Why is it that all around the world throughout history, women have always been disregarded as below men?

Whisper · 2019-04-11T01:23:16+00:00

Because humans are so very smart, and this has a tremendous biological cost. You have to start building that giant brain early, which means you have to deliver something with a giant head... and you have to deliver it prematurely, because if you left a human in the womb for the ideal amount of time, you couldn't get it out.

Newborn horses can walk in a few hours. Newborn humans can't support their own heads.

Every aspect of the structure of a woman's body, and her instinctive behaviour, has been "designed" around the strain of having genius babies. Tremendous biological sacrifices have been made to make this possible. And it flows over into men, as well... because they now have to be adapted to do the things women can't or won't, because of the babies.

Humans are a race which has been twisted by hyperspecialization. It's been a successful experiment, we rule the fucking planet, but sometimes we fail to recognize and account for the cost.

Morpheus_TNTB · 2019-04-11T01:13:34+00:00

Throughout history, mankind used to value the truth. Nowadays, not so much!

Project_Zero_Betas · 2019-04-11T01:35:06+00:00

As a professional historian? Because up until the 20th century, society was dictated and organized purely by whoever could monopolize physical power, which men are biologically constructed to exceed women in.

Also, your OPs title should say "REGARDED"

W_O_M_B_A_T · 2019-04-11T18:47:14+00:00

Most primitive Hunter-gatherer societies were matrilineal and matriarchal. Who your mother was made your status in the group. The old grandmother medicine woman ruled with a gentle touch but an iron grip.

Women stayed with the family group and did most of the gathering of fruits, roots, grubs, trapping birds, etc. Men banded into smaller hunter groups to chase large game, but this meant that their social influence was lesser. Hunting provided much more nutritious food that children in particular needed, but was more dangerous and much less reliable. Women bartered romantic favors after a major kill.

There's an argument to be made the modern humans wouldn't have been successful without this sexual specialization. There's some evidence to suggest that Neanderthal women hunted alongside men equally, and they just kind of did what they individually felt like. It's known that Neanderthals had a higher childhood mortality rate, so modern humans prospered because we were better at childcare in some way.

In many if not most cases the idea of a man having any parentage or influence over the child's characteristics was unknown. Women were the life givers and creators. Men were the guardians of death. That wasn't a man's power. Sex was just a fun activity thst helped the process along like unearthing a root vegetable.

Patriarchy has everything to do with the development of agriculture and the need to maintain and defend the most fertile land, long term.

This kicked off 7 millennia or more of violent conflicts over control over land and rivers. It wasn't pretty but it allowed the human population to increase by a factor of 10,000 or more (We're still fighting that old argument over "my turf" despite borders being increasingly irrelevant and massiy economic hurdles.)

As far as parentage, a traditional belief in agricultural societies is that men planted the seed and women were merely the ground it needed to grow in. Hopefully this symbolism makes sense.

If you read Esther Perel's famous book, "The manipulated man" she presents a good argument that the idea that women have been systematically excluded and persecuted against is pretty narrow.

They've been discriminated against politically, yes.

However women have generally enjoyed greater security, greater social influence, greater control over money and spending. They are far less likely to be jailed, or murdered. Until recently they tended to suffer significantly less psychological stress than men. No society that I'm aware of has ever obligated women to fight in wars on behalf of their city or county. When women ask for help they are more likely to be taken seriously.

Most ideas about political power structure, having a professional job, institutional education, fame, etc. the things women claim men are excluding them from. These are both descendents of male hunter society, and they are also representative of the things women sterotypically value in men as mates.

It's all a big complicated mating dance, or else countries, bureaucracy, science, "education," religion, cooking, indeed, even agriculture wouldn't exist. There'd be no reason for them to exist because women didn't care if men had them or not. This is something of an oversimplification, but you have to understand that "traditional male power" are indeed most of what humans do socially has everything to do with female sexual selection.

And women definitely like guys who do a song and dance for them.

So until recently, there was often the unspoken connotation of lesbianism when women were trying to enter into political or professional institutions. Women must be trying to impress and horn in on other women just like a man.

On the other hand, agriculture is so heavily mechanized and the vast majority of people now work in service or intangible capital related jobs. Basic resources aren't scarce. So the major Raisons d'Etre of patriarchy much less in force than when agriculture was the dominant economic activity.

Remember that the women's rights movement almost exactly parallels the development of synthetic fertilizers and mechanized transportation. I think that it's almost inevitable that the pendulum will swing towards more matriarchy now that the economic pressures of an agricultural economy are mostly gone. This isn't actually a problem and it worked well for our Hunter gatherer ancestors for hundreds of thousands of years.

If women want to to the things men or doing, I don't really have a problem with that. Where there's demand someone will supply it.

But women should keep in mind that if they're not rewarding men by meeting their needs for intimacy and family and children, in exchange, then we're going to stop doing something and let women deal with it instead. We'll move on to something that's more new and dynamic that women don't yet control. See for example: computer programming.

Title	Why is it that all around the world throughout history, women have always been disregarded as below men?
Author	TheDarkRanger
Upvotes	0
Comments	4
Date	April 11, 2019 1:09 AM UTC (5 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/askTRP
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/asktrp/comments/bbu1dq/why_is_it_that_all_around_the_world_throughout/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/askTRP/why-is-it-that-all-around-the-world-throughout.225011 https://theredarchive.com/post/225011