While everyone else was busy cooking and raising children and straight vibing, these men went looking for a fight and in the resulting tales fashioned themselves the main characters. People (men) who took big hunting risks didn’t do so out of necessity there was plenty of food. Early humans were mostly gatherers, so the first tools were most likely containers, or “carrier bags,” yet culture has taught us that the first human tools were weapons. She argues that while epic tales of heroism are indeed exciting, they’ve evolved from a narrow, patriarchal understanding of what it means to be human. Le Guin tears into our culture’s obsession with the hero’s journey. That quote comes from a 1986 essay called “ The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction,” in which Ursula K.
Before you know it, the men and women in the wild-oat patch and their kids and the skills of the makers and the thoughts of the thoughtful and the songs of the singers are all part of it, have all been pressed into service in the tale of the Hero.
