Untrue: Why Nearly Everything We Believe About Women, Lust, and Infidelity Is Wrong and How the New Science Can Set Us Free

by Wednesday Martin

Sociologist Rae Blumberg has pointed out that it is only in this one type of agrarian society, and for less than 3 percent of Homo sapiens’ history, that women have been transformed from competent, self-sufficient primary producers who make their own decisions relatively autonomously into secondary producers and costly consumers who are, in some circumstances, fundamentally dependent on men. Female chimps and bonobos, our closest relatives, never stop foraging for themselves and their offspring. Female hunter-gatherers often continue to gather while pregnant; some even nurse and gather simultaneously. Mbuti women in the Ituri rainforest and Aka women of the Central African Republic are competent net hunters, working on their own and alongside their husbands to provision their families. All these practices give important clues about our evolutionary prehistory: dependence is new. It is human females of the Anthropocene—even and perhaps especially those living in the industrialized West post-plough—whose well-being and in some cases very lives are uniquely contingent on the support of males.