A Dyke A Broad #28
The unsurprisingly Victorian roots of #archeology and their rotten effect on #women, an annoyed British feminist on judgy Americans, plus a trans woman on "sex work" & more.
Hello from Paris!
Nothing much is happening here except the weather. Which insists on showing us all its very weathery paces. Enjoying the warm sunny day? Look how quickly the temp can drop. Getting used to that? Too bad! Watch it rise again! And how about some giant billowy clouds, after yesterday’s damp and subtle grays…?
In other news I did have a birthday. Which is nothing remarkable either. Happens every year around this time. For a prezzie, the thoroughly vaccinated Girl went to an actual bookstore and bought me an actual book that I’ve been wanting for yonks, Prehistoric Man Is Also a Woman: The History of Women’s Invisibility, “L’homme préhistorique est aussi une femme: Une histoire de l’invisibilité des femmes,” by the anthropologist Marylène Patou Mathis.
The nutshell version is in the first few lines: “No! Prehistoric women did not spend their time sweeping out the cave! Suppose they also painted Lascaux, hunted bison, shaped tools, and were the source of social innovations? New techniques of analyzing archeological remains, recent discoveries of human fossils, and the development of the archeology of gender have called into question a number of established ideas and clichés.”
Before I saw an interview with the author, I hadn’t really thought about this. I mean, it’s a given for me that male and female humans are largely equal in their capacities that don’t rely exclusively on their bodies—like reproduction, or pure strength. A male can’t lactate (unless he has a pituitary tumor or liver failure), but there’s no reason he can’t look after the squealer. No reason either a female can’t be a good tracker, or a good shot with her spear.
I just hadn’t thought so precisely about how those natural history museum dioramas we grew up with which featured some hairy guy bludgeoning a wooly mammoth or inventing fire, while the timid woman, if there is one, cradles a baby— create a foundational story of what it means, not just to be male or female, but to be human with a tendency towards a violent hierarchy embedded from the first.
It was news to me, too, how the whole field of archeology is relatively recent, dating back just to the Victorians who, scattering artifacts like runes, found in them a mirror of their own culture—assigning men the manly roles of hunter, inventer and artist, warrior and explorer. And women, well, women stayed at home looking after the kids and sweeping out the caves in a feebly womanly fashion. Maybe picking a few berries on occasion.
Mathis explains that the timing of the field’s emergence was important, because the Victorian era was when our understanding of women, previously defined by God and the Church as being necessarily subservient to men, (Eve being made from Adam’s rib after all), were now defined by scientists who were only uncovering what Nature decreed. Which was unsurprisingly the same. That we females were second-tier humans, only slightly above our new cousins the apes.
Starting from there, our Victorian pals also used their fossil runes to divine all kinds of ideas about how human society was formed, including the idea that humans (men) were innately violent and competitive, and women were inevitably prey for rapists and slavers. For them, our true nature lurks under a thin veneer of civilization, which is why men must be treated delicately or they will explode. And why women, who are by nature feeble and weak (Thanks, Freud!), must not be strained by things like education or work—unless they are poor, and closer to animals, anyway. In which case, drag them to the nearest sweatshop.
It’s interesting to see how ideas evolve and take root. It’s also demoralizing. Spelled out like that, women are essentially fucked. How can we envision ending discrimination against us, especially anti-woman violence, if most people continue to believe our subjugation is either ordained by God, or natural and inevitable, bound into our DNA?
Key, of course, are books like this which yanks the curtain up and shows that the wizard of Oz is nothing but a funny little man with a funny little mustache playing with smoke and mirrors, and that actual archeological evidence in fact points to early humans being co-operative, and not particularly violent towards each other. The shift came when communities started to get wealthier, and developed hierarchies with their inherent inequalities. Which in turn lead to unpleasantness of all kinds, including cracked skulls.
That reminds me… I haven’t quite finished that book by the Fields sisters, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life, which also goes after our received ideas. This time they show race is, in fact, a construct of racism, not the reverse.
That’s another ground-breaking idea that is both so radical and so obvious. The only question left is how best to dismantle them, racism and misogyny, when the tool we’ve used most for the last couple of decades is identity politics—good for pointing out the problems and rallying the troops, but then what? Sometimes it seems like they re-entrench the discriminations they were meant to address.
So that’s where my head is at. Thinking about how we live in a kind of twilight zone where almost everything we believe is baseless, imaginary, built on artifice, but also has real-world, snow-balling consequences which gives things like race and sex (or gender) an almost mystical, mythical reality after all. No wonder we adore superhero stories, and both fear and desire a kind of Ragnarök. Which is also a really good series on Netflix by the way.
In other news, which I guess is related, I’ve been thinking about how British and American feminism are more than ever pursuing bifurcating paths, the Brits being “materialist,” like the good Marxists many of them were and still are, and “self-actualizing” Americans all about the individual. This requires more reflection on my part, but here is summed up by an angry Brit tired of judgy, finger-wagging Americans. (You should click on this to get the whole thread.)
And since my next rabbit hole may well be socialist feminism, here’s “A Socialist, Feminist, and Transgender Analysis of “Sex Work” by a socialist feminist trans woman and ex-prostitute who is not a fan at all of bourgie women waving the flag of sex work while poor women and immigrant women get shoved into it and pay with their health or their lives.
And while I’m on the subject of prostitution, click on the following to get a Twitter thread with some really interesting facts
In Happy Dyke News…
The Cubbyhole bar reopens in New York!
AND…
The Paris City Council has just approved a motion to name a sporting establishment after Eudy Simelane, a brilliant South African soccer player who was raped and murdered—for being an out and proud dyke.
That’s it for this week.
Disgruntledly yours,