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Gender egalitarianism made us human: patriarchy was too little, too late

The original rule was that against rape, ‘No means NO’, a woman’s body is sacred if she says so. Here is my story about how that rule arose.

By Camilla Power
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A Hadza female coalition on the warpath, hunting down boys during their maitoko ceremony. Chris Knight. All rights reserved.

“It’s not Me Too. It’s not just sexual harassment. It’s an anti-patriarchy movement. Time’s up on 10,000 years of recorded history. This is coming. This is real…You watch. Women are gonna take charge of society.”

So spoke former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon at a Golden Globes dinner last February where actors wore black – a symbol of sexual refusal – to protest sexual abuse. It’s doubtful Bannon had boned up on his anthropology and archaeology in reaching for the 10,000-year date, but he was joining a recent debate on the lifespan and ‘natural history’ of patriarchy.

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Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0