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rivendellroseJust in case anybody sees it relinked on their news aggregators, let me be the first to say that this little news blurb about how it's anthropological fact that "female-dominated societies are violent" is a piece of idiocy. Now, I am NOT saying that female-dominated societies are peace-loving utopias, because that argument is just as much crap as the one propounded by this article. However, their "evidence" as stated in this little blurb sucks total ass.
Their argument is that the supposedly-peaceful bonobos (once known as pygmy chimpanzees, now recognized as a separate species from common chimps) "have been observed repeatedly hunting and killing other apes in the wild." Okay... and this says what about their society? Apes kill other apes. It's not murder, it doesn't even technically qualify as warfare (which apes also do, but that's an argument for another day), it's food and/or competition - they're different species.
The quote from the actual anthropologist who wrote this study (whose work I have not yet had a chance to read, so I don't know if his conclusions match the total bunk this little website is spouting) is as follows: "In chimpanzees, male-dominance is associated with physical violence, hunting, and meat consumption. By inference, the lack of male dominance and physical violence is often used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos. Our observations suggest that, in contrast to previous assumptions, these behaviors may persist in societies with different social relations." As near as I can tell, what the actual anthropologist is talking about here has nothing to do with the conclusions the website is drawing - all he's saying is that the former interpretation, that female-dominated societies would be peace-loving vegetarian utopias - is bunk. Which, begging his pardon, every anthropologist worth his or her salt already knew. If there's new evidence to add to the argument, it's not being brought out here.
The simple fact is that in a lot of traditional cultures, women have been instrumental in encouraging tribal and extra-familial violence. The classical literature is full of examples - Viking matrons and maidens shaming their sons and lovers into going to war, Roman matrons telling their sons to come home victorious or dead, and so on. The idea of one sex as inherently more peaceful than the other simply doesn't bear out from an overall anthropological perspective. It may be true in some cultures because of societal pressures for women to be retiring models of peaceful virtue, but in others the exact opposite is true.
...I'm going to go do my actual work, now. Ahem.
Their argument is that the supposedly-peaceful bonobos (once known as pygmy chimpanzees, now recognized as a separate species from common chimps) "have been observed repeatedly hunting and killing other apes in the wild." Okay... and this says what about their society? Apes kill other apes. It's not murder, it doesn't even technically qualify as warfare (which apes also do, but that's an argument for another day), it's food and/or competition - they're different species.
The quote from the actual anthropologist who wrote this study (whose work I have not yet had a chance to read, so I don't know if his conclusions match the total bunk this little website is spouting) is as follows: "In chimpanzees, male-dominance is associated with physical violence, hunting, and meat consumption. By inference, the lack of male dominance and physical violence is often used to explain the relative absence of hunting and meat eating in bonobos. Our observations suggest that, in contrast to previous assumptions, these behaviors may persist in societies with different social relations." As near as I can tell, what the actual anthropologist is talking about here has nothing to do with the conclusions the website is drawing - all he's saying is that the former interpretation, that female-dominated societies would be peace-loving vegetarian utopias - is bunk. Which, begging his pardon, every anthropologist worth his or her salt already knew. If there's new evidence to add to the argument, it's not being brought out here.
The simple fact is that in a lot of traditional cultures, women have been instrumental in encouraging tribal and extra-familial violence. The classical literature is full of examples - Viking matrons and maidens shaming their sons and lovers into going to war, Roman matrons telling their sons to come home victorious or dead, and so on. The idea of one sex as inherently more peaceful than the other simply doesn't bear out from an overall anthropological perspective. It may be true in some cultures because of societal pressures for women to be retiring models of peaceful virtue, but in others the exact opposite is true.
...I'm going to go do my actual work, now. Ahem.
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Date: 2008-10-15 05:18 pm (UTC)And also, happy birthday (I take my cue from
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Date: 2008-10-15 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 05:31 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 08:46 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 05:56 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 06:03 pm (UTC)Personally I'd love to believe that they existed, but... from an archaeological standpoint, it seems just as likely that they didn't. :(
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Date: 2008-10-15 09:04 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-15 09:05 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2008-10-17 05:43 pm (UTC)Some animal species mate for life. Others take 20 partners each mating season. Some penguins and flamingos exhibit homosexual traits. A few animals have sex purely for pleasure while others do it just for reproduction. Sometimes the male is much smaller than the female; sometimes he's larger.
And through all of this--WHAT DOES THIS HAVE TO DO WITH US? Even if bonobo females are the most evil psycho bitches that ever lived, that says nothing about female humans, bluebirds, seahorses, or anything else. o_O
Male lions will often kill the young of the pride sired by a different father. Does that mean that single mothers should be afraid of marrying a new man because he's likely to kill her existing babes? Puh-leeze.
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Date: 2008-10-17 09:47 pm (UTC)There's a great book called "Doctor Tatiana's Sex Guide for All Creation" that I think you might enjoy. It goes into a lot of this, highlighting the vast disparity in the way different species go about all their reproductive behaviors, and she's very good at pointing out that a lot of pop-culture concepts about what's "natural" about sex behavior are completely inaccurate to large swathes of the real natural world. All that, and it's funny, too. It's one of my favorite books.