PART TWO: PATRIARCHY
10. Genesis
Talk to a random selection of people about sexism and sexual equality and you will find that most people tend to think there is something basically primitive and natural about the domination of women by men, and that the goal of sexual equality is the product of a modern, shiny veneer-like overlay of "civilization" that coats the worst of our animal nature.
As the id, this concept is reflected in classical Freudian psychoanalysis, as well as pop-psychology offshoots; certainly it manifests itself in our punitive cultural attitudes and behaviors towards our wrongdoers; and the notion of ourselves as inherently naughty creatures dates back to pre-literate days at the dawn of agricultural civilization in the Tigris-Euphrates valley, as the Biblical book of Genesis testifies.
In the shadow of originally sinful human nature, the goal of sexual equality may seem to lie in a direction contrary to the goal of freedom, especially to men. Many times I've read or listened to men who pined for the "old days when men were real men and weren't yet quite so gelded and pussy-whipped by modern civilization", or something to that effect. They seem to be blaming women for overly restrictive law and law enforcement, the control of society through communication rather than physical strength, peer pressure that condemns nonconformity and having fun, and so forth, while praising undisciplined hell-raising, control and domination by brute force, and wanton destructiveness in the name of having fun.
In the name of chivalry, many other men have cited similar views, yet sided, they said, with the women against these savage types who, unless deprived of their freedom, would obviously abuse it.
Central to the idea that freedom invites abuse, and that peaceful civilization necessitates the loss of some degree of freedom, is the subject-object dynamic of sexuality: surely in the absence of feminizing (restricting) civilization the men would rape the women!
"Close your eyes and imagine a caveman. What is he doing and to whom?
Most people see him clubbing a cavewoman (usually walking by herself) over the head and
dragging her off by the hair...
Let us look at some of the ideas suggested by the caveman scene. First, that rape is natural,
that in some natural state unfettered by civilization and its discontents, men would rape women..."
-- Timothy Benecke, Men On Rape 1
Yet the Hemingway-ish men who see men as victims of a female progress towards policed and controlled life are wrong, since women certainly did not create our laws or law systems, nor participate in their designing; nor have women ever benefitted from oppressive governments, which always feminize (restrict) their women far worse than their men. It is an article of radical feminism that the feminizing process as applied to women has been the model for all other oppressions, and that the agents of this process, the patriarchs, are the culprits to be held responsible not only for rape, brute force, and random hell-raising, but also and simultaneously for the existence of overly restrictive laws, conformist peer pressures, and the antiseptic dull "tameness" of modern society.
Which brings me back to my favorite question: why? Patriarchy isn't particularly pleasant even for the privileged, relatively wealthy, well-educated, heterosexually oriented males born to it, and so why did we create it? Or, if we aren't the culprits, why is patriarchy? Where did the prototype for domination and oppression come from?
Is it natural, necessary or inevitable? A freak error of social evolution? Why did our Gods and ancestors bequeath us this mess?
* * *
It's rather difficult to say for sure how long we, the species human, have been around, not only because we didn't leave behind copious fossil records, but even more so because it's hard to pinpoint anything physical which clearly indicates that the individual did or did not think and feel as we do which is what makes us us in our own eyes. But I can probably claim that there were people fundamentally like ourselves one million years ago (minimum) without being contradicted by archeologists.
Of that million-year span, we apparently lived for nine-hundred-ninety-some-odd thousand years as nomads who went where the food went, both animal and plant, before some of our ancestors maybe ten thousand years ago wandered into places like the fertile crescent of the Tigris-Euphrates valley and discovered the secrets of plant and animal fertility that led to agriculture and the domestication of animals. *
Thus, the past we study in history classes, from which our concepts of our historical legacy come, is only the last one percent of our natural history (if not considerably less), and furthermore a strange and unusual percent following the prior ninety nine we spent before agricultural civilization. The final one percent, the last nine thousand year interval plus or minus, seems to be a history of uninterrupted patriarchy, but if (as some anthropologists now suggest) it is the entire history of patriarchy, and that, before the crude versions of agriculture and livestock ranching developed, these "norms" were not likely to have been normal for us, then patriarchy is a very recent development which is already under serious attack as being obsolete. In her book Women's Creation, Elizabeth Fisher draws upon evidence from the past and modern observations of a few still-surviving nomadic tribes to postulate a pre-patriarchal world where the role of fatherhood in reproduction was unknown, and the creation of human life was therefore a totally female process which was expanded into the image of the Goddess, mother creator of all; sex was sex, in all its interpersonally erotic senses, yet not understood to have anything to do with pregnancy; women gathered plant food and helped hunt, while men hunted and helped gather plant food; and in what little governmental processes were necessary, women and men participated as equals in wisdom and authority.
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* At one time, I think it was widely thought that the early agrarian areas were places where the food supply was so bountiful that our nomadic ancestors decided to stay for awhile, and thus discovered the blessings of planting and harvesting. But, partially because the "work-day" of the nomadic hunter is shorter than that of the hardworking horticulturalist, it is now more generally thought that agriculture came about in regions where higher population made the food supply more scarce.
ignorance about the connection between sex and pregnancy, semen and fatherhood, makes sense when you realize that lactating mothers with unweaned babies do not ovulate and become fertile, so pregnancy would not always be linked to sex occuring months earlier:
"[During the Stone Age] there can as yet have been no understanding of the part the father played. Anthropologists in recent times have found numerous primitive peoples who were unaware that the male seed was as necessary to procreation as the female ovum and womb. The myth of female magical power certainly had its origin in a period when the mother was the only parent, when her impregnation was as easily attributed to the wind, or the dew, or an ancestral spirit, as to the man she lived with."
--Elizabeth Janeway, Man's World, Woman's Place 3
* * *
After a mere nine-hundred-ninety-some-odd thousand years of migrating with the crops and the beasts, a band of these sexually equal primitive natural ancestors of ours apparently grew tired of being forever on the move, and upon coming across a river valley where (at least initially) there was abundant food, they decided to stay where they were and rest their archetypally aching feet and call it home. Some clever individual must have noticed that the fruit pits thrown into the very fertile trenches of rotting garbage (we weren't real fastidious in those days) would quickly sprout, and the sprouts turn into fruit-producing plants...or maybe someone noticed grain growing inside the cave where she ground flour...and said to herself, "Aha!"
As soon as they had a garden growing, though, certain things changed, fairly rapidly. A nomadic tribe survives best at a smaller optimum size than an agrarian society, which will feed more but requires more workers to tend the fields. Once the population shot up to agrarian optimum, then, it may not have been feasible to wander off nomadically if the crops failed...or were raided by those damn nomads who didn't seem to understand that these were "our" food-plants! Defense of property, a new social role, emphasized physical strength, as did many agricultural processes, which elevated male status; meanwhile, the need for strong young males made reproduction a more functionally important part of being a woman, which no doubt underlined the worhip of female fertility and awe at the same time that it strengthened the images of motherhood as the role of primary importance for women.
However stable the plant-food supply was, it certainly stayed put where it was planted, which rooted the society right there, but the animal sources of meat, plentiful though they might have been in the general area, tended to wander and require expeditions from time to time. Eventually, someone weaving a tote-bag or something stopped and stared at the tough hemp fibers and came up with the idea of tying up a bunch of animals, feeding them as necessary, and then butchering them at leisure, instead of chasing round for miles, dragging them home only at the rate they could be eaten, and having to do the same all over again when the meat was either all eaten or spoiled.
With a few refinements came the basic fence and animal pen, along with another necessary population surge and an increase in the amount and the complexity of labor.
But the clincher came when someone noticed that she-creatures penned together in isolation from the males never brought forth young, but when given the opportunity to mate, would become pregnant -
"...[Animal] breeding, in telling the human male about his role in procreation, suggests the worship of the male sexual organ...The misplaced analogy of seed and semen assigned generation to men. The worship of fertility in animal, plant, and human and the glorification of the phallus as seed producer: these are the religious and utilitarian vectors which influenced the rise of the patriarchy.
The metaphor of mother earth, reducing the female to passivity, was particularly damaging...In the absence of biological knowledge male semen, actually analogous to pollen, was credited with the power inherent in the fertilized egg; the female became a passive gestator...a difficult distinction should be emphasized: that between fertility as generation, the magic of creation, and fertility as production. The one was...reassigned to man, the second left to woman..."
-- Elizabeth Fisher, Woman's Creation 4
The knowledge of how to increase the incidence of childbirth came at a time when such an increase was desired, and being a breeder became a primary function of woman while at the same time the process was stripped of any religious-mythical female-creator symbolism. Female status had definitely been set back by these changes, but women at this time were probably not yet treated to the full-blown misogyny characteristic of patriarchies. That, however, was soon to come.
* * *
In the space of a few short generations, the spending of available female worker-hours had been shifted from a fairly generalized range of activities to, most specifically, being a Mommy, along with some domestic activities that were relatively compatible with raising a large brood of kids and being pregnant. That left a shortage of laborers in other areas, which had to be covered by the men in a world where scarcity of laborers and plentitude of labor was going to be the way of things for a long time. Labor must have been first quantitatively measured about this time, and rewarded by incentives which set the stage for the development of the economic system. And what was the logical unit of currency? How do you get the maximum amount of work from your available, predominantly male, labor supply?
"The family was not invented, nor has it evolved, to make children happy or to provide a secure emotional and psychological background to grow up in. Mankind evolved the family to meet a very basic need in small and precarious societies -- to make sure that as many children as possible were born, and, once born, physically taken care of...[by harnessing] the sexual drives of young men to the begetting and nurturing of young children. The rules boiled down to this. You can't have sex except to make a baby; you have to take care of the woman who will be the baby's mother; and when the baby is born, you have to take care of it as well...In return for the trouble of taking care of this woman and her child or children, society gave them to the man as property."
-- John Holt, Escape from Childhood 5
"Taking care of" the women and children translated as picking up the slack in the now-male world of nondomestic labor, and the incentive program controlled and permitted access to women only to those men who earned it by doing their share of the load. This process turned women into sexual commodities for the first time; sexual access became the impetus for male breadwinners to work the long, tiring shifts. Men now first experienced being meal tickets, and naturally resented having their sexual appetite exploited, just as women naturally resented being turned into property, even if both men and women accepted the premises enough to go along with it. Men may well have begun taking out this resentment on their women, since the labor leaders, having recently evolved to the new social powers of determining reward and punishment, were not safe targets, even if perceived as the real appetite-exploiters. The woman, stripped of autonomy and resentful, and too thinly spread as a compassionate parent to too many children, may have responded in kind, but because of the physical disparity probably found her safest and most convenient targets in her children.
"The grown child remembers the mother as slave, as loving nurturer who tends and watches and serves. But the mother is also the master...
She can mold [her child] and shape its habits, play with it and frustrate it, push it towards the fulfillment of her own desires...[this] is real power...
Indeed, the less control which a woman exercises over other areas of her life, the greater will be the satisfaction she derives from managing the lives of her children."
-- Elizabeth Janeway (Man's World, Woman's Place) 6
We know the stereotype of the emotionally dominating Mom, the benevolently manipulative tyrant whose powerlessness elsewhere is offset by power over her children. In our time, children's lib is still dormant, and culturally we still take it for granted that it is okay to treat a child "like a child", although we know full well that no one else would appreciate or voluntarily tolerate it.
Prior to this patriarchal family dynamic, though, children were probably present only in quantities small enough to receive full loving social attention without adult exhaustion (some feminists postulate the prevalent use of herbal contraceptives and abortifacients before the rise of patriarchy), and obtained love and attention from the entire community, not merely their respective mothers. They were probably treated much more as if they were naÔve but respected junior-edition adults and less like untamed uncivilized animals or cute pets, personal property.
It was only after the changes I've described that children were raised in patriarchal fashion. Some of these children, of course, were female. They saw in their mothers not just an adversary in an unequal power struggle (including emotional powers), but also a role model; they measured themselves in emotionally dynamic terms with the assumption that they could eventually fill Mommy's shoes.
The boys, though, would get the message that they were not going to grow up to be like Mommy, they were going to marry someone like Mommy; they weren't supposed to emulate her. So years later, as adults, these men may have been inwardly terrified to find that their socially endowed privileges as pater familias didn't keep their wives from treating them like one more child at home, using the "feminine" powers of parental approval and disapproval to manipulate a man's confidence and guilt...and, since patriarchy had so successfully harnessed male sexual appetite by using woman as the carrot on the stick, she might have tried, with husband-horrifying success, to use sex to train him to her control, just like her Mommy used to use various rewards or the withholding of them (including emotional closeness as a commodity) to keep her in line.
Of course the law could say (and soon did) that he could rape her if he so chose, she was his; but that didn't keep her from taking advantage of his shame and guilt and his need for her voluntary, affectionate, approving cooperation. The law said a lot of things, but it couldn't legislate for a man the emotional toughness that patriarchy inadvertently built into its women.
Meanwhile, for the woman in patriarchal society, with no overt powers to contend with a man who owned her life, her body, and her children as property, it was covert power, as well as a touch of ego compensation to be able to look on him as just another emotional dependent: no all-powerful he-God-creature after all, just an oversized child.
But when sufficiently oversize and violent, a child can be a real source of fear, and terrorized women became more like little girls when Daddy comes home mad about something, not like confident Mommies who could pull the legs out from under his ego, and some men inevitably noticed that. To really act on it, though, they had to somehow stop the boomerang of guilt. That required that men dehumanize women in their minds, denying any thread of innate human identity-in-common with them. The result is called alienation, and tends to work internally as well; that is, to dehumanize someone, to alienate someone you wish to be able to deal with as not-really-human, you also have to alienate from the part of your self that knows better, and to get it back, you'd have to face the unexperienced guilt.
In other words, this male coping pattern was self-destructive and counterproductive, even given the goal of dominating women to prevent being dominated by them; but, then, men weren't reacting rationally to an understood threat, but really running from vague shadows that were only given substance by their own immature fears. After all, what damage would the women do? Wouldn't it make more sense to trust them not to abuse their psychological advantages during the initial intimacy until experiences toughened and matured each male's interpersonal strengths? Undoubtedly women had to contend with childishness enough from actual children to prefer an adult equal partner, and since a mature male who was her equal would probably not make much actual use of his socially sanctioned authority over her as his possession, one would logically assume that women in general would much prefer that the men did catch up emotionally.
But men did not assume this, partly because to see this would require an emotional maturity and interpersonal wisdom which (catch-22 style) the men did not possess because of their weaknesses in the area; and partly because by this time male and female experiences had diverged to the point of making men and women enigmatic aliens to each other. You might or might not like a person of the opposite sex, might or might not trust their motives, but to predict what one of them would do or think or feel was risky by now. Imagining what you would do if it were you requires similarity of background to work as an accurate guide, and actual divergence plus socialized exaggeration of the existing differences discouraged such empathy.
As a modern example, a (socialized) male in a subway station at two o'clock in the morning may see a lone (socialized) female and think to himself, "I would like it if she came over and flirted with me right now", but to assume that she would similarly appreciate his behaving thusly towards her ignores the dissimilarity of background experiences and socialization. Most people would know not to expect her to respond as he might to her, but instead of attributing the difference to divergent experiences and different perspectives, they usually assume and declare it to be an innate difference between the sexes.
Once divergency had begotten this sexism -- the belief that "you can't do unto them as you would wish done unto you because they're different inside" -- good intentions and fondness and respect no longer necessarily worked contrary to contempt and cruelty, and often worked side by side with them to increase the process of alienation. Misogyny, terrorism, and domination of women was soon regarded as natural, not unkind or unfair, even that it would be unmanly not to participate in it and unwomanly to resent it or fail to enjoy it. Cruel insensitive selfish dominating behavior eventually even came to be seen as a sexy attribute of males, without which men presumably would be sexually unviable with women.
From the female side, it was this notion of natural difference again, not a reciprocal female cruelty, which brought women into the position of reinforcing men within the patriarchal behavior pattern rather than those outside it. The idea that men were not the same mentally and emotionally and had different needs did not destroy women's capacity for intimacy or the powers of emotional resiliency (which were still the best tools for contending with alienated-alienating men), but it did play havoc with their judgment about how to use it. If men are different by nature, then maybe the same (human) standards of conduct shouldn't apply, either to men or to the male/female interpersonal relationship; and, for that matter, if woman's nature is not the only natural human nature, maybe the judgment of women is too subjective by itself to be trusted.
At worst, female powers of compassion were coopted by the most patriarchal of men, with many women convinced of such men's worthiness as they accepted masculine standards of what it means to be a good man, and gave their female energy over to them because it was how women were supposed to relate to men:
"In the State of Possession, the victim of psychic and physical invaders becomes autoallergic, re-acting against...the spirit's own process. Pathologically re-acting against her own endogenous powers of resistance to invasion, she sides with her invaders, her possessors. Her false self possesses her genuine Self. Her false self blends with the Possessor who sedates his beloved prey. She turns against her sisters... So deep is the disease of autoallergy induced in women by the sedative seduction of the little Sir Sirens of Siredom that women try to kill not only their Selves but their sister selves..."
-- Mary Daly, Gyn/Ecology
7
Of course, there were personally courageous women throughout the span who retained their own self-validated standards of what makes a good person, and so some of this resource was spent on women and on woman-defined concerns.
Similarly, there have always been men who remained humanly kind and treated women thoughtfully and as empathically as their nurturing and caregiving capacities permitted, and a few have managed, throughout the ages, to develop those supposedly feminine powers to the point of being equal to any woman.
But most of these opponents of patriarchal hellishness struggled blindly through long ugly years valuing intimacy and trust in a chaotic world of fear and alienation, convinced that things could be so much better but seldom having any idea as to why the world was such a loveless and hostile place.
* * *
To whatever extent radical feminism can be accused of having an orthodoxy, "orthodox" radical feminist theory states that oppression of women was the blueprint for all subsequent oppressions. I ascribe to this theory myself, but I think it might be more diagnostically correct to state that the psychological changes men had to go through themselves to be able to dehumanize women and deny them empathy is what actually set the stage for dehumanizing other (i.e., male) people as well. People may have sensed the wide potential for patriarchs coming to regard everyone else as not-really-human, which would make for a lot of powerful inhuman psychopaths, but that didn't keep the process from spreading to various groups of men as well. To preserve at least the potential for humanhood for men in the face of all this dehumanizing, the rules said that if you could prove you were a man by behaving masculine and exhibiting masculine values and so forth, you could be considered as one, but otherwise you were feminine, womanlike, not one-of-us, and it was okay to dehumanize you. That proving was not always an accessible process, though, as patriarchs would disqualify men who were different from themselves (safe for them and their kind, they figured) when they needed more slaves for the laborpool, wanted to selectively narrow the power structure, decided to distribute commodities less equally, and so forth. In modern historical times, men have been disqualified because of race, religion, language, comparative poverty, location of home, lack of proper ancestry, illiteracy, and literally hundreds of other arbitrary criteria.
To prove yourself a man is to be granted the chance to obtain power and respect, and those who are categorically eliminated from proving themselves men are not given any such opportunity. The final cut, then, is the logical one of disqualifying those who do not possess power at the moment, which eliminates all that sentimental stuff about respecting someone's manhood: the people you avoid dehumanizing are the ones with the power superior to your own, whom you have to treat with consideration; the people with the power are the ones who are defined as entitled to seek it. Prove otherwise.
Dehumanization is virulently contagious. Those who throw it will catch it themselves, first by the distortions within, and eventually politically as well.
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