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Man, gold diggers. Fuck gold diggers. Right? Women who just use men for their money. Terrible people. Marrying rich to ensure a life of clothes and cars and a hot tub that you have a servant to clean is about the lowest thing a lady could do.
Marry for love. Not money.
But what if I told you you shouldn’t be mad? That gold digging gals weren’t working to ensure themselves a future of obscene wealth, but just a future, a life, the ability to reproduce and raise kids. What if I told you that gold digging was as old as time, an evolutionary behavior no less ingrained in women than the desire to spread our seed about and pick up a lot of hotties on Tinder is in men.
You’d probably scoff or something and say something like, “Bullshit, money was invented by the Medicis in 1610, so no woman could have those kinds of desires inherently inside her.”
Yea, I’d say, glossing over your Euro-centric rememberance of history. But before you needed money to survive–remember, there wasn’t always money–you needed food. Food was like money you could eat. What I’m trying to saying is that bitches back in the day married dudes who were good at farming, not investment banking like they do today. But it followed the same priniciple. From The Washington Post:
Researchers recently uncovered a sharp decline in genetic diversity in male lineages across the world during the Stone Age. The study’s authors hypothesized that material gains made through early agricultural success — a proxy for wealth — gave smaller groups of related men the reproductive upper hand for generations.
“Men who had more wealth and power might have had more to offer to women,” said co-author Melissa Wilson Sayres, an Arizona State University professor who studies sex-biased biology. “Their sons and grandsons could have been more successful in the same way.”
And it turns out that men who were rich boned A LOT in the Stone Age. Way more than men who were poor.
For every 17 women who passed on their DNA, researchers could find genetic evidence of only one male whose lineage stretched to modern times.
Of course. Why would you fuck a gross smelly caveman loser who also didn’t have food? Because he was cute: Spoiler: Everyone was butt fucking ugly in 6,000 BCE.
Meanwhile, people are using this news to crap on men folk, such as our (not) friends at Slate, as though the idea that the Bros who were best suited to survive in the times they lived in should have 1. Not reproduced and 2. Respected women’s wishes to leech off their land and food stuffs and not provide sex in return (desires we aren’t necessarily sure even existed).
“More to offer” is one way to think about it, but the cynic in me wonders how much choice women could really exercise in societies that were so strictly patriarchal that a few wealthy men shut all the other men out of the sexual marketplace so effectively.
That statement just made me barf. Sure, our currently backwards and rigid sexual norms can be traced back to the structure of society long ago, BUT THESE PEOPLE DIDN’T KNOW WHAT THE FUCK THEY WERE DOING. They didn’t know what choice is. Blaming these people for having a patriarchal society is no different than crapping on cavemen for not having the foresight to kill off the monkey population to preempt the AIDS epidemic.
Anyhoo, gold digging. It’s the world’s oldest profession, in that a profession is doing whatever you can to keep yourself alive, which in this case is ensuring you and your offspring access to food during the Stone Age.