Here’s a link to the VIDEO discussion of “The Roots of Misogyny.”
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Here’s a written presentation of the main ideas:
The Roots of Misogyny
Intro
Back in the late ‘80s, the author Riane Eisler and I were both speakers at a conference being held in the New York by the Institute for Noetic Sciences. We had both recently published books that had made some favorable impression on the people putting the conference together.
Ms. Eisler’s book was The Chalice and the Blade, and it was a big hit (especially in feminist circles).
The Chalice and the Blade argued, as I recall, that the subordination of women was the result of some implied bad choice of the men to abandon the old “partnership society” to set up the “dominator society.” I don’t recall her having any explanation of why men made that choice. It seemed that it was the male desire to dominate that was to blame for the change.
I can’t recall whether she and I discussed publicly a disagreement between us on how the subordination of women was to be understood. According to my different perspective, articulated in the two books I published in the 1980s, what had happened was an essentially inevitable result of the rise of civilization.
Proper understanding wasn’t a matter of placing blame: the power imbalance between men and women was more something that happened inevitably to the civilization-creating species, and less as something that men had done to women.
An unfortunate situation inevitably arose with civilization. That unfortunate situation led — by a series of inevitable steps — both to the oppression of women in civilized societies, and to the misogyny that has often accompanied it.
The war of all against all
My book (The Parable of the Tribes) demonstrated that the breakthrough into civilization made it inevitable that a “war of all against all” would arise with this unprecedented new life-form, and this in turn made it inevitable that only those societies structured for victory on the intersocietal battlefield would survive and spread.
Inevitably, this “war of all against all” made the protection against external enemies paramount for a society’s survival.
“Protection” against external threats has been in the job description of males since we were primates. Inevitably, when the rise of civilization made external threats more grave and more constant,
- the “protector” role of men would be magnified;
- societal survival became more dependent on success in the struggle for power among societies; (Archaeology noted that the wall-carvings of early civilizations changed in their emphasis from dramatizing the fertility requirements of agriculture, to depicting wars against other societies.)
- and men, playing a more essential role, would gain power at the expense of women.
In this way, the rise of civilization led inevitably to the selection for male-dominated warrior societies, replacing the more equal “partnership” society whose elimination Eisler noted, but couldn’t explain.
The Warrior’s Contempt for What They Have Repressed in Themselves
The societies that survived would be those who bred their males to be effective warriors.
The selection for warriors means that males will be trained into a particular structure, one in which fierceness and strength are emphasized while vulnerability and weakness cannot be tolerated. Boot camp toughens.
As an athlete coached by former Marines, I witnessed how warriors get trained to deny their vulnerabilities. And also how the culture of the warrior teaches men to project onto women what they deny in themselves.
So the contempt for weakness gets translated into contempt for women. (One can see this in the subcultures of the military, the police, and athletics. Nothing was so scathing from the coaches as, “You’re playing like girls!”)
Thus the warrior structure in the civilized human male feeds the unjust treatment of women.
A misogynistic feeling that arises out of the terrible position that males get placed in because our world has long been the scene of a chronic, intersocietal “war of all against all.”
Women treated Unjustly then Mothering the Next Generation of Men
This part – about mothering -- I infer from what I know about the effects on people of being treated in unjust, wounding ways, having studied how “Brokenness Begets Brokenness.”
If women are being mistreated by the male-dominated society – which for millennia they habitually seem to have been in most civilized societies through most civilized history – they will inevitably be injured and damaged by that mistreatment.
It seems inevitable that -- if women were being mistreated by the men in their lives and by the male-dominated culture – they would bring some kind of brokenness into how they play the vital role of “Mother” raising the new generation of males.
Perhaps we can assume that the mistreatment of women made the mothers of the male-dominated society less good with their sons in some way. And if the way they were less good made them injurious to their sons, such injurious mothering could produce in the rising generation of men some whose feelings of hurt and anger would result in misogynistic feelings toward women-- from sense of revenge.
The Cascade of Consequences
The “war of all against all,” therefore, that inevitably accompanies the rise of civilization puts in train a cascading sequence of consequences:
- the rise of male-dominated warrior societies;
- training of men to deny parts of themselves that are a liability in a warrior;
- men projecting onto women parts of themselves the warrior culture has taught them to reject and regard with contempt;
- women being wounded by their mistreatment in the male-dominated culture;
- and – because of their wounds – women mothering their sons in ways that lay the groundwork for their sons to join the forces of misogyny when they become men.
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I thought it fitting — in particular now -- to think about some of the social evolutionary process that has generated male-domination and some of the misogynistic feelings that have gone with it. “In particular now” when the United States is in the grip of a political party whose policy actions so often display a drive to oppress women. And when that party is totally dominated by a man who was found — by the unanimous verdict of a dozen average Americans — to have sexually assaulted a woman in the traumatizing and humiliating way he described himself as doing (entitled to because he was “a star”). And now, as President of the United States, has seemed to go out of his way to appoint other misogynists to powerful positions, as if he regarded such hostile and harmful attitudes and conducts as an important qualification for office.