Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture • Hacker News Board

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#31

Post by [deleted] » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:05 PM UTC

sageikosa wrote: post #28

zeteo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it It was not until 1677 [1] that people started to discover how reproduction works beyond "penis goes in, life comes out". Yet there are no major religions documented before that (in about 5000 years of recorded history) which revered crude vulva drawings. Whereas pornographic graffiti has…

I'm no anthropologist, but the document leaving religions were social organizing at broader scales (market communities and early cities) than the basic coming of age rituals/education that were best left to family, clan and kin (hunters, herders and farmers).

[deleted]

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#32

Post by mseebach » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:06 PM UTC

im3w1l wrote: post #18

mmatants wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

>pornography implies objectification what exactly do you mean by this?

The idea is that porn reduces the actors in it to objects that exists solely to be exploited for the pleasure of others. It is often combined with unease over the power relationship implied, typically of women being subject to men.

The main counter to this is that it's fiction and the actors are consenting adults, and that the only material difference between porn and other crappy fictional films is prudish judgment of (primarily) women's sexual behavior.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#33

Post by benmmurphy » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:10 PM UTC

history is perfect for data mining. just search for interesting correlations and then publish when you've found one. it's not like anybody can run a fresh experiment to see if it is spurious or not.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#34

Post by mseebach » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:18 PM UTC

zeteo wrote: post #25

>The plough was heavier [...] it gave men an advantage over women. [...] Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses And this is why North European countries, which used the heaviest plows [1], are the most backward in their treatment of women. Oh wait... In any case, as anyone who has had a serious conversation with a farmer can attest,…

Harvesting is a surge-activity that has to be completed in a very narrow timespan for maximal yield. Also, harvesting primarily requires stamina, not strength.

Tilling, on the other hand, is less time sensitive, and can better be the job of a smaller group spreading their effort over a longer period of time.

Also, the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the passing of a threshold where men gain a physical advantage.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#35

Post by scarmig » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:19 PM UTC

People seem to be a bit overly upset by the mention of the mother goddess, which I agree is certainly an outmoded hypothesis. But that's a throwaway line in the article, which fundamentally is about how different technology can create different social norms and institutions. It's like half the comments on the article bitching about a capitalization error.

If the authors of the original article dotted all their is and crossed their ts, that's really something extraordinary: peoples whose ancestors were plough users show a strong correlation with regressive views on gender. That's remarkable.

That original paper can be found here:

On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough http://qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/02/19/qje.q...

Note also that the strong correlation here lends itself to a variety of causal claims. Maybe ploughs led to higher population densities and strong states, which enforce gender roles. Maybe it's the strength based argument offered by the Economist. Maybe they became manufacturable only once society had developed strong states, which would make the correlation purely a one of shared cause.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#36

Post by dspeyer » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:24 PM UTC

jostmey wrote: post #7

bradddd wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's a slippery slope, but I don't think they're directly claiming the cause of sexism. Instead, the point they're claiming is: "Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses than their counterparts in countries at similar levels of development who happen to be descended from hoe-users." So the bulk of the argument stems from some initial…

If anything the invention of farming may have lead to less violence and greater equality. This was a period of time when humanity transitioned from the Hunter to the Farmer. Farming promoted development. It did not hold it back.

Isn't it pretty well established that farming led to an increase in violence?

Thinking in terms of "development" is generally a bad approach. History doesn't have levels. Using generic terms like that implicitly assumes all sorts of correlations that don't actually exist.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#37

Post by dspeyer » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:27 PM UTC

mmatants wrote: post #13

jgj wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it is at least as likely that the statues are porn as that they are representations of powerful goddesses I'm not so sure there is or needs to be a distinction between the two. Penis goes in, life comes out. You can't explain that. Well, paleolithic man couldn't. But they could draw/sculpt it and revere it for both its pleasure- and life-giving properties.

Reverence is the debatable aspect here. Statue of a goddess implies respect, pornography implies objectification and a very different power relationship. So if we draw conclusions about the role of women in that society, interpreting statues as porn versus pedestals makes a difference.

> pornography implies objectification

It really doesn't. People can relate to porn in many ways. Unless the definition of "objectification" is so broad as to make the statement meaningless.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#38

Post by zeteo » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

rada wrote: post #20

tokenadult wrote: post #5

A claim about "all-powerful mother goddesses" before the end of the fifth millennium BC is inherently unhistorical. The submitted article notes, "For each group, the data included a description of its agricultural methods as far back in time as it was possible to go using historical evidence or, in the case of groups which did not have a written language, the first time they were observed by outsiders." That's much n…

It sounds like your problem with the article is that its "mother goddess" interpretation is baseless because there is no written record of that time period. That's valid, except you then proceed to offer your own modern interpretation that is equally as baseless. Just because we are inordinately pre-occupied by porn today, doesn't mean pre-historic people were. If anything, they were hungry, hand-to-mouth wilderness…

>breasts were not the sex symbol they are today for much of human history, and neither was masturbation to external visual sources

I have no idea where you got this from. Breasts are treated as sex symbols in lots of ancient sources (see e.g. the Song of Songs).

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#39

Post by lifebar » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:33 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #32

im3w1l wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>pornography implies objectification what exactly do you mean by this?

The idea is that porn reduces the actors in it to objects that exists solely to be exploited for the pleasure of others. It is often combined with unease over the power relationship implied, typically of women being subject to men. The main counter to this is that it's fiction and the actors are consenting adults, and that the only material difference between porn and other crappy fictional films is prudish judgment…

"porn reduces the actors in it to objects that exists solely to be exploited for the pleasure of others." 1. They are not objectified. Recording is created of sex/nudity that is object, not actors "reduced" to objects. And also, last time I checked - humans were objects. Whole sentence is wrong. 2. Pay me as much as women in porn are payed...

"typically of women being subject to men." You are not watching enough porn. In most porn women are the ones initiating sex, and men just plays along. It's your personal problem if you are watching male on female BDSM.

Re: Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

#40

Post by zeteo » Thu, May 02, 2013, 4:43 PM UTC

mseebach wrote: post #34

zeteo wrote: post #25

>The plough was heavier [...] it gave men an advantage over women. [...] Women descended from plough-users are less likely to work outside the home, to be elected to parliament or to run businesses And this is why North European countries, which used the heaviest plows [1], are the most backward in their treatment of women. Oh wait... In any case, as anyone who has had a serious conversation with a farmer can attest,…

Harvesting is a surge-activity that has to be completed in a very narrow timespan for maximal yield. Also, harvesting primarily requires stamina, not strength. Tilling, on the other hand, is less time sensitive, and can better be the job of a smaller group spreading their effort over a longer period of time. Also, the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the p…

>the research doesn't claims any relation between the weight of the plow and the mindset beyond for the passing of a threshold

So let's see, the research is about the relationship between two variables, both of them naturally continuous: weight of farming tools and degree of discrimination against women. The correlation doesn't quite hold for some sections of the graph, so what do you know: let's just separate the first variable into two arbitrary buckets, "light" and "heavy". Voila, case proved! Except if we happened to place the division at a "heavier" point, leaving only the Nordic countries in the "heavy" bucket, we'd obtain the exact inverse correlation.