If you are
a homemaker, you may occasionally experience an “irrational” reaction to having
to do one more bleeping sink of dishes
or prepare yet another meal for your thankless loved ones. I’ve been there more
than once. But what if I told you this reaction might not be so irrational
after all? What if I pointed out that humans are among the very few species on
the planet that live together as a nuclear family? The “moms” of almost every
other animal on Earth, in fact, live long term with either their partner OR
their offspring, but not both. This human condition creates a ton of work for
the parent who is not leaving the house to work - or for the parent trying to
do it all by themselves. How did we get into this situation?
And why in the world would less traditional, same sex couples sign up for this crap?
It’s actually a matter of instinct. Prehistoric
humans who lived as devoted pairs in a tribe were able to successfully rear the
most offspring. As a result, tribes with the most fertile couples had the best
chance of surviving their harsh prehistoric landscape. This all sounds terribly
technical, and frankly pretty boring to read about, so I am going to discuss it
from Claire’s point of view. Claire, as you may know, is what I call the part
of me that still thinks like a cave-dweller, and this is her very important and
interesting story.
When we
first met Claire, she was deciding which tribe to join. She was pretty young when
she left her original tribe - not quite old enough to have a mate - and life
was pretty simple when she decided to follow Jerome. She chose him as her leader
because he seemed more reliable a person than Blaine, the other leader she had
considered following. She was pleased with her decision especially after
hearing stories of Blaine’s erratic behavior from his tribe members at various
watering holes over-time. Blaine was an effective hunter, but he was also an
asshole – he only saw the members of his tribe as resources…as if his followers
only existed to serve his needs. But Jerome was more egalitarian. He was a
great hunter - and could certainly put his tribe members in their place - but
he generally had an even temperament. He thought of his followers as useful but
also as separate individuals. If he had not already had a mate when she joined
his tribe, Claire was pretty sure she would have liked to have been Jerome’s
significant other.
But not
every member of Jerome’s tribe was as predictable as he was. Soon after Claire
had been accepted as a member, she began developing, and single dudes started
paying attention to her as a potential mate. This situation became a major
annoyance. Because she was a human, she did not send off obvious signals about
when she would be interested in having sex. She did not “go into heat” every so
often like her primate cousins did. And once she developed boobs, they were
pretty much a constant signal that she might be ready to make babies – though
the guys who were tailing her did not consciously think about creating
offspring with her. They just wanted to get busy with someone who looked like
she had not done it with some other dude in the recent past - a girl with a
waist that was more narrow than her hips - so they could be reasonably sure
they would end up raising their own offspring (if by chance the sex resulted in
kids.) So as Claire got curvier, the passes made at her became more aggressive.
It totally sucked. But fortunately for Claire, there was something about the
male human body that helped her escape unwanted advances – the accessibility
and sensitivity of a guy’s gonads. While external plumbing was handy for a
male’s primate cousin to conduct quickies in the jungle, it made a human male
vulnerable to temporary paralysis via full-frontal rejection to unwanted sexual
attention. So the more civilized males looked for green-light signals from the
ladies they were courting besides if she was already pregnant
or not. And Claire was careful. She had a very clear-cut idea of the kind of
guy she was willing to partner with.
This brings
us to the most important part of Claire’s story, because her story is actually
the story of natural selection. Females not only hold the power to create human
life inside their bodies, but they control the course of evolution. Girls like
Claire exacted the majority of human hook-ups which decided whose genes would
be passed along to the next generation and whose would not. (If this were not
the case, our species would not have advanced very far.) And since Claire
wanted reliability and commitment from her mate, she was not willing to settle.
She waited and observed the behavior of her potential hubbies. She looked for
characteristics like symmetry and size as signals of health, and strength and
intelligence as signs that her choice would survive the next big hunt and
return to help protect her (and her possible offspring.) In evolutionary terms,
Claire and other females like her were the shit.
But the
fact that she had her choice of mate was a pretty recent development. In
Blaine’s tribe, for example, things were less egalitarian. Blaine ran his
affairs more like the really old days – our speicies' tree-dwelling days when a group’s strongest male had rights to all the ladies and no other male
could participate – unless another male earned the right to replace the
strongest male by beating the strongest male’s ass. But this created a lot of
tension in a group. At some point, the dominant male leaders of cave-dwelling tribes
moved away from a polygamous structure and gradually started using a monogamous
structure – meaning a leader would allow other males to partner with females
who would have formally exclusively partnered with him. Jerome
was one of these forward-thinking tribal leaders, and it made for a more
peaceful way of life. In addition, multiple families shared a campfire, so jobs
like cooking or prepping food were shared by more than one gatherer. And
surprisingly, offspring were not always an asset when living a Paleolithic,
nomadic way of life. Building up and tearing down an encampment of 100 people took an advanced skill-set and was no place for kids. And since sometimes cave-dwellers needed to follow their food around, the ladies were expected to
keep up – even if they were in labor. All the more reason for a cavegirl to
have a strong, dependable partner in her life.
But a lot
of things changed in human culture once we figured out how to farm. For the
first time in history, a group of living things could create food – and
equally importantly, could hoard it. Modern individuals who had the most
food/resources had the most power, and many attempted to control others by using
that power…sometimes without waiting for buy-in. A human female’s “value”
gradually changed from bad-ass gatherer/creator of superior life to “pampered”
baby-maker. And I don’t mean pampered in the literal sense. Because humans no
longer had to move when their food did, families were able to make their own
separate, permanent homes. This must have initially appealed to a former
cave-dweller’s longing for predictability. But when we lived in tribes, we were
less isolated. The campsite workload once shared by multiple families became
the work of individual females in a home. A woman’s main purpose, in addition
to running a household, became making more farmhands. And since the males were
still the strongest, they predictably became the protectors of not only life,
but property. Laws were eventually created to protect property, and wives came
to be classified as part of a property, too. Entire human cultures became based
on asserting power - using, distributing, and at times stealing stored
resources with an aggressive win-lose mantra. (Not unlike Blaine's very old-school tribe.) Other human cultures were content
with the hunter-gather way of life – not controlling the natural order and
still fitting into what was already working. They trusted that their fellow
tribe members had the group’s best interest in mind. These cultures had more of
a win-win credo. They also had win-win leaders, like Jerome - Claire’s choice
for leader and model for her future husband.
Up Next: Claire considers sex in “George Michael was Right (Mostly)”
References
Up Next: Claire considers sex in “George Michael was Right (Mostly)”
References
Beck, J. (2018). The Concept Creep of Emotional Labor: An Interview with Arlie Hoschild. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/
Cheng, J.T. et al. (2012). Two Ways to the Top: Evidence that Domain and Prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to Social Rank and Influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 104, No. 1, 103-125.
Currier, R. L. (2015). Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made us Human and Brought our World to the Brink.Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing, Delaware.
Dunsworth, H. (2018). It is unethical to teach evolution without confronting racism and sexism. The Evolution Institute, Online.
Click on 'Congirl vs Cavegirl' above to see older posts. Comment below.
Cheng, J.T. et al. (2012). Two Ways to the Top: Evidence that Domain and Prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to Social Rank and Influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 104, No. 1, 103-125.
Currier, R. L. (2015). Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made us Human and Brought our World to the Brink.Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing, Delaware.
Dunsworth, H. (2018). It is unethical to teach evolution without confronting racism and sexism. The Evolution Institute, Online.
Click on 'Congirl vs Cavegirl' above to see older posts. Comment below.
© 2019 Penny Fie. All rights reserved.
I think I needed to read this. So much of my past behavior has been unconscious. I’ve been a wayward cave girl. ��
ReplyDeleteI very much enjoyed this read. However, your intro focused on life in tribal or clan form. Claire ended her story with a cultural move toward an individual family life style. This new shift in culture would most likely provide her with the ability to have choice in a mate/leader. Deminishing the historical reference to tribal leader styles for individuals. However highly important for the development of social governments; socialism or capitalism.
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