Everyone’s been linking to this Shape of a Mother blog, where women submit pictures of being pregnant or post-pregnant. Broadsheet—which has an alarming number of really stupid commenters—posted on it and being a masochist, I decided to read the comments. My masochism was satisfied by the many assholes therein.
The stretch marks and the sagging bellies are not a result of having children, but are a result of sheer physical slothfullness. If your avocations include long distance hiking, running 10K’s or half marathons, or mini iron-men, you will not have a disgusting body no matter how many children you have had. The sheer physical laziness of most Americans is appalling. We used to socialize with friends by running 10 miles with them, slowly enough to have great conversations. All the women had had at least two children. If you don’t like stretch marks get off your ass.
I wonder if I can jog off the stretch marks on the side of my legs from growing like 6 (or whatever it was) inches in a year when I was young. I’ve exercised regularly for years now and yet they don’t seem to be going anywhere. But I’m amused by this person’s insistence on how easy this is. Do you have to run 10 miles the day you go into labor or just every other day of your pregnancy?
Sorry, but blecchhh. Never written a letter to this before, but I don’t feel like its okay to celebrate a wilted terrible looking body….it’s hard enough to have kids, but jeez take care of yourself afterwards too! Happy mother, happy kids.
I was ambivalent before about having children (Still single, still deciding), yes for some vain reasons, also other reasons I won’t discuss here, but that site, just made me grab my abs and say “nooooo”. I will not accept that look just because I “nourished and inhabited” some living creature for 9 months. That’s no excuse. I’m glad that site makes mothers feel betetr but it doesn’t change the fact its not very attractive.
Because the only thing she can imagine celebrating a body for is its ability to look like an airbrushed model in a magazine. God knows that all the language on the site about celebrating women’s labor in bearing children is just some code for laying claim to being a supermodel.
This guy would like to share why he’s angry at the suggestion that pregnancy might distend the belly some. Nuh-uh! In his fantasy, you have lots of Virility Objects for him while staying a Playboy model and earnestly and happily busying yourself with feeding his important man-self:
I doubt that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had fat bellies. I can just picture those lovely naked women diligently searching for roots and nuts surrounded by the children. The reason that men prefer flatbellies is that they are more fertile and healthier. Our primitive brain knows these things.
I love an armchair evo psychologist who doesn’t even bother to hide his fantasies of living amongst the Noble Savages. But I love his version of science, which is one where you stand me, a childless woman with what’s probably a flat enough belly by most standards next to a woman who has a post-pregnant belly from giving birth recently, and if told that one of us is infertile, you’ll pick the one who’s had a baby every time. By the same logic, you can always tell who’s illiterate by making sure she has a college degree first.
I checked out the website and was a little put off by the fact that almost all the bodies I saw were of overweight women who either started out overweight or gained way too much during pregnancy…..
To calm all of the normal weight women out there with a healthy attitude toward their looks, sexuality and motherhood: motherhood doesn’t mean frumphood and loss of sexuality. To the women who willingly decide to sacrifice their looks and body to the altar of perfect motherhood: good luck when your kid gets to school age and you find yourself wondering why you have aged faster then the other moms. Take care of yourselves, and do your husbands and children a favor at the same time: exercise and eat less.
This woman’s logic that in order to be sexual you must be thin makes me wonder how she thinks all the women who started off overweight got pregnant in the first place. More dangers of abstinence-only education.
This guy has an alternative plan for having both his Virility Objects and a wife who’s body is unmarked by pregnancy, one that doesn’t require retreating to a fantasy of being a Noble Savage:
One young woman (this was a few years ago, we were 21 or 22 at the time) told me that she never wanted to have children because of the effect it would have on her figure. This made perfect sense to me. That raises (or begs) a question. If, for whatever reason, someone wants to rear children, why don’t they adopt one or more out of poverty? Isn’t that the sensible thing to do? Why bring more people into this burning, dying world, at potentially great cost to your own body, when instead you can do a good deed and preserve your figure (another good deed!)?
Brilliant plan, by god! Get married and farm the baby-making out to poorer women. That way a man can have it all—one woman making the children out of sight and another woman raising them while providing him sex with minimal stretch marks. The only rub is how women might feel about this, but luckily, they don’t matter. And when the sex object starts to get a wrinkle here or there from age, you can take her into the Wife Shop and use her as a down payment for another. In fact, if she’s still fertile, she can probably be recycled as a breeding unit. Recycling is a good deed, isn’t it?
There are some other letters that are actually pretty good and rah-rahing the dose of reality that’s been presented here. So don’t despair overly much. Some people still have a couple brain cells left.
65 Responses to “Dude, you didn’t say that getting knocked up made you pregnant!”
Leave a comment
Line and paragraph breaks automatic, e-mail address never displayed, HTML allowed: <a href="" title=""> <abbr title=""> <acronym title=""> <b> <blockquote cite=""> <code> <em> <i> <strike> <strong>
I can just picture those lovely naked women diligently searching for roots and nuts surrounded by the children.
That has to be the lamest wank fodder I’ve ever seen.
Wannabe bet he imagines them all to have perky DD breasts after 5 or 6 children as well? Breasts that are naturally bare, of course, so he can lay back and enjoy watching his Virility Objects scamper over to grab a suckle.
The stretch marks and the sagging bellies are not a result of having children, but are a result of sheer physical slothfullness. If your avocations include long distance hiking, running 10K’s or half marathons, or mini iron-men, you will not have a disgusting body no matter how many children you have had.
My avocations include cycling several thousand miles a year, kayaking, and hiking.
I have the shape of a mother, eight years out. In fact, as I have gotten thinner, the shar-pei effect has only gotten WORSE as rolls turned to wrinkles. Kayaking has improved my abdominal tone to the point where I could probably field a cannon ball, but my “sixpack” is in the fridge.
Fucktards like this don’t deserve to share my oxygen, IMHO. Such physiologic geniuses they are! Oh, yeah, I’m sure they plan to “babysit” plenty of hours so their women can put in the kind of fitness time required to not look disgusting.
Yeah. Right.
“I can just picture those lovely naked women diligently searching for roots and nuts surrounded by the children.”
I’m sure he does…frequently.
I wonder if in his fantasies, she’s dead before she’s 30, or if she’s suffering from scepticemia or one of those other diseases that were around pre-antibiotics. I wonder if he realizes that she was almost constantly pregnant because of no birth control and no concept of saying no, and that it wasn’t that bad an idea really, given how many of the happy nekkid kids were liable to die.
They die before wrinkles and gray hair? He probably doesn’t see that as a problem. Sex objects have no business aging.
Thanks for the insight, Ms. Kate. I’ve known a lotta pregnant women and what it does to your body is pure genetics. Some women I know had like no effect, some a lot. Working out seems to have no bearing on this. Heh, my aunt didn’t even get an outie the whole time she was pregnant. I wonder if you can jog that into happening.
Our primitive brain knows these things.
Well, at least, he admits he’s got a primitive brain.
Hunter/gatherer females like The Venus of Willendorf? http://witcombe.sbc.edu/willendorf/willendorfdiscovery.html
One word to Mr. Hunter-Gatherer-Fantasist: Venus of Willendorf (OK - Venusofwillendorf - that’s one word). Our hunter-gatherer ancestors, if anything like modern hunter-gatherers, thought fat women were bee-yoo-tee-full.
Ha! Our hunter gatherer ancestors were as fat as they could manage to be; it was their best food storage system. And one of the reasons women have problems losing weight and keeping it off. In times of shortage and famine a woman’s fat fed not only herself, but her most recent child. The ability to store fat well and replace it quickly and easily meant these women, and their children, survived better to spread that trait around.
MKK
Okay, I assume the women would go to a site like this to help deal with the almost inevitable changes pregnancy brings (during and after). I’ll grant some of the men are trying to prepare themselves for the changes their wives/girlfriends are/will face (maybe…).
What are the other perverts there for…?
To quote Bill Hicks, “How scientific! I can’t argue with that kind of fucking research.”
I mean, first off, projecting our standards of beauty backwards is a exercise in asinine futility. In our recent history there have been drastic changes. When people all worked outside pale whit skin was what you aspired to, but in our modern world being artfully tan is in. But somehow this idiot thinks what turns him on is special and reflects the complete history of our species. Talk about your fevered egos.
Second, has this guy ever actually seen pictures of actual indiginous peoples who live as he describes? Some degree of belly fat is pretty much de rigueur—when your food source is not totally dependable having fat stored is good way to insure survival.
As for flat bellies being fertile and more healthier, I got a cousin who is borderline anorexic and was always quite thin anyway. She could not conceive or carry until she forced herself to gain about 20 lbs. Meanwhile, I made Zog wear glasses until he got snipped because I swear he’d knock me up if he so much as looked at me the right way.
It about our only plausible explanation for the existance of our younger son.
Maybe he’d rather whack off to some gorilla-nursing action. Seeing as we’re pretty much subhuman in his eyes anyhow…
http://tinyurl.com/qxh8q
I made Zog wear glasses until he got snipped because I swear he’d knock me up if he so much as looked at me the right way.
HEY! I wear glasses! My girlfriend says they’re cute! [/pouting and wishing he had better eyesight]
Geez, what a plethora of idiocy.
First of all: “That raises (or begs) a question.” It RAISES. It DOESN’T BEG. Could everyone on the internet please look up the correct definition for this expression? Thank you! Signed, Sophronia the Pedant.
Secondly, I’m not surprised that so many people have no idea what normal aging human bodies look like. Most of them have probably never seen one. In our culture, the only bodies on display belong to people who get cosmetic surgeries so they don’t look like that. So what people think is a normal aging female body is actually a bizarre plastic approximation of the human figure.
Anyway, I think the answer is, we need more public nudity. Lots of it.
Honestly, I can’t imagine anyone who has ever had an actual sexual relationship with a human being making comments like this. I know most of them probably have; I just don’t get it.
-This woman’s logic that in order to be sexual you must be thin makes me wonder how she thinks all the women who started off overweight got pregnant in the first place.
excellent point. But I would imagine the woman also thinks that women only express their sexuality by being looked at , by being found attractive by men. She probably isn’t thinking that a woman might be sexual by having her own set of desires. I doubt she’d call the average fat dude non sexual.
Don’t be so sure about the always pregnant state of H&G women. Breastfeeding provides some relief from getting pregnant, not that it was always reliable, and knowledge of local abortifacients would have been quite common, even though dangerous. Penroyal tea and mistletoe berries, both toxic, are thought to have been used as such.
I know a woman who’s 15 year old son has vertical stretch marks on his back.
At first she freaked and thought they might be scars from some kind of physical violence. The kid denied anything bad had happened to him.
She took him to a doctor, who explained to her that the marks were from a very rapid adolescent growth spurt.
The kid was small for his age until he got to be about 13. then he started sprouting like a weed. He’s about 5′9″ now and still growing.
Maybe Mr. Primitive Brain is having some Oedipal reaction to this site. When he sees all those post-partum bellies, he’s seeing his own mother, and he’s thinking NOOOOOOO!
To think that there is beauty in stretch marks and flabby boobs is evidently too mind-blowing for some of those asshole commenters. As a mom, I love that site, and I know lots of women who have found it empowering. A woman’s body is never the same after pregnancy, but we all like to cram flabby selves into great clothes that hide our imperfections and pretend like it is.
I have stretch marks on my breasts and my hips, both of which continued growing until I was well into my 20s. I’m not the thinnest person on the planet, but I’ve never been even medically overweight, and I exercise more often than a lot of people. If you have thin, delicate skin and the right kind of genes, you’re going to get stretch marks that don’t have anything to do with rapid fat gain. What a maroon.
Our ancestors often did have fat bellies, as well. Paintings of peasants (like those of Breughels, for instance) usually show the women looking if not fat, then quite well-padded (and not all of that was bum rolls and laces). It really only makes sense.
“Anyway, I think the answer is, we need more public nudity. Lots of it.”
I was suggesting this very thing for all the uptight people who can’t take the sight of women nursing. Maybe if we saw more breasts in the wild, we’d stop being so stupid at the sight of them at work.
“The reason that men prefer flatbellies is that they are more fertile and healthier.”
Remarkable. It’s as if these guys are making up evopsych theories without knowing any biology whatsoever.
Glad to know that they’re the rational, sensible ones.
if we saw more breasts in the wild
Thou art a Godles Heathen!!! Hehe, anyway. Yep, absence makes the heart grow fonder and all that jazz.
“Take care of yourselves, and do your husbands and children a favor at the same time: exercise and eat less.”
After working all day, being a single mother, cooking and cleaning and getting my master’s degree at night, I’ll take all of my plentiful disposible income to the local gym for a 2 hour workout. I’d hate to think that I’m not going a favor for my family…
As if? There’s no ‘as if’ about it.
I wonder if Mr. Hunter-Gatherer-Lover has considered that those women probably had far more body hair and body odor than he would ever consider acceptable. No, he probably pictures them shiny clean and waxed…
Have to say, public nudity won’t work for everyone.
Learning animation, you do a LOT of life drawing; I think we were doing 6-9 hours of drawing naked people each week back in school. The stereotype is the advertising model, but I really did hety to see the whole human condition: Old men, women from rail-thin to moderately overweight (think Oprah or Rosie), even one 8-month pregnant woman. Tatoos, piercings, a few gay men…
I’m past the titillation by now, and it gets to the point where I look forward to the unusual and ugly along with the beautiful. I’m not there for the turn-ons, after allp; I’m learning how to draw the range of humanity for art.
But I admit, I’m very much in the minority. Many, perhaps even most animators really are still stuck in the “Beautiful People” mode, and get pretty grumpy afterwards if the model isn’t up to their standards of attractiveness. Even the women animators are the same way more often than not.
Still, I loved my mom’s observation after a public nudity debate a couple years ago. “I wonder if people would be so gung ho about public nudity if they had to see their grandmothers go topless.”
I have stretch marks on my hips, apparently related to jack shit. Not to get all technical n’ stuff, but during copulation if she’s able to see my hips we’re doing something wrong.
during copulation if she’s able to see my hips we’re doing something wrong.
How are you copulating?! Sorry, but I’m not understanding you.
Oh, I get what you’re saying…nevermind.
I have no problem with my nudity, and neither does my girlfriend, so we are naked or semi-nude in front of each other all the time.
The young lady worried about her abs is in for a rough road, kids or no. You can be as non-pregnant as you want; it doesn’t reverse the effects of age and gravity.
And EvoPsych Porn Boy apparently hasn’t figured out that stretch marks are a function of, uh, stretching. Where does he think the baby goes for nine months? In a paper bag?
Obviously these folks have never been to a museum. Not just the VenusofWillendorf & her sisters. What was considered “ideal” goes up and down the map over the ages, but for about 200 years, there, fat was definitely *hot*, from the late 15-early 1600s to the late 1800s, with the height of good looks = well padded being the mid-late 1600s. You were nobody if you didn’t have at *least* 2 chins - which showed that you were wealthy enough to eat 3 square meals a day and never wear it off thru relentless manual labor, fiscally and socially stable enough to never have gone through a hungry period, which leaves its own lasting marks, and therefore healthier than the rest of the common folk around, who had to subsistence farm or work for less than a living wage…and the few people who could afford to live that way, chose to have themselves painted in full fleshy pride by people like Reubens and Ingres. (Then again, these evpsych types don’t seem to get out much, do they?)
No, he probably pictures them shiny clean and waxed…
Hey, it’s his nocturnal emission.
A year or so ago, Amanda wrote about some horrid 3D computer volleyball game, and how the women’s breasts were animated as if they’d used women with implants as models, as if the artists had never actually seen natural breasts. It occurred to me that I hadn’t, really, and I wondered if that might actually be more common than you’d expect.
I think that’s a distinct possibility FoolishOwl. Alternatively, they’re making over-sylized symbolic representations for the purpouse of sexual appeal, and there’s not much of anything in the way of decent reference for that.
That said, I’m proud to say a woman has complemented me on my breasts. I doubt many men can say that with pride.
What a lovely site. I’m so tired of seeing gossip rags with airbrushed celebs and arrows pointing out their “baby bumps”, wondering if they’ll be able to “lose the weight”. Such a pleasure to see (and read) real women talking about the changes in their bodies and lives.
What a fantastic site. And I didn’t find the women on there to be overweight and out of shape for the most part. They were normal women with normal bodies.
I doubt that our hunter-gatherer ancestors had fat bellies. I can just picture those lovely naked women diligently searching for roots and nuts surrounded by the children. The reason that men prefer flatbellies is that they are more fertile and healthier. Our primitive brain knows these things.
My imagination has a wider-angle lens than the guy who wrote that idyllic piece. I picture frequent burials, those naked women interring their kin and infants. I bet they had real bad teeth too, though you couldn’t tell so easily, the mean life expectancy being in the low thirties, so many of those women were off to the boneyard before all their teeth fell out.
What’s with all these guys with their starry-eyed ideal of “natural life” as they imagine it existed before civilization dumped all its discontents upon us? If you think about it seriously for a minute you realize that the pre-civilization hunter-gatherer life was a short, miserable ordeal of fear, poverty and pain. It doesn’t seem to me like an epiphenomenon of the workings of the human “primitive brain” could be responsible for such elaborately detailed yet rationally absurd fantasies. Hyper-real dreams as fancy and as forced as these have got to be products of the convoluted workings of high civilization.
Actual GH people were apparently reasonably healthy. They moved around a lot, ate about the right amount, not so heavy on cereals as farmer diet would be. Their diet would have actually been pretty diverse. An anthropologist once answered the question, “what is the leading cause of death among GH peoples?” with “Accidents.” If someone became disabled so badly as not to be able to keep up when the band moved to another site, they were SOL.
As for infectious disease, the kinds that generally wiped out huge numbers of farming/pastoral peoples, especially in cities, generally didn’t exist. Germs are parasites and exist in a symbiotic relationship with their hosts (=prey) and many of the worst epidemics derive apparently from herd animals. GH people didn’t keep herd animals, their bands were too small to sustain endemic diseases, and their contact with other groups of humans sporadic.
In Africa and other similar tropical environments they were subject to diseases, especially in Africa with all the primates around to serve as alternate hosts.
But most of our picture of the misery of primative existence properly belongs to what happened when people became dependent on farms. In evolutionary terms this was a huge success, as our numbers exploded, but in terms of diet, workload, sanitation issues from remaining on one site continually, and sheer population density it was a radical change from the conditions we evolved for.
But no, GH life was not paradise. And I daresay the more prosperous bands had a fair share of plump people, and women’s bodies certainly don’t snap back like these bozos demand.
Good thing for me I like women in general, not just some ridiculously narrow and artificial “ideal.”
I did a lot of weight-lifting when I was younger and I have big stretchmarks on my upper arms. Not that I think they are disgusting.
Searching for the human carrying capacity of X acres, I looked up “population density hunter-gatherer” on Yahoo and found this article at Wikipedia (yeah, I realize that wasn’t PhD quality research, if anyone has anything better please do). It says that the population density in a hunter-gatherer society is generally one or two percent that in an agricultural society.
Societies keep their population stable either by birth control or by death control. Considering the state of pharmaceutical contraceptive science in h-g society and what with all those “lovely naked flatbellies” strutting about flaunting their this and that, I can’t imagine how Fred and Wilma, Barney and Betty could have restrained themselves from impulsively running the birth rate up up up, so death control it was. If the main cause of post-infancy hunter-gatherer death was accidents, they must have had a Hell of a lot of accidents.
With respect to exercise at the great cure-all for the marks of pregnancy, I have to quote my favorite cardiologist: It’s better to be lucky than good. If your genes don’t run to stretch marks, you won’t get them. (After three term pregnancies, I have nary a mark on my belly.) And even if you exercise as much as you safely can during pregnancy, you may end up with a few “badges of motherhood” anyway (my gnarly varicose veins and stretch-marked breasts being exhibit A). The problem comes when people confuse their good luck (no belly marks) with personal virtue (I did something right) and then start castigating those who had a different experience.
Picking on mothers is a time-honored sport in our culture, but I have to wonder if these anti-preggo tools feel the same way about old men with gallbladder-surgery scars, or amputees. David Sedaris’ essay “Naked” describes his stay in a nudist trailer park and how the variations in the human form were the matter-of-fact norm. Maybe, as someone suggested above, more public nudity is the answer.
I wonder if he realizes that she was almost constantly pregnant because of no birth control and no concept of saying no
to be fair, most of the anthro for stone age culture I’ve seen uggest a matriarchy.
so, while still constantly pregnant due to lack of bc, the women would get to initiate sex at will, and ownership of the children applied only to the mothers.
of course, I’m sure this doesn’t factor into his fantasy, where the MAN! big strong hunter, leads the tribe.
Also a lot of the MAN==Big Strong Hunter meant Death by Goring or gangrene arising from whatever gash or….
If these guys get so squicked out by normal human bodies, I suggest they all move to Los Angelos and hang around all the young nubile flesh there. Make sure you have a) lots of $$, b) are a director or producer, c) own a movie studio, or d) a god-like body of your own, however.
Either that or they could just remain in their mothers’ basements wanking off to internet porn. Looks more to be their style.
The reason that men prefer flatbellies is that they are more fertile and healthier.
So did I just imagine all those fat fertility goddess images or what?
Building on what Mark said, hunter-gatherers were pretty healthy, and had way better teeth than people living on a high-carbohydrate low-protein diet (i.e. most farmers). Re: constant pregnancy, though, my understanding is that the hunter-gatherer diet is better suited to maintaining breastfeeding-related infertility than is the agricultural diet. However, GH groups also kept their numbers down because, being constantly on the move, for survival reasons a woman COULDN’T get pregnant again until her youngest child was three years old, and if she did, would abort. By the age of three, a child is capable of walking on its own pretty competently, and the GH groups move a lot. A woman who’s heavily pregnant or carrying an infant can’t also be carrying a toddler. She won’t be able to keep up, and both she and her dependent children are liable to end up dead. Hence, nomads typically breastfeed exclusively for three years, then upon that child reaching an age of relative independence, quit breastfeeding and get pregnant again, leading to an average spacing between children of four years. Less if the child dies in infancy or as a toddler, because with a dead baby, her milk will dry up. However, even exclusively breastfeeding and eating the ‘right’ diet isn’t a totally reliable form of birth control, and nomads will resort to abortion if the woman gets pregnant when her youngest living child is too young to walk on its own. That keeps population growth relatively low.
In agricultural societies, the diet is different, meaning breastfeeding is less reliable as birth control, and there aren’t the same pressures to space your children out. Also, again as Mark said, giving up the GH lifestyle gives more food (not nearly as high-quality, but more of it) so it’s easier to feed a big family, and the settled lifestyle leads to epidemic diseases which may wipe out several of your children, so having lots is a good idea on the theory that only some of them will die.
Yeah
I was reading about HG people who live in the Kalahari. Women average 5 pregnancies over a lifetime with 2 children making it to adulthood and reproducing .(late miscarriage infant mortality, accidents in adolescence stabalizing the population. ) But once you make it to adulthood you are fairly healthy. Also menstruation starts late, 17 or so. Probably the constantly pregnant thing is just projecting a western agrarian norm back in time.
Thomas Jefferson talked about the low fertility of Native American tribes in the 1700s being something that was caused by a) the fact that the women were always active and often lean, due to the hard work involved gathering & hunting; and b) the effective contraceptives/abortifacients they had developed and used, since many of the women also worked as hunters, and when there was famine they didn’t hesitate to put the life of the mother first. But that this changed, when First Nations women married white men and moved to a settled agrarian or urban life, and thus there was obviously nothing hereditary about the different fertility levels.
“I can just picture those lovely naked women diligently searching for roots and nuts surrounded by the children.”
Those lovely naked women were covered with body hair.
W. Kiernan: Don’t forget that the life expectancy curves are left-skewed. Accident is easier to come by when one is inexperienced (this changes again as one ages, and reaction times slow down).
As has been pointed out, the indigenous peoples of the Ameriacas, and Austrailia, have a lower birthrate, and a higher deathrate than we, as moderns with better medicine, expect to have ourlselves.
But a quick trip to a 17th century graveyard in New England, or Old England, will show a great number of infant and child deaths.
Fertility drops in lean times, long nursing leads to lowered birthrate as well. Inferences on aborifacients (mostly from N. American indigenies) also imply conscious attempts to keep the population to the carrying capacity of the groups income.
TK
I’m surprised no one here has noted that while GH societies in recent memory don’t have this problem, one of the primary forms of “accidents” that killed people back when all people lived that way was being killed/eaten by animals. So yeah, a lot of accidents killed people and men more than women. I imagine if the rate of death for men was significantly higher this way, that might have cut down on pregnancy rates as well, as a lot of women would be mate-less for at least some periods of their lives.
How did people abort then? Might be useful information to know soon….
Ginger - those people are the Khoisan (aka Bushmen). They are total badasses when it comes to their knowledge of the land they live in. They are able to thrive in conditions where any ‘civilized’ person would die within days. It’s hard to overstate the extent of their knowledge of the ecosystem they live in, and within their traditional knowledge is an extraordinary knowledge of the medicinal properties of the plants, insects, and animals. This knowledge includes abortifacients and contraceptives. I wish I had taken better advantage of my contact with them. All I remember about their birth control methods is that they use an herbal blend inserted in the vagina as a contraceptive, but I can’t for the life of me recall what it is.
To my thinking it is absurd to suppose that the hunter gatherer cultures of prehistoric times didn’t have as exhaustive a knowledge of the useful properties of herbs, insects, and animals in their environment as the Khoisan. The recent discovery of a drilled tooth from prehistoric times is a case in point - people assume no anasthetic was used, but opium poppies are native to the area. Can anyone seriously claim that they didn’t know about the properties of the seed pod sap?
One of the things that changes with the transition to farming is a reduction in contact with the naturally occuring medicinal resources of the area. There’s just not that much incentive to go wandering around in the bush trying out stuff and observing the effect of various plants on the animals that consume them. When farmers expand into a new area the relevance of their herbal knowledge is reduced because there are different plants, and their lifestyle naturally reduces the incentive to explore. If you know wherre your next meal is coming from you’re much less likely to take a chance on something unfamiliar, so you lose the opportunity to discover interesting properties (of course, you also lose the chance to be killed by your curiousity
Except that much of farming, when agriculture was in its infancy, involved very close observation and experimentation. It’s not like it was from GH societies to Monsanto in one jump, y’know.
togolosh - I seem to remember learning in middle school about the indigenous peoples of what is now Central America - there was some anthrolpogical evidence that long before us white people showed up they were using a form of cocaine as anesthesia in what appeared to be very primative brain surgery.
I knew a hippie woman who used half a juiced lemon as a diaphragm… A new one every time, obv. Worked for her; but of course, she’s one example, and may have had compromised fertility, making that work for her. So I wouldn’t recommend trying it unless you’re okay with having a baby, &/or there is no other contraception available.
I’ve also had experience in the emerg with a friend who tried to use the pennyroyal/black cohosh/parsley & something else abortificant. In my experience, the best termination available is the good ‘ole D&C: I’ve helped two women through the abortion pill cycle, and both seemed to suffer a lot. Of course, the pill is better than a coathanger, by a landslide, and is more smuggle-able should things continue in that direction.
Oh, I should have said: she ended up sick, but still pregnant.
Glad to see so many people making the responsive points I would have about GH living conditions. Thanks!
Amanda, have you ever studied that part of anthro? I really don’t think being eaten by animals was a major problem. If you think about it, there aren’t many animals much bigger, or more vicious, than us. Most animals that are bigger aren’t predators (but dangerous enough!) and human social organization is a powerful multiplier of force. Isn’t it pretty much a commonplace that only a sick or otherwise desperate tiger or lion will prey on humans, because they are smart enough to know from experience that it is best to leave humans alone? To be sure, being eaten by a wolf or cheetah or whatever might have been a major anxiety, but I think it just about never actually happened.
Nope, the “accidents” Dr. Thayer Scudder of Caltech was referring to include things like broken legs, loss of fingers, wounds that get infected-stuff like that. Talking about the age pyramid of GH communities like the Khosian or the Mbuti, death visits pretty much at random over the life cycle, leaving a small but revered population of elders–who, when they eventually become disabled by sheer old age, agree to be left behind to die. But until they reach quite an advanced age they tended to be tough old birds.
You’d think that accidents might be more likely to strike men than women (an elephant, or a buffalo, is not a predator, but neither does it want to be preyed on), but by all accounts I’ve seen, the sex ratio among the elderly GH folks is about even. Perhaps women were indeed at risk in childbirth, despite their overall good health, and this pretty well offset greater risks men might have been running in the hunt?
I personally would like to think that there were lots of plump jolly GH women (about the men, I leave them to the imagination of those inclined to fantasize about them) with plenty of proud evidence on their bodies of childbirths. But I think they did tend to be on the slim side in reality–fat was an ideal, and unattainable.
As for body hair–people are saying that like it’s a bad thing.
BO is quite negotiable.
Bring ‘em on, I say, stretch marks, floppy breasts, bellies and all.
The question is whether they’d have anything to do with me. I’d better brush up on my antelope-catching and flower-arranging skills.
As for my peacock plumage I’ve been flattered on that, so there’s one point. But I’m practically deaf, so back in the day I guess I’d have been scrubbed right out of the GoodGenes Derby.
I’m not an herbalist, but I remember that a lot of the jars at the homeopathic/wiccan/new age shop I went into last year had strong warning labels not to make an herb tea containing X/Y/Z when pregnant, as they could cause miscarriages. I’m sure some alternative medicine/historical sites must be out there which explain the biological mechanisms. There was also something in a historical novel I once read involving dried seaweed which expands many times when wet and dilates the cervix, but I don’t know if that was all there was to it.
I have to weigh in here with kcb. 1st time I was pregnant, I put on 71 pounds; 2nd time I put on 83 pounds. Both times started at 97 lbs and 101 lbs, respectively (I’m 5′7″). I have not one stretch mark, and both times lost all the weight within 3 weeks. My youngest is 21 and I’m now 47 years old and 123 pounds. In my case, it has absolutely nothing with anything I do “right,” which is pretty damn little. It has everything to do with the pure luck of my genetic/family history.
Bellatrys: The seaweed you read about is lamanaria (sp?), which is still used in gynecological care for that very reason, including in abortion procedures. It’s the gentlest way they’ve found to dilate the cervix without drugs.
Human beings are not the only animals using plants to induce abortions. That may in fact be how we figured out how to use them in the first place: watching herd animals using them. Google Sister Zeus, I think that’s who’s put together a comprehensive website on the subject.
Glad to see people weighing in on the HG issue. I was like, “How in the world did we survive as a species if life was as miserable, nasty, brutish and short as these people are saying? For Pete’s sake, GORILLAS live to old age. They’re called silverbacks.”
I’m well over 200 lbs now, even though I had lost all my pregnancy weight this time around. I was trying vegetarianism after the birth of my second and wound up gaining it all back and then some. Diabetes runs strongly in my mother’s family and I would be a freak if I *weren’t* fat.
I’m covered in stretch marks. COVERED in them. Breasts, belly, thighs, butt… the only fleshy part of me that’s without them is my upper arms. I’ve never had a kid, but what I do have is mixed racial ancestory: pale and relatively delicate skin from my Scottish mother, and a tendancy to scar at the least provocation from my Indigenous father. As such, my pale skin is marked almost completely by these just-as-pale scars that curve over most of my body.
So am I genetically unlucky? Hardly. Since the scar tissue showed up and faded to barely-visible white, my skin’s been firmer than ever. I think that scar tissue is plumping it up from the inside. Go nature!
I imagine that I’ll get even more if I have kids. Bring it! My partner and I enjoy trying to trace my “contour lines” and… well, I’ll end that story there.
As for the birth controll available to the ancients; read:
www.sisterzeus.com
and both the books written by John Riddle (google and thou shall find
)
If there’s anyone who happens to speak Dutch and wants to know more on the subject, I’m writing my final paper about it.
I’m sure there’s a way you can contact me if your really want to…
About the blog: I love it! For sure!