The Problem with Women

Abstract

Gimi women and men conceptualize and cope with existential problems of human neoteny in ways that recall the scenario of Sigmund Freud’s Totem and Taboo. The ‘band of brothers’ murdered the father but afterwards felt remorse because they also loved him. To make amends, they renounced the sisters whom he held captive and they coveted most. The mythic scenarios accompanying sister-exchange marriage reveal that, in relinquishing sisters as wives for other men, Gimi men also shift onto them, and onto women in general, all responsibility for the primal crime. A bride is the vehicle of her brother’s guilt, burdened with the entire blame and shame for what brother and sister did together in the mythic past but for which the sister now ‘refuses’ to atone.

Unlike men, women ‘refuse’ to repent for their part in the primal father’s murder by offering up for exchange the ones they stole from him and cherish most: their children. Menstrual blood is every Gimi woman’s stillborn “first child” sired by the Moon, the Gimi primal father. Her “second” ones, born alive, she attaches to herself. As long as women keep what they killed and ingested in the primordial past, install it inside their bodies, between their thighs and at the breast, the incest and murder are all theirs.

‘Tis grief that stops her utterance, and words sufficiently indignant fail her tongue …

Nor is there room for weeping. But she rushes onward …

And is wholly occupied in the contrivance of revenge.

Ovid. The Metamorphoses. Book VI: “Tereus, Procne, and Philomela.”