The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. —Friedrich Engels
Variation I.
Every living creature on this planet is here because of sex. All plants, insects, fish, reptiles, mammals, birds are the product of sex. This blue planet is a very sexy place. Even the so-called asexual reproducers must experience sexuality on some scale when they asexually reproduce. Why else would they bother? Sexuality is the natural expression of cosmic intelligence. It’s the very music of The Spheres. Sex is a microcosm of Life itself. Women are, by virtue of being the carriers, bearers and sustainers of new life, considerably more sexy than men. Woman is the conduit for that cosmic intelligence. Male human sexuality has only one goal oriented aspect: intercourse.
Female human sexuality, however, has many: the menstrual cycle (including menarche and menopause), intercourse, pregnancy, birth, lactation. When god was a woman, She smiled on these rich variations and encouraged diversity. Sex in all its variations was honored as an aspect of divinity. Sex was the sacred conduit, continually flowing into, out of, and between body and soul, earthly and cosmic.
Protopatriarchal Aryans recognized womankind as the embodiment of the awesome creative power of the positive Life-Force of the cosmos: Sex. Control sex, they reasoned, and you control all of Nature. The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. It started with rape. Rape, something unheard of in pre-historic times, is the beginning of sexual control of woman by man. Our modern conceptions of “romance” and “seduction” have their roots in rape. In Hellenistic myth, when this or that god “seduced” this or that goddess, it means he raped her. This was the dawning of the idea that women not only like to be raped, but should be.
Sex became a trophy, commodity, a form of control rather than a communion. Woman was humiliated, debased and made into the slave of man’s lechery. She became a mere instrument for the breeding of his children.
This trend was expanded upon greatly in both the Christian and Scientific traditions. Woman’s licentious nature is wholly responsible for man’s Fall from Grace (even though woman’s sexuality is the very Grace he Fell from). Matter, flesh, and nature became vile repulsive things one needed to subdue and “rise out of.” Disembodied spirit, however, is pure, chaste and perfect—something Descartes was later able to “prove” with Mathematics. Sex became a sin and woman personified sex.
Much later, Freud added his voice to the misogyny chorus using so-called scientific methods to prove the natural inferiority of women. The life-affirming abundance and sensuality of woman’s innate physical/spiritual being is perverted into something “evil.” Because of woman’s lewd, lascivious and sensual nature man had to find a way to secure her sexual constancy. In order to be assured of the paternity of his children, he had to dominate her entirely.
If he kills her, or merely rapes and tortures her, or kidnaps her children he is but exercising his right. Within the context of patriarchy, “Monogamy does not by any means make its appearance in history as the reconciliation of man and woman, still less the highest form of such a reconciliation. On the contrary, it appears as the subjection of one sex by the other, as the proclamation of a conflict between the sexes entirely unknown hitherto in prehistoric times.” (Engels, p. 739)
Variation II.
She understands with a perfect dreadful clarity that she is all wrong. She adjusts her behavior, her body and her entire belief system to enable her, but not other women, to be exempted from the sin of femininity. She is better than the rest of those stupid females. She realizes everything she is must be despised and subsumed by something she is not, and learns to ignore and hate what she is in order to love and embrace what she is not. It’s hard work, but well worth it. Patriarchy thinks the feminine principle is a dangerous element that should be subdued at all costs. She agrees.
She sees evidence of female stupidity every day. At the office, in her family and among her friends. It’s everywhere. Swooning over this or that man—throwing their very lives away over him, even if he’s married or an alcoholic or worse. Stabbing each other in the back. Gossiping. When somebody tells her these behaviors are the result of women’s lack of power in this society, that manipulation is the only form of control a woman has at her disposal, she rolls her eyes. She never acts like that. She thinks women let men take all the power. She does not realize that her own misogyny is, itself, the sophisticated and subtlized epitome of the very things she says she hates about women.
Women born in a misogynistic culture, unless specifically taught not to, accept, to some degree or another, its premises, for some period of their lives. Every woman who fully accepts and internalizes patriarchal ideals is, in her unhappy heart, a microcosm of the wider society and its state that so devalues and fears her. Many never notice or question this. Those who do must make a choice: freedom or safety. Safety usually wins. But this so-called safety has a price: obedience. And the respectability she earns in the patriarchal realm is at the expense of her self-respect.
She thinks she has tons of self-respect. She is intelligent, confidant and articulate. She has made it in a man’s world better than a lot of men. She had to work twice as hard as any man and is proud of this fact. She thinks everybody should be in a position to have to struggle the way she did. She does not think of her migraines, PMS or fibroids or her Aunt Hattie’s breast cancer as by-products of a society that hates women but as part of the innate curse of being unfortunate enough to be born female. The overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex.
Variation III.
The personal is the political and the more personal, the more political. But politics are the symptom, not the solution–the solution is philosophical understanding. Where politics are about control, philosophy is about understanding. Politics uses philosophy, twisting and distorting it however it needs to in order to validate itself and its institutions.
Politics is what prevents humanity from evolving group understanding. Politics is what enabled the overthrow of mother right. Politics was responsible for the world-historic defeat of the female sex. But the political defeat of one is not the victory of the other, as much as it may appear. It is the defeat of both. Engels, in quoting Fourier’s thoughts on marriages of convenience demonstrated this, “Just as in grammar two negatives make a positive, so in the morals of a marriage, two prostitutions make one virtue.” This virtue is not a virtue in the usual sense of the word but the appearance of a virtue. It is a political system. A world. When a new world is born it is assumed to be an improvement.
Philosophy is the enlargement of the soul, the liberation of spirit and the illumination of the mind. Unlike politics, validation is its natural by-product, not it’s goal and liberation from the bonds of old conditioning comes through the liberation of understanding. This awareness is achieved en masse when a philosophical understanding saturates the collective consciousness. When it does, entire populations, like a flock of birds changing direction mid-flight, can change their collective minds. And their world changes. A new world is, in effect, born. There is no limit to the diverse fragments of understanding and the ways in which they spread, each revolving, growing and expanding into new worlds. Except for politics.
Politics takes this new and temporary world born out of naturally flighty philosophical roaming and clamps it into an iron clad system. A limitation one doesn’t dare step outside of, for stepping outside the limitations is punishable by law. Philosophy becomes perverted into politics and inadvertently provides a basis for domination.
Variation IV.
Religion is as improper a response to the divine as politics is to the philosophical. Where divinity defies description, religion attempts to put it down on paper, making dogma of it and killing it in the process–not to mention killing people who don’t go along with it. Gloria Steinem says, “ Any religion in which god looks suspiciously like the ruling class is very different from spirituality that honors the godliness in each of us. It makes us feel different. It makes us act different.”
Female divinity was, for the vast majority of human existence, an incredibly strong, pervasive and innate understanding. It’s only natural—all of humanity is born of woman. Multi-faceted female sexuality was in keeping with the creation myths that grew out of and supported multi-faceted female sexuality. The religious overthrow of mother right and multi-faceted female sexuality, therefore, was the world-historic defeat of the female sex.
Athene pre-dates Zeus—and Greece by—many millennia. She was the Neolithic Great Goddess. Before that, the Paleolithic Snake Goddess. Re-mything Her into a motherless thing born full-grown out of the head of Zeus by early Hellenistic Patriarchy, via the politics of rape, was the beginning of this overthrow. This re-mything defied sexuality making her, instead, a product of male thought. We create, and re-create deities in our own image. They are our role models and specifically show us how to behave. Patriarchal godheads demonstrate how to clamp down spiritual wanderlust into a system that, by virtue of its domination mentality, becomes inescapable to all–irregardless of their spirituality. They validate domination because they are dominators.
The theme of patriarchal thinking has been to continuously usurp female power by defiling female sexuality and mother right. Engels seems to have thought this was not a particularly difficult thing to accomplish, “For this revolution—one of the most decisive ever experienced by mankind—need not have disturbed one single living member of a gens. All the members could remain what they previously were.” Except it was not a single revolution and it disturbed everybody. It took many thousands of years. It took wave after wave of invasions—onslaughts of raping, pillaging, burning, destroying art, kidnapping, etc., to get to what was to become known as Hellenistic times.
Like an onion, patriarchy peeled layer after layer of sanity away to get to the core of its own brutality. Christianity. Because sex, perverted as it was by rape, was still a central theme in the Hellenistic pantheon, these gods and goddesses were re-mythed by Christian patriarchy into a new pantheon of Saints. Henry James Breasted said, “Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.” The new pantheon of Saints now existed as a foundation to uphold this monotheistic and imperialistic politico-religious system in which women were barely considered human.
From that unnatural and inhuman system came the Inquisition—the main purpose being the eradication of midwives in favor of the new barber-surgeons, usurping woman’s one remaining power source: Childbirth. The early medical men were ignorant and incompetent. The infamous childbed fever was an iatrogenic disease. Before the discovery of antiseptics, doctors would go directly from examining cadavers to examining birthing women without bothering to wash their hands. When Semmelweis discovered proper antiseptic hand-washing prevented puerperal fever, doctors (after many years of foot-dragging suspicion about antiseptics, and many more thousands of deaths) heroically took credit for curing a disease they themselves caused. They became the saviors of all of womankind. Out of love for her children, womankind was duped. She believed Medicine was the savior of the terrible thing known as childbirth.
Variation V.
Money is just a unit of measurement. It represents the expenditure of energy in the production of goods and the securing of services. It measures to what degree physical forces are dominated by the will. Engels said, “Monogamy arose out of the concentration of considerable wealth in the hands of one person—and that a man—and out of the desire to bequeath this wealth to this man’s children and to no one else’s.” When sexual, political and religious status is reduced or denied, a corresponding and proportionate lack will be reflected in the financial status as well. This “proves” the correctness of such attitudes and practices and propagates their further continuance. Numbers don’t lie. Engels says, “As wealth increased, it, on the one hand gave the man a more important status in the family than the woman, and on the other hand, created a stimulus to utilise this strengthened position in order to overthrow the traditional order of inheritance in favour of his children.”
Money is an unobstructed vehicle for domination and oppression. All of womankind became ensnared in the web of man’s exclusive financial system. Even her children belonged to him. Divorce was only an option for women willing to leave their children with the father that owned them. The economic overthrow of mother right was the world-historic defeat of the female sex. Engels says, “The modern individual family is based on the open or disguised domestic enslavement of the woman; and modern society is a mass composed solely of individual families as its molecules.” The larger society, and its state are reflected in microcosm in the marital relations of individual couples. “In the family,” Engels continues, “ he is the bourgeois; the wife represents the proletariat.”
Long live the revolution!
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