"Society is sexist unless we need a role model."

lumpynose · 2023-10-23T22:07:50+00:00

Lacy and her colleague Cara Ocobock from the University of Notre Dame examined the division of labor according to sex during the Paleolithic era, approximately 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago. Through a review of current archaeological evidence and literature, they found little evidence to support the idea that roles were assigned specifically to each sex. The team also looked at female physiology and found that women were not only physically capable of being hunters, but that there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting.

All I can do is just laugh at such "rigorous" research. Imagine the wealth of evidence they have from 12,000 to 2.5 million years ago.

biscuitheque · 2023-10-24T12:35:20+00:00

Change the word 'hunting' to 'gold-digging.'

AirSailer · 2023-10-24T13:07:23+00:00

From the referenced article:

much of the work we have to rely on to make our physiological arguments about female hunters in prehistory is based on research with small human sample sizes or rodent studies.

Then they say that women might have been hunters based on human physiology because of estrogen...

Overall, females are metabolically better suited for endurance activities, whereas males excel at short, powerful burst-type activities. You can think of it as marathoners (females) versus powerlifters (males). Much of this difference seems to be driven by the powers of the hormone estrogen.

Except extra fat within the body makes it harder for women to compete with men. And marathon times are actually less for women by a significant amount

https://www.runtothefinish.com/gender-differences-in-running/#:~:text=Women%20are%20predisposed%20to%20hold,for%20women%20is%204%3A47.

Women are predisposed to hold an additional 5-10% body fat for child-bearing. The extra weight of this body fat means the female body has to work much harder to run an equivalent pace. In fact, the average marathon time for males is 4:22 and the average marathon time for women is 4:47.

Gaspar_Noe · 2023-10-27T21:00:00+00:00

This looks quite bad from a few angles.

First, the subtext seems to be that somehow women throughout society internalized some complex of inferiority because of a long-standing hypothesis about cavemen (other articles about this news make the connection more explicit), however such 'sexist' theory is actually from 1968, not from 18 BC, thus its effect on the mindset of women in society can't be more than a few generations.

Second, it's not like we have plenty of evidence from more recent (and more documented) times in which such gender roles were more clearly divided. It looks once more that contemporary ideology is conducting a war-by-proxy using alternatively cavemen or animals or amazon tribes, as if showing that there exist somewhere an exception to something would disprove the overwhelming majority of evidence of something.

Third, this is what currently constitutes hype in society and science (just look at the trending topics in top journals in healthy science), so the very fact that we just found out that prehistoric societies aligned to the current way of thinking seems at least suspiciously coincidental.

Fourth, 'there is little evidence to support that they were not hunting' sounds like a very weak way of making the point that they were, indeed, hunters.

Roto2esdios · 2023-10-28T18:07:15+00:00

I read the whole article and I couldn't find anything but an opinion (which is ok). My main concerns are the BS about estrogen making the muscle resilient and whatnot and the lack of references. If these people call themselves true academics they should be ashamed and renounce their jobs. Science is a serious business and should not be biased by believes.

Shadow_Falcon41019 · 2023-10-25T06:08:18+00:00

Wtf why can’t we just let the past be the past

ComradeAB · 2023-10-27T19:33:56+00:00

I thought this was an anti-feminism page, not one dedicated to misogyny. Some of the comments are dripping in it.

antifeminist3 · 2023-11-04T20:48:56+00:00

"...examined the division of labor according to sex during the Paleolithic era, approximately 2.5 million to 12,000 years ago. Through a review of current archaeological evidence"

So they looked at bones which cannot show such evidence, and state 'there is no evidence'. Yup.

Ignores recent anthropoligical evidence of hunter gatherer societies which showed almost all hunting is done by men.

Women 'hunters' who are breast feeding would need to bring the kid, who would cry and alter the prey. Women would be slower because of the kid, because they are shorter and because of strength. Men can throw a spear farther, so he doesn't need to get so close to the prey. Biology matters. The vast majority of hunting was done by men.

Title	"Society is sexist unless we need a role model."
Author	Wild_Aioli
Upvotes	165
Comments	18
Date	October 23, 2023 7:31 PM UTC (2 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/AntiFeminists
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/antifeminists/comments/17esvvn/society_is_sexist_unless_we_need_a_role_model/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/AntiFeminists/society-is-sexist-unless-we-need-a-role-model.1236144 https://theredarchive.com/post/1236144

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