RANT ALERT: Sexism and Paleo

While the MacLeans article on paleo was one of the better ones, I think the illustration they chose (above) is indicative of what's wrong with paleo media coverage. While there have been exceptions, nearly every reporter I've talked to about paleo has asked me ridiculously sexist questions pulled out of some sort of pulp caveman fantasy. "Do do the guys doing the paleo diet club women and bring them back to their caves?" was one of the worst.

It's fiction people.

It doesn't help that there are more than a few paleo dieters willing to go along with this and frame paleo as a way to pick up hot chickz and to reclaim a ridiculous idea of masculinity. Guess what? While evolutionary psychology has some lessons, it's been distorted to justify disgusting behaviors that have nothing to do with being human. Real hunter-gatherers are diverse: some have rigid gender hierarchies and others don't. But such men don't want to hear about the complexities of human cultures, they just want to cover up their own very-real inadequecies by spouting nonsense about how manliness is being oppressed by modern society.

Nevermind that it's women who are the ones consistently shamed away from eating meat, hunting, and fishing, among other things. The wimpiness of our culture cuts across the gender divide. Did you know the foragers have LOWER testosterone than studied hunter-gatherers? American men are crash and burn- high testosterone when young probably leds to stupidity and aggression, which quickly fizzles out into viagra-popping territory.

In the media's stupidthropology, men in the Stone age hunted while women pattered about with children on their backs gathering the makings of an organic argula-walnut salad. Guess what? Gathering is a dumb word that demeans the role of women, because in the anthropology world it includes fishing, trapping, and hunting game- often with complex traps and nets. But this is consistently ignored, even by female writers.

And guess what- the Stone Age wasn't an era of hot muscular men having sex with a zillion ladies while the wimps were beaten into the jungle. Humans are not bonobos. We are wired for "monogamy," though this biological term has little to do with the modern Christian fantasy of having one partner for the rest of your life. Rather, it seems humans bear biological marks of serial monogamy with some furtive extra-pair copulation....with as all things human, quite a bit of diversity in terms of sexual preferences.