a series of bats

I think that are numerous issues with this perspective and etiology of gender, and naturalizing gender inequality around biological traits has a tendency of leading to those sorts of beliefs (reactionary/antifeminist/essentialist). At the very least, any position that had that as its baseline and didn’t end up having many implicit beliefs along these lines would be very atypical and idiosyncratic (a good example of a not explicitly transphobic version of this would be Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex, but it fails to be not-reactionary due to being very racist).

much like the etiology of gayness, I don’t find some sort of Platonic Historical origin of misogyny/sexism/etc to be particularly insightful or helpful in understanding current manifestations of sexism, and tbh i think there are just numerous intellectual issues w it for example:

Thinking of all of world history as coming from one universal “prehistoric society/origin” that all had the exact same genesis of gender relations

I’m not even sure that we have any evidence that gender heirarchies existed worldwide prior to recorded history - namely, it seems like a projected assumption because of early historical gender heirarchies, but that doesn’t necessarily mean its the case. this seems more a faith argument than like an evaluation of evidence

The projection of some group as inherently brutish, strong, and prone to attack the weak actually has a lot of historical precedence in how various groups were subjugated (see: greek and latin discussions of ‘barbarians’, colonialism, reactionary racism today), and having a gender-only focus that plays into that can and has gone bad places (see: suffragettes).

attendently, not all men are stronger than all women - this sort of anti-societal, purely physical approach ignores that social structures maintain heirarchies even when they don’t fit onto individuals, and those social structures would seem to be the culprits rather than physical traits or whatever

this ignores that genders were divided differently across different societies (and still are!). even if you want to accept that all historical societies had some sort of gender based dividing system, you can’t argue that they all divided it along the same exact lines.

i think that generally, naturalizing gender inequality has a tendency to make people just believe that that’s how things must be - otherwise, you have to admit that you are arguing for the complete overturning of what is easily conceptualized as ‘the natural order’. which i’m not necessarily against, but i wonder what praxis that actually serves (it seems v paralysis prone).