Cole S. H. sent us a link to this set of glasses:
Coincidentally, I had just taken a picture of this tray at the Pasadena Flea Market the day before:
Somewhere we got the idea that ”caveman” courtship involved a man clubbing a woman over the head and dragging her by the hair to his cave where he would, presumably, copulate with an unconscious or otherwise unwilling woman (who may or may not have “really wanted it”). This idea, as these two products show, is generally considered good for a chuckle. Ah cavepeople, they were so cute and primitive!
Of course, we have little to no knowledge of the social lives of early humans. First, long buried bodies and archeological dig sites simply can’t tell us much about how men and women interacted. Second, to speculate about early humans based on humans today is to project the present onto the past. Third, we cannot extrapolate convincingly from any species of ape alive today. Ape behavior varies tremendously anyway, even among our closest cousins, so which type would we choose? So the caveman-club-’er-over-the-head-and-drag-her-by-the-hair narrative is pure mythology.
I use our attachment to this mythology to illustrate two concepts:
First, the mythology affirms the idea that men are naturally coercive and violent by suggesting that our most natural and socially-uncorrupted male selves will engage in this sort of behavior.
Second, the mythology affirms the teleological idea that society is constantly improving and, therefore, getting closer and closer to ideals like gender equality. If it’s true that “we’re getting better all the time,” then we assume that, whatever things are like now, they must have been worse before. And however things were then, they must have been even worse before that. And so on and so forth until we get all the way back to the clubbing caveman. There are serious problems with this idea: (a) We may stop working to make society better because we assume it will get better anyway (and certainly never get worse) with or without us. (b) Instead of thinking about what things like gender equality and subordination might look like, we just assume that equality is, well, what we have now and subordination is what they had then. This makes it less possible to fight against the subordination that exists now by making it difficult to recognize.
