A Man's World

In the beginning, Hesiod Theogony wrote, God created only men. But when Prometheus stole his fire, Zeus punished the beneficiaries of Prometheus’ theft by creating women. Ever since, men have been forced to co-habit the earth with these “nagging burdens.”

Writing in the 7^th/8^th century BC, Hesiod wasn’t writing at the dawn of patriarchy, but he’s the author  Nancy Tuama begins with in her book, The Less Noble Sex, published in 1993.

Why should we pay attention to a random Greek writing 3000 years ago? People were much more primitive way back then, right? And women have since claimed their rightful place of equality with men so we can stop worrying about ancient myths created by cranky men whose wives said “no” once too often.

Except …

As Tuama shows, men have been teaching each other similar nonsense generation after generation. Hesiod remained in the curriculum and is no doubt still there for philosophy or history students interested in the period.

Maybe Plato (428 – 348 BC) studied his works a few hundred years later? He also posited a world initially without women. Men’s destinies were determined by how they dealt with their emotions and sensations, he wrote. If a man failed to control them, he would be reincarnated after death as a woman. Women were created basically as failed men. Easy to see why people (men) revere Plato as a great thinker.

Aristotle (384-322 BCE) was more “scientific.” He labelled woman a “monstrosity”, lower on the hierarchical scale of being than the male. Her intellectual faculty is not developed, she is controlled by her desires and passions, and her role in generation of new life is limited to nurturing the soul implanted in her womb by the male semen, he wrote. He’s still taught at universities of course – and is known for his logic and ethics. Oh and hierarchical scales.

Then there was the Judeo-Christian book of Genesis in which women’s inferiority really took off with the story of Eve, created from Adam’s rib. The first century Jewish philosopher, Philo, came to the obvious conclusion that creation from a bone made one inferior to those (men) created from dust. The logic of that may be impenetrable to a layperson.

Churchmen like Augustine in the 4^th century CE and later Thomas Aquinas in the 13^th reiterated and embellished the old saw that women are more sensual and passionate than men. Uncontrollably so, they argued in defiance of their own all too eager erections. And Aquinas also pondered deeply why a woman was created as a helper to Adam. It didn’t make sense and I think both women and men might agree. If God wanted to create a helper for the first man, he should have created more men. Eventually it twigged to Aquinas that God meant women could help men by creating more humans. And so woman’s (sole) place was under her man, getting knocked up.

It was depressing reading Tuama’s book but I soldiered through it on the grounds that it’s better to know the whole truth, even when that truth exposes the blind determination of men in the pursuit of a pretty much exclusive place in the human world.

Tuama takes us right up to the second half of the 20^th century – oops, I guess that’s a spoiler. Nothing changes but the justifications. Here’s John Calvin, father of most branches of Protestant Christianity, teaching that while men were created in the image of God, women were in the image of God only in “the second degree.” Damn, an image of an image.

Paracelsus, the founder of alchemy, might have said it better. Man is the microcosm of the universe, but women is the microcosm of man. Aren’t we blessed?

Eventually, thanks to better technology, like steam-powered ships, someone like Darwin could develop a theory of evolution based on observations from all around the world. Finally “the science” would settle women’s place on the shelf right there beside men. Except it didn’t. Darwin noticed that sexual differentiation increased as animals evolved. The greater the difference between the sexes, the more evolved the species.

The Victorian society that birthed Darwin was one of culturally prescribed major difference between the sexes, especially among the middle classes and higher. Interesting that this theory perfectly mirrored his culture and validated the imperialist countries’ belief in their superiority.

He found a nice “evolutionary” answer to explain men’s superiority over women too. Because female humans must expend so much of their energy on fetal development, they have little left over for developmental variations – those accidents that enabled evolutionary change.

Since natural selection required men to maintain themselves and their families, men were programmed to increase their mental powers. (Evidently pre-historic “cavemen” had already sorted themselves into nuclear families with stay-at-home wives.) Thus human females were less evolved than males. In fact, he proposed, women fell on the hierarchical scale somewhere between men and children. You can see his debt to Aristotle.

Following Darwin, Gustave Le Bon (1841 – 1931) who founded social psychology, wrote:

“All the psychologists who have studied the intelligence of women … recognize they represent the most inferior forms of human evolution and are much closer to children and savages than to civilized adult males.”

Note that this was a mere 100 years ago -- that a man generally regarded as intelligent and educated could arrive at such a conclusion  and publicize it without fear of ridicule. And teach it to another generation or two of young men (women still being mostly excluded from higher education).

In case you’re wondering why I’m reviewing the history of male perceptions of women transmitted down through the centuries, it’s because  when second wave feminists claimed women were men’s equal, this is the position they were arguing against. That men were human and women were not is the difference between male and female that feminists claimed did not exist.

In the late 19^th century the growing feminist movement argued that any inequalities between the abilities of the sexes resulted from socialization and education. That was the beginning of women “talking back” to the male intellectual elite.

Men countered with a theory of womb-brain opposition. If a woman channelled energy to her brain, it would drain necessary energy away from her womb, they said. Clearly the threat was not just to the individual woman foolish enough to pursue education, it was a threat to the entire human race. Men had to do everything possible to prevent women from destroying humanity. Naturally.

Then Freud introduced Europe to a new field of psychiatry. Initially providing “talk therapy” to young women traumatized by incest,  he was himself traumatized by the knowledge he was uncovering about his friends and peers. He turned his attention to the fiction of the oedipal complex, which made women morally deficient because they suffered from lack of psychological development. The oedipal complex led to the creation of the superego in boys, allowing them to transcend subjectivity for the objective realm of morality and justice.

In contrast, the female oedipal stage leads to passivity, narcissism, vanity, a need to be loved, envy, a lesser ability to sublimate the instincts. Since girls can’t rise above their passions and become moral, they must be raised to suppress their otherwise rampant sexuality. Same old, right?

To sum up, for Freud, the male is the ideal human, the female is an incomplete male. Anyone who has ever watched a Woody Allen film knows that Freud was huge in America through at least the 1970s. Now we’re talking less than 50 years since men were educating each other about women’s deficiencies.

In the views of male intellectuals over thousands of years, woman lacked something essential to humanity. She lacked a superego, she lacked self-control, she lacked creative power, she lacked a soul, she lacked rational intelligence.

These claims have been a massive psyop meant to exclude girls and women from the human race.

When the current crop of male influencers claim that women’s repudiation of difference between women and men led to transgenderism, to men believing they could be women, to interchangeability of the sexes, we should note their duplicity. To claim to be human is not to claim men and women are interchangeable. This is simply another way of excluding women. If women are human, then men can be women. Er, no. Logic??

Today we can see both the right and the left struggling mightily to pretend women don’t exist. For the right, women are just functions and roles, all of which are meant to serve men. For the left, women are “sex characteristics”, meaning bodily parts and bodily functions. Ergo, we are menstruators, cervix-havers, the lovely language of dehumanization that we’re being forced to tolerate.

What’s really chilling is that the vast industry of transhumanism, already in full gear developing substitute body parts and cultivating synthetic biomaterial in Petrie dishes, is also driven by men who at some level don’t believe women are human, or if they are, they’re just men with different body parts. Eliminating the body parts is just as cost-effective in humans as in any other machinery. Streamline the product, increase the profit. No need for two sexes at all. Just men.

What we need to realize – and this is only possible if we have access to women’s scholarship – is that the claiming of humanity for men only has been the plan right from the start.  Not just the plan, the blueprint of patriarchy from its inception and imposition wherever humans lived.

Merlin Stone wrote in her 1976 book, When God Was a Woman, that once upon a time before history, waves of brutal men descended from northern regions into the settlements around the Mediterranean where women lived on equal footing with men, running their own businesses, passing their property down to their daughters in matrilineal patterns.

The highest God in all those areas was the creator mother god, known by many names in the many locales where she was worshiped. Inanna, Ishtar, Isis, Cybele and other of her names appear in tablets going back 40,000 years. Was it a coincidence that in all those same locales the act of sex was held sacred, that it was women who chose with whom to mate, and when?

The northern tribes ripped this highest god away from women, forcing the worship of male deities, calling the worship of the maternal creator blasphemy.

Whatever we may think of gods, they are above all symbols of the meaning we give to our own lives. To hold a god up is to hold up an image of ourselves in a universal ideal. In order to enslave a free people you need to strip them of their god, of that which gives them meaning in their own eyes. That’s what these male invaders did to the women in the settlements.

And we are still without a god we can call our own. Without a god of our own to look up to, to see ourselves reflected in, to aspire to, we don’t know who we are. We still don’t know. Without a god as our model we have no basis on which to esteem ourselves. And so we don’t – not collectively as a class. Without a god to accept us and challenge us, we have nothing to aspire to.

Men have made us godless women and through Christianity replaced our god with the passive, vapid Mary who functioned merely as a channel to guide Father into Son. We have been told for millenia to model ourselves on her, to imitate her passive helplessness, creatively named “mercy”. That the height of a woman’s power was on her knees, begging Father to #bekind.

The creator mother god was both creator and destroyer, a fierce maintainer of all living things. To mirror her, to be in her image, doesn’t require all individual women to be mothers, just to know ourselves as archetypal mothers of all things, defenders of all life, fierce destroyers of all that threatens and corrupts life.

Of course I’m not saying that women’s future rests in any god’s hands, or requires that we believe that god/s exist. We will never know whether there is anything divine in the universe, so maybe we should stop obsessing on that question, and simply try to live as though divinity does exist. As though we have it within us.

Do we deserve, at this end stage of male-dominated civilization, when men have abandoned their own gods to declare themselves god, do we women deserve to live? As scientists experiment with external gestation pouches – to unburden women of the labours of procreation, of course – we have to ask if there is some purpose to male and female that transcends procreation.  This is a question we will have to answer soon.

I think there must be men, millions of them probably, who are happy they get to share their lives with living human women, different than them in some ways, maddening in their own self-will at times, disagreeing with them at times, showing a different perspective, refusing to cooperate sometimes, but able to bestow what only they can bestow – love.

If this is what you want, men, then its time for you to step up, to fight against the desexing of women and children, the replacement of genuine female subjects, with something like a wifebot, who’ll provide you with whatever you want -- except companionship.

Cover it with a burqa and that will end the culture clash between fundamentalist Muslim man and post-Christian enlightenment man.