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Great discussion! Regarding the "disruption of the male life journey," the book Eve's Seed might be of great interest to anyone following this thread. McElvaine was among the first to propose or at least popularize the notion that the "primal" sexual upheaval was the discovery and technologization of the mechanics of sexual reproduction. This lead to a shift towards agriculturally based ways of life and correspondingly huge shifts in the work the male was going to need to perform: hunting, the quintessential male group project, was less important, as one was literally more rooted to the soil. But McElvaine's analysis is interesting for being not strictly materialist: he argues that the overwhelming forces of domestication that knowledge of sex enabled changed the anthropology of the sexes in fundamental ways, generating at once a sort of resentment of his "domestification" on the part of men, and a diminuition of the once divine or "magical" power of female reproduction and an exaggeration of the male role in planting potent seed in the more passive, "chthonic" female body. It's a rich analysis deeply involving questions of psychology and epistemology. He even sees the story of "The Fall" in Genesis as a sort of memory of our being driven out of a naturally paleolithic world by the discovery of the reproductive mechanism [McElvaine argues that women were the discovers] -- hence the association of knowledge with fruit, hence Eve rather than Adam being the first to take the fruit, hence the "sexual shame" associated with the event, and hence the expulsion from the Garden to a life of agricultural toil... The second half of the book is disappointingly flaccid in its feminism, but it is worth the read. We are always to bent on discovering "where it all went wrong." "Blame the feminists!" "Blame feminism!" "Blame the capitalism that gave birth to feminism!" "Blame the voluntarism that rationalized the market!" We can go as far back as we want. Blame the snake. |