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Deep-seated attitudes to women have roots in ancient agriculture

economist.com

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

#41

Post by Spooky23 »

I think the explanation here is much simpler that it needs to be.

Pre-agriculture, everyone's job #1 was getting food on the table. Post-agriculture, you had a surplus of food, so people began to specialize. Economic and market forces started to become more sophisticated, as people were secure enough that daily survival wasn't an issue.

So economically speaking, before the advent of modern farm machinery, what did a farmer need to prosper? Answer: Labor.

Where did this labor come from? Answer: Children.

Farm families are historically speaking very large. Much larger than what a hunter/gatherer could possible support.

A woman might have 12-15 children, and since you have a food supply, many of them will survive to adulthood. So if you have 15 term pregnancies, starting at age 15, you're talking about being almost continuously pregnant until age 30.

In primitive surroundings, pregnancy is deadly. Today, the lifetime risk of maternal death in sub-Saharan Africa is 1/16. (vs. 1/2800 in the developed world).

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

#42

Post by codex »

The beauty of evolution is that it not only produces a wide variety of human offspring (via sexual reproduction and sexual selection) but also a _homo_ _sapien_ family unit in which each individual (male + female(s), usually) has different strengths.

This surplus of skills has allowed humans to survive under a wide variety of circumstances and environments. Evolution does not guarantee long term survival of the fittest--it guarantees long term survival of the most adaptable.

In some environments, the female may be more critical to the success of the family (or extended clan, or tribe, or what have you). In others, it's the man. Sometimes it's equal. But just because a particular skill set isn't the most valuable at any point in time doesn't mean that the individuals with those skills should be second class citizens. Eventually, years or decades or millennia from now, or thousands of miles away, their time will come again.

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

#43

Post by mseebach »

zeteo wrote: post #40
mseebach wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 fi…

Hoeing to ploughing is a discontinuous function. Either you scratch the ground with your hoe or you plough it. There is no middle ground where your hoe gradually gets heavier and turn into a plough.

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

#44

Post by Zimahl »

jgj wrote: post #16
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 That's a very modern application of those words. The very act of creating a statue is (true) objectification, whether it was carried out due to respect or solely to titillate. I'm not convinced that both cannot be true of the same statue. And the modern concept of pornography means very little when framed in a pre-Judeo-Christian world. I doubt any of our loin-clothed ancestors s…

I agree.

Making a statue in ancient times wasn't cheap or easy. Cheap in the aspect of always living on the edge of life, where a bad season could decimate a living group, and having time to do so. Easy in that tools weren't readily available to get it done quickly. I don't think anyone was just swinging in a hammock on a lazy Sunday - there were no lazy Sundays.

From that you can most likely assume that statues had purpose and significance. They weren't just put up for titillation which is really all modern porn is today.

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

#45

Post by zeteo »

mseebach wrote: post #43
zeteo wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 fi…

Hoeing to ploughing is a discontinuous function. Either you scratch the ground with your hoe or you plough it. There is no middle ground where your hoe gradually gets heavier and turn into a plough.

Again, weight of farm tools is a naturally continuous variable. There are heavy hoes, light plows and lots of ground in between [1] [2]. Transforming weight into a binary variable with an arbitrary separation point is not sound statistical practice.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mattock

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ard_(plough)

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

#46

Post by jfoutz »

bitwize wrote: post #29

Plows were usually drawn by animals, not people. If this hypothesis holds, horses and oxen should have even higher status than men. This is all an exercise in intellectual wankery that reminds me of the bit in Cryptonomicon where Randy's girlfriend publishes a paper correlating Unix beards with female oppression. Oh, and by the way, 'twas Margaret Mead -- a woman and hardly an apologist for the patriarchy -- who put…

you should take a long look at those handles on a plow and think about how you steer that around, and keep it ploughing, rather than sliding over the top of the fields.

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

#47

Post by wisty »

Zimahl wrote: post #44
jgj wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> pornography implies objectification That's a very modern application of those words. The very act of creating a statue is (true) objectification, whether it was carried out due to respect or solely to titillate. I'm not convinced that both cannot be true of the same statue. And the modern concept of pornography means very little when framed in a pre-Judeo-Christian world. I doubt any of our loin-clothed ancestors s…

I agree. Making a statue in ancient times wasn't cheap or easy. Cheap in the aspect of always living on the edge of life, where a bad season could decimate a living group, and having time to do so. Easy in that tools weren't readily available to get it done quickly. I don't think anyone was just swinging in a hammock on a lazy Sunday - there were no lazy Sundays. From that you can most likely assume that statues had…

Hunter gatherers may have worked far fewer hours than agrarian societies, especially if they had just had a decent haul.

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

#48

Post by thwest »

jgj wrote: post #16
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 That's a very modern application of those words. The very act of creating a statue is (true) objectification, whether it was carried out due to respect or solely to titillate. I'm not convinced that both cannot be true of the same statue. And the modern concept of pornography means very little when framed in a pre-Judeo-Christian world. I doubt any of our loin-clothed ancestors s…

> That's a very modern application of those words.

It follows from your argument that because our ancestors didn't share an evolutionary perspective, modern humans describing our ancestors in evolutionary terms is less meaningful.

Put another way, when modern humans describe the process of objectification, it matters not at all if the objectifier says to themselves "I sure am making an object out of this".

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

#49

Post by [deleted] »

bitwize wrote: post #29

Plows were usually drawn by animals, not people. If this hypothesis holds, horses and oxen should have even higher status than men. This is all an exercise in intellectual wankery that reminds me of the bit in Cryptonomicon where Randy's girlfriend publishes a paper correlating Unix beards with female oppression. Oh, and by the way, 'twas Margaret Mead -- a woman and hardly an apologist for the patriarchy -- who put…

[deleted]

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

#50

Post by ameister14 »

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.

Ok, you're taking the linear progression of history part, but leaving the slaughter-bench?

Hegel would be very disappointed

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