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Patriarchy means societies where men dominate women. Like all systems of domination, it ultimately depends on violence to extract consent from the subordinated. In patriarchal societies, men rape, batter, buy or trade, torture and murder women. Other forms of coercion may include economic, legal and cultural institutions, but sexual violence is at the core of patriarchy. Mary Daly points out that patriarchy is the ruling religion of the planet. It’s all variations on the theme of masculinity asserting itself by killing women and pretty much everything, usually for a sexual thrill. In The Chalice and The Blade, Riane Eisler writes that “underlying the great surface diversity of human culture are two basic models of society.” The first she calls the partnership model, societies that are egalitarian, nonviolent and life-affirming. The second is the dominator model, which values the power to establish and enforce domination.
In her ground breaking article “The socio-cultural context of rape: a cross-cultural study,” anthropologist Peggy Reeves-Sanday studied 95 band and tribal cultures and found that 47% were rape-free while 18% were rape-prone. In rape-free societies, women are respected and influential members of their communities; sacred beings are conceived of as both male and female; economic and political power is held equally between the sexes; nurturing and childrearing are understood as the basis of human interactions; and there is an attitude of reverence instead of dominance toward the earth. In these cultures, rape is considered abhorrent and there are severe consequences for perpetrators. In West Sumatra, the subject of Reeves-Sanday’s book Women at the Center: Life in a Modern Matriarchy, a man who rapes has disgraced himself and all his kin, and will face assault, exile or death.
In contrast, in rape-prone societies, women hold limited economic and political power; men express contempt for women as decision makers; god is male; masculinity is predicated on an ideology of toughness and cruelty; and violence is an acceptable method of settling disputes. Welcome to America.
The basic psychological dynamic of masculinity is that men are men because they aren’t women. Women are the hated Other. Hating her, hurting her, is how boys become men. Masculinity breeds a personality based on entitlement, arrogance and cruelty, which is compelled to prove itself again and again. Inherent in masculinity is a violation imperative: in acts of invading and conquering, men become men. The brilliance of male supremacy is that it links acts of political oppression to sexual response. Not only is the soldier-rapist rewarded with orgasm when he dominates/rapes, but his action feels “natural” rather than political. This welding of domination and subordination to sexual arousal, and the accompanying normalization of oppression, is the deep heart of patriarchy. And these acts of oppression become what sex is—how sex is practiced, how arousal is experienced—under male supremacy.
For instance, researchers tried to show male viewers a film scene depicting violence—not sexual violence, just regular old violence—against women. And they found that they couldn’t. No matter what the film showed (hitting, punching, kicking) at least 25% of the men would get an erection. Sexual domination and subordination are institutionalized into the very concepts of masculine and feminine. Masculinity is simply a conglomeration of the personality traits necessary for the patriarchal soldier-rapist: physically strong, emotionally cauterized, rational, domineering, cruel. All of this is supposed to add up to “handsome” as well. Likewise femininity is ultimately a description of the personality that results from trauma and powerlessness: weak, passive, yielding, emotional, hyper-vigilant to the needs of the dominators and desperate for the dominator’s attention.
In patriarchy, political oppression is thus experienced as normal and natural. It’s easy to turn the rapist into the soldier—the template is already in place. Instead of “woman,” fill the Despised Other category with the racial or ethnic group of your choice, and watch men—good soldiers all—rise to the occasion. Sheila Jeffries names this the erotic roots of fascism. This ethic of domination and violation extends beyond interactions between humans to human relations with animals and the earth. Animals aren’t seen as sentient beings capable of suffering. They are instead mechanical units of production to be used in factory farms and laboratories. Or they aren’t seen at all, as their habitats are destroyed for more agribusiness plantations, oil wells and suburban sprawl. The earth isn’t a complex web of interdependent life forms co-creating a living home, deserving our humility, reverence and respect. It’s instead so many board feet of lumber, so many gallons of crude: one part garbage dump to two parts profit margin. The violation imperative inherent in masculinity finds its full expression in modern science—invading the boundaries of the atom with nuclear physics and of life itself with genetic engineering.
It’s heretical to name men. It’s blasphemous to state the simple facts. Around the world and across time men have beaten, raped and incested us; burned us as witches and widows; demanded that our feet be bound, our genitals mutilated, our bodies starved; bought and sold us; kept us captive and veiled; and simply tortured us to death. With the advent of technologies of mass communications, they’ve also filmed it all and made a fortune while creating a population of serial sex killers. The first step in stopping these atrocities is to name who is doing what to whom. And that’s hard, psychologically. It’s not intellectually hard. The facts are overwhelming, indisputable. But psychologically it can be terrifying. And you will be punished. Still, if we want anything like liberty, we are going to have to do it. There was that famous speech by Russell Means, “For America to Live, Europe Must Die.” I agree. And I’d add, for the earth to live, masculinity must die. If we want to end rape, stop racism, save the planet, men have to stop being men.
I’m going to end with a comment addressed specifically to any men who are still reading this. You can be traitors to your class. You don’t have to be good soldiers, good Germans. You can shift your loyalties. You can learn to identify with women. It’s even to your benefit to do so. Growing up, I saw what happened to turn my brother from a child into a boy and then into a man. It was brutal. Male socialization is pretty ghastly. And as long as there is war, the rich, old men will sacrifice the young men on the altar of power and profit. Men may not be defined a priori as victims, as fuckable, like women are, but you can be fucked. 1 in 11 boys are sexually abused. That’s a lot of abuse. As long as domination is eroticized, as long as violence and violation constitute masculinity, you aren’t free either. My question is: how many of you will face that and cast your lot with us?
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