Good morning:

I'm biting my tongue. Having promised, almost sworn, not to foster or 
start any off-topic subject on this list anymore, I just find myself to be 
in an impasse right now. 

Having read the excerpt below (Adam Sroka), I almost can't help saying 
something about it that I know beforehand to be off-topic. 

Am I asking for punishment? Well, if I must be punished, don't make it be 
driving me away from the group. Not yet. Even though I am no masochist, in 
self-punishment, I'll suspend myself for a few days. You will hear again 
from me only after Mardi Gras. But now let me publish my cacophonies.

That modern and ancient women worked more and in some cases harder than 
men is a well-known fact. When I come to think of it, I can discern that 
men were trained to work with the unexpected (of course there's some 
method to hunting, but much of it is simply chance), whereas women were 
trained to work with routines (gathering, harvesting, etc, maybe 
childbirth is an exception).

House chores are typically routine. That's maybe why women are so good at 
it, much better than men. 

This doesn't mean, however, that women can only work with routines. We say 
here a woman has often a double agenda: working outside the house as a 
professional and then in the home and for the kids, while husband watches 
his TV. No, I don't mean you paleo men, but ordinary men, if ever there is 
such a thing. 

I'm really concerned about the double agenda of women. It isn't an easy 
load, but on the other hand they may be physically fit for it. Why call 
them "the weak sex"? A man would probably fall apart in less than two 
weeks if he had to follow a double agenda. 

But what really breaks my heart (and again the sentimental guy is showing 
up here) is the unfortunate situation of a woman having to bring up their 
children alone, not because she chose to be a single mother, but because 
the father went away, in rejection of the child(ren). I don't think this 
happened with paleo mothers.

A very extreme example of this is happening all the time here, in this 
country: we hear of young mothers discarding their newly born babies into 
the garbage or waterways. Of course it'd be better to give up the child 
for adoption, but it seems that just after childbirth a few women are into 
a dreamy state or a trance and can't be responsible for whatever they do. 

I know that, among the ancient, discarding defective babies and the aged 
was very common. But then it was a question of survival for the group, 
which was unable to look after the invalid. Was there compassion? I don't 
know when. At some point, however, a mother must have felt really bad for 
leaving behind a defective baby and decided to keep it at all costs or a 
man must have felt really sorry for having to forsake his aged parent on a 
cold mountain and provided him with shelter and food. 

The difference with these young modern mothers is that their offspring are 
healthy babies who in some cases (but not always) will survive the 
discarding, but I can only wonder about future psychological consequences 
for both mothers and children. And for the fathers as well. As they grow 
older, they may resent all the harm they have "unconsciously" caused. No?

I don't know what best conclusions we can draw from all of this, but I 
know some questions: 1. Are we really still so primitive? 2. How frail are 
the human webs of our current high-tech society? 3. Are males innately 
too "lazy" to take up their burden as fathers? You say it.

Now I'm on the way to my retreat, and I hope you can forgive me for my 
blah-blah-blah.

JC

On Tue, 21 Feb 2006 13:15:52 -0600, Adam Sroka <[log in to unmask]> wrote:


>Which, initially, according to many anthropologists, meant that women
>did most of the work; since they were traditionally responsible for
>processing plant foods. In the long run, however, when division of labor
>came along, men did most of the farming and storing and women did the
>actual preparation.
>=========================================================================