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PaperclipPerfector  4mo ago (text post)   27313 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 30, 2024

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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-theory-that-men-evolved-to-hunt-and-women-evolved-to-gather-is-wrong1/

It's hard to trust Scientific American when they mix communicating real, good science with blatant contradictory nonsense. Their article on Man the Hunter being inaccurate makes great points about how women can be excellent endurance runners, outpacing men over long distances. But then it also has a this paragraph about gender vs sex.

Before getting into the evidence, we need to first talk about sex and gender. "Sex" typically refers to biological sex, which can be defined by myriad characteristics such as chromosomes, hormone levels, gonads, external genitalia and secondary sex characteristics. The terms "female" and "male" are often used in relation to biological sex. "Gender" refers to how an individual identifies—woman, man, nonbinary, and so forth. Much of the scientific literature confuses and conflates female/male and woman/man terminology without providing definitions to clarify what it is referring to and why those terms were chosen. For the purpose of describing anatomical and physiological evidence, most of the literature uses "female" and "male," so we use those words here when discussing the results of such studies. For ethnographic and archaeological evidence, we are attempting to reconstruct social roles, for which the terms "woman" and "man" are usually used. Unfortunately, both these word sets assume a binary, which does not exist biologically, psychologically or socially. Sex and gender both exist as a spectrum, but it is difficult to add that nuance when citing the work of others.

How many pre-historic humans would actually have any seperation between the concept of a "female" and a "woman"? Not to mention they way they actually bring up "women in social roles" doesn't acknowledge their own distinction- you're never going to get a pregnant trans women, but you could get a pregnant trans men. We don't know anything about "gender" as progressives view it in pre-historic societies- we only know about sex, what we observe through things like skeletal remains and inferences from behaviour of human-like animals. The article would've done better to solely use female and male the whole way through and not try to seperate sex and gender.

Later, there's a paragraph about how athletic studies don't do enough research on females that wasn't relevant to anything else in the article. A non-sequitor that wasn't relevant to the article since we do know enough about female biology to determine their relative advantages and weaknesses at physical activities compared to men.

The article does have some good informative material in it.

Important for the purposes of this discussion, estrogen also improves fat metabolism. During exercise, estrogen seems to encourage the body to use stored fat for energy before stored carbohydrates. Fat contains more calories per gram than carbohydrates do, so it burns more slowly, which can delay fatigue during endurance activity. Not only does estrogen encourage fat burning, but it also promotes greater fat storage within muscles—marbling if you will—which makes that fat's energy more readily available. Adiponectin, another hormone that is typically present in higher amounts in females than in males, further enhances fat metabolism while sparing carbohydrates for future use, and it protects muscle from breakdown. Anne Friedlander of Stanford University and her colleagues found that females use as much as 70 percent more fat for energy during exercise than males.

Correspondingly, the muscle fibers of females differ from those of males. Females have more type I, or "slow-twitch," muscle fibers than males do. These fibers generate energy slowly by using fat. They are not all that powerful, but they take a long time to become fatigued. They are the endurance muscle fibers. Males, in contrast, typically have more type II ("fast-twitch") fibers, which use carbohydrates to provide quick energy and a great deal of power but tire rapidly.

Females also tend to have a greater number of estrogen receptors on their skeletal muscles compared with males. This arrangement makes these muscles more sensitive to estrogen, including to its protective effect after physical activity. Estrogen's ability to increase fat metabolism and regulate the body's response to the hormone insulin can help prevent muscle breakdown during intense exercise. Furthermore, estrogen appears to have a stabilizing effect on cell membranes that might otherwise rupture from acute stress brought on by heat and exercise. Ruptured cells release enzymes called creatine kinases, which can damage tissues.

But then later it had this infamous paragraph:

Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports. As an example, some endurance-running events allow the use of professional runners called pacesetters to help competitors perform their best. Men are not permitted to act as pacesetters in many women's events because of the belief that they will make the women "artificially faster," as though women were not actually doing the running themselves."

I had never seen that paragraph in context before. Knowing the context, that they just explained the inherent biological differences, then denied them right after, makes it worse! Right after they broke down in detail how females have hormones and muscles built for stamina over power! The reason why male pacesetters aren't allowed for women's endurance running is because the male pacesetter would be setting the pace too fast for the women, who are built for going a longer distance at a slower pace than men, as they had literally just explained earlier in the article.

They also downplay the evidence that "Man the Hunter" was accurate, but at least they include it.

Males living in the Upper Paleolithic—the cultural period between roughly 45,000 and 10,000 years ago, when early modern humans entered Europe—do show higher rates of a set of injuries to the right elbow region known as thrower's elbow, which could mean they were more likely than females to throw spears. But it does not mean women were not hunting, because this period is also when people invented the bow and arrow, hunting nets and fishing hooks. These more sophisticated tools enabled humans to catch a wider variety of animals; they were also easier on hunters' bodies. Women may have favored hunting tactics that took advantage of these new technologies.

In conclusion, their own conclusion perfectly demonstrates their own double think:

Female physiology is optimized for exactly the kinds of endurance activities involved in procuring game animals for food. And ancient women and men appear to have engaged in the same foraging activities rather than upholding a sex-based division of labor. It was the arrival some 10,000 years ago of agriculture, with its intensive investment in land, population growth and resultant clumped resources, that led to rigid gendered roles and economic inequality.

They claim at the same time that females are biologically optimized to perform certain activities better than males, but also that females and males performed the exact same activities in an egalitarian society.

A lot of old anthropology like the original "Man the Hunter" article this article is a response to, is flawed. But at the same time, modern anthropology is just as if not more biased than the anthropology of the 60s. Their intro has a line saying,

Bystanders might be left wondering whether portrayals of women hunters are trying to make the past more inclusive than it really was—or whether Man the Hunter-style assumptions about the past are attempts to project sexism backward in time.

The reason why bystanders are so confused is because that's exactly what organizations like Scientific American are trying to do. If they really were just trying to correct a mistaken historical record, bystanders who don't do deep dives into human pre-history could safely trust pop sci and wouldn't be so skeptical. But when Scientific American blatantly tries to push an agenda, bystanders rightly grow skeptical.

Others have already discussed the merits of this article as a piece of science communication (or rather, lack thereof). If anything, it is proof positive of how little time progressive science writers spend around pregnant women. I will point out that the article provides receipts that are useful to counter another kind of propaganda.

TERFs like to engage in a particular kind of revisionist history that claims that men in women's sports are yet another insidious ploy by the patriarchy to keep women down. When confronted with the argument that men in women's sports are simply the natural outcome of decades of feminist propaganda claiming that any and all biological differences that disfavour women are the product of a misogynistic culture and nothing else, they employ the usual gaslighting: Nobody thinks that, you are delusional, it didn't happen and if it did that's a good thing.

To have the Scientific American authoritatively state that "Inequity between male and female athletes is a result not of inherent biological differences between the sexes but of biases in how they are treated in sports." is quite the trump in that discussion. It will be countered by No-True-Scotsmanning of course, but that's the way of things.

TERFs like to engage in a particular kind of revisionist history that claims that men in women's sports are yet another insidious ploy by the patriarchy to keep women down. When confronted with the argument that men in women's sports are simply the natural outcome of decades of feminist propaganda claiming that any and all biological differences that disfavour women are the product of a misogynistic culture and nothing else, they employ the usual gaslighting: Nobody thinks that, you are delusional, it didn't happen and if it did that's a good thing.

I don't necessarily think this is a good characterization of TERFs.

There is not just one "feminism" - it is a bunch of different ideologies with different starting premises, and different conclusions about what is to be done. While there's variety within so-called "TERFs", many of the people who get called TERFs that I'm familiar with online tend to be of the opinion that "the thing that makes you a woman is the combination of being a biological female in a world run by biological men, with all that entails." (AKA difference feminism as opposed to equality feminism.)

Now, I do acknowledge that TERFs themselves are a diverse group, and if I had to break down the TERF pie based on what I've read and seen, I would imagine that the grouping consists of some combination of the following:

  • "Old school" difference feminists who were fighting for feminism in the 1960's through 1980's, and whose beliefs just haven't moved on since then. (Think Janice Raymond and her book The Transsexual Empire.) Some of these are the only actual "radical feminists" in the TERF camp.
  • Modern difference feminists who often started as postmodern feminists or equality feminists, and who were "burned" in some way by those movements. (Either they had a string of blackpilling relationships with men that soured them on mainstream liberal feminism, or they were cancelled or ostracized and then ended up in a bubble that made their views more "radical" over time.)
  • A small handful of social conservatives LARPing as feminists. Could be grifters, could be an example of horseshoe theory.
  • A small handful of postmodern feminists, who, as /u/RococoBasilica suggests, believe almost everything progressive gender-focused feminism believes, but who arrive at the conclusion that transwomen are another form of patriarchal male oppression.

Maybe this is a subset of your first group, but also transhumanist weirdos like Shulamith Firestone. That's what radical feminist used to mean, but like almost any term that gets politicized, it's been mangled so often so many different ways that nowadays it basically means whatever the speaker wants it to, like Carrol's Humpty Dumpty.

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