Our species, Homo Sapiens, has been around in its current, recognizable form for about 200,000 years. Until recently it was in the culture we call hunting-gathering. Life under those conditions was hard—and dangerous. Dwellings were as provided by nature for most of that period, giving way to slightly less primitive ones fashioned by humans. Among other things a dwelling had to provide protection, protection from wildlife and from other hunter-gatherers. The stereotypical person of this age of human existence is the troglodyte, the cave man.
In the cave, or whatever habitat was contrived to replace it, the women and children slept in the inner chambers and men slept, or camped, at the entrance. They were there to guard the habitat from whatever dangers occasioned. These were fought off with clubs stereotypically, the earliest and easiest weapon to improvise. As time went on habitats improved and so did weapons. Stone-studded maces, stone-pointed spears and one day the seminal inventions of projectile weapons beginning with the atlatl and the bow. It’s important to recognize that this hunter-gatherer period was about 188,000 of those 200,000 years of human existence. We inherited the adaptations of that age and they are still with us.
But since then things have changed.
Men have now created a world much more suitable for women. Distance has been tamed by the railroad, airplane and automobile, cities are safe (no more walls needed), rival tribes are no longer attacking in the night and civil order is, by and large, well established. But that’s not nearly all.
Women were chained for centuries by common chores that have been alleviated by modern machines: Clothes washers and dryers, hot running water, dish washers, garbage disposers and now, wonder of wonders: the microwave oven. The monotonous labors that once filled a woman’s life are cut to a fraction. Time for a woman to go out into the new, safer and more interesting world.
Women are moving into many of the places and pursuits that were once the exclusive territory of men. Even (some) race cars today can be driven by women. Most recently there has been an attack on women’s segregated sports as men have tried to enter competition with them. Equality is sometimes a sword with two edges.
Women have invaded the learned professions. They now make up half or more than half of the classes in law and medicine, once the sole provinces of men.
Even warfare is changing in step with the rest of human culture. In the most recent conflagrations some of the violence has been inflicted by unmanned machines, flying on sorties of many hours length. They deploy against the enemy while they are safely controlled by pilots thousands of miles away, dealing devastation on orders from keyboard and mouse, giving commands carried around the Earth via satellite. We’ve even become familiar with the oxymoron of drone pilot. And some of those drone pilots are women. She now has more power on the field of battle than the most fell of the Spartan soldiers of old—and she works a comfortable, eight-hour shift wielding it. She aims potent warheads at blips of light on a screen, kills a score of enemy on the other side of the planet, then sips her coffee and files her fingernails. Warfare continues, but it’s more and more fought with the machines men invented for that purpose. More and more often these machines can be operated by women. One might say, ironically, that women can now man them.
There’s still a lot of rifle butt ’n bayonet fighting and extrapolations of the changing parts of a culture are always tricky but the direction in which things are going is immutable. War itself is being automated—and that automation is being feminized.
A woman finds a man ever less necessary. She no longer needs the protection, the heavy lifting or the aggressiveness of a man to protect or assist her. She has time and freedom as never before because of the machinery and appliances that have freed her from drudgery.
This wasn’t something anyone planned. For millennia men were content to kill each other in savage wars and didn’t bother inventing washing machines, electric automobile engine starters or automatic transmissions. Somehow that didn’t last. Men went to work making life safer, easier and more comfortable for everyone.
Today we are all doing things we were not adapted to in the long selection of the hunter-gatherer environment. Yet modern life has not gone on long enough to change those archaic adaptations. As life has become more suited to a woman’s capabilities and proclivities it has become more foreign to the same qualities in a man. Men have been inventing themselves out of a place in human society.
Men will still be superior in jobs that are less removed from the primitive life style. Some jobs still require physical strength and expose the worker to danger but men are still hard at work eliminating and effeminizing those conditions.
And women, by immutable nature, will retain their monopoly on child bearing and nurturing (whether they like it or not). Some modern areas of endeavor will see men and women side by side. Others will separate them by inherently masculine and feminine requirement. But less and less and less.
That’s enough of predicting the future, always a dicey business. The future will, as always, impose itself upon us but it’s nice to be able to understand what’s happening. Meanwhile, there’s still that satisfaction that comes from opening a tightly closed jar of pickles for your wife.
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