When God Created Man, She Was Joking.

Below, find a brand new commentary from Notes From Disgracedland’s Bjarne Knausgaard  who regular readers will recall pens some of the best political/economic color around.  

The first link there is to his blog and the second is his Twitter, which you should follow.

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When god created man, she was joking.

The union between man and woman has to be one of the most disruptive developments in human history. A Stone Age equivalent of seduction was effectively an act of abduction and enslavement of woman. By joining a man as his “wife”, a woman redefined the economy of time: a man no longer had to hunt one deer at a time; with a woman carrying the catch, hunting became less frequent, and if a man went alone, a woman could stay behind, guard the dwelling, defend it against predators, work in the field, bring water etc. Apart from serving the reproductive function, the most dramatic effect of the forced symbiosis of man and woman was to free man’s time and open the door for his mobility. According to Paul Virilio: This allowed man to engage in the obscenity of the narcissistic homosexual activity of duel with other men[1].

During the hunters and gatherers era, when hunting provided the main access to protein, overpopulation presented the most acute risk, synonymous with self-destruction. The math was simple: the number of mouths to be fed is determined by the number of women – a population consisting of one man and ten women could produce as many as ten babies in one year, while the natality of a one woman and ten men community could not exceed one baby per year. The conclusion was rather unambiguous: Femicide was the only way to control population growth and prevent starvation of the entire community through the depletion of resources.

With time, the risk of overpopulation had been balanced with a possibility of territorial expansion where war played an essential part. Preference for raising (male) warriors further amplified the existing bias towards the neglect of females. Teaching women to use weapons or hunt large animals would have only complicated the “algorithm” and was therefore further inhibited. In the end, as Marvin King summarizes it, war and female infanticide are part of the price our Stone Age ancestors had to pay for regulating their populations in order to prevent lowering of standards to the bare subsistence level. However, warfare and infanticide did not cause each other. Both of them, together with a sexual hierarchy that developed along the way, were caused by the need to disperse population and control the risk its of growth[2]. As a residual of these dynamics, throughout the history, long after the control of population growth stopped being an issue, men continued to feel they had a natural right to control women. And so they did.

Travelers taken up by the violence of speed are displaced persons

Man is the passenger of woman. (Paul Virilio)

Woman is the first source of man’s transport and his mobility. She brings man to the world[3]. Where would human civilization be if women hadn’t tempered with man’s experience of time and space? If it were not for women, man would have never travelled. In all likelihood, he would have not strayed far away from his cave still hunting wild animals to survive.

The need to disperse the population shaped the quest for mobility and speed. This was the beginning of the mount — the man mounted horse and, as distances shrunk and the quest for speed intensified, he dismounted only to board ship, and follow up with train, car, and airplane. The acceleration of movement has been assimilated to progress as a curious blind alley in the history of movement[4]. As more speed bore more spectacular disasters, progress, as the articulation of the quest for acceleration of movement, became a flight from the inevitable, instead of the journey forward, with constant attempt not to be caught by the “end”.

Woman have shaped man’s destiny. But, as it happens with every innovation, there was a price to pay. The quest for mobility disturbed the initial harmony. To travel is to leave, and to leave is to leave behind, to abandon the comfort zone and one’s sense of calm[5]. Mobility is displacement, and displacement leads to loss of identity. The identity loss is an encounter with consequences of displacement — always after it is too late to do anything about it, a delayed reaction – articulated as the second stage of grief through anger and aggression. This is where misogyny enters the scene. Being the primary force behind man’s mobility, woman is causally connected with man’s identity loss, and misogyny intrinsically linked to man’s discontent with his displacement.

This has created institutions of discrimination and women’s repression through history and, as Eva Figes argued, solidified resistance to change. By questioning the external norms that relate to the position of men and women in society, man has and had nothing to gain and everything to lose: he would lose not only social and economic advantages, but something far more precious, a sense of his own superiority which bolsters his ego both in his public and private life. [6]

Modern day misogyny, as the ultimate male fantasy, is a nostalgia for the times of lower entropy, a return to the past as a site of coherence, and a relapse to the patriarchal setting when man held their “naturally deserved” upper hand and He (who is a male) ruled the world. Through misogyny man articulates the desire to reclaim what he considers his “natural right” to control women and, in that way, take control of his own destiny.

[1] Paul Virilio, Negative Horizon: An Essay in Dromoscopy, Bloomsbury Academic Continuum Impact Series (2008)

[2] Marvin King, Cannibals and Kings: Origins of Cultures, Vintage (2011)

[3] Paul Virilio, ibid.

[4] Paul Virilio , ibid.

[5] Paul Virilio , ibid.

[6] Eva Figes, Patriarchal Attitudes, Persea Books (1986)