Section for items on Gender issues.

P2P Foundation material

• See our conversations and interviews with the 100 Women Who Are Co-Creating the P2P Society

Quotes

"I want to present evidence that gender egalitarianism was pivotal to the evolution of our language-speaking ancestors. I’ll ask whether it makes a difference if our modern human bodies and minds evolved through a prolonged period of increasing egalitarianism. Would it help us if we were designed by natural and sexual selection to be happy and healthy in egalitarian conditions? If so, then perhaps the positive question that needs asking first is not ‘how did we get to be unequal?’ but ‘how did we first become equal?’"

- Camilla Power [1]

"For years, feminism has fought a passive war of attrition on masculinity, starving it of honor. With its 2018 guidelines, the inherently feminist APA has gone on the offensive. This assault is not as simple as misandrist pay-back by feminism for a history’s-load of oppression. It has its roots in the feminist need to be man-identical. When your idea of gender equality is a 50/50 breakdown of men and women in any given situation—that is, when you think that 100 percent of women should do what 100 percent of men do—masculinity poses a threat. Making men less like men (and more like women) becomes a backdoor route to making women more like men. Such gender denial is the new Aryanism; unscientific, unprofessional, immoral. Insisting that each gender is “wrong” and must be more like the other to be “right” cripples both, and shrivels the human footprint to only what the genders have in common."

- Natalie Ritchie [2]

"The entire English language is being manipulated and twisted in order to obscure the reality of sex. In June 2021, the Biden administration replaced the word “mothers” with the words “birthing people” in a section of a budget proposal regarding infant mortality. In a guide on “Safer Sex for Trans Bodies,” the Human Rights Campaign urges readers to refer to a vagina as a “front hole” and to a penis as a “strapless…” That our language has changed so dramatically as to make the natural, material reality of sex nearly invisible, with so little public debate, is astounding… If we cannot talk about sex, we cannot talk about sexism. If we cannot talk about sexism, we cannot fight back against it."

- Kara Dansky [3]

"Without even getting into the debate about how workable this level of freedom ever was in a stable and prosperous world, what about the one we’re facing now? For material conditions have changed radically. As we slide further into a 21st century that’s so far seen economic crashes, geopolitical instability, climate change, supply chain disruption and pandemic, it’s far from clear that this level of radical individualism will be at all workable for very much longer.

In that context we need to think about how to re-solidify liquid social relations. And at the smallest possible scale, this means reclaiming marriage as the central unit for solidarity between the sexes. This might seem a very qualified way of making a feminist case for marriage - but inasmuch as my argument isn’t for female supremacy but for the sexes learning to live with one another, an institution that convenes radical interpersonal solidarity in the long-term interests of both sexes and of our children is a no-brainer.

It’s also a foundational unit of post-capitalist organising. A marriage - and the family unit it creates - offers a route out of the logic of the market that pushes all of us to treat all relationships as transactions. And it’s only by resisting the logic of the market that we can start to re-solidify human relations for life in common."

- Mary Harrington [4]

Key Resources

Key Articles

• Gender Egalitarianism Made Us Human. How humans are primed for cooperation and gender equality, and how it separated us from primate logics. By Camilla Power of the Radical Anthropology Group.

• A review of gender inequalities that disfavor men [5]

Key Books

• A call for partnership feminism: Feminism Against Progress. Mary Harrington. Swift Books, 2022.

"What happens when the material conditions that enabled feminism to emerge hit the buffers, forcing a radical re-negotiation of everything we thought we believed about women and men? My forthcoming book, Feminism Against Progress sets out what those material conditions were, why they’re changing now, and what I think comes next."

• Brigitte Kratzwald. The Whole of Life – Self-organisation between joy and necessity.

(Originally a German-language book: Kratzwald, B. (2014): Das Ganze des Lebens. Selbstorganisation zwischen Lust und Notwendigkeit. (The Whole of Life. Self-organisation between joy and necessity. Translated by the author of this review) Sulzbach/Taunus: Ulrike Helmer Verlag, p.11.)

• Mothers and Others. The Evolutionary Origins of Mutual Understanding. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy. Harvard University Press, 2011 [6]

• The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future by Riane Eisler: "the book introduces a new conceptual framework for studying social systems that pays particular attention to how a society constructs the roles and relations between the female and male halves of humanity. It proposes that underlying the long span of human cultural evolution is the tension between what Eisler calls the dominator or domination model and the partnership model."

• Heide Goettner-Abendroth: 1) Matriarchal Societies. Studies on Indigenous Cultures Around the Globe; 2) Societies of Peace. Matriarchies Past, Present and Future. Inanna Publications and Educations Inc., Toronto/Canada 2009

• To explore: the material and hypothesis by the Radical Anthropology Group on human symbolism, the sex strike and the instrumental role of women n the civilising process. They recommend the following books:

1. Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, The Old Way, 2001;
2. Loretta Cormier and Sharon Jones, The Domesticated Penis: How Womanhood has Shaped Manhood, 2015; Christopher Boehm: Hierarchy in the Forest and the Evolution of Egalitarian #Behavior, 1999, and Moral Origins, 2012; e
3. Richard Wrangham, Catching Fire: How Cooking Made Us Human, 2010;
4. Joan Roughgarden: Evolution’s Rainbow: Diversity, Gender and Sexuality in Nature and People, 2004, and The Genial Gene: Deconstructing Darwinian Selfishness, 2009.

• Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism. by Kathleen Stock. (Fleet, £16.99) [7]

• Female Erasure. Ruth Barrett, editor. Tidal Time, 2019. [8]

• Sex and Power in History: How the Difference Between the Sexes Has Shaped Our Destinies. Amaury de Riencourt; traces the changing historic roles of women, especially Western women. He reaches back to remote sources to explain—and suggest solutions to—the current predicament of the sexes. When some three of four thousand years ago men revolted against the myth of the Great Earth Goddess and set up dominant male gods, it was a psychological event of the first magnitude. This shift to the masculine principle, claims de Riencourt, marked the beginning of history proper and led to the male-oriented societies of Greece and Rome."

Key Individuals

Riane Eisler

• on the Partnership Model of Society vs the Dominator model

• Riane Eisler on the Real Wealth of Nations and Caring Economics‎
  • Riane Eisler on Caring Economics‎
  • Riane Eisler on Building a Caring Economy‎

Key Statistics

• Report: THE EMERGING GENDER GAP IN LABOR MARKETS AND EDUCATION (MIT Economics)

URL = https://economics.mit.edu/sites/default/files/publications/wayward%20sons%202013.pdf

"Although a significant minority of males continues to reach the highest echelons of achievement in education and labor markets, the median male is moving in the opposite direction. Over the last three decades, the labor market trajectory of males in the U.S. has turned downward along four dimensions: skills acquisition; employment rates; occupational stature; and real wage levels. These emerging gender gaps suggest reason for concern. While the news for women is good, the news for men is poor."

"As my colleague at the American Enterprise Institute, Nicholas Eberstadt, documents, the U.S. is in the midst of a “quiet catastrophe—the collapse of work for men.” America, says Eberstadt, “is now home to an ever-growing army of jobless men no longer even looking for work—over seven million between ages 25 and 55, the traditional prime of working life.” Economist Lawrence Summers projects that one third of working-age men will to be out of the workforce by 2050. The social and psychological toll of such a dislocation is incalculable." [9]