Quote Originally Posted by ReineD View Post
Many people have brought up the idea that bias exists in our society because the male privilege is compromised. Without getting into anthropological accuracy, surely the notion of male privilege is a construct of modern (ish) society? In primitive societies, wouldn't both men and women have combined their abilities in order to survive, there would have been no thought of a superior vs. an inferior gender, but rather just different bodies to fulfill different functions? And wouldn't a tribal member who could not contribute to everyone's welfare or survival be cast aside?

I'm making a mental note to read about primitive gender roles and survival practices. It's a fascinating topic.
That may be true, I'm not familiar with the scholarship on that.

I did read one really interesting book called "The Alphabet Versus the Goddess" by Leonard Shlain, which posited that a rise in masculine privilege/values was directly related to the deveopment of the alphabet! Basically the idea that Shlain puts forth (he is a neuroscientist but this still seems kind of oppositional sexist), is that the intrinsically female way of thinking is holistic and 'all-at-once', whereas the intrinsically male way of thinking is compartmental and sequential. He then describes how pre-alphabetic cultures worshipped mostly females and had a distinctively more female way of thinking of the cosmos, and how this was reflected both in their languages, which were typically pictographic or hieroglyphic, and their governmental/social systems, which were not divided into caste systems, did not rely on definitions of property, etc.

So then he goes on to posit that the development of the alphabet basically enabled men to dominate society, by basically re-inventing language and societal structure according to the way they think, obviously putting them in a position of privilege. Alphabetic language is read in a sequential manner, where strict rules of syntax are required to decode the meaning, and the social structural changes that accompanied the development of the alphabet in many cultures also coincided with strict rules and stratified government (Hammurabi's code in the case of the Babylonians for instance), as well as a stratified class structure, and stratified gender roles...