There's this frustrating tendency of humanities academia to put premodern and modern hunter gatherer societies on this pedestal of having the answer to everything, and gender equality is very much one of those things.
These fields do seem to attract too many (lefty) personality types who seem to care more about their political agenda than ascertaining what actually happened (and happens) in the world. And I say that as a left-of-center liberal who's revolted by authoritarianism and the malignancies of the far-right.
There's a saying that you can tell what kind of conservative someone is by what year they want to go back to. If you want to go to hunter-gatherer days, you've jumped to the other end of the horseshoe and become a far leftist.
It's pseudo-religious mythologizing. The myth of the noble savage followed by our 'corruption' when private property was invented is the secular equivalent of the Garden of Eden and subsequent Fall narrative.
Excellent article. But nobody should ever underestimate the dominant power of physical force (including both capacity for superior fighting capacity and work). Ultimately, in the struggle for survival, including procreation, physical force was always the trump card. Most women and the majority of men and almost all children were on the receiving end. Power was not rooted in sex/gender, but base biological capacity for force. The failure to appreciate this in feminist thinking is why feminism, by definition, is limited as a vehicle for understanding humanity. Women need to see themselves as smaller, less biologically forceful people.
Are you saying feminists are too stupid to notice that men have larger bodies and more strength than women, take advantage of that biological reality using violence and exploit women and children through force? I think a more reasonable explanation is that you don’t know much, if anything, about feminism or women and are now putting that ignorance on display.
If someone ever raises a point or an idea that is genuinely interesting then I would go ahead and read more about it but most of the issues with feminist theory are pretty basic and nobody has yet indicated any source to where actual answers to those issues might be found.
So you don’t know what your talking about and don’t intend to educate yourself, got it.
Your comments are a great example of how male supremacy lacks critical thinking. You admit you have never attempted to educate yourself, don’t plan to and wouldn’t even know where to start. Why should anyone take your opinions seriously?
Patriarchal conditioning tells men they are intellectually superior (among other myths) without them ever having to do the work associated with it, such as knowledge gaining and critical thinking. You and other dude tripped over yourself to run to the comments of a women’s researched essay (read, actual work) to pontificate on a subject that you have no idea about and is irrelevant to the topic.
Alternatively, you could pay attention to the resource you are commenting on (resources that you say don’t exist) and take a bit more time and think just a bit harder before commenting with more meaningful substance.
Misogyny is deteriorating your ability to critically think. You should care about that. Feminism can help. Start with ‘Feminism is for Everybody’ by bell hooks. Actually, at this point googling definitions of “feminism” “misogyny” and “patriarchy” would get you miles ahead of where you are currently at.
This is a whole bundle of assumptions and personal attacks.
Disagreeing with someone isn't a statement of intellectual superiority, and you're far from the first person to recommend "Feminism is for Everybody", but I'm still not going to read it because there is still no indication any of the points in it have any more substance than things that are repeated by all the people who praise the book.
I am more than well aware of the various attempts to define feminism, patriarchy and misogyny as well.
When trying to come up with a predictive model of the world, feminist theory puts a lot of stock in the idea that society took certain actions basically just to hold women down and prop men up.
Rather I think sex is not a particularly important variable, but rather important associated variables with sex are what determines outcomes.
For example, in a preindustrial society women are substantially less economically vible than men. As a result they either have to lower their standard of living or depend on men. Society didn't force women to be dependent, so much as that's just the choice women tend to go with (especially in a time where everyone is much poorercand the world scarier). You don't need society to have any particular attitude towards women or hate them or any particular history either.
This is word salad full of contradictions and false information. You’re either arguing that sex matters or you’re not, it cannot be both. I’m not gonna waste my time.
You'd be interested in Christophe Darmangeat's work on the anthropology of conflict (war and violence), and women's oppression. BTW, he says often that the fact that something has existed for a very long time or is "natural" doesn't mean it can't be corrected; dying of tetanus after stepping on a sharp stone has been "normal" and "natural" for millions of years, and is now fortunately very rare :)
None of this surprises me because I read the literature on primitive warfare in my MA program. The pre-contact plains Indians were matrilineal and also brutal, the Arawak were matrilineal and also brutal, 10 percent of male craniums and 5 percent of female craniums among pre-contact California burials show signs of blunt force trauma, either recovered in life or perimortem. Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong, and it's not even a close call.
Men may have been more likely to be killed in warfare and interpersonal violence. But patriarchy is not the same as gender parity in deaths. It is about men dominating power and status.
That seems like an oxymoron if men are better at violence than women. If power is handed out via violence, things won't be gender-equal. I think that's fundamentally the reason why patriarchy is so common.
Extremely likely different types of violence, though. Compared to women, men would be more likely to be killed or wounded but less likely to be raped or beaten. But I think Evans's main point is that these may not have been terrific societies for women to live in even if in some ways, they had some power.
Whatever her intended point may be, the issue is gender equality, to which the type of violence one experiences and whether one has a nice life is irrelevant
LOL, wut?!? How is the violence experienced and how nice life is (or isn't) not related to gender equality (or any human relations) in the real world?!? Do you only live online/in books and have no experience in the real world interacting with other human beings?
I also wonder what definition of gender equality you have in mind, Victor, to say it is unrelated to quality of life and violence.
I am talking about gender equality as a construct, as an ideal, not as an indicator that will only ever be imprefect. PS: it is precisely one of Alice's argument that standard measures of equality are incomplete as they fail to capture vulnerability of women to make dominance and violence.
Or would you really argue that freedom from male violence isn't part of gender equality?
And note that violence experienced by men is mainly done by men, too, so there is no gender equality in violence, even IF men were more often victims for some forms of violence.
But if women are subject to violence from men, this is one expression of gender inequality, and not distinct from it. Or (how) would you argue against that? And if not, what is your point then when you say "the issue is gender equality, to which the type of violence one experiences and whether one has a nice life is irrelevant"
"Today, in Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine, there are reports of killings, abduction, torture, electric shocks, and gang rape. Victims of sexual abuse range in age from four to 82. This reflects a recurring pattern of sexual violence as a weapon of war."
Is that really a weapon *of war*? It seems unlikely to help the Russians win their war, after all. It sounds more like a perk of the job: "And as a bonus, you can have all the women you can rape."
It would seem to be a militarily useful weapon only in ethnic cleansing campaigns, and suchlike.
Apologies for not being sufficiently clear. The Russian Army is clearly seeing rape as a perk and a bonus. I am not the Russian Army. I do not see rape as a perk and a bonus. I am aware that other people may do so. Including, it would seem, the Russian Army.
This tracks. Many developed countries nowadays have highly educated women who can divorce and own property, but as the MeToo movement showed, gender equality is still hampered by sexual violence, not to mention domestic violence and violence against children.
There's also the fact that, if we are going to compare like with like, we'd need to acknowledge that much of the economic and social practices that were largely contained internally to these so called "small scale societies" are now expanded out between large geographic areas. So if were going to compare the violence in such a small scale societies to today's, we'd be engaging in I think a false dichotomy to compare them to individual nation states. An accurate comparison between such a small scale society, and something today, would need to compare them to not only the violence in say the US, but also the violence in all the manufacturing and resources bases the US relies on which it has delegated out through massive use of force and violence.
The monopoly on force the article refers to only appears to be a relative peace when you ignore the expanded economic and social sphere where no such monopoly on force is present.
This is a very interesting essay and a really cool dataset I now want to poke into. I’m wondering how this would look when measured against the relative safety and security of men in these societies. How many of them are slave owning where a man can also be captured and lose his freedom? What I’m getting at here isn’t “oh no but what about the men” but more like a comparative rather than absolute metric of women’s safety, like a Gini coefficient but for gender imbalances.
Isn’t this mixing up descriptive and normative language? For example, one of the sources pointed to in this article, The Dawn of Everything, does go some efforts to arguing that “egalitarian” doesn’t mean “good” and furthermore, that “egalitarian” also is not an all encompassing term; some aspects of society can be egalitarian, with other aspects not at all egalitarian. And there’s all sorts of odd ways to arrange that; I believe several such examples are given in the book of societies that have some quite strong egalitarian aspects in one area, while also having quite strict authoritarian and hierarchical aspects in another. Obviously I can’t speak for many of the other sources presented here because I haven’t read them. But regarding The Dawn of Everything, I did get the sense that how they used the term “egalitarian” was being misrepresented here. Because I never got the sense when reading it, that by “egalitarian” they meant, a society with no male violence.
Furthermore, it's not clear from your article what violence has to do with gender equality at all? For you to make the case you are making, that this violence undermines claims of gender equality, you would need to show that male on male violence was not also increased in these societies. Otherwise, you could just be highlighting very gender equal, very violent societies.
It’s also not clear how the term “pre-state” society is being used here. The term is just thrown in with no explanation or definition and seems to be instead be used in a more ideologically driven way. One of the core arguments in "The dawn of everything" is there isn't really a pre or post state point in history or development. They argue that the state does not have any specific origin. Citing steven pinker in your article is certainly a choice that seems to line up with the explanation for your usage of "pre-state" being more ideologically driven and normative, than descriptive.
>women celebrate and encourage male violence for their own benefit
>"Wow guys, these males, huh? They're so violent and misogynistic when they're out here killing...checks notes...mostly men (and women are always the victim, of course)"
The reality is that women often do best if they don’t stand up for other women but instead ally with the most powerful coalitions, and often the scenarios where men are abusing women also include female abusers.
It’s never fashionable or safe to side with those who are truly powerless
This is very interesting, but I'm no academic, just a guy who has lived, loved, travelled the world, and listened to the female voice (because women talk more than men, and are interested in people, whereas men are interested in things and concepts).
The talk of feminism generally doesn't make much sense to me.
One theory I’ve been stewing on for a while is that there was a time before recorded history when this wasn’t the case. Where the drive to violate wasn’t so strong or where there was no need or incentive for it. It’s more of a hope than anything, because agree with Alice’s conclusions here. Another loose theory: the impulse for violence may have begun as a genetic mutation, one that was amplified once it began to serve the power dynamics of resource acquisition and, eventually, the structures of modern “capitalism”. Call it cope…
Missing here is any discussion of class. There are societies where "domestic violence" is largely confined to the lower classes. I think these become more egalitarian over time, a function of both "imitating your betters" and that downwardly mobile middle class members take their values with them when they fall in society.
I didn't mean to imply they were. But "how do we get to Denmark" seems to always have a phase where the judgement "it is so low-class to beat your wife" replaces old norms where wife-beating was normal.
Domestic violence is perceived as 'low class' only because aristocratic arrangements are more efficiently and openly patriarchal. In high society, women either comply in advance or face clandestine consequences, where the ultimate penalty for defiance is an untimely death, the most absolute form of violence.
There's this frustrating tendency of humanities academia to put premodern and modern hunter gatherer societies on this pedestal of having the answer to everything, and gender equality is very much one of those things.
These fields do seem to attract too many (lefty) personality types who seem to care more about their political agenda than ascertaining what actually happened (and happens) in the world. And I say that as a left-of-center liberal who's revolted by authoritarianism and the malignancies of the far-right.
There's a saying that you can tell what kind of conservative someone is by what year they want to go back to. If you want to go to hunter-gatherer days, you've jumped to the other end of the horseshoe and become a far leftist.
It's pseudo-religious mythologizing. The myth of the noble savage followed by our 'corruption' when private property was invented is the secular equivalent of the Garden of Eden and subsequent Fall narrative.
Excellent article. But nobody should ever underestimate the dominant power of physical force (including both capacity for superior fighting capacity and work). Ultimately, in the struggle for survival, including procreation, physical force was always the trump card. Most women and the majority of men and almost all children were on the receiving end. Power was not rooted in sex/gender, but base biological capacity for force. The failure to appreciate this in feminist thinking is why feminism, by definition, is limited as a vehicle for understanding humanity. Women need to see themselves as smaller, less biologically forceful people.
Are you saying feminists are too stupid to notice that men have larger bodies and more strength than women, take advantage of that biological reality using violence and exploit women and children through force? I think a more reasonable explanation is that you don’t know much, if anything, about feminism or women and are now putting that ignorance on display.
This is basically why I'm not a feminist.
Feminist theory really suffers from not really explaining anything that isn't better explained in sex-neutral ways.
Which feminist texts have you read?
I am not a Catholic but have never read Aquinas.
If someone ever raises a point or an idea that is genuinely interesting then I would go ahead and read more about it but most of the issues with feminist theory are pretty basic and nobody has yet indicated any source to where actual answers to those issues might be found.
So you don’t know what your talking about and don’t intend to educate yourself, got it.
Your comments are a great example of how male supremacy lacks critical thinking. You admit you have never attempted to educate yourself, don’t plan to and wouldn’t even know where to start. Why should anyone take your opinions seriously?
Patriarchal conditioning tells men they are intellectually superior (among other myths) without them ever having to do the work associated with it, such as knowledge gaining and critical thinking. You and other dude tripped over yourself to run to the comments of a women’s researched essay (read, actual work) to pontificate on a subject that you have no idea about and is irrelevant to the topic.
Alternatively, you could pay attention to the resource you are commenting on (resources that you say don’t exist) and take a bit more time and think just a bit harder before commenting with more meaningful substance.
Misogyny is deteriorating your ability to critically think. You should care about that. Feminism can help. Start with ‘Feminism is for Everybody’ by bell hooks. Actually, at this point googling definitions of “feminism” “misogyny” and “patriarchy” would get you miles ahead of where you are currently at.
This is a whole bundle of assumptions and personal attacks.
Disagreeing with someone isn't a statement of intellectual superiority, and you're far from the first person to recommend "Feminism is for Everybody", but I'm still not going to read it because there is still no indication any of the points in it have any more substance than things that are repeated by all the people who praise the book.
I am more than well aware of the various attempts to define feminism, patriarchy and misogyny as well.
“Sex neutral” - in other words, “gender equality”.
I think I wasn't totally clear.
When trying to come up with a predictive model of the world, feminist theory puts a lot of stock in the idea that society took certain actions basically just to hold women down and prop men up.
Rather I think sex is not a particularly important variable, but rather important associated variables with sex are what determines outcomes.
For example, in a preindustrial society women are substantially less economically vible than men. As a result they either have to lower their standard of living or depend on men. Society didn't force women to be dependent, so much as that's just the choice women tend to go with (especially in a time where everyone is much poorercand the world scarier). You don't need society to have any particular attitude towards women or hate them or any particular history either.
This is word salad full of contradictions and false information. You’re either arguing that sex matters or you’re not, it cannot be both. I’m not gonna waste my time.
It isn't contradictory.
Economic viability is what really matters for a lot of the outcomes we see.
When economic viability changed, society changed. That economic viability correlated with sex didn't make sex causal (since sex hasn't changed).
You'd be interested in Christophe Darmangeat's work on the anthropology of conflict (war and violence), and women's oppression. BTW, he says often that the fact that something has existed for a very long time or is "natural" doesn't mean it can't be corrected; dying of tetanus after stepping on a sharp stone has been "normal" and "natural" for millions of years, and is now fortunately very rare :)
Unfortunately his latest book isn't yet available in English, but here's his book about war https://www.bloomsbury.com/us/justice-and-warfare-in-aboriginal-australia-9781793632319/ and his book about male domination https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/2667-primitive-communism-is-not-what-it-used-to-be
Thank you Emmanuel!
Oh BTW you'll find a significant bunch of articles in English on his website though most of it is in French: https://www.lahuttedesclasses.net/p/publications.html
There are incredibly deep discussions with his anthropologist peers in the comments section of his blog, but unfortunately rarely in English :)
None of this surprises me because I read the literature on primitive warfare in my MA program. The pre-contact plains Indians were matrilineal and also brutal, the Arawak were matrilineal and also brutal, 10 percent of male craniums and 5 percent of female craniums among pre-contact California burials show signs of blunt force trauma, either recovered in life or perimortem. Hobbes was right, Rousseau was wrong, and it's not even a close call.
Are men less likely to suffer violence in these societies? If not, then gender equality obtains.
Men may have been more likely to be killed in warfare and interpersonal violence. But patriarchy is not the same as gender parity in deaths. It is about men dominating power and status.
So how exactly does this differentiate from a (hypothetical) perfectly gender equal society that just happens to hand out power via violence?
That seems like an oxymoron if men are better at violence than women. If power is handed out via violence, things won't be gender-equal. I think that's fundamentally the reason why patriarchy is so common.
If women are X% as good at violence as men, then we would expect them to get X% of the power.
It is just a merit-based system where violence is considered a merit (which it is in its own way).
Thanks
Extremely likely different types of violence, though. Compared to women, men would be more likely to be killed or wounded but less likely to be raped or beaten. But I think Evans's main point is that these may not have been terrific societies for women to live in even if in some ways, they had some power.
Whatever her intended point may be, the issue is gender equality, to which the type of violence one experiences and whether one has a nice life is irrelevant
LOL, wut?!? How is the violence experienced and how nice life is (or isn't) not related to gender equality (or any human relations) in the real world?!? Do you only live online/in books and have no experience in the real world interacting with other human beings?
It's not that hard. Gender equality can be high if both sexes have it bad.
I also wonder what definition of gender equality you have in mind, Victor, to say it is unrelated to quality of life and violence.
I am talking about gender equality as a construct, as an ideal, not as an indicator that will only ever be imprefect. PS: it is precisely one of Alice's argument that standard measures of equality are incomplete as they fail to capture vulnerability of women to make dominance and violence.
Or would you really argue that freedom from male violence isn't part of gender equality?
And note that violence experienced by men is mainly done by men, too, so there is no gender equality in violence, even IF men were more often victims for some forms of violence.
Gender equality can be high if both sexes have it bad.
But if women are subject to violence from men, this is one expression of gender inequality, and not distinct from it. Or (how) would you argue against that? And if not, what is your point then when you say "the issue is gender equality, to which the type of violence one experiences and whether one has a nice life is irrelevant"
Because then the issue would be based on capacity for violence, which men have more of but isn't the same as them being men.
This is a great article! Thank you for this.
Thanks Alice, should get much more air-time than it does
"Today, in Russia-occupied areas of Ukraine, there are reports of killings, abduction, torture, electric shocks, and gang rape. Victims of sexual abuse range in age from four to 82. This reflects a recurring pattern of sexual violence as a weapon of war."
Is that really a weapon *of war*? It seems unlikely to help the Russians win their war, after all. It sounds more like a perk of the job: "And as a bonus, you can have all the women you can rape."
It would seem to be a militarily useful weapon only in ethnic cleansing campaigns, and suchlike.
You see rape as a perk and a bonus? So you see raping as a desirable activity?
Apologies for not being sufficiently clear. The Russian Army is clearly seeing rape as a perk and a bonus. I am not the Russian Army. I do not see rape as a perk and a bonus. I am aware that other people may do so. Including, it would seem, the Russian Army.
This tracks. Many developed countries nowadays have highly educated women who can divorce and own property, but as the MeToo movement showed, gender equality is still hampered by sexual violence, not to mention domestic violence and violence against children.
There's also the fact that, if we are going to compare like with like, we'd need to acknowledge that much of the economic and social practices that were largely contained internally to these so called "small scale societies" are now expanded out between large geographic areas. So if were going to compare the violence in such a small scale societies to today's, we'd be engaging in I think a false dichotomy to compare them to individual nation states. An accurate comparison between such a small scale society, and something today, would need to compare them to not only the violence in say the US, but also the violence in all the manufacturing and resources bases the US relies on which it has delegated out through massive use of force and violence.
The monopoly on force the article refers to only appears to be a relative peace when you ignore the expanded economic and social sphere where no such monopoly on force is present.
This is a very interesting essay and a really cool dataset I now want to poke into. I’m wondering how this would look when measured against the relative safety and security of men in these societies. How many of them are slave owning where a man can also be captured and lose his freedom? What I’m getting at here isn’t “oh no but what about the men” but more like a comparative rather than absolute metric of women’s safety, like a Gini coefficient but for gender imbalances.
Isn’t this mixing up descriptive and normative language? For example, one of the sources pointed to in this article, The Dawn of Everything, does go some efforts to arguing that “egalitarian” doesn’t mean “good” and furthermore, that “egalitarian” also is not an all encompassing term; some aspects of society can be egalitarian, with other aspects not at all egalitarian. And there’s all sorts of odd ways to arrange that; I believe several such examples are given in the book of societies that have some quite strong egalitarian aspects in one area, while also having quite strict authoritarian and hierarchical aspects in another. Obviously I can’t speak for many of the other sources presented here because I haven’t read them. But regarding The Dawn of Everything, I did get the sense that how they used the term “egalitarian” was being misrepresented here. Because I never got the sense when reading it, that by “egalitarian” they meant, a society with no male violence.
Furthermore, it's not clear from your article what violence has to do with gender equality at all? For you to make the case you are making, that this violence undermines claims of gender equality, you would need to show that male on male violence was not also increased in these societies. Otherwise, you could just be highlighting very gender equal, very violent societies.
It’s also not clear how the term “pre-state” society is being used here. The term is just thrown in with no explanation or definition and seems to be instead be used in a more ideologically driven way. One of the core arguments in "The dawn of everything" is there isn't really a pre or post state point in history or development. They argue that the state does not have any specific origin. Citing steven pinker in your article is certainly a choice that seems to line up with the explanation for your usage of "pre-state" being more ideologically driven and normative, than descriptive.
>women celebrate and encourage male violence for their own benefit
>"Wow guys, these males, huh? They're so violent and misogynistic when they're out here killing...checks notes...mostly men (and women are always the victim, of course)"
Is this serious?
The reality is that women often do best if they don’t stand up for other women but instead ally with the most powerful coalitions, and often the scenarios where men are abusing women also include female abusers.
It’s never fashionable or safe to side with those who are truly powerless
This is very interesting, but I'm no academic, just a guy who has lived, loved, travelled the world, and listened to the female voice (because women talk more than men, and are interested in people, whereas men are interested in things and concepts).
The talk of feminism generally doesn't make much sense to me.
But then who am I to argue with experts?
One theory I’ve been stewing on for a while is that there was a time before recorded history when this wasn’t the case. Where the drive to violate wasn’t so strong or where there was no need or incentive for it. It’s more of a hope than anything, because agree with Alice’s conclusions here. Another loose theory: the impulse for violence may have begun as a genetic mutation, one that was amplified once it began to serve the power dynamics of resource acquisition and, eventually, the structures of modern “capitalism”. Call it cope…
Missing here is any discussion of class. There are societies where "domestic violence" is largely confined to the lower classes. I think these become more egalitarian over time, a function of both "imitating your betters" and that downwardly mobile middle class members take their values with them when they fall in society.
Small scale societies did not necessarily have a class system
I didn't mean to imply they were. But "how do we get to Denmark" seems to always have a phase where the judgement "it is so low-class to beat your wife" replaces old norms where wife-beating was normal.
Where are these stats published and how were they gathered?
Domestic violence is perceived as 'low class' only because aristocratic arrangements are more efficiently and openly patriarchal. In high society, women either comply in advance or face clandestine consequences, where the ultimate penalty for defiance is an untimely death, the most absolute form of violence.