Toward a New Hierarchy

I'm grappling with several idea threads and trying to weave them together into a single coherent concept. They involve success, hierarchy, patriarchy, and YA fantasy literature.  In sum, The overall idea goes something like this: the backlash worldwide toward violence against women and fundamentalist religious orthodoxy is a reaction to women changing the meta-model for male reproductive fitness.

It started with my feeling troubled with  the word "success."  I'm not thinking of how a person defines his or her success. I'm thinking that the word in itself should only be applied to a finite task. So much of my life and the lives of the women I see are not at all measurable by success.  Meals, for example, fall almost exclusively to women's responsibility, take up perhaps a quarter of our waking lives, and yet somehow don't factor into equations of success. Nor should they.  Much of what women do is repetitive and recursive, which eludes categorization as success. Yet it has a pull on the psyche as sharp and as persistent as nicotine. Try not to think in terms of success, unless applying it to a limited, finite task. I'm finding it nearly impossible.

Then I came across the work of Jordan Peterson at the University of Toronto. His ideas, or at least my understanding of some of his ideas, as well as studies by others into dominance hierarchies, the correlation between infectious disease and conservative ideology, and my own delving into the current YA fantasy literature have led me to think that women have a task to do, a momentous task, and that the future of the planet is in our hands.  This probably is a book's worth of argument, but I'm going to attempt a blog post as a first pass at these ideas. Here are the raw materials.

Dominance hierarchies are not the same as patriarchy. Apparently, dominance hierarchies can be found in crustaceans and predate even the evolution of trees on the planet, so as a structure of cognition, they go deep. Getting rid of dominance hierarchies is not going to happen any time soon.

Each dominance hierarchy has its own rules for reaching the top, but even if you don't rise to the top, there are behaviors that gain you status and behaviors that diminish status. Status correlates to reproductive opportunity, so males compete strenuously for it. There are also sets of behaviors that are similar across all hierarchies, and this set of successful behaviors could be considered the "god" or "hero" set.  Narrative in the form of myth becomes the template for rising in the set of all dominance hierarchies.

Humans today have twice as many distance female ancestors as male, meaning that many men were not successful at finding women willing to reproduce with them. Females are picky. Peterson asserts that, "women's sexual selection was the primary force of human development and drove rapid human cortical evolution." The big heads made birth harder for women than other mammals, and the long development led them to want caretakers who were able to protect them and ensure the lives of their offspring. But remember Darwinian evolution is not toward "better" but toward "fitter." So as society changes, the abilities in males that ensure women's safety change. And so the "god pattern" that men use to establish status needs to change, but it must perforce lag behind the changing attitudes in the women. The narrative follows, and in the lag, many men get left behind.

I'm thinking that patriarchy itself was a backlash, an overthrow of the goddess who gave women the choice to select the fittest men.  If you give college coeds a set of t-shirts that young men have slept in and have the women sniff the shirts and describe the smell, their nose apparently describes as sexy the scent of men whose genetic makeup is most distant from their own and disparages with "smells like my brother" the t-shirts worn by men whose genetic makeup is closest to their own. Patriarchy took this choice away, forcing women to mate with a broader pool of men. (I wonder if using the word "choice" to oppose abortion doesn't really call this ancient reactionary desire to control women up from the depths and if another word might not be better.)

Women wanting high-status men is old and deep in our makeup. Throughout nature, a lower position on the dominance hierarchy results in a more precarious existence. When a new pathogen is introduced into a bird population, for example, the bottom of the pyramid dies first.

But what constitutes status changes depending on circumstances. So in more violent times, choosing a man with great physical prowess and a violent nature was desirable.  As society became more complex, intelligence was added to the mix and so Odysseus replaced Achilles. As peoples mingled and cultures were absorbed into larger empires, Law became the means of reconciliation of differences with a single ultimate authority. The set of qualities to rise in a lawful society were placed under one God and thanks to writing, these attributes could be shifted and massaged so that over time, instead of a new God, new layers could be added to the older paradigm.  Thus Jesus shifts the Old Testament dominance hierarchy without discarding it.

Comfort and scientific progress meant money became more essential to survival as the bourgeoisie rose along with a rise in pragmatism. Which meant the warring Olympians who became the God of Judgment and then the God of Grace fractured into the God of Protestant Reform.  All reflected the sexual desire of women to have men capable of supporting them and their children in the real, changing world.  Nietzsche's claim that God is dead I think says that the meta-set of dominance behaviors needed to rise to the top of the modern hierarchy pyramid IN ORDER TO have access to women is failing men and they do not have a model with which to organize their competition so that they are assured of success. And this makes them blame women.

For the last century, women have been gaining the rights and means of paying their own way.  That has driven a final stake through the heart of the old god and it is simply the lack of anything to take its place that has us floundering culturally and has allowed all this backlash. Until women figure out that they are driving this through the men they select, and recapture the power of choosing undermined by patriarchy, society is going to be drawn and quartered by the disconnect between the ideology of men and the wants of women.

So the question is, can women take the narrative bull by the horns and help craft a story that gives men a clear path to success in a new dominance hierarchy?

I noticed how YA fantasy which is full of paired female and male protagonists in an equal partnership with traditional and non-traditional roles blended. Young women are drinking these stories of werewolf packs and vampire hives and clockwork geniuses. The new hierarchy is in the forge. I'm thinking that the greatest gift to the future any writer could give is a potent and durable YA narrative that plants the framework for a paradigm of male and female for the future in the minds of these young women. For if the women build it, the men will come.

I think that's plenty for now.  Feel free to tear into this.  Or to support it.  If you made it this far, do let me know that, too.

The Seven-Minute Itch

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

I want to take a minute to talk about the 7-Minute Itch. After 8 years of looking at hundreds of short films for the Broad Humor Film Festival, films that started well but then sagged and died despite all the good work that went into them, I think many of the failures of comedy are in the structure of the overall script. In a short film, somewhere around 7 minutes, the story needs to take a turn. A big turn, to change the game entirely for the audience. It doesn't have to be a Hollywood change where the stakes for the main character suddenly escalate, thought it can. It could be any turn that wakes up the viewer lulled into "knowing" what the film was about and ready for it to be done. Curiosity is aroused. Instead of being ready for it to end, I want to see where it goes from there, at least for another 7 minutes. Then wrap it up. Or take yet another turn, a different turn, and then I'll be with you to the end of your half-hour. (Stories over a half-hour long need even more in terms of story, with almost as much depth as a feature, and they have a very hard time finding a home in film festivals.)

CAVEAT: When you hear 7 minutes, do not think of a stopwatch. Think of a cigarette. Cigarettes burn at different speeds depending on how much and how often you puff on them, but if a cigarette stays lit, it has a maximum span before it fizzles and goes out. If you want to keep smoking, you have to light another. A completely new cigarette. Likewise, your story after your 7-minute turn, should feel like a new movie. You can stretch it a bit if you are bringing your film to a bang-up finish. However, if you add another five minutes of interesting complications in the same vein as the rest, it causes a kind of despair: I'm tired of this. Let me go! You may love the charm of the moment, but if I feel the mental and emotional equivalent of an attack of claustrophobia, your charming scene becomes torture to me, no matter how well done.

 EXCEPTION: If you are making a film that is more experimental, an artistic deconstruction of comedy, or a recursive philosophical parody (we had a French film like that the first year that was 26 minutes) all bets are off. But a discussion of comedy and aesthetics has to be for another day.

Start with the Baby Not the Birth

*cross-posted with broadhumor.blogspot.com

I was talking to a filmmaker, a good one, about beginnings. I was trying to figure out a way to convince her to consider cutting the top of her film, but she loved it and so did her circle of beloveds. So I used the movie-as-baby analogy and took it a step further. Your movie may be an amazing baby, but if you introduce me to it by showing me the delivery or, God forbid, the act of conception, I am so outta there you have to work doubly hard to capture my heart. TMI, folks, too much information.

Seeing act of birth can be beautiful and amazing to family. The lovemaking that leads to conception is also beautiful, but not really something I want to watch if I'm not one of the parties in bed - and even then, probably not. Keep all that in your heart, and possibly in the extra value content on the DVD, but take it out of the film. Show me the shining, luminous new being already washed and swaddled in its blanket. All that other stuff you are so sure needs to be in there so I know what's happening probably is covered again later. And even if it's not, I can figure stuff out. I know where babies come from. I know that you had to do the deed and nine months later push it out. Not necessary to explain. Start with the baby, not the birth.