I try to think how we got here. The theory I developed in college (shared by many I’m sure) is one I have yet to beat: Womb Envy. Biology: women are generally smaller and weaker than men. But they’re also much tougher. Put simply, men are strong enough to overpower a woman and propagate. Women are tough enough to have and nurture children, with or without the aid of a man. Oh, and they’ve also got the equipment to do that, to be part of the life cycle, to create and bond in a way no man ever really will. Somewhere a long time ago a bunch of men got together and said, “If all we do is hunt and gather, let’s make hunting and gathering the awesomest achievement, and let’s make childbirth kinda weak and shameful.” It’s a rather silly simplification, but I believe on a mass, unconscious level, it’s entirely true. How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue? That every popular religion puts restrictions on women’s behavior that are practically untenable? That the act of being a free, attractive, self-assertive woman is punishable by torture and death? In the case of this upcoming torture-porn, fictional. In the case of Dua Khalil, mundanely, unthinkably real. And both available for your viewing pleasure.
It’s safe to say that I’ve snapped. That something broke, like one of those robots you can conquer with a logical conundrum. All my life I’ve looked at this faulty equation, trying to understand, and I’ve shorted out. I don’t pretend to be a great guy; I know really really well about objectification, trust me. And I’m not for a second going down the “women are saints” route – that just leads to more stone-throwing (and occasional Joan-burning). I just think there is the staggering imbalance in the world that we all just take for granted. If we were all told the sky was evil, or at best a little embarrassing, and we ought not look at it, wouldn’t that tradition eventually fall apart? (I was going to use ‘trees’ as my example, but at the rate we’re getting rid of them I’m pretty sure we really do think they’re evil. See how all rants become one?)
That was written by Joss Whedon, you can find the rest here. I’m not even going to make a snarky comment about how well he knows objectification. I’m just going to say I’m feeling pretty good about naming my blog after him.
I quite appreciate that.
I still feel like Buffy & Firefly aren’t the most feminist things ever. I mean, they’re yonks better than most TV, but hardly flawless.
But I think Joss definitely deserves a cookie for that rant. :)
That’s a great essay — thanks for posting the link.
After reading Joss’ piece, I searched for the “Captivity” billboard, and it really was much worse, and much more disturbing, than I had expected.
Yikes.
Your (awesome) post title caught my eye b/c I’ve been thinking about Joss Whedon alot lately. I’ve done two posts of Buffy lately, one one earlier conceptions of power in the series and one on later conceptions.
In retrospect, Whedon was quite revolutionary in his take on women with power, and there is something utterly compelling and elegant and beautiful in the final, change the rules, solution to the series.
Now…how is it that I got to the age of nineteen without ever thinking about that before? That is…awesome.
How else to explain the fact that cultures who would die to eradicate each other have always agreed on one issue?
Joss’ heart is in the right place.
Personally, when something persists for thousands of years, I am suspicious of any theory that suggests the persistence is the result of a human decision. We just don’t work that way as a species.
A more fruitful approach might be to consider, what would happen to some protosociety back in the stone age that implemented the values that we modern folks would like to see. I suspect, unfortunately, that the answer is “extermination”. In the state of nature, a tribe or group that doesn’t make and raise a lot of successful babies, dies out or is replaced by one that does.
Women, in freedom and security, will certainly make and raise successful babies. They won’t make and raise nearly as many babies as they will if their options are constrained and their value to their society is predicated on how many babies they make, rather than on how fulfilled they feel or their economic contribution or whatever. Tribes that practice women’s rights are quickly squashed and displaced by tribes that don’t.
There probably were societies and cultures that didn’t work this way. They are dead now, and have left us little or nothing to tell us about themselves. Their patriarchal neighbors overwhelmed them by force of numbers. We have lots of information about their patriarchal neighbors; they’re our collective ancestors.
Fortunately – because the state of affairs I have just described is truly monstrous to all women and to any men of sensitivity – technology and economic progress has broken that paradigm. It is no longer necessary for every woman to be a baby-slave, for a society to be competitive against its neighbors where every woman IS a baby-slave. In fact, the balance has tipped the other way. Societies which treat women as second-class citizens or as slaves are at a gross disadvantage to societies which treat women as people, because economics and technology have become more important than raw numbers in societal conflict, and societies which make use of the brains of 100% of their members (rather than the brains of 50% and the wombs of 50%) have huge advantages in economics and technology. Hooray!
But we shouldn’t fool ourselves about what makes this possible, or congratulate ourselves on being so much more moral than our forebears. We have options that our forebears didn’t; when we emancipate women, our society becomes richer and more resilient, instead of becoming weaker.
Capitalism and intellectual vitality are the foundational precursors of any viable feminism.
“In the state of nature, a tribe or group that doesn’t make and raise a lot of successful babies, dies out or is replaced by one that does.”
This would be a lot more convincing if we didn’t have evidence that women in many hunter/gatherer societies used birth control and carefully spaced births to maintain zero population growth, because the societies had become as large as the environment could sustain.
The premium on “Lots of babies! Lots!” seems to be primarily an agriculture thing.
Which is not to say that your whole argument is wrong, but the phrasing needs alteration to adjust for peoples we have record of.
“Capitalism and intellectual vitality are the foundational precursors of any viable feminism.”
Feminism? As in the movement that seeks to repair the damage of a patriarchy? Yes. Probably, capitalism helps.
But, while there aren’t any historically known societies that are truly egalitarian or matriarchal, there are historically known societies that were probably about as good as we are as regards women’s equality (as far as such comparisons can be made).
It seems to me that you’re resting your argument on the evolution of western history, but that’s not the only history that exists.
Mandolin – you’re right, I’m assuming an agricultural society, since that’s mostly what we have in the world now. The hunter/gatherer societies that survived into the historical period did so usually because they were geographically isolated from the denser-populated agriculturalists, or because they lived on land so ill-suited for agriculture that the farmers couldn’t compete.
As far as I know, whenever one of those two things change, the H/G society goes boom. Cf. the Australian aborigines for the first case, the Amazon rain forest dwellers for the second case.
What non-western societies do you have in mind which (roughly) managed to achieve female emancipation, without also breaking the babies-or-die paradigm? I don’t know of any offhand, but that could speak to my ignorance just as easily as to their absence.
I was thinking of the Western Navajo, which is my number one answer to the question, “If you couldn’t live in the contemporary world, or in the future, where would you live?”
I think there are some other cultures that one can make the argument for, including the Cherokee (which I agree with calling a relatively benevolent patriarchy).
Hunter/gatherer societies survived pretty well in pre-contact America. We did wipe them out, but I’m not convinced it was because we were so much more functional. I tend to think of genocide by disease the same way I think of mass extinction events. They’re times when the rules for species/cultural survival change. Animals that died at the KT boundary didn’t die because they were poorly adapted, they died because there was a meteor hit. Native American cultures that died or faded after contact got hit with an epidemic which wiped out, if I recall teh estimates correctly, about 99% of the population. That’s vastly more than something like the black plague, and sets the stage for the conquest of the Americas.
Most of the pre-Columbian North American natives were agriculturalists and pastoralists, not hunter gatherers, IIRC. H/G was limited to the marginal areas of the continent, and to the Pacific Northwest which is a special case. The disease waves are thought to have wiped out between 80 and 90 percent of the population, and you’re right, did set the stage for the European colonization project.
As for the Navajo, they were matrilocal but I don’t know of anything to indicate that there were roles for childbearing-age women that didn’t boil down to “make babies”. Perhaps they are like the Basque, where there are cultural values that don’t denigrate women and women are honored members of society, etc. – but only as long as they are making and raising the babies. (“You’re free to do whatever you choose, as long as you choose to raise kids.”)
Interesting discussion, but please forgive my absence now, as the demands of making a living rudely intrude. ;)
I didn’t say most Native Ameicans were hunter/gatherers, I said there were h/g societies that survived to contact, and post-contact. :-P
Also, I suspect you might not be up to date on Navajo anthro. ;-) Not that I am either, but what I’ve seen is very benevolent in re: gender roles.
Yeah, but the H/G weren’t living in the lush Ohio river valley. They were skulking around the Canadian tundra – driven off the more productive land.
I yield to your more extensive knowledge of indigenous anthropology – you’re quite right that I’m not up to speed, there.
There were H/G peoples in California, I’m pretty sure. And as a great lover of California, I hope we’re good land. ;-)
Re: the original post. There’s a lot of anthropological work around the ways in which men coopt the power of childbirth. There’s a people called The Gabra where men ritually become women during one of their age ranks, which at least one anthropologist thought was a way of metaphorically tapping into the power of childbirth.
There were H/G peoples in California, I’m pretty sure. And as a great lover of California, I hope we’re good land. ;-)
There were indeed. We can unpack hunter/gatherer a little bit, perhaps with mutual profit in gaining perspectives. My understanding is that there usually are hunter/gatherer people around the periphery of more developed land. Some tribes and groups end up on the farms, and others end up in the rocky mountains – and who’s who often changes due to war, pestilence, comets (no, really) etc. Generally, the winners of these struggles/beneficiaries of good luck farm, and are the ones who have big multiples of population over the losers. Sometimes this can be dynamic (in terms of which groups control the best land), other times it becomes stable.
So there were certainly tribes out in the redwood forests, hunting deer and scowling (or maybe trading) across the river at the farmers in the San Joaquin Valley. They probably represented at most 5-10% of the population of the region.
California has some good regions, but the place as a whole is very wild and difficult country. There were probably more h/g groups there than usual, just on the basis of all that agriculturally-marginal land where game could flourish.
By the by, it should be noted that h/g lifestyles, in places where the climate was good and the game plentiful, were probably more pleasant/easy than the agricultural lifestyles available downriver. Although nobody had it easy back then. Heck, not that many people have it easy today.
mparham – I was going to call this post ‘obviously, some hairy legged feminist’, but I’d already used that title.
Mandolin – I agree with you. There are huge problems with much of Buffy, Angel and Firefly from a feminist perspective. But, I’d say other bits go further than ‘better of most of the rest of TV’ to ‘pretty amazing feminist narrative’. The series final is an obvious example, but even episodes like The Witch manage to show really straight up feminist analysis in a tv show.
“There are huge problems with much of Buffy, Angel and Firefly from a feminist perspective. ”
My experience with Buffy and Angel is really limited. I find some of the external trappings of Buffy to be off-putting, for both feminist and non-feminist (ARGH, the acting) reasons. That may not be fair.
So I can’t speak for overarching narrative in those shows, only in Firefly. I found Serenity disappointing on that level, although I totally respect that he had to deal with cancelation and compressed space.
Within Firefly, I was totally enamored of things like Zoe’s relationship with Wash, which I felt really took a dynamic look at an unconventional male/female relationship. And then there was stuff like Inara’s Gratuitous Sponge Bath in episode one, and that female assassin who was married to Mal.
I’m really grumpy about feminism and science fiction right now, though, so take my current perspective with a grain of salt.
(ETA: I’m also not comparing it to _Battlestar Gallactica_ or Terry Goodkind or Orson Scott Card; I’m comparing it to _Woman on the Edge of Time_. That’s probably not fair either.)
“Generally, the winners of these struggles/beneficiaries of good luck farm, and are the ones who have big multiples of population over the losers. Sometimes this can be dynamic (in terms of which groups control the best land), other times it becomes stable.”
Huh. I honestly had no idea. That’s really interesting. What kind of analysis is that coming from?
Archaeology plus guesswork, most of the time. ;) And I am talking really, really broadly – it’s not like you have Joe Blow getting driven off the farm, taking to the hills, and then coming back ten years later for revenge. It’s more like “this vaguely-defined tribe was mostly hunter gatherers but then they got lucky and took over this nice river valley for a while when a war/plague/comet wiped out the original holders and then five hundred years later they got kicked out again by a new wave of invaders.”
(Yes, I’m fixating on the comets.)
Mandolin said, I tend to think of genocide by disease the same way I think of mass extinction events.
When you use the word “genocide”, is there an issue of intent there or is it simply a recognition of the effect?
Well, I wasn’t using it with an issue of intent (since I was including disease in the causes of genocide, and while my understanding is that there was deliberately spread infection, I don’t think the initial waves of illness were intentionally spread). But certainly, there is an issue of intent — I mean, in California white people were paid by the government to bring in Native American scalps. There’s no good claim to be made that that isn’t intentional genocide.
ETA: It occurs to me that you meant more generally. Yeah, I think I did mean to say that genocide, intentional or unintentional, is like mass extinction events. But that’s really an insupportable statement. I should have said “some genocides” or “the genocide that was committed by mostly white colonists against Native Americans.”