man the provider

[leo9]

The traditional role for a man is provider. Men are on average larger, stronger and faster than women. Back when we were hunter/gathers , men did the hunting because men have, on average, characteristics that make them better hunters than women (I say "on average" because some women are stronger and faster than I am.). And for women, who have to give birth to babies, it only makes sense that while the men are out hunting, the women are looking after the house and the children. So the roles of the man being the provider and the woman looking after the home go way back and for those reasons, still persist.

This idea was popular with Victorian anthropologists, who went to existing hunter-gatherer cultures and asked the men, who said, oh, yes, we feed the tribe, they'd starve without us. So they wrote up their textbooks saying that men had always been the providers, which was what they had wanted to prove.

Then modern anthropologists went back to the same tribes and actually studied what happened, instead of asking the men. And they found that women's gathering produced most of the everyday food, while the hunters contributed an occasional high-protein feast. Facts can be such a problem.

In my old forums we used to call it "the Flintstone theory" - the assumption that gender roles in primitive cultures were exactly like present-day suburban Western ones.