If someone were to say the phrase “Caveman Courtship” to you, chances are it might conjure up an image like the one above from a 1949 wedding invitation – a caveman clubbing a cavewoman over the head and dragging her back to his place. This image was chosen Pfeiffer-Gilman wedding invitation and wedding was held in the Lost River Caverns tourist attraction, this is because the caves were, and still are, the Gilman family business, and the unusual nuptials became worldwide news after a wire service picked up the story. The image, however, in reality is an imagining of violent non-consensual sex and abduction among our prehistoric ancestors, but it was considered to be not only acceptable but also funny. After thinking about the eagerness of the press to latch onto notions of prehistoric cannibalistic violence, and about the fallacy of man the hunter and woman the gatherer, as well as discussing the earliest winery and a very early penis pendant in our podcast this week, I began to ponder where and when this idea acceptable and “funny” of prehistoric sexual violence and abduction arose.
According to Nicholas Ruddick of the University of Regina in Canada, this image of cave men beating and kidnapping cave women has been part of our fictive imagining of the past since at least 1865. It was in this year that Scottish lawyer, John F. McLennan, published Primitive Marriage: Inquiry Into The Form of Capture In Marriage Ceremonies, in which he posited that primitive warbands, valuing male hunters, practiced female infanticide, which in reality was unlikely as our Stuff in the News for our podcast discusses this week, because in almost 80% of cases women were also hunters in foraging societies. McLennan, however, not having access to a great deal of anthropological data in 1865 can be forgiven for assuming the myth of “man the hunter” to be true and he argued that the lack of women due to the posited female infanticide was what led to the forcible abduction of women for sexual partners. We can at least give McLennan some points for actually accepting the great antiquity of mankind in an era when calculations of the age of the earth were, in the West, based on the Bible: Bishop Ussher (1581-1656), for instance, declared based on his biblical calculations that creation happened at 6pm on 22 October, 4004 BCE. McLennan’s work was of an age with Charles Darwin’s Origin of the Species (1859) and Descent of Man (1871). The new ideas of evolution and survival of the fittest, therefore, imbued McLennan’s work – and it is not too surprising that the Victorian “armchair anthropologist” came up with the notion that marriage had “evolved” from the more primitive state of abduction in which men selected and forced sex onto the women they found desirable for their own gratification and for the traits they wanted to see in their children. His data, however, was highly dubious; he quotes from an 1805 account of “courtship by club” practices among Australian Aboriginals, a group who were considered by contemporary evolutionists in the West to be closest to prehistoric ancestors. The idea stuck and persisted because as Ruddick comments “wife-capture is tinged with an uncanny primal erotic that survives most attempts to deny, ironize, or mock it. Indeed, wife-capture taps into a deep psychological well regardless of the quality of the specific treatment of the scenario (p.48).”
So if the prehistoric man’s violent courtship abductions began with the erotic fantasies of of the Victorian male imagination, inspired by the problematic beginnings of anthropology, how did it become “funny”? A significant step along the way was Victorian and Edwardian prehistoric fiction, which as Ruddick explains, “had a strongly progressionist tendency: the caveman who went hunting with club in hand for a wife was likely to be cast as an antagonist, destined to be defeated and superseded by men with more chivalrous manners. There are frequent reprises of the scene in which a prehistoric fair maiden, abducted by an ape-man, must be rescued by a hero, who is a more advanced human type like herself.” (It is all too easy to see how this fictive threat could become racialized and mutually reinforced by unfounded white fears about black men’s uncontrollable desires for white women.)
Humor comes into play because because many people find it acceptable to laugh at things that they don’t consider as “evolved” as them. I’m guilty of this to some extent: I laugh at the antics of my dog, Kitty, and likewise at the nutty, ninja squirrels in my garden. We can extrapolate from this to the idea that cavemen, who were consider to be less evolved might also have done “funny” things that we, as thoroughly modern humans, have evolved beyond. This notion is underpinned by the teleological notion of progress, that society is constantly improving, that we are getting better all the time. Thus, caveman courtship must have been more primitive, and although it is imagined that this involved rape and abduction, this is funny because this is only how it was done in the distant past – we have evolved, we have improved, we are moving closer and closer to gender equality. This is dangerous thinking. As sociologist, Lisa Wade, of Tulane University comments, if we think that society always gets better naturally it, “may encourage us to stop working to make society better.” By inventing cave-man courtship, we can imagine what the subordination of women looked like way back then, and we imagine it to be extreme violence and abduction, but this actually makes it more difficult to see what the subordination of women looks like in the here and now. Wade concludes that, “The idea of cave-man courtship…seems silly and innocuous. But it actually helps to naturalize man’s aggressive pursuit of sex with women. And that naturalization is part of why it is so difficult to disrupt rape myths and stop rape.” So, not only is the myth that men are naturally wired to rape endorsed in this “humorous” imagery of cave man courtship with a club, but at the same so is the myth that we have somehow moved beyond this as a society.
And lest we should think that we must have at least progressed since the 1865 publishing of Primitive Marriage or the 1949 wedding invitation above, let me share with you a headline from the Daily Mail in 2011, “Dump the chat-up lines and act like a caveman if you are after a one-night stand, men told – (Subheading) Women after casual sex prefer “aggressive courtship.” I will refrain from the temptation to make any quips about the Daily Mail and cavemen because I am reluctant to insult our prehistoric ancestors and because such teleologically based “humor” is inaccurate and assumption of our progress can be potentially damaging.(Though I’ll admit I possibly made the quip anyway in mentioning my reluctance to do so!)
Sources
Nicholas Ruddick, “Courtship With a Club: Wife-Capture in Prehistoric Fiction, 1986-1914,” The Yearbook of English Studies, vol.37, No.2, Science Fiction (2007), pp. 46-63.
Lisa Wade, “Caveman Courtship and Its Mythology,” The Society Pages: Sociological Images, 8 August, 2014, accessed on July 5, 2023. https://thesocietypages.org/socimages/2014/08/08/caveman-courtship/
Chris Parsons, “Dump the chat-up lines and act like a caveman if you are after a one-night stand, men told,” Daily Mail, 25 August, 2011. Accesssed on July 5, 2023 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2029559/One-night-stands-Women-casual-sex-prefer-aggressive-caveman-courtship.html
Picture Credit: “Lost River Caverns (Lost Cave) Hellertown, Pa.” Card. Pub. by E. C. Gilman, Hellertown, PA. “Tichnor Quality Views,” Reg. U. S. Pat. Off. Made Only by Tichnor Bros., Inc., Boston, Mass., [ca. 1930–1945]. Digital Commonwealth, https://ark.digitalcommonwealth.org/ark:/50959/gx41nn780 (accessed July 05, 2023).