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Why Men?: A Human History of Violence and Inequality
How did humans, a species that evolved to be cooperative and egalitarian, develop societies of enforced inequality? Why did our ancestors create patriarchal power and warfare? Did it have to be this way?Elites have always called hierarchy and violence unavoidable facts of human nature. Evolution, they claim, has caused men to fight, and people--starting with men and women--to have separate, unequal roles. But that is bad science.Why Men? tells a smarter story of humanity, from early behaviors to contemporary cultures. From bonobo sex and prehistoric childcare to human sacrifice, Joan of Arc, Darwinism and Abu Ghraib, this fascinating, fun and important book reveals that humans adapted to live equally, yet the earliest class societies suppressed this with invented ideas of difference. Ever since, these distortions have caused female, queer and minority suffering. But our deeply human instincts towards equality have endured.This book is not about what men and women are or do. It's about the privileges humans claim, how they rationalize them, and how we unpick those ideas about our roots. It will change how you see injustice, violence and even yourself.
565 pages, Kindle Edition
Published September 1, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
July 23, 2024
Maybe it's the heat but I got bored with this book about halfway through. Judging by the title, I expected an incisive account of the (near-exclusive) role played by men in creating conflict, What I got was first a dewy-eyed idealisation of pre-farming society, where equality was maintained, childcare was kindly provided by caring women and men alike, and bullies were suppressed. Well. killed, actually. Infanticide was routinely practised, but it was carried out by women, so that's OK. Just a kind of late abortion, apparently.
Sex, it seems, was just heavenly in those far-off, paradisiacal days. I did like the suggestion that the clitoris was only there because Nature couldn't be bothered to remove a gestating girl's penis, but alas, since the developing foetus is originally female, this isn't quite logical. Lindisfarne is very interested in the subject of orgasms, and devotes quite a lot of attention to the topic, providing the diverting image of cave-dwellers 'using their fingers'. Like many members of the LGBT+ community, she believes that sex permeates everything we do or say.
The book's style is irritatingly simple to begin with, as if the writer was addressing a wide-eyed audience of 11 year-olds, and references are thin on the ground at this point, not surprisingly because much of this is speculative, though the image of male bonobo couples hanging upside-down from trees giving each other hand-jobs will stay with me for some while. Primate behaviour was a major plank in the early reasoning of this book.
The tone changed when the author moved onto the observations of various anthropologists about real hunter-gatherers, and the references came thick and fast. Suddenly we were in an academic paper arguing forcibly towards a theory of prelapsarian innocence in the lost Utopia of prehistory. It seems we had got it just right up to that point and indeed it is now clear from various sources that the Neolithic revolution led to a more numerous but less healthy and arguably less happy period in the history of Homo sapiens. Somewhere here, though, precision gets lost and we hear of the traditional 'hunters' of Native American culture sweeping across the plains on horseback, though the horse was not introduced into America until the arrival of the distinctly postlapsarian Spanish in the 16th century AD.
Once we get to the age of class-based societies, the tone changes again. Storing grain was something done by 'bullies' (prudence and foresight don't get a look in here) and the subsequent emergence of class distinctions, maintained by unscrupulous 'enforcers', provides a smooth segue into the Foucaultian discourse of power, language and ideology. We're in a Social Justice lecture, with pages and pages railing about the violent subjection of minorities in society, and though the preface to the book declares that America is a poor model for the discussion of the human condition, we are now firmly in the 21st century West. The rest of the first part is a standard Theory-based analysis of sexual suppression which you could read anywhere.
Lindisfarne believes that early humans evolved beyond the need for status, setting a pattern for human society which wasn't broken until the Neolithic 'bullies' came along to smash what had hitherto been a perfect system, but considering the preoccupation with status across all human societies, her argument is not really convincing. The worst failure of the book was the writer's refusal to attribute causes to the subjugation of women. Apart from the generalisation that gender inequality always accompanies class-based social organisation, she seems to claim that nobody can explain this. In fact, dozens of theorists have advanced compelling arguments. You can read some of them on Wikipedia.
The strong impression I got from reading the book was the writer had started out with a theory and found evidence for it along the way, rather than beginning with the evidence and moving empirically to a conclusion. Most of it is not really new, and where it is original, it is far from objective.
Sex, it seems, was just heavenly in those far-off, paradisiacal days. I did like the suggestion that the clitoris was only there because Nature couldn't be bothered to remove a gestating girl's penis, but alas, since the developing foetus is originally female, this isn't quite logical. Lindisfarne is very interested in the subject of orgasms, and devotes quite a lot of attention to the topic, providing the diverting image of cave-dwellers 'using their fingers'. Like many members of the LGBT+ community, she believes that sex permeates everything we do or say.
The book's style is irritatingly simple to begin with, as if the writer was addressing a wide-eyed audience of 11 year-olds, and references are thin on the ground at this point, not surprisingly because much of this is speculative, though the image of male bonobo couples hanging upside-down from trees giving each other hand-jobs will stay with me for some while. Primate behaviour was a major plank in the early reasoning of this book.
The tone changed when the author moved onto the observations of various anthropologists about real hunter-gatherers, and the references came thick and fast. Suddenly we were in an academic paper arguing forcibly towards a theory of prelapsarian innocence in the lost Utopia of prehistory. It seems we had got it just right up to that point and indeed it is now clear from various sources that the Neolithic revolution led to a more numerous but less healthy and arguably less happy period in the history of Homo sapiens. Somewhere here, though, precision gets lost and we hear of the traditional 'hunters' of Native American culture sweeping across the plains on horseback, though the horse was not introduced into America until the arrival of the distinctly postlapsarian Spanish in the 16th century AD.
Once we get to the age of class-based societies, the tone changes again. Storing grain was something done by 'bullies' (prudence and foresight don't get a look in here) and the subsequent emergence of class distinctions, maintained by unscrupulous 'enforcers', provides a smooth segue into the Foucaultian discourse of power, language and ideology. We're in a Social Justice lecture, with pages and pages railing about the violent subjection of minorities in society, and though the preface to the book declares that America is a poor model for the discussion of the human condition, we are now firmly in the 21st century West. The rest of the first part is a standard Theory-based analysis of sexual suppression which you could read anywhere.
Lindisfarne believes that early humans evolved beyond the need for status, setting a pattern for human society which wasn't broken until the Neolithic 'bullies' came along to smash what had hitherto been a perfect system, but considering the preoccupation with status across all human societies, her argument is not really convincing. The worst failure of the book was the writer's refusal to attribute causes to the subjugation of women. Apart from the generalisation that gender inequality always accompanies class-based social organisation, she seems to claim that nobody can explain this. In fact, dozens of theorists have advanced compelling arguments. You can read some of them on Wikipedia.
The strong impression I got from reading the book was the writer had started out with a theory and found evidence for it along the way, rather than beginning with the evidence and moving empirically to a conclusion. Most of it is not really new, and where it is original, it is far from objective.
April 24, 2024
This is such an important topic and of great interest, but I was not left convinced that this book provides any more answers than anything else out there or that these authors were best placed to assess the huge body of material available. There was too much focus on how a range of chimps/apes/bonobos behave and the review of human history had the usual carefully selected studies from particular places around the world from the many studies available. But it did not explain current violence by men against women in contemporary society. Maybe it is just too unrealistic of me to expect to find a book that explains such behaviour.
July 26, 2025
A very interesting book but not the easiest read. I enjoyed the beginning and end a lot more than I enjoyed the middle.
March 28, 2026
In a better world, this book would have received more attention than anything by David Graeber or Stephen Pinker.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews