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Notes -
CisHajnal Europe (from about 1000 AD) less than most*, and we are the most successful civilisation by far. The socially optimal amount of male control over female sexuality may well be higher than what we have now, but it is lower than what arises by default in the vast majority of societies.
One of the sources of confusion here is that people misunderstand the 1950's social model as a free-market outcome. Women working outside the home was and is fundamental to modernity (the first factory jobs were pink-collar) and the societies that better accommodated it outcompeted the ones that did not - notably on the battlefield in the World Wars. The 1950's housewife - i.e. the idea that respectable working class married women should not work outside the home - is a result of post-war America (and post-war Europe once it had repaired the war damage) deciding that is both rich enough relative to historical expectations and egalitarian enough to prioritise leisure over wealth accumulation. The whole point of the social model was to give each respectable family access to 40 hours a week of paid work at above-market wages, but not the ability to get ahead by working harder than that. Because if families can compete for social status by sending mum to work, empirically they will. Famously, this is what drove Elizabeth Warren to anti-feminist heresy in The Two Income Trap.
* Hoe-based agriculture produces the least patriarchal societies, plow-based agriculture produces more patriarchal societies, and animal herding produces even more patriarchal societies. Hunter-gatherer societies are all over the place. Premodern cisHajnal Europe is comfortably the least patriarchal plow-based society.
Hoes are the earliest form of agriculture. Does that mean that the first farmers where less patriarchal? I think Ive heard the opposite.
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Hoe-based societies are notoriously find only in places where heavy labor is not required for farming, and usually there are also good conditions. This results in men having the free time to engage in their favorite past-time - fighting to steal land and women from other men, and getting women to feed them, too. Men aren't pulling their weights because women can be free.
It's precisely one of the reasons why they are not really going anywhere and are never getting anywhere, and why the patriarchal, cattle-herding Tutsi, are, at the moment, invading a neighboring country 30x their size and winning.
Have, you, per chance, ever read any of these awfully boring 19th century novel written by women, mostly griping about marriage and so on ?
That’s not patriarchy, for the same reason that 10,000 British didn’t rule over 300 million Indians or a few million Israelis didn’t hold back the combined Arab armies due to differences in patriarchal values. That’s just IQ.
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I wonder why that is. (Unironically.)
As I understand it, livestock on the hoof is a lot easier to steal than the types of wealth you see in crop-growing societies. This means that men are a lot more valuable to the tribe, because they can guard cattle or steal the other tribe's cattle. But I'm not an expert.
Damn. That didn't even occur to me.
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Physically harder to wrangle cattle than till the earth with a hoe or drive a plow?
Man, if they're tilling the earth with them, I'd think that would be considered more patriarchal.
Depends, are you tilling the earth using a hoe or alongside her?
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Makes sense.
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Regarding your last paragraph, I don’t think that’s a meaningful anthropological distinction. I’m sure there would be plenty of plowing in any truly hoe-based society.
It's certainly a distinction used by academic anthropologists, which given the epistemic standards of anthropology is only weak evidence that it is useful. Yudkowskian rationalists who read books by antrhopologists have said that this particular concept is non-BS, which is rather stronger evidence.
The broader point - that some, but not a majority of, sub-Saharan African cultures fit a pattern where farming is considered pink-collar work, men do very little useful work for the tribe, and women enjoy more sexual freedom than they did in almost any other premodern culture is well-attested by a wide range of Western commentators including journalists, travel memoirists, British imperialists, aid workers etc. as well as academic anthropologists .
I know, I was just trying to make a puerile joke.
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