Tornado Alley (PROG)

[fuagf]

Colombia .. Turkish, Sirt .. rl Amsterdam .. The International Women's Day movement, Global Women's
Strike, March 8 ey work practices .. Iceland, 1979 .. Poland, 1992, England's Marylebone Cricket Club,
1990, some for 9 years (sandwiches) .. Sharanahua, S. Am., 300,000yrs ago .. creationists, beware ..

.. excerpt ..
The tale that he unfolds is, predictably, one of revolution - the fundamental revolution, centred on reproduction and sexuality. It is not, he assures us, true to say that human nature is such that revolution is impossible to accomplish - on the contrary, our humanity, our cultures, our relational networks come into being through and in a revolution initiated by women 300,000 years ago, and through the counter-revolution subsequently mounted by men. Thus it was that our humanity was forged by women, whose fundamental needs for food and for help in raising children form the foundations upon which culture was to be erected.

Let us follow one of his key illustrations : the Sharanahua is a South American people among whom one may regularly see a group of young women, arrayed in their finest garments and very visibly painted, form a line, dance together, and challenge the young men. Each of the women chooses a man whom she orders to go off into the forest and hunt for her. Off go the men ; when they return, the women are waiting for them. Unhappy is the wretch who comes back empty-handed ; he will do his best to creep into the village unperceived, and to hide in his hut. The lucky hunter, however, lays his prey down at the entry to the village, where the women are waiting, and goes off to prepare himself for the festivities. He knows that he will that very night enjoy the favours of the woman by whom he was chosen.

Knight tells us that this scenario is a distant echo of the birth of all human culture. Women need men - not as mere genitors, but as providers of goods and services. To persuade males to play a role so rare among primates, women have recourse to a 'sex-strike'. Knight sums this up in the formula : No meat, no sex. To underpin his theory, he follows two paths ; first he carries out a rewrite of Lévi-Strauss, and second he tries to show how the very specific physiology of the human female can be explained by the 'sex-strike'.

http://www.timothyjpmason.com/WebPages/Publications/Knight.htm