Piltdown Woman

"When nothing seems certain or safe

Let it burn through you"

 

Garbage - Run Baby Run

 

 

Weighing the potential of a minor horror game, I skipped professional critics (i.e. paid advertisers) toward user reviews, one of which gave me a fit of the giggles.

"The game allows you to turn off nudity so you don't have to see the main character, Matt's, penis. It's a nice penis. You can pee with it. As a woman that was a fun experience as I haven't done that before."

Wait-wait-wait... there are chicks out there who think a penis can be nice? Why was I not notified of this! For over a decade now the unfairer sex's party line has held male genitals so disgustingly, unfathomably, Lovecraftianly horrific that a mere glimpse will scar any woman for life and justify any and all retribution. Above all, we're not permitted to admit that even if such gonadophobic women do exist, they must by necessity be extreme outliers. We would not exist today if H. habilis damsels had a habit of vanishing into the underbrush at the sight of a twig and berries.

So why kow-tow to such blatant fictions about human nature, based solely on anecdotal noise?

 

You've heard of Margaret Mead - if not in an anthropology course then in endless "documentaries" in which heartfelt, misty-eyed narrators inform you of her discovery of innocent tribal societies unspoilt by our modern decadence, living in peaceable, ecstatic sexual freedom under matriarchal or egalitarian rule. Doth it not bloweth thine mind? Does it not make you want to restructure the entire world by their august example? One supposed tribe's men who "spent their time primping" like peacocks while the women did all important work calls back to me from both PBS and Intro to Anthro / Intro to Soc.

If my college courses made any mention of controversy surrounding her work, I sure as hell can't remember it past the simplistic, glorified image we were fed of Mead as a striding colossus sweeping aside the entrenched male opposition. Even in later years any mention of criticism has been restricted to the apparently infamous Derek Freeman calling into question her most famous work, Coming of Age in Samoa, painting the all-too-convenient image of A MAN attacking the noble lady's virtues, seemingly baseless and shiftless in his mysterious motivations and machinations. Oooohh, spooooky!

 

At least and at last, Wikipedia, at some point in recent years, has deigned to mention that Mead's claims of free gender roles, not only in Samoa but at the other end of Melanesia in New Guinea, rather repeatedly failed to stand up to scrutiny. And not by A MAN or THE MAN but by names like Deborah and Jessie the born-again feminist, and not yesterday in a YouTube comment section, but starting from '74 and '81 based on data going back to 1850. Not that you would've heard such countervailing evidence from my professors in the 2000s, as it fails to puff up the fable of Mighty Maggie braving the exotic perils of worlds beyond to retrieve the holy grail of 100% all-natural matriarchy and return to strike down evil kings.

These're ANTHROPOLOGISTS. You'd think if anyone should know the pitfalls of mythopoesis... but that's the point isn't it? She didn't need to be right or wrong, just politically convenient. The over-riding criterion for inclusion in feminist hagiography has always been a willingness to bloody men's noses, no matter the justification.

 

But the real kicker isn't the factual validity of Mead's work, or that of her ilk. It's the interpretation, the undue importance heaped on such exotic ends-of-the-Earth anecdotes by puritan audiences drooling after tales of nubile young sun-kissed nymphs sleeping their way around their villages (sounds tantalizing from either angle, don't it?) Assume all of Mead's observations flawless, her interpretation of each village's social system immaculate.

So. Freakin'. What?

At which point was the old truism "the exception proves the rule" overturned? How do those five or ten or three hundred examples stack against... the world? Y'know, like, the whole rest of it, thousands of years of history, tens of thousands spanning prehistoric relics, the myriad villages and traditions all over the globe independently arriving at the same miserable routine from Hokkaido to Sicily to Colorado to the Kalahari: family ties, headsmen>kings>emperors, male warriors squabbling over reproductive access, all that jazz. It's called an evolutionarily stable strategy. How fanatical a denialism does it take to declare nearly all observable human behavior void... because we found this mosaic of women tossing a medicine ball.

 

And isn't it odd that social constructionists, who so flatly deny natural inclinations, always latch so eagerly onto such noble savage anecdotes of alternate natural states as self-justification? Well, of course the point was never self-actualization but We Can Break You.

 

Outliers do not disprove a data set. They have their place within it. Phenotypic variation exists. There will always be some same-sex attraction, some promiscuity, some female warriors, some males who'd rather type rants about anthropology courses than go out conquering the world (nobody you know.) In fact, if you want to see men primping, just hang around Belmont&Broadway in Chicago and smell the hair gel... but then we're not talking about male/female relations anymore, are we? (So maybe the supposed constraint lies not with men but with the demands placed by women on men, but let's leave that for some other time.) The exception simply does not carry the same weight as the rule. If meteorologists acted like social scientists, our cities would consist of nothing but impenetrable, uninterrupted forests of lightning rods.