Peter,

What I meant was that women mirror more closely the mystery and Dionysian nature of the natural world.
I think mankind as a collective entity embraced civilisation as a protection from "Mother earth"...however,humans can't escape the "nature" that is inherent in their own physicality.

Tell me about these matriarchal societies (serious question) I'd always believed that most societies, even in antiquity, modelled themselves on the "man as hunter and protector" - "woman as forager and nurturer" paradigm.

Poirot:"I think mankind as a collective entity embraced civilisation as a protection from "Mother earth""

I think that's stretching it. All sorts of animals form social groups for very good reasons. Humanity, as is the way of the "thinking ape", sought ways to make the interactions within the group less primitively based on simple strength imbalances, as they largely are in other primates and as they are in primitive human tribal cultures, such as gangs.

http://www.smh.com.au/national/porn-is-not-a-dirty-word-20111015-1lqqe.html

Porn is not a dirty word, Bettina Arndt.

It really is a shame the OLO has a plethora of pathological altruist's, who seem to want to ban any form of sex that they find objectionable.

So it is a shame that there are not more writers like Bettina to add some sort of balance to the so far bias of OLO.

Anti,

I'm talking here about the "grandeur" of culture - art, religion, science, great metropolises. Humans have a capability of pushing back nature, of creating environments that shield them from the vagaries of the natural world.
The modern world, for example,almost completely shields its inhabitants from realities that more primitive societies confront on a daily basis.

Of course social grouping is an integral part of life on earth for most species, and mammalian humans are no different in that respect. However, man's ability to construct material and theoretical buffers to lessen his vulnerability to nature is an important and defining factor in his technological advancement.

JamesH
Please don’t dignify the author’s obnoxious prurience with the name of altruism.

Pious hypocrisy, yes. Bullying intolerance, yes. Bustling officious meddling, yes. Lemon-sucking sex-hating, yes. “The-world-revolves-around-my-prejudiced-opinions”-type egotism, yes. Zealous wowserism, yes.

Altruism? No.

Poirot
By matri-centic I mean a society in which the main family grouping is a woman and her children (often or usually by several men), with the maternal grandmother as her main support. The family role of a man is as the mother’s sexual partner, not as the children’s father.

(Matriarchal society is only a notional construct, because none has ever existed. Matrilineal society is one in which property passes in the female line.)

It is only speculation that matri-centric society preceded the discovery of paternity, but the premise is well-grounded because it follows from the theory of evolution. The original condition must have been ignorance of paternity.

(Matri-centric society accounts, btw, for the evolution of menopause. The risks of child-bearing - both to a woman and her child – increase with her age. When the risk becomes approximately double that of her adult daughter’s, a unit of the grandmother’s reproductive energy is better devoted to her grandchild, than having a child herself.)

Matricentric society is also what we see where the modern welfare state has subsidized the breakdown of traditional father-headed families. It’s like matri-centrism is society’s default mode.

Also there is ample ethnographic evidence of societies that did not understand physical paternity. Homer mentions them. C.P. Mountford describes a conversation with an Aranda (Uluru) woman in 1948. She told him that a child can have one father, several, or none.

Since such societies existed until recently, it is reasonable to think that the discovery of paternity didn’t happen until evolutionarily recently. Thus societies were probably matri-centric for 99 percent of the time of human evolution; patriarchy being, relatively speaking, very recent.

“What I meant was that women mirror more closely the mystery and Dionysian nature of the natural world.”

I don’t see how that statement could ever be verified or falsified.

But certainly before paternity was discovered, reproduction must have seemed …

(cont.)

… a peculiarly female thing: a product of femaleness and the spirit world. (And even now of course it’s amazing and awe-inspiring.)

As for the "grandeur" of culture - art, religion, science - evolutionary psychology theorises that such arose by sexual selection. This is where traits evolve because they confer an increased chance of reproductive success, rather than of increased survival. The peacock’s tail is an example. Sexually selected traits may even confer an active disadvantage when it comes to survival – for example the peacock’s increased risk of predation. But so long as the opposite sex is attracted to prefer such traits, they confer an advantage in reproduction.

According to this theory, the human mind is a software version of the peacock’s tail. For example, we only have to consider the sexual opportunities of a rock star, compared to an ordinary guy, to see how sexual selection for musicality might work. Man’s religious tendencies could also have been sexually selected. Even in sex-hating Christianity, the increased chance of reproductive success of its vectors – not just the harems of Moses and Abraham, but also Knox (5 wives), and Joseph Smith – as well as the ordinary clergy for many centuries! – has explaining power.

It is no answer to assert that art, morality, science, etc. are “socially constructed”. This only begs the question how and why the brain hardware to socially construct such things evolved in the first place.

Just as Christianity was wrong about the nature and origin of languages, and of geological formations, and species, and planets, it is probably wrong in its understanding of the nature of human sexuality too.

Christianity’s view is - with the unrealistic exception of monogamous life-long marriage as virgins having sex only for reproduction - that sex is shameful, sinful, wicked, degraded, loathsome, repugnant and generally negative, as Helen Pringle assumes.

But most probably the truth is that human sexuality – including the tendency of men to philander, and women to have sex for material advantage - more than anything, has given rise to the distinctive wonders of the human mind.