An Integral Approach to Feminism
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I thought some of you might find this interesting. This is an introduction to an Integral perspective on feminism. It has two features: 1) it’s developmental, in that it tracks social structures through time, and 2) it does so in a “4-quadrant” view which accounts for subjective and objective realities.
(It gets a little corny and markety toward the bottom, but the piece is supposed to make you want to listen to the audio conversation ….)
Redefining the Relationships between Men and Women
It is amazing to consider how much has changed in the past five decades in regard to sexual liberation and empowerment. The woman’s role in today’s society is almost unrecognizable compared to the early 20th century, and would be wholly unimaginable in the centuries prior. In America, attitudes toward sexuality and gender began to dramatically shift with the Boomer generation (and the newly emerging pluralistic values they brought with them), as birth control, free love, and several new schools of “second wave” feminism began to challenge the traditional attitudes that defined preceding generations. Since the early sixties, there has been a tremendous amount of movement toward redefining ourselves as men and women—some forward, some backward, and plenty of jogging-in-place. In the ensuing decades, we have witnessed the masculinization of women, the feminization of men, the neutralization of both genders, the roles of helpless victim set upon women, the witch hunts of fallacious prosecution set against men, the movement to procure equal rights for homosexuals, the advent of sex-change surgery, the rise of pornography as a multi-billion dollar industry, and the capitalization of just about every kink, fetish, and fixation imaginable. And through it all, not surprisingly, men and women in the 21st century still seem to look at each other with the same bewilderment they did 20,000 years ago, after waking up with a headache and an annoying lump on the back of her head.
In order to come to any coherent definition of ourselves as sexual beings, we must take as comprehensive a view of sexuality as possible. Ken Wilber has developed a theoretical model known as the “Four Quadrants,” which, when applied to nearly any field of human knowledge, offers a very simple way to ensure that all bases are being covered and that nothing is being left out. The Four Quadrant model accounts for the interior and exterior dimensions of both the individual and the collective, yielding four major realms of consciousness: intentional, cultural, behavioral, and social (or “I”, “we”, “it”, and “its”, respectively, for those interested in tracking pronouns). All four of these dimensions are closely related, with each quadrant having strong correlates in the others—though none of these quadrants can be reduced to each other (despite the entire history of human thought being essentially an attempt to do exactly this.)
When applied to human sexuality, the Four Quadrants allow us to clearly see the respective roles of biological sex (male vs. female), interior sexuality (masculine vs. feminine), and sexual gender (man vs. woman, as defined by cultural beliefs and expectations), while also accounting for the various technological and economic systems all of these are situated in. By differentiating each of these important dimensions of sexuality, we are able to see how each is able to develop along its own trajectory, with its own history, without needing to confuse one’s sexual orientation with one’s sense of “manliness,” one’s secret desires with one’s cultural taboos, or even one’s gender with one’s genitals.
As previously mentioned, each of these major dimensions of human sexuality (sex, sexuality, gender, and sociological factors) grows through several distinct stages of unfolding. Just as the human body grows through stages of physical maturity—from fetal to infancy, to toddler-hood, to adolescence, to reproductive maturity—so do we grow psychologically, culturally, and socially. In fact, it is only toward the higher reaches of psychological growth that these sorts of important differentiations between biology, psychology, culture, and society can be made—and only from within a relatively advanced culture can significant strides be made on behalf of sexual identity, expression, and liberation. Both men and women evolve through ego-centric, ethno-centric, and world-centric stages of development, creating cultures that reflect these ever-deepening and increasingly inclusive values as they go.
A special note should be made in regards to our techno-economic development, which arguably has the most influence upon development in the other quadrants, for a variety of reasons. By looking to the history of economic production, we can find the history of gender roles themselves—in the earliest stages of civilization, men and women were able to produce food fairly equally, as men would hunt and women would gather, and even later when we moved into the horticultural stage and both men and women could use a digging stick to grow crops. Things changed, however, when we moved into agricultural mode of production, requiring the training of large animals to pull heavy plows through the fields. As men possess more upper-body strength than women, and women were much more susceptible to birth complications under this sort of physical labor, men and women both made the mutual decision to each tend to different spheres of life. This is we begin to see our first true divisions of labor, with men becoming responsible for the public sphere, and women for the private sphere. (And as an interesting footnote, most of the cultures from these eras worshipped gods that were predominantly matriarchal or evenly split between male and female deities, as opposed to agrarian societies who typically only worshiped male deities.) In societies still struggling with survivalist needs, women became valued as humanity’s most precious resource, and men became valued for their disposability, and are expected to compete for the opportunity to protect these resources.
For the next several thousand years, men did what they do best: kill, compete, and construct rigid and elaborate patriarchies, in all flavors of tribalism, nationalism, religion, aristocracies, meritocracies, and steel cage matches. And, in these testosterone-driven social hierarchies, a woman’s proper place in the public sphere was all too clear: she had none whatsoever. And though modern and post-modern feminists can (and do) scoff at the unabashed sexual inequities within these patriarchies, the fact that this was an intentional, necessary, and mutually beneficial decision made by both sexes early in history is regrettably forgotten. Most men aren’t the oppressive beasts they are often made out to be, and most women aren’t the helpless victims of men’s oppression that they are often made out to be.
Of course, we are now in a completely different era of history, with modes of technology that have rendered many, if not all, of these prior decisions about labor division obsolete. Much of the physical labor men traditionally had to do has been replaced first by the steam engine, then by combustion, and now by the microchip. This is probably the single most important factor in terms of the rise of women’s liberation, and has brought into relief one of the most frustrating aspects of collective transformation: although the technology can change overnight, the culture is much more slow to adapt, often requiring entire generations to die off before real change can be enacted throughout society. Or, as Ken has bleakly joked elsewhere: “the knowledge quest can only proceed funeral by funeral….”
All in all, it is an amazing time to be alive—to be a man or a woman, male or a female, masculine or feminine, gay or straight. We are bearing witness to an entire new wave of individual and collective values, an Integral wave of development which, when it reaches the tipping point of its emergence, will make just as extraordinary a splash upon history as the European renaissance or the postmodern revolution of the sixties. And while each previous revolution has occurred only to steer the world away from the pathologies and excesses of what came before, the Integral revolution will be markedly different—while creating a space of personal and collective transformation that is radically and unmistakably new, Integral consciousness will also help to bring a tremendous amount of healing, stability, and sanity to the rest of the world, with the crucial understanding that everyone must start at square one before evolving to Integral consciousness. With as comprehensive a view of human sexuality as Integral consciousness provides, it becomes apparent that all of our old and apparently obsolete methods of relating to each other will always exist, and we must therefore allow them to exist on their own terms, while simultaneously liberating ourselves from definitions of sexual maturity that no longer seem to apply to us or our relationships, and finding new ways to relate to each other with more authenticity, more wholeness, and more erotic passion than ever before possible….
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evil_FUX
4:41 pm | Jun 20, 2008Great article D; nice summary and way to bring a larger picture into perspective. Though I think Lopan maybe right with what seemingly always have on your mind…
jaehwan
6:46 pm | Jun 20, 2008Actually, I didn’t like this article at all. There were too many statements that lacked any proof or evidence.
The author writes:
I’m not an anthropologist, but this author’s portrayal of pre-agricultural society completely contradicts everything I’ve read on the subject. It doesn’t even sound right. Think about it–which would yield more calories, killing a wild boar or picking berries? Looking at cave drawings and listening to traditional stories, which activity was more socially celebrated? You see pictures of the hunt, but rarely to do you see pictures of mushroom gathering. Plus, why focus solely on production? I’m sure a lot of the social structure was enforced by intra-species violence as well; what makes him think that it’s all about food? I would think that it is far more likely that sexism based on biology within patriarchal societies always existed because it was based on physical size.
And what about matriarchal societies? The author seems to believe that we have to go through these stages, but he ignores the fact that matriarchal societies, some of which are still in existence today and have proven themselves fit, never went through this.
Again, documentation please, Mr. Farrell. Is he saying that women made a conscious decision to be oppressed by sexism? If it’s “forgotten,” it’s still his responsibility to document why he believes we somehow developed collective amnesia.
I don’t know; to say that it was an intentional and mutually beneficial decision seems a bit biased against women. How does he know this?
I think it’s fine to have an integral approach to feminism, but I wonder if there isn’t a better article out there.
D:
His last paragraph made my eyes bleed.
Dialectic
11:08 pm | Jun 20, 2008Jaehwan, this was an informal summary of their position, not a formal article. You’d have to read Sex, Ecology, Spirituality for more on that.
You’ve misinterpreted what they’re saying, and you’re also assuming that this article gives the full picture when it’s just an introduction.
I’m going to be very brief here.
First, the level of techno-economic mode of production of a society exists in a reciprocal relationship with the cultural identity and social structure: if you’re hunter/gatherers, you will think tribally (and vice versa: if the group has a tribal mindset, its members will be hunter-gatherers); if you have an agricultural base and not much further, you will think ethnocentrically; if you have an industrial base, you’ll think in a formal rational manner; if you’re in an information-rich structure (or information economy), you’ll think worldcentrically.
Basically, a society’s social and political structure can be predicted when we know its primary techno-economic mode of production. The way it regards the “roles” or relationships between men and women can also be predicted.
These numbers are approximations, but basically, tribal pre-agrarian societies tended to be 50/50 matriarchal/ patriarchal: it was a coin toss and depended on local conditions. Once societies switched to agriculture, I believe they went to 90-100% patriarchy. This occurred primarily because women could on longer significantly participate in the techno-economic mode of production: miscarriages would skyrocket and men are more physically efficient in terms of labour.
As such, any society that had women participate equally in agricultural production would basically fall apart because it wouldn’t be able to reproduce.
As such, what we understand as “patriarchy” was co-enacted under harsh biospheric (or biogeographical) constraints.
What’s the alternative explanation, Jaehwan? The alternative explanation is, to put it bluntly, that in every post-tribal culture on the planet, men were dominating assholes and women were submissive sheep. That is, it’s either we accept that what we call the patriarchy was co-enacted under severe production constraints, or we accept that men are basically evil and women were too dumb or too weak to “fight back.”
Once industrialization arose, rational reflection and the first stirrings of feminism came with it. This came about for a few broad reasons: industrialization basically evened out the productive capacity between men and women (with engines it doesn’t really matter who’s using it), which has only been helped by the current information revolution (now, just thinking and writing down your thoughts is productive, and men are not more efficient in this at all). In addition the rise of a mass literate population, which began to seriously and formally reflect on the world, enabled people to see that the way things had been for thousands of years didn’t have to be the way things are now.
This is a very brief overview, and I’ve undoubtedly left a lot of big gaps, but the point is essentially this:
Historically, if you’re going to have agriculture, you’re going to have men in charge (it’s a bit different now with advanced technologies being sold to less tech-advanced cultures, complicating things). This is universal. I can’t think of a single post-tribal agricultural matriarchy. If you don’t accept this, then you implicitly accept that men are universally oppressive assholes and women are universally dumb weak sheep who somehow couldn’t fight this off or see through this oppression anywhere, until the steam engine was invented. That’s how the reasoning plays out.
The only way to get a good comprehensive grasp of things like race, culture, gender, and the like is to appreciate a long-term cross-cultural view. These are some of the tentative conclusions put forth by the first of such approaches.
JadeDragon
11:59 pm | Jun 20, 2008I have to agree with everything D said.
While these matriarchal societies still exist, most of them, if not all, function pretty much at the tribal level and aren’t able to keep up with the rest of the world in terms of development, socially and technologically. Even the oft-cited Mosuo matriarchal society isn’t the feminist utopia that some people would like to think it is.
Sexism as a concept didn’t exist back then. No one had the time to sit around the ol’ campfire articulating complex theories and giving them names as they were too busy fighting off the wild boar next door. In those days when these pre-Enlightenment societies were the norm, any necessary tasks were carried out by whomever could do it best, and not only because one was a man or a woman.
Besides, why is women’s work in the private sphere (aka housework) not seen as worthy as men’s work in the fields? Just because women were no longer in the public sphere didn’t mean that they did not contribute to their enclave/village/society in other ways before women’s suffrage.
jaehwan
12:46 am | Jun 21, 2008D:
I agree with you on the agricultural thing–I can’t think of a single post-tribal agricultural matriarchy either. But I don’t agree with the “facts” on which this writer’s case is built (e.g. when he says “the fact that this was an intentional, necessary, and mutually beneficial decision made by both sexes early in history is regrettably forgotten”), and therefore I don’t agree with the logic of how things came to be. I think there’s a much simpler alternative that he isn’t considering.
As I said, I’m not an anthropologist, but from what I do know about the majority of research that I’ve read, most human societies, regardless of what stage they are at, are and were patriarchal. I remember studying cultures in high school, and back then, they taught that ALL societies were male-dominated (and I think this is supported by Jade’s mention of the Mosuo tribe). This was, of course, during the time while academics were fighting over the validity of some of Margaret Mead’s work, but even now, it looks like most anthropologists support the idea that most, but not all, societies were patriarchal.
It’s also true that most powerful societies today are also patriarchal. It’s true in the general population of the U.S., Britain, Germany, Russia, China, Japan, and just about everywhere else you go. Most of these societies passed through the same kind of techno-economic mode of development that you mention–hunter/gatherer, agricultural, industrial, and (not all yet) information.
But I think that it’s because a large majority of societies are patriarchal, along with the fact that patriarchal societies may have advantages in war.
The evidence for the near universality of male dominance is overwhelming. As I mentioned before, you have the cave drawings. You also have the traditional stories of the hunt. Plus you have the fact that killing a wild animal, the traditional hunter-gatherer male job, usually yields more calories and food than picking berries or fruits, which was the traditional hunter-gatherer female job.
Plus–and this is big–you have the evolutionary evidence. The fact that we’re almost universally sexually dimorphic, where the average man is bigger than the average woman (even if Obama thinks Asians are short), indicates male-centric polygamy, which indicates patriarchy. It also indicates a natural tendency of the species to prize fighting ability. Indeed, most primates are patriarchal, which would indicate that we were patriarchal long before we even looked human.
So here’s part one of my alternative theory: I don’t think men are all assholes, but back in the day before we had time to think and read, we relied a lot more on our brute force to get our way. Indeed, we’re not all that far away from that–if you look at U.S. history, for example, back in the day of Lincoln, Senators used to carry firearms into the chamber and challenge each other to duels when they didn’t get their way. We was a buncha thugs. We’re patriarchal not because we’re assholes, but because we just haven’t reached the level of understanding that we do now. And I say this with humility, of course, because there still remains a lot more work to be done.
Jade:
I agree with you, but I think matriarchal societies are rare among primates in general, and I think patriarchal societies had an advantage in war.
So here’s part two of my alternative theory regarding agriculture: The reason you don’t see many agricultural matriarchies is because:
a)there were far more patriarchal societies to begin with
and
b) agricultural requires ownership of land.
In order to own land, you have to drive everyone else off of it and keep people afraid enough not to get on your turf. Back in the early days of agriculture, most fear was inflicted through physical violence, and because humans are sexually dimorphic, patriarchal societies had an advantage in driving people out because of physical advantages–what Farrell might call “upper body strength”. This is why we don’t see matriarchal agricultural societies.
You’re right, but Farrell’s words were that it was a “mutually beneficial decision made by both sexes.” That’s quite a different statement than saying that we were simply not aware of sexism or were too busy to deal with it. And of course women contributed through the private sphere.
I think that we have a lot to learn from the past. However, I think that in order to understand the past, we need to put it into a context that makes sense. Your context, Jade, makes a lot more sense than Farrell’s.
Xian
9:44 am | Jun 21, 2008It’s funny, because I agree almost entirely with D on the theory, but I argue with Jae on the arguments. JD tends to combine good framing with good theory.
As I said, I agree with your general points, D, but this is straight bullying argumentation:
If you don’t accept this, then you implicitly accept that men are universally oppressive assholes and women are universally dumb weak sheep who somehow couldn’t fight this off or see through this oppression anywhere, until the steam engine was invented. That’s how the reasoning plays out.
I DO accept your points, but there are about a thousands ways one could questions your points without accepting your extremist framing of ALL of the alternative theories.
I would say that somewhere in the equation there is the empathy factor which–either biologically or socially–tended to be invested in the female role. In pre-information era, the greatest asset that a society could have is the willingness to remorselessly go genocidal on other civilizations.
That is the only non-informational/cultural meaningful advantage that the dominant civilizations used to dominate and eradicate their competitors.
That (along with a complete lack of hygiene) is the reason why the Europeans were able to dominate a world in which they trailed in transportation expertise, weapon expertise, water obtainment, and on and on.
In a battle, it was always less important who had the bigger club than who was willing to do the most unspeakable thing.
However, it was not a useful path for human development. The fundamental truth–that other human beings are your equals will infest the long term conscious of those who value genocidal ethnic superiority over universal empathy, and the informational age can/has/will facilitate that process. At the same time, it becomes less possible to merely eradicate those who are cosmetically different, and diversity of all kinds becomes a resources rather than an impediment.
lycanmaster
4:24 pm | Jun 21, 2008New guy here…
Surprised that it finally took this long for this subject to come up. By that I mean the “evolutionary-biological” spin on things (like male-female relations). Although to be fair, I don’t consider the field anywhere near to be the end-all-be-all explanation for everything in the world; it still just one factor along with culture, socialization, etc when explaining human behavior. With that having been said…
Anyone reads ev-bio “theories” will definitely come away with different perspective especially on the ‘female gender’. They definitely don’t come off as being innocent little angels; alot of times they seem be just selfish, cruel, and brutal as men are, but in different ways. Women are not saints unfortunately; they really are just human (which is probably the better perspective to take in the end…)
Dialectic
1:35 am | Jun 22, 2008Xian, from what I can tell, we don’t disagree at all. We both attribute the development of the “patriarchy” to biogeographical/evolutionary conditions.
I will have much more to say on this later, but let me make a couple more points now.
You are correct that agricultural societies require land ownership; in fact, the concept of formal land ownership as we understand it doesn’t occur in tribal societies. Post-tribal societies require land ownership because they need land to till and be responsible for, and because agriculture will increase the population density, and formal title or ownership (as well as giving political power to a centralizeed authority) is necessary to create a stable order in areas of high population density.
At this point in time, the only significant “reality” is physical: the sphere of the “mind” does not arise until agriculture has been around for a while and a literate class can stably form and begin to systematically reason. As you say, violence, which is intrinsic to the animal world, is also a fundamental method of dispute resolution among humans, and this, combined with the physical requirements of agriculture, resulted in men being in charge in the “public” or techno-economic productive sphere.
The only reason I used the rhetoric you object to is because too many people have been taught that women have forever been “oppressed” by men, when there was no such “oppression” when these social/political/productive structures were formed: it was co-enacted (and it was “consciously” decided because it was the structure which enabled survival across all post-tribal cultures) and then only became “oppression” when we realized that social/political/productive conditions gave us a viable alternative.
But without an understanding of biogeographical/evolutionary causation, it’s all just a big oppression game: men were evil assholes that put down women everywhere, and women took it. And that belief is implicit in many “feminist” perspectives today, even if it’s not consciously articulated, and it’s just not true.
Dialectic
1:40 am | Jun 22, 2008Lycanmaster, welcome and thanks for participating! Yes, as far as I know, there is no evidence that women in general are any more or less “moral” than men; they simply have a different orientation in terms of how they negotiate moral sequences. You can look at the work of Carol Gilligan vs. Lawrence Kohlberg (it’s early stuff but good) to see one possible model of how women have a different emphasis on morality: men on justice, freedom, agency, and women on care, inclusion, communion. But they do go through the same basic stages: Gilligan uses, simply, “selfish, “care,” “universal care,” which correlate with Kohlberg’s pre-conventional, conventional, and post-conventional (which also roughly correlate with Piaget’s cognitive pre-operational, concrete operational, and formal operational — cognitive and moral development are related, but not the same, with cognitive being a minimum requirement for moral).
Finally, I’ve been talking about this kind of stuff for years, but only in the forum, and I’ve been planning to bust out some pretty long posts for a while on large-scale internal and external human development and its implications for race and feminist theory.
Dialectic
2:08 am | Jun 22, 2008As a point of interest which I’ll come back to in a later feature, let me also say that the so-called “rational” mind, which arises after the ethnocentric/ mythic membership/ rule-role/ conformist mind is the one which can see through existing political and social structures and hierarchies, understand that they are “constructed,” not a “natural order,” and understand the reasons for their construction and the limitations of their usefulness. But before an individual or society become “rational,” they first go through a “mythic-rational” phase, in which the emerging rational mind first seeks to justify the way things are using reason.
As such, it first seeks to rationalize the existing structures and orders it sees, and therefore comes to erroneous conclusions, like men are smart and strong, women are dumb and weak, or whites are civilized and innovative, non-whites are Brutish and backwards, and that’s just the way things are. It is only when a critical mass of a society’s elites really take hold of reason that they can really start to question fundamentals, like the existence of God, the role of men and women and minorities, and modify societies quickly and effectively.
In this sense, there was no “oppression,” no “sexism,” no “patriarchy,” no “colonialism,” no “homophobia,” no “child abuse,” until society had gotten to a point where it could really think through existing social and political structures, what they stood for, and what they were capable of. And for this, you need reason, you need division of labor, you need science, industrialization, agriculture, printing, a literate class and a population to a certain extent “free” from fundamental biological needs (the bottom of the Maslow hierarchy).
maloy
3:42 am | Jun 22, 2008what the hell? jaehwan, your argument doesn’t stand up to farrell’s at all regarding mutually-beneficient decisions. no one is saying that a bunch of chicks stood around and were like, “hey, i just realized, those dudes can go hunt and we can farm!” these types of “decisions” evolved over time.
social contracts DO exist even though it’s not documented (i mean, seriously, no one has fucking documented how char siu bao was invented, and yet it still exists) otherwise, why do we all agree to be governed? why did people allow feudalism to thrive? the few have always oppressed the many throughout history, why did that happen?
nothing that is being said here is new. hobbes wrote about this a million years ago.
“Hobbes points out that humans are “naturally selfish creatures who [stand] in need of authority to tame [us]” (Hobbes, xii). In other words people left totally without any sort of government or social control would exist in a state of nature within which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short” (xi). Anarchy, such as would result if we had no order imposed upon us, is a much greater danger than anything we might suffer under a government since under this “every man for himself” system there can be no assurances of personal safety and violence must be the means of social interaction.
In order to save us from ourselves, Hobbes says that we must form a social contract and agree to form a civilized society wherein all individuals subsume their own personal goals and right to make major decisions to a single authority figure—a Leviathan. This “figure” can be either a single individual or a legislative body comprised of several members who share and enforce a single, uniform set of beliefs.”
Excerpts from “Leviathan”
“So that in the nature of man, we find three principal causes of quarrel. First, competition; secondly, diffidence; thirdly, glory.
The first maketh men invade for gain; the second, for safety; and the third, for reputation. The first use violence, to make themselves masters of other men’s persons, wives, children, and cattle; the second, to defend them; the third, for trifles, as a word, a smile, a different opinion, and any other sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name.
Whatsoever therefore is consequent to a time of war, where every man is enemy to every man, the same consequent to the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal. In such condition there is no place for industry…and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.
Hereby it is manifest that during the time men live without a common power to keep them all in awe, they are in that condition which is called war; and such a war as is of every man against every man.”
“And whereas some have attributed the dominion to the man only, as being of the more excellent sex, they misreckon in it. For there is not always that difference of strength or prudence between the man and the woman as that the right can be determined without war.”
“If there be no contract, the dominion is in the mother. For in the condition of mere nature, where there are no matrimonial laws, it cannot be known who is the father unless it be declared by the mother; and therefore the right of dominion over the child dependeth on her will, and is consequently hers. Again, seeing the infant is first in the power of the mother, so as she may either nourish or expose it; if she nourish it, it oweth its life to the mother, and is therefore obliged to obey her rather than any other; and by consequence the dominion over it is hers. But if she expose it, and another find and nourish it, dominion is in him that nourisheth it. For it ought to obey him by whom it is preserved, because preservation of life being the end for which one man becomes subject to another, every man is supposed to promise obedience to him in whose power it is to save or destroy him.”
maloy
7:29 am | Jun 22, 2008okay, i had to go out for a second there, but to clarify what i wrote, my main beef is with this thing that jaehwan wrote:
“Plus–and this is big–you have the evolutionary evidence. The fact that we’re almost universally sexually dimorphic, where the average man is bigger than the average woman (even if Obama thinks Asians are short), indicates male-centric polygamy, which indicates patriarchy. It also indicates a natural tendency of the species to prize fighting ability. Indeed, most primates are patriarchal, which would indicate that we were patriarchal long before we even looked human.”
first of all, i’m with hobbes that just because someone is bigger or stronger than you, you immediately secede authority to it. wtf, brute strength can be overpowered by other things such as cunning and skill. if not, then we’d be slaves to lions or gorillas right now. as such, there was some form of tacit social contract that was made in order to preserve the peace, so that lives didn’t have to be nasty and brutish and short. it’s a natural inclination that stems from a selfish desire to live.
as for your primate theory, i hardly ever throw this accusation out, but you do realize that you’re making a sexist fucking assumption that primate females submit to patriarchal rule because they’re weak? have you ever considered the thought that perhaps primate females realize that they spend a lot of time pregnant and caring for babies, and it would be pretty useful to have some dude around who could watch out for predators, etc.? a bunch of female primates could wreak as much havoc as a bunch of male primates but they have other biological priorities. this would also explain why there is the need for only one male in a group…what’s the use of having more than one penis around? you never see one female just wandering around like a fucking bum because females are precious to the species, while most beta males just wander off and die or form sad, lonely female-free groups where they bicker amongst each other and hate on women (hm, sounds familiar). in fact, to even see this as male domination or patriarchy is a reflection of your own sexism that you’re projecting onto animal behaviour.
as for fighting ability, SB1 taught me before that most fights are won even before the first punch is thrown, which is why most animals have threatening noises/appearances to intimidate others so they don’t actually have to throw down.
jesus, i thought nightshade and i were the misogynists here, but some of you really take the cake. arrrr!!! this is so fucking frustrating…men are so fucking retarded.
maloy
7:31 am | Jun 22, 2008oh shit, correction:
“first of all, i’m with hobbes that it’s NOT TRUE just because someone is bigger or stronger than you, you immediately secede authority to it.”
Dialectic
3:23 pm | Jun 22, 2008^Good follow-up, Maloy. I’m not sure Hobbes was the ideal to use, but he is a classic. Your point about the strength/weakness point in Jaehwan’s response is exactly what my rhetoric was meant to address above. I’m being repetitive here but I don’t care: there is an implicit assumption in many peoples’ understandings that patriarchy came about because, basically, women were too weak and/or dumb to stop men from “oppressing” them, which is simply not the case. Biological, geographical, technological, economic, political, etc. conditions required that things be this way, at least for a time (post-tribal agricultural societies).
Also, somewhat related to your talk about males and families, socially, the integration of the male into the family in a productive/protective capacity is actually the first integration human societies go through, universally. In most cases, the male takes the role of the “father,” though in some exceptional instances, as in the Mosuo, it’s the uncles, or mother-side males who take the primary male roles in the family.
After this first integration of the core family unit comes that of the extended family, the band or tribe. Once enough tribes occupy a certain amount of land, they form chiefdoms, and eventually, nations. Nations then go through three known phases: agricultural, industrial, and now trans-national informational.
All of these structures produce different kinds of identities and understandings of the world, and each subsequent one builds on the last. Now, we’ve at last come to the point where we have enough scientific know-how, reasoning capability, and information to take long-term developmental and evolutionary views of social structures and move away from simple, distorted ideas of oppression, racism, sexism, and blame.
maloy
3:52 pm | Jun 22, 2008hee, well you had to bring up gilligan, so i had to go medieval on all your asses with hobbes.
i’m waiting for someone to bring up sarah ruddick now (i actually wrote a thesis on her book, blech) or dorothy dinnerstein (who i’m still at annoyed at for misleading me with the title of her book “mermaid and the minotaur.” i thought i was gonna be in for some interspecies erotic fantasy stuff, tsk)
nightshade
5:46 pm | Jun 22, 2008HAHA, Hobbes. Sadly, I knew I was weird because I took a class where we had to read Hobbes and Rousseau, and everyone else liked Rousseau better and I kept saying that Hobbes had a better thought out position. I guess it’s just the hater in me being able to spot a fellow hater.
jaehwan
8:12 pm | Jun 22, 2008D,
I think we agree on the main points. Not the 50/50 patriarchy/matriarchy thing, but the main points about evil oppressors, yes.
Lycan,
Welcome!
Yes, it took a long for the biology/evolutionary stuff to come out. As you can see, these kinds of arguments often get one in trouble. I still think it’s the best way to understand what was going on in the pre-literate world.
By the way, there’s this good book called “Madame Bovary’s Ovaries” that talks about evolutionary psychology and literature. It’s not deep thinking stuff, but it’s a pretty fascinating read.
Maloy,
Farrell writes that there was a “mutually beneficial decision made by both sexes.” While I agree with what you (and Jade) are saying, I don’t agree with what Farrell is saying because he uses the word “decision.” That’s a whole lot different than what you described. When we’re talking about early humans, it’s probably a lot different from talking about rational modern humans. The scorpion doesn’t make a “decision” to sting the frog; it’s just in his nature. Certain dogs don’t decide to run in traffic; it’s just in their default nature to do what makes sense on a simple level. Early humans just fell in line with what apes did. When we become rational, we can transcend that. When we become rational, we make decisions.
So I don’t disagree with you at all. But what you and Hobbes and Jade are saying is quite different from what Farrell is saying with his “decision” statement.
Maloy, if I had said that, it would be not only sexist but scientifically indefensible. However, I never said anything of the sort! I didn’t say that primate females were submitting to patriarchal rule because they are weak, nor did I imply that primate males were beating on “weak” females. I was just saying that sexual dimorphism indicates to evolutionary biologists the presence of male-centric polygamy, and that male-centric polygamy is usually if always associated with patriarchy.
The sexual dimorphism has little to do with physical competitions between men and women. In evolutionary terms, it is caused by the selection of bigger males beating out weaker males and pushing them out of the genetic pool in order to get more women, a process which you yourself described quite accurately. It’s intra-gender competition that causes the size differential, not inter-gender competition. As you said, female primates have their own skills. I never disputed this. I agree with D that you wrote a good post, but it wasn’t in response to anything I said or believe.
Also, this “dimorphism” theory isn’t my theory either; I’ve seen it many times in many books about evolution, and I’ve never seen anyone in the science community try to dispute it. So if it’s sexist, it didn’t originate with me.
Mao, are you sure it was SB1 that taught you this? I’ve always been afraid of you.
Dialectic
10:51 pm | Jun 22, 2008The division of labor was a decision, Jaehwan. Men and women across the planet made individual and collective decisions to divide labor in a certain way under certain harsh conditions to secure the existence of the species.
This is what I mean when I say that what we understand as the “patriarchy” was “co-enacted” way back in human history: men and women had to agree to this division, or it wouldn’t have happened (and the bands and tribes and chiefdoms and kingdoms wouldn’t have survived). You don’t have to sit everyone down, debate the pros and cons of courses of action, and decided based on an optimization analysis to make a decision.
At any rate, this is nit-picking over terminology. The point is patriarchy was not “imposed” by men but was developed by all to live, and now, in post-agricultural contexts, it has lost its usefulness.
As for the 50/50 fact, we can just confirm/deny this through research, and in any case, even if the numbers are off, the essential point is this: matriarchy (or matrifocality) is viable in tribal structures, and it did in fact occur in a whole bunch of places; in agrarian structures, it is not sustainable.
Finally, your point about hunting producing more calories than gathering doesn’t hold water: you have to look at how long it takes to hunt, and how many calories are expended in the hunt. Productive capacity between men and women in tribal structures was a lot closer than in agrarian.
Remember this article?
http://www.thefighting44s.com/archives/2008/01/05/hunter-gatherers-noble-or-savage/
Agriculture also stands accused of exacerbating sexual inequality. In many peasant farming communities, men make women do much of the hard work. Among hunter-gathering folk, men usually bring fewer calories than women, and have a tiresome tendency to prefer catching big and infrequent prey so they can show off, rather than small and frequent catches that do not rot before they are eaten. But the men do at least contribute.
(I post long-ass intellectual stuff for a reason! Also, note that the Economist is using “hard work” in a certain context; their point is that agriculture brings in patriarchy.)
jaehwan
12:13 am | Jun 23, 2008D:
I’d agree that we’re mostly debating over terminology. But I’d also argue that it’s important terminology because no one ever made any kind of conscious “decision.” It was just the way it was. It’s the way most primates have always behaved. These baboons and orangutans didn’t decide to divide labor; they were just born into the situation that evolved over millions of years.
Using the word “decision” opens up all kinds of problems when we talk about relationships between different groups or genders. If we simply write off Farrell’s use of the word “decision,” we can justify any relationship in equilibrium and say that people “decided” something.
I think it would’ve been much better if he had just explained it that way. It would’ve been more accurate.
It’s one guy’s opinion; I’ve seen other opinions as well. On the Discovery Channel or National Geographic, it’s not uncommon to see hunter-gatherer societies where women spend entire days scooping liquid out of tree trunks and praying for the men to catch something. The women in one particular tribe spent hours chopping and scraping tree trunks for what looked like a pint of liquid. There’s no way that’s efficient, and the narrators pretty much said so. I don’t know–maybe it has something to do with the location of the hunter-gathering society.
In any case, I’m not debating that agriculture was pro-male and was biased against matriarchy. I agree with you there. I just think that the idea that we went from equality to non-equality contradicts the evolutionary record and (in some cases) the importance of the hunt for (I guess) certain hunter-gatherer societies. I think patriarchy was always the rule rather than the exception, though I agree that it was more common before agriculture.
So in sum, I guess I just didn’t like the article. Maybe you should write these articles instead. :)
nightshade
2:49 am | Jun 23, 2008Jae, if you’re saying that no one made a conscious decision, you’re pretty much saying that women were retarded weaklings who just let shit happen to them.
There was a social contract. We can’t look at history without remembering the context.
jaehwan
8:37 pm | Jun 23, 2008Shades,
Of course I’m not saying that.
The context is exactly what I’m talking about. We’re not talking about conscious decision-making because when that schism occurred in labor division, it was long before we had even had conscious decision-making abilities.
Did giraffes “decide” have long necks? Did cockroaches “decide” to breed in really big numbers? Of course not. Evolution “decided” that for them. I think it’s the same thing with humans and the division of labor. It’s circular, but we evolved according to the way we evolved. According to Wikipedia, agriculture is about 10-12,000 years old, while we homo sapiens have been around for about 200,000 years old. Homo Erectus was around even longer than that. If you look at the sexual dimorphism or Erectus (one of the criteria we’re discussing), Erectus was even more male-centric polygamous than we were. (And yes, I know that now would be a good time to make a joke about Erectus, but no, I’ll abstain, thank you.)
I agree with the main point that D and others are making here about men not being oppressive assholes. I think the evolutionist’s way to look at it, however, is not saying we “decided,” but saying that that is just the way we evolved before we had cognitive abilities. I’m not saying flat out that we didn’t “decide,” but given the fact that Erectus was even more sexually dimorphic than we were, that, to me, would indicate at least the existence of “patriarchy” among that species. Of course I wasn’t there, but it would seem to me to be an educated guess. I don’t know what came before homo erectus, but based on the other primates we see, it looks like that is how most of us evolved.
Look at when the roles are reversed. A female Praying Mantis will sometimes get hungry during copulation and will bite off the head of the male. Does this make the male “retarded?” I guess it depends on how you look at it, but I would say that that is just the way the species evolved.
Now with cognition, the entire game changes, which is where we find ourselves when we talk about how to improve relationships and power dynamics.
jaehwan
8:47 pm | Jun 23, 2008Somewhat related but not entirely–I would guess that throughout our evolutionary line, all matriarchal societies took place within societies of homo sapiens. I would guess it was thinking that enabled us to take control of our society and relationships.
Now you’ve got me thinking…Homo Erectus had stone tools, but religion, deeper communication, and everything else where we take control of nature probably came from Homo Sapiens, so perhaps any control over our animal nature probably comes from us.
Okay, I need to stop. I’m not a vegetarian, but yesterday I ate a vegan meal for dinner, and I woke up hungry in the middle of the night. Hunting animal meat may or may not have more calories, but it definitely keeps a person full for a longer period of time…
jaehwan
8:59 pm | Jun 23, 2008Okay, this is really my last last thought before getting out of here.
It occured to me that in the age of cognition, cognitive abilities enable us to create real constructs in our minds that alter our value system. No other animal would consider killing himself or herself after a stock market speculation gone bad, but we’re able to associate it with death. And if you consider that bad investments in the stock market could imperil you or your family, it’s very real.
Similarly, George W. Bush isn’t the biggest guy on the planet, but with his title of Commander in Chief and his ability to drill for oil on protected land, he’s a pretty scary and intimidating guy.
When you enter the age of cognition, your values not only change, but your values also become changeable. Only with cognition can people actually create values. Before that, big is big, and dangerous is dangerous.
Relating this to D’s original post, we create our values.
evil_FUX
1:49 am | Jun 24, 2008Hmm, since we’re talking about hominids and such, did anyone else know that Bonobos have a matriarchial social structure?
Dialectic
10:07 am | Jun 24, 2008With regard to the whole “decision” thing, it’s the same thing as saying that we as a society have “decided” or “chosen” to structure ourselves in a certain way.
“Decision” doesn’t imply conscious, calculated, self-reflectively rational choice, independent from environmental factors. It refers to the fact that the “patriarchy” is a social structure that we as a people came up with. The way you’re approaching it, Jaehwan, is similar to saying that I can’t “decide” to work, because I have to work, but it’s still a decision. I can decide to not work and die. (Your physical evolution analogies don’t hold water, because we’re talking about social structure and roles.)
(This actually goes into a whole other discussion about where “free will” fits into evolutionary/ biogeographical determinism, but staying within normal language, using the word “decision” is fair.)
And again, you don’t have to agree with the exact modes of causation espoused in any article; as long as you understand the idea of biogeographic causation as it affects social structure. Also, we’re not talking about any one particular tribe; we’re talking about surveys of all known tribes, and again, pre-agrarian, whether a tribe is led by men or women depends much more on local conditions than agrarian, which requires a male lead in production.
As for the bonobos, yes I actually read quite a bit about them last summer; the best explanation I’ve read for their matriarchal structure is also biogeographical (which is, I admit, obvious to say, as biogeographical factors would account for the behaviour of all animals, including humans up to industrialized societies, where we become much more “free” - but never totally free - with how we structure ourselves). Bonobos hang out in nutrient-rich areas on the ground, enabling the females to band together in groups which can’t be dominated by males, whereas chimps hang out in trees all day where females can’t get into big groups and males end up dominating them one on one.
jaehwan
5:14 pm | Jun 24, 2008If we were able to evolve physically over the last 1.5 million years, starting with Homo Erectus, although it probably goes back even further than that, why should social structure and roles be free from evolutionary influence? An organism with a pathological or unhelpful physical trait is just as likely to face extinction as one with a pathological or unhelpful social trait.
A good example of this was in Richard Dawkins’s “The Selfish Gene.” (I don’t have a copy of the book right now, but I remember being blown away with the explanation.) He talks about genes being the units of life, and therefore, he argues, whether we’re talking about “groups” or “organisms” makes no difference since they all serve the purpose of progagating genes.
The example he used was a beehive. In a beehive, bees use ritual dances to tell each other about food, and they have a very militaristic culture that revolves around the queen and her eggs. It’s a system whose purpose is the propagation of genes, much like the human body propagates genes, through reproduction. Dawkins says that it doesn’t matter if you treat the bees themselves as organisms or the colony as an organism because they both serve the same purpose.
So how does evolution work on a social structure level?
Let’s say Groinpull sees a beehive, and let’s say he is hungry for sweets. “Mmm, honey!” he thinks to himself. He walks up to the beehive and sticks his hand in.
What happens? Thousands of drones get militaristic. They get mad. They swarm him, stinging him all over, until he leaves and goes hopping into the lake. The queen doesn’t get involved in the action–she stays within the confines of the hive–but the drones do. They assume their social roles as protectors of the hive.
Keep in mind that on an individual level, swarming makes no sense. Honeybees have barbed stingers, and the soldiers usually die when they sting since it pulls out their entrails. However, swarming protects the queen and the eggs, which helps the genes of the colony propagate. This is why Dawkins treated the colony as an organism.
Had there been bees in the past who did not swarm, they probably would’ve died out because Groinpull would’ve eaten their honey and saved nothing for the babies. Some of these colonies may have had cultures where the drones just didn’t care, and as a result, those colonies would die out. This is the evolutionary pressure that social structures face.
It’s the same thing with human cultures in the absence of cognition. Perhaps the hominids who didn’t have patriarchal structures got murdered by those who did. Or maybe some other evolutionary pressure forced them out of the propagation game, much the way big men forced out little men. You’re right in saying that we came up with patriarchy, much the same way bees came up with the swarm mentality, but I think “decide” is the wrong word since we’re talking about organisms that didn’t have much mental capacity to decide. “Evolved” would be much more accurate.
Also, think about the word “decide.” what do you think of when you hear “decisive?” Usually you think of something discrete and final. You usually don’t think of something that has been around for hundreds of thousands if not millions of years.
I still don’t like the Farrell article, but yes, I agree with all your main points. It is an interesting discussion though, and if we have evidence that brings us closer to what really was, it’s fun to compare evidence.
evil_FUX
6:45 pm | Jun 24, 2008Hmm interesting, that sounds about right. I mean the sexual dimorphism between the Bonobo sexes is minimal and they have few predators right? So I could see how the females could gang together against the males.
Dialectic
9:00 pm | Jun 24, 2008Jaehwan, I don’t know where you’re getting these points that you’re debating me on. I NEVER, EVER stated that social structures were free from evolutionary influence; in fact, my entire position is BASED ON THE FACT SOCIAL STRUCTURES AND WORLDVIEWS EVOLVE OVER TIME IN A RECIPROCAL RELATIONSHIP WITH THE TECHNO-ECONOMIC MODE OF PRODUCTION, WHICH IS GREATLY INFLUENCED BY THE AVAILABILITY OF CROPS AND DOMESTICABLE ANIMALS.
The word “decide” is a reference to the subjective/ internal element of a human being: that most of us generally accept that we exercise some degree of “will” in every conscious action we take, so that when a man opts to be the one to go out and hunt and fight, and a women opts to be the one to stay in the village, cook, and raise kids, we say they have made a decision.
What you, and possibly Dawkins, are doing, is reducing all references to subjective internal realities to objective external descriptions: this is called material reductionism, which I reject for a number of reasons, one being that it takes personal responsibility right out of the picture by making internal states, or “choices” irrelevant.
We are all subject to external evolutionary pressures, always, including now; if we don’t kill ourselves, our level of self/other awareness in a thousand or so years will be far beyond what it is today. If I took your position that external evolutionary pressures effectively wipe out the will, or decision-making component of human action, in less aware societies, then even right now, we wouldn’t be able to judge or hold anyone responsible for anything, because everything would be what it is, and everyone would be who they are: we couldn’t hold a racist, or sexist, a murderer, a rapist, a homophobe, whatever the case, personally responsible for their thoughts and feelings today, because their conditions were certainly influenced by environmental/evolutionary conditions.
jaehwan
11:42 pm | Jun 24, 2008D,
Do you differentiate between “personal responsibility” in animals vs. humans? Because my point is that “patriarchy” first came about in our line more than 1.5 million years ago if we’re going off the evolutionary record, and if we were mere animals back then without human cognition to aid us, then “personal responsibility” wouldn’t apply to us.
I accept personal responsibility in humans, but if my dog poops on the floor, I tend to blame myself for not walking him. I have the privilege of personal responsibility, my dog may or may not.