Blood Story

"...Male dominance had to be overthrown because the unending prioritizing of male short-term sexual interests could lead only to the permanence and institutionalization of behavioral conflict between the sexes, between the generations, and also between rival males. If the symbolic cultural domain was to emerge, what was needed was a political collectivity-an alliance-capable of transcending such conflicts." (514)

• Practice menstrual avoidance
• View sexual avoidance as necessary for success in hunting
• Link abstinence with sexual avoidance
• Draw a sharp distinction between raw and cooked
• Make mythological/metaphorical connections between female blood and the blood of game animals

"Selection pressures in favor of heavier menstrual bleeding resulted in part from women's need for visible signals to help keep track of their own and one another's cycles. The use of blood in this context also meshed with a focus on blood spilled periodically by men in the hunt, an idea which ties in with the view of classical scholars that the first true 'contracts' had always to be 'signed' in blood. The result was a blood-centered symbolic system which linked game animals and the female body into a tightly integrated web of meanings which generated the stylistic characteristics and distribution of much early Upper Paleolithic art. These characteristics included periodic notation systems, the use of ochre as a blood substitute, the recurrent association of vulva engravings with those of animals, figurines which emphasize the female reproductive organs-and, more generally [what has been described as]...the art's suggestively lunar/menstrual as well as seasonal or 'time-factored' internal logic.

...Just as females collectively synchronized and extended their receptivity to motivate male provisioning, so-by the same token-they collectively refused sex whenever meat supplies were exhausted or men attempted to approach without meat...The need to signal 'no' in visually and physiologically emphatic ways would explain both the biological accentuation of menstruation and its associated symbolic negativity." (282-83)

"'I believe', wrote Sir Edmund Leach (1962)...that we social anthropologists are like the mediaeval Ptolemaic astronomers; we spend our time trying to fit the facts of the objective world into the framework of a set of concepts which have been developed a priori instead of from observation.'" (528 )

"One group of males 'gave' its females to another, trusting that the recipients would reciprocate in kind. This was the quantum leap in which culture was born. Gift-giving on such a level was the ultimate in generosity, for a woman was the most precious of possible gifts. From this point on, the daughters and sisters reared in each group were valued as potential gifts, to be used by their male kin in order to make social relationships with other groups of men." (p.75)

"So it is as periodic creatures that women are in danger of disrupting the orderly working of the universe. Their social insubordination often referred to in the myths, as an anticipation in the form of the 'reign of women' of the infinitely more serious danger of their physiological insubordination. Therefore women have to be subjected to regles. And the rules instilled into them by their upbringing, like those imposed on them, even at the cost of their subjection, by a social order willed and evolved by men, are the pledge and symbol of other 'rules', the physiological nature of which bears witness to the correspondence between social and cosmic rhythms." (quoted in Knight, 511)

"When sex is used not just reproductively but politically-as a way of negotiating one's way through a conflict-ridden political landscape, or as a way of acquiring privileges or food-then this results in selection pressures placing sex increasingly under cortical rather than hormonal control." (532)

"Since mothers and their offspring must always have been the main beneficiaries of the 'own-kill' taboo, since men probably had no 'natural' (as opposed to cultural) inclination to abide by it, and since men's rewards for compliance appear to have been overwhelmingly marital and sexual- avoiding one's own kill must in some sense have been motivated and established by women." (124)