For most of the existence of human species (according to the scholarly consensus of anthropologists) we existed in bands of adults who would intermingle freely. Adolescent men would raid nearby tribes and kidnap their young women, which is the means by which genes were exchanged between tribes.
All the monogamy and licensing happened after agriculture and the great leap forward once tribes became big enough that infectious diseases were no longer contained through pure isolation. We see the misogynistic trends rise in late Hellenic periods and then Christianity cranked it up to eleven, so now we imagine even our migrant hunter-gatherer ancestors paired off.
As a note, during the middle ages, it was super important among aristocracy to assure ladies-in-waiting were virginal before they were wed, and then used purely as heir machines, but the serf class routinely banged like bunnies in springtime. And while frowned upon by the more piety-minded clergy, it was generally ignored because a) Child mortality was something awful and every kid that ever reached majority was to be celebrated, and b) The labor shortage was extreme everywhere. There was always way too much stuff to be done, and so every pair of hands was welcome, even when they were attacked to an idiot, a malformed hunchback, a ne’er-do-well or the bastard progeny of a mixed coupling.
Curiously, as we see in the birth of Mordred, pre-Christian European traditions included suspending adultery limitations during holidays, which happened at least once a season, sometimes twice. So even in societies where monogamy was the norm, there was a defined space for getting a bit on the side. (Useful when your partner was infertile.)
Funny how people who fantasize being in a zombie outbreak never realize they’re one of the zombies, and not even one of the special infected with zombie powers.
Take all your overgrown infants away somewhere And build them a home, a little place of their own The Fletcher Memorial Home for Incurable Tyrants and Kings
And they can appear to themselves everyday On closed circuit TV To make sure they’re still real It’s the only connection they feel
– Roger Waters, The Fletcher Memorial Home
Even in the early 1980s, some of us bleeding hearts and artists saw and knew.
Louis CK has a bit about how women have to take a terrible risk when dating, since men very often can be aggressive to the point of violent. In the 70s and 80s this was just accepted as a thing (and there was still a debate whether wife-rape was a thing). Since then, we’ve been trying to push the notion that romantic relationships should be consensual, not something that women should just have to weather, like it’s an act of nature. And we’re seeing the pushback from the Christian nationalist movement / transnational white power movement, to the point where rolling back women’s suffrage is on the table.
This is that dominance hierarchy thing again. It seems our society likes men with prowess, especially sports chops, though money chops or political chops are also enjoyed. Our school administrators favor schoolyard bullies over their victims, which is only one example out of dozens how we favor men who are more bestial than civil.
So yeah, having to contend with a bear in the woods may not be worse than having to contend with a man in the woods.
Although, this is about the choice between a strange man and a strange bear, and the scenario comes down to hoping the beastie doesn’t get too hungry / horny or otherwise is willing to respect you and your personhood. If not, it’s a problem of escaping, and while the bear is way faster and stronger (we’re assuming one of the larger ursine species) the man is smarter and may have tools. Given a strange man in the woods, we cannot automatically assume he has the manners of a New York family man with a robust office-clerk résumé.
A related question can be applied to a lot of our elected officials. Would the public be served better if we replaced our current official with a bear? There are a lot of them – people who are allegedly exemplary citizens of our society to which our kids can aspire – who behave worse than a bear might in their position.
It could be a good place for introspection. If you are a guy, and ended up stuck in a survival situation with a woman, would she be lucky she encountered you and not a bear? Similarly, if a woman drank to much at a social gathering and was too inebriated to think clearly, or even needed a place to rest, would your presence improve her safety or pose an additional risk? Not being a threat to our fellow humans is a very low bar, but it is a bar that a lot of people fail to clear.
I opine this is not fully their doing. US society really resents its teenagers and young adults, and did so even when I was a kid in the 1970s-1980s, which drove a lot of guys towards the alt-right even before Steve Bannon worked to turn it into a voting bloc. Here in the States we have a longstanding tradition of letting our young men turn into War Boys, join up with Immorten Joe, ever looking for an opportunity to go out in glory all shiny and chrome. ( Witness me! ) I got out by pure luck in the early 1990s, never quite finding my divine wind moment.
A woman saying yes to a date with a man is literally insane and ill-advised, and the whole species’ existence counts on them doing it, and I don’t know how they– How do women still go out with guys when you consider the fact that there is no greater threat to women than men? We’re the number-one threat to women. Globally and historically, we’re the number-one cause of injury and mayhem to women. We’re the worst thing that ever happens to them…
How do they still do it? If you’re a guy, try to imagine that you could only date a half-bear, half-lion, And you’re like, “I hope this one’s nice. I hope he doesn’t do what he’s going to do.”
I mean yeah, Louis is a putz and a predator, but he did make a valid point.
This was par for the course in Heydrich’s Sicherheitsdienst in which undesirables and antinationals were rebranded within the service as hardened criminals so they could be treated more cruelly while in detention.
Similarly ICE is only supposed to go after undocumented immigrants who are also felons. They go after any immigrant and some vulnerable American citizens, felons or not.
The point is to paint the society as teeming with enemies of state, so as to justify more extreme security measures.
The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.
A friend of mine who lived in Berkeley in the early aughts was a member of her local tool library. I thought it was a brilliant idea. You just had to be live in the community and getting your library card was free.
At one point my roommate needed a drill to complete some home improvement, so I got the drill, committing to be the drill guy the buddy that had a borrow-able power drill.
Curiously, when I moved, I needed to reduce my stuff drastically, so my roommate inherited the drill.
Not in high school. I was privileged and lived in a wonder-bread suburb. But a lot of people then (fewer now) believed those with mental illness should be treated like Jason Voorhees and gunned down like a rabid animal or locked in an institution and kept tranquilized my the nurses.
I did believe in the late '80s I could negotiate with law enforcement and was able to navigate though some troubling encounters. If I wasn’t Scandinavian white, those could well have gone differently.
Yes, in the 1980s, it was presumed by the ignorant public that all crazy people were a danger to themselves or others. It was the era of serial killers, psychopaths and sociopaths.
A serial killer is a specific kind of killing pattern identified by law enforcement investigators (contrast spree killers and rampage killers.) Serial killers are extremely rare, and don’t have a corellation to mental illness or any specific diagnosis. Despite reports in the 70s that asserted (without evidence) serial killers are responsible for 5000 homicides a year in the US (they are not), in fact, you’re more likely to get killed by lightning (less than 50 per year in the US) than by an active serial killer.
A psychopath is a designation by an expert witness in a courtroom, often by a psychiatric professional who has not actually assessed the suspect, but is guessing based on publicly known facts regarding his behavior, the way an armchair psychiatrist might guess that Trump suffers from NPD. In the 1980s, designating a suspect as a psychopath was to suggest he doesn’t need a motive. Psychosis is the category of diagnosis, but isn’t related.
Sociopathy was a personality disorder (Personality disorders are actually, less abnormal than what I have, a psychosis called Major Depression, though their dysfunction can be more evident) Sociopathy was retired in the DSM V, and replaced with antisocial personality disorder. While dangerous APD subjects exist, their rate of violent crime per capita is less than the general population. Though their rate of being victims of violent crime is higher than the general mean. Sociopath is also used as a forensic term to convince juries that a suspect is too dangerous for society.
These days, while we have more awareness of mental illness, there still remain some stereotypes and biases. The public doesn’t want me to have access to guns, for example, on the single basis I have a diagnosis. (It’s a difficult sell, since the US has a lot of veterans with diagnoses and guns, and could not be easily disarmed without creating a big bloody mess. They also go on and off suicide watch, and some counties have a delicate let your friend hold your gun for you program so as to not endanger law enforcement by forcing them to disarm trained soldiers with combat PTSD and justifiable grounds for paranoia)
Then there’s the matter that the institutions in the United States intended to secure inpatients are closely tied to its institutions for securing inmates (for whom we have no love and are glad to leave in squalor). Inpatients get about the same degree of abuse as inmates by their alleged caretakers (violence or sexual assault by orderlies, or abuse of pharmaceuticals by the nurses, who are fond of over-administering tranquilizers to keep the kooks quiet). Our public has about the same empathy for the crazies as they do the convicts, even when the inpatients didn’t necessarily do anything wrong to be denied their civil liberties.
So yeah, the likes of Voorhees and Kruger and Dolarhyde and Lecter have affected sentiments about us lunatics the way Peter Benchley’s Jaws affected attitudes about sharks, the effects of which are seen to this day, say when police routinely gun down subjects of mental health crises (which are disproportionately counted among officer involved homicide.)
So the choices are indulging in risky experiences, whether for pleasure or for character building (e.g. facing a storm at sea). Only memory is preserved. You can’t make sociopolitical improvements or enrich yourself. (Though if you revert to a day ago you might know what stocks to buy in the morning.)
I don’t think social media use by kids can be contained any more than drugs, video games, outdoors mischief or any of the other coping methods kids use in a society that forces their parents to work to exhaustion.
Maybe more social programs, shorter work hours so parents can actually engage their kids, and community efforts to engage kids will pull them from their coping methods of choice.
As it is, social media is restricted to 13+ (since most platforms rather do that than child-safe their platforms – there are standards) but kids nationwide (if not worldwide) just lie about their age as they do with porn access. For a while this was a major source of (unenforced) CFAA violations.
Here in the US not even the Democratic party is going to help us change to a society that cares for and protects our kids, and all but criminalizes our teens, so until there is a radical sweep and reform of societal norms, our kids are just screwed.
The first step is recognizing that you may love your kid, but our society collectively hates all minor demographics and treats them as a market to exploit, or a pest. This has been the case prior to the boomers and makes for an intergenerational mental health crisis.
I’m pissy about it but because it’s a valid concern, and you should be able to jog at night.
I can walk my dog at night in a rough neighborhood but my wife feels its to risky for her to leave the complex. That sucks and I wish our society was better.
It bugs me when people say “the thing is is that” (if you listen for it, you’ll start hearing it… or maybe that’s something that people only do in my area.) (“What the thing is is that…” is fine. But “the thing is is that…” bugs me.)...
I can see it used that way. Yes, but then I’d think there’d be an obligation to explain why the proceeding arguments trump the previous ones if it’s not obvious. With that said is certainly a bridge from one part of an argument to the next.
I see this phrase used a lot on blahaj lemmy. I’m actually bi but I don’t really like using the word ‘folk’ over ‘people’… it just kinda sounds pretentious, I don’t want to be described like a mythical creature
Queer folk are your community members where queer people are a demographic of the population.
In my case queer folk and trans folk and LGBT+ folk come from a tip from Santa training, where you talk about a kid’s folks instead of parents, so as to not raise issues when kids don’t have them but guardians instead.
Queer folk are the people among my crew and homies and mates who identify as queer or queer-adjacient.
Polyamorule (files.catbox.moe)
Gonna need to be a full on poly commune at this rate if prices keep going up.
rule (lemmy.world)
All my real Americans from US State stand up! (lemmy.world)
king rule (lemmy.eco.br)
Just a wheel of troll cheese aging on a Norwegian mountain. Why? (sh.itjust.works)
The prompt is in the title....
girls rule (lemmy.blahaj.zone)
Mean world syndrome has reacted a fever pitch. (lemmy.world)
Trust me bro (jlai.lu)
After Raids, NYPD Denied Student Protesters Water and Food in Jail (theintercept.com)
How rental ‘libraries of things’ have become the new way to save money (www.theguardian.com)
The theory is simple: instead of buying a household item or a piece of clothing or some equipment you might use once or twice, you take it out and return it.
rule (lemmy.zip)
You have 24 hours to do anything with absolutely no consequences. What do you do?
Me and who? 🥺 (lemmy.world)
How the US Is Destroying Young People’s Future | Scott Galloway | TED (youtu.be)
Cleaning rule (i.ibb.co)
Ladies if all the men of the world disappeared for 24 hours, they are fine they will come back, BUT during those 24 hours what are YOU doing?
This question has been around for a while but I’m curious as to your answer
What linguistic constructions do you hate that no one else seems to mind?
It bugs me when people say “the thing is is that” (if you listen for it, you’ll start hearing it… or maybe that’s something that people only do in my area.) (“What the thing is is that…” is fine. But “the thing is is that…” bugs me.)...
Why do people say 'queer folk' instead of 'queer people'?
I see this phrase used a lot on blahaj lemmy. I’m actually bi but I don’t really like using the word ‘folk’ over ‘people’… it just kinda sounds pretentious, I don’t want to be described like a mythical creature