I'm having a hard time dealing with "women's history". Need some balanced, unbiased information.

powerpiglet · 2012-08-26T14:28:15+00:00

[permanently deleted]

DavidByron · 2012-08-26T15:06:26+00:00

Well you're actually talking about pre-history there a lot I think. You're doing a little evo-psych thing there. Maybe you should get GirlWritesWhat's view on that. At any rate we don't know that stuff about pre-history or it would be history.

However we do know some of your concepts are badly wrong.

society became a much more dangerous place

We know that society became much safer. Both in terms of the difference between primitive tribes and more civilized ones (which we can guess at by comparing eg murder rates in the last few existing tribes like that in Papua New Guinea with more advanced tribes and modern populations as mentioned by Jared Diamond in Guns, Steel and Germs which you certainly ought to have read.

Then again in more recent history violence has been rapidly decreasing per Steven Pinker for example. Here's a TED talk about it: http://www.ted.com/talks/steven_pinker_on_the_myth_of_violence.html

Now you might think what about the wars and so on haven't wars got worse, and it's true that World War one and two were bad, but since then and in large part due to the UN working more, the numbers of wars and civil wars and so on has been reducing at a rapid pace (though because we tend to concentrate on US wars that doesn't seem to be the case intuitively).

They started fighting among themselves, rather than the forces of nature

Until recently population has grown to its natural limit with humans just as with other animals. Humans have always had to fight nature first as all animals have. Now we have reached a point for the first time where humans control their own population (and we have already reached "peak child" - the largest number of human children there will ever be on Earth). And here's a short video on that: http://www.ted.com/talks/hans_rosling_religions_and_babies.html?quote=1634

As a result, society became a much more dangerous place, with men having more social power as a result of their physical strength

Did that ever happen? I don't think we know of any society based on the strongest physical people ruling over the others. For example it would mean that older people would have little respect. No old people would ever rule. Perhaps it is easier to imagine this in pre-history but I don't think even primitive tribes that remain practise this and historic societies certainly did not. Social power is not physical power. Social power is more about how to manipulate others and women tend to be better at that than men. Historical societies have more often than not be ruled by very physically weak individuals.

there were probably a great many women who welcomed protection from their men

It sounds like you think of history as a long period of Mad Max post-Apocalyptic Zombie world where it's all about fighting to the death. The reality is that the earliest societies we know the laws of (from about 4000 years ago) had in place already a raft of laws protecting women physically by the state. So physical strength got you nowhere for social power and women were not at a disadvantage for that reason.

ManUpManDown · 2012-08-26T17:58:01+00:00

Parallel conversation going on over here (link below). I'd love to see the mrm fora run by the ladies visited more frequently:

http://www.reddit.com/r/LadyMRAs/comments/yun4l/gender_relations_in_history_how_do_you_feel_about/

2012-08-26T18:00:49+00:00

I happened to look into some medieval laws in connection with some claims in a reddit discussion, and although I've been around here a bit, I was frankly surprised at how far they were from the feminist narrative. The one that stuck with me (and the one I quoted) was from the Visigothic code, the law among Christians in Spain from around the 7th century to the 10th. See for yourself:

http://libro.uca.edu/vcode/visigoths.htm

loose-dendrite · 2012-08-26T13:43:41+00:00

This is a gigantic question!

Look, here's a basic query: are there any instances of women moving-away to build their own society off in the wilderness without men present?

No, really, I can't think of one. They haven't done it. Women tend to stick around men. So... men are doing something that causes women to stick around. Despite all complaints. Today, no one would stop a group of women from gathering, buying some wilderness and trying to build some kind of female-only armed kibbutz from scratch. But it hasn't happened. Despite all the moaning about how rotten and oppressive men are. Why not?

I'm something of an amateur historian as well. I'm learning new things all the time. But one thing I can say is that very few empires based on slavery & domination have lasted more than a thousand years or so. And yet, we are to believe that women's slavery & subjugation has continued uninterrupted for many thousands of years. That rather stretches credulity, if you consider women as equals. Does it not?

There's plenty of wilderness around. You'd imagine that some band of enterprising women would gone-off and built their own society at some point. Or perhaps revolted and kicked-out the men. History is full of persecuted groups who did that. The Mormons, the Afrikaners, the Puritans, the Cossacks, the Israelites, the Haitians... where's the female-only Utah? The female-only Cossack state? The female-only fort out in the wilderness which bills itself as the world's only true homeland for women? Why do these perpetual victims persist in hanging-around their tormentors all the time?

And why haven't women developed their own secret language so they can communicate covertly without men listening-in? A creole is a language that was created for subjugated peoples to communicate with their masters in the context of slavery. So wouldn't there be a lot of female-only creoles by now?

Finally, if the view of perpetual female subjugation is true, it means that men are are absolute geniuses when it comes to subjugating women. And that would be a convincing argument if you want to claim that men are superior to women. Or, at the very least, you cannot claim that women are equally intelligent as men if you think women needed 10,000 years to figure-out that men have been oppressing them and that they still haven't carved-out some kind of Israel or created some language of their own.

If anyone claims that the answer to these questions is that "women were too oppressed to do anything on their own," there's a one-word answer: Jazz. Jazz was created by black American men, a badly oppressed group, during the darkest days of Jim Crow, and yet they still managed to create something new and amazing. Okay, so were white women more oppressed than black men?

None of the female-oppression view of history makes very much sense. That's its most damning feature.

rightsbot · 2012-08-26T13:20:17+00:00

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C0CKPUNCHER · 2012-08-26T17:26:17+00:00

For most of history people worked incredibly long days doing very hard labor, their daily walking commute would be beyond most people. Men did heavier work than women. That was the gender difference, you are delusional if you think gender relations were based on violence. It's only since the 50's that people have had enough free time to have gender relations (outside the upper class).

Dathadorne · 2012-08-26T17:12:45+00:00

You're in the wrong subreddit. There's gotta be a good history/prehistory one, even anthro.

sixofthebest · 2012-08-26T14:52:58+00:00

Men are better at war.
Not being burdened by pregnancy and breast feeding means men were more free to participate in high risk activities which give better rewards.
On the other hand men don't come with automatically productive gears (breasts and ovary) like women do so men had a more urgent need to build their social value.
Skill transfer - a lot of jobs were done by men and so it made sense to teach the required skills to men only.

BrSy · 2012-08-26T13:34:42+00:00

We formed society for a reason. The purpose of almost all religion has been to curtail female nature and for a good reason; they trick males to slaughter one another for entertainment among other things. It's an inherent female compulsion to tell lies and they go mad with the power of lies and wreak havoc with it if left unchecked. The problem is that everyone started actually believing in the facade religious nonsense and that has caused a lot of headache. Also rapists. They're always on the hunt and you have to have someone covering your back or they could get you. The only safe way to live before we formed society and started making up for these severe imperfections was to dig holes in the ground and stay there armed with pointy sticks.

I suggest you go to sites like spearhead and a voice for men for a better understanding and education about these things. It's never to late to become educated.

Title	I'm having a hard time dealing with "women's history". Need some balanced, unbiased information.
Author	doch_doch
Upvotes	15
Comments	55
Date	August 26, 2012 1:18 PM UTC (13 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/yunsv/im_having_a_hard_time_dealing_with_womens_history/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/im-having-a-hard-time-dealing-with-womens-history.1014978 https://theredarchive.com/post/1014978

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