer review is a cornerstone of scholarship. The upside is that it allows more public engagement with science, which… I’ll be honest, I personally don’t much see as an upside. Non-scientists tend to misinterpret early results and get carried away with weird theories a lot, which is a massive headache. Look at the whole “vaccines cause autism” thing as an example, or the “climate hockey stick.”
There’s a website called ArXiv which does more or less what you’re asking. It’s very good for some fields (particle physics, for example, where it is in the process of supplanting other methods of publishing) but full of nonsense for others.
@ EJ
Totally off-topic (except in so far as there’s been a discussion about films) but have you seen “The Wild Geese”?
I’m in Canada, not the US, but the situation on publishing scientific findings is similar. It’s basically up to the individual lab/institute/organization to determine how they publish their findings, and the only time we have to demonstrate that we’ve done enough is when we go back to the parent organization (read: funding source) for the next set of grants.
My own lab is trying to improve our presence, but at the moment we’re just publishing in a fairly small set of journals. Which, honestly, is good for our case, because we’re working with some things with, aheh, some fairly wide error bars right now. Probably a good idea to not distribute that too widely, until we have more confidence!
I’m personally in favour of abandoning the journal model for an open source peer review model. Gets rid of the scammy pay-for-publishing journals, makes the process transparent. Still needs editors involved to stamp an “approved” or “rejected” on it, but that process really needs more exposure. In my opinion!
Hey, scientifically accurate Flintstones included a reference to my favorite piece of cave art, often described as “a man, on skis, apparently having sex with an elk”.
My theory: I think the big problem with this idea (which I vaguely remember hearing way back when) was that it made a sort of category error – one which a lot of people make when they talk about -isms – that is, it treats racism, sexism, etc. as matters of individual will and personal belief, rather than as systemic social forces. So, what happened with the internet was that ideas of cultural normativeness came to supersede the sense of anonymity in a lot of online spaces. Like, if a bunch of people post on a messageboard for a field that’s culturally understood to be male-dominated – like, gaming, or science – then even if everyone’s anonymous, they’re presumed to be male by default; if a user mentions that they are, in fact, female, then that’s viewed as somehow disruptive or invasive.
In other words: the anonymous character of many online spaces has helped to underscore ingrained cultural biases, rather than erase them.
@Binjabreel,
well that’s sent me down the rabbit hole of google image :/
Well, I just stumbled down the rabbit hole of comments on the “Lolita” piece. I shouldn’t have gone down there.
@Mike
I think also that preconceived notions of racism, sexism, etc. would have an impact on anonymity anyway.
Like if someone posted a comment you don’t agree with and find infuriating, people would just say, “clearly a woman wrote that comment, only females would say something so stupid.” and such.
People will be jerks forever. There is no way around it.
Five million years ago… was the Pliocene. The ancestors of our ancestors were cute little things that ate fruit… and grubs, and termites, and such, which to this day have been caught by female anthropoids, who make simple tools to catch them with. If Elaine Morgan went overboard with the aquatic hypothesis, she was still, in my opinion, not wrong. We probably went through a phase of living near estuaries, spent a good deal of time clamming with our toes, and learned to make nets– all things well within the capacities of even modern, city-bred women. Where do we go when we’re stressed out? The beach. What do we like to snack on? Little salty things. When do we have sex? Normally, during our designated sleeping hours, an anomaly most readily explained by our spending daylight hours “out of our element” (movie scenes aside, it is very difficult for human beings to consummate a sexual union in water, and then there are washouts). It is only in periglacial and arid environments that childbearing women are handicapped in providing for themselves and their children, and I suspect that this is why male supremacists are also so anti-environmentalist.
I feel your pain. My own work was lucky to get within an order of magnitude of known values.
Scientist fistbump. What’s your field, if I may ask?
@WWTH:
My apologies for the above; I didn’t realise how unkind what I wrote was until I reread it.
At the risk of mansplaining, let me try to explain myself and not dig deeper.
I agree with you wholeheartedly that there should not be a scientific priesthood that locks away its data and doesn’t tell anyone else what it is. I also agree with you (and Scildfreja) that the field of science publishing has severe issues, and that locking everything behind paywalls is definitely not the answer, not least because it massively disrespects the general public.
However.
Speaking only for my own field, we would have severe issues with simply releasing all our data into the public regularly. The problem isn’t to do with money. The problem is with the speed of information. If I publish a paper on a great discovery today, it won’t be anything like ready for public consumption. It might take a year or more for other people to be ready to even reply to it meaningfully at all, and in the interim a whole lot of other research will come out. When others finally reply then it might be to support my findings or to contradict them, or even to suggest a new interpretation or an overarching narrative. Even the most frenzied, fast-paced conversations within science need people to have a patience span measured in months. Any one of these papers may need to be withdrawn later, even if they were published in good faith and total confidence. Any number of people are going to be publishing reviews which attempt to link these data points to draw grand overarching patterns, and these need to be reviewed in turn. One month X is going to look good; the next month Y will be ascendant; and nobody knows what the final consensus will be. This is precisely the sort of environment in which creationists, climate change deniers and other smug, preening assholes can stick their noses and do immense reputational damage by imposing a false description upon it; and in which the normal news cycle is badly suited to reporting a developing story.
In other words, science needs a safe space where we can talk to other scientists without journalists and/or political ideologues wading in. We need to be able to publish potentially wildly wrong results without facing ridicule or censure, because if we didn’t have the courage to publish knowing that we might be wildly wrong, we wouldn’t publish at all.
What science also needs is for the public to see this discussion and feel involved in it, rather than just seeing science as an esoteric priesthood behind whose closed doors robed figures lurk, and from which occasional enigmatic proclamations are issued ex cathedra.
Of course, these two goals are contradictory, and this is a problem. If it’s solved I think it will genuinely help bring in tremendous amounts of new talent, especially female talent which science desperately needs, but it’s a problem that many people have struggled with and failed to see an easy answer. The current thinking is to raise an entire new discipline of science communicators whose task it is to be the liaison between science and the public, and to train people for this purpose straight from university rather than rely on occasional charismatic exceptions like Neil DeGrasse Tyson or Ben Goldacre. Encouragingly, many of the people I’ve met who studied science communication are female. Less encouragingly, many people see it as a form of second-class citizenship into which women and other excluded groups can be marginalised. Time will tell.
By all means, have ideas about how to solve the problem. I would genuinely love to have that discussion, and really don’t want to shut it down. It’s a vital and important thing to do. But a blanket “all science should be done in public” isn’t going to help.
@ EJ et al
I often have to attend things where we operate under “Chatham House Rules”.
To oversimplify, it allows people present to utilise information provided but not to attribute it or disclose the source. It’s an extension of the “without prejudice” discussions we use a lot generally.
The rules are quite handy as people can toss ideas around without the risk of them being misrepresented so it promotes free thinking. Also, it promotes cooperation, or at least trying to come to see if a compromise can be established between opponents. You can say “Well, you might have a point there” and not have someone Tweeting “Alan agrees I’m right!”
Perhaps the scientific community could adopt something similar; if you haven’t already.
@ Evil Inky
Hahaha basically yes. Though if that were the actual video I may have been able to sit through the whole thing for pure entertainment value
@EJ, WWTH
I actually agree that scientific discourse would benefit from open access with a peer-review process.
EJ, you make some good points, but the example you use re:autism and vaccines is not great, because that original study was willfully and (I’d argue) maliciously falsified. The big deal with that study was that if failed to replicate, which brings me to my next point; if the public had access to studies that were not published because they failed to replicate a finding, they hopefully would be less likely to latch on to a false finding like that (autism and vaccines). Replication studies are a really important part of the scientific method and in my field especially they are unlikely to get published, which is a huge problem. Plus you have laymen who are research literate and the like, and open access would enable them to more cogently understand scientific discourse, even if the general public doesn’t.
Edit: here’s an NPR article about replication studies failing to get published http://www.npr.org/sections/13.7/2014/06/02/318212713/science-trust-and-psychology-in-crisis
While I support shaming Wakefield for being a garbage person who did massive harm to try to enrich himself and am kind of encouraged seeing it used as a science education lesson, it’s actually not a great teaching tool unless you are at a pretty high level. There is so much wrong there you can easily lose the forest for a particular tree. It’s hard to make a specific point about how science is suppose to be done when you are talking about a case study where there is unethical data collection, conflict of interest, data manipulation and a media overblowing of what was at best a tiny pilot study suggesting an avenue for further research.
The thing is, bad science reporting in the mainstream press is already giving the general public bad ideas. The fact that the actual data is constantly locked behind a paywall just makes it harder to counter because all anyone has for information is the interpretation and the dumbed down-ness of the mass media. If someone Googles a scientific query that get bad journalisms and biased blogs. Keeping the data in the hands of the privileged few just encourages ignorance and anti-intellectualism.
I’d be fine with some sort of waiting period. But it’s beyond fucked up to ever place any barrier on learning IMO.
That’s not actually the problem. The problem with anonymity without any identifiers is that everyone gets mentally slotted into whatever the reader’s “default human” looks like. In the United States, this is going to be a white, able-bodied, hetero- and cis-sexual, middle-class man (age variable) for a huge number of people.
If a white, able-bodied middle class young man assumes he is in a community with other people exactly like him, and he is racist or misogynist or ablist or whatever, he is going to make comments that are disparaging to marginalized groups. Some of the anonymous people in the community who are members of those marginalized groups, unsuspected by the racist/misogynist/etc., now find themselves faced with a bad choice in whether to speak up or stay silent, with no realistic expectation for a good outcome to any option.
This is not speculation; I have seen this happen over and over. The dynamic changes when the community features identifiers, because racists are less likely to casually spout racism if they can clearly see that the community has a large nonwhite population. In that case, while you certainly get trolls, the trolling is at least deliberate and not someone just automatically presuming that racism is okay because everyone else is (presumed to be) white.
Communities back in the early 90s were shocking, in some ways, because you could get really involved and invested in a group that seemed to be warm and welcoming, and you’d think to yourself, these people like me for me, and I know this because all they know of me is my personality. Then one day your friends would suddenly start making rape jokes, and you’d be slapped in the face with the realization that this group was not actually welcoming to people like you, and they’d only welcomed you because they had a mistaken idea about who and what you are.
Also, there was this joke going around that black people and women did not know how to use the Internet.
As a black man who more or less grew up alongside the internet and had been using computers since 386 processors were the hottest shit ever – and 56kbps was ‘blazing fast’ – I did not appreciate people saying things like that.
Back then, people would tell me I was just pretending to be black for laughs.
Nowadays, people insinuate that I might be pretending to be black because of all the fucking white supremacists who use a picture of a black person as their avatar and then express themselves in mangled English, because durr hee hurr that’s how all black people type, am i rite!1?1
Perhaps you’ve personally observed the latter.
Sigh.
SIGH.
SIIIIIIIIIGH.
All this talk about the idealization of the internet in the 90’s reminds me of this Last Week Tonight sketch:
Although the theory of man the hunter may seem sexist it’s supported by a lot of evidence and rather than being a product of patriarchy it actually explains why we’ve evolved to be a patriarchical species.
Among the Kalahari women do bring home more food than men and aren’t bossed around much by then men but these people are unusual for HG societies. The habitat they live in is basically a crappy desert with few animals for men to hunt so the women end up bringing home 85% of the food and the men just 15%. On average in HG societies around the world men contribute about 70% of the food, the women are much more dependent on the men.
The women in most HG societies are treated pretty badly by the men. A common occurrence is that when a man comes home from hunting his wife is expected to jump and and get the fire going for cooking. If she doesn’t she gets a walloping. It’s like a man in our society coming home from work and shouting at his wife to get in the kitchen and make a sandwich. The women are often treated like domestic slaves and made to carry out labours like fetching firewood, cleaning and carrying stuff when traveling. Basically, all the ways women in our societies get pushed down and used are seen in most HG societies.
The attitude that women are lesser than men is not just a phenomenon of modern societies but seems to be innate and natural to our species*.
* Hopefully, I shouldn’t have to point out that saying it’s natural does not mean I think it’s right.