Men’s Rights Activists are the least active activists in activityland

It’s really unfair and misandrous that women are stepping up to provide mras with a list of undebunkable studies. What, are men supposed to do their own rights activism!?

@Worked All That Out

[W]e’re too busy to respond to the call “citation needed!”

And here you are on the Internet. I’m pretty sure you’re not simultaneously digging through literal shit. Why can’t you provide us with citations.

We’re not going to do the work for you. We’re busy digging through MRAs’ metaphorical shit.

@Worked All That Out

Did you miss the part where it was your fellow (male) MRAs requesting the irrefutable statistics and so on?

It’s been a while since we had at troll. this could be amusing .

Oh, it’s lobster boy.

Should I bust out the citronella candles? I hear the whining of verminous bugs again.

OT but hopefully good news. I am now 5 days late for my period but I’m worried it’s to soon to take a pregnancy test.

Trying this one more time.

@Elaine:

Best of luck.

@Wonked All That Out:

War of Northern Aggression

*eyeroll*

Oh, dear God.

What were you taught about the war? Because according to official sources, the Battle of Fort Sumter began on April 12, 1861, when South Carolina Militia artillery fired from shore on the Union garrison. Based on who fired the first shot at whom, it sure sounds like it was the War of Southern Aggression to me …

The umlaut fetishists at the New Yorker have a new and very interesting article out this month:

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2021/11/08/early-civilizations-had-it-all-figured-out-the-dawn-of-everything

A contrarian account of our prehistory argues that cities once flourished without rulers and rules—and still could.

Socialists and anarcho-whatsits and the like, rejoice. Maybe what you want isn’t a pipe dream after all. Moreover, the researchers behind this think our present capitalist-authoritarian state of affairs might ultimately be the fault of a very familiar villain:

If cities didn’t lead to states, what did? Not any singular arrow of history, according to Graeber and Wengrow, but, rather, the gradual and dismal coalescence of otherwise unrelated, parallel processes. In particular, they think it involved the extension of patriarchal domination from the home to society at large. Their account of how household structures were transformed into despotic regimes requires some unconvincing hand-waving, but throughout they emphasize that any given process can be historically contingent without being simply inexplicable.

Patriarchy as original sin?

The one thing they don’t mention, which is something of an elephant in the room, is … war. In fact, I’d argue that war is the original sin, and patriarchy was one of its early consequences.

Consider this. Early human societies, before large-scale agriculture, would have come in three broad varieties depending upon geography:

• Highlanders, with goat and sheep herding and some hunting, fishing, and small-scale horticulture. Likely mobile on short circuits of known valleys and passes.
• Wet-climate lowlanders, who would have settled along watercourses and coastlines. They would have significant access to fish, especially if on a larger lake or the ocean, plus hunting and gathering on land and small-scale horticulture.
• Dry-climate lowlanders, who would have been nomadic herders of larger animals (bison, cattle).

The significant thing here is that the first two don’t scale. Highlanders would be limited to small upland areas they knew well, hemmed in by geography as much as by any neighbors, and lowland settlers would have been limited in their food-generating footprint to a large region of water, within range of small rowed or sail-equipped vessels of their village, and a smaller region of land, extending along the coasts and/or riverbanks the range of their boats plus a smaller disk centered on the village. And without beasts of burden as large and capacious as camels or horses, they would not have had the ability to expand to larger-scale settled agriculture.

The third one does scale: nomadic herders’ habitat is vast expanses of steppe and prairie, and they could spread out in a line and move perpendicular to that line when grazing their herds, a geometry that allows nearly unlimited expansion of a polity’s numbers by simply making the line longer and sweeping out a correspondingly larger area of grassland per mile of travel.

How does this lead to patriarchy? Well, as human societies populate the landscape they eventually begin to experience competitive pressures from one another. When there’s little competitive pressure you get some amount of trade; when there’s more, trade and what the article calls “schismogenesis” and ecologists studying Darwin’s finches called “character displacement”, which result in changes in food acquisition methods, places, and times to avoid coming into direct competition. Past a certain point, though, you get war, and more specifically, raids whose purpose is to seize food or food-production capital from a rival polity. For highlanders and nomadic herders, that would mean stealing each other’s sheep or cattle; for settled horticultural/hunter/gather/fishers, predominantly encroaching on one another’s fishing territorial waters or raiding for food. Nomadic herders would abut highlanders at the foothills, and would abut lowland horticulturalists at the river and coastal floodplain edges, and might raid both for food, but the highlanders have highly defensible terrain, making the lowlanders the preferred targets. Lowlanders regularly raided by herders would have to develop defenses, such as raising a temporary army out of their labor force after harvest, the time when raids would be most likely.

The interesting bit is the herders’ cattle-rustling operations against each other. Without fixed defenses, fortifications, or infrastructure of any kind, and on generally flat terrain, the defense would be to position horsemen armed with ranged weapons between the herd and any strangers, and to have night watches on rotating shifts. With wide open prairies, sightlines are long, favoring long-range weapons (atl-atl, bow) and making stealth very difficult. So, raiding a band who have developed these defenses pretty much requires engaging in full-blown war, and it is a form of war (no terrain advantages, no surprise, just pitched battles) that strongly favors the side with numerical superiority. And as noted above, the nomadic herder polities could scale up quite a lot, unlike the other two types. So the exigencies of war would give a long-term competitive advantage to polities that could grow, and regrow, their numbers (of horses, people, and cattle) fastest.

Growing their numbers of people, though, would be bottlenecked by the rate at which women could produce babies. So, to do so fastest would mean having women be nearly constantly pregnant over their entire fertile period — and since women generally don’t want to be reduced to baby factories, they would have to be stripped of having any political power and forced to. Hence, patriarchy.

This also explains the near-lack of matriarchal societies in the past or present. Notably, there is no evidence of societies anywhere near as matriarchal as current western countries are patriarchal; i.e., where men are not typically taken seriously and are hired even for technical positions partly based on their looks; where men dare not walk alone late at night lest a gang of women waylay and rape them; where men need be careful when taking a woman home with them lest they be date-raped; etc. — let alone, say, where men cannot own property and are financially dependent on women, save for widowers, or where only women can vote, or where men are basically bought and sold like livestock and kept in guarded harems.

This asymmetry needs explaining, and without resort to gender-essentialist nonsense about women being inherently weaker or more easily dominated. The above hypothesis explains the asymmetry as arising, ultimately, from the one indubitable difference of biological origin, that only half the population can get pregnant.

Authoritarianism also comes from this wellspring: the herders on the steppes are vulnerable to being defeated piecemeal if they ever divide, so each polity has a strong warfare-based pressure to remain in the same place at all times, moving as a unit. That makes it like a ship, and a ship has a captain who decides the direction it goes and a crew who makes it move. It would be hard to use democratic methods to decide on a course to set — even the horticulturalists that send out hunting parties tend to have a temporary authoritarianism within each hunting party, according to the article. The herders on the steppes would have this authoritarianism full-time, with a single leader, certainly male, making the polity’s key decisions.

So, patriarchy (and likely the notion of property ownership, of both cattle and women) and full-time king-and-subjects-style authoritarianism arose first among the nomadic herders. Even now, the societies with the most extreme forms of patriarchy derive from mounted steppe herders in the relatively recent past, particularly Arabic herders of the 5th century CE and of course the Mongol hordes of the vast Asian steppes.

How did it leak into other societies, particularly settled agriculturalists?

I have an even more interesting theory there, which also explains much of the structure of the classic feudal kingdom.

Let’s start with a village-horticulture society on a river floodplain, regularly raided around harvest time by herder nomads who live in the drylands beyond. They develop some defenses: copy the longbow technology, build a palisade, and start building big sturdy stone structures in which to store the harvest through the winter, which gets the ball rolling on neolithic architecture while also forcing would-be grain thieves to attack through a narrow doorway — a stone structure with a single entrance creates artificially the sort of defensible terrain the highlanders obtained naturally.

Even so, they lose both grain and people to raiders most years after harvest time. Mythology reflects this: it is replete with tales of cyclically visiting demons or monsters or dragons whose depredations require defensive actions to be performed, typically around harvest time, and a celebration and remembrance of the dead is a common festival type, generally post-harvest. One defensive action is to keep a vigilant watch in that post-harvest period, with lanterns everywhere to make it impossible for raiders to sneak up at night. Lanterns plus the dead equals Halloween. Now you know why Halloween occurs when it does and features temporary lanterns so prominently, and why many similar things have arisen across many cultures.

One way to lessen the losses of people would be to estimate how much grain you’re going to lose anyway, and put that much out in some undefended location, while keeping the rest under lock and key and armed, lantern-equipped guard. Then hope the raiders just take the portion that’s undefended and decide it’s not worth losing some of their people in attacks on the highly defended grain silo trying to get more.

This becomes the basis of another very common cultural trope: the ritual sacrifice, especially of food. When the original purpose is forgotten “appeasing the gods” might be confabulated as a reason for the ritual, but it will have had its roots in bribing the raiders to leave them be.

But there’s more. Over time, the raiders come to expect this tribute, and what had been bribery is flipped over to become blackmail. The raiders turn into a protection racket, the first ever in the world: it’s a nice village you have there. It would be a shame if something happened to it.

Generations down the line and raiders with a good income from this sort of shakedown along a river course may just decide to stop the whole nomadic-herding thing and settle nearby as a full-time shakedown gang. And eventually move right into the village to cut down on travel costs.

And now that village has a two-tier society. There’s a peasant class, from which fieldhands and infantry come, consisting of one set of bloodlines; and there’s a royalty class, from which the cavalry and nobles and royals come, consisting of another set of bloodlines, initially likely somewhat racially distinct. The latter brought with them large beasts of burden, patriarchy, and the notion of having a single king-like figure hold ultimate authority over an entire polity.

It’s become a feudal kingdom.

Moreover, because it now has large-capacity beasts of burden, it can farm on a larger scale than ever before, at least once one more innovation is developed: irrigation. At that point, with the means to grow large fields of crops and the means to transport such a large harvest inward to a central point, it is possible to create the first truly agrarian societies in history, employing horses and/or other large animals as plow-drawing engines and truck engines, and to achieve new levels of population density. The nature of warfare shifts, too: partly, they must defend against raiders at harvest time (by the distant cousins of their own royal family), but also, kingdoms engage in the first ever wars for territorial conquest, once they begin crowding up against one another along the rivercourses and coasts. Once the only way to get more decent arable land is to take someone else’s by force.

This, then, is how we got from prehistory to the kind of world that existed on the eve of the Bronze Age, and that, with minor modifications, mostly persisted clear through until the Industrial Revolution. And it set the pattern of what was to come after that: a distinct privileged owner class, plus an impoverished working class, plus patriarchy. Welcome to capitalism.

And the original sin that led us to this juncture was … cattle-rustling.

Reading WATO’s first post, before I realized the poster was unfamiliar, I assumed it was one of the regulars posting an MRA parody. I am still 90% convinced it is play-acting, though sadly the subsequent replies are not as entertaining as the original post.

@ Surplus

The original sin was cattle rustling? On behalf of my Irish and Scottish ancestors, I would point out they were happily doing their rustling on their own little islands minding their own business before the English came along. ;D

Alan, please, no citations. They’re too much work for some people.