The leaders of the patriarchy’s PR machine known as ‘religion’ — elderly men in dresses kissing each other
The patriarchy made God to impose male Supremacy
The patriarchy invented the Abrahamic sky-god death-cults of Judaism, Christianity and Islam and so these are the most extremely misogynistic of the major religions. Their hatred of women oozes like pus from every page of their texts. Women are slaves, the chattels of their fathers, to be sold off as sex slaves to male owners for whom their only function is to provide male heirs and, perhaps as an unfortunate by-product, replacement baby-factories like themselves.
From within the patriarchy, it is practically impossible to see it. It’s like the old saw: you can’t see the wood for the trees. We all contribute to it, willy-nilly. Just look at your name — or mine, for that matter: Rod Fleming. My name and my father’s name. But wait: why? What did he do? He fucked my mother, that’s all. Just as your father fucked your mother. But that was where his input ended. Who carried you through gestation? Who went through the pain and potentially lethal risk of parturition so that you could be alive? Your mother did. And where is her name? Nowhere. Your legal title is determined by a brief sexual encounter that ended in an ovum being fertilised. That’s it.
So should I change my name? To Rollo, my mother’s maiden name? But wait, her mother was a Martin, the Rollo name came from a similarly brief encounter. In fact, look at your ‘family tree’. It’s all based on male inheritance. If you could trace it back a thousand years — and precious few, if any, can do that — it would still just be the record of the path of forty or so fucks. That’s it. Of the women whose labour — literally — allows it to exist at all, nothing is known. Just the men.
Another elderly man in a dress acting as pimp for the patriarchy
Men are Irrelevant
This is so pervasive that we don’t even see it. Yet it is the badge of the patriarchy: the lineage of father through son, though in fact, men are largely irrelevant to the process. One man could, were he diligent enough, impregnate what, ten women a day? That’s over three thousand a year. One man. Just one. If we had a culture that was 99% women, not only would it survive, it would boom, just on the efforts of those 1% of men; but all the actual work would still be done by women. Populations are strictly dependent on the number of fertile mothers.
Consider the other scenario: a culture 99% male. Within a generation or so, this would die out. It has no hope of survival. There just are not enough women to keep it going, assuming they produce babies at the same ratio of 99:1 male to female.
So how did we ever get the idea that men are more important than women are?
The answer is in the web of lies and propaganda spun by the patriarchy and disseminated by religion, philosophy and even science. A lace of dishonesty and deception that has one end: to maintain male supremacy and ensure female subordinacy. That simple.
The operating manual of the Western patriarchy
Plato, the Greek philosopher, can be credited with much of the basis for the modern Western patriarchy, though the rot goes further back in time. Perhaps most importantly, his ‘Middle Platonism’, a discourse of the relationship of humans and deities, was probably the stimulus for Paul the Apostle’s writings, which are actually the oldest texts in the New Testament canon — which is the operating manual of the Western patriarchy.
Plato was an unambiguous misogynist of the very worst order. He believed that like attracted like and so men who were attracted to women were displaying their feminine side. As far as he was concerned, only a man of pure masculinity was fit to govern, which meant that men should never fall in love with women, as this rendered them unfit for office of state. No, women were for the production of babies to continue the patriarchy. They were like cattle to be milked, and servicing them was an onerous task that men had to carry out in order to ensure future generations — of men.
So, men were supposed to love other men. Still, Plato couldn’t quite get himself to go along with the physical side. Why? Because in a relationship in which one man has sex with another, one must give and the other receive. However, the act of being penetrated makes a man into a woman, and for Plato, that was the worst possible thing that could happen. So how did he square this circle? Easy: invent an ideal society in which men fall in love with each other but don’t have sex, while occasionally fulfilling the noxious civic duty of impregnating women whom they do not love, for the future of the nation. Love and sex become separated, and sex becomes shameful and immoral, while ‘love’ — which, remember, for Plato was properly only that between two men — exalted. That is what ‘Platonic Love’ really is, and a better recipe for a sick and dysfunctional society could not be imagined.
This, dear reader, is the cockamamie ‘philosophy’ upon which Western ‘civilisation’ is based, as handed down and modified by the Romans, the Catholic Church, a few other more or less rabid Protestant kirks, the Enlightenment thinkers, imperialist Europe and so on. Result: the United States of America, the most dysfunctional and terminally fucked-up culture on the planet…except for Islam. But while Islam is just as sick and deranged and has the numbers, the USA has the biggest and most expensive killing machine on the planet.
It’s no accident that the most homophobic and sexually repressed culture in the developed world is also the most religious, nor that the religion that infects and animates it is Christianity. This cult was deliberately shaped to serve the ends of the Roman Empire in its conquest of all the cultures around it. Whether or not you believe there was a historical Jesus, it is undeniable that Paul the Apostle set up the Pauline church to fit directly into the political structure of Rome, and that subsequent ‘Fathers’, synods, Councils and committees refined this. So much so that it became the natural choice of the Roman Emperor Constantine when he sought to establish one official religion for the whole Empire. (We discuss this in depth in ‘Why Men Made God‘.)
For a nation founded on the solid imperialist principles of land theft, slavery and ruthless use of overwhelming military force against much weaker opponents (while carefully avoiding situations in which it might get trounced, as happened in Vietnam,) Christianity is a natural choice of religion. USicans have much to thank Plato, Paul and all the other developers of the cult for.
This background in religion and philosophy explains the modern Western patriarchy, as well as how and why it is, right now, attempting to roll back the limited gains made by women in the twentieth century. The misogynistic, patriarchal right seeks to re-establish the status of women as chattels, their sexuality the property of first their fathers and then their husbands, aided and abetted by their close male relatives.
The striking similarities between the Western patriarchy and the Islamic one exist because Islam is itself a half-baked pastiche of Platonic and Roman Christian ideas, with a dose of good old-fashioned barbarism and a few Arab fairy-tales thrown in just to make things interesting. In other words, the philosophical and religious bases of the Western and the Islamic patriarchies are the same, so it is not surprising that they should be so alike. And anyway, there are only so many ways you can say ‘men are better and if you disagree we’ll rape you’.
How Dubbya got dumb(er)
When George W. Bush described Islam as ‘a fine religion’ many of us though he had finally flown the coop. But in a way he was right: Islam is very similar in its misogyny, homophobia, condemnation of women and absolute insistence on male supremacy to the Southern Baptist cult Dubbya was rendered stupid by — or at least, stupider than he started out.
Indeed it is arguable that in a few limited senses, these cults are even more viciously misogynistic than Catholicism. So Dubbya was praising the similarity between them — which, if you hadn’t noticed, is their hatred of women — and, had somebody not tried to park some airliners on prominent USican landmarks, there’s a good chance that Islam would still have Presidential support. Which just goes to show that birds of a feather flock together.
There would be no divide between the rabid mullahs of Islam and the USican Republican right on a huge range of issues: both condemn contraception and abortion, because they recognise that these represent women’s choices, and neither has any time for that. Both condemn sex before marriage, for the same reason. Can’t have the girls trying out a few partners to see if any actually ring the bell, can we — while, of course, men can fuck blue and be lauded for their manliness. Both hate homosexuality because they recognise, as Plato did, that the sexually recipient partner is, by definition, not a man, at least in the act of sex. Since, in these miserable cults, the most dishonourable thing a man can do is to be womanly, actually performing as a woman in sex is intolerable to them.
This is why the same song is heard from all across the Christian and Muslim world. Even where ‘being homosexual’ is permitted, actually having sex is condemned. Why is the act of sex between two people with male genitalia so reviled? Because in order to carry it out, one of them must become a woman. It has nothing to do with queasiness about the other functions the anus performs and everything to do with the symbolic act of the surrender of manhood in the act of sex. Since ‘being a man’ is the most highly-vaunted status in the patriarchy, rejecting that is to flaunt it.
Even worse and more offensive to the patriarchy is to appear to be a man while performing sexually as a woman. This is the reason why transsexualism, or at least one form, the True or HomoSexual form, has historically been so widely tolerated in the Islamic world; transsexuals are not pretending to be men, claiming status to which, in the patriarchy, they have no right.
(It is deeply saddening to see how, as the poison of Saudi-funded Salafism has spread to Indonesia, that country’s historic tolerance of its colourful transsexual minority has been compromised by extremists.)
All of this hatred and intolerance has one root: misogyny and the establishment of male supremacy – otherwise known as the patriarchy.
None of these attacks on human dignity, nor the suppression of women and their rights, would have been possible without religion, which has served as the ideal form of social control and the most powerful weapon in the patriarchy’s war against women.
Humans may indeed be preconditioned in an evolutionary sense to accept spirituality. The belief in things that we don’t exist may even have uses. As Michael Shermer says, if you hear a rustling in the savannah and run up a tree, and there’s nothing there, then all that happens is you get laughed at; but if you hear a rustling in the grass and think it’s the wind, but actually it’s a lion, you’re lunch. That is a powerful stimulus and we are all subject to it.
However, as we show in ‘Why Men Made God‘ religion is much more than spirituality, or the early cultic practices of shamanism or animism. Religion is an established method of controlling large numbers of people and determining the way they will think and act. It is an organised mechanism through which the church and its leaders may become vastly wealthy. And it is operated by the patriarchy.
God was made by men in man’s image for one purpose alone: to give moral justification for the establishment of male supremacy and the suppression of women. Religion is the mechanism by which this is enforced. It should follow that if we want to enhance the situation of women and roll back the tide of their suppression. alongside those of homosexuals and transsexuals and indeed any other class that the patriarchy oppresses, then we have to name the enemy and face up to the challenge that it presents: and that enemy is called religion.
In order to become a free, tolerant and equal society, the patriarchy must be destroyed and its religions have to be swept away.
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