Week: 610.3

Guest: Desmond Morris, producer, The Human Sexes

Topic: Societal ills/prehistoric roles

Host/Producer: Steve Girard

NEMA: Prehistoric gender models?....coming up...

NEMA: The prehistoric hunter-gatherer family was a tremendously successful unit, where man and woman were equal without competition...Desmond Morris, author of The Naked Ape and producer of the new TV series called The Human Sexes, says women created the nexus of society through organization...and men could be loving to their mates and children, because they used their aggressiveness and bravery in the hunt...

MORRIS: They had nothing to prove. The difficulty now, and one of the problems we have in relationships between men and women today is that when men come back after a day’s work, they haven’t had excitement, they haven’t proved themselves, they haven’t taken risks, they’ve perhaps been given a rough time...they’d been bullied or humiliated. And so, when they come home, they’re not in a gentle mood, and what happens is that they start to take it out on their wives and their family. And that, I think that is the change that has taken place, and if we look back on prehistoric society, we can learn a lot from them about what is the ideal relationship between men and women, and how it’s gone wrong in so many cases.

NEMA: Morris is not proposing we go back to building huts and hunting with clubs, but examines the issues of our gender nature as it clashes with the society we’ve created. The Human Sexes airs on The Learning Channel beginning February 2nd. I’m Steve Girard at The Heart of the Matter.