The World According to Claire

If you are a homemaker, you may occasionally experience an “irrational” reaction to having to do one more bleeping sink of dishes or prepare yet another meal for your thankless loved ones. I’ve been there more than once. But what if I told you this reaction might not be so irrational after all? What if I pointed out that humans are among the very few species on the planet that live together as a nuclear family? The “moms” of almost every other animal on Earth, in fact, live long term with either their partner OR their offspring, but not both. This human condition creates a ton of work for the parent who is not leaving the house to work—or for the parent trying to do it all by themselves. How did we get into this situation? And why in the world would less traditional, same-sex couples sign up for this crap? It’s actually a matter of instinct. Prehistoric humans who lived as devoted pairs in a tribe were able to successfully rear the most offspring. As a result, tribes with the most fertile couples had the best chance of surviving their harsh prehistoric landscape. This all sounds terribly technical, and frankly pretty boring to read about, so I am going to discuss it from Claire’s point of view. Claire, as you may know, is what I call the part of me that still thinks like a cavedweller, and this is her very important and interesting story.

When we first met Claire, she was deciding which tribe to join. She was pretty young when she left her original tribe—not quite old enough to have a mate—and life was pretty simple when she decided to follow Jerome. She chose him as her leader because he seemed more reliable a person than Blaine, the other leader she had considered following. She was pleased with her decision especially after hearing stories of Blaine’s erratic behavior from his tribe members at various watering holes over-time. Blaine was an effective hunter, but he was also an asshole. He only saw the members of his tribe as resources…as if his followers only existed to serve his needs. But Jerome was more egalitarian. He was a great hunter, and could certainly put his tribe members in their place, but he generally had an even temperament. He thought of his followers as useful but also as separate individuals. If he had not already had a mate when she joined his tribe, Claire was pretty sure she would have liked to have been Jerome’s significant other.

But not every member of Jerome’s tribe was as predictable as he was. Soon after Claire had been accepted as a member, she began developing, and single dudes started paying attention to her as a potential mate. This situation became a major annoyance. Because she was a human, she did not send off obvious signals about when she would be interested in having sex. She did not “go into heat” every so often like her primate cousins did. And once she developed boobs, they were pretty much a constant signal that she might be ready to make babies—though the guys who were tailing her did not consciously think about creating offspring with her. They just wanted to get busy with someone who looked like she had not done it with some other dude in the recent past—a girl with a waist that was more narrow than her hips—so they could be reasonably sure they would end up raising their own offspring (if by chance the sex resulted in kids.) So as Claire got curvier, the passes made at her became more aggressive. It totally sucked.

Fortunately for Claire, there was something about the male human body that helped her escape unwanted advances—the accessibility and sensitivity of a guy’s gonads. While external plumbing was handy for a male’s primate cousin to conduct quickies in the jungle, it made a human male vulnerable to temporary paralysis via full-frontal rejection to unwanted sexual attention. So the more civilized males looked for green-light signals from the ladies they were courting besides if she was already pregnant or not. And Claire was careful. She had a very clear-cut idea of the kind of guy she was willing to partner with.

This brings us to the most important part of Claire’s story, because her story is actually the story of natural selection. Females not only hold the power to sustain human life inside their bodies—they also control the course of evolution. Girls like Claire exacted the majority of human hook-ups which decided whose genes would be passed along to the next generation and whose would not. (If this were not the case, our species would not have advanced very far.) And since Claire wanted reliability and commitment from her mate, she was not willing to settle. She waited and observed the behavior of her potential hubbies. She looked for characteristics like symmetry and size as signals of health, and strength and intelligence as signs that her choice would survive the next big hunt and return to help protect her (and her possible offspring.) In evolutionary terms, Claire and other females like her had a lot of power/control.

But the fact that she had her choice of mate was a pretty recent development.  In Blaine’s tribe, for example, things were less egalitarian. Blaine ran his affairs more like the really old days—our species' tree-dwelling days when a group’s strongest male had rights to all the ladies and no other male could participate (unless another male earned the right to replace the strongest male by beating the strongest male’s ass.) But this created tension in a group. At some point, the dominant male leaders of cave-dwelling tribes moved away from a polygamous structure and gradually started using a monogamous structure—meaning a leader would allow other males to partner with females who would have formally exclusively partnered with the him. Jerome was one of these forward-thinking tribal leaders, and it made for a somewhat more peaceful way of life. In addition, multiple families shared a campfire, so jobs like cooking or prepping food were shared by more than one gatherer. And surprisingly, offspring were not always an asset when living a Paleolithic, nomadic way of life. Building up and tearing down an encampment of 100 people took an advanced skill-set and was no place for little kids. And since sometimes cavedwellers needed to follow their food around, the ladies were expected to keep up, even if they were in labor. All the more reason for a cavegirl to have a strong, dependable partner in her life.

But a lot of things changed in human culture once we figured out how to farm. For the first time in history, a group of living things could create food—and equally importantly, could hoard it. Modern individuals who had the most food/resources had the most power, and many attempted to control others by using that power…sometimes without waiting for buy-in.  A human female’s “value” gradually changed from bad-ass gatherer/creator of life to “pampered” baby-maker. And I don’t mean pampered in the literal sense. Because humans no longer had to move when their food did, families were able to make their own separate, permanent homes. This must have initially appealed to a former cavedweller’s longing for predictability. But when we lived in tribes, we were less isolated. The campsite workload once shared by multiple families became the work of individual females in a home. A woman’s main purpose, in addition to running a household, became making more farmhands. And since the males were still the strongest, they predictably became the protectors of not only life, but property. Laws were eventually created to protect property (and penises), and wives came to be classified as part of a property, too. Entire human cultures became based on asserting power—using, distributing, and at times stealing stored resources with an aggressive win-lose mantra. (Not unlike Blaine's very old-school tribe.) Other human cultures were content with the hunter-gather way of life…not controlling the natural order and still fitting into what was already working. They trusted that their fellow tribe members had the group’s best interest in mind. These cultures had more of a win-win credo. They also had win-win leaders, like Jerome, who was Claire’s choice for leader and model for her future husband.

Listen to this soundtrack for The World According to Claire.

https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7jDFReaevUYqmpH1S4RQM3?si=4ToyaEsCQ42sQRnFACp9gw

References

Beck, J. (2018). The Concept Creep of Emotional Labor: An Interview with Arlie Hoschild. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/11/arlie-hochschild-housework-isnt-emotional-labor/576637/

Cheng, J.T. et al. (2012). Two Ways to the Top: Evidence that Domain and Prestige are distinct yet viable avenues to Social Rank and Influence. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, vol 104, No. 1, 103-125.

Currier, R. L. (2015). Unbound: How Eight Technologies Made us Human and Brought our World to the Brink.Arcade/Skyhorse Publishing, Delaware.

Dunsworth, H. (2018). It is unethical to teach evolution without confronting racism and sexism. The Evolution Institute, Online.

© 2019 Penny Fie. All rights reserved.