The Caveman in the Mirror: Masculinity and Paleofantasy

Abstract In the early 2000s, mainstream US wellness culture started to develop something of an obsession with the distant past. These “paleofantasies” (Zuk 2013), such as barefoot running and the Paleo diet, are not based in scientific evidence about prehistoric human behavior or accurate understandings of evolutionary theory. Why, then, do so many people (especially men) find them compelling? In this paper, I argue that the “stone age” chronotope is implicitly masculine and in fact tends to exclude women altogether. Women are largely absent from imaginings of prehistory, whether those imaginings are car insurance commercials, diet and exercise programs, or even anthropological texts. Looking at various popular discourses about the stone age chronotope, I consider how women are effectively rendered invisible, leaving behind what is perceived as a distilled masculine essence. I suggest that the proliferation of paleofantasy in the past two decades has been part of a broader cultural backlash against feminist progress.