In his novel, Seven Eves Neal Stephenson used parthenogenesis. In this really quite good SciFi story, something caused the moon to break up into a lot of pieces. Male astronomers calculated how the pieces would rub together, making more pieces, and would eventually bombard the earth and heat it up to a very high temperature killing all life on earth. Fortunately, lots of people were launched into space abroad various life boats.

Things didn't go well. The earth was bombarded, and life on earth was destroyed. Most of the life boats failed. It took a tremendously valiant, heroic effort to survive. By the time the last life boat found refuge on a big piece of the moon, all of the men had died saving the remnant of the species. Fortunately, a lot of genetic lab equipment had been included, and the remaining 7 women cloned themselves, hence Seven Eves. Eventually the geneticist eve figured out how to build a Y chromosome. 5000 years later, earth had been reseeded, the atmosphere was blue sky again, and everything worked out fine. Never mind how, this is science fiction after all.

By the way, two of the 7 women were exceptional devious destructive bitches.

Fun fact, one of the reasons poetry has been populated by so many females for so long is that it is one of the few arts that can be written "on the go" while having little ones playing and nagging and interrupting all day long. — NKBJ

Source for this "fact?"

I heard that in a graduate lecture a few months ago. Give me a moment to see if I can find a source.

Neal Stephenson — Bitter Crank

I've read some of Stephenson's books. I didn't really like the science fiction, e.g. Snow Crash, but I loved Quicksilver.

Emily Dickinson wrote her poetry on the go and she didn't have any children to worry about. Not taking care of children is probably necessary for artistic success -- or most other kinds of success.

Michelangelo to his children in the studio: "Allontanati da quella statua finita, schifoso moccioso!" ... "Get away from that finished statue, you fucking brats!"

Why do you suppose Karl Marx spent so much time in the British Museum Reading Room? "Don't you dare mess up that manuscript, you fucking brats!"

They do take up a considerable amount of time and brain power!



I'm afraid I cannot find the exact quote at the moment. Though I do hope common sense would tell you that raising 7 children pre-washing machines and refrigerators while continually pregnant was a job that left little time for leisurely painting or writing War and Peace.

Fun fact, one of the reasons poetry has been populated by so many females for so long is that it is one of the few arts that can be written "on the go" while having little ones playing and nagging and interrupting all day long. — NKBJ

Camille Paglia is a good author to read on the subject. Very saucy. 200 proof.

This thread kinda blew up; but, I'm glad everything is fine.

Though I do hope common sense would tell you that raising 7 children pre-washing machines and refrigerators while continually pregnant was a job that left little time for leisurely painting or writing War and Peace. — NKBJ

No, that doesn't really sound like common sense to me. How many men ever had lives where they didn't have to work long hours in the fields or factories? We don't need to take this any further. If you do find the source I'd like to take a look at it.

This thread kinda blew up; but, I'm glad everything is fine. — Wallows

I'm a big supporter of keeping to the original post. If you, the original poster, thinks it has gotten off track, you have the right to try to set things straight.

No, that doesn't really sound like common sense to me. How many men ever had lives where they didn't have to work long hours in the fields or factories? We don't need to take this any further. If you do find the source I'd like to take a look at it. — T Clark

A) Typically throughout history laborers have not been the ones creating art.
B) A day job ends at the end of the day. Motherhood is 24/7.

A) Typically throughout history laborers have not been the ones creating art.
B) A day job ends at the end of the day. Motherhood is 24/7. — NKBJ

As I said, if you have information to provide beyond "seems to me," I'd be happy to look at it.

Eternal cynic.

I somehow doubt you'd listen to any sources I provide here either.

Despite my wariness of your cynicism, here's an article which supports my post. This article speaks specifically about journaling as a female literary outlet, but the social structures and constraints are the same.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/24780526?read-now=1&seq=3#page_scan_tab_contents

Eternal cynic. — NKBJ

I am the least cynical person I know. I am, however, skeptical. It bothers me when you make a claim with potentially significant social implications with no support except your impressions. You've been around the forum long enough to know that is a common attitude here.

Despite my wariness of your cynicism, here's an article which supports my post. This article speaks specifically about journaling as a female literary outlet, but the social structures and constraints are the same. — NKBJ

All I could get access to was an abstract. It is generally related to gender roles in literature, but I didn't see anything that backed up what you claim. It's not even that I think you're wrong, you just haven't provided any support for your position.

journaling — NKBJ

Journaling!

Journals, diaries, and the like are usually NOT of interest as "literature". Pepys journal is valuable as an intimate view of everyday history. Some journals, whether written by men or women, also are interesting in that way. Some are interesting as religious material, or psychological material, and so forth. I love Pepys's journals, but they aren't literary in the usual sense of the word. But let's face it: they are also a lot more interesting than a lot of formal literary product.

You might want to investigate the American author, Tillie Olsen (1912 -2007).

Olsen was born to Russian Jewish immigrants in Wahoo, Nebraska and moved to Omaha while a young child.

Over the years Olsen worked as a waitress, domestic worker, and meat trimmer. She was also a union organizer and political activist in the Socialist community.[3] In 1932, Olsen began to write her first novel Yonnondio, the same year she gave birth to Karla, the first of four daughters. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tillie_Olsen

Olsen introduced themes that would become central to a generation of women readers and writers: she brought the subject of motherhood into focus as a valid topic for literary representation, even as she showed how it, along with economic “circumstances” and the restrictions imposed by race, class and sex, presented a major obstacle to women’s artistic creativity. http://www.fembio.org/english/biography.php/woman/biography/tillie-olsen/

Back in the good old days when the University of Minnesota's radio station, KUOM, was part of University Extension, (now it just plays whatever current music students want to hear) I heard Tillie Olson read some of her own work. From one angle it was a long whine about how children, children getting sick, children having inconvenient needs, money problems, house work, and so on got in the way of her literary career. More charitably, her report is entirely reasonable.

A married working class woman with children had and still has chances of literary success just a little better than a snow ball's chance in hell--not for lack of talent, but for lack of uninterrupted time and freely available resources.

I haven't read any of her books; here is a piece you can sample immediately. As I stand ironing...

I mean, how do you explain that? — Wallows

There are so many factors that warrant discussion to fully answer the question of why there are fewer female prisoners than men, but I can at least start you off with an explanatory evolutionary perspective:

As @Bitter Crank pointed out, populations of men and women have a certain amount of internal "divergence" (a tendency to display varied traits across different individuals). Let's assume for the sake of discussion that people who are in prison are there because of ultimately genetically programmed deviance (we can leave the nurture discussion for another time; I'm dealing with the "nature" side).

Just about any human trait can be measured in populations as a distribution curve (statistically). Let's use height as an example. On average women are shorter than men, but men have more variance in their height. Their distribution curves on a graph charting the frequency of different heights look like this:



Why is there more variation in the male population you ask? There's a fairly strong evolutionary argument that helps explain it:

Women have wombs (an evolutionarily critical human organ), and wombs have certain physiological requirements to be functional: hips need to be a minimum width; metabolism needs to be capable of supporting pregnancy, etc... On top of this, women are typically the primary child-rearers, and rearing children demands a particular kind of personality to be successful (patient, caring, etc...) (now we're getting closer to the crux of the thread).

The set of tasks that evolution is optimizing women for don't change a great deal; much of their energy is imperatively invested in a body that can support the necessary sex organs. Meanwhile, men of any size, shape, and personality are capable of having a working penis, and using it. Instead of growing big tits and big asses, evolution is free to roll more dice with us in order to ensure that inter-generationally we can adapt to a wider set of changing environments that require different kinds of tasks. For instance, height is beneficial in mostly open landscapes (savannah, plains, hills), but it is decidedly not useful in dense forest or jungle (for obvious reasons); we should expect to see height correlate with environment in this way, and we do!

In short, men are expendable compared to women (only a few men need actually reproduce, whereas our population numbers and growth are bottle-necked by the number of available wombs), and evolution therefore uses them as such.

It's true that men and women have the same average I.Q, and it's also true that there are more extremely high IQ men than there are extremely high IQ women (and there are also more men of extremely low I.Q). Evolution knows that women need to be within a certain range to be good parents, but it doesn't know what kind of man will be most optimal for the future environment, so it covers more bases.

If crime is at all the result of genetics, then we should see more male outliers than females. (and what is a criminal BUT a behavioral outlier?).

--------

If this perspective interests you at all, there's a wider field of study with many such useful models that are really highly insightful. I've reccomended this (free) Standford lecture series here before, and I'm proud to do so again!

I should temper the above by pointing out that we absolutely must consider environment in addition to genetics. Genes do absolutely nothing without an environment to express in, and changes in environment (eg: pre-natal hormones, diet, climate, culture, etc..) can have wild ramifications on the shape and behavior of the resulting organisms.

DNA plays an undeniably important role, but so too does environment.

The set of tasks that evolution is optimizing women for don't change a great deal; much of their energy is imperatively invested in a body that can support the necessary sex organs. Meanwhile, men of any size, shape, and personality are capable of having a working penis, and using it. Instead of growing big tits and big asses, evolution is free to roll more dice with us in order to ensure that inter-generationally we can adapt to a wider set of changing environments that require different kinds of tasks. For instance, height is beneficial in mostly open landscapes (savannah, plains, hills), but it is decidedly not useful in dense forest or jungle (for obvious reasons); we should expect to see height correlate with environment in this way, and we do! — VagabondSpectre

I am very skeptical of this type of simplistic story-telling about evolution. There is not this sort of one-to-one correspondence between traits and evolutionary "causes." Your explanations don't seem very plausible to me.

Evolution knows — VagabondSpectre

I know you're using this as a metaphor, but still, evolution don't know nothing.

You can register to jstor for free to read the whole article.

Journals, diaries, and the like are usually NOT of interest as "literature". — Bitter Crank

And that's patriarchy.

My mother was contemporary with Tillie Olson and was also a working class wife and mother (of 7). She didn't have literary aspirations, as far as I know, but if she had other aspirations, they had to be set aside.

Monday was devoted to laundry. She had a wringer washing machine, but no water heater. All the water had to be heated on a stove, carried to the washing machine, and then carried outside. All o the clothes were hung outside to dry. She prepared noon dinner for self, children and husband - the main meal of the day. Then house cleaning.

Tuesday was ironing. Wednesday - no major chores. Maybe small laundry on Thursday; Friday ironing. Saturday, bread baking. Sunday, major dinner preparation for family.

9 people to support, no car, minimal plumbing, minimal conveniences, coal burning space heater (they're dirty), oil stove in kitchen, extensive canning in the summer, and so on.

Women of her time (and even more so before her time) and her station in life could not pursue non-essential work. There was simply no time and energy to do more.

My two parents both worked very hard to provide a steady solid home environment. They were successful. But neither of them had much time for anything else.

The people who occupied the New York literary scene, people like Dorothy Parker or Mary McCarthy, were not burdened in the same way. Parker's publisher asked her why she hadn't produced anything during the last several months. Her excuse was "somebody was using the pencil." She wasn't swamped with housework and sick children.

I am very skeptical of this type of simplistic story-telling about evolution. There is not this sort of one-to-one correspondence between traits and evolutionary "causes." Your explanations don't seem very plausible to me. — T Clark

They're not my explanations, I'm just relaying the fruits of applying an evolutionary perspective to human behavior. Sexual dimorphism and changing frequencies of traits are a part of the fundamental building blocks of Darwinian evolution (well described and well observed):

If traits are heritable, if they can vary in degree (such as height), and if they impact future reproductive success, then natural selection will act upon them.

That DNA has an impact on behavior is not exactly debatable. You can try to argue that nurture is more important in determining psychological outcomes, but you can't argue that the principles I've outlined don't also apply.

I know you're using this as a metaphor, but still, evolution don't know nothing. — T Clark

But it still has a kind of "predictive power" that essentially emerges from the "stored data" which DNA represents.

Sexual dimorphism and changing frequencies of traits are a part of the fundamental building blocks of Darwinian evolution (well described and well observed): — VagabondSpectre

I have no problem with that. It's the story-telling about how specific traits result from specific evolutionary effects that bothers me.

Okay, yes, I agree with all that. What is your point?

No it's not patriarchy. You read the post too quickly. Journals written by men are usually not literature either. Journals have real value, just not "literary" value because they are, after all, written for a very small audience. I wrote a very candid summary of my life, for my eyes only. It had zero literary merit. It was for private purposes. It might have made juicy reading for my siblings, but hardly for anybody else.

I don't believe there is such a thing as "patriarchy", but if there is such a thing the proof wouldn't be in the lack of recognition anybody -- male or female -- gets for their journaling. Most people who do believe in patriarchy think that there are few women composers, famous authors, great painters, and so on because they have been suppressed, oppressed, and repressed. Fanny Mendelssohn is probably a better example of "patriarchy". Fanny, Felix Mendelssohn's sister, wrote between 400 and 500 compositions, and is largely unknown. Clara Schumann, wife of Robert Schumann, was a recognized composer and performer on her own merits. She doesn't get a lot of air time either.

I'm not rendering a full explanation of height, (nor criminal deviance), but i AM providing an important piece of the explanatory puzzle. Presumably there's much more to the adaptive story of height (which is about 80% genetically determined), but it's at least highly plausible that greater height enables greater top speeds (more useful in plains) and hinders mobility in dense brush (a hindrance in jungles). I'm not trying to draw firm conclusions about the adaptive utility of height, I'm trying to show why trait variation in men can be more liberal in order to gain a species wide adaptive advantage.

Okay, yes, I agree with all that. What is your point? — NKBJ

Sigh. I was merely amplifying the point that working class women, one of whom I observed at close hand for years, didn't have much opportunity to pursue literary careers. That was Tillie Olsen's complaint -- without independent wealth from some source (husband, inheritance, good luck, etc.) it was very hard to have a literary career. Poor women just had to work too hard.

No it's not patriarchy. You read the post too quickly. Journals written by men are usually not literature either. Journals have real value, just not "literary" value because they are, after all, written for a very small audience. I wrote a very candid summary of my life, for my eyes only. It had zero literary merit. It was for private purposes. It might have made juicy reading for my siblings, but hardly for anybody else. — Bitter Crank

A) Some journals are written with a large audience in mind.
B) the article I link to says that men who pursued journaling most often did so apologizing for doing something so feminine.

I don't believe there is such a thing as "patriarchy", — Bitter Crank

Is or ever was? Cause if the latter, I think you may be beyond reason.