Posts Tagged ‘gender equality’
are Australian Aboriginal societies egalitarian?
In years gone by I’ve heard talk of hunter-gatherer societies in terms of the males out in the field competing with each other in bringing down the biggest game, and increasing their status thereby, while the women gathered their nuts and berries collectively while gossiping about the menfolk. Or something along those lines. I’ve also heard talk that ‘hunter-gatherer’ is an obsolete term – this from fellow Australians, who point out that fish and seafood, for example, both from rivers and the sea, was an essential part of Aboriginal diets, and that generally their ways of obtaining food were too diverse and complex to be so categorised.
Of course, what interests me about the term is whether there was a more or less clear division of labour in Aboriginal society, along gender lines. And for that matter, was Aboriginal society ever One Thing, bearing in mind that, according to AI (never lies), there were over 250 Aboriginal languages and 800 dialects at the time of white colonisation.
All this is really about patriarchy, matriarchy, or whether there can be (or has been) a general ‘equal but different’ social structure in human society. I’ve noted that of all the social primates, leaving aside H sapiens, none are egalitarian. They’re hierarchical, and mostly male dominant. AI tells me that only bonobos, ring-tail lemurs, mouse lemurs and some macaques swing the other way. That’s why I prefer to promote matriarchy rather than egalitarianism, or even ‘feminism’. But of course referring to other primates gets me nowhere in my quest, because we humans believe that we’re so far, far above and beyond other primates that comparisons really are odorous.
Unfortunately, between chimps/bonobos and H sapiens – the gap in time being filled by extinct species – H neanderthalensis, the Denisovans (scientific designation still under dispute), H rudolfensis, H floresiensis, H erectus, H habilis, H heidelbergensis, H naledi, H antecessor, and then Australopithecus africanus, A anamensis, A afarensis, A garhi, A sediba, and then Paranthropus boisei, P aethiopicus, P robustus, to name a few, and who knows how many more will be identified, mis-identified, merged or split in the future – that gap in time is somewhere between 8 and 6 million years, plenty of time for us to mysteriously develop our super-smart superiority. And of course, in respect of every one of these aforementioned species, and the more to be discovered, this question of matriarchy, patriarchy or ‘equal but different’ is currently without answer, and probably always will be. It’s exhausting just to think about.
So getting back to pre-colonial Australia and its Aboriginal societies, which is a complicated enough subject in itself, it seems that ‘separate but equal’ seems mostly true, though it doesn’t mean entirely separate, obviously, nor entirely equal. I’m far from being particularly knowledgeable in this field, but I know that many groups have separate ‘men’s business’ and ‘women’s business’, not just in terms of activity but in terms of group knowledge and history of country.
It just occurred to me to check for patrilocality in Aboriginal societies, because I visited the Tiwi Islands a few years ago and was told, in a public talk given there by an Islander, that this was their practice. It seems that most Aboriginal societies practised patrilocality, and they made the most of that practice, with men’s knowledge focussing on ‘country’ and history, while women brought kinship and trade connections between groups, but the variations to this practice were complex and multifactorial. When I think of the many female Aboriginal activists that I’ve been made aware of over the past fifty years, I can’t help but feel that Aboriginal women in general haven’t been backward in coming forward regarding their rights and their treatment, both within white society and their own. So I would conclude, more or less hesitantly, that women were generally treated as equal but different in Aboriginal societies.
The reference is to a work I’ve only just discovered, which gives more than a few glimpses of the complexities involved.
Reference
the thirty percent rule, or whatever, revisited: bonobos, anyone?
cold land, warm heart
So I wrote about the 30% female empowerment rule, or target, put forward by some UN body, some time ago, and it’s time for another look, given the extreme macho activities of recent years, such as Putin’s war on Ukraine and ‘the West’, Xi’s relentlessly anti-female government, the horrors of Hamas and the Israeli government, MAGA brutalist absurdity, and the anti-female governments of – well, they’re too numerous to mention. Clearly, all Islamic governments are male-dominant, as are most South American and African governments, given their largely patriarchal societies….
I of course am more interested in a 70% rule, or a bonobo humanity, a world turned upside-down. Not likely, but wouldn’t it be interesting if some ‘small’ but advanced nation, like Australia, or New Zealand, or Taiwan, or one of the Scandinavian nations, performed such an experiment. After all, bonobos are a small community, and they’re putting the human world to shame, or they would be, if it wasn’t for the dolorous fact that we’re too far up ourselves to pay attention.
I’m always a little reluctant to address the fact that bonobo female dominance, and their less aggressive, more caring and sharing social behaviour, is mediated largely through kissing and-a hugging and mutual masturbation. Sex is always a touchy subject – even if it’s only yourself you’re touching. The Catholic Church, with its all-celibate, all-and-ever male clergy, continues to lead the way, in the WEIRD world, in terms of misbegotten attitudes to sexuality. Not only does it have a five-tiered edifice of celibate male bureaucratic authority (Popes above cardinals above archbishops above bishops above priests), but it insists upon promoting a ‘virgin mother’, essentially sexless, voiceless, compliant and devoid of any identifiable character, as the ideal woman. And yet, this disastrously misogynist organisation is holding up better than its protestant offshoots, a situation sorely in need of analysis in some future blog pieces.
Another setback for women’s rights and sexual freedom comes from the world’s largest Moslem nation, Indonesia, which I seem to recall once prided itself on being a ‘moderate’ nation by comparison to those of the Middle East. In late 2022 its parliament unanimously passed a law criminalising sex outside marriage throughout its numerous islands and cultures, which seems to me as dumb as banning ice-cream and lemonade. Not very bonobo. Which makes me wonder – how the fuck did Indonesia become Islamic? It’s a long way from Mecca, methinks. But that’s a story for another day.
Today I’m writing about advancing on the paltry 30% rule, or target, which I seem to remember was part of the UN platform… but never mind, must’ve been a dream. The UN has 17 ‘sustainable development goals’, and goal 5 is ‘gender equality’. An admirable goal of course, but I should remind everyone that in the mammalian world there’s very little gender equality. Mostly, when it comes to social mammals, it’s male dominance, while some mammals, like bonobos, squirrel monkeys, marmosets, tamarins and lemurs (amongst primates) are female-dominant. That’s one of many reasons why I favour female dominance over equality. The main reason, though, is that female dominance is generally not simply an inversion of male dominance – it tends to create a very different kind of social structure, one that, it seems to me, is worth striving to achieve (this is most obviously the case for bonobo culture, and it’s significant that they are our closest living relatives, along with chimps).
But of course we’re a long way from anything like equality, never mind female dominance. Here’s some commentary from the UN website on goal 5:
On average, women in the labor market still earn 23 percent less than men globally and women spend about three times as many hours in unpaid domestic and care work as men.
Sexual violence and exploitation, the unequal division of unpaid care and domestic work, and discrimination in public office, all remain huge barriers. All these areas of inequality have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic: there has been a surge in reports of sexual violence, women have taken on more care work due to school closures, and 70% of health and social workers globally are women.
At the current rate, it will take an estimated 300 years to end child marriage, 286 years to close gaps in legal protection and remove discriminatory laws, 140 years for women to be represented equally in positions of power and leadership in the workplace, and 47 years to achieve equal representation in national parliaments.
Fortunately, like most people, I plan to live forever, so it’ll be interesting to see if we can do better than those estimates. However, I’m man enough to admit that I’d rather not see it happen through men killing each other off in wars, a scenario that seems a bit real these days. One thing we can try to be optimistic about, I suppose, is that ‘current rates’ are never static. But it’s hard to deny that the current scenario is gloomier than it has been for a while. The UN’s future scenario re the pace of change is more or less duplicated by that of the World Economic Forum, which estimates that it will take ‘131 years to close the [gender] gap’. In a report published 6 months ago, it made these points:
- Gender equality recovers to pre-pandemic levels but pace of progress has slowed
- Gender parity in economic participation and opportunity drops from 2022 levels, while political empowerment makes only slight gains
- Iceland remains the most gender-equal country, followed by Norway, Finland, New Zealand and Sweden
Australia, by the way, isn’t in the top ten, and neither is the USA nor Canada, nations we tend to compare ourselves with. It’s a surprise to me that Nicaragua and Namibia are 7th and 8th, which says much about my own biases.
Of course, the real problem is our very long historical tradition of patriarchy. Going back several hundred years, before the scientific revolution initiated by the likes of Kepler, Galileo and Newton, the proto-WEIRD world, of Jews, Christians and Moslems, all worshipped essentially the same ultra-male god, and the Christians, the most numerous of the three sects, raised up, as their ideal female, a ‘virgin’ mother, sexless, voiceless, and symbolically passive. Even before that, the ancient Greeks, Romans and Mesopotamians forced their women under veils and kept them enclosed, but the Abrahamic religions cemented patriarchy and faith together into a kind of powerful ontological force that only gradually began to crack apart with the scientific and philosophical enlightenment of the 17th and 18th centuries – though this enlightenment has been largely ignored by the Islamic world.
Science is the intellectual force that religion is struggling to contend with. I’ve written, years ago, about the falsity of Steven Jay Gould’s concept of NOMA (non-overlapping magisteria), a rather pretentious term arguing for completely different spheres of concern for science and religion. Galileo, that devoutly Christian scientific pioneer, might’ve approved, but he almost lost his life because the then Pope, Urban VIII, and the Bible itself, differed with him on celestial matters. And even today, if you care to press the requisite keys on your device, you’ll be flooded with creationist propaganda and other anti-science ‘Christianity’.
Anyway, that’s why I encourage anyone, including myself, to consider the science of primatology, our human heritage, and our primate cousins the bonobos and chimps, and the lessons to be learned.
References
https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/gender-equality/
https://karger.com/fpr/article/91/1/48/144017/Female-Power-A-New-Framework-for-Understanding#
https://www.weforum.org/press/2023/06/gender-equality-is-stalling-131-years-to-close-the-gap/
https://bonobohumanity.blog/wp-admin/post.php?post=9879&action=edit
a bonobo world 29: the 30% rule and Myanmar