Prologue: A Man’s World?: Hell hath no fury like a man devalued. Karl Marx had it wrong. Class has, to be sure, been a major factor in history; but class itself is a derivative concept that is based on the ultimate causative power in history: sex. Marx’s famous formulation must be revised: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggles based on the division of our species into two sexes, jealousies emanating from this division, exaggerations of the differences between the sexes, misunderstandings about sexual reproductive power, and metaphors derived from sex. Together, these closely related matters constitute the most important, but largely neglected, set of motive forces in human history. Control -- or the claim of control -- over the means of reproduction has been even more fundamental to history than has control of the means of production.
Taking sex seriously as the basic underlying force in history throws everything into question; it obliges us to rethink all of history and see it from a new perspective, one that places primary emphasis on areas that have been almost completely ignored by most historians. It does not simply change the cast of characters; it totally revises the plot line. From this perspective, the most significant historical events took place before or outside the usual field of vision of historians. The climax of the drama, as we shall see, took place in what might be considered Act I, scene 2, at a time when conventional history has not yet raised the curtain. Historical directors have, in fact, simply dropped the whole of Act I from their productions. But the action taking place in the scene we are playing out at the beginning of the third millennium cannot be comprehended, by either the cast or the critics, without a serious examination of that long-ignored opening act.
~ Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History ~Former representative David Duke is portrayed as a person with very marginal support, but although he was outspent 100 to 1 in media he received over 60 percent of the White vote in his race for Governor and U.S. Senator in Louisiana. He even won the primary for Vice-President of the United States in the far northern state of New Hampshire. He receives this support because he is the best known voice of European Americans, and when his voice is actually heard rather than the media characterizations of him, the vast majority agree with his positions. In two hard fought races where people had the chance to hear his message (in spite of savage media attacks against him) he still received a landslide of White voters. Why?
~ Who is a "Loving Procreation, Zero Population Growth Honourable Ethnic Leader": Truthteller David Duke or Two-Faced Hypocrit Nelson Mandela? ~To think that we can advocate for human rights, peace, and social justice while ignoring their necessary ecological basis—is both intellectually dishonest and ultimately self-defeating.
The longer we put off choosing the nicer methods of achieving demographic stability, the more likely the nasty ones become, whether imposed by nature or by some fascistic regime. Urine Good Company might represent a mild version of what could actually be in store if we let the marketplace, corporations, and secretive, militaristic governments come up with eugenic solutions to our population dilemma.
~ Population, Resources, and Human Idealism, Energy Bulletin | Population Growth: Most Powerful Force on Earth, Money&Markets ~
VilniusRRSufi :: "The fact is one cannot begin to search for a solution to a 'Hell Hath No Fury....' problem that has yet to be accurately defined.."
"After reading Eve's Seed you'll never look at a farm, the bible, feminism, rock 'n' roll lyrics, mass consumption, or Bill Clinton in the same way."
~ Paul R. Ehrlich, Bing Professor of Population Studies, Stanford University, and author of Human Natures: Genes, Cultures, and the Human Prospect ~
Prologue: A Man’s World?:
Hell hath no fury like a man devalued.
If the complex argument of this book had to be reduced to a single sentence, that would be it. More about that shortly. First, though, the outlines of the problem that led to the exploration that produced this argument and conclusion."Life Is Dramatically Unfair to Women"
"We hear and we say that life is unfair, but what this report shows is that life is dramatically unfair to women," declared the administrator of the United Nations Development Program, speaking of a 1995 worldwide survey of the status of women.
Life is dramatically unfair to women.
If such a statement could still be made with accuracy as the second millennium was drawing to a close, certainly it has been applicable throughout the five millennia for which we have some written evidence of how people lived. Although there are still a few people who cling to the faith that there is a small culture here or there in which men are not dominant, it is now generally accepted, as feminist anthropologist Sherry Ortner said in her famous 1972 essay, "Is Female to Male as Nature is to Culture?" that although the degree of male dominance varies, the subordination of women to men is something approaching a cross-cultural universal.
But why? Are men just naturally dominant and it has always been so?
Despite the enormous gains women have made in the past few decades, one suspects that many men—and women—look at the long, unbroken history of male dominance and privately still harbor the suspicion (or firmly hold the conviction) that women are biologically inferior. Although I had completed most of the research and much of the writing of this book before Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel appeared, when I read that book I was much struck by the parallel between what he saw as the major reason his analysis of the actual causes of world dominance by European-descended people was needed and my own view of a similar need for an adequate, historical explanation of the subordination of women:
Nevertheless, we have to wonder. We keep seeing all those glaring, persistent differences in peoples’ status. We’re assured that the seemingly transparent biological explanation for the world’s inequalities as of A.D. 1500 is wrong, but we’re not told what the correct explanation is. Until we have some convincing, detailed, agreed-upon explanation for the broad pattern of history, most people will continue to suspect that the racist biological explanation is correct after all. That seems to me the strongest argument for writing this book.
Similarly, continuing widespread suspicions that the sexist biological explanation of another broad pattern of history is correct after all seems to me the strongest reason for what I am undertaking with this book.
The broad pattern of history that is the subject of this book is, I believe, even more fundamental than that which Diamond explored. And the broad pattern for which he sought an explanation was one that has primarily been evident for "only" the last 500 years. The pattern of domination by one sex over the other stretches over at least 5000 years.
If the matter is not quite so simple as that men are "naturally superior," several absorbing questions open up: When did men establish their control over human societies? How did they do so? Why did they find it desirable to do so? Most important of all, what has the subordination of women meant for society as a whole? Has history itself been shaped in fundamental ways by the belief in female inferiority?
A variety of possible answers to these questions has been offered.
Many people in the Judeo-Christian tradition still respond to the question of why women are treated unfairly by saying that it is not unfair, because women were subordinated by God as a punishment for Eve’s sin. Although this argument cannot be taken seriously by educated people today, the story itself plays a crucial part in the interpretation I shall present in this book, as will be explained presently.
A second accounting for the domination of men over women is what might be termed the "Because we can" argument (I take the name from a line in the 1975 movie The Stepford Wives, in which the character "Diz" gives this answer to the question of why the men in Stepford are replacing their human wives with completely subservient artificial women.) The claim is simply that men have used their greater average size and upper body strength to impose their wills on women. Thomas Jefferson gave voice to this reasoning in 1785, when he wrote: "The stronger sex imposes on the weaker. It is civilization alone which replaces women in their natural equality."
Aside from the Eve-is-to-blame explanation, this belief that men have asserted control by sheer brute force and that male dominance has been lessened by civilization has probably been the most widely accepted answer to the question of why women have been subordinated. The notion that "cave men" went around clubbing women over the head and mistreating them to a greater degree than have their more refined descendants remains a staple of the popular imagination.
The explanation of why life has been dramatically unfair to women presented here begins with the converse of the "Because we can" argument. I propose that the underlying source of male assertions of superiority is "Because we can’t." It is the male inability to bear and nourish children that causes many men to feel insecure. Because of this relative incapacity, many men suffer, largely subconsciously, from what might be termed "womb envy" and "breast envy," or even the "non-menstrual syndrome." So, while making the claim that women are "by nature" inferior, many men have actually harbored a fear that women are, in certain respects, by nature superior. Such men seek to make women "by culture" inferior and confine them to certain roles:
In order to compensate for what men cannot do, they tell women that they may not do other things.
Because they cannot compete with women’s capabilities in the crucial realms of reproduction and nourishing offspring, men generally seek to avoid a single standard of human behavior and achievement. They create separate definitions of "manliness" which are based on a false opposition to "womanliness." A "real man" has been seen in most cultures as "notawoman."
While this fear of male inferiority and resulting tendency to insist that the sexes are "opposite" is the essential starting point for exploring the ways in which women have been subordinated and what the wider consequences of that subordination have been, it is just the beginning. This factor has always been present, although the degree of its impact has varied as other circumstances have changed. It is in those changing circumstances -- history -- that we must seek more complete answers to questions about why, how, and when females were subordinated and how sex has shaped history.
Evolution as Protohistory
Until the last third of the twentieth century, our view of history was grossly distorted by a huge error: the omission of half of our species from the record of human experience. The exclusion of women from history was, in fact, one of the most important examples of men establishing their own ground, on which women were not permitted to tread: You have the babies, since we can’t; but you may not enter our exclusive club that we call history.
Historians have now gone a long way towards rectifying this immense misreading of the past. But that is just the first step in the needed expansion of our historical field of vision.
While our understanding of the times that came before us has improved substantially with the restoration of women to our history, two other, closely related, fundamental mistakes continue to prevent us from reaching a proper understanding of the human past and present: the discounting of human nature and of "prehistory." It is these omissions that have left us without the sort of convincing explanation of why women have been so long subordinated and how sex has shaped history that is needed to combat the idea that the received sexual hierarchy is based on biological superiority/inferiority.
This book brings together two modes of inquiry that have advanced our understanding in recent years, but which have remained separate (and largely hostile): history, especially women's history, and the neo-Darwinian perspective that has appeared in the field of evolutionary biology and has been adopted by some researchers in the social sciences. (A group of evolutionary feminists, such as Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Patricia Adair Gowaty, and Barbara Smuts has emerged in recent years. But the findings and ideas of these women have yet to register with either historians or most more traditional feminists.) Much recent work has shown that human evolution left us with a variety of proclivities (human nature ) that were "designed" to adapt our ancestors to live in an environment that is vastly different from the one in which most of us live today.
But something very important is missing from these arguments: history. In jumping from evolution to the modern human experience, sociobiology and evolutionary psychology miss fundamentally important developments during the period when human-made changes first created a social environment for which the human biogram was not well adapted. This includes the same critical 5000 years of "prehistory" that historians conventionally shortchange, as well as most of the 5000 years traditionally called history. It is that gap -- the last ten millennia -- which the present book seeks to begin to fill.
If the practitioners of revamped evolutionary science have largely ignored history, historians have even more ignored evolution. Most historians, along with most people involved in all of the social sciences and humanities, have long been panicky at the mere mention of the possibility that anything in humans might be innate.
Misled by a belief that has been dogma in many intellectual circles since the time of John Locke, that humans at birth are blank slates which are thereafter shaped solely by personal experience, and by its modern equivalent, faith in complete cultural determinism, we have generally ignored human biology. Many people today panic at the very mention of "human nature," fearing that if they so much as admit the possibility of its existence they will be castigated as social Darwinists -- or worse. In recent years we have been reminded of where an apparently biological approach can lead by the racist ideas contained in Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray's The Bell Curve (1994). But the genuinely scientific evidence that we are not, in fact, blank slates at birth, wholly shaped by culture, has become overwhelming. The time is past when historians or the general public can afford to ignore the valid findings of science because some researchers have abused this sort of investigation and reached outrageous conclusions. We must stop throwing out the Darwinian baby with the racist and sexist bathwater. The attempt must be made to bring together neo-Darwinian evolutionary biology and history to form a new way of understanding the human experience: biohistory.
I very much believe in the unity of knowledge—what Edward O. Wilson terms consilience: that for all the variety of explanations that can be offered by different disciplines, all intersect and "there is intrinsically only one class of explanation." This book attempts to make a contribution to beginning to blend history with other branches of knowledge by combining biology (and several other disciplines) with history to reach conclusions vastly different from those of Herrnstein and Murray or the social Darwinists.
My approach to utilizing biology to enhance our understanding of history differs radically from social Darwinism. That discredited creed held that natural selection is just "the way things are" and that we should -- indeed, that we must -- model society after its uncaring brutality and intense competition. My position is that natural selection and the human nature that it produced need to be understood so that we can devise ways to guide our innate proclivities into channels that we choose, on the basis of our own moral decisions. It is foolish to deny that natural selection has played a major part in making us the way we are. Our task as humans is not to dispute this, but to envision "the way things ought to be" and use our knowledge of the way natural selection has molded us to find means by which we can move closer to that vision. The evolution of human nature must be seen as protohistory, the first history, the starting point for subsequent history.
Anyone who looks seriously and with an open mind (which should not be confused with a blank slate) at the findings of modern biology cannot doubt that there is such a thing as human nature. Our distant ancestors had adapted biologically to live in small bands of collector-hunters, the hominid and human way of life for at least 98 percent of our evolution. It was this process that created the human nature -- the mixed constellation of motivations that give us predispositions to respond in certain ways to certain circumstances and to desire particular situations of living -- that remains with us down to the present. Some understanding of this human biological inheritance (the biogram of Homo sapiens) is essential to a proper comprehension of history. It seems to be common sense that the study of history, the unfolding of human life, should be grounded in knowledge of human biology, the science of that life. Yet for most of us in the historical profession, that has rarely been the case.
History Does Not Begin with a Blank Slate
To an only somewhat lesser extent, we historians have also ignored "prehistory." Understandably reluctant to draw many conclusions about life in times for which we have no written records, we have for the most part acted as if human history began about the same time that writing was invented, shortly before 3000 BCE. If human history cannot be properly understood without an acquaintance with the innate biological predispositions with which evolution left us, neither can it be accurately fathomed without some knowledge of the effects of the monumental alterations in the human social environment that occurred during the approximately five thousand years preceding the conventional starting point for history. If hominid and human evolution through the Paleolithic Age are protohistory, the 5000 or so years from the development of agriculture to the invention of writing can be seen as deuterohistory, a second era of history that set the stage for the 5000 years conventionally called "history."
Although we have rarely, if ever, noticed the connection, historians have been applying Locke’s tabula rasa concept to human history as well as to individual humans. To act as if "history" began with a blank slate 5000 years ago is as profoundly misleading as to see the human infant at birth that way. Indeed, it is basically the same mistake, since to say that humanity’s slate was blank around 3000 BCE is to discount completely not only all of "prehistorical" experience, but also any biological influence on human behavior.
Ironically, historians have generally taken a view of the scope of the human story that is similar to that of biblical fundamentalists, since the latter customarily date Eden at about 6000 years ago. But humans and their direct ancestors had been around by that time for 4 to 5 million years. "Conventional history," Colin Tudge rightly observes in his 1996 book, The Time Before History, "starts almost at the end."
It is easy to appreciate the hesitation of historians in saying much about the period before writing. In a literal sense, after all, "prehistory" is a blank slate. The methodological difficulties involved in considering such periods for which there are no written records are enormous. But there were people living in these vast eons, and they had lives -- there is a "prehistoric history." Learning about this history is very difficult, and conclusions we reach about it must be classified as tentative and in some cases even speculative. It involves borrowing from many other disciplines, including biology, archeology, anthropology, and the study of religion and mythology. Yet if we, as historians, believe that "what is past is prologue," we must face up to the difficulties, because we will understand that human history in the time when there was no or little writing has had substantial effects on the history that followed.
"History from the bottom up" came into vogue at the end of the 1960s. This meant seeing history from the vantage point of the oppressed, rather than the oppressors, the losers rather than the winners: slaves, peasants, industrial workers, immigrants, minorities. It has been a most worthwhile and edifying project, one which meshed well with the expansion of women’s history, since women have almost always been "on the bottom." (The significance of such sexual metaphors is enormous, as will be explained later.) The effort must now be made to give "history from the bottom up" a new meaning: to "get to the bottom of things," to find the roots, the source, the basis, of history.
What most of us in the historical profession have been doing is like trying to examine and understand the construction of the upper stories of a tall building without looking at the structure's foundation or its lower floors. To truly transform our conception of history, we need now to go beyond the new carpenters and building materials (women historians and historical women) that have come onto the construction site in the past few decades. We need a new blueprint, one that includes the lower stories, the foundation, and even an analysis of the bedrock on which they rest.
It will be argued in these pages that the bedrock on which the foundation of history stands is the set of innate characteristics and proclivities that developed over the unimaginably long evolution of hominids and humans, that the foundation is sex, including misunderstandings of it and metaphors based upon it, and that the lower stories are the roughly 5000 years between the development of agriculture and the invention of writing.
Sex and History
Feminist historians have done a good job of showing that, as Joan Wallach Scott has put it, "sexual difference cannot be understood apart from history." But all sorts of previously obscured vistas open up when we comprehend that the converse is also, and even more importantly, true:
History cannot be understood apart from perceptions of sexual difference.
One of the primary objectives of this book is to explain how people’s views of sexual difference have shaped history.
Karl Marx had it wrong. Class has, to be sure, been a major factor in history; but class itself is a derivative concept that is based on the ultimate causative power in history: sex. Marx’s famous formulation must be revised: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggles based on the division of our species into two sexes, jealousies emanating from this division, exaggerations of the differences between the sexes, misunderstandings about sexual reproductive power, and metaphors derived from sex. Together, these closely related matters constitute the most important, but largely neglected, set of motive forces in human history. Control -- or the claim of control -- over the means of reproduction has been even more fundamental to history than has control of the means of production.
The implications of the questions about the sources and development of male dominance and female subordination go far beyond the treatment of women. It will be contended here that male subordination of females is at the very base of how our society operates and how we view the world. An understanding of when, how, and why men asserted complete dominion over women will begin to provide us with answers to many other questions about why human societies operate as they do.
Taking sex seriously as the basic underlying force in history throws everything into question; it obliges us to rethink all of history and see it from a new perspective, one that places primary emphasis on areas that have been almost completely ignored by most historians. It does not simply change the cast of characters; it totally revises the plot line. From this perspective, the most significant historical events took place before or outside the usual field of vision of historians. The climax of the drama, as we shall see, took place in what might be considered Act I, scene 2, at a time when conventional history has not yet raised the curtain. Historical directors have, in fact, simply dropped the whole of Act I from their productions. But the action taking place in the scene we are playing out at the beginning of the third millennium cannot be comprehended, by either the cast or the critics, without a serious examination of that long-ignored opening act.
A Distant Mirror
It is an age in which dramatic social and economic changes have disrupted previously existing sex roles. The traditional roles of one sex have been devalued, and members of that sex have begun to move into roles and occupations previously defined as appropriate only for the other sex. Changes are underway in the sex-linked roles of provider and care-giver. All these alterations are leading to inevitable resentments. Our whole way of life seems to be changing in radical ways. Traditional religious beliefs and family structures are being altered. Many people fear it may be the end of the world as we know it.
The time described in the preceding paragraph is a vast era that was, in terms of changing sex roles, the mirror image of the twentieth century. That period continues to hold sway over our lives today. It began about 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, when the invention of agriculture started to disrupt long-established ways of life, finally devaluing the traditional male roles of hunting and group defense. The result was what may be termed a "masculinist movement" by which men gradually took over roles previously defined as female, ultimately changing the human understanding of procreation and religion in ways that have influenced all of recorded history and continue to affect us profoundly in our own time.
The invention of agriculture (including the keeping of animals as well as the purposeful growing of plant food) reshaped human life in such essential ways that it should be seen as the first of two "mega-revolutions" in human history. It "dis-placed" (took away their place in society) men by undermining the value of what they had traditionally done, especially hunting, at the same time that it "re-placed" (put into a new position in society) women by fundamentally altering the relationship between resources and population in such a way that substantial population growth became desirable and women were obliged to give up most of their previous role in production and concentrate much more on reproduction. Men, in need of new roles, sought to take over roles previously identified as female. Today, some five centuries into a second mega-revolution based on increasing mobility (both social and spatial) and a consequent reconceptualization of the world as a marketplace, it is women who are seeing a traditional role undermined. Extraordinary advances in productivity and medicine have so increased population that we now find ourselves, in one important respect, returning to a situation similar to that before agriculture: the environment’s capacity to support human population has nearly been saturated. This means that women are no longer called upon to spend so much of their lives in child-bearing and -raising. "There is no longer a single country in Europe where people are having enough children to replace themselves," the New York Times reported in 1998. Women, in short, have now been "dis-placed," albeit to a lesser degree than was the case with men in the wake of the development of agriculture. As men did thousands of years ago, women today are seeking new roles by entering occupations that had been reserved for the other sex. This, in turn, has once again threatened the status of men, many of whom are reacting in ways similar to those of their very distant forefathers.
The Genesis of History
The most important account of the "prehistoric" devaluation of roles for which men had been biologically "designed" and the consequences it had for men and women is well known to almost everyone in the Western world and hundreds of millions of people beyond, but it has not been recognized as such. The key to that recognition is the view that came to be widely accepted among anthropologists and others only in the last two decades of the twentieth century, that it is highly likely that women invented agriculture. The reasons for this conclusion will be discussed in Chapter 4 of this book, but the best-known version of the story is in a very familiar, Chapter 3.
The story in Chapter 3 of the Book of Genesis which Christians came to call "the Fall of Man" actually does describe a "prehistoric" fall of men, but in a very different way from what has been thought. As I shall explain in detail, the story in Genesis is an allegorical representation of the "fall" that men experienced as a result of women’s invention of agriculture (Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge): once food could be intentionally produced, the traditional male roles, particularly as hunters, were greatly devalued. This story (like many other ancient myths in a variety of cultures) blames women for the loss of the collector-hunter way of life, which from a distance came to look like paradise to men obliged to go "forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground" and earn their bread by the sweat of their brows doing the "woman’s work" of supplying plant food, and punishes women by declaring them henceforth to be totally subordinate to men. The low esteem in which the "women’s work" of agriculture was held is shown dramatically in Chapter 4 of Genesis, when the male God shows no regard for the produce brought to Him by the farmer Cain, but is pleased by the "manly" offering of meat from Abel.
It will further be argued in this book that the early chapters of Genesis contain the very basis of history. In the second chapter men attempt to overcome their feelings of inferiority by asserting complete superiority over women through a drastic rearrangement of the order of creation that is given in Chapter 1, where men and women are created simultaneously on the sixth day. The contrast of the account in Chapter 2 could not be sharper: in this version, man is created on the first day, then all other living things, and last of all, woman. Even more important, men claim creative power in Genesis’ second chapter through the literally incredible story of the birth of a woman out of a man. In Chapter 3, womb envy is stood on its head when the blessing of the power to give birth is redefined as a curse. The Fall of Man has been transmuted into the Fall of Woman.
Read this way (and there is much more to it, as we’ll see later), the first four chapters of Genesis are restored to their place at the beginning of history, but in a markedly different way from that in which they long held that place in the Judeo-Christian tradition. These chapters become a mythologized synopsis of the real Act I of human history, told from the very slanted viewpoint of men who saw themselves as victims of the events in that Act.
Biology + Environment = History
A basic argument of this book is that human history consists of the interplay of our innate proclivities with changing, human-altered social environments. I believe that most of the largest problems we face today -- and most of the greatest difficulties throughout the recorded portion of human history -- stem from a mismatch between the human nature that evolved over millions of years of human evolution and the human-made social environments that have existed for about ten thousand years, since the invention of agriculture radically altered the circumstances in which Homo sapiens lives. That mismatch has grown much greater in the modern world, as the social environment we have manufactured has departed ever farther from the conditions for which humans are biologically adapted.
The development of agriculture, causing people to become sedentary, live in much larger societies, and deal with such new issues as surplus, property in land, and impersonal relationships, generated social conditions for which humans were not biologically adapted. Since there was insufficient time for much biological adaptation to the rapidly changing social environment, it was necessary to create more complex values, which amount to cultural adaptations to circumstances for which our biological inheritance does not suit us. The invention of agriculture proved to be mother to the necessity of establishing complex values to mediate between human nature and the transformed social environment.
Metaphors Make History
Another of the major beliefs that informs the arguments presented here is that how we live in the world affects how we perceive the world. Changes in the social environment bring about changes in the selection of ideas and worldviews that will be deemed acceptable. This is to say that the principles of Darwinian biology apply to human thought and scientific understanding itself. In much the same way that organisms that are better adapted to a new physical environment are the ones that will survive and thrive, ideas that are better suited to a particular social environment are the ones that will become accepted.
Metaphors are one of the primary means through which the social environment transmits its outlook to science and the thinking of people at large. Metaphors are wonderful devices; writers would be at a loss without them. But the unfortunate tendency to take metaphors literally can lead to gross errors in understanding. Metaphors do not represent reality; to think they do is almost sure to be misleading. Certain metaphors have become so powerful that they have shaped (and often misshaped) in fundamental ways for thousands of years how we have seen the universe and ourselves. A principal focus of this volume is on what I believe are the two most important of the metaphors that have led us astray, the two master metaphors through most of human existence. The first of these is that such concepts as manhood mean superiority, power and dominance, and terms like womanly equate with inferiority, weakness, and submission. This is literally the master metaphor, since it is used as the basis and model for all power relationships, all situations in which one man claims to be "master" over another. The use of this master metaphor can be usefully termed pseudosexing: the classification of an individual of one sex as the other. Plainly this metaphor developed in part as a means of combating male fears of inferiority and is a manifestation of the "notawoman" definition of manhood.
But this metaphor is so fundamental that its deeper origins must be sought not simply in "prehistory," but in pre-hominid evolution. The idea that other animals use metaphorical behavior may be surprising, but it is plain that this is what is going on when a dominant male among several species mounts a subordinated male and simulates intercourse with him. The former is, in effect, "saying" to the latter: "I am so dominant over you that I can treat you like a female."
Symbolic mounting is, as chapters 13 and 14 will explain, an unexplored but highly significant aspect of human male behavior. Sometimes the practice is as direct and literal among humans as it is among other primates -- in male prisons, for instance. But human males generally do not have to act out intercourse in order to pseudosex other men and indicate that they are dominant over them, as they assume themselves to be over women. The capacity for language has given humans a much wider range of symbols and metaphors than is available to other primates. Men can and do use words in place of symbolic actions. One man saying "Fuck you!" to another carries exactly the same symbolism as does the mounting of a subordinated male macaque by a dominant one. Such language of domination and subordination can accurately be called verbal mounting.
The second master metaphor that has shaped the human experience since before recorded history began is one that proved to be all but irresistible after plow agriculture began. The apparent analogy of a seed being planted in furrowed soil to a male’s "planting" of semen in the vulva of a female led to the conclusion that men provide the seed of new life and women constitute the soil in which that seed grows. This metaphor is a central part of what was the most consequential and far-reaching mistake in human history: the idea that men are solely responsible for procreation. This monumental error, which I call the "Conception Misconception," has had profound effects on all of recorded history and continues to plague us today, centuries after we learned for sure that it is an error. The seed metaphor reversed the apparent positions of the sexes in regard to procreative power. What had always appeared to be a principally female power was transformed into an entirely male power. No longer apparent bystanders in reproduction, men now claimed to be the reproducers, while women were reduced from the seeming creators to the soil in which men’s creations grow: not to put too fine a point on it, women were equated with dirt. Women were left with all the work of procreation, but men now took all the credit.
During the Neolithic Age, then, women both ceased to be major producers (as men took over the production of plant food along with continuing their traditional responsibility for providing animal food) and ceased to be seen as having reproductive power. The woman-made world of agriculture had, paradoxically, become a man’s world to a degree unprecedented in human existence. Hell hath no fury like a man devalued.
Neither, apparently, hath heaven.
The belief that men have procreative power led inevitably to the conclusion that the supreme Creative Power must also be male. The toxic fruit that grew from the seed metaphor was male monotheism.
The combination of the belief that God (or the god who is the ultimate creator) is male with the notion that humans are created in God’s image yielded the inescapable conclusion that men are closer than women to godly perfection. Thus the line from the misconceptions about conception emanating from the seed metaphor to the belief, given its classic expressions by Aristotle, Aquinas, and Freud, that women are deformed or "incomplete" men is clear and direct. There is no telling how much evil throughout history might have been averted or eased had the growth of this vine of thinking somehow been nipped in the bud.
Even this brief introduction to the arguments that will be made in this book should be sufficient to show how completely inadequate the usual scope of history is. By the time humans began to record history, what in some respects were the most meaningful changes -- the most important history -- had already taken place. As a result of the development of agriculture, before the conventional starting point of history, humans had already moved into a new reproductive situation in which population expansion was possible and desirable, women had been largely consigned to reproduction, men had seen their traditional roles devalued and claimed procreative power, and women had come to be seen as inferior. Goddesses were in decline and the ultimate Creative Power was beginning to be seen as belonging to a male deity. By starting near the end, we historians have put ourselves in the same situation as almost all of the other people who lived during the last five thousand years. We have taken all these changes as givens, a constant -- the way things are -- rather than as products of historical development that they in fact are.
Asking the Right Questions
The seed that "Eve" showed people how to use for their own benefit changed the world in ways wholly beyond anything "she" could have imagined. We have been living with the consequences throughout the recorded period of history, but with, at best, only the dimmest perception of their genesis. This book constitutes an attempt to begin to bring that genesis into sharper focus and to explore the different understandings of history and present-day life that a greater comprehension of their deep bases opens to us.
The research and thinking that I have done on the vast questions addressed in this book have substantially changed the way I look at the world; it is my hope that the book might begin to do the same for others. If we do not change some of the fundamental ways that we have been looking at the world, our troubles are surely going to become worse, especially since we now find ourselves in an environment in which the roles that have traditionally been assigned to women are declining in value and the roles for which men evolved but were devalued thousands of years ago have still not been adequately replaced.
I do not claim that I have all the answers -- or even very many of them. But we cannot hope to find the right answers until we begin to ask the right questions. That is what I have tried to do in the pages that follow.
Source: Eve's Seed
Review of Eve's Seed,
by Bruce Miller
This is a refreshingly ambitious book that takes on a really big issue and does it by making grand survey of Western history. The "it" is Robert McElvaine's attempt to apply the findings of contemporary research on human evolution and the physiological differences between men and women to the writing of history. And his focus throughout is the social relationships between men and women with an emphasis on how (in his view) much of historical civilization has been built around men's fears and the need to contain certain antisocial characteristics that evolved as particularly "masculine."
He uses the "Eve's seed" metaphor to describe how the transition from hunter-gatherer cultures to agricultural ones affected the way men saw their roles in life. In contrast to some of the "evolutionary psychologists" he criticizes, McElvaine uses admirable balance and restraint in integrating the finds of biology and paleontology with his historical narrative.
He shows similar restraint in evaluating archaeological finds of very ancient female figurines. He discusses their implications for his theory while refuting the popular theories of prehistoric matriarchal societies and universal goddess worship.
Any book about sex differences has some intrinsic appeal. But this one explores aspects of the topic one is not likely to hear on "Oprah!" or the "Jerry Springer Show." His analysis sheds light on questions of community in large urban groups, our attitude toward the environment and contemporary politics.
In the book's first half, he gives special emphasis to the evolution of religious ideas and how they both reflected and influenced the relations between men and women. In the second half, he focuses more on European and American history in the last two centuries, dealing with material that will be more familiar to most readers. One of the intriguing aspects of the book is that, even though it's highly critical of certain historically "male" attitudes and practices, the analysis focuses largely on men's perception of their roles and the institutions they built on that basis.
Along the way he offers surprising insights into the many ways the relations between the sexes influences the way we understand even seemingly objective information. For instance, he finds that one of the results of the dissemination of Darwin's ideas was to de-feminize nature in people's minds and thus emphasize the idea that nature is a competitor to men, something to be conquered.
McElvaine's analysis in some places raises more questions than it answers. For example, he describes the Roman Empire as a place where "male" tendencies to over-consumption, violence and cruelty were carried to great excess, and takes the dualistic Mithra religion as embodying those negative male attributes. But in pointing out that a partial legal and social liberation of Roman women did not to curb those excesses, he doesn't answer the obvious question, why not? If male domination produced particular negative outcomes in Rome, why did an improved social role for women not counteract them? And how did a more "feminine" Christianity win out over Mithraism as the dominant religion? (He does suggest some partial answers to the latter.)
One of the ironies of this book is that, in elaborating a more woman-friendly view of history, its view of women in the Bible could serve to undercut efforts of feminist theologians to reexamine traditional interpretations. McElvaine's treatment of the story he makes the book's leading metaphor, Adam and Eve in the Garden, is probably justified in seeing the historical transition to agricultural societies as central to the cultural context of the story. But in focusing on the historical view, the complex theological and ethical aspects of the story are perhaps inevitably shortchanged.
Yet some of the readings of the Hebrew Bible/Old Testament here can also be questioned on historical grounds. McElvaine seems to implicitly accept the predominant Western Christian reading of the Eden story, which derives largely from Saint Augustine, as an unequivocal story of the human Fall from innocence to Original Sin, with Eve as a sinful villain. But assuming the original hearers of the story understood it this way is a very speculative exercise, and one that can overlook important implications of the story.
Fresh readings of the stories of Biblical women in recent decades - Eve, Miriam, Deborah, Dinah, Sarah and Hagar, Potiphar's wife, Bathsheba, Ruth, Jezebel -certainly raise questions about the extent to which we can assume that the dominant "male monotheistic" voice in the Bible reflects more general attitudes in the societies of that time. As do recent findings on the worship of the female goddess Asherah in Israel, who wasn't so despised by ordinary Israelites as by the authors of the Bible.
A similar question arises about McElvaine's argument that Second Isaiah, who articulated a more exclusively monotheistic brand of Yahwism than seems to have been prevalent during most of Israel's earlier history, was notable for introducing more "feminine" attributes of God.
A great part of the value of "Eve's Seed" is that it does surface such issues throughout. The last chapters apply the earlier observations about sex differences and social roles to discussions of "flappers" in the 1920s, verbal aggression in contemporary life, the youth culture of the 1950s and after, how perceptions of their own masculinity affected several American Presidents, and the feminist movement of recent decades.
This is a book meant to provoke thought and discussion. Neither liberals nor conservatives will find it entirely congenial from the point of view of current ideologies. Because it raises some tough questions about deep-seated social problems for which there are no clear solutions. Much less easy ones.
Source: "Refreshingly Ambitious"
Stan Goff's Sex & War
by William T. Hathaway
Book Review
Goff, Stan: Sex & War. Publisher: Stan Goff at Lulu Press, 2006, ISBN 1-4116-4380-2, 206 pages, $13.66 (paperback)
(Swans - May 22, 2006) Stan Goff was the ultimate warrior, a combat-hardened member of the Rangers, Special Forces, and Delta Force. His conscience proved stronger than his military indoctrination, however, and he quit and turned against the state's institution of terror. Once outside it, he devoted himself to understanding the social and psycho-sexual roots of organized violence. Sex & War is his third and most ambitious book on this topic.
The book is constructed as a mosaic, and that's a difficult art form. Each piece needs to have its own discrete integrity, and it also needs to fit together with the others into a whole.
Stan Goff has mastered this technique. Sex & War is written in riffs and blips, in shards, with lots of edges. Some English comp instructors would give it a D for organization, but this seems the right form for this topic in our fragmented times. When the reader pulls back from the pieces, the overall pattern emerges. The book has two perspectives: in your face and off the wall.
Goff writes often with grace, always with energy, and almost always with clarity, but his zest for theory sometimes propels him into convoluted, abstract sentences that require a second reading to spring forth the meaning, but the backpedaling is worthwhile.
He flashes from vivid descriptions of his military operations, to related stories of the plight of women forced to live under patriarchal militarism, to insightful renderings of the stunted psyches of warriors, to Marxist analysis of the United States' violent drive for hegemony, then he connects us to the work of other writers on these issues, thus extending the discussion out in many directions.
He gives us insider reports on the military mentality that make clear the inevitability of atrocities. Then, in a synaptic leap, he shows that the abuse of women is a similar syndrome but much more widespread throughout society. In his portrait of a Delta Force friend turned rapist, we see how rape in all its varieties is a mainstay of patriarchy as a whole, not just its military branch.
Goff was a medic, among other things, in the Special Forces. Now he emerges as a diagnostician of the pandemic pathology of our culture. And like a good medic, he has suggestions for curing us of this disease of sexualized violence.
Sex & War is both a personal and an analytical tour de force. It's a book that only Stan Goff could write, and I'm very glad he did.
William T. Hathaway's first novel, A World Of Hurt, won a Rinehart Foundation Award, and his second, Summer Now, has just been published by Avatar Publication. It is set now amidst the war on terrorism as a US warrior falls in love with a Sufi Muslim and learns from her an alternative to the military mentality. His writing has been published in over 40 periodicals and he wrote the introduction to America Speaks Out: Collected Essays from Dissident Writers. Hathaway is a former Fulbright professor of English and creative writing at universities in Germany. He lives in Oldenburg, Germany.
Source: Swans Commentary Review Stan Goff's Blog: Feral Scholar
