Post #4191847

2026-07-29 08:11 UTC

"Any tendency to male dominance and strategic control of females would have obstructed these unprecedented increases of brain size. While there must have been variability in the degree of dominance or egalitarianism among human groups, we can be confident that those populations where male dominance, sexual conflict and infanticide risks remained high were not the ones who became our ancestors." Camilla Power https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-patriarchy-was-too-little-too-late/

Replies (3)

@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green 2026-07-29 08:17

"BaYaka women of the Congo forest have a slogan perfectly expressing their resistance to male philandering: ‘One woman, one penis!’ This serves as their ritual rallying cry against any attempt by a man to form a harem. Basically, hunter-gatherer women demand one man each to support their energy requirements and investment in costly offspring." https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-patriarchy-was-too-little-too-late/

Open ##4280586
@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green 2026-07-29 08:21

Culture is the ‘the oldest “equalizer”. Among animals capable of symbolic communication’ he said, ‘the weak can collectively connive to overthrow the strong.’ Only in such conditions is language likely to emerge. The strong have no need of words; they have more direct physical means of persuasion. https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-patriarchy-was-too-little-too-late/

Open ##4280588
@gerrymcgovern@mastodon.green 2026-07-29 08:41

"Does it matter that women, organizing as the revolutionary sex, bust through the ‘gray ceiling’ of brain size? That female political strategies created human symbolic culture? That resistance is at the core of being human?" "The untold secret – how it gave our African ancestors an extraordinary future? If we want that future stretching ahead of us as far as it stretches back into our hunter-gatherer past, I think it does." https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/gender-egalitarianism-made-us-human-patriarchy-was-too-little-too-late/

Open ##4280590