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Veronica Schwarz

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Herausgeber: Next Chapter
Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
Sprache: Englisch

Beschreibung

Down to Earth: Busting the Myths of Mars and Venus blasts the lid off the myths of gender roles and stereotypes, and the damage they do to people and our planet.

The book also offers strategies for changing the lives of women and men, girls and boys, for the better. Veronica Schwarz tells it like it is, with blistering clarity, anecdotes, statistics and humor, highlighting the points with her own illustrations.

Busting The Myths of Mars and Venus is the result of ten years of research in fields ranging from anthropology to sociology, history to literature, folklore to psychology, medicine and neuroscience, myth, philosophy and religion. It offers you, the reader, an unforgettable experience and can change your life. Once you see it, you will never unsee it.

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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

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Leseprobe

BUSTING THE MYTHS OF MARS AND VENUS

Gender: Reality, Myth or Disaster

VERONICA SCHWARZ

DOWN TO EARTH BOOK 1

Acknowledgments

Graphics

Foreword

1. It Starts with You

2. The Story So Far

3. Are We There Yet?

4. What’s in a Name?

5. Earth Women Are Revolting

6. Making the Difference

7. The Taboo of Sameness

8. Stay as Sweet as You Are.

9. Boys Will Be Boys

10. Suck it up, Princess.

11. But Baby, Different Doesn’t Mean Unequal.

12. Women Are Their Own Worst Enemies. (Let’s You and Her Fight.)

13. Does it Really Matter?

14. You, Me and the Whole Damn World

15. Myth Busters

16. My Mind is Made Up

17. Tell me Where I Will Die, and I Won’t Go There.

18. Be the Change

19. Over to you

Graphics

Get ‘em Young: Tethering Elephants

Ms Gulliver and the “Trivial” Ties of Gender

What’s Water?

Sexism’s Deadly Funnel

Breaking Free from the Cookie Cutter

Samson and the Pillars of Gender

The Man Box

Maslow’s Taxonomy of Human Needs

A Snail Race to the Stars

Foreword

Equality between women and men is still a thing of the future. In most cultures and societies, it has not been a reality for five to ten thousand years.

Women’s secondary status is designed and maintained through the illusion of the feminine gender stereotype as well as its many supporting myths. In other words, it’s rigged. Cultures mould us from birth so that we behave, dress, and think “appropriately” for our culture, our social class, our age, and our sex We learn to conform and perform. Most of us, male and female, are unconsciously subjected to the dehumanising processes of gender stereotyped cookie-cutting where we are supposed to all come out just the same. Cookies with pink or blue icing.

My aim and hope is to provide women and girls with some information and tools to help them see through the gendered socialisation process, the gaslighting and the beliefs about themselves, to help them grow stronger, more confident, independent equal partners with men, to step out of the cage or off the pedestal of gender expectations to become more truly themselves. While the book is primarily about women, it demonstrates that men and boys live within a prison of gender also. The hope is that we will recognise the constraints and excesses of “masculinity” that are thrust upon most of our little boys and change our child-raising practices for both sexes.

The solutions I have found for myself, or even the many I suggest in this book, are not necessarily right for you. The major aim is to ensure we know we have a choice.

The ideas in this book also apply to many other forms of stereotyping, prejudice, and inequality. However, the insidious nature of Sexism is its universal application, its “naturalness”, its normalization, and its subsequent invisibility. Many women themselves do not recognise or believe that Sexism exists. The nature of the problem is made more complex by the intimate relationship between males and females. Men are our fathers, grandfathers, brothers, sons, lovers, friends, and partners. We identify with their needs as easily as we identify with our own, sometimes more so.

My goal is to help to right some gross injustices, to eliminate the violence, cruelty, the wanton waste of talent and economic opportunity, and to recognise the common humanity of males and females in particular, and all other marginalised groups regardless of race, religion, or skin colour.

I acknowledge my debt to the many women and the men who supported them throughout history and still today, who fought and wrote and spoke out and suffered in a struggle to raise women to their rightful place as partners not property. I mention many of them in this book. The book has taken ten years of research across many fields of knowledge – at times exhilarating, at times deeply depressing. It involved re-thinking, restructuring, and constant updating as more information became available.

This book is not perfect, but I hope that readers will see my intentions within it and use them as a stepping stone to their own greater understanding of how we came to be the way we are, and how we can change ourselves to make our world a better, fairer place.

Veronica Schwarz

veronicaschwarz.com 2021

It Starts with You

(MAID OR MADE)

From Birth to Booties

You probably don't remember the day you launched your unique self onto this planet. It's also unlikely you remember the first words you heard upon arrival. For most humans, it was a version of 'It's a girl!' or ‘It’s a boy’, In the local language, of course. There are babies who don’t fit into either category, but more on that later.

Depending on the society you were born into and in what circumstances, if you are female, your arrival caused anything from joy to disappointment, delight to despair.

And there you were, hopefully with you and your mother safe and sound. So, what happened next?

They cleaned you up a bit and dressed you. They “oohed” and “aahed” over you, and your mum got to hold you for a while, and everyone else had a turn too.

You maybe got a bit of peace when they stopped clucking over you. Not so long ago, if you were born in a hospital, one of the staff members would whisk you away. In that case, they may have put you in a crib, in a bright white room with a lot of other babies. There you could lie and sleep or cry depending on how you felt about it all.

Then the kid next to you pipes up, "Are you a girl or a boy?'

'I dunno,' you mutter sleepily.

'I'm a boy,' your neighbour confides.

'How do you tell?' you ask with interest.

He pulls back his blanket and points downward.

'Look,' he says, and pauses for effect, 'Blue booties.'

You soon discover pink is your code colour. Floods of it. It's a code to help the adults.

Other than checking out your “booties”, there’s not much difference between males and females at this stage, so – in Western Culture - we use colour codes like pink and blue. Then everyone can relax. Everything’s normal. Ambiguity is uncomfortable and even frightening. We accept and perpetuate things which are familiar. We often reject and even condemn the unfamiliar or different. The implications of this tendency for people, progress, knowledge, and growth are frightening, rightly so. They have slowed us down and hobbled us, all of us, for thousands of years.

Certainty is comforting and, as we shall see later, that need for certainty is built into our brains and expresses itself through Confirmation Bias. We actively look for confirmation of our beliefs and even fail to see contrary evidence when it is right under our noses. I’ll be mentioning this bias throughout the book because it is such a huge factor in our perception of differences between the sexes. We’ll particularly look at it more closely in Chapter 16: My Mind is Made Up.

This is one of the first experiences you had that ensured everyone knew you were a girl. Even if your parents didn't think you needed pink, almost everyone else did. Labels are an easy way of sorting people and, for everybody, the first label is your sex, boy or girl. Apart from the bits under the nappy, boys and girls look pretty much the same. What to do? Code pink. For boys, it’s blue. At least nowadays. There was a time not so long ago when pink coded boys and blue coded girls. Pink was considered too robust for girls, so cool blue was considered more appropriate. Despite this, there are researchers today now trying to prove that baby girls are “naturally” drawn to pink. The desire or need to prove inherent differences between the sexes is powerful, even to the point of ridiculous. If your parents managed to avoid the colour coding, your hairdo probably provided a clue.

Once you were colour-coded, everyone knew how to talk to you, and about you. They knew whether to say “he” or “she”, “his” or “hers”. They knew how to treat you and what to expect of you. They even knew what gifts to buy you even though you hadn’t expressed any likes or interests yet.

The neuroscientist Gina Rippon, author of The Gendered Brain, shared an anecdote that helps demonstrate just how soon children can be exposed to gender stereotypes and the negativity towards the female.

It was the birth of her second daughter in 1986. – the night that a footballer named Gary Lineker scored a hat trick against Poland in the men’s Football World Cup. There were nine babies born in the ward that day, Gina Rippon recalls. Eight of them were called Gary. She remembers chatting to one of the other mums when they heard a loud din approaching. It was a nurse bringing their two screaming babies. The nurse handed her neighbour a “blue-wrapped Gary” with approval – he had “a cracking pair of lungs”. Rippon’s own daughter (making exactly the same sound) was passed over with an audible tutting. “She’s the noisiest of the lot – not very ladylike,” the nurse told her.

“And so, at 10 minutes old, my tiny daughter had a very early experience of how gendered our world is,” Rippon says.

But let’s check out what probably happened to you and those around you in order to keep everyone else happy and comfortable while you were growing up.

You live in what we believe to be one of the most progressive times for women, at least in most Western cultures. Many laws that once kept women constrained in what they were permitted to do, have been changed. Much of this has happened within my lifetime. But laws are not enough. Laws can be ignored or surreptitiously got around. Attitudes, expectations, customs, culture, religion and the need to conform and the need to be loved, all play a powerful part in a child’s development. And in families and communities, attitudes and customs frequently remain unchanged. Through adult attitudes and the teachings of religion, children are moulded and taught to obey customs created hundreds to thousands of years ago.

These teachings and customs are passed down from generation to generation. They are reinforced through child-raising, peer pressure, social expectations, media representations, religious edicts, and that primal need to conform.

For most of us, there is the need to belong to and be part of a group, to conform, to fit in and to avoid rejection, to know who we are and where we belong. We watch and learn from parents, grandparents, friends, kindergarten, school, movies, TV. We are surrounded by images, guidance, and insistence on how we should behave, dress, talk, play, and work. And most of us do conform to expectations of our social class, our religion, our ethnic origin, our parents’ belief and requirements. The one universal pressure is to conform to “gender” expectations.

As you grew up, you may have noticed that beliefs about girls and boys, men and women, their treatment by others, and expectations of them, are quite different. Many of the beliefs about the two sexes have been proved wrong, but most people still continue to believe them.

Newspapers and magazines will give lots of space to research findings that claim to find differences between the sexes, particularly if they show that men, on average, are superior. Researchers themselves have commented on the fact that when their research proves any of these theories of gender difference to be wrong, the story is either not reported or buried in a tiny paragraph at the back of the newspaper.

For women, the focus is on appearance and attractiveness. The word “attractiveness” is the key here. It points to our designated major purpose, to “attract” a male. Most but not all people want to “attract” a mate, but in the male/female relationship, men are still expected to do the “choosing”, to take the lead in the mating game. Women may manipulate it, but it must be subtle. There are women and men who want to change this and many other gendered behaviours, but while laws and lip service have changed, for many the reality is still rigid, and appropriate behaviour is maintained through ridicule or disapproval. In some cases, through punishment.

While men have many other goals in life as well, the heterosexual woman’s goal is to be “chosen” by a man. We tell little girls they can be anything they want, but society makes that difficult. We burden females with the expectation that they will care for the children, the sick, the elderly and provide the home services that make everyday family life run smoothly. We expect women to continue to give birth and raise children to replace the population. We tell women and girls they can do and be anything but fail to value what they already do and fail to provide adequate childcare or support to help with the feminine “carer” role, or encouragement to males to step up and do their share. And the final insult is that the underlying critical judgement of the woman without a man or children is always just beneath the surface. “Childless” or “barren” are derogatory terms for such a woman.

This is a sure-fire way of ensuring women keep having babies with the bonus of giving men access to consensual sex with women. Win-win: the species continues, and heterosexuality is protected.

“But,” you may say, “Girls can be anything they want.” Perhaps, while performing two-thirds of the world’s work, much of it unpaid and unrecognised, performing with superhuman energy and strength and maintaining the patience to put up with the unfairness of it all. Hold that thought. We’ll check it out in Chapter 3: Are We There Yet?

There are thriving industries trying to prove that not only are women and men extremely different, but that those differences are “natural”. As if religions maintaining the required place and behaviour expected from the female, was not enough, the prophets have been joined by the profit-makers. There are industries working overtime to convince you to buy their products and services that will help you demonstrate just how different from the opposite sex you are. Now that just shows how ridiculous this all is. If you need a product to make you a “natural” woman, doesn’t that indicate that the characteristic isn’t natural to begin with?

Being male and female like the other animals was not enough for humans. Oh no. We took the whole idea into our own hands and embellished the natural order that other animals experienced. Some animals who lived in herds or packs had developed dominance and subordination, often based on sex. Males are dominant over other males in some species usually based on physical strength. Males competing to gain the female’s favour is a common form of behaviour in many species. Females are dominant in other species. And some animals who live in pairs just get on with the sharing and caring. Male dominance over all females is not that common in the animal kingdom. It wasn’t usual in human societies either until very recently as we shall see in Chapter 2: The Story so Far (A Primal Dream).

Humans took it to a whole new level – as you’d probably expect given our large brains and opposable thumbs or whatever it is that makes us think we are the superior species. As the wonderful Robert Brault quipped:

Humans have been voted the most intelligent species on earth by all the animals who returned the survey.

But probably the most relevant development that gave us the concept and enforcement of inequality was the Cognitive Revolution. At a particular stage in human evolution, around 70,000 years ago, we developed the capacity to think of things that didn’t actually exist and to believe them to be real. We became capable of imagination. This enabled us to create stories, myths, gods, and religions. We believed them to be as real as the trees and grass.

This ability to create and believe things in our own minds added a new dimension to power and status, control and inequality, and we figured out ways to make ourselves believe this was all ordained by non-human powers that had to be obeyed – or else. We invented gods and religions. A grand plan that didn’t even need brute strength to maintain. We’ll also investigate this in Chapter 2: The Story So Far (A Primal Dream). But let’s get back to you.

Making the Difference

The first thing that we notice about anyone is what sex they are. Once the baby’s sex is assigned, that little person’s destiny is pretty much decided. Almost everyone starts to assume and look for the differences.

Societies assume that little boys will be more active, rougher, tougher, and adventurous, and later they will be good at Maths and Science and will grow into men who will be strong and in control, and good at sport and perhaps a bit aggressive and authoritative and take charge of things and be explorers and pilots and plumbers and doctors and lawyers and carpenters and prime ministers and presidents. Now, all those things are true of some men and boys some of the time. We probably all know men and boys who have some of those qualities. We also know others who do not.

On the other hand, we assume that little girls will be gentler, better behaved, more docile, sweet, and pleasing. Because they are girls, it’s assumed they will be less active, and not interested in, or good at, Maths and Science: Allergic to Algebra as one T-shirt available for girls proudly proclaims. They will grow into women who will take care of people. They’ll still get a job. Many of them will also have babies and look after the house and children and husband. They may need to get part-time or casual work, so it doesn’t interfere too much with looking after the house and children - and the husband if they are not single parents.

To fit in, women need to be feminine, to be likable and to be loved or desired by a man. Most of the requirements to fulfil this image are external. They involve your bodily appearance, looking pretty, being sweet, and, in Western civilization in the current era, being slim. Then there’s feminine behaviour to conform to: not being loud or “opinionated”, being pleasant, non-aggressive and slightly diffident, caring for other’s emotional and physical needs, and smiling. These are all part of the feminine job description. Never upstaging a man is also a subtle requirement. It makes everybody, particularly the man, feel very uncomfortable if a woman does this. The upshot of all this feminine preparation for “the male gaze” is the assumption of the inevitable rivalry of women. We’ll explore this in Chapter 12: Women are their own Worst Enemies (Let’s You and Her Fight.)

Not a moment to be lost then. The lessons begin as soon as you arrive. What you learn will stick better if they get you when you’re young. Until the age of six, our minds have no filters. We believe what we receive. The Jesuits, way back in the 1500s, knew this when they said, “Give me a child until he is seven, and I will give you the man”. Aristotle said it even before the Jesuits, about 2,400 years ago. The beliefs we learn before the age of seven are embedded in our minds. They resist all logic and any efforts to shift them. Depressing really.

Like training young elephants. Baby elephants are tethered to a stake when they are young and small. They pull against the tether, but they cannot break free. As they grow bigger and stronger, they give up trying and, by the time they are strong enough to pull the stake right out of the ground, they still believe they cannot. The same tether they were tied to as babies, still holds them in place despite their enormous strength as adults.

Figure 1: Get 'em Young. And our belief controls our behaviour from within our own brains. No need for external force. © Veronica Schwarz

Similarly, with us. We could break free and risk the consequences, but most of us don’t even know we have been tethered. As the great German writer, Goethe, put it:

None are more hopelessly enslaved than those who falsely believe they are free.

Every culture is created by the people who once lived in it. Our cultures, yours and mine, are based on the needs, the fears and the beliefs of people who lived more than a thousand years ago and, in many cases, two to three thousand years ago. Their knowledge and understanding of the world around them were only just evolving when they began to create their imagined world full of rules and requirements, fears, and conformity. It’s quite remarkable that we base our modern societies and our lives on their rules. But that’s what most of us do. The good news is that, since people created societies and cultures, people can change them. This means those of us living today can change societies and cultures to make them fairer and kinder, richer and happier. If we want to. Of course, that doesn’t mean it’s easy.

First, we must “see” that “the way things are” is not set in cement or even written on tablets of stone. Sadly, parts of our own brains are lagging behind. Human brains are still operating in ways that kept us safe in the Stone Age. We react more strongly to fear and uncertainty than we do to reason and even reward. Our brains also look for things that confirm what we currently believe. We fear, deride, or fail to notice things that contradict those beliefs.

We need to “see” that much of our potential is hidden from our view. Our enormous potential for growth, and contribution to our societies are, for most of us, kept hidden beyond the horizon of our cultural limitations. The possibilities opened up by a wide range of experiences, joy, learning, and understanding, are hidden from us, both male and female. In many cultures, they are even forbidden to us.

As the cognitive scientist Alexandra Horowitz put it:

Even as we develop from relatively immobile, helpless infants into mobile, autonomous adults, we are more and more constrained by the ways we learn to see the world.

As author and entrepreneur Tim Ferris put it, the common-sense rules of the “real world” are a fragile collection of socially reinforced illusions. And yet they seem so right and reasonable.

These constraints apply to groups of people to varying degrees. The result is gross inequality which is currently worsening around the planet. These inequalities are not related to anything that individuals have personally done. They are almost totally the product of the randomness of birth into different circumstances, particularly to which sex you are assigned and what colour your skin is.

Almost 500 years ago, the great German astronomer and mathematician, Johannes Kepler, noted that his mother’s intellect was not inferior to his, but their lives and circumstances were as different as night and day. He made the perceptive observation that the difference between the fate of the sexes is not in the heavens but in the earthly construction of gender as a function of culture. It was not his mother’s nature that made her ignorant but the lack of opportunity for intellectual growth, learning and development of potential. Her gender ensured her fate was as fixed as the stars. Today, 500 years on, we are still fighting to have that fact recognised with more than lip service. It’s also worth noting that, in 1615, this famous man set aside his career, risking condemnation himself, to spend six years defending his elderly widowed mother against charges of witchcraft. Imprisoned and chained to the floor of a cell, Katarina Kepler did not burn at the stake like the many thousands of women and men in Europe who did. At the end of those six years, her son’s rational and well-argued case won her freedom. A rare event. Sadly, she died six months after being released. You can read her story in Ulinka Rublack’s book The Astronomer and the Witch.

As Kepler observed, it’s patently obvious that not all males are cleverer, more intelligent, or more competent than all women, but cultures are structured as if that were the case.

Almost all cultures on earth are now hierarchical. Power, status, wealth, privilege, and respect are mainly allocated to designated groups. Individuals are given specific privileges, or deprived of them, generally on the basis of group membership rather than individual merit.

The most basic grouping of humans is that of sex, female and male. No matter what other group you also belong to, rated by skin colour, religion, caste, or social class, males are almost universally granted higher status than females within every other group.

How did it happen? Let’s check out the story so far.

The Story So Far

(A PRIMAL DREAM)

When men are oppressed it's a tragedy; when women are oppressed it's a tradition.

Letty Cottin Pogrebin

Men look to destroy every quality in a woman that will give her the power of a male, for she is in their eyes already armed with the power that she brought them forth, and that is a power beyond measure.

Norman Mailer

Do you ever wonder why things are the way they are? Why some people have so much, and others have so little? Why some groups control most things and other groups are powerless?

Why do we persistently do things in a certain way when there are probably several ways at least of doing them? Some of them more efficient, fairer, or kinder.

Probably one of the major reasons for the ongoing nature of customs is that we tend to believe that the way things are is the natural way they have always been. And as anthropologist Ruth Benedict pointed out in her seminal work, Patterns of Culture, even though these “right and natural” ways of doing things differ across cultures, each society believes its customs to be the “right” way to do things. Grouping and ranking people, however, is common to almost every culture, if not all cultures today.

The most basic grouping is that of sex – female and male. Both sexes are members of the human race, Homo sapiens, even though one group – males – disputed that concept for centuries in some cultures including Western culture.

Homo sapiens is an interesting term. It means “wise man”! We modestly gave ourselves that name. We got away with it because none of the other humans was left around at the time. It’s possible that we had killed them off. Other humans? Yes.

Let’s just take a little detour here and look at our ancient sisters and brothers from all those years ago. Why? Because we are so convinced that the way things are, is the way they have always been. Knowing there were other humans before us, might be a refreshing wake up call to break free of the cementlike nature of our beliefs.

We are part of the species homo which means person in Latin. We’ve been here for 300,000 years but we weren’t the first, although so far, we are the last.

Homo habilus (meaning “handy man”) was one of the earliest human species as far as we know. A fossil was discovered in Tanzania, Africa between 1960 and 1963. It turnedout homo habilus had been around for at least 1.44 million years. The debate still rages as to whether or not homo habilus is a true member of the species homo. Another discovery, also in eastern Africa, proved to be another species of human, called by us, homo erectus. These humans had been around for at least some 1.55 million years. This would indicate that the two types of human could have co-existed for hundreds of thousands of years. We always think of ourselves as the top of the evolutionary tree, the only one above all the other animals. The story is much more interesting than that. Check out Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari, probably one of the best books available on the subject of us.

When homo sapiens came out of Africa, around 300,000 years ago, there were at least six other versions of humans roaming the earth. The number is debated, as is the categorisation of some fossils as in or out of the species homo, but the major point is we were not alone. These were species we have since named as homo neanderthalensis, homo erectus, homo denisova, homo soloensis, homo florensi (the hobbit). They either died out of unknown causes, or we wiped them out. Some of us still carry their DNA, so there must have been a bit of mixing, mingling, partying, and breeding going on between the different types of humans, specifically homo sapiens with the Neanderthals and Denisovans. Their DNA can be found in humans today. So, let’s get back to us as we are today.

As we touched on in Chapter 1, there are many social setups that ensure inequality based on difference. Two of the greatest are Racist and Sexism. Others include ethnicity, religion and ability. We go even further and divide and judge people by castes, social classes, and type of work done. Many individuals are affected by more than one power division. This is called “intersectionality”. In this context, it means being hit by a double or triple whammy. People may be grouped by their sex and gender, and by the colour of their skin. Then in no particular order, it’s their religion or their ethnicity or their body shape. Or something else. Then they may be judged or discriminated against on any or all of the stereotypes related to those groupings simultaneously.

However, the one division of power that cuts across all others is Sexism. It is the use of sex and gender to decide who does what, and who gets the most reward and the most say. It culturally gives power, dominance, respect, visibility, and control to males over females across all other divisions of people. Religions, rituals, beliefs, attitudes, language, and even humour support this hierarchy of dominance. It’s been like this in Western culture in particular for 5,000 to 10,000 years. Colonialism and predominantly the Christian religion spread it globally. It was not always like this. It is not natural or inevitable that males should dominate females regardless of race or religion.

Let’s look at how things came to be the way they are. Not because I think we should dwell on the past. The dead opposite in fact. But I do believe we can learn from the past to understand the present. It can even help us break free of outdated or unfair customs.

So how did it come about? It’s worth knowing, because most of the myths, beliefs, and attitudes that rule our lives today, have their origins in the past, and usually, the distant past.

Based on the fact that women have the babies, and the belief that men are stronger and more competent than women, we tend to assume that gender roles developed as a rational division of labour. We believe this is normal and natural and has always been the way things are. The story goes like this:

Hunting and Gathering

Only females become pregnant, give birth to, and breastfeed the young of the species. To date, men cannot. Also, the human male, like most mammals, is usually stronger than most of the females. So, we believe that our pre-historic ancestors organised themselves accordingly. The men hunted the big animals. Women stayed close to camp and gathered, foraged, and caught small animals. Naturally, they looked after the children. Easy peasy, gender roles naturally developed. Or so the story would have it.

But that explanation does not explain all the facts. Why didn’t women who were not heavily pregnant or caring for an infant, join in the hunt? Why did men who were unable to hunt, for reasons of age or disability, not help gather and forage. If this division of labour is indeed factual, the tasks seem to have been assigned by sex rather than on actual ability or agility.

Kevin Reilly noted this puzzle too in his book, The West and the World: A History of Civilization,

He wrote: It is a common practice among hunting-gathering societies to assign different tasks to men and women. These separate assignments go far beyond what is required by the differences in size or strength between men and women or the need of women to carry and nurse infants. In fact, some jobs are thought of as "masculine" in one society and "feminine" in another.

It seems creating different roles for the sexes is the true aim of this division of labour. Ability, skill, or potential are not the primary factor. It is sex.

It is perhaps even more important to cultures than good sense, better results, or even survival, as we shall see when we check out modern society’s divisions between the sexes. Nowadays, we still divide societies by sex in spite of changes in technology, infant welfare, and the lack of a need for brute strength in many tasks. We do this, often unconsciously, and automatically, regardless of the fact that today this has proved irrational and detrimental to society as a whole.

But this division of Man the Hunter and Woman the Gatherer, may not have been universal. An article in Science Magazine (November 4, 2020,) by Ann Gibbons, reported a recent find in the Andes. Archaeologists discovered the 9,000-year-old grave of an apparently highly respected hunter. The skeleton was found to be female. Graves of other female hunters were also found, leading to the conclusion that early big game hunting may have been gender neutral.

We also know that many tribes used a team effort to hunt big game. Women and children participated in driving animals over cliffs. The indigenous people of Australia worked together to drive animals out of the bush with noise or fire, while others waited to club the animals as they tried to escape.

In addition, the gendered view which focused on Man the Hunter, hid the contribution of women in earlier societies, making it all but invisible until recently. We now realise that almost all hunter-gatherer tribes relied on the gatherers for up to 85% of their food on a daily basis. The hunting of larger animals provided meat very irregularly and was often cause for great celebration when it happened.

Scientists now say our concept of prehistoric humans and their behaviour might be based more on our own sexist assumptions than fact. Earlier palaeontologists seem to have brought their modern beliefs about gender roles and male dominance to their research. They interpreted their findings through a modern gender-biased lens.

Pennsylvania State archaeologist Dean Snow stated in an interview with National Geographic: “There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time. People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions.”

Scientists who study hunter-gather tribes still in existence find most are remarkably egalitarian.

Mark Dyble, lead author of a report on a recent study of existing hunter-gatherer tribes summed it up. There is still this wider perception that hunter-gatherers are more macho or male-dominated. We'd argue it was only with the emergence of agriculture, when people could start to accumulate resources, that inequality emerged.

Anthropologists have found evidence that women probably hunted too. Their conclusion is based on skeletal injuries found on the bones of females similar to the injuries found on males.

Some skeletons have been found with hunting tools buried with them and were erroneously believed the skeletons of males. More recent testing methods have revealed that the skeletons were in fact female. One notable skeleton, found in the Andes in Peru, was buried with many hunting tools, and was assumed to be a great hunter and chief until the skeleton was revealed to be female. The significance of this is still contested.

Anthropologists who assumed that men did all the hunting, also assumed that the men did all the artwork in caves since so many of the paintings involve animals. This too is a myth. Seventy-five percent of the paintings of hands found in caves are female. Women certainly had contact with animals and perhaps as we have just seen, participated in the hunting of them. If they were in the cave, painting their hands on the walls, it’s reasonable to assume they also painted animals and other things.

In Erie, Pennsylvania, Mercyhurst Archaeological Institute’s Director James Adovasio suggests that the idea of Palaeolithic men as the strong, fierce hunters and of women staying away from danger, may derive more from our own modern culture than from the actual evidence.

Anthropologist, Margaret Mead, noted that all existing early cultures differed in their gender roles, but the more the men separated themselves from the women and children, the more warlike, aggressive, and combative the men were. In those tribes and groups where men were more involved in caring roles, men and women had more equal status and influence and worked together. The tribe members and particularly the men, were more co-operative and peaceful.

Women fulfilled another vital role in early societies. They were links between tribes. By interbreeding with males from other tribes, women not only brought valuable variations in genetic material to the tribe, but they also contributed to the union of families, the expansion of territories, and the prevention of territorial disputes and wars. It became the custom among men to “give” women as gifts to other men from other tribes. This was the beginning of marriage. We still see the remnants of this custom in traditional marriage ceremonies when the conductor of the ceremony asks, “Who gives this woman?” and usually the father of the bride hands her over.

Why have we downplayed the importance and contribution of women, and given the men the power and the glory? We’ll explore our modern reasons in later chapters. For now, let’s look at our ancestors’ path that transformed Woman from Partner to Property.

Phallus in Wonderland: Fatherhood, Religion and Property

In the early days of human development, both women and men were unaware of men’s role in conception. Because women gave birth to the children as if by magic, being female was important and valued. The Great Goddess was the most powerful of the gods.

Once men became aware of their contribution to conception, it seems to have gone to their heads. They assumed the women were merely the soil in which their seed was planted. The penis or phallus became an object of worship. The Great Goddess was overthrown in a frenzy of envy and resentment. In many cultures, she was then depicted as evil and was torn or cut into pieces. Her place was taken by a male god. This fundamental status shift from the female to the male appears in many mythologies around five to ten thousand years ago, corresponding with the development of agriculture, the end of nomadic existence and the beginning of possession of property.

Men did not see fatherhood as giving them equality with women but rather as proof of male worthiness, superiority, and dominance. Women’s status plummeted and the chief gods became male, finally culminating in the One God, invariably male. Men created THE god in their image, then declared that they themselves were created in the image of God, and women were an inferior offshoot.

Since the male was made in the image of the god, woman was the sexual contrast, the polar opposite, the “opposite sex”. Not even fully human. And so, developed the Taboo of Sameness, to use Gayle Rubin’s apt term. Whatever men were, women were not and should not be.

Here we see the beginnings of our modern child-raising mantra to men and boys: Never do anything like a girl. Even today, men are belittled if they behave in a “feminine” way. Men who knit. Men who stay home and look after their children. Men who prefer poetry to football. Trivial examples but revealing.

Men embodied all the human skills and abilities. Women were the half-formed, inept opposites, servants and property of men, and incubators for the next generation. Humans entered the age of Phallus in Wonderland to use Rosalind Miles’ phrase. We are still in that state with male dominance and gross inequality of the sexes, after more than five to ten thousand years.

For too many men, the penis became a weapon of dominance rather than an instrument of desire or love. Rape is still used as a weapon in war. It is seen as the best way to humiliate the male enemy. Violate his “property”, his females, in the most intimate way possible. It is also used as a weapon against women in “civil” society. Fear of rape constrains our movements and our whereabouts even today.

Once early humans developed agriculture and domesticated animals, they stopped being nomadic. The irony in all this is that, since most women gathered and foraged for plant foods and killed smaller animals, it was probably women who invented the farming of crops and domesticating of animals, sealing their fate. With the development of farming, ownership of property became important. Men wanted to be sure the sons they passed their property on to, were in fact their sons. Ensuring their wives were not impregnated by some other interloper became of top importance to them. Female virginity at marriage became a requirement. The balance tipped further to male dominance and female secondary status. It led to more and more constraints placed on women’s movement, behaviour, and especially their sexual activity.