Turning a Man

[Butterfly]

Turning a Man
A.E. Brain
By Zoe Brain
25 January, 2011


http://aebrain.blogspot.com/2011/01/turning-man.html 🔗


When I began to work in the New Guinea highlands nearly 30 years ago, the highlanders were just emerging from Stone Age conditions of incessant intertribal warfare. Even more startling to me than the stone axes and heavily armed men that I met were the hostility and rigid role divisions between the sexes. Women served as beasts of burden, while unmarried men lived homosexually in communal houses to which the women only brought food. The most feared warriors, whose territory was still closed to outsiders during my early visits, were the people I'm referring to as the Sambia.

[glendagladwitch]

Just ... wow.