By David Futrelle
Manosphere dinguses, like the Evo Psych professors many of them are such fans of, love to tell “just-so” stories about human prehistory that reinforce their backwards notions about men and women.
Often, these stories involve mammoths. As is the case with this story I recently ran across while doing an unrelated search in the archives of the MGTOW subreddit. It’s got a doozy of a headline:
What our cuck society does not understand, is that women only want to consume, nothing more. They continually establish consumption baseline and advance from it, unless there is an external limitation
In the post itself, regular MGTOW subreddit contributor nowig tells us a story about brave mammoth hunters and their naggy cave-wives:
It’s an evolutionary adaptation. Men form cooperative groups and hunt, risk lives for each other. Women just sit home and nag, “what did you bring, a rabbit, why not a deer, the guys at the other cave brought a deer.” If it’s a deer it would be “why not a mammoth?”
Maybe I should change the name of the blog to “You Nagged Us to Hunt the Mammoth to Feed You.”
In any case, while we know that ancient humans did indeed hunt mammoths, men weren’t doing all the hunting — there’s prehistoric art and other evidence showing that at least some women were involved in the hunt.
Regardless of the precise gender breakdown of prehistoric hunting parties, the idea that women in those days were sitting around whining while men did all the work is, of course, completely ludicrous. In hunter-gatherer societies, everyone works. And women may have worked even harder after the invention of agriculture. Indeed, one recent study found skeletal evidence that “women worked so hard during the dawn of farming they were almost uniformly buffer than today’s elite rowers,” as National Geographic summed it up.
But let’s return to nowig’s Old Misogynists’ Tale:
That’s why there always was a patriarchy. To shut them up, because they would not regulate themselves.
Yes, let’s blame women for men taking away their power.
The women evolved as part of the system where they are put in [their] place by external force.
And, boy oh boy the MGTOWs want to go back to this.
Nowig launches into a racist fantasy of macho Muslim dudes putting today’s uppity women back in their place — and literally responding to sexual harassment lawsuits by slapping women in the face. And, of course, in nowig’s diseased brain the women will happily accept the abuse.
Western men are now cucked and will be pushed further and further, until Ahmed assumes the role of now missing forceful restraint. The women who file lawsuits because they were told they look nice, will be struck in the face, per Koran, if they argue. And they will like it. It will feel very safe.
Nowig then ends his fantasy with some phony concern.
I am not sure what’s the way out of this predicament. It’s all very sad
To be fair, it is very sad that so many men like to entertain each other online by telling each other these terrible tall tales.
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Even with my limited education in anthropology and evolution, I can confidently assert that this is not the way things worked.
Some groups were male-dominated, some were female-dominated, and for some populations we simply don’t know. But these toons have bought into an evolutionary narrative that is pure cliche.
@jsrtheta
Never mind the fact that even if they were right they’re forgetting one very important fact.
Which is that (if you’ll pardon the anthropomorphizing) evolution doesn’t care about how a species survives long enough to reproduce, only that it does so. Would they be so quick to approve of those evolutionary just-so stories if I showed them how they could just as easily be rewritten to justify cannibalism?
(I was tempted to say “pedophilia” in that last sentence, then I remembered some of them already think along those lines.)
That’s why there always was a patriarchy. To shut them up, because they would not regulate themselves.
Yes, let’s blame women for men taking away their power.
Of course. If they used logic, “It’s always the woman’s fault” would be the first a priori assumption.
Or feminism?
Or even actual gynocracy?
@Surplus
Stop or we’ll have to get them the fainting couch!
So much barf material right there.
I know the source text of this stunning piece of Paleo Anthropology. It’s called ‘Cave Baby’ by Julia Donaldson, I just finished reading it to my 4 year old. (Yeah, I know, and the Flintstones)
From the OP:
Whereas men are like air plants and live solely off the moisture in the air and sunlight?
Oh, I see. But do they consume what they hunt, or do they catch and release or whatever unless “nagged” by constantly consuming women to bring home what they hunt?
These guys seem to think that men were already going their own way in the neolithic or something. Citation DESPERATELY needed!
Great, now I want to build a time machine, just so I can l´pull a Moe Szyslak… ERM… what I meant to say is… god… doesn’t it get boring to be this hateful?
I see it’s not just the Creationists who watched The Flintstones like it was a documentary…
So, let’s grant the premise that Paleolithic humans lived primarily off of big game and that only men hunted big game.
Doesn’t that mean then, that women nagging is responsible for our species’ survival? I mean, since apparently men would only feed themselves and their tribes if being nagged about it.
I don’t know about women and as a man wouldn’t presume to speak for them, but well
It would surprise me considerably if anybody of any gender identity liked it if they were slapped in the face for airing grievances much less felt safe for it.
Maybe it’s just me?
Sort of reminds me of a documentary I saw on the Icelandic sagas last night. Apparently, in a lot of them women are instigators of violence during feuds and vendettas, urging men away from seeking redress through legal procedures and instead demanding that they use violence to get revenge.
I’ve never seen the film The Public Enemy, but the scene in the photo below is quite famous. When I was a teenager I read about it in several magazines and it was always discussed as sexy, as though this kind of thing turned women on.
And here’s a link to the scene on Youtube:
Here’s wikipedia’s take on that scene
Twovultures:
Sort of reminds me of a documentary I saw on the Icelandic sagas last night. Apparently, in a lot of them women are instigators of violence during feuds and vendettas, urging men away from seeking redress through legal procedures and instead demanding that they use violence to get revenge.
My favourite saga is the one where, by complete contrast, ghosts/zombies haunt a village and the villagers eventually deal with it by taking them to court for trespassing and winning their case.
@Kat, ambassador of the feminist government in exile:
The Public Enemy is a weird and interesting movie, and I’m pretty sure that scene was *not* intended to be sexy.
I’m also pretty sure the bit near the end of the movie in which another gangster’s moll gets Cagney’s character drunk and sleeps with him was also meant to be creepy, even if it might not have been considered sexual assault in the 1930s – at any rate he’s horrified enough by what’s been done to him that he flees the “safe” house and her, setting up the movie’s last act and his own destruction.
@twovultures
Indeed, it feels like the ancient “barbarians” were oftentimes better at writing good female characters than 90% of modern Hollywood writers, and in case of Game of Thrones, they managed to make the Fantasy setting more misogynistic than real-life medieval Europe ever was.
For comparison, Gudrun/Kriemhild from Norse and Germanic folklore was the protagonist of one of the most epic revenge tales ever, and in the older versions of the story, she doesn’t even get punished for everything she does. Plus I’m 100% certain the this silent film adaption was the inspiration for Disney’s version of the queen in Snow White.
Also, did anyone else here know that Brunhilde from the Niebelungenlied (and later Wagner’s opera) was based on the real historical queen Brunhilda of Austrasia, who was from the Spanish city of Toledo, so she likely was a pretty far cry from the blond aryan woman most pop-culture has portrayed her as.
@Scanisaurus
Well, Spain didn’t exist yet. Toledo was the capitol of the Visigothic kingdom in Iberia, once that Germanic tribe had settled there as a ruling minority over the Celti-Romano-Iberian population during the Migration period toward the end of the Roman Empire. I actually have no idea what phenotypes predominated among the Visigoths, but blond Aryan is a possibility, since they were a Germanic people of possibly Scandinavian origin long before settling in the Iberian Peninsula.
And I didn’t know that about Brunhilde! Thanks for sharing.
@solecism
True, it’s hard to know what many people actually looked like back then, though I’m certain there was more variation than most Hollywood movies would show. Plus it’s also worth noting that whilst Scandinavia has had a pale-skinned population for most of it’s history, even up here there have always been plenty of people with dark hair and brown eyes too, so even among Scandinavians there’s no guarantee for blond hair and blue eyes. Personally, I think the 1924 Fritz Lang adaption did the most interesting visual take on the character:
Anyway, glad you liked the link!
@Scanisaurus
I like that picture a lot!
And you’re right that brown-eyed brunette make just as much or more sense. I don’t recall coming across any physical descriptions of leading Visigoths of the period, but then, I haven’t really looked either since it’s not my area of focus.
And yeah, the lack of variation coming from Hollywood is boringly predictable. I recently saw a picture of the last national beauty pageant final contenders, and it looked like a family portrait of clones. Kinda frightening, actually.
The other thing that is often forgotten is that hunter-gatherer societies lived far more by gathering than hunting—meat was an occasional luxury, not a staple of their diet.
@solecism:
Well, except for their casting Tessa Thompson as Valkyrie. Some progress at last?
@Citerior Motive
Occasional luxury is overstating the case in most climates, but the majority of animal protein comes from fish, rabbits and hares, game birds, frogs, assorted rodents, and a variety of insects, all of which are hunted principally via snares and nets, rather than macho spear throwing and archery.
I do like the latest theory in human evolution, that Beta males responded to the presence of a violent dominant Alpha male not by showing him deference but by getting together with other Beta males, as well as females, and killing him, thus producing modern humans who show a very reduced level of dimorphism compared to our hominid ancestors.