Why would a tendency to adorn oneself not be innate? Seems pretty universal to me. Why should nurture be the default assumption? I'm sorry but your answer is terrible, akin to "look up sexual selection and read about genetics."
There is evidence that Homo Sapiens settlements are accompanied with jewelry findings. As far as I know this is one of defining differences with other Homo species, even Neanderthals.
The most complex kinds of objects that chimpanzees craft are tools. To posit that a psychological propensity for pieces of jewelry (a human invention) is inborn in only women is extraordinary and reeks of post-hoc logic. To posit that it is cultural meme is obviously not. Do you not understand this intuitively? Are you being 100% honest with me?
I think you're fighting a strawman here. The "human invention" part is what led the other commenters to generalize from "jewelry" to "adornment", which is a more accurate expression of the idea anyway. In this theory, jewelry is only a close-to-hand vehicle for expressing deeper inborn urges, also satisfied by elaborate clothing, hairstyles, hats and head-dresses, war paint, etc. Further, it's not present only in women, it just seems stronger. Given the obvious morphological and other behavior differences between men and women, it's entirely plausible that such a thing could be inborn.
Most of the world population is religious (or was for most of civilization's history, if the scales have tipped recently) -- perhaps we should assume that belief in God is inborn?
I will break it down if that doesn't suffice: Before women and men were women and men, they were girls and boys growing up in whatever cultural atmosphere they were born into; and every culture worldwide has a policy of showering newborn and infant girls with "adornment" while withholding it from boys. This is trivial observation -- I invite you to visit your nearest toystore (look at children on the boxes if you're having trouble) and report back to me otherwise.
Not at all, actually. Douglas Adams dispensies with this notion in his 1998 Digital Biota 2 speech, in the paragraphs starting with "Where does the idea of God come from?" [1]
...a question which ... only comes about because of the
nature of the sort of person he is, the sort of person he
has evolved into and the sort of person who has thrived
because he thinks this particular way. Man the maker looks
at his world and says 'So who made this then?' Who made this?
Not only is that an inborn motivation, but if you take away the assumption that there is no god, it's consistent with the Christian view of the whole "everyone knows there's a God" issue. I won't speak for guard-of-terra, but that's close enough for me. It's also in line with the kind of thing I'm talking about in regard to fundamental differences between men and women, in terms of baseness (if that's not an abuse of that word).
That said, thanks for the interesting read. I think we've said all that can be said without repeating ourselves or talking past each other, so I'm done.
You're practically making my argument for me. Pretty much every culture is more concerned with adorning its females than males. How can that be without an underlying, enduring reason? You keep pointing to the self-reinforcing cycle, but how does it start, the same way everywhere?
For similar reasons, yes, it seems clear that there is something about us that drives us to religion. I'm pretty sure I would believe that even if I wasn't already a Christian.
Where does the power differential come from? I alluded to that in one of my other comments.
It's tragic that the author of that article thinks that the only alternative to "femininity is about looking pretty so men can objectify you" is "femininity is an illusion of the patriarchal society". Not even an attempt to bring the conversation away from physical appearance, with an unnecessarily cynical interpretation of the no-makeup thing to boot; I always assumed that was about discovering, "hey we're beautiful without makeup after all", which you'd think the author would be in favor of. I'm not going to watch the video (because I find videos annoying), but if it's more of the same I'm not going to regret it at all.
