Breaking down the Bodyguard Hypothesis

Week 6: Division of Labor

Definitions

Gender: social roles, culturally created

Sex: biological sex defined in several ways

• Chromosomal sex (XX / XY / XXY, etc.)
• Hormonal / physiological sex (physical expression)
• Skeletal sex (shape of pelvis, size of long bones, etc)

"Instinctual sex"

Wrangham's cooking hypothesis: Sociality

• Cooked food is more vulnerable to theft than raw food
  • More labor
  • More ready to eat
  • Once you start cooking food you are increasing the value of the object
• A 'producer-scrounger' game (it pays to wait and scrounge than to go through the hassle of producing)
  • Pays to wait
• Bigger males make better scroungers than females. But when cooking is introduced, the males become the scroungers the females become the producers
• Females benefit from protecting themselves from male theft. Make an "agreement" with male "bodyguard": food for sex
• To obtain best bodyguard, females amongst one another to be the most attractive to largest/more dominant males

<aside> ‼️ Find holes and inconsistencies in this argument

</aside>

• Still don't think there is a clear beginning expressed here. He seems to just make the inference that it males were forced into being hunters and females were forced into cooking. There had to have been more of joint effort on both parties. Seems like he is taking gender roles still exhibited today and almost working backwards to justify them
• The sex argument is not clearly explained. Is it supposed to be a win for the male that he now gets to have sex with the female? Isn't the trade off supposed to be that the female provides FOOD and the male provides PROTECTION? When is it that sex enters the room?
• Overall it seems like the switch to the topic of sex and its relation to cooking is pretty exaggerated. "Attractiveness" is highly relative and based on the time period, so how are we supposed to determine what was viewed as attractive then?
• So heteronormative