The ancestral environment of females

The collagen in old bones of humans shows stable isotope levels similar to that of the old bones of wolves and hyenas, indicating that humans ate at the same trophic level as wolves and hyenas or higher, that is to say, the same position in the food chain or higher, which implies that almost all the food was meat, which implies hunting mattered and gathering did not matter, which in turn implies that women were kept like pets for their sexual, domestic, and reproductive services, that women were incapable of supporting themselves and were entirely dependent on fathers, brothers, and husbands, not only for protection, but also for food.

Women are psychologically adapted to this environment, an environment where they are property, perhaps much loved property, and if they are virtuous and lucky, more loved than a good hunting dog.  Such psychological adaption leads to disturbingly counterproductive and self destructive behavior in the more favorable present environment.

Women are ill suited to make decisions about their own lives, because in the ancestral environment they did not get to make such decisions.

Thus, until women psychologically adapt to an environment where upper body physical strength and capacity for violence is less important, which will require centuries and perhaps millenia of evolution, emancipation and universal suffrage will remain entirely unworkable and impractical ideals.

Show me a marriage where the housework is equally and fairly shared, rather than being divided into man’s work (taking out the garbage, unplugging the drains, mowing the lawn, and barbecuing meat) and woman’s work (almost everything else)and I will show you a marriage where the husband sleeps on the couch, and once in a week or so the wife’s lover drops in to bang her on the main bed, rough her up a bit, take her money, and leave a mess for the husband to clean up.

This is the Darwinist equivalent to the Judeo-Christian proposition that God created women to be a help meet for man

I first slept with my wife when she was very young, and we are still married much later, so I think I can speak impartially about other people’s divorces:  Divorce is almost always the woman’s fault, always the woman’s fault that I know of, and most of the time even though the wife grossly misbehaves, nagging, backseat driving, and speaking back to her husband, it is the wife who foolishly and self destructively initiates the divorce.  If you give a woman equality, she will take supremacy, and if she takes supremacy, she will walk all over you and then completely lose interest in you and walk right out.  In people’s personal individual sexual lives, it is clear that equality between men and woman  does not work out, that it reliably leads to complete disaster.  If you treat your wife as equal, you will lose everything, and your life will be completely destroyed.  Equality is not in a woman’s nature, and this applies every bit as much to women educated in elite institutions and full of feminist ideology.

Contrary to what I claimed above about ancient bones, a feminist anthropologist has recently reported that among currently living South African Bushmen, gathered food accounted for about 80 percent of the calories and the culture was thus quite egalitarian

However, the old hunting and gathering lifestyle no longer exists, due in part to the fact that these days bush meat is obtained using rifles, which procedure for obtaining bush meat she excluded from consideration, thus I am inclined to doubt that it is possible for an anthropologist to observe the old hunter gatherer lifestyle, though doubtless easy to observe what she wishes the hunter gatherer lifestyle should have been.  If she really did manage to find some genuine hunter gatherers, whose game really had not been eradicated by men with rifles, they were in a very marginal environment, thus likely to be atypical of our ancestors.

Tasmanian aboriginals would trade a good woman for a good hunting dog, at the ratio of one dog for one woman, and no one would think to consult either the dog or the woman.  While modern reports on (no longer actually existent) hunter gatherers tend to support feminism, the old reports from the times when it was a major and important lifestyle, from the times when hunter gatherer lands were first being settled, depict women being treated like dogs.

The PUA doctrine on shit tests is the equivalent of the no longer fashionable eighteenth century Judeo Christian proposition that women are sinful, easily tempted, and thus apt to fail in their duty to be help meet for man and therefore need supervision and restraint.

Mental differences:

Women are  better than males at reading people.  The average women also has more verbal skills than the average man.  She should: the average woman talks several times as much as the average man.  They are also better at finding stuff than men.

Women, however are not smart in that they lack logic, and not smart in that they lack emotional wisdom, making extremely stupid choices, being unduly moved by immediate and momentary pressures.  In these areas of life they vary from not too bright to dumb as a rock.  Just as almost every man, as near all of them as makes no difference, is stronger than almost every women, as near all of them as makes no difference, there are quite important areas of life, such as logic, where most men smarter than almost every women.  Even though women have more emotional intelligence than men in reading people, they have markedly less emotional intelligence than men in managing people, thus tend to be ill suited for management positions.  There have been some very great female political leaders, such as Queen Elizabeth the first, Margaret Thatcher, and Golda Meir, but there have been no great female business leaders.

That IQ tests are gender normed should tell you that if they were not gender normed, women would test out less bright on average, as expected from the fact that their brains are smaller on average relative to body size.  If it was men that would test out less bright, the tests would not be gender normed.

effect of status and intelligence:

Today, among both men and woman, the longer the education, the fewer children that they wind up having, and the more elite and high status the education, the less the students are apt to behave sexually.

However, among men, the more successful the career, the higher the number of children. Optimal fertility tends to be associated with a shorter and less elite education, but a more successful career.

In women, but not in men, having a successful career depresses fertility, and results in pathological, perverse and self destructive sexual behavior. She has no more sex than a lower status woman, perhaps less, but what sex she does have is more immoral and self destructive, apt to hurt both herself and any relationships she might have.  (Personal observation, I cannot provide any scientific studies to support this claim, and many people disagree with this claim)  Studies do show that successful women have low reproduction rate, and successful men a high reproduction rate, indicating that successful women are not marrying successful men, consistent with personal observation.

However a women with an elite education who at a reasonably young age marries a male with a somewhat more elite education than she has, a man who earns more money that she does, even if only moderately more, is relatively well behaved compared to lower class women, in part because she is less sexually active, and, unlike the career woman, a lot less sexually active with criminals, musicians, sportsmen, bosses, and high status legal clients. (Personal observation, controversial and not universally accepted)

Where there is large variance in male reproduction rates, female preference for assholes (what used to be called cads) is adaptive for the individual female.  She produces sons who will also be cads. (Darwinian theory)

society and civilizational collapse:

Reproduction is a prisoners dilemma problem.  If the female is loyal, but the male defects, the male is better off.  If the male is loyal, but the female defects, the female is better off.  If both defect, both are worse off, if both loyal, both are better off.

If the female preference for cads is allowed free reign, we get a defect/defect equilibrium, resulting in more male energy being applied to male/male sexual competition, and less male energy being applied to offspring and posterity.

The solution, of course, is familial enforcement of a cooperate/cooperate equilibrium, with shotgun marriage being enforced on males, and chastity on daughters.  Societies and social classes where the cooperate/cooperate equilibrium is enforced out reproduce and out invest societies that practice the defect/defect equilibrium, thus societies, and social classes in a defect/defect equilibrium disappear from history.

To illustrate the proposition that women are apt to make bad decisions, I will link to the reality show character Kate Gosselin,  who evidently failed to notice that the father of eight children is irreplaceable.  Kate Gosselin became a shrew and harridan who made life a living hell for the father of her children, and was videotaped doing so.

In a typical divorce (personal observation, not universally accepted) the wife spends an immense amount of effort and emotional energy into making life a living hell for the only man who will ever love her children, and should he fail to leave under his own power, perhaps fearing that his children will wind up in the hands of a stepfather who will at best treat his children as enemies, at worst treat them as vermin, murder his sons and hate fuck his daughters, then his wife proceeds to destroy her own life and her children’s lives by divorcing him, despite the fact that raising children single handed does not work, and trying to have a love life with your children by another man hanging around works considerably worse.  Stepfathers are the natural enemies of stepchildren.  (Personal observation, universally accepted – and almost universally denied with pious hypocrisy).

It is glaringly obvious, yet somehow never mentioned, that most divorced women under forty with children fail to maintain a safe environment for their children.

The solution proposed by men’s rights activists, equal custody, is a completely ludicrous solution to the problem that women are breaking up their families irresponsibly and self destructively:  You can see the Katie Gosslin divorce on reality television.  Most divorces are pretty much like that.

Men’s rights activist sites piously whine that men are not equal to
women, and should be – but we tried equality in 1850.  It was a complete disaster and things have steadily gotten worse since then.  As the pick up artist sites point out, women are not equal to men by nature, and treating them as equal leads to bad outcomes.

The reason men’s rights activist sites are so whiny is that they accept the progressive ideology of equalism, and in their own lives they treated women as equals, and of course got treated like shit.  Women are very nice and have all the virtues attributed to women provided you keep them in line, but not otherwise.

Once again, I cite the case of reality television person Kate Gossylyn, who self destructively ditched her husband because that was the only way to hurt him more than she was hurting him already, and was then astonished to find that no one else wanted to father her eight children.

The normal cause of divorce is that female psychology is maladapted to the modern environment.

In the ancestral environment, if a woman could get away with treating a man as an equal, let along an inferior, let alone bully him, then it was not a man, and so did not exist sexually or as a source of support.

In the ancestral environment, women were dangerously powerless, so natural selection made them always want to have more power, just as it made us always want to have more sugar, so that we are inclined to eat more sugar than is good for us, and women inclined to take more power than is good for them.

So women always push for more, and even if they have equality or supremacy, do not consciously realize it.  Since they keep on pushing regardless, they rationalize that they cannot have equality or power. But if they succeed in getting equality or supremacy over their husbands, they will leave their husbands.

Pick up artists argue that to pick up women, you have to treat them badly.  Well, I am no expert on picking up women, but I do know that to keep a woman, however you may acquire her, you have to treat her as a subordinate, a much loved pet, but however much you love that pet, you cannot afford to put up with too much shit from that pet.

Roissy argues that women want a master.  This true and untrue.  It is untrue in that they certainly do not believe they want a master.  It is untrue in that they will struggle with alarming determination to get the upper hand over their husbands.  It is true in that should they succeed in getting what they think they want, they will ditch their husband without the slightest thought of the disastrous effect on themselves and their children.

In the considerable majority of divorces, all of them that I know of, the cause of divorce was that  the husband was too nice a guy to his wife, and therefore allowed her equality.  Of course you should be nice to your wife, just as you should be nice to your dog, but if you allow her equality, she will walk right over you and walk right out, and will use the legal system to destroy you and destroy her own children. (Personal observation, controversial and not universally accepted)

The reason Men’s Rights Activists are so angry and bitter is that they tried treating women as equals in their personal sexual lives, and, of course, suffered a total and complete disaster.  Women just cannot be treated as equals.  At best, you can get away with spoiling and indulging them like kittens.  They are grossly maladapted to equality.

In the standard romantic story written for women, the love interest is a monstrous jerk or impossibly powerful male.  However, he winds up twisted around the protagonists little finger, that being standard female wish fulfillment – but when the female’s wish is completely fulfilled, the readers lose interest in the male, so the writer saves this fulfillment to the very end of the story.

In romances targeted at women, the asshole is invariably tamed, and frequently winds up twisted around the women’s little finger, indicating that women want power over men. However, we observe that the romantic love interest never winds up mastered by the woman until the final curtain, consistent with the PUA contention that when the badboy is tamed, when the woman gets what she thinks she wants, the woman forgets about him and loses sexual interest

In “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”, when Spike was the big bad of the series arc, it seemed that most of the audience were women hoping to see Spike with his shirt off.  When Spike wound up wrapped around Buffy’s little finger, the audience, the writers, and in due course Buffy herself, completely forgot that he existed.  Various Spike related plot threads were left hanging in mid air, much like the father of Kate Gosselin’s children.

Women want to wrap the man around their little finger, but they don’t want a man that they can wrap around their little finger.  They want what they do not want, and they don’t want what they do want.

Nice guy love interests do exist in female romances, but is in a position of power over the protagonist:  The protagonist’s family gave her or sold her to the nice guy or some such improbable plot, as with the protagonist of “Red String” and her considerably older nice guy boyfriend.

What the protagonist and her twelve year old readers want, is not to have the power to get what they want, but rather that a man takes possession of them and gives them what they really want like it or not.

How marriage was destroyed:

We see heavy handed state intervention in marriage starting in the
nineteenth century.

Before then, middle class families enforced marriage on terms violently unfavorable to women, which, according to contemporary accounts seems to have balanced supply and demand, or if there was an imbalance, it was that any respectable eligible bachelor was in extremely high demand by families with virginal daughters who were getting too old, “old” in this context meaning approaching twenty.

This resulted in the practice of unloading problem middle class females (for example suspected of lack of virginity, or getting horribly elderly, for example twenty three) on industrious upwardly mobile members of the working class, and compensating the husband by using influence to advance his career.

Aristocratic marriage, however, was in bad shape, with massive family breakdown.  Theoretically the same norms applied to aristocratic marriage as to middle class marriage, but in practice these norms were massively violated and spectacularly disregarded, with frequent failure of aristocrats to reproduce.

In 1912, marriage was already violently asymmetric in favor of women, in that the duties of the husband were legally enforceable and enforced, but the duties of the wife were not.

Logically one would expect that this would lead to high demand for marriage by women and low demand by men, but since women are maladapted to a high status role, since they do not desire a relationship in which they have power, even though they contradictorily desire power within a relationship, it leads to low demand by both.

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39 Responses to “The ancestral environment of females”

  1. […] converged on similar values. Values converged because cultures that implemented these values had a competitive advantage over their neighbors and became civilizations. Cultures that did not implement them failed and are […]

  2. […] a help meet for man. And if the blind forces of natural selection shaped women, they shaped women to function in a role profoundly unequal to her husband and her father, for in the ancestral environment, women were completely dependent upon men, resulting a female […]

  3. steve says:

    In Paraguay where i moved to from Oregon as a youngster, and left as a young man , men there still hunted with dogs and clubs . The dogs were used to circle a beast (usually a wild boar ) and the man had to run in and club the beast to kill it and keep from losing to many of his precious dogs, i never saw or heard of any women trying to voluteer to do this feat, and i myslf didn’t want to try it. Women stayed at home with the children and cooked the pan bread for us to eat while on the hunt, also even fruit was seasonal in the jungle..

  4. Shenpen says:

    A note on methodology: there is little point in studying modern-age hunter-gatherers like Tasmanians: the very fact that they stayed H – G while everybody else moved on suggests either they or their environment is really, really different.

    So, yeah, we have to study old bones. We don’t have anything else.

  5. Innocent bystander says:

    Good book on the Bushmen and source of my information “The Old Way: A Story of the First People” by Elizabeth Marshall Thomas

  6. […] a help meet for man. And if the blind forces of natural selection shaped women, they shaped women to function in a role profoundly unequal to her husband and her father, for in the ancestral environment, women were completely dependent upon men, resulting a female […]

  7. […] a help meet for man, And if the blind forces of natural selection shaped women, they shaped women to function in a role profoundly unequal to her husband and her father, for in the ancestral environment, women were completely dependent upon men, resulting a female […]

  8. Mitchell Porter says:

    “Studies do show that successful women have low reproduction rate, and successful men a high reproduction rate”

    Nine months versus thirty seconds. Reproduction is a little more time-consuming for the woman!

  9. Zach says:

    Jim, if your wife was a virgin before she fucked you, then, “studies show” she will be loyal and with you forever, on avg. On the contrary, Women that fuck a lot before they get married – those Women tend to wander, as Men do, and to their detriment as well.

    I’m guessing you’re familiar with this stuff, as you seem to read more books than a librarian.

  10. none says:

    i guess it just goes to show jim. you really are a master troll, or an amazing reactionary.
    up against the wall, you’ll be. up against the wall.

    or maybe we’ll save the bullet and just hang you.

    ps look up the band poison girls and their song ‘offending article’.

  11. TGGP says:

    I had also heard the stat about most calories coming from gathering rather than hunting, but not from anyone identified as feminist. I would REALLY like a link to the study Jim refers to showing a mostly meat diet.

  12. RS says:

    > That IQ tests are gender normed should tell you that if they were not gender normed, women would test out stupid on average

    Are you saying women have a lower average IQ such that the real IQ of White women is like 90, if that of White men is 100?

    The question of a gender difference in IQ means has been examined, with one researcher claiming it is as high as (I think) 6 points. I believe Jensen considers the difference to be zero (or close to zero) — but considers men to have a larger variance, which is something all authorities I know agree to.

    • RS says:

      Oh, you mean it is gender-normed during the making of the test? If so, Kanazawa agrees with you, he says this is a major issue.

      However, he seems to imply that methods were developed that can resolve this issue… and that the result was that the difference is 3-5 points. So it’s not huge, may be pretty small (3.0) or may be fairly significant (5.0). Though even at a difference of 5.0 it would be hard to call women ‘dumb’ by men’s standards, I guess you could say ‘tending toward dumb’.

      […]Not wanting to discover, or a priori denying, any sex differences in intelligence, psychometricians simply deleted from the standardized IQ tests any item on which the performance of men and women differed.

      More recently, however, especially since the turn of the millennium, there have been an increasing number of studies that cast doubt on this politically correct conclusion. Studies with large representative national samples from Spain, Denmark, and the United States, as well as meta-analyses of a large number of published studies throughout the world, all conclude that men on average are slightly but significantly more intelligent than women, by about 3-5 IQ points. So this has now become the new (albeit tentative) consensus in intelligence research.

      • RS says:

        So maybe what I was saying in my first post is wrong, or more likely just outdated. I didn’t know of this Kanazawa article until just now, nor had I heard of any of the stuff it talks about. Maybe Jensen now accepts this new consensus (namely 3-5 points difference) on the basis of the new work on the question.

        • jim says:

          Three to five points is not much, but I think this may reflect the high weighting the tests gives to verbal facility, and may well reflect that the larger the difference one notices, the more trouble one gets into. Observe a woman trying to park, or turn a car around in a narrow space, the difference between men and women is, to my casual and perhaps biased observation, at least a standard deviation, probably more. The difference with common engineering tasks is comparable.

          On the other hand, we subconsciously take for granted fluent and complex speech from women. Our reaction to verbal fluency by a woman as compared to verbal fluency by a man shows that subconsciously everyone knows that women are better at words, which is not a trivial skill.

          • Steve Johnson says:

            Personal observation on the same matter.

            In a large office building where the elevator banks have elevators on both sides (facing one another) and the exit in the lobby is on one side of the elevator bank all men always know which direction the exit is and immediately turn that direction when getting out of the elevator. All women are confused and look in both directions before knowing whether to walk left or right.

    • jim says:

      On reflection “stupid” is too strong. I have amended it to “less bright on average”

  13. Candide III says:

    @Alrenous: I second the request for a link to the collagen study. Sure looks interesting.

    @_B_: no, the easiest hole in that study is the fact that there has been no bush meat worthy of the name in Australia for, like, 30000 years. Because humans ate all of it.

    Women want to wrap the man around their little finger, but they don’t want a man that they can wrap around their little finger. They want what they do not want, and they don’t want what they do want.

    Ah, this went down good!

  14. Alrenous says:

    That collagen point is seriously damning. Can I get a source? I’m worried I’m believing it because I’m biased. I already refer to the tribes as hunter or farmer, though that’s partly justified because I’ve never heard of a farmer-forager tribe, so that latter is simply redundant as a name.

    Being inclined to eat sugar isn’t natural, however. I think you get socialized into it. (I’d need a baby to try some things on.) If you pay attention to your body’s feedback after eating sugar, you will find that the pleasure is shallow and tainted. The taint is the body telling you straight up not to eat it. A similar test is just downing a handful of sugar, to take advantage of the dose-response curve on the taint-feeling feedback.

    I stopped eating bread and waffles before I found out about paleo. I would have stopped eating cereal as well, for exactly the same reason, but I didn’t reason far enough to get that starch==sugar and that the alternative was fat, so I didn’t have any replacements.

    Most fruit gives me the exact same ‘don’t eat too much of that’ feedback as bread and waffles. After I discover this, I’m told most fruit is basically candy bars from a tree.

    “consistent with the PUA contention that when the badboy is tamed, when the woman gets what she thinks she wants, the woman forgets about him and loses sexual interest”

    An amusing parallel with men regarding variety. When the badboy gets what he says he wants with the chaste girl, he loses sexual interest.
    Apparently for women, being treated respectfully is the exact equivalent of a one-night stand.

    I wonder if there’s a male sexual equivalent of the tamed shrew?

    • jim says:

      Perhaps you are better adapted to the modern environment than I am. I have to make some effort to eat a paleo diet.

      • Alrenous says:

        If you get addicted to things in childhood, you grow around it as you develop and the addiction sets in permanently, roughly when the personality etc. is being locked in. Similar to how a tree will grow round a metal pole and keeps the hole even if the pole is removed.

        It could be adaptation, or it could be a childhood maiming. It’s one of the things I’d need a baby (and ethical indulgences) to test.

    • KK says:

      “If you pay attention to your body’s feedback after eating sugar, you will find that the pleasure is shallow and tainted.”

      This is true, but while the pleasure is fleeting, it is still hard to resist for us in general. Leave an open bag of sweets lying around, and I’ll nibble a bite every now and then even though the pleasurable feeling gets more and more diluted. It’s easier just to not buy anything sweet or starchy in the first place rather than to have to actively resist the temptation when it’s lying around.

      I’m trying to think of an analogy on how women could adapt their power games for modern environment along those lines. The Christian context can forms a proven framework to subdue that impulse, and that seems to work for some people. But that’s not actually enforced in any church these days from what I gather. Some self-aware women seem to independently seek a submissive position in relation to her husband, but those are very rare cases.

      An ‘unnatural’ (like you noted in many places, submission is not what women want, even though they want it in the end) behavior like this can likely be only adapted through an ‘outsourced morality’, which I consider to be one of the main reasons for religion in general. Women aren’t the only ones whose hindbrain impulses are harmful for building and maintaining civilization.

      • KK says:

        To riff on that half-baked analogy a bit more, the female condition definitely does face an uphill struggle in a modern world. Making a choice to not test for her man’s dominance and power is something she must make in theory infinite times per day. It’s not like going to a grocery store twice a week, making a choice to not pick up a lollipop, and then going on with your day. A woman can’t just ‘choose the right guy’ and be done with it. The choice to go against her biological programming is omnipresent.

      • jim says:

        Some self-aware women seem to independently seek a submissive position in relation to her husband, but those are very rare cases.

        According to the game blogs, all women seek a man that can dominate them, which allegedly expert opinion agrees with my inexpert observation. However my observation is that all woman make it as hard for a man to dominate them as they can, which in today’s environment is hard indeed.

        A woman, to the best of my observation almost any woman, will compliantly obey orders under circumstances where a man would bristle, but, unlike a man, rather than then letting the relationship settle, will continually push back just a bit in subtle ways, maintaining a permanent quiet pressure for more power.

        Men tend to quickly sort out their status hierarchy and then get on with other matters. Women will test you continually hour after hour, day after day, month after month, year after year. In this sense, they are very non compliant.

        Observe that in Mormonism and Orthodox Judaism, where God decisively backs the husband’s authority, the fertility rate is way high for unmixed marriages, and people are getting married at an age that is not unreasonably late.

        Mormonism, however, seems to be succumbing to progressivism, which will lead to, perhaps already has led to, a split analogous to that in Judaism, where the progressive Jews have a very low fertility rate and delayed marriage, and the orthodox a remarkably high fertility rate, and marriage at a more appropriate age.

        I am not sure what is happening with Islam. Possibly polygamy reduces fertility. The Philippines, which has old fashioned Christian marriage has a significantly higher fertility rate than Saudi Arabia, which has old fashioned Muslim marriage, while Iran, which has progressive Muslim marriage, has a collapsing fertility rate.

        Ideally men should have ample confidence in paternity, thus maximizing male investment in offspring and posterity thus women should be virgins at marriage, in which case a reasonable age of marriage is probably fourteen or fifteen for girls. Women, of course, should have confidence in their husband’s probity and provider characteristics so nineteen or twenty is a reasonable age of marriage for males. All existent societies fall short of marriage customs that maximize male investment in posterity.

        • Alrenous says:

          “Possibly polygamy reduces fertility. “

          It does, they did studies. It has some dude’s name on it. Let’s see if I can dredge it up…

          A ha! http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2011/feb/27/mormon-polygamists-fruit-fly

          It’s called the Bateman effect.

          • jim says:

            It makes sense that both lack of paternal certainty reduces investment in posterity, because men do not care to invest, and polygamy reduces investment in posterity, because most men do not get to invest.

            So societies, classes, and religions with monogamy and chastity will always win, and societies without it will always disappear. The Georgians believed that you cannot have monogamy and chastity without patriarchy. The Victorians attempted to prove them wrong, but in the end, proved them right.

          • Alrenous says:

            “So societies, classes, and religions with monogamy and chastity will always win, and societies without it will always disappear.”

            I’ve been wondering why monogamy is so prevalent when almost every other line of evidence shows that humans naturally gravitate away from it. And then here you just lay it out.

            I should do a post on patriarchy, because I find the truth is orthogonal to most analysis, like this one. But honestly I have more post ideas than time. Short version: patriarchy is just a fact. Since men physically overpower women, anything women do is at the sufferance of men. Feminism only works because the men who oppose it are fought off by men who supported it. Women cannot stop ‘sexism,’ only men can stop other men.

            Feminism refutes itself during any success.

          • arj says:

            Does polygamy has a eugenic effect due to high quality men siring more offspring while those bottom were completely excluded? Is it sufficient to offset its negative effects?

            • jim says:

              In theory it should, but the ruling elite in Muslim nations, the typical guy with four wives, seems to me to be grossly inferior.

              I conjecture that theocracy tends to select for true believers, and belief in bullshit is negatively correlated with desirable traits. Even if the original prophet, and the original companions of the prophet are really smart guys, things go downhill.

          • arj says:

            What about non-theocratic polygamous society? Up until the 20th century, wealthy Chinese men tend to have several wives. If there is a eugenic effect from polygamy, is the benefit more than enough offset the Bateman effect?

            • jim says:

              That may well explain the higher east asian IQ. While the mandarinate exams were not all that effective in selecting the best, they cannot have been entirely ineffective.

  15. Matthew says:

    This reads like an excerpt from Faulkner, and I mean that as a compliment. The digression on social homogeneity in The Reivers was an eye opener.

  16. _B_ says:

    >Contrary to what I claimed above about ancient bones, a feminist anthropologist has recently reported that among currently living South African Bushmen, gathered food accounted for about 80 percent of the calories and the culture was thus quite egalitarian

    The easiest hole to shoot in this study is that calories != protein and fat, which are the crucial macronutrients to human long-term survival and reproduction. I’m not sure about long-term protein storage, but assuming that the trend of women producing 80% of the calories is historically accurate it would explain the Bushmen’s prevalence of steatopygia-strategic reserves of fat for women to build up during the season of plenty, when men bring in massive amounts of fat and protein (rainy season?) and use the rest of the time for fetal development and childrearing.

    • Innocent bystanderq says:

      Amonfg the bshmen, a men who could not hunt would die. Other than close relatives, no-one would feed him gathered food so he would not get enough calories. He would not be able to marry. A man would have to prove his hunting abaility before marrying (bride service).

      As others have pointed out, the gathered foods are low in protein and insufficient to support life. Reflecting the importance of meat, the chief is the one who divides up the meat.

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