Gorean Red Savage Camp

Do you want any help?" I asked. "No," said Cuwignaka. "This is woman's work." I laughed. This response, a joke on Cuwignaka's part, is a commonplace among the red savages. The offer of a man to help with a woman's task is almost always refused. The man has his work, the woman hers. The gender of a task commonly has a plausible rationale. It seems to be the men, for example, who are best suited to be the warriors and the women who are best suited to be the lovely, desireable prizes of such warriors. Similarly it seems men, with their strength, agressiveness and size, would be better suited for the hunt, pursuing the swift, trident-horned, belligerent kailiauk at full speed than the slighter, softer women, and that the women, with their patience, their sense of color, with their small, nimble fingers, would be better suited to exacting fine tasks such as beadwork and sewing. Similarly, it is natural to expect that the general, sex-linked orientations and predispositions, statistically obvious, both male and female, or human beings, presumably functions of genetic and hormonal differences, would tend to be reflected, broadly, in the sorts of tasks which each sex tends to perform most efficiently and finds most congenial. Some tasks, of course, from the biological point of view, may be sex-neutral, so to speak. Whether sex-neutral tasks exist or not is an interesting question. Such a task would seem to be one in which the sexual nature of a human being, with all its attendant physiological and psychological consequences, was irrelevant. It seems likely that sex-neutral tasks, at least of an interesting nature, do not exist. We shall suppose, however, for the purposes of argument, that there do exist such tasks. Let us suppose, for example, that the cutting of leather for moccasins is such a task. Now among the red savages this task, supposedly sex-neutral, for the purposes of argument, is always, or almost always, performed by females. This call attention to an interesting anthropological datum. The performance of even tasks which may be 'sex-neutral," tasks that do not seem to have an obvious biological rationale with respect to gender, tends to be divided, in culture after culture, on a sexual basis. Similarly, interestingly, whether for historical reasons or not, these cultures tend to be in substancial agreement on the divisions. For example, in most all cultures, though not all, loom weaving is a female task. This tends to suggest that it is important in these cultures that sexual differences, in one way or another, be clearly marked."
Blood Brothers, pages 81-82