Female hunters and how to claim victory over the Patriarchy

 

Apparently women can hunt. Who would have thought? Seriously, here we are, sitting in our male privilege, telling women to go to the kitchen, and boom, a news like this happens.

Damn. It is a good thing that all these popular science portals present it in an easy-to-digest way, already positioned for fitting into the narrative of identity politics so popular nowdays, posted on their facebook pages with short tags, like "sexist scientists". Or with "The idea that men always hunted and women gathered in ancient hunter-gatherer societies is a myth."

Well, of course it is a fucking myth. It is a myth you just made up, because a cursory glance at the academic papers and wikipedia will tell you that the whole issue of sexual division of labor was not viewed in this simplistic, "Patriarchic" manner by all those sexist, white male scientist people. Let's also ignore the fact that present hunter-gatherer societies (you know, what researchers used as the closest available to model how early humans lived) also very much have gender roles present (as the author of the original paper admits). Let's also ignore the fact that it is not actually a clear-cut evidence, and 'a few female hunters' does not equal to the sweeping generalizations even the study's authors are making (which is kind of telling about their findings... somehow I do not believe they can be partial when they say things like this: "Labor practices among recent hunter-gatherer societies are highly gendered, which might lead some to believe that sexist inequalities in things like pay or rank are somehow ‘natural.’ But it’s now clear that sexual division of labor was fundamentally different — likely more equitable — in our species’ deep hunter-gatherer past". This sounds like some activism mixed with science to me. I would also like to get an explanation how this "genderization" happened in all known stone-age level societies present on this globe.) To be honest, even some common sense thinking would tell you not to expect strict gender roles in a society that is balancing on the edge of survival: whomever can, will hunt. Nobody will tell a female hunter not to hunt when she brings home an elk.

But this, of course is beside the point. Let's ignore the decades-long scientific discussion. What we need is articles showing how we stick it to the Patriarchy, so people who have absolutely no fucking clue what science is can happily share it on their facebook, generate clicks, and, as a side-effect fight the gender wars which are only deepening the fissures in our societies. (Just reading those posts will melt your brain, by the way. People did find a way to inject some anti-European -anty white under a more palpatable name- sentiments there as well if the whole male-female discussion was not enough for you.)

All this crying about fake news and the post-truth world...

Since Brexit and the Orange Wonderboy there has been much lamentation about all the fake news on Facebook, the Evil Russian Misinformation Factories, and in general, how inaccurate and untrustworthy the information is you get from social media. We live in an era when facts don't matter anymore; when not a couple of well-dressed talking heads are giving out the information, but the rabble makes it up for themselves.

If only everyone stuck to the real journalists is the unspoken (or spoken) conclusion. You know, the real McCoy; guys (and gals) in trench coats and sharp pens, investigating leads, running around and striking fear into the heart of the Establishment.

There are two problems with this. The first is: they lie as much as the "fake news" does. (I have no idea how the Independent dared to publish this article; it discredits them and every other news agency in the Free World... It's something we knew, but seeing it in print in a large -well, relatively large- newspaper is nothing if not miraculous. And this is the second time...) This has been quite obvious in the case of Aleppo, the Iraq War, the migrant crisis, the Russian hacks (I've still not seen anything that can constitute as proof of the accusations), or anything, really. It's not hard to see them; you just have to spend five minutes to find ample proof of the media being dishonest either by withholding information or by straight-out lying to the reader/watcher. They don't report, they manufacture facts to conform their agenda. We always have lived in the post-truth world.

The other is this. So here we have a very brazen (but not unique) example where a "real" journalist simply stole something from the social networks. It seems like there's a positive feedback here: something gets posted or Reddit (or Digg or Facebook or whatever), this gets nicked by the "real" media, and gets posted on Reddit again, which, in turn, gets reported in the media. They do it so shamelessly, they even quote reddit users. It's a self-sustaining perpetual machine that produces an endless stream of shit.

These people are part of the problem; the people who are supposed to be doing the journalism became simply content-thiefs. They killed journalism by replacing investigation with "cats that look like Hitler" (yes, a Bridget Jones reference; figure that, the movie actually had something meaningful to say), and "you would not believe what happened after this man told a woman not to apply makeup on the tube". Guess what I don't give a fuck. I would have, however, appreciated an honest assessment of the situation in Aleppo. As in: why did certain politicians call the members of Al Quaida "moderate rebels". And maybe a mention of how people of Aleppo did not support them to begin with; this kind of puts their heroic struggle into a different light. But we got "she did not know why the crowd was cheering her", and "can you go through all 10 of these horrible photos".

And, ladies and gentlemen, this is why the system is rotten to the core. This is why we have Brexit, why the Right is getting stronger, and why the Orange Ape (sorry, apes, I know I'm smearing your reputation) got into the White House.