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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   35474 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 30, 2023

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Women by and large did not have stressful work in addition to duties of mother/wife, or if they did, they would have wet nurses and hired help.

No. What about wet nurses and hired help? Did they have no stressful work, or did they have wet nurses or hired help of their own? Cooking and laundry and spinning used to occupy a lot of women's time.

Once a woman had a child, family would usually come to minimize the stress at the home.

Yes. Living in an extended family is much easier. Judging by the ages of her children, she has been a full-time mom for five years. It's impossible to do this alone and lead an "instagrammable" life at the same time. At some point you have to say, "fuck it, I don't care if your pants are covered in dry mud, they are dry and that's all that matters" or "fuck it, we're eating frozen lasagna today. Again" or "fuck your colic, Imma put the cot outside and listen to some relaxing music instead" or "fuck it, I ain't ironing anything ever again". If you have a sufficiently neurotic personality that you can't do this, you will break down sooner or later.

It’s easy to be confused about the etiology of stress. Wet nursing is not a stressful occupation. Generally speaking, when humans are doing tasks that they evolved to do, the task isn’t mentally taxing. (There was a study last month about how loggers have high life satisfaction, one of the highest of any profession. This is weird until you realize, “wait, men were designed to cut out trees and be in forests, of course they do.) A young woman who previously had a child nursing a child is possibly the least stressful task a person can do. Wet nursing was a regulated and solid profession for these women. Some of the oldest contracts we have are Babylonian contracts specifying nursing protocol for wet nurses. Remember that some women are born with what we moderns call humongous mommy milkers, and that breastfeeding significantly reduces their risk of breast cancer. Someone like Abigail Shapiro was designed by God to nurse babies, not to be an eh opera singer, and because she didn’t nurse babies she had to cut her boobas off (which is a crime against God). Women are literally designed to be around babies and there are a number of studies showing extensive health benefits for woman-child contact. Of course, when you raise every girl from 6-21 in a sterile classroom and tell them they should be a girlboss, maybe it’s stressful for them.

Spinning is a flow state activity. Not only is it not stressful, it is the very antagonist of stress. Cooking and cleaning are not stressful when you were raised to do this at 6 and mastered it at 10. Plug in “cleaning inspo” to YouTube and behold a bountiful gender imbalance. Then check out the gender ratio of whoever watches the great British bake-off.

But yeah, hired help would certainly have stressful lives. They were the bottom rung of society. Today we just feed them GMO slop and over-medicate them and whatever.

A young woman who previously had a child nursing a child is possibly the least stressful task a person can do. Wet nursing was a regulated and solid profession for these women.

Yes, but they still had to cook and wash and clean and do the rest of chores. It's not like they could scroll TikTok all day between the feedings.

Generally speaking, when humans are doing tasks that they evolved to do, the task isn’t mentally taxing

... no? Both "strenuous exercise", "difficult intellectual work", and "complex conflicts" are things people evolved to do, yet are 'mentally taxing'. Most efficient use of resources usually involves almost exhausting them sometimes (otherwise you use more!). This is like saying 'during evolution, human life was always good', forgetting the prevalence of disease / parasites.

You’re right that moderate exercise is something humans evolved to do, which is why it shown to be healthy in a number of ways and protective of stress.

Semiregular strenuous exercise is something humans evolved to do, and it's still mentally taxing - no matter how fit you are, you'll be tired and a lot less able to do difficult intellectual stuff after a long game of / session at the gym. I'm not saying it's bad, just that it's 'mentally taxing'. Evolution involved playing a lot of different tradeoffs against each other, not just a bunch of unreserved goods in all contexts.

The kinds of exercise humans evolved to do were long walks or jogs as a group to obtain a reward. The Hunter gatherer tribes still existent would walk to follow herds, and there are some that jog out to tire an animal (humans are the best at endurance jogging, not sprinting). You then have the exercise of chopping wood or obtaining dwelling materials.

Modern strenuous exercise attempts to be cost efficient but humans didn’t quite evolve for “sprinting for no reason” or “repeatedly lifting up extremely heavy thing while laying down”. When you take a fat American and you place him in a European city where he has to walk 30 minutes to obtain the buffalo meat cappuccino, this is generally considered relaxing and is why a lot of people are promoting walkable cities. There are studies on this. Importantly, humans evolved to not exercise when there is no salient appetizing reward.

Human males often evolved to fight, I suppose. I think men would be a lot more relaxed if they got to punch their boss.

But I’m at a loss why you think humans evolved to do difficult intellectual work. That’s the one thing we do that we are least evolved to do, and so it requires tremendous social incentive, decades of training, and the decidedly non-evolutionary skill of reading to accomplish. We did evolve to learn complex physical skills through imitating older members of the community, but that is much different.

I agree that most exercise was light over long durations, and the fact they're light + long-duration means they don't cause one to be that tired, but that coexisted with less-frequent shorter periods of strenuous exercise, which do cause exhaustion. Things like fighting other humans, moving heavy things.

We did "evolve to do difficult intellectual work". Things like planning for human conflicts or making boats are quite complicated.

While I have no doubt that most women would rather hold babies than make spreadsheets, and that mothering is probably much less stressful for women who are used to being around children requiring active care, being incredibly busy all the time(and just mathematically most women cannot have hired help, at most 50% of them can, and that’s assuming women do literally nothing else) is actually really stressful.

Of course. Women today are stressed because they have to work stressful jobs in addition to being mothers, in addition to being informed citizens. But it’s not busyness per se, it’s disparate tasks, non-mastered tasks, and ennui. The Amish fill up their day with busyness in excess of the girlboss cohort, and yet they have limited stress. This is because many of their tasks fit the Csikzentmihalyi model of optimal flow (among other reasons)

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S1049386707000369

If you have a sufficiently neurotic personality that you can't do this, you will break down sooner or later.

I wish I had a meme of a woman thinking she can handle a situation, with a giant looming monster behind her labelled "Statistically likely to be highly neurotic". And I doubt their statistical likelihood of being highly agreeable helps either. That peer pressure to fit in with all your "friends" instagrammable life is a bitch and a half.

These counterfactuals of "Yeah, if women just weren't neurotic, their lives would be a breeze" make me want to go "And while we're playing in fantasy land, what if I earned $1m every time I jacked off?"

But they are what they are. They appear to have a biology purpose designed to extract care for children out of them with a big ass stick of neuroticism, and not much carrot to go along with it. It's no wonder when Dworkin style feminist began exploring the human condition with respect to women, they began reacting with horror and disgust to childbearing and families.

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