In this episode, we re going to be studying pronatalism through the lens of cultural anthropology and the cultural anthropology of U.S. cultural anthropology. We re looking at what the founding cultures of the early 19th century had to say about women and sex, and how they viewed their own wives.
00:26:19.600she wants oh no we're gonna go dude nicely done
00:26:22.020this is a modern context the the the tv shows that these people grew up with the radio stations
00:26:28.340these people grew up with the news they grew up with none of them lauded this this this is
00:26:33.180This is completely due to either genetic selection for these forms of preferences or a cultural memory that goes back generations in terms of what a good wife is.
00:26:45.080And you saying, oh, it's just what's around them.
00:26:50.640Otherwise, what we would see is in the low trust Islamic out there regions right now where like ISIS is, they'd be like, oh, we want a woman who can fight, which is not what they want because they aren't a truly martial culture.
00:27:02.400They are a culture that is a sort of ordered form of martialism, which we talk about in other videos.
00:27:06.900You can see this in our other videos on this.
00:27:11.540Do you have a counter argument to that?
00:27:14.920I just don't find your argument to be very compelling.
00:27:17.140And I think that when you look at each of these cultures and you see the amenities of people.
00:27:21.600Explain, if you don't find it compelling, explain how the Appalachian Cultural Group maintained this value without containing control of their media environment.
00:27:30.240What do you mean control of their media environment?
00:27:43.900So when their kids are growing up and they're trying to normalize to what's culturally normal, they are reading books that are produced by whether it's Puritans during the past.
00:27:55.160I think that's more of an argument in my favor.
00:27:56.800That's an argument that you grow up to respect the fact that your mother can defend your home with a gun and that your mother can process meat because you are living.
00:28:04.760You're much more likely to be living on a farm in a highly rural area without a butcher in town.
00:28:10.060I wasn't living on a farm in a highly rural area.
00:28:12.220And I still grew up respecting all of that.
00:28:15.580All of this is about cultural transmission and not about the context of their daily life.
00:28:21.880I hear that and I think that there is some inherited interplay.
00:28:28.640Like we are realizing more and more with our kids that a lot of what we thought were just quirks of our personality are probably genetic.
00:28:36.900Just like how insistently our kids are interested in things.
00:28:41.220Your attraction profile, preference for a wife, everything like that is genetic and that it needs to be paired with a culture that works with them.
00:28:47.440Yeah, but I think that these are downstream of selective pressures which were produced by their surroundings in society.
00:28:53.880Yeah, obviously all selective pressures are produced for their society.
00:28:59.120But the point I'm making is these things persist generations, like a hundred years after the selective pressures existed.
00:29:06.200That's not that many generations, Malcolm.
00:29:08.920That's a long time if you're talking about American history.
00:29:12.820Yeah, but not if you're talking about the number of ancestors.
00:29:16.060I mean, I understand if you're talking about the number of ancestors, but what you're acting like is that groups just basically cave to the surrounding cultural pressures when that's like objectively not true?
00:29:28.820Well, no, but they also, keep in mind, they also select for similar cultural pressures.
00:29:33.760So your family kept just migrating out to like new frontiers and trying to build around new civilizations going out to Texas.
00:29:40.360Because my family made their way to California and tried to like, you know, go out to the frontier there and rebuild San Francisco after it burned down in 1908.
00:29:48.520So like, again, like these things have an interplay.
00:29:51.960And I think you're much more likely to find someone of Scots-Irish descent who maintains those cultural values if their family continued to lean into the environments that also leaned into the selective pressures that support those values.
00:30:04.880Yes, you're definitely going to find that, which means you need to pay attention to that and how you choose your family environment.
00:30:13.340But I think the point you were trying to make earlier is a lot of this is just cultural and it's not.
00:30:18.160It's cultural, like modern pop cultural.
00:30:23.320I was saying it was a product of their surrounding society that, for example, in Puritan, in the Puritan colonies, people needed devout, conscientious, sober wives because this was a highly religious settlement in which people lived in tight-knit communities in which people played different roles.
00:30:43.800And you needed people who were very, like, who played the right role within their communities.
00:30:50.120All the stuff that you're talking about right now was an intentional cultural choice of the Puritans when they moved into these environments, which differentiated from the cultural choices that led to the genetics that led to things like the Quakers or the Southerners or the Appalachians.
00:31:28.660So not just their mental profiles, but I think their physical genetic profiles.
00:31:33.520If you look at Quaker women, it seems pretty obvious to me that they were selected by plainness.
00:31:40.000Like, no shade on, like, the Quaker community, but this is a community that intergenerationally selected for plainness.
00:31:48.080If you look at the Puritan community, you see, like, if you look at you, for example, Simone, your physical appearance, you do not look that different from the Puritans that you would have seen in art back in the day.
00:31:59.820And I can put art on the screen here and people can see it.
00:32:01.440You look a lot like them in your physical facial features, which are really focused on, one, like, intellectual conversational ability.
00:32:11.100This is something that you were clearly selected for, and industriousness and looking industrious.
00:32:16.900Like, you have a face that looks like a wife who's going to do a lot of work and not put up a fight.
00:32:23.220But, like, I look at you, I'm like, oh, this is a woman who looks financially sound and industrious.
00:32:27.500More than a rousing in a traditional sense.
00:32:30.700If you look at what happened to the southern women, they became very ornamental in their looks.
00:32:37.560These women are the most traditionally attractive within the United States.
00:32:41.020I don't think most people would argue that.
00:32:42.800And if you look at the Appalachian women, they became very robust compared to the other women.
00:32:47.620And if you like tomboys, you're going to like the women that are produced by this culture.
00:32:51.360And so I think that we also see this sort of etched into the characters.
00:32:54.800And this is something that we try to ignore because everyone's focused on, like, ethnic differences instead of, like, interracial differences where we selected into these cultures.
00:33:04.860And that, for example, if a woman looked like Simone, looked, like, industrious and prudent and intellectual, she would be, if she was born into a different culture.
00:33:15.000Suppose she was born into the Appalachian culture, and my family lived alongside that culture, so we're, like, part descended from that culture.
00:33:20.960You would have been selected into our family, right?
00:33:24.200Like, really early on in that cultural period.
00:33:27.080Or if you were born to a Quaker family, you might have found a higher quality husband was in a Puritan family because, and this is how you get these sort of genetic vortexes that happen really quickly culturally that can end up mattering a lot more than the ethnic cultural vortexes that everyone's so focused on.
00:33:41.860But if we go back to what were the backwoods people looking for, okay?
00:33:45.980So William Byrd II, while not strictly a frontierman, wrote in his journals about backcountry women he encountered, noting was approval how they could ride a stride and handle an axe as well as a needle.
00:33:58.900So these are things that they were seen as good about them.
00:34:01.420Can they handle an axe as well as a needle?
00:34:03.080What was really interesting is Mary Ingalls, who escaped Native American captivity, was often praised in contemporary accounts for her, not for her appearance, but for her, quote, extraordinary constitution and ability to survive in extreme conditions.
00:34:16.080So to be captured and to fight back about your capturers, remember I mentioned that, like, how do you choose a good wife?
00:34:22.580Who gets in a good position during a raid?
00:34:24.380Who can escape Native American captivity?
00:34:26.780This is not what the other cultural groups were interested in, but martial prowess was the number one thing that they were looking for, toughness in a wife, a bearish fatigue, as he said.
00:34:37.420So contemporary accounts of Betty Zane, who became a frontier hero for carrying gunpowder during the siege of Fort Henry in 1782, were widely shared as retold.
00:34:47.380So this is a woman who is being praised within these cultures.
00:34:49.620If you look at more modern iterations of women, you know, you don't just have the mud wrestlers of today.
00:34:54.560You don't just have the noodler women of today.
00:35:05.260You have individuals like Annie Oakley, who secured her husband by beating him in a duel.
00:35:12.780So, and by Butler's own accounts, when he talked about what he liked about Annie Oakley, he emphasized her shooting and her practical skills, saying, quote, I fell in love with her courage and determination, not, you know, what she looked like or anything like that.
00:35:27.240Any thoughts about the backwards people before we go to the southerners here?
00:35:30.840I'm still just seeing the products of selective pressures of an environment.
00:35:38.720But the selective pressures were a selected environment, so it doesn't make any difference.
00:35:43.660No, they, I mean, okay, the Scots-Irish did not choose to go to the backwoods.
00:35:48.420They were kind of forced in there by the Quakers who were like, get the hell out of here, you are not one of us.
00:35:53.920And they came over on, like, the cheese.
00:35:55.640The Puritans, okay, let's talk about where every group chose to immigrate to because you are being just, like, I don't know, do you not remember?
00:36:03.900No, no, no, I know the Puritans chose, like, the cold and rocky ground of New England.
00:36:10.000So they specifically chose settlements that were very rocky because they were harder to plow because they wanted to emphasize industriousness in their daily life.
00:36:18.320I mean, I don't know if I said, I feel like that's apocryphal.
00:36:24.620And why did the backwoods people move to the areas where there were constant Klan conflicts?
00:36:31.900Well, there were constant Klan conflicts among them even in Scotland.
00:36:35.840Because they were moving from areas where there were constant Klan conflicts.
00:36:39.820They created the nature of the environment.
00:36:42.500The Appalachian Mountain area wasn't hostile because it was an innately hostile area or the Native Americans, there were more hostile than other Native Americans.
00:36:54.620They were hostile because the backwoods people were there fighting with the Native Americans and fighting with each other.
00:37:01.920If you look at the pre-areas, the Native Americans in the Appalachian region were not more hostile before the backwoods people got there than any of the other Native American communities.
00:37:12.060Yes, the backwoods people did act as a buffer zone that the Quakers sort of laid out in that region.
00:37:17.800But the backwoods people also intentionally sorted into this region.
00:37:22.240Well, anyway, it's important to note, as you mentioned, where, like, if a woman was disproportionately, you know, like, attractive to one of these groups or had attitudes that was disproportionately attractive to one of these groups, she was likely to marry into them, which leads to this vortex.
00:37:40.220But also, if an individual is born to a Quaker group and they are more martial, they are more interested in being rowdy and fighting and, you know, maybe like girls who are rowdy and fighting and everything like that, they're going to move out of that community and into the backwoods.
00:37:57.780If a Quaker was born less, like, focused on their status, less focused on how other people saw them, and was more interested in intellectualism for intellectualism's own sake, they're going to move to the Puritan community.
00:38:14.860They're interested in being an ornamental white, they're going to move to the Deep South community.
00:38:19.580This is the way these things work and create-
00:38:22.300I feel like you're overstating the social mobility of that time.
00:38:25.440You don't need to overstate the social mobility because all of these groups lived adjacent to each other.
00:38:31.440So even if you don't have pure social mobility, you're going to have a degree of genetic social osmosis, which is going to strengthen every one of these groups within these regions.
00:38:42.560And if you talk about, like, the Southern, you're like, oh, it's just an accident that the aristocrats from England moved to the part of the United States where slave cropping worked.
00:38:52.040The people who had never worked a day in their lives wanted to move and create a culture where they didn't have to work a day in their lives.