Re: The anxious ADD of the pro-choice. [W:330]
Really? Because bringing a personal insult into a discussion indicates that you recognize that your argument is weak, and so you feel the need to use diversionary tactics such as bringing in my sex life.
If you want to take what I said as an insult, go ahead, but my point was that your biological reduction of the sex lives of others easily suggested an impression of your own as fairly low, and pointing that out could call your attention to the degree to which you reduced people in general.
I know, but this "power" is a very primal version of domination that has little correlation with human society. Think about it. In a tribe of cavemen 50,000 years ago, you've got the men hunting and fighting and the women bearing children and gathering vegetables. Hunting and fighting are dangerous activities, picking berries is not. There likely weren't enough men for the loving monogamous relationships we see today. As a result, polygamy and rape to spread genes. Why do you think some men are willing to totally discard empathy and remorse, two biological emotions that were extended to apply to everyone, in order to have sex
My point, and the point of the book, was that our whole show of civilization is just a facade, a shell rapped around our base impulses which are desperately trying to escape.
And why do you think this occurs? Freud would argue that this is a result of the "id" breaking free of the constraints placed upon it by the ego and superego. While Freudian psychology is outdated in many areas, his basic point about the id is apparent - much of what we do is influenced by our primitive instincts, and our most barbaric acts are these instincts showing themselves.
You have an anthropologically naive view of what life must have been like 50,000 ya. First, in some technologically unsophisticated, non-literate hunter-gatherer societies, women's gathering has provided as much as 60-80% of the tribe's dietary caloric value, and women usually also engage in small game hunting, so they can be the main breadwinners in some societies, though the large game hunting of males is a particularly appreciated contribution, which can also provide skins for warm clothing, bedding, etc. Second, women's lives would also have been dangerous: gathering and small game hunting tend to be done more individually and large predatory species were more abundant; moreover, when men went off to do large game hunting as a group, women would have to defend those who stayed behind.
Third, who says pair bonding was mostly monogamous? But in genuinely polygynous tribal societies, women can want co-wives for help with work more than men can be willing to make the effort to get them, and in genuinely polyandrous ones, polyandry is usually fraternal, so the brothers manage to share a wife without serious conflict. Marriage patterns vary by social and environmental conditions, but people have been living in families for over 50,000 years.
The family arrangements could involve relatives of both the men and women in close quarters in cave dwellings, and the degree of social control would have been much more restrictive given the complex close family networks than in our socially atomized civilization. Furthermore, where gender specialization of primary survival labor occurs, males are as dependent on females as females are on males. Remorselessly rape the primary firekeepers, gatherers, and food preparers? You'd worry about what was put in the food you ate. And women in hunter-gatherer societies would be much better at self-defense and use of weapons than women in our "civilization."
Your portrait of cave life recalls the early 1950s picture. What its missing is the old Colin Turnbull range of society from
The Forest People to
The Mountain People, ethnographies from the later 1950s. When environmental problems bring virtual starvation, a people made of complex family networks can fall apart and it's each for himself or herself, but at that point, who cares about sex? But without such problems, a supposedly primitive society has much tighter social control over its members because they are organized as interdependent for group survival.
Such people can be influenced by base impulses or instincts or exhibit barbarism, but not necessarily more than "civilized" people. History has given us literate nomadic groups like the uber-rapists under Genghis Khan, the non-literate Eskimo, among whom guests would be offered the sexual favors of one's willing spouse as a courtesy, the civilized imperial Japanese who conducted the Rape of Nanjing and put heads on spikes in downtown Singapore and the civilized German Nazis, who experimented on and killed the Jews in ways only people with sophisticated science and refined remorselessness could.
It is not "primitive instincts" and the "id" that necessarily go with "barbarism" and control of instincts by the superego that necessarily goes with "civilization." Human beings, in groups and individually, range in potential from selfishness and baseness to selflessness and refinement, but they can combine them unexpectedly, as when the Nazis made lampshades out of the skin of murdered Jews or when my apartment became almost as filthy as some prehistoric cave dwelling while I did a time-consuming favor for a friend. Human beings are too complicated for your model.
