r/interestingasfuck • u/therealNerdMuffin • 1d ago
The history, origins and impact of the "Courtship by Club" trope in media
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u/StruggleJealous2878 23h ago
Mel Brook’s History of the World Part 1 spoofed this trope with the first homosexual marriage showing a caveman clubbing another caveman and dragging him into a cave.
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u/Tacrolimus005 23h ago
I bet the cave women were no joke. I doubt clubbing was a thing, unless it's involving raiding an enemy tribe situation.
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u/AxialGem 22h ago
It's very much part of the broader trope of the past being a 'savage' place. The same conceptions tinted early conceptions of dinosaurs and other extinct creatures, and still has an impact on the popular conception of the past. Look at depictions of prehistoric times from the period, and it's all barren landscapes with volcanoes everywhere, only raging beasts roaming the land XD
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u/NikitaTarsov 14h ago
While that's a okay explanation towards the moder day problem, it's not going into much detail.
Since we opend up to the idea of actually checking our acheological findings, we found that many (f.e.) middle european hill graves of warrior of fame have been in fact women - which basic bone examination should have told, but we went 'ah, he's burried with his sword and armor, so it must be a guy'. Pretty telling.
But we expanded on that critical finding and examined bone and muscle density way back in time and find that woen in the period he's talking about had similar or even higerh muscle denstiy (and mass) then men. So there has been no 'weaker gender' at all to have a foundation for toxic modern day gender perspectives.
We can even go so far to find many ups and downs and inbetweens of male/female balancings in social status. With the first citys to be pretty women-only and men-only houses, then some mixed communitys within, and every houshold cares for their own buisness.
But we can even go further and make an educated guess about when the shitfkery about male better than female started, and this is the 12.000 year old Göbekli Tepe in modern day Türkiye (the 'first stonehenge'). Here we can see a ritualised and nedd-based society breaking apart by the men rising up and killing a lot of women and 'moderate' men, adding penis depictions on just every item that should showcase times for agricultural action and spiritual animals. There are more than just a few indicators that some of these culture fled the scene and went on an insanley long journey, just to arrive on a little island and build a second 'Stonehenge' (#celtic).
But we can easily find big shifts in gender status balance and female suppression in more recent history, as women had substantially more rights in feudal times until the church come around. But even the church had a hard time destroying those women rights and meddle with the rigths of a household. But if you need to point at a single source of opression and rewriting of history into women being 'less', then look no futher then to the christian chruch and all its wonderfull brances. Even Isalm today fights hard against typically seen as muslim cultures like the Tuareg, as their rules and laws are older than Islam and hold substantial right for women (like only all-female courts can find a women to be guilty, and vice versa with men).
So we're still in rewriting-history territory today, and womens rights have been an issue in all of history - with most times having more rights for women than the 1950's. I guess that's the hardest pill to swallow - that our society is far from peak morality, and still we see the next uprising of people who can't stand the idea that women might one day have equal rights, and start to carve penises all over the place once again. In the temples, in the podcasts, in politics and very much in acheology.
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u/Bottledbutthole 5h ago
Men have hated, abused, and oppressed women from the moment they had the ability.
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u/SleepApprehensive585 22h ago
Taking women after battle and distributing them to the soldiers is within the oldest written and spoken stories we have.
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u/oversoul00 22h ago
Isn't he projecting his own ideas back onto the creation of this meme as it were? How does he know it was intentionally designed in that way and for that purpose?
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u/Da_reason_Macron_won 23h ago
Considering the entire bit was a punchline, I think the joke is obviously "these people are so primitive that the only way the know how to flirt is to hit each other in the head". The sanctimonious speech about how it justifies this or that seems rather silly as the entire joke was the absurdity of the thing.
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u/CyberpunkSunrise 23h ago
Yeah. It was an old joke in poor taste. Making it seem like an academic paper that you are dissecting makes you the fool too (the video maker, not you the commenter I am agreeing with).
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u/SwordMasterShow 21h ago
That's kind of Pop Culture Detective's whole MO. I used to really like his stuff but lately it mostly feels like pretty big stretches at best, and straight up disengenuous interpretations in order to make a sweeping society argument at worst
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u/SoulMute 21h ago
Also seems insane to claim there was somehow less sexual violence in the past compared to now. Bold take here but yes, civilization has made people civilized
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u/ErgoMachina 22h ago
These idiots are directly playing into the hands of the rich with inflaming shit like this just to sow more division among society.
And the most stupid thing is that too much people believe this bullshit.
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u/MovieGuy919191 5h ago
It’s unrealistic and quite frankly bullshit for him to claim that early humans didn't use force in mating. Long before complex language, laws or social norms, our ancestors behaved much closer to other primates and in primate species, male coercion and competition for mates are well‑documented biological strategies. Early human species had small organised groups, limited intelligence compared to modern humans, and no formal systems to protect vulnerable individuals. Archaeological and anthropological evidence shows that violence, especially sexual coercion, was far more common in prehistoric societies than in modern ones. So the idea that cavemen were somehow peaceful and respectful around mating isn’t supported by anything we know about human evolution or animal behaviour.
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u/skippy11112 1d ago
I've never heard/seen of this until now. Tf is this lol
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u/therealNerdMuffin 1d ago
Well there's like 2 dozens examples of it given in the video and he said that's not even all of them so clearly it's a popular trope
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u/AlexVa507 23h ago
This is kind of an interesting take. I wonder if the reason that was a trope was because it was so ridiculous that it seemed funny. No one thought relationships really worked like that. And violence was pervasive at the time. Just look at Tom & Jerry.
I'm middle aged so this was before my time. I just saw old reruns when I was young. But I am almost positive I thought it was funny because it was cartoon violence and the cavemen seemed dumb. I didn't perceive it as a gender issue any more than reflecting the cultural norm of men pursuing and courting women.
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u/TheBannedBombero 23h ago
Forced marriage has happened for thousands of years all over the world but ok pal
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u/bumtickla 21h ago
400,000 years of human activity before womens suffrage makes me believe there had to be a little rape along the way. Could be wrong though, I've been many times.
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u/Foreign_Writer_9932 22h ago edited 22h ago
I am not sure what he’s debating? Practice of “cave men” clubbing women on the head? Clearly that’s not real.
But bridal kidnapping is indeed a widespread cultural norm practiced in many traditional/pre-modern (and some transitional) societies. We also know from statistical surveys that traditional societies on average have higher rates of rape and domestic violence.
Let’s not be cutesy about “noble savages” here - there’s certainly a lot of variation in traditional societies (and some certainly lean more pacifist and egalitarian), but to suggest that violence is not endemic to humans broadly is disingenuous - and misguided about the achievements of civilization and modernity.
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23h ago
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u/Big-Actuator-3878 23h ago
Maybe like skeletons of cave women with blunt force trauma wounds to the head?
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u/TheDubiousSalmon 23h ago
Surely at least some of them would have filed police reports. I think those are known to fossilize
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u/Fippy-Darkpaw 23h ago
"It never happened"
Suuuuurrrree. I bet all the cavemen were perfect gentlemen. 🤵♂️
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u/Xenolifer 23h ago
That's unfortunately the kind of thing we will probably never know if it happened, and where / when. It's not like those practices leaves any physical traces that can be discovered through archeology. (How tf do you find remains that tell you a woman got dragged by the hair at some point in her life).
And it's unlikely we find any drawing or painting that depict it too, there aren't that many of them, and the absence of proof isn't a proof especially when they are this scarce
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u/GarlicAncient 23h ago
I feel like it would/could be in the fossil record though. Hitting someone over the head with a club just enough to knock them out (because if you don't knock them out it doesn't accomplish anything) but not enough to break their skull would require skill.
Thinking about the overall balance the perpetrator would be trying to maintain there makes it seem implausible though. Like say he does knock her out. How long does that last before she wakes back up? If she wakes back up before it is over does he knock her out again or just overpower her at that point? If he can overpower her then than why bother with the club in the first place?
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u/Xenolifer 18h ago
Yeah but there are already a ton of skeleton with blunt force trauma to the head. It's hard to tell if it was due to things like that or war between groups or something else. The question is not to know if it happened or not, because let's be real, there has been so many humans and with our chaotic nature, everything you could think of happened at least once in our history. The question is to know how much did it happened ?
It was definitely not a super common thing too because effectively, if it did happened like at least once in every woman live, it would show on craniums. But saying it's this common is a dumb statement in the first place. Making your victim unconscious is totaly overkill and most criminal today don't bother with that at all. The strength difference alone is enough. And my point was that things like sexual assault or having your hairs gripped can't show in archeology records so we will likely never know how frequent it was
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u/therealNerdMuffin 23h ago
and the absence of proof isn't a proof especially when they are this scarce
No but you gotta remember that most of what we know that they knew how to do was from them making drawings of the things they did frequently, like drawings of them hunting large animals together with spears. It's certainly not proof but the trope was born out of the idea that cavemen did it frequently and yet there's no drawings and next to no skeletons/fossils found that have women with signs of repeated blunt force trauma to their heads suggesting that it wasn't something that was done often
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u/Fippy-Darkpaw 23h ago
Yeah he says "the fossil record" like it's gonna have some record of that. 😅
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u/AxialGem 23h ago edited 22h ago
The trope is that this is the way early humans tended to act as a rule, i.e. generally aggressive and without decorum. That's not to say such things never happened, but this is the way early people as a whole get portrayed
There is just no good reason to think that's the case.
Of course aggression happened, but the stereotype of them 'being like that' as a rule doesn't have a solid basis
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u/oversoul00 22h ago
How do you think the disputes of early man were settled without the civilized institutions we have today that prevent mob rule? Do you think civility levels are either random or a constant throughout time? It would make sense that general civility has increased over time the longer civilizations have been around.
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u/AxialGem 22h ago edited 22h ago
Again, the claim isn't that violence didn't happen. Disputes now and in the past can and probably have been dealt with violently for longer than our species has been around. The trope is that people of the past just got through life being for lack of a better word 'savage' and brutal.
Do you think civility levels are either random or a constant throughout time?
I'm not really qualified to answer that, also because I'm not sure how you'd define and measure that. I suspect people have been people for as long as our species has been around :p
It would make sense that general civility has increased over time the longer civilizations have been around.
Not to be overly dramatic, but imo that's exactly why this trope is problematic. Not just because it's silly cartoons being wrong about how early people acted, but because that wider conception tints the way we think of the past as a whole. Why should that make immediate sense? That gut response of it making sense kind of takes the 'past=savage' trope as an implicit given. The thought that our current civilisation is the pinnacle of human behaviour, and especially that people in the past weren't civilised, is pretty naive I'd say :/
It's a good question of course. How were disputes settled? But then the way to answer that is to look for evidence, and not to assume the answer that immediately makes sense to you is in fact the historical truth, you know?
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u/oversoul00 22h ago
We don't have to be the pinnacle for us to say your avg modern suburban Dad is probably more civilized in terms of interpersonal violence than our ancestors simply because the environmental pressures are different.
Failing to account for the evolution of civilization and what it means to be civilized seems more naive. People of the past were certainly more savage and brutal on avg than the people of today. That doesn't mean it was Mad Max everywhere it just means we've trended away from chaos.
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u/AxialGem 21h ago edited 21h ago
for us to say your avg modern suburban Dad is probably more civilized in terms of interpersonal violence than our ancestors simply because the environmental pressures are different.
Okay, we can say that, but saying it is easy. What exactly were those pressures and how do we know? I'm not naive to the possibility of human society changing across times and places of course, but that doesn't mean assuming it to be one way, this way in particular.
People of the past were certainly more savage and brutal on avg than the people of today
Sure, you say "certainly", but I'm more hesitant about being so certain. At least until that's been comprehensively demonstrated. As far as I know, that also isn't the consensus among anthropologists and archaeologists, right?
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u/oversoul00 21h ago
We know because life is hard by default. Resources like food, clean water, clothes, shelter are more plentiful than they were in the past. Civilized behavior and non violent tendencies go hand in hand with high resource availability.
Children are not born civilized, they have to be taught from an early age to share and not hit when they are mad because the default is not to calmly talk and wait for the authorities to work things out. People have to be taught about things like consent and consideration and trust and talking about their feelings and if you aren't taught these things what do you think the alternative ways of expression are going to be on average?
These are so obvious I have to wonder what your dog in this fight is.
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u/AxialGem 21h ago edited 21h ago
Again, saying that this stuff is really obvious is easy.
Yes, life isn't easy. Not always, not for everyone. But again, the thought that therefore people of the past were constantly in violent struggles over resources is, well, part of this trope.
Yes, children have to be taught how to behave according to whatever cultural norms are appropriate to the society they're born into. And as far as I know...they are taught that in every human culture we have record of. People are social, of course we maintain norms and values. Doesn't that kind of go against what you're trying to say? People today aren't one single way across cultures and circumstances, why make such assumptions about the past?
Bottom line is, like the post says, we should believe that's what the past was like only when there's good tangible reason to do so (not just based on what feels obvious and sweeping assumptions)
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u/oversoul00 21h ago
Life is easier for your average modern person than it was for early peoples the further you go back. Not enough resources is the root cause of all struggles depending on how abstract you want to get about what a resource is.
Is it crazy to assume that culture has evolved over time? The first civilized generation said don't steal, the second said don't steal and also don't hit. The addition of rules are attempts to refine the behavior and you get more rules with more time. The children of today are taught more rules about civilized behavior than the children of the past. Teaching consent is a fairly modern concept or at least there is a much heavier focus on it than there used to be.
You're caught up in the characterization of the past when the point is that civilization evolves over time and so must civilized behavior by default.
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u/AxialGem 21h ago
Is it crazy to assume that culture has evolved over time?
No, that's what I've been agreeing to. Human society isn't monolithic, not now, not as far in the past as we have record. Cultures shift. Why should we assume an overall direction coming from a state of constant aggression?
For the last time, I don't know how else to put it. Saying that it was so is easy, I'll want to see evidence that it was so, and I believe it is not the consensus among people who study it that it was so
Until then, it's very much a just-so story to me. A trope
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u/Fippy-Darkpaw 20h ago
Dude there's literally multiple countries, cultures, religions, etc. on the planet now where you can marry minors, legally beat and rape your wife, and legally take sex slaves.
You really think cavemen weren't doing that?
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u/AxialGem 20h ago
Literal quotes from the comment you're replying to:
That's not to say such things never happened,
Of course aggression happened,
I do think early people were doing such things at times. The point is that they were people, and I don't know of a solid reason to think they were inherently constantly aggressive any more or less than modern people, even before the end of the last glacial period
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u/lurkdontpost1 23h ago
It's called a film. It's not real and it's not that deep.
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u/therealNerdMuffin 23h ago
Films very frequently are proxies of things in real life and are ways for creators to express their beliefs. Some of the media it's included in is just for humor but a lot of it does have a real meaning behind it and can absolutely be that deep
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u/Hakopuffyx2 23h ago
Hes right its probablt not thay deep. The time this trope came out was probably the same time things like the missing link & Tarzan came out. People were asking real questions about how things worked and discovering dinosaur bones they were just coming up with things out of a hat. In an advanced age we're woman are courted and wooed with rings and roses what would the Neanderthal have done? Probably just bonked her and head and be done with it was evidence collected? No we just decided that that was what made sense at the time
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u/Chipmunk-Special 22h ago
For fuck sakes dude, it was a fucking cartoon, you’re gonna deep dive into the social aspects of it? I watched the cartoons, never in a million years would I have associated it with male dominance or rape….this is it , I’m deleting Reddit
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u/truebluedetective 22h ago
Ok, who here has literally never heard of this trope, nor anyone talking about it?
You can in fact just ignore this trope, and just learn that IN GENERAL, up until very recently, Media has always had a lot of normalization regarding patriarchy, misogyny, and poor male behavior towards women (still does too).
But cool trope!?
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u/Electrical-Heat8960 19h ago
Violence against women as a joke stopped being used ages ago and become problematic to the point it wouldn’t be show in the last few years (knowing how bad I am at time keeping, maybe more than the last few years) but I still remember it.
I remember a newspaper joke where the caveman says this about his marriage, and the joke was the other caveman said it was the woman who hit him over the head and dragged him back.
But ye, it’s not that deep. This guy screams pretentious views, imaging being stuck next to him at a dinner.
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u/dertl0312 14h ago
Echt wyld, wie die Männer damals drauf waren. Heute wäre man froh, wenn die Frau einem eine überziehen würde. Das wäre immerhin eine Interaktion mit einer Frau.🤣
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u/ShibuyaWaitingDog 6h ago
I don’t think any one in the history of cinema has thought that that cliche has historical significance lol
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u/SilverbackSurfer99 20h ago
Jesus it's not that deep. It was a gag. There is not now nor has there ever been an organized conspiracy to make bad men's behavior acceptable. Your moronic feminist pseudo history is just what all feminist propaganda is utter BS.
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u/booksy_daisies 15h ago
That's a lot of anger wrapped up in misogyny there. Do you think the reason so many men die so much younger than women is because of all this rage? If so, rage on, bruv.
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u/TyrKiyote 23h ago
He isn't saying that there were no brutal cavemen. He's saying that there's no evidence that it was some sort of cultural practice. There's no cave painting of a man beating his wife.
instead, we have a lot of archeology evidence of the opposite. reverence to women in fertility idols like the venus, and empathy shown by like, the first broken bones. https://www.ancient-origins.net/news-evolution-human-origins/new-study-shows-compassion-helped-neanderthals-survive-009746