{"id":5245,"date":"2014-08-08T09:00:48","date_gmt":"2014-08-08T14:00:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=5245"},"modified":"2014-07-29T01:02:37","modified_gmt":"2014-07-29T06:02:37","slug":"caveman-courtship","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2014\/08\/08\/caveman-courtship\/","title":{"rendered":"Caveman Courtship and its Mythology"},"content":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday.<\/em><\/p>\n

Somewhere we got the idea that\u00a0“caveman” courtship involved a man clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her by the hair to his cave where he would, presumably, copulate with an unconscious or otherwise unwilling woman.\u00a0 This idea, as these two products show, is generally considered good for a chuckle.<\/p>\n

\"1\"<\/a>
\n<\/a>(glasses<\/a> sent in by Cole S.H.)<\/p>\n

\"2\"<\/a>
\n(tray for sale at the Rose Bowl Flea Market, photo by me)<\/p>\n

Of course, we have little to no knowledge of the social lives of early humans.\u00a0 First, long buried bodies and archeological dig sites simply can’t tell us much about how men and women interacted.\u00a0 Second, to speculate\u00a0about early humans\u00a0based on humans today is to project the present onto the past.\u00a0 To speculate about early humans based on today’s apes is (at least) as equally suspect. \u00a0Ape behavior varies tremendously anyway, even among our closest cousins. Which type do we choose? \u00a0The violent and hierarchical chimp or the peace-loving Bonobos who solve all social strife with sex?<\/p>\n

In other words, the caveman-club-‘er-over-the-head-and-drag-her-by-the-hair narrative is pure mythology. The mythology, nonetheless, affirms the idea that men are naturally coercive and violent by suggesting that our most natural and socially-uncorrupted male selves will engage in this sort of behavior. \u00a0Rape, that is.<\/p>\n

The idea also affirms the teleological<\/a> idea that society is constantly improving and, therefore, getting closer and closer to ideals like gender equality.\u00a0 If it’s true that “we’re getting better all the time,” then we assume that, whatever things are like now, they must have been worse before.\u00a0 And however things were then, they must have been even worse before that.\u00a0 And so on and so forth until we get all the way back to the clubbing caveman.<\/p>\n

Thinking like this may encourage us to stop working to make society better because we assume it will get better anyway (and certainly won’t get worse). \u00a0Instead of thinking about what things like gender equality and subordination might look like, then, we just assume that equality is, well, what-we-have-now and subordination is what-they-had-then.\u00a0 This makes it less possible to fight against the subordination that exists now<\/em> by making it difficult to recognize.<\/p>\n

The idea of caveman courtship, in other words, seems silly and innocuous. \u00a0But it actually helps to naturalize men’s aggressive pursuit of sex with women. \u00a0And that naturalization is part of why it is so difficult to disrupt rape myths and stop rape.<\/p>\n

Originally posted in 2008 and cross-posted at Ms. magazine<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Flashback Friday. Somewhere we got the idea that\u00a0“caveman” courtship involved a man clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her by the hair to his cave where he would, presumably, copulate with an unconscious or otherwise unwilling woman.\u00a0 This idea, as these two products show, is generally considered good for a chuckle. (glasses sent […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":63488,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[12508,55,2095,2102,2087,2090,253,701,293,133],"class_list":["post-5245","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-activismsocial-movements","tag-gender","tag-gender-feminismactivism","tag-gender-history","tag-gender-masculinity","tag-gender-violence","tag-history","tag-modernprimitive","tag-social-construction","tag-violence"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2014\/08\/12.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5245"}],"version-history":[{"count":20,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":63487,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5245\/revisions\/63487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/63488"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5245"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5245"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5245"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}