Sexist Savages

The other night, while driving home from a college basketball game, my four year old nephew invented an activity he called the Christmas game, which involved getting points for spotting Christmas decorations—or at least that’s what it involved at first. The rules kept changing in order, it seemed, to ensure my nephew’s victory. At times, green and/or red street lights yielded points. Other times not. Car break lights were included in his tally but not mine. And at the end of the game, points were awarded for just remembering Christmas decorations from the past, a nuance I had not been clued in on until the game was declared over. Needless to say, I was soundly defeated—fourteen points to five, and, mature adult that I am, I accepted my defeat in stride, without protest.

The maturity of my response was in marked contrast to the behavior of an elderly man I recently witnessed on a TV show called The Adventures of Mark and Olly about two British men who travel to Papua, New Guineau to live in the jungle with an indigenous hunter/gatherer tribe known as the Mek. In the latest episode, the tree house where the two British men have been staying starts to break down, so the tribe agrees to build a new one—about three hundred feet up. Olly, one of the British men, has a difficult time climbing the trees to help with the building process and so has to stay below and work with the women, causing his status within the tribe to diminish, or so it seemed. Later in the episode, after all of the fires in the community have gone out during the extensive rains, something else happens that, along with the tribe’s distinct gender roles and the fact that the women do the bulk of the work, seems to confirm the modern condemnation of primitive life as backward, immature, and, above all, sexist. When the male elder fails to start a fire, one of the women takes the materials inside, and, within minutes, creates a steady blaze. She gloats, and the man takes offense. The two argue until the woman walks away.

What the male should have done, of course—what any non-sexist civilized man would have done—is to graciously admit defeat, smile, and congratulate the woman for her success. In other words, he should have treated her like an adult treats a child, the same way I treated my nephew after losing the Christmas game. The fact that the male elder took offense, that he argued with the woman about the event’s significance, suggests that he might have some very real doubts as to his superiority in the community. In the modern world, you could make a strong case that no such doubts exist. The sophisticated modern male simply laughs off female victories because he knows deep down that such victories are either aberrations or meaningless child’s play—that they don’t really threaten his dominance. In the modern world, the male’s superiority would not be challenged by a simple failure to start a fire better than a woman.