Lunarchy and Weapons Inspection
written by Chris Knight January 2003
Weapons inspections! What a great idea! The case of Iraq has amply demonstrated that we now have the technology to detect biological, chemical or nuclear weapons wherever they may be located on the planet. The United Nations weapons inspectors have shown expertise in dealing with uncooperative governments. It is therefore high time we inspected and disarmed the régime which is popularly recognised as the most well-armed and dangerous in the world. The oil tycoon at its head installed himself as President of the United States by means of a nepotistic coup in November 2000, since when he has been responsible for numerous breaches of international law including devastating acts of terrorism against other countries. Further crimes are undoubtedly planned, so doing nothing is clearly not an option. Future generations will never forgive us should we stand by and allow such evil to prevail.
Régime change! What a great idea! And why stop at Saddam Hussein? Any and every régime which violates human rights, defies the sovereign will of its people or harbours weapons of mass destruction must go. At present, few régimes on the face of the planet — if any at all — appear legitimate by these criteria. But our first task must be to tackle the worst offenders and their client states. As the United States is inspected and disarmed, G.W. Bush should be removed from office, arrested and tried for human rights abuses and war crimes. The same should apply to those U.S.-financed dictatorships, henchmen and satraps currently terrorizing the people of South America, the Middle East, Central Asia and most of the rest of the globe.
Some European leaders are currently listening to their people. But the vast majority are in the pocket of the tyrant Bush. Most influential among these is Tony Blair. In Britain, the Labour Party has been beheaded and denied power despite its two overwhelming election victories. The people of Britain voted overwhelmingly for a Labour Government. Had Blair run as ‘New Labour’ against ‘Labour’ in either election, he would never have won. Blair fooled the electorate into thinking he was the Labour Party leader. In the meantime, however, his ‘New Labour’ mafia had hi-jacked Labour headquarters, enabling him to install an administration in league with the European and American far right. Blair has played a key role in encouraging the worst excesses of the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld oil triumvirate currently plotting global domination. Despite opinion polls showing 80 per cent of Britons hostile to war against Iraq, Blair persists in slavish obedience to his United States masters. Blair must go, so that the duly elected Labour Government can take power.
We may be on the verge of revolutionary events. What system might eventually replace global capitalism? If we are getting rid of terrorist régimes, what do we replace them with? The process of disarmament through weapons-inspections shows how the world’s people can reclaim the planet. But the difficulty is the problem of power. Suppose arms inspections turn out to be an ongoing feature of life. How will we enforce the law? Will we ourselves need weapons? If so, how will we control and distribute them among ourselves? If rules are to be imposed, then some kind of agency must impose them. Suppose we establish a World Court, a World Police Force and a World Government. How will these agencies be controlled?
The ideals of previous revolutionaries became corrupted by power. Following the revolution’s initial success, its momentum became checked and thrown into reverse. It did not establish brotherhood and solidarity. It did not eliminate poverty and war. Instead, those in power colluded with the dynamics of class society, producing a tyranny which shattered popular faith in the possibility of revolutionary change.
Our immediate aim must be to assume power – in centres such as New York, London, Rio, Johannesburg, Calcutta, Moscow and Beijing. As internationalists, we will declare Planet Earth a single country. We will defend our commonwealth, protecting the seas from overfishing, the skies from pollution, the rainforests from desecration. No-one will be allowed to privatise a valued resource. The planet will be labelled Not for sale.
We have had ideals before. But can we live up to them? How can we ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself? It will be difficult to maintain global solidarity once local state oppression has been overthrown. Might not a planetary super-state prove to be a worse tyranny than any we have known?
History tells us that the only time when people experience genuine power and solidarity is during the act of resistance to oppression. If that’s true, we need to think of a new model of revolt. In this story, we are not trying to win for good and all, and then change human nature. The trouble is human nature doesn't change. With disarmament through weapons-inspection, we CAN overthrow the brutes of state violence and of patriarchal medievalist theocracy. But then, who speaks for the planet? Who has the right to represent humanity? Allow even the slightest inequality in power and the whole sorry story starts again. A few become increasingly dominant, conspiring against the voiceless majority. How do we ensure that the sovereign voice of the people is heard?
Once power has been seized in the name of the planet, let's celebrate with the mother of all parties! We dance in the streets because we know that all weapons of mass destruction have at last been eliminated? 10,000 years of patriarchal military-industrial complex overthrown!
But now what? In this story, the sovereign people say ‘Let’s give up the power!’ As long as there is no danger from Weapons of Mass Destruction, this is a risk we can safely take. Wall Street and the Pentagon can go back to work. Let them dress up in their funny suits and hats! Then we can have the fun of overthrowing them all over again! Inspect the Pentagon! Knock off their hats! Solidarity is renewed by resisting their plans. It is in struggle that we can speak out, find our voice, debate democratically at the grassroots and then act decisively. We trust only our own actions born in struggle, not decisions made by others acting on our behalf.
But what rhythm should we use? Should the revolution be re-enacted every week? Every year? What rhythm most diametrically opposes the capitalist order of time? A pulse experienced by our bodies? One that women and children everywhere could tune into without needing CNN or MTV? Our biggest, most democratic clock marks time for the entire planet. It is the moon. Imagine the moon governed our actions. Lunarchy – rule by the moon. Each new moon, say, we stage the revolution. We seize back power, dance all night, and the next and the next… until full moon. Then, we wind up the carnival and surrender power. Then it’s the other side’s turn. Let people dress up as bankers, brokers, police officers — whatever turns you on. Until new moon. Then we smash you again.
The beauty of this system is that it avoids any need for a separate elite of people to impose ‘the law’. There is no law – except that of solidarity itself. The moon now rules by its phases, which are the same for everyone across the world. There is no state and no system – just revolution in balanced alternation with its own opposite. Applied to our present world predicament, it would mean organizing a synchronised insurrection aimed at disarming all states, all capitalists, all terrorist entities of every kind. Obviously, before taking any risks, we’d have to make sure we really had won. Every palace, barracks, oil company headquarters and government building would have to be carefully inspected for hidden weapons. Once capitalism had been successfully overthrown, it would be criminal to risk a return to rule by the bomb and by the gun. But a playful ‘return’ – a return in form, not content, would be a very different thing. Once the whole planet was ours, we could play with our enemy as a cat plays with a mouse. Disarm the criminals, level them, annihilate them – and then give them two weeks to do their worst. Two weeks is not time enough to reconstruct a stock exchange, a futures market, a stable banking system, national armies or any other feature of capitalism. But to invite back the transient forms of such perils would be invaluable as a lesson and as a reminder, driving us to insurrection again and again. That way, no-one would have sovereignty but the moon.
The carnival against capitalism isn’t just about class. What about women under Lunarchy? If we tracked the cycle of the moon in this way, organising the planet’s periodicity around it, then women all over the world would start to tune into the moon’s cosmic rhythm and each other. The average length of the human menstrual cycle equals the moon's – 29.5 days. Dance in rhythm with the moon each month, and your cycle starts to entrain to other women’s. This is well known among most of the world’s indigenous nations, and is used in many cosmologies to mark time through women’s bodies. Only Euroamerican patriarchs servicing capitalism 24/7 have forgotten it.
Sound mad? Crazy? Lunatic? No revolution ever worked, right? Or could ever change human nature?
Except the revolution which worked – the revolution which made us human. The human revolution.
We know that the human revolution worked because we are here now. Among all animals, only we humans have language, art, religion, symbolic culture. What extraordinary evolutionary events could have produced so unique a species?
What kinds of evidence can tell us about the human revolution? First, the evidence left us by evolution in the shape of our bodies; second, archaeological evidence left by ancestors; and third, what we can learn from the lives – especially sex lives – of people who until recent times have been living in ways that resemble our hunting and gathering past.
As far as our bodies go, we may be 99% similar to chimpanzees in terms of shared DNA. But therere remarkable differences. For one thing, our brains are three times bigger than any chimp’s. If you go to the zoo to watch chimps interact you will very soon see obvious differences in sex behaviour. In the few days before, and just when, she is fertile, a female chimp sports a pink sexual swelling the size of a grapefruit. During this period of oestrus, she is busy having sex with all the adult males of her group. And this takes place openly in front of other group members.
Women, by contrast, show no such display marking out the most fertile days of our cycles. We ca have sex - or not - pretty much any time. Although it varies between societies, every society on earth has some standard of modesty or discretion surrounding sex, which clearly does not apply to chimps. Our large brain size can be linked with these features of sexual behaviour. Very large brains are energy-consuming. A human mother breast-feeding an infant needs a lot of high-quality food to sustain the child's brain growth. Once a chimp gets pregnant, the adult males of her troupe – any of whom might be possible fathers – simply leave her to get on with the job of childrearing all on her own. But a human mother expects others, including men, to help with the energetic burden. The reason why our female ancestors evolved to show no sign of ovulation is that it kept males guessing about when a female might be fertile – and so kept males hanging around, possibly doing something useful. That means sex which was not necessarily fertile or reproductive sex could be used to reward particularly helpful males.
But what about synchrony of menstrual cycles, which most women experience at some time? Is there an evolutionary reason for that? If you observe your cycle entraining with another woman's, the underlying mechanism of the process is that your time of ovulation is coming closer to hers. Now think back to the situation of our evolving ancestors, and take the viewpoint of a male who is trying to find fertile females to get his genes into the next generation. If the females around him are synching their cycles, he will have a hard time paying attention to more than one of them. While he is busy with one, other males are going to be trying to get friendly with the others. This could be very useful for the females if they need more than a single male to help with protecting the group and getting some high-energy foods for the kids. Females of many mammal species show the capacity to synchronise their cycles, including several monkey species. And when they synchronise, more males come into their troupes. If females want the males, they do synchrony; if they don't (maybe because there isn't so much food around), they become asynchronous. In the case of human evolution, synchrony seems to have been very important for us. We can tell because not only is the mean length of a menstrual cycle the same as the lunar cycle at 29.5 days, but also the mean length of gestation is a precise multiple of nine lunar cycles. Evolution has inscribed the lunar rhythm into women's bodies. We are designed for lunar periodic synchrony.
Of course, once a woman is pregnant, gives birth and starts nursing, her male partner/s might be inclined to look elsewhere. This was a major problem for our foremothers in evolution. Females had to breastfeed for years after birth; males would be able to tell which females were fertile, not by signs of ovulation – these had been phased out – but by menstruation. A menstruating female is not fertile immediately, but in a week or two she could be. Therefore, evolving human males would have been eager to bond with any menstrual female, bringing her the Palaeolithic equivalent of flowers and chocolates, more likely to be choice cuts of game meat.
But the females who really needed the extra energy were the nursing mothers. Faced with competition from fertile menstrual females, they had two choices: either, hide the fact another female was menstruating from the males; or, use her attractions to encourage the males to extra efforts. This second strategy gave us the first cosmetics – the earliest kinds of body art and symbolism. All women, whether they were pregnant, nursing or fertile, daubed themselves with blood red colours, using ochre and haematite pigments ground up and mixed with fats as sexual warpaint. In this display, the message of the women – as a group – to the men was: you're not going to separate us; you're not going to pick and choose; you're going to hunt for all of us. And NO sex till you do.
By acting in solidarity, women used sexual display to organise the world's first economy. Hiding would have got little extra out of men. Collective cosmetic display got men to go hunting, providing energy and vital nutrients for large-brained offspring. As a result, humans thrived, spreading all over the planet.
We are an extraordinarily young species, emerging from Africa just 150,000 years ago. The ‘human revolution’ broke out initially in sub-Saharan Africa. Across southern Africa by 120,000 years ago, archaeologists find widespread evidence for a cosmetics industry of red ochre and haematite. This includes bright red crayons, shaped like lipsticks, used in the first body art and colour design over 100,000 years ago. One of the best known sites is Blombos Cave, on the shores of South Africa. Here, among numerous beautifully crafted ochre crayons, archaeologists have found one brilliant red crayon which has been carefully decorated with a cross-hatch pattern, showing beyond reasonable doubt that its makers were true artists. Dated to 76,000 years ago, this particular item made newspaper headlines across the world in 2002 – proving that art is at least twice as old in Africa as any known in Europe.
Wherever these first humans went, first into the Middle East, then moving round the Indian Ocean to Australia, finally going north into Eurasia and the Americas, they carried red ochre cosmetics with them. We can track and date their movements. There is even some evidence that Neanderthals picked up and copied our cosmetics when we came into contact in Ice Age Europe some 40,000 years ago.
Among African hunters and gatherers, cosmetics have cosmic significance. When a young woman begins menstruating for the very first time, her older sisters and other kinswomen celebrate the occasion by bonding tightly with her, not letting her from their sight. Her menstruation is marked by red ochre. The girl stays in a hut while all the women dance outside. The much-desired maiden is declared off-limits. Her body is ‘sacred’ – no man may come close. The sisters accentuate their bond with the girl by constructing her blood as enveloping them, too. The blood refuses to be confined, welling up like a flood, casting its spell everywhere. In Africa, Australia, Eurasia and the Americas, women traditionally wore blood-red cosmetics to make just this point, asserting their bodies to be ‘blessed by the moon’.
Moon-scheduled revolution, for Africa’s surviving hunting-and-gathering peoples, is not an event dimly remembered in ancient myths and traditions. Rather, it is a task still to be accomplished each month. As the new moon makes its appearance in the sky, people form a circle as brothers and sisters, singing and clapping hands as if a baby had been born. This is their revolution, and it happens each month. How is it that a revolution can be constructed as a repeatable event? The secret is know not only how to seize power. It is equally important to know how to let go, how to play.
Each month, at new moon, synchronised insurrection overthrows the rule of men. Women declare themselves on strike, extending their action until ‘the enemy’ have got the message and understood. No individual can be exempt from the action: fertile sex is impermissible during this time. But why stay on strike forever? Why cling to power once victory has been achieved? At the approach of full moon, women begin anticipating an all-night celebration. A fortnight earlier, they had sent the men away. Now, utilising the moon’s light, these hunters should be closing in for the kill. On the night of the full moon, they should ideally be returning home – laden with freshly-killed game. According to a popular Kalahari saying, Women like meat! They like hunters’ bodies, symbolically identified with the fatty flesh which good hunters bring. Where there is meat in abundance, the matriarchs will be happy to yield. If this were a permanent surrender, they might have legitimate doubts. If the enemy could regain and entrench sexual dominance, it would be unwise to surrender at all. But the women know that this is not so. They won the revolution once – they know they can win it again. Men’s victory will be as transient as women’s, each camp yielding to the other in turn. As women choose honeymoon, they relax in certain knowledge of what the future will bring. Next dark moon, sure as our blood flows – we’ll be out on that picket line again!
Régime change! What a great idea! And why stop at Saddam Hussein? Any and every régime which violates human rights, defies the sovereign will of its people or harbours weapons of mass destruction must go. At present, few régimes on the face of the planet — if any at all — appear legitimate by these criteria. But our first task must be to tackle the worst offenders and their client states. As the United States is inspected and disarmed, G.W. Bush should be removed from office, arrested and tried for human rights abuses and war crimes. The same should apply to those U.S.-financed dictatorships, henchmen and satraps currently terrorizing the people of South America, the Middle East, Central Asia and most of the rest of the globe.
Some European leaders are currently listening to their people. But the vast majority are in the pocket of the tyrant Bush. Most influential among these is Tony Blair. In Britain, the Labour Party has been beheaded and denied power despite its two overwhelming election victories. The people of Britain voted overwhelmingly for a Labour Government. Had Blair run as ‘New Labour’ against ‘Labour’ in either election, he would never have won. Blair fooled the electorate into thinking he was the Labour Party leader. In the meantime, however, his ‘New Labour’ mafia had hi-jacked Labour headquarters, enabling him to install an administration in league with the European and American far right. Blair has played a key role in encouraging the worst excesses of the Cheney-Bush-Rumsfeld oil triumvirate currently plotting global domination. Despite opinion polls showing 80 per cent of Britons hostile to war against Iraq, Blair persists in slavish obedience to his United States masters. Blair must go, so that the duly elected Labour Government can take power.
We may be on the verge of revolutionary events. What system might eventually replace global capitalism? If we are getting rid of terrorist régimes, what do we replace them with? The process of disarmament through weapons-inspections shows how the world’s people can reclaim the planet. But the difficulty is the problem of power. Suppose arms inspections turn out to be an ongoing feature of life. How will we enforce the law? Will we ourselves need weapons? If so, how will we control and distribute them among ourselves? If rules are to be imposed, then some kind of agency must impose them. Suppose we establish a World Court, a World Police Force and a World Government. How will these agencies be controlled?
The ideals of previous revolutionaries became corrupted by power. Following the revolution’s initial success, its momentum became checked and thrown into reverse. It did not establish brotherhood and solidarity. It did not eliminate poverty and war. Instead, those in power colluded with the dynamics of class society, producing a tyranny which shattered popular faith in the possibility of revolutionary change.
Our immediate aim must be to assume power – in centres such as New York, London, Rio, Johannesburg, Calcutta, Moscow and Beijing. As internationalists, we will declare Planet Earth a single country. We will defend our commonwealth, protecting the seas from overfishing, the skies from pollution, the rainforests from desecration. No-one will be allowed to privatise a valued resource. The planet will be labelled Not for sale.
We have had ideals before. But can we live up to them? How can we ensure that history doesn’t repeat itself? It will be difficult to maintain global solidarity once local state oppression has been overthrown. Might not a planetary super-state prove to be a worse tyranny than any we have known?
History tells us that the only time when people experience genuine power and solidarity is during the act of resistance to oppression. If that’s true, we need to think of a new model of revolt. In this story, we are not trying to win for good and all, and then change human nature. The trouble is human nature doesn't change. With disarmament through weapons-inspection, we CAN overthrow the brutes of state violence and of patriarchal medievalist theocracy. But then, who speaks for the planet? Who has the right to represent humanity? Allow even the slightest inequality in power and the whole sorry story starts again. A few become increasingly dominant, conspiring against the voiceless majority. How do we ensure that the sovereign voice of the people is heard?
Once power has been seized in the name of the planet, let's celebrate with the mother of all parties! We dance in the streets because we know that all weapons of mass destruction have at last been eliminated? 10,000 years of patriarchal military-industrial complex overthrown!
But now what? In this story, the sovereign people say ‘Let’s give up the power!’ As long as there is no danger from Weapons of Mass Destruction, this is a risk we can safely take. Wall Street and the Pentagon can go back to work. Let them dress up in their funny suits and hats! Then we can have the fun of overthrowing them all over again! Inspect the Pentagon! Knock off their hats! Solidarity is renewed by resisting their plans. It is in struggle that we can speak out, find our voice, debate democratically at the grassroots and then act decisively. We trust only our own actions born in struggle, not decisions made by others acting on our behalf.
But what rhythm should we use? Should the revolution be re-enacted every week? Every year? What rhythm most diametrically opposes the capitalist order of time? A pulse experienced by our bodies? One that women and children everywhere could tune into without needing CNN or MTV? Our biggest, most democratic clock marks time for the entire planet. It is the moon. Imagine the moon governed our actions. Lunarchy – rule by the moon. Each new moon, say, we stage the revolution. We seize back power, dance all night, and the next and the next… until full moon. Then, we wind up the carnival and surrender power. Then it’s the other side’s turn. Let people dress up as bankers, brokers, police officers — whatever turns you on. Until new moon. Then we smash you again.
The beauty of this system is that it avoids any need for a separate elite of people to impose ‘the law’. There is no law – except that of solidarity itself. The moon now rules by its phases, which are the same for everyone across the world. There is no state and no system – just revolution in balanced alternation with its own opposite. Applied to our present world predicament, it would mean organizing a synchronised insurrection aimed at disarming all states, all capitalists, all terrorist entities of every kind. Obviously, before taking any risks, we’d have to make sure we really had won. Every palace, barracks, oil company headquarters and government building would have to be carefully inspected for hidden weapons. Once capitalism had been successfully overthrown, it would be criminal to risk a return to rule by the bomb and by the gun. But a playful ‘return’ – a return in form, not content, would be a very different thing. Once the whole planet was ours, we could play with our enemy as a cat plays with a mouse. Disarm the criminals, level them, annihilate them – and then give them two weeks to do their worst. Two weeks is not time enough to reconstruct a stock exchange, a futures market, a stable banking system, national armies or any other feature of capitalism. But to invite back the transient forms of such perils would be invaluable as a lesson and as a reminder, driving us to insurrection again and again. That way, no-one would have sovereignty but the moon.
The carnival against capitalism isn’t just about class. What about women under Lunarchy? If we tracked the cycle of the moon in this way, organising the planet’s periodicity around it, then women all over the world would start to tune into the moon’s cosmic rhythm and each other. The average length of the human menstrual cycle equals the moon's – 29.5 days. Dance in rhythm with the moon each month, and your cycle starts to entrain to other women’s. This is well known among most of the world’s indigenous nations, and is used in many cosmologies to mark time through women’s bodies. Only Euroamerican patriarchs servicing capitalism 24/7 have forgotten it.
Sound mad? Crazy? Lunatic? No revolution ever worked, right? Or could ever change human nature?
Except the revolution which worked – the revolution which made us human. The human revolution.
We know that the human revolution worked because we are here now. Among all animals, only we humans have language, art, religion, symbolic culture. What extraordinary evolutionary events could have produced so unique a species?
What kinds of evidence can tell us about the human revolution? First, the evidence left us by evolution in the shape of our bodies; second, archaeological evidence left by ancestors; and third, what we can learn from the lives – especially sex lives – of people who until recent times have been living in ways that resemble our hunting and gathering past.
As far as our bodies go, we may be 99% similar to chimpanzees in terms of shared DNA. But therere remarkable differences. For one thing, our brains are three times bigger than any chimp’s. If you go to the zoo to watch chimps interact you will very soon see obvious differences in sex behaviour. In the few days before, and just when, she is fertile, a female chimp sports a pink sexual swelling the size of a grapefruit. During this period of oestrus, she is busy having sex with all the adult males of her group. And this takes place openly in front of other group members.
Women, by contrast, show no such display marking out the most fertile days of our cycles. We ca have sex - or not - pretty much any time. Although it varies between societies, every society on earth has some standard of modesty or discretion surrounding sex, which clearly does not apply to chimps. Our large brain size can be linked with these features of sexual behaviour. Very large brains are energy-consuming. A human mother breast-feeding an infant needs a lot of high-quality food to sustain the child's brain growth. Once a chimp gets pregnant, the adult males of her troupe – any of whom might be possible fathers – simply leave her to get on with the job of childrearing all on her own. But a human mother expects others, including men, to help with the energetic burden. The reason why our female ancestors evolved to show no sign of ovulation is that it kept males guessing about when a female might be fertile – and so kept males hanging around, possibly doing something useful. That means sex which was not necessarily fertile or reproductive sex could be used to reward particularly helpful males.
But what about synchrony of menstrual cycles, which most women experience at some time? Is there an evolutionary reason for that? If you observe your cycle entraining with another woman's, the underlying mechanism of the process is that your time of ovulation is coming closer to hers. Now think back to the situation of our evolving ancestors, and take the viewpoint of a male who is trying to find fertile females to get his genes into the next generation. If the females around him are synching their cycles, he will have a hard time paying attention to more than one of them. While he is busy with one, other males are going to be trying to get friendly with the others. This could be very useful for the females if they need more than a single male to help with protecting the group and getting some high-energy foods for the kids. Females of many mammal species show the capacity to synchronise their cycles, including several monkey species. And when they synchronise, more males come into their troupes. If females want the males, they do synchrony; if they don't (maybe because there isn't so much food around), they become asynchronous. In the case of human evolution, synchrony seems to have been very important for us. We can tell because not only is the mean length of a menstrual cycle the same as the lunar cycle at 29.5 days, but also the mean length of gestation is a precise multiple of nine lunar cycles. Evolution has inscribed the lunar rhythm into women's bodies. We are designed for lunar periodic synchrony.
Of course, once a woman is pregnant, gives birth and starts nursing, her male partner/s might be inclined to look elsewhere. This was a major problem for our foremothers in evolution. Females had to breastfeed for years after birth; males would be able to tell which females were fertile, not by signs of ovulation – these had been phased out – but by menstruation. A menstruating female is not fertile immediately, but in a week or two she could be. Therefore, evolving human males would have been eager to bond with any menstrual female, bringing her the Palaeolithic equivalent of flowers and chocolates, more likely to be choice cuts of game meat.
But the females who really needed the extra energy were the nursing mothers. Faced with competition from fertile menstrual females, they had two choices: either, hide the fact another female was menstruating from the males; or, use her attractions to encourage the males to extra efforts. This second strategy gave us the first cosmetics – the earliest kinds of body art and symbolism. All women, whether they were pregnant, nursing or fertile, daubed themselves with blood red colours, using ochre and haematite pigments ground up and mixed with fats as sexual warpaint. In this display, the message of the women – as a group – to the men was: you're not going to separate us; you're not going to pick and choose; you're going to hunt for all of us. And NO sex till you do.
By acting in solidarity, women used sexual display to organise the world's first economy. Hiding would have got little extra out of men. Collective cosmetic display got men to go hunting, providing energy and vital nutrients for large-brained offspring. As a result, humans thrived, spreading all over the planet.
We are an extraordinarily young species, emerging from Africa just 150,000 years ago. The ‘human revolution’ broke out initially in sub-Saharan Africa. Across southern Africa by 120,000 years ago, archaeologists find widespread evidence for a cosmetics industry of red ochre and haematite. This includes bright red crayons, shaped like lipsticks, used in the first body art and colour design over 100,000 years ago. One of the best known sites is Blombos Cave, on the shores of South Africa. Here, among numerous beautifully crafted ochre crayons, archaeologists have found one brilliant red crayon which has been carefully decorated with a cross-hatch pattern, showing beyond reasonable doubt that its makers were true artists. Dated to 76,000 years ago, this particular item made newspaper headlines across the world in 2002 – proving that art is at least twice as old in Africa as any known in Europe.
Wherever these first humans went, first into the Middle East, then moving round the Indian Ocean to Australia, finally going north into Eurasia and the Americas, they carried red ochre cosmetics with them. We can track and date their movements. There is even some evidence that Neanderthals picked up and copied our cosmetics when we came into contact in Ice Age Europe some 40,000 years ago.
Among African hunters and gatherers, cosmetics have cosmic significance. When a young woman begins menstruating for the very first time, her older sisters and other kinswomen celebrate the occasion by bonding tightly with her, not letting her from their sight. Her menstruation is marked by red ochre. The girl stays in a hut while all the women dance outside. The much-desired maiden is declared off-limits. Her body is ‘sacred’ – no man may come close. The sisters accentuate their bond with the girl by constructing her blood as enveloping them, too. The blood refuses to be confined, welling up like a flood, casting its spell everywhere. In Africa, Australia, Eurasia and the Americas, women traditionally wore blood-red cosmetics to make just this point, asserting their bodies to be ‘blessed by the moon’.
Moon-scheduled revolution, for Africa’s surviving hunting-and-gathering peoples, is not an event dimly remembered in ancient myths and traditions. Rather, it is a task still to be accomplished each month. As the new moon makes its appearance in the sky, people form a circle as brothers and sisters, singing and clapping hands as if a baby had been born. This is their revolution, and it happens each month. How is it that a revolution can be constructed as a repeatable event? The secret is know not only how to seize power. It is equally important to know how to let go, how to play.
Each month, at new moon, synchronised insurrection overthrows the rule of men. Women declare themselves on strike, extending their action until ‘the enemy’ have got the message and understood. No individual can be exempt from the action: fertile sex is impermissible during this time. But why stay on strike forever? Why cling to power once victory has been achieved? At the approach of full moon, women begin anticipating an all-night celebration. A fortnight earlier, they had sent the men away. Now, utilising the moon’s light, these hunters should be closing in for the kill. On the night of the full moon, they should ideally be returning home – laden with freshly-killed game. According to a popular Kalahari saying, Women like meat! They like hunters’ bodies, symbolically identified with the fatty flesh which good hunters bring. Where there is meat in abundance, the matriarchs will be happy to yield. If this were a permanent surrender, they might have legitimate doubts. If the enemy could regain and entrench sexual dominance, it would be unwise to surrender at all. But the women know that this is not so. They won the revolution once – they know they can win it again. Men’s victory will be as transient as women’s, each camp yielding to the other in turn. As women choose honeymoon, they relax in certain knowledge of what the future will bring. Next dark moon, sure as our blood flows – we’ll be out on that picket line again!
