Elizabeth Roy - The Tender Carnivore and the Female Role

While I definitely find Shepard’s ideas interesting, I don’t particularly like his ideas about women. Shepard says that women are equipped more for gathering and that they are not meant for hunting. I find this a vast generalization. I think that there are definitely a lot of men are not well-equipped, physically or emotionally, for hunting, and a lot of women who would be better hunters than gatherers. I did enjoy Shepard’s point about women being political administrators – if we accept as true the premise that men are traditionally hunters and would be out hunting most of the time, then women, as those left behind, would indeed be running the society politically. Despite this and Shepard’s assertions that he is not a misogynist, he seems convinced of women’s shortcomings and rather doubtful of their abilities:

"For a million years under conditions of the hunt women lived – and because of biology still live – geographically more circumscribed lives than men. They have a poorer sense of large-scale spatial relationships and direction and are not good throwers or runners. They probably have superior social intelligence and inferior strategic cunning than men. These differences are genetically controlled and are part of the personality of all living women, taken as a group." (119-120).

In addition to this, I do not at all agree with his assertion that women’s place in society, specifically how they live geographically more circumscribed lives than men, is biologically based. What nonsense! It has more to do with the culture we live in and our social norms. I wonder, would there still be a difference in male-female spatial skills if women drove around on dates, to work, and other places as much as men did? If they were expected to know how to get places and therefore had as much practice with these skills as men did? After all, what Shepard says is rather contradictory – gathering requires just as much knowledge of directions and large-scale spatial relationships as hunting, perhaps more. In hunter-gatherer cultures, the gatherers have to have excellent senses of direction because they must know the location of specific gathering places. Personally, I’d like to see some research that backs up Shepard’s ideas, and I’d like to NOT be taken ‘as a group’!