| I've long wondered about the machismo associated with meat. What's so manly about eating unhealthy quantities of unhealthy food produced via factory farming? Yet, the manliness of meat is undeniable. Sure, you'll meet male vegans and vegetarians... and I'm sure somewhere out there you can also find men who ask for directions, men who wear pink shirts, and men who don't mind going to the store to buy tampons for their wives. Those men must all be very secure in their manhood.
I found details on the link between machismo and meat this past week, when I wasn't really looking for it. I went to visit my parents, where I had no access to the internet. In my boredom, I picked up an old anthropology textbook from college and started re-reading it for fun. |
One of the essays in the book was called "Society and Sex Roles" by Ernestine Friedl. She seeks to understand why males are dominant in so many societies and why "evidence of a society in which women control all strategic resources like food and water, and in which women's activities are the most prestigious, has never been found." To find the answers, she looks at hunter-gatherer cultures that still exist today, saying:
Foraging has endured for two million years and was replaced by farming and animal husbandry only ten thousand years ago; it covers more than 99 percent of human history. Our foraging ancestry is not far behind us and provides a clue to our understanding of the human condition.
Hunter-gatherers are people whose ways of life are technologically simple and socially and politically egalitarian. They live in small groups of 50 to 200 and have neither kings, nor priests, nor social classes. These conditions permit anthropologists to observe the essential bases for inequalities between the sexes without the distortions induced by the complexities of contemporary industrial society.
Her conclusion? The source of male power is meat. She elaborates:
When men in a hunter-gatherer society return to camp with game, they divide the meat in some customary way...
Vegetable foods, in contrast, are not distributed beyond the immediate household. Women give food to their children, to their husbands, and to other members of the household, and rarely, to the occasional visitor. No one outside of the family regularly eats any of the wild fruits and vegetables that are gathered by the women.
The meat distributed by the men is a public gift. Its source is widely known, and the donor expects a reciprocal gift when other men return from a successful hunt. He gains honor as a supplier of a scarce item and simultaneously obligates others to him.
These obligations constitute a form of power or control over others, both men and women. The opinions of hunters play an important part in decisions to move the village; good hunters attract the most desirable women; people in other groups join camps with good hunters; and hunters, because they already participate in an internal system of exchange, control exchange with other groups for flint, salt, and steel axes.
It makes sense why meat provides a source of power. But a second question must be asked: Why don't the women hunt?
The author answers this question quite well. First of all, it's practically impossible to simultaneously hunt and gather. You've got to do one or the other. If you've got your arms full of gathered food, it would be pretty hard to chase down a deer and throw a spear at it without dropping everything in your arms. For that reason, it makes sense why each person is either hunting or gathering but not both. The gathering job goes to the women because they can perform it while pregnant or carrying a baby or small child.
In the last part of the essay, the author compares various hunter-gatherer cultures. As it turns out, the larger percent of the diet the male hunters are responsible for supplying, the more power they have over women. In one culture, the Washo Indians, men and women hunt, fish, and gather food together. Among their culture, men and women are relatively equal. The extreme opposite are the Eskimos.
Among the Eskimo, representative of the rarest type of forager society, inequality between the sexes is matched by inequality in supplying the group with food. Inland Eskimo men hunt caribou throughout the year to provision the entire society, and maritime Eskimo men depend on whaling, fishing, and some hunting to feed their extended families. The women process the carcasses, cut and sew skins to make clothing, cook, and care for the young; but they collect no food of their own and depend on the men to supply all the raw materials for their work. Since men provide all the meat, they also control the trade in hides, whale oil, seal oil, and other items that move between the maritime and inland Eskimos.
Eskimo women are treated almost exclusively as objects to be used, abused, and traded by men. After puberty, all Eskimo girls are fair game for amny interested male. A man shows his intentions by grabbing the belt of a woman, and if she protests, he cuts off her trousers and forces himself upon her. These encounters are considered unimportant by the rest of the group. Men offer their wives' sexual services to establish alliances with trading partners and members of hunting and whaling parties.
So there you have it. Historically, meat was associated with male dominance. |
