RadFeminists are making it difficult for the Democratic party to fight the GOP's attack on women

[RainDog]

340. the view of female as submissive is cultural

the argument about submission in sex is cultural - patriarchal - it accepts that what is simply is rather than acknowledging the cultural construct that created it - and those constructs are religion and property - and, with property, primogeniture.

Primogeniture itself was a construct of religiously derived cultural views of females - before we had scientific knowledge, people assumed the genesis story was true (some, idiotically, in spite of all biological evidence that denies this, still do.) The belief in the homunculus was part of this religious belief in the "closer to god" view of males and the "closer to dirt" view of females.

what we know from our primate ancestors is that both males and females lived in communities of non-related and related same and different sex homo erectus, etc. - about 100 to 150 in a community. hunter gatherer societies that still exist demonstrate far greater egalitarian relationships than those societies that hoard goods and property and assign those goods to individuals rather than the community. some are matrilineal some are patrilineal - we don't have just one cultural model from the past - and those that are matrilineal have greater sexual freedom for females because, again, property or goods are not dispensed by a male who controls a female's sexuality - the male that is important for children is the uncle, not the father. that doesn't mean it's not culturally possible to have mother/father/children egalitarian relationships - but this is tied to economic parity and legal parity - not anatomy.

because of male anatomy, we know females were not monogamous (the size and shape of the penis and scrotum.) because of our lack of sexual dimorphism, we know humans did not evolve with males keeping harems (tho, culturally, that did evolve - after the fact - and with laws that circumscribed women's rights based, again, upon religions.)

our closest genetic relatives, common and bonobo chimpanzees, have two very different cultures that seem to have evolved based upon the level of competition for food - not among the community, but with other mammals.

both species of chimpanzees have females who are sexually promiscuous. one is matrilineal. the other is patrilineal. the species (bonobo) with a matrilineal community structure have members of that community having sex in various combinations all the time - not simply when a female is fertile. They are bisexual - all of them. Sex is used to deal with community tension rather than smacking the shit out of one another.

common chimps - females have sex with many males - but only when they are fertile and the goal of this sexual activity is not just to conceive but to confuse paternity to insure an offspring will not be attacked by jealous males who kill offspring to bring females back into estrus (because that female would begin to ovulate again, soon, with the end of breastfeeding.)

....which makes me wonder if this is where some of the deep seated weirdness about females breastfeeding in public comes from, but who knows.

we don't know exactly what sort of community proto-humans had - but we do know, again, that it was more egalitarian than what came after and it was not one in which females were subjugated by male desire - females had agency to choose sexual liasons.

this is also why human females do not display when they are fertile - because females had sex for pleasure - not just for reproduction.

I hope the Pope's head is exploding about now. Humans did not evolve in a way that they had sex merely for procreation.

because humans, like bonobos, have females who engage in sexual activity beyond the times when they are fertile, it's a pretty good guess that females and males used sex for social cohesion - whether it was the bond between one man and a woman, or a woman and her friends and neighbors... the point, the major point - is that females did not evolve as sexually submissive.