Humans are (contrary a whole bunch of dogmatic statements all over sf and popular literature about human evolution stopping) undergoing accelerated natural selection. Part of that is rapid change of environment -- agriculture is just as much an environment as "semi-arid savanna"; so are cities -- but another part of that is culture. The environment people live in is made up of their interactions with other people.
Culture is, from this angle, a massive fight over whose needs have structural biases in favour of them (which produce structural biases against everybody else's needs as side effects); it's constructed, sure, but so are (in a certain sense) termite mounds, coral reefs, and climax rain forests.
Patriarchy/presumption that women are services, rather than people/men-being-horrid can be thought of as a combination of structural-biases-in-favour and a determination to keep them from going away, because while there certainly are many other possible cultures, in those cultures, if you're horrid, your relative fitness just dropped like a rock, sometimes to zero. (Sometimes below zero.)
Of course, if you have to interact with a patriarchal social context[1], and you're male, and you're *not* horrid, your relative fitness is pretty darn low, too. Like many evolutionary outcomes, just because it's stable doesn't mean it's good.
If you're operating mostly in another culture already, and have to keep dealing with another one with different biases, well, "culture clash" is real; just because they're from the same ostensible material culture doesn't mean you can't have one with them.
[1]Neglecting, so well as I am able, the whole aspie-spectrum conviction that the entire world has been carefully organized so that everything with actual importance (that is, human social hierarchy construction, because that *is* the environment people live in, no matter what) is something I can't do.
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Date: 2010-04-11 04:46 am (UTC)Humans are (contrary a whole bunch of dogmatic statements all over sf and popular literature about human evolution stopping) undergoing accelerated natural selection. Part of that is rapid change of environment -- agriculture is just as much an environment as "semi-arid savanna"; so are cities -- but another part of that is culture. The environment people live in is made up of their interactions with other people.
Culture is, from this angle, a massive fight over whose needs have structural biases in favour of them (which produce structural biases against everybody else's needs as side effects); it's constructed, sure, but so are (in a certain sense) termite mounds, coral reefs, and climax rain forests.
Patriarchy/presumption that women are services, rather than people/men-being-horrid can be thought of as a combination of structural-biases-in-favour and a determination to keep them from going away, because while there certainly are many other possible cultures, in those cultures, if you're horrid, your relative fitness just dropped like a rock, sometimes to zero. (Sometimes below zero.)
Of course, if you have to interact with a patriarchal social context[1], and you're male, and you're *not* horrid, your relative fitness is pretty darn low, too. Like many evolutionary outcomes, just because it's stable doesn't mean it's good.
If you're operating mostly in another culture already, and have to keep dealing with another one with different biases, well, "culture clash" is real; just because they're from the same ostensible material culture doesn't mean you can't have one with them.
[1]Neglecting, so well as I am able, the whole aspie-spectrum conviction that the entire world has been carefully organized so that everything with actual importance (that is, human social hierarchy construction, because that *is* the environment people live in, no matter what) is something I can't do.