Secret Women's Business

Have you ever had a moment where things go horribly wrong? Where words produce strong emotions and cause a fight, which then spirals out of control? Kate Smith had one of those moments in 1996, when she rang her sister Jess about Christmas dinner. A number of years before, Kate and her husband Geoff moved into the old family home to care for her mother, who suffered a protracted battle with cancer. Kate inherited the family home after her mother died. For several years she maintained the tradition of having Christmas lunch with the extended family in the old family home. Kate and her two sisters cooked and cleaned and gossiped; the brothers in law played backyard cricket with all the youngsters after lunch. A fairly standard Australian Christmas. But in 1996, Kate Smith had a bad year. Very bad. She had been bullied at work, leading to severe anxiety. Geoff suggested this year the family should have Christmas lunch as a picnic at a park, as the thought of getting everything ready...

I gather that in hunter-gatherer societies from diverse places around the globe, work frequently is "gendered". Men work together in groups to hunt, and may also fight against neighboring tribes to defend their patch. Women work together in groups to look after young children, to gather fruits, nuts, roots, bulbs etc. and (often) to prepare these items for eating. They often develop some separate cultural rituals for men and women. I wonder whether some stereotypes about men might have some kind of genetic or cultural origin from hunter-gatherer societies? The stereotypes that men are good at navigation (traversing long distances) problem solving (creating weapons and tactics for the hunt and for war) aggressive (courage in a hunt would be an advantage) and less verbal than women (I imagine yabbering away might scare off your prey)... all of these might be helpful if your community role involved hunting and fighting. I wonder whether some stereotypes about women may have ...

One of the things I wonder about is the tension between having opinions and having humility. Intellectual humility would surely involve openness to being wrong. Part of the brilliance of the scientific method is that ideas are constantly tested against reality. Results of controlled testing are published, so others are able to design new tests to see whether a hypothesis is supported or not. Other areas of academic endeavour, such as philosophy, mathematics, theology, history, and the arts, also involve the discipline of publishing research for scrutiny. The business of publishing academic work opens one up for critique: your ideas might be rejected as other opinions compete for validity.  There is a vulnerability about the best academic endeavour. I must confess there are many areas where I have formed strong opinions. For example, I have judged Complementarian theology to be very poor theology indeed, based on dreadful hermeneutics, forcing those who adopt it to accept ludi...