Beyond the Myth of Male Supremacy

Hey everybody, it's Craig here. As you may recall last week, I mentioned Daniel Quinn's book called Ishmael and the way he kind of revealed to all of us that our creation story, the story we've always been told about the Big Bang all the way up to the birth of homo sapiens, is a myth, suggesting that the whole point of the entire cosmic story, billions and billions of universes, more stars than there are grains of sand, we believe the whole point of all of that was just so humanity could appear on this one tiny little planet. 

And the way we tell that story implies that that's how we believe it all fits together with the purpose of all of it, actually is namely: us.  Now, of course, when you explicitly think about it, that way, it really makes no sense. And we can begin to check our arrogance a little bit. And start to put ourselves in our proper place in the universe.  Well in the sequel to Ishmael, which is called The Story of B, Quinn does it again. This time he takes the image we have of ourselves as humans and changes the way I've thought about it, and probably the way you've thought about it for your whole life, in the span of a single paragraph. 

Okay, you ready to have your mind altered? Here it goes, this is the quote it's towards the end of the book. He says: 

We are not humanity. We forgot that we're only a single culture and came to think of ourselves as humanity itself. If we were humanity itself. Then all of our destructiveness would belong, not to one misguided culture, but to humanity itself.  If we were humanity itself, then the fact that our culture is the enemy of life on this planet would mean that humanity itself is the enemy of life on this planet. But we're not humanity. We're just one culture out of hundreds of thousands that have lived their vision of this planet and sung their songs. If it were humanity that needed changing. Then we'd be out of luck. But it isn't humanity that needs changing.  It's just...us. 

Now, that's a pretty amazing paragraph. I mean, yes, it's worrisome, right? You can argue about it, but it's pretty clear that humanity is not necessarily doing everything it can to support the rest of life on our planet. And. We do seem to have a destructive bent to us. But in the end. I think it's ultimately optimistic saying that yes, we have gotten to this point. But, we can change.

So as we launch into this week's episode, Once again, remember that David Graber quote that I'm going to return to over and over again on this show.  He says,  "The great, hidden secret of the world is that it's something that we made. And can just as easily make differently."  And this week's episode, I'm going to begin the process of making a different world. 

Hopefully at least a little bit. By attacking one of the major elements of our particular human culture. The one that we made. And one that we can make differently.  Now just as a heads up, some of you are not going to be too happy with the mind change I'm going to suggest. But many of you are going to be quite happy with it.  This is not a new suggestion by any means. But one that's been fought over for quite a while though in sort of terms of human history it's been just the blink of an eye. I'm hoping, by applying a little ungaslighting thinking, we can begin to remove this driver of much of our culture's destructiveness And to begin a new world that is more in line with our genuine humanity, more in sync with nature, and more likely to survive and thrive.  To find out more about this particular conflict that is really at the core of this human culture of ours. And how we might begin to move beyond it.

Please stay tuned.

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I'm just going to lay it on the line. The characteristic of our culture. Remember just our particular human culture, not humanity itself, which has been a fundamental force since we started engaging in what Dan Quinn calls totalitarian agriculture -- because that's clearly what it was and still is -- about 10,000 years ago was a new and novel differentiation of power. That is, male supremacy. 

Now, lots of people have lots of strong opinions. About male supremacy. But it gets clearer every day that there is virtually no good solid, empirical evidence for male supremacy.  And there is a lot of bad evidence that tends to hang on and keep it alive within our culture. 

As far as I'm concerned, the only real evidence you need that our human culture is male supremacist is that. To this day. Most people believe. That. In our pre-agricultural hunter-gatherer society,  Men alone were the hunters.  

The evidence is clear that that is simply not the case. Now you could probably find a newspaper article today. That suggests we have a genetic lineage of men being hunters and women being gathers. But what if I were to tell you that archeologists unearthed a 10,000-year-old remains of a woman who was buried with a projectile point that she was a hunter. Well, that evidence was found. In 1963.  And promptly, misinterpreted and forgotten.   And we went on our Merry way, believing that men were hunters and women were gatherers. Now there has been incontrovertible evidence that the entire culture was more egalitarian. Since about 2018 and even still, the old narrative persists, although it's changing bit by bit. But the only evidence you really need  is in our world, Where we know so much about our ancient past, about 10 stint galaxies. About the genome. That, to this day, we're still barely able to recognize the empirical fact that women were hunters, and to begin to factor that in to our constructed culture. 

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So at this point after humans themselves had existed for millions of years, our particular culture, which has only been around for about 10,000 years, has swallowed up just about every other culture that ever existed, including the ones where men and women were much more equal, and women were obviously hunters. 

Now, our culture feels incredibly successful, right?  After all, we've destroyed almost every other culture that ever existed. And, plus, we have space travel and we have the Internet and we have podcasts.  But at the same time, We're dancing awfully close to f***ing it all up, along with every other organism that we share the planet with, so you got to kind of factor in the good with the bad, when you think about just how sustainably successful our male-dominated human culture has actually been.

And who knows what the world would look like if we hadn't squandered the talents of half the population for thousands of years. One other thing to keep in mind.  When we talk about success, it's usually defined in ways that capitalize on men's particular strengths, and that have been decided upon in advance by of course, men.

Now, maybe all of this wouldn't have made any difference, and we would have found ourselves in this position as a species, regardless of how power was distributed

I've often thought and I'm sure I'm not the first person to think this, that one of the reasons we've never been contacted by alien life is that life is simply incompatible with the level of technological advancement that's required to communicate across the universe.  It's kind of a discomforting thought, but that doesn't make it unreasonable.   And if it's not unreasonable it makes sense that we might want to think about how to tweak our culture a little bit before inevitably destroying ourselves.

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So let's get back to male supremacy.  In my view, and I'm pretty confident that this is backed up by plenty of empirical evidence, as well as my personal experience. Is that the only objective measure by which you can say that men on average are superior to women on average is physical size and muscle mass. That's it.  And ironically, the physical size difference is most likely due to males competing for sexual access to females over the generations. Everything else is just a subjective construction by those in power, namely men.  There's just no good evidence to support an argument otherwise. There is of course plenty of bad evidence that supports the male supremacist argument.  All of which has been working really hard to create and maintain our culture in which male supremacy is still taken completely seriously. Here's one great example that still to this day is cited by lots of folks desperate to maintain our cultural norms at all costs. 

British psychology professor Simon Baron-Cohen, who is the cousin of Sasha Baron-Cohen, and who has since been knighted, published a very influential book called The Essential Difference, basically arguing that boys are biologically programmed to focus on objects, predisposing them to math and understanding systems and things like that, while girls are programmed to focus on people and feelings. 

Now this was based primarily on this study of day-old babies, like 24-hour-old infants. So, what they did is they took these one-day-old babies and they had them look at different images, either of objects or faces. And what they found was that male babies were more likely to look at objects. Female babies were more locally to look at faces. 

So of course the conclusion was that male brains were more suited to understanding the structures of the world, the physics and the chemistry. And female brains were more suited to interpersonal pursuits. Sound familiar?

But what's interesting is if you look at the details of the study, you begin to realize there was a major flaw. So the subjects in this study are day-old, infants. And in order for them to look at different images, they had the infants on their parents’ laps. And, if you're a parent, or if you've ever been around a very young infant, you realize they cannot hold their heads up. So the babies’ heads were held up by their parents.   So, is it the baby's hard-wired male or female intelligence that is causing them to look at one image or the other? Or, is it their parents’ hands holding their heads that are causing them to look at one image or the other?

Now this study has not been replicated. In fact, Baron-Cohen, hasn't been able to replicate the results himself.   Nevertheless, it pops up day in and day out to this day with people who desperately want there to be dramatic, significant biological, intellectual differences between men and women. 

Another example that I like to reference about this sort of understood difference between men and women that doesn't really hold up if you think about it for 10 seconds is this constant refrain that you hear that women are just too emotional to achieve levels of power or be successful in politics or things like that I suppose this has meant to imply that men aren't emotional.  Really? 

Have you ever sat in the stands at a hockey game? Have you ever seen two guys beat the crap out of each other at a bar? Just because one looked at the other funny. That's not emotional. I think when men say that women are too emotional. They just mean that those particular emotions that the women are expressing make men uncomfortable. So those are problematic emotions, whereas rage, apparently is not a problematic emotion.  Now, all of this is also a good reminder that men and women are different, right? 

I'm not trying to suggest that men and women are exactly the same, despite the obvious physical differences. There's a great quote from suffragette Elizabeth Cady Stanton, who said men and women complement each other. That's an interesting way of looking at it. That definitely implies difference, but it does not Iin any way imply hierarchy. Although, if you want to talk about hierarchy, It's looking more and more likely that before too long men might actually find themselves in a position that we're not terribly comfortable with.

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Okay.  So let's assume that I've convinced everyone that the male supremacy part of our human culture needs to be made differently.  What does that look like?

Well, one way of looking at it ends up being not terribly flattering for men. And this comes from psychologist, Melvin Konner. Who wrote a book called Women After All  and he says:  

There is a birth defect that is surprisingly common due to a change in a key pair of chromosomes. In the normal condition, the two look the same. But in this disorder, One is shrunken beyond recognition.  The result. Is shortened lifespan, higher mortality at all ages, an inability to reproduce, premature hair loss, and brain defects variously resulting in attention deficit, hyperactivity, conduct disorder, hypersexuality, and an enormous excess of both outward and self-directed aggression. I call it X Chromosome Deficiency Syndrome and a stunning 49% of the human species is affected.  It is also called maleness. 

Now for a lot of men, thinking of themselves as defective is a bit of stretch and a bit antithetical to the way we've been raised. Now I'm not saying you necessarily need to take it as far as Mel Konner has taken it, although he makes a very sound argument in his book as to why we should think about it that way.  So for example, Konner observes how evolutionarily organisms went from asexual reproduction to sexual reproduction. Now if you have a creature that can reproduce on its own and then you introduce a partner that cannot reproduce on its own, it's clear that the first one is much more analogous to females, and the additional one, which came afterward, is much more analogous to males, which kind of throws quite a bit of doubt on the whole Adam and Eve story.  

Now I'm not saying, and to be fair, neither is Konner that men should think of themselves as defective. What I am saying is that it's really important that we begin to thoroughly interrogate this notion of male supremacy and figure out if it is invalid – and it's pretty clear that it is – what do we replace that understanding with?

So, where do we go from here? Where do we as our human culture, males in particular, progress to from this point to become a more positive force for the long-term survival of the species of the planet. Well, the first thing I suggest is that men stop being so knee-jerk, defensive. In particular, to this term “toxic masculinity” that gets thrown around a lot. I think a lot of men immediately think that when someone says “toxic masculinity”, they just mean normal masculinity that offends them or frightens them. Well, in a lot of cases over the generations, toxic masculinity has been so normalized that it's easy to mistake it for something normal. But that doesn't mean that behaving better is somehow unmasculine, or even feminine. It just means behaving better is re-normalizing non-toxic masculinity. I think that one of the reasons a lot of men react so viscerally to the term toxic masculinity is that there hasn't been enough effort to define and reinforce its opposite. Now the opposite is not femininity. So if that's the case, what is it?

There's an article I really like that Caitlin Flanagan wrote in the Atlantic in late 2023. I don't agree with everything she says, I feel like she can be a little bit kind of retrograde for my tastes, but I think in this sense, she does a great service to the cause of trying to counteract toxic masculinity and offer an alternative. And she calls it “heroic masculinity”. And what it means simply is taking advantage of the positive differences that men bring to the table and how men compliment women, and ultimately find ways for men to use their strengths, literally and figuratively, to be protectors. Not to dominate, but to protect when the opportunity presents itself in ways that men can. 

And I think that's a pretty good alternative to toxic masculinity. It doesn't imply neutering men. It doesn't imply feminizing men.  I think it's a pretty healthy way to look at masculinity. 

And I think it's really essential at this point to offer that alternative. So when you call something toxic masculinity, You're not suggesting that the maleness is the problem. You're suggesting that the toxicity is the problem.  And this person needs to think in heroic terms rather than toxic terms. 

All right. So now we've taken some time and we've looked at the constructed nature of our human culture. We've looked at the fallacy, no, no pun intended, of male supremacy. And we've seen one possible alternative. So how can we mix that all together and have a takeaway here that we can actually begin to implement, and change the thinking on the ground and the behavior on the ground. 

Okay, so let me just talk to the men out there at this point and see if I can offer a little advice. 

Guys, I think it's time to just read the writing on the wall. Okay. Like, It reminds me of Exxon-Mobile, you know, a few decades ago, they knew that oil wasn't gonna last forever. But rather than take advantage of their energy expertise, their infrastructure to move into a new form of energy that would have allowed them to dominate the world for probably centuries to come. Instead, they're turning themselves into a dinosaur before our eyes, spending billions on lobbying and facing a massive public backlash for committing a huge fraud against future generations. 

So I kind of feel like men need to do the same thing. Rather than digging in your heels and saying, we have to hang on to what little dominance we have regardless of the consequences. I think it's going to be best to embrace egalitarianism after all that is the true nature of humanity. 

Okay, I get it. Our particular culture for 10,000 years has gaslit all of us into believing that men are superior in ways beyond purely physical. But the writing is on the wall and it seems to me like it's about time for men to make an egalitarian deal moving forward while it's still on the table. I mean, if you look at the history of education, women have received more bachelor's degrees than men in every year. Since how long, how long do you think it's been? Would you be surprised to know that it's been since the mid 1980s? Okay, every year this gender gap in education is only expanding and will only continue to expand.  Now, of course, some men will argue, but look into the past, right? I mean, all of the great inventions, all of the great technologies were created by men, the great business leaders were men. They must obviously be superior in some way. Well, not really. I mean the only way they were superior was in the fact that they were able to exclude women for hundreds of years from participating as equals in those fields. 

And as we've seen, as women are treated as equals and begin to establish themselves in these fields, they do just as well if not in many cases, better than men do. 

So, before too long men may find themselves in a slightly weaker bargaining position or possibly a much weaker bargaining position, facing a female-dominant society that's none too interested in meeting us halfway and making a deal. So while we still ostensibly have some superiority, I think this might be a good time for men to take the deal and establish a true egalitarianism that will be good for us as individuals, will be good for us as a species, and will be good for the planet as a whole.

Well, that's it for this week. I recommend as you go through your day,  keep an eye out for things in the news, or just talking with friends or overhearing conversations where you'll begin to notice people reinforcing this constructed human culture that not only isn't humanity, but is in a lot of ways antithetical to humanity, and really goes contrary to our human nature, which is fundamentally egalitarian and fundamentally in sync with nature.  And when you do hear those things and you begin to realize that they just don't make sense, push back on them when you can,  And bit by bit, we can all do our small part to begin to make the world different.

Until next week. Be kind to yourself,  cut each other, some slack and as always, use your damn turn signal.