Ever since reading the book Sex at Dawn, I've been finding tendrils of it's tenets in several unexpected places. I think it's a good indicator of successful scientific writing when a reader easily amalgamates the information, links it to other peripherally related topics and then ponders those disparate topics more thoroughly. The book describes evolution of sex in humans, but the broader narrative is really how hunter-gatherer societies likely differed from our own and the scientific evidence supporting it. Unlike the terribly boring "Guns, Germs and Steel" (which I bought but couldn't even finish! As an interested scientist! I even tried twice!) that deals with many of the same topics (namely how our society changed when we adopted a settled agricultural lifestyle over a hunter-gatherer one), Sex at Dawn uses cheeky prose to address some of our culture's most rigid ideologies - patriarchy, monogamy, human brutishness.
So back to the opening sentence of this post, what tendrils am I speaking about?
The first was this video on human child rearing that I came across on some random comment board somewhere on the internet. I don't agree with everything (or perhaps, even most) of what Gabor Mate says, but he is nonetheless quite compelling. In the embedded video he mentions the old way of child rearing (the whole village) and contrasts that to the nuclear-family-in-a-suburb method we are using now (...guess what he thinks of each):
The second, nebulous instance of "tendrils" was in relation to this advice column on Salon about dealing with patriarchy. It basically admitted that one needs to remove oneself from society in order to get away from patriarchy. I'm a feminist, I meet with a group of female friends at least once a week to talk about women's issues/sex/books/etc and I'm still forming my opinion. It was the way that Sex at Dawn connected the (inevitable?) development of patriarchy with hereditary land ownership that struck a particular chord with me. These are things I think about now as a whole, and sheds a different light on many of the articles, online blog posts and other content I read on a daily basis.
Finally, last week we listened to about 8 hours of RadioLab science podcast while working on the house. The topic was "patient zero" & disease in humans. The case study was HIV, and how it spread from monkeys to chimps to humans, which was amazing in it's own right but it was the visceral description of hunting chimps that really brought me back to Sex at Dawn. Chimps are brutal hunters - they apparently eat their prey alive, searching for the tastiest organs to devour first while the victim screams, getting covered in blood during the whole process (and thereby aiding the spread of monkey-to-chimp SIV). SO. Sex at Dawn goes into compelling detail about how our OWN view of human nature may have been swayed by the early discovery of our closest relatives the chimpanzees (with all their nasty violent tendencies) and the comparatively late discovery of our equally related (but oft ignored) primate relatives the bonobos. Bonobos are peaceful little hippies compared to chimps, and it boggles my mind that how we view the inevitabilility of human brutishness might just correspond to what we thought (for a long time) was the inevitability of primate brutishness. Such fleeting, stochastic factors might have lead to justification for some pretty abhorrent human behaviour. Fascinating, hun?
2 comments:
You should tell all of the unemployed MEN out there how offended you are by their "patriarchy" while you drink your wine with your friends and the men sit in unemployment lines and wonder how soon they'll be homeless.
Grand idea.
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