see:
Was Agriculture Impossible during the Pleistocene but Mandatory during the Holocene? A Climate Change Hypothesis
Peter J. Richerson, Robert Boyd, Robert L. Bettinger
American Antiquity, Vol. 66, No. 3 (Jul., 2001), pp. 387-411

Aaron
NYC

I think I’m the one you feel is missing the point. I rahter think the point of Sharon’s post is that the future is what we’ll make of it. I did mention that I was straying off the topic, you’ll notice. And I hope you don’t really think rape isn’t an unmportant issue.

Best

MEA

Ultimately, I think that the best solutions are the ones that are best for a whole lot of other things as well - a voluntary, stabilized “powerdown” (even though I’m not wild about that term).

I will say that while rape in war is a horror, I do think it is worth comparing it to what happens to the *men* in wartime. That is, in most cases, when women are raped in wartime, it is because they aren’t being murdered. In Bosnia, for example, the men were taken out and shot in many cases, and dumped in mass graves while women were “merely” raped. Or, men are conscripted and killed that way. While I agree that rape in wartime should be unacceptable, to a large degree what happens to women in wartime is less serious than what happens to civilian men, or prisoners of war - women get to live, however horribly. For all that I am genuinely concerned about wartime rape, I know that were I unfortunate enough to live in a place where war was going on, the fate of my husband and sons would almost certainly be worse.

Sharon

Although I’m as high-tech as they come, I have always firmly believed that we really are the same as always. We have better technology, but people have not, in fact, evolved much in the last couple of thousand years.

Anyway, right in the intro she says:

A greater hazard, built into the very nature of recorded history, the the overload of the negative: the disproportionate survival of the bad side–of evil, of misery, contention, and harm….The normal does not make news….

She makes a bunch of other good points which reinforce the idea that it isn’t all bad all the time, even during the plague. I think people have a very skewed idea of pre-oil because of this.

I’m not saying post-oil will be all bluebirds and happiness. But really, the Mad-Max view dismays me.

Strange, this desperation to miss the point and focus on the irrelevant.

Only a minority of women have marrige under the Talmud (with, I recall the nice provision that the wife of a cammel driver can call upon her husband for sex more often than the wife a student of the law).

And whatever the status of women at some time in the past, in North America we are coming out of a tradition that holds “maidenheads as cheap as nails” in time of war, and has, in fact only the the last few years considered wartime rape a crime, not just an unfortate side effect (or, worse, a soldiers hard earn privilage).

We are also living in a wider world where the status of women often sucks, to be frank, and as times get harder, the changes that tend to improve a woman’s lot (health care, reproductive control, education) will be come harder and harder to come by in those parts of the world.

And I think there is a tendency to “protect” women in times of crisis in ways which reinforce their status as second class citizens.

And while it would be wonderful to have a society in place where it is unthinkable to rape anyone, we aren’t there yet.

And, finally, (and I may well get flamed here) the line between consent and none-consent is sometime finer that we’d like. A man forcing himself on a woman who is saying no — that’s a clean picture. A woman who knows that it’s her fertile time, but also know that she says know to often the her man will leave, and she and her children would be in a more vulnerable position without right now vs. the fact she may end up with a unwant for uncareable for child…what do you call it?

She wants to say no, he doesn’t know that, he takes her slience for consent (of course, he’s a brute for basically saying, sex or I leave and to hell with you and my children), but she not resisting… at what point does society say, hey, she’s making a choice, sex for protection. Why is anyone even thinking it’s rape? That’s the slippery slope I think we are on. And I think by pretending it couldn’t happen, we are making it more likely.

Of course, this doesn’t describe most men, but that doesn’t mean the situtation can’t (and doesn’t) happen.

MEA

I don’t know who said that, but I remind myself of that when I lose hope. Spring is the season of hope and renewal for me. The season of hope, of new beginnings. I watched the very first blossom on my peach tree bloom the other day. It was its first blossom ever. (It’s a very young tree.) How could I fall to have hope when watching that?

MEA -women have had high status in many, many socities. Contrary to what we’re taught in history class, our society is one of the exceptions when it comes to the status of women. I think that we’ll be able to keep the freedoms we’ve (re)gained.

I like this idea. It encourages us to be earnest and ingenious and brave, as befits ancestral peoples; but keeps us from deciding that because we don’t know all the answers, they must be unknowable and thus unprofitable to pursue.”

It all begins at home. Every important movement in history, politics, art, religion - all began with some person sitting down with a few of their friends and talking about what they could do.