Killarney,

On the contrary, there is every physical and evolutionary reason reason to conclude that men "quest" and women "nest".

Primates usually exist in static communities with their food supply surrounding them. Humans, on the other hand, evolved into carnivorous hunters, here's an excerpt from zoologist and anthropologist, Desmond Morris's book "The Naked Ape":

"Because of the demands of his new way of life, he had to reduce his powerful primate urge never to leave the main body of the group...the hunting males also had to carry food supplies home for the nursing females and their slowly growing young. Paternal behaviour of this kind had to be a new development, for the general primate rule is that virtually all parental care comes from the mother...Because of the extremely long period of dependency of the young and the heavy demands made by them, the females found themselves almost perpetually confined to home base. In this respect the hunting apes new way of life threw up a special problem....the hunting parties, unlike those of "pure" carnivores had to become all-male groups. If anything was to go against primate grain it was this. For a virile primate to go off on a feeding trip an leave his females unprotected from the advances of other males that might happen by was unheard of.
The answer was the development of the pair bond. Male and female hunting apes had to fall in love and remain faithful to one another. This is a common tendency in many other groups of animals, but is rare amongst primates."

Come off it Poirot it's The Patriarchy! All men, in secret conspiracy, hating women, and loving it. Throughout the ages.

Secret meetings are every second Tuesday in the shed at the back of my house. I learned the secret handshake at 9 months, so was appointed head patriarch.

if only those pesky feminists didn't learn of our secret organisation and our secret hatred of all women.

As any proud terrorist organisation would do, we claim responsibility for all the ills of the world. Even bad hair days.

We decided it was best for us to teach women that even though they get that little tingle between their legs, that they don't really like sex as much as us. Then we would be forced to chase, coerce, write stupid poems that make us cringe even though they seem to like them, spend thousands on rings, and drinks at the pub, hang on... whose idea was this!

Houellebecq, you forgot responsibility for male controlled religions that ban sex outside marriage (and in some cases pretty much inside it as well).

What male would could not love all those rules about women covering up and not having sex for the fun of it?

R0bert

ah ha! Houellie and Robert,

You two need to read the first chapter of Camille Paglia's "Sexual Personae". It's titled "Sex and Violence, or Nature and Art". In it she proposes that all the male institutions like religion are buttresses against woman and nature....

"Civilised man conceals from himself the extent of his subordination to nature. The grandeur of culture, the consolation of religion absorb his attention and win his faith. But let nature shrug, and all is in ruin....Sexuality and eroticism are the intricate intersection of nature and culture. Feminists grossly oversimplify the problem of sex when they reduce it to a matter of social convention: readjust society, purify sex roles, and happiness and harmony will reign...sex is a far darker power than feminism has admitted....sex has always been girt round with taboo, irrespective of culture. Sex is the point of contact between man and nature, where morality and good intentions fall to primitive urges....Happy are those periods when marriage and religion are strong. System and order shelter us against sex and nature....but a critical point has been reached. With the rebirth of the gods in the massive idolatries of popular culture, with the eruption of sex and violence into every corner of the ubiquitous mass media. Judeo-Christianity is facing its most serious challenge since Europe's confrontation with Islam in the Middle Ages. The latent paganism of western culture has burst forth again in all its daemonic vitality."

Paglia's a big fan of male cultural achievement. It's men who fashioned sky religion and the rest of the civilised world. Strange how pagan expression is growing through the cracks in modern times.

Poirot

'The Naked Ape' was published in 1967, when women were still legally enshrined as second-class humans, a woman's place was in the home, and anthropology was still an almost exclusively male field of study. Desmond Morris' observations typically reflect this. For example:

“Because of the demands of his new way of life, he had to reduce his powerful primate urge never to leave the main body of the group...”

So what about the women? Didn’t they have to ‘reduce their powerful primate urge’ to travel long distances to find all those seeds and herbs and fruits and vegies - that made up 80% of the food needs of the group?

‘… the hunting males also had to carry food supplies home for the nursing females and their slowly growing young’

More than likely the nursing females and their slowly growing young had been collecting plenty of food to keep the group fed while the men were off hunting, or even doing some hunting of their own. Besides women weren’t pregnant and nursing all their lives and men weren’t hunting all their lives.

‘…for the general primate rule is that virtually all parental care comes from the mother...’

This guy obviously hasn’t seen all those nature documentaries of female primates charging all over the place killing prey and gathering food for the brood, while the males lie around in the sun.

‘For a virile primate to go off on a feeding trip an leave his females unprotected from the advances of other males that might happen by was unheard of.’

I doubt if those prehistoric males were as desperately insecure as Desmond Morris appears to be. This guy badly needs to watch a few episodes of Meerkat Manor.

Killarney,

I'm not sure what your point is - it seems a particular psychological perspective to enshrine oneself as a "second-class human" because one happens to be of female gender. I'm a female and I've loved having babies and nurturing them. It hasn't stopped me from embracing life.
Anyhooo....what's the big deal about The Naked Ape being published in 1967 - is all knowledge and theory tainted or devalued by the times in which they were published? We'd better go and toss out Darwin's Theory of Evolution (1857) and Einsteins Special and General Theories of Relativity (1905 and 1916 respectively) in that case...sheesh (as Yabby would say).

For a start, women did not range the distances that men did. They foraged relatively close to wherever home base happened to be. Men were required to range further and cooperate, to not only kill the larger prey, but to return home with it. Yes, women contributed greatly to the diet - they still do in traditional societies, but there's one point you overlook in man's evolution to a hunting carnivore and that was the concentrated nature of the protein diet.

From "Food and Evolution: Toward a theory of Food Habits" (Marvin Harris and Eric B. Ross):

"It has been postulated that meat played an important role in the development of homo sapiens. By consuming animals that live on plant foods, humans obtained a highly concentrated and complete form of protein that contains all the essential amino acids converted into animal protein. Animal protein is far more complete and concentrated than plant protein..."

I watched a troop of males from a contemporary, but traditional, tribe from Brazil called the Matis recently on "The Human Planet". The men went off with their poison darts, deep into the jungle, killed as many monkeys as the tribe needed and lugged them home - to the women and children.