Between all the great events during the women’s international week, I decided to go to “sex, lies and evolution”. It was a spectacular experience, I learnt about a lot of new things that I didn’t know or thought about before. It opened my eyes to all of those stories that we have heard ever since childhood but never actually thought about deeply enough to know that maybe they are incorrect. Jacky Vallée, the speaker, mentioned a few of the general misconceptions that exist. He also said that what people have been claiming for too many years as “it is normal” or “it is human nature”, anthropology (a scientific field that studies humans) explains the opposite. I could tell that I was not the only one who was surprised by those facts and who left the auditorium and started questioning everything again.
We all know the answer to those questions; who first made fire, who hunted animals, who first created tools, it is “men”. What Jacky tried to debunk is that behind those stories, there are other answers. With the help of anthropology, there is proof that the answer might differ and it is not always men. Everyone knows men as the dominant gender and that is the “human nature”, but it isn’t. Tools, fire, etc, all these are just objects, how can anyone know who first made them. There is no evidence of such a thing than all those pictures in the internet about men creating them. Our mind is just set to think that it would be done by a man rather than hearing that it may have been a woman, because it is less exciting, which is sad.
Another bitter truth, the human evolution picture, the most known one is the ape that transforms to a man. It also shows how when we think about humans we directly think about men. And that is how from a random picture we get stories and call them “human nature”.
I now think differently about so many things, this event helped me realize that just because the majority believes in an ideology, that it is the truth. Anything can differ from someone’s point of view to another. And before following the bunch, we have to stop for a second and try to look at it from a different angle, so we can actually see the full story, the full truth about it.
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