By David Futrelle
In another world, the internet might have functioned as a sort of enlightenment machine, allowing billions of people instant access to vast repositories of insight and knowledge.
Instead, it’s turned into possibly the greatest amplifier of crackpot notions in human history, bringing about, among other things, the revival of flat-earthism and assorted baroque conspiracy theories like Pizzagate and QAnon. There are countless people who willingly, and happily, get much of their understanding of the world, such as it is, from fake news sites and conspiracy forums.
The manosphere is, of course, one of the most pernicious disseminators of toxic nonsense on the internet today.
Indeed, I can’t help but fear a little for the future of humankind every time I poke my nose into, say, the Men Going Their Own Way subreddit, filled to the brim with extravagantly wrong “insights” into the alleged true nature of women.
Take, for example, this dude, who basically thinks women have evolved to be lazy baby-making machines living off handouts from Big Husband Government,
![GoatKnows[S] 2 points 10 months ago
That's the thing there is no such thing as wife material under a government that can substitute a man's position, all women can marry the government demand it supplies for them without reason, buy them tampons, pay for their abortions well rape I understand, but look the government is a single mothers husband, and even though the quality of life given isn't perfect it allows her nature to consume her. Woman are designed to be a food source for a growing person in their body, that's why day are prone to being lazy, the baby doesn't need activity or stress it needs mom to stand still and be calm and feed.](https://i0.wp.com/www.wehuntedthemammoth.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/2019-05-03_17-28-57.png?fit=600%2C690)
The MGTOW subreddit has more than 100,000 subscribers. Boy, I sure do love it that there really are dudes out there getting their, er, “knowledge” of women from anonymous douchebag Redditors who don’t understand what sentences are.
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Ohlman: I don’t have a better explanation but that’s kind of irrelevant. It takes evidence to determine that a particular trait is even adaptive let alone that it evolved for a particular reason. Just because an explanation seems plausible it doesn’t mean it is true.
This is the core reason why evolutionary psychology is largely nonsense.
The percentage of food from different sources depends hugely on the climate and season. There was also fishing and the trapping of small game like birds and rabbits.
This is why humans were able to spread out so far into otherwise inhospitable areas.
And the fixation so many people have that the hunting in gatherer/hunter societies was mainly big animals is annoying.
What caused the extinction of the megafauna during the Holocene is fuzzy.
The warming climate and the combined rising of sea levels and spreading of forests shrunk the available habitat.
Over hunting may have played a role as well.
The science is still up in the air on this topic and anyone saying they know definitively has no clue what they’re talking about.
For all we know there was some kind of virus that mutated and swept through a weakened population.
There probably isn’t one single reason to pin it down to and more of a multi factorial explanation.
@Cat Mara:
The comma is a curvy and therefore feminine punctuation mark, so they avoided learning how to use it for fear of cooties.
As for the OP: Wait, women are lazy?
Huh. I wonder why…
https://www.wsj.com/articles/women-wanted-blue-collar-fields-find-new-workforce-11556530201
Johanna
Your comment reminds me of an old argument I had with a zealous, more-socialist-than-thou friend of mine; they refused to accept that working for a small family business both was and WAS NOT exploitation, given the economic system we are born into. Wanted us all to condemn our families because theirs was shitty.
Peace!
Supposedly, the only stone-age tribes in the recent past/present day where hunting is a 100% male activity are the ones which rely entirely on big game spear hunting and/or driving predators from their kills. This only takes up about 20% of all known tribes, however. It’s common for women to do at least a small part of the hunting, but if they have a strict cultural division of labor by sex and/or gender, then men and women use entirely different hunting methods. It’s not clear if this has always been true.
@Snowberry : I am not a specialist in that, but as far as I know, most ancient civilizations were less strict about social roles than their written record let around.
@Knitting Cat Lady : the pinning of hunting only on large animal is so annoying you see it in people that don’t think that :/. I would add that when human spread, each time there simultaneously a real impact on local fauna (and not just megafauna !), so the claim that it’s not related to human is an actual hard claim.
That being said, I don’t get what you try to convey. You seemingly try to split smaller games (and fishing) from megafauna hunting, and I don’t see why. Especially since hunting rabbits and bird isn’t easy, and thoses kind of prey require hunting parties for chimpanzees.
@specialfrog : the claim that a trait is non adaptive is just as much of a claim. When it’s about a complex and dangerous activity that require coordinations of several individuals, the claim become bigger. That’s why claiming that eye color isn’t an adaptative trait is much more reasonable than claiming that, well, hunting isn’t an adaptative trait.
Now, one *could* argue that early humans were rolling deep enough into ressources that they hunted for the same reason that pharaoh built pyramids. That don’t seem terribly more likely than hunting being a good way to round up foraging, doubly so when a common reaction to environement change is to either start predating, or on the opposite giving up predation.
Also, the reason behind a specific trait is just as important as the trait. Finding out why dinosaurs developped feather is just as important than the fact that they weren’t developped for flying initially.
Arguably the Internet is both of those things; I’m not giving up on it just yet.
@Knitting Cat Lady
Possibility that I’ve not really seen mentioned, though I’ll admit I’ve not looked for it over hard, is less over-hunting and more the hunting targets picked.
The easiest way to hunt for food quickly is to take the young – they’re weaker AND far less experienced, at the cost of less meat. It doesn’t take too many years to wipe out even a large herd doing that.
Chimps do that – it’s well documented by Jane Goodall’s lot at Gombe, and baboons do it too (funny thing – in chimpanzees, hunting is a co-operative activity DURING the act, and a dominance display once the hunt succeeds. That sounds way too familiar.). Not too big a stretch to assume our ancestors also hunted in that manner, and that it had a disproportionate effect on the local megafauna.
I’m currently reading a remarkably dismaying book on the natural history of how humanity has fucked up the oceans.
One detail that applies here – once European trespassers* discovered the beaches where sea turtles laid their eggs, they would wait for the nights when they crawled on shore to do so, then rush out and flip them over. Following morning was slaughtering time.
Of course, all the turtles were females of reproductive age, which magnified the impact this had on breeding populations. It’s amazing that there still *are* any sea turtles.
*Hat tip to Terry Pratchett.
Ohlmann: I did read this a long time ago so I cannot cite sorry.
Maybe this was just one particular gatherer/ hunter community that was studied.
I do remember that there was access to highly nutritious nuts and seeds, which of course would not be the same for all groups.
@Kat, ambassador of the feminist government in exile
Have you seen it? Do you agree with the review? I would be interested in your opinion. I avoided it because it seemed to me that it was going to be a “schlubby schlub without merit gets hot woman and never has to work ever again because she supports him” movie, which seems like a movie incels would love. But I based this content guess on vague things I heard, and also admittedly an amorphous dislike for Seth Rogan, so I’m willing to give it a shot if you recommend it.
Idk what is up with my internet but I think my last post bugged out. Anyway here’s a debate Should women be allowed to vote by a vegan youtuber and a self described incel standing in for Turd Fling ING Monkey, a mgtow you tuber who said women shouldny have that right, or msot rights. Hes apart of the YouTube mgtow crowd that claims western civilization is falling because of women not being forced to stay at home and be incubators. Also claimed that being mothers are the highest honor and should be the only thing women should strive for
read some of the comments from the video too and one of them said that mgtows are the only men to truly love women…. Depressing all around. And right when I learned that The Handmaids Tale is coming back