Hey women

[Deep13]

511. Your objection is a normal part of human behavior.

Well, I don't know you well enough to comment on your life, but for humans generally, I think a case can be made that we are a lot like apes. Apart from the obvious physical needs of food, warmth, and water, we live in structured societies like bonobos, gorillas, and chimps. We define ourselves based on relationships to others. We are all concerned about our position in society. For chimps, that is asserted by physical strength, for us it tends to be by personal wealth. And therein is another similarity. The dominant pair or individual has the ability to provide for the troupe, and for us generosity is a measure of social standing. Most people want to reproduce and to facilitate that we live in family groups. Like social apes, raising children is a group effort. We are largely organized to provide for our needs, especially food and water, but for us it now includes things that are not essential for existence. We defend our territory like apes and our entire military complex can be seen as an outgrowth of male chimps fights for control.

None of this justifies exploitation of one sex by the other, of course, and hopefully rationality and what we call our positive instincts will win out in the end. Still, I have to wonder to what degree our concern about equality is a product of our specific cultural norms. Writings by women from other times or from other places during our own times tend not to question their own status quo. For example no one in Muslim world really cared at all about veiling until Westerners made it an issue. I suspect modern concern over the issue of female agency is the result of modern times being unusually oppressive. (There is no need to fight against something that does not exist). We now know, for instance that European and Middle Eastern women of the early and high Middle Ages had a lot more personal agency and rights than European women of the 19th c. had. As a historian, I am more interested in finding explanations for attitudes and feelings than I am in trying to justify them.