It's a Catch-22, in my opinion. A vast number of unreflected bigots out there believe that gays and lesbians are immoral simply because they are gay or lesbian. Where does this hugely wrong idea come from? I would argue that it's an inextricable aspect of patriarchy, which we still live in, somewhat diluted though it is.
Patriarchy in its undiluted form, which remains the basis of our social order, insists on rigidly separate gender roles which are meant to underscore its fundamental(ist) concept, male superiority. Everything is set up in neat (and oversimplified) dualisms. Every characteristic a person possesses is labeled "masculine" or "feminine," and these characteristics are traditionally presented as overdetermined "opposites." "Rational" versus "irrational," "strong" versus "gentle," "aggressive" versus "submissive," and so on and so forth ad nauseam. And for every one of this infinite series of dyads, the one labeled "female" or "feminine" is seen as inherently inferior to the one labeled "male" or "masculine," even if the consequences of either "masculine" or "feminine" concepts running amok, unleavened, are quite obviously destructive to the entire society. And even though it's quite obvious to any person with common sense that everybody has traits of both kinds, as well as others that don't fit neatly under either rubric.
Rigid policing of gender roles starts at birth, as many a classic experiment has shown. Boy babies are identified with the color blue (true blue), girl babies with the color pink (soft, gentle, unthreatening). Instead of being dressed in practical, unisex baby clothes, colors for boys and girls remain, on the whole, quite gendered. You'll hardly ever see a boy baby in any item of clothing featuring a floral print, and very few girl babies will be decked out in overalls embroidered with trucks and earth movers. You'll see more of the latter than the former, because for a girl to be a tomboy means she's aspiring to the higher order, while gods forbid a boy embrace anything "girly," be a "sissy"! People play more actively and roughly with boy babies while girls are coddled and cuddled and carefully kept away from harm (and a lot of learning experiences). Boys are stifled emotionally very early on, while girls' emotions are sometimes overdeveloped by constant indulgence. Names, colors, how we're treated -- we're pushed to embody one or the other gender role or gender type from Day One.
I feel for gay and lesbian kids. Even if they're lucky enough to have parents who don't think homosexuality is intrinsically wrong, they're surrounded by a society pervaded by homophobia. Long before we're old enough to be able to critically analyze the ideas with which we're bombarded, we're overwhelmed by a tide of prejudice and stereotypes. Elementary school kids -- sometimes even kindergarten or playschool kids -- already know that if you're called "fag," it isn't a compliment. They know it's a swear-word long before they have any idea what it means.
Children are shaped by what is expected of them. This is basic psychology. And our society, on the whole, tells gay and lesbian kids that they are abnormal, wrong, sick, perverted, pretty much doomed. At its most "positive," it makes them feel that they have to fit into a set of gay and lesbian stereotypes: gay men are all supposed to be sissy, lesbians are all supposed to be butch. In other words, if you're a gay man, you're supposed to tend toward the "female" stereotype, while lesbians are supposed to resemble the "male" one. No room for full development of one's true individual characteristics, whether you happen to be gay or straight. But for homosexual youth, the added, huge burden of being assumed to be morally inferior. And this not-so-great expectation is reinforced by ongoing, massive legal discrimination.
It's so incredibly obvious to me that separate can never be equal. "Allowing" gay or lesbian couples "civil unions" isn't a generous gesture, it's a means for the condescending majority to reinforce the idea that their partnerships are at best less than marriages. What presumption! We in the United States are raised with the notion that our country is the best, in every way. Right. The truth of the matter is that a goodly number of industrialized Western nations, including our neighbor to the north, Canada, are light-years ahead of us in terms of eliminating legalized bigotry against gays and lesbians. In much of Canada, gays and lesbians have been able to marry for years. They can also marry in Spain, home of the Spanish Inquisition! And even Britain, from which we inherited much of our knee-jerk homophobia, has dropped any form of "gay ban" in its armed forces. I had to laugh when I read that an American reporter covering a story about "gay integration" in the Dutch army -- Holland is another nation that's way ahead of us on this score -- asked some Dutch soldiers if they weren't concerned about having to share a tent with their openly gay captain. "Sure," they answered. "He snores!"
Sometimes I get very frustrated with my beloved country. There's so much blinkered religious dogma, unconsidered, self-righteous bigotry, an apparent total unwillingness to stop wasting energy on labeling, segregating and hurting people because of how and whom they love. Just think what we could do if we had all the energy at our disposal that's now being squandered on policing gender boundaries, trying to enact legislation that actually worsens legalized discrimination. Why do people think they should be able to force anyone "different" to live a lie, either depriving them of rights or making what limited rights they do have (or their ability to keep their job, live in their home, etc.) contingent on how well they pretend to be someone they're not? It's exactly as Harry Truman (not a past U.S. president I entirely love, but a man with a lot of good sense) said about racial discrimination: "For every black man you want to keep in the gutter, there'll have to be a white man in the gutter to keep him there." We need to wake up and realize that as long as our society continues to prescribe second-class status for gays and lesbians, and preach hate at them, the whole of the society will remain much less than it could be. Time to stop judging by sexual preference or orientation, and start setting our sights on the goal of making ourselves better individuals and making our country the truly great place it might become.
Showing posts with label dualism. Show all posts
Showing posts with label dualism. Show all posts
Monday, April 6, 2009
Sunday, November 30, 2008
Patriarchy and Dualism: Anti-Liberty, Anti-Life
This is an excerpt from a presentation I made a few years ago at a national conference:
Patriarchy literally means “the rule of the fathers,” and its core concept is the idea that all men are born superior to all women. As Shulamith Firestone put it in her classic book, The Dialectic of Sex, this sexual class system, which in its purest form demands the literal enslavement of women and girls [see Nicholas Kristof's editorial in today's (11/30/08) New York Times on the prevalence of throwing acid in women's faces to punish them and keep them down in Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc., if you think female slavery is over], serves as the model for all other systems of oppression, such as racism and homophobia.
The key mode of patriarchy is domination. Scholar Riane Eisler has named patriarchy “dominator culture.” Dominator culture can conceive of power in only one form, as “Power Over” others. Every imaginable relationship, including that between parent and child, and that between lovers or spouses, is defined in terms of dominance and submission. Someone has to be “on top,” and someone else has to be “on the bottom.”
To make it easier to achieve this, dominator culture is saturated with dualism, a mode of thinking we are taught from the cradle. Dualism insists that everything boils down to an either/or choice – that you can never have your cake and eat it too. There are only two acceptable or possible answers to any given question, and these two answers are literally poles apart: polarized. They’re opposites. One answer is labeled entirely right and good, and the other is seen as entirely wrong and bad. Needless to say, dualism makes for gross over-simplifications and generalizations, and twists and distorts everything it touches. With a little bit of imagination, in most instances one can perceive a much broader spectrum of choices, and often more than a single option could be embraced. But that wouldn’t fit with the system of “tops” and “bottoms,” where one thing must always be “better” than another.
Patriarchal religions are used to justify and preach this system, and to legitimize the persecution and often extermination of those who resist it, both inside and outside a given culture. For the first two thousand years or so of patriarchy, these religions featured both Gods and Goddesses, but the “top god” in patriarchal religion was always male. The Goddesses were defined as wives, sisters, mothers, love interests or daughters of the male gods, to make sure that ordinary women didn’t get any ideas about freeing themselves from being defined as the possessions of men. For some patriarchs this didn’t go far enough, so about three thousand years ago they started to preach that there was only one god: male, of course. Eventually, several different religions of this type: male monotheism: developed. My friend the feminist art historian calls it “mono-male-theism.” However you prefer to arrange the syllables, the term proclaims: “Just For Men.”
Patriarchy has been with us in the West – Europe and North America – for only about 5,000 years, give or take half a millennium or so. Human beings have existed for much longer than that: hundreds of thousands of years. Patriarchy entered a Europe where many other cultures already existed, cultures that operated with a very different kind of mind-set. These were what Riane Eisler calls “partnership societies.” Partnership societies were quite cooperative and evolved, with high levels of creative sophistication. Their social structures were generally matrilineal – that is, children traced their descent through their mother back to her mother and so forth. These cultures were comparatively non-violent: they did not “focus on the power to inflict pain and kill, but the power to give life and pleasure.”[i] Their religions centered around a Goddess. The earliest European and Middle Eastern images of the Divine Female are up to 400,000 years old.
These partnership cultures were not in the dark about how babies are conceived: they were aware of both the male and the female role in reproduction. Partnership spirituality usually thought of “the divine in both female and male form,” but “the male deities were not associated with thunderbolts or weapons (like Jehovah or Zeus)” and they were, at most, equal to the Goddesses. In partnership cultures, “masculinity was not synonymous with domination and conquest.”[ii]
Patriarchy is a recent human invention. Despite what its religions preach, it is not natural, it is not inevitable, and it has never been “the only thing that’s out there.” There are alternatives to it, and all human-made systems can be changed. In the relatively brief span of its existence, patriarchy has already gone just about the whole way toward proving itself unviable. This comes easily to dominator culture because it is fundamentally “anti-life,” so anti-life that it has made uncounted life-forms extinct and now threatens even the survival of the human species.
Dominator religions preach the unlimited exploitation of our planet Earth, proclaiming that the world was created for “man” to use, and use up if he so chooses, since some otherworldly Heaven or Paradise is his “real home.” Their expectation is that “mankind” will end by causing global disaster, that human beings are incapable of self-control and common sense. In my local paper in May 2002, one Mike Hosey, a Christian, confidently stated:
“Christianity, in general, believes the world to be a lost and dying place in need of salvation; a place where people need to put their faith in God, and not in themselves.”[iii]
I totally disagree with this view of the world and of humanity, and I believe there is real reason for hope. As Riane Eisler points out, in the West, over the past 300 years and more, a historical continuum has developed that is moving us away from absolute dominator culture.[iv] In the 17th and 18th centuries, the “divinely ordained” rule of kings and emperors over their “subjects” was challenged and largely overthrown. The early feminist movement in the 19th century chipped away at the control of men over women and children, while the abolitionist movement and pacifist movement challenged the entrenched traditions of the enslavement of one race by another, and the use of force by one nation to control another. In the past 100-plus years, civil rights, organized labor, anti-colonial, women’s liberation, indigenous people’s rights, and gay rights movements have arisen to oppose further aspects of domination. A relatively new and very important movement is now taking a stand against domination and violence in intimate relationships: rape, battering, child abuse and incest. Putting an end to intimate violence is central to moving toward a partnership society.
There is no mistaking that this “shift toward partnership has been fiercely resisted every step of the way.”[v] But if you look at the overall trend, we have moved a long distance away from all-out domination and toward partnership in a relatively short time. We are presently in a backlash phase, what Eisler calls a “periodic regression toward the dominator model.”[vi] Yet the irony of globalization is that the world has become so small that people cannot really avoid the knowledge of our mutual world-wide interdependence. We are being forced out of the denial that is typical of dominator culture by phenomena we cannot ignore, such as global warming. The world’s systems of domination are only able to escalate these problems, and as a result it is becoming inescapably obvious that these systems are counter-productive.
[i] Eisler, The Power of Partnership, p. 189
[ii] Eisler, p. 189
[iii] Mike Hosey, in an editorial on the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church, The Gainesville Sun, May 20, 2002.
[iv] Eisler, pp. 94-95.
[v] Eisler, p. 95.
[vi] Eisler, p. 95.
Patriarchy literally means “the rule of the fathers,” and its core concept is the idea that all men are born superior to all women. As Shulamith Firestone put it in her classic book, The Dialectic of Sex, this sexual class system, which in its purest form demands the literal enslavement of women and girls [see Nicholas Kristof's editorial in today's (11/30/08) New York Times on the prevalence of throwing acid in women's faces to punish them and keep them down in Pakistan, Afghanistan, etc., if you think female slavery is over], serves as the model for all other systems of oppression, such as racism and homophobia.
The key mode of patriarchy is domination. Scholar Riane Eisler has named patriarchy “dominator culture.” Dominator culture can conceive of power in only one form, as “Power Over” others. Every imaginable relationship, including that between parent and child, and that between lovers or spouses, is defined in terms of dominance and submission. Someone has to be “on top,” and someone else has to be “on the bottom.”
To make it easier to achieve this, dominator culture is saturated with dualism, a mode of thinking we are taught from the cradle. Dualism insists that everything boils down to an either/or choice – that you can never have your cake and eat it too. There are only two acceptable or possible answers to any given question, and these two answers are literally poles apart: polarized. They’re opposites. One answer is labeled entirely right and good, and the other is seen as entirely wrong and bad. Needless to say, dualism makes for gross over-simplifications and generalizations, and twists and distorts everything it touches. With a little bit of imagination, in most instances one can perceive a much broader spectrum of choices, and often more than a single option could be embraced. But that wouldn’t fit with the system of “tops” and “bottoms,” where one thing must always be “better” than another.
Patriarchal religions are used to justify and preach this system, and to legitimize the persecution and often extermination of those who resist it, both inside and outside a given culture. For the first two thousand years or so of patriarchy, these religions featured both Gods and Goddesses, but the “top god” in patriarchal religion was always male. The Goddesses were defined as wives, sisters, mothers, love interests or daughters of the male gods, to make sure that ordinary women didn’t get any ideas about freeing themselves from being defined as the possessions of men. For some patriarchs this didn’t go far enough, so about three thousand years ago they started to preach that there was only one god: male, of course. Eventually, several different religions of this type: male monotheism: developed. My friend the feminist art historian calls it “mono-male-theism.” However you prefer to arrange the syllables, the term proclaims: “Just For Men.”
Patriarchy has been with us in the West – Europe and North America – for only about 5,000 years, give or take half a millennium or so. Human beings have existed for much longer than that: hundreds of thousands of years. Patriarchy entered a Europe where many other cultures already existed, cultures that operated with a very different kind of mind-set. These were what Riane Eisler calls “partnership societies.” Partnership societies were quite cooperative and evolved, with high levels of creative sophistication. Their social structures were generally matrilineal – that is, children traced their descent through their mother back to her mother and so forth. These cultures were comparatively non-violent: they did not “focus on the power to inflict pain and kill, but the power to give life and pleasure.”[i] Their religions centered around a Goddess. The earliest European and Middle Eastern images of the Divine Female are up to 400,000 years old.
These partnership cultures were not in the dark about how babies are conceived: they were aware of both the male and the female role in reproduction. Partnership spirituality usually thought of “the divine in both female and male form,” but “the male deities were not associated with thunderbolts or weapons (like Jehovah or Zeus)” and they were, at most, equal to the Goddesses. In partnership cultures, “masculinity was not synonymous with domination and conquest.”[ii]
Patriarchy is a recent human invention. Despite what its religions preach, it is not natural, it is not inevitable, and it has never been “the only thing that’s out there.” There are alternatives to it, and all human-made systems can be changed. In the relatively brief span of its existence, patriarchy has already gone just about the whole way toward proving itself unviable. This comes easily to dominator culture because it is fundamentally “anti-life,” so anti-life that it has made uncounted life-forms extinct and now threatens even the survival of the human species.
Dominator religions preach the unlimited exploitation of our planet Earth, proclaiming that the world was created for “man” to use, and use up if he so chooses, since some otherworldly Heaven or Paradise is his “real home.” Their expectation is that “mankind” will end by causing global disaster, that human beings are incapable of self-control and common sense. In my local paper in May 2002, one Mike Hosey, a Christian, confidently stated:
“Christianity, in general, believes the world to be a lost and dying place in need of salvation; a place where people need to put their faith in God, and not in themselves.”[iii]
I totally disagree with this view of the world and of humanity, and I believe there is real reason for hope. As Riane Eisler points out, in the West, over the past 300 years and more, a historical continuum has developed that is moving us away from absolute dominator culture.[iv] In the 17th and 18th centuries, the “divinely ordained” rule of kings and emperors over their “subjects” was challenged and largely overthrown. The early feminist movement in the 19th century chipped away at the control of men over women and children, while the abolitionist movement and pacifist movement challenged the entrenched traditions of the enslavement of one race by another, and the use of force by one nation to control another. In the past 100-plus years, civil rights, organized labor, anti-colonial, women’s liberation, indigenous people’s rights, and gay rights movements have arisen to oppose further aspects of domination. A relatively new and very important movement is now taking a stand against domination and violence in intimate relationships: rape, battering, child abuse and incest. Putting an end to intimate violence is central to moving toward a partnership society.
There is no mistaking that this “shift toward partnership has been fiercely resisted every step of the way.”[v] But if you look at the overall trend, we have moved a long distance away from all-out domination and toward partnership in a relatively short time. We are presently in a backlash phase, what Eisler calls a “periodic regression toward the dominator model.”[vi] Yet the irony of globalization is that the world has become so small that people cannot really avoid the knowledge of our mutual world-wide interdependence. We are being forced out of the denial that is typical of dominator culture by phenomena we cannot ignore, such as global warming. The world’s systems of domination are only able to escalate these problems, and as a result it is becoming inescapably obvious that these systems are counter-productive.
[i] Eisler, The Power of Partnership, p. 189
[ii] Eisler, p. 189
[iii] Mike Hosey, in an editorial on the sexual abuse scandal in the Roman Catholic church, The Gainesville Sun, May 20, 2002.
[iv] Eisler, pp. 94-95.
[v] Eisler, p. 95.
[vi] Eisler, p. 95.
Saturday, November 29, 2008
On Marriage, continued
Something just struck me. I wrote in an earlier post about my objections to women taking their husbands' names upon marriage. Well, in one way this connects with my problems with societal homophobia. I believe that people are capable of remembering two or even more family names in connection with a single family unit, but many of them just aren't familiar with the concept and therefore bridle at it, or would rather be mentally lazy and slap the same label on both spouses and their kids. And many, whether consciously or subconsciously, subscribe to the idea that a woman should "be subsumed into" her husband upon marriage, as is the will of patriarchy.
Now, gay and lesbian couples are (blessedly, in my opinion -- they're a breath of fresh air within the New York Times Sunday Styles wedding announcements, see earlier post) very likely to include two or more names in their family unit. So maybe gay and lesbian couples are in somewhat of the same boat with heterosexual couples who retain two names instead of shoehorning both partners in under one name. Many folks claim they "can't handle it" when the truth often is, they don't want to handle it. They're using nomenclature as a means of social compulsion, to make straight women who want to maintain their independence, and gays and lesbians, disappear.
Of course it's not as simple as that. Homophobia is still far more socially acceptable than misogyny. Though misogyny remains too socially acceptable on its own account, if a straight woman, and her male partner, are willing to take on the extra work needful to make the world at large recognize the fact that they each have their own surname even though they're married, they can usually get pretty much everyone to go along with it. Some people may be obnoxious about it, and even attack you personally if they feel threatened enough, but if you don't cede ground, all but a handful will back down. Unfortunately, the same is not true for gays and lesbians seeking the plain old right to marry, much less recognition as a married couple. A straight woman who insists on her own name may get guff, but she won't get beaten up or killed. Gays and lesbians who refuse to pretend to be who they're not may actually get beaten up or killed, or lose their jobs, or be denied housing, or lose custody of their children... and a lot of other unpleasant, wrong and dangerous things. Not to mention that they run a very good chance of being abandoned, rejected and/or abused by their very own family members.
This is a strange time. We've managed to go a little ways toward getting past sexism and racism in our political choices, but at the same time, there's this "renaissance" (I would say recidivist slide) of women ostentatiously "taking their husband's names," and, far worse, a spate of benighted anti-gay legislation which has gone so far as to re-write state constitutions to deny the right of marriage to a specific group (on the basis of sexual orientation or preference), and also to deny the option of domestic partnership to heterosexuals who don't want to legally marry. The effect on my state, Florida, is catastrophic. First there's the despicable homophobia and anti-American tenor of the constitutional amendment passed here. And then there are the disastrous consequences for our senior-citizen-heavy population. Many single seniors live together without marriage because marrying means losing a significant part of their already pathetic Social Security benefits. Now they face not being able to register as domestic partners, which means they have no rights if a partner gets sick, no access to a partner's health benefits, etc. etc. Sickening.
Let me be clear on one point. If a woman desperately wants to change her name upon marriage, it's a free country. But the overwhelming trend of women "taking their husbands' names" is an ongoing expression of a pretty clearly discernible, long-standing patriarchal sentiment, which is that women are here to support and enable men (and children), and not to lead lives of their own or have goals of their own. This system has not redounded to the psychological or economic benefit of homemakers, whose vital work I think should be explicitly part of the Gross Domestic Product. Full-time homemakers of either gender should be awarded Social Security in their own right, not as derivatives of their spouses, and ideally, they should be officially allotted a given share of the annual family income, so they never have to beg, cajole or manipulate in order to get their hands on spending money. And don't get me going on so-called "no-fault" divorce, which seems to assume that someone who hasn't held a paid job for years can somehow jump right back into paid work! What very few people realize is that only about 15% of women who divorce are awarded ANY alimony at all, and as for child support, the frequency with which men skip out on paying it is disgusting.
But I digress. Which I do tend to do. To get back to the resistance of the larger society to both "two-name" heterosexual marriage and, far more aggravatedly, gay/lesbian marriage: of course, what both these options do is to undermine the paradigm of patriarchal marriage. They offer models of marriage that go against gender-role assumptions and assume equal partnerships instead of complementarity. A large percentage of our fellow citizens don't want to see, and don't want their children to see, that there are quite a few different ways to do coupledom, including ones which don't necessarily involve hierarchy, dominance/submission, procreation, or the "disappearing" of one partner into another. They want to force everyone into "one-size-fits-all" (it never does) gender roles and marriage molds, ones they find familiar and comforting, ones that don't require individual thought and don't necessitate the taking of individual responsibility or individual stands.
This is intimately connected to our culture's love of dualism, the idea that there are only two answers to any given question, one labeled "right" and one labeled "wrong." Every situation is reduced to an "either-or" choice, with no option labeled "both-and." More on this next time.
Now, gay and lesbian couples are (blessedly, in my opinion -- they're a breath of fresh air within the New York Times Sunday Styles wedding announcements, see earlier post) very likely to include two or more names in their family unit. So maybe gay and lesbian couples are in somewhat of the same boat with heterosexual couples who retain two names instead of shoehorning both partners in under one name. Many folks claim they "can't handle it" when the truth often is, they don't want to handle it. They're using nomenclature as a means of social compulsion, to make straight women who want to maintain their independence, and gays and lesbians, disappear.
Of course it's not as simple as that. Homophobia is still far more socially acceptable than misogyny. Though misogyny remains too socially acceptable on its own account, if a straight woman, and her male partner, are willing to take on the extra work needful to make the world at large recognize the fact that they each have their own surname even though they're married, they can usually get pretty much everyone to go along with it. Some people may be obnoxious about it, and even attack you personally if they feel threatened enough, but if you don't cede ground, all but a handful will back down. Unfortunately, the same is not true for gays and lesbians seeking the plain old right to marry, much less recognition as a married couple. A straight woman who insists on her own name may get guff, but she won't get beaten up or killed. Gays and lesbians who refuse to pretend to be who they're not may actually get beaten up or killed, or lose their jobs, or be denied housing, or lose custody of their children... and a lot of other unpleasant, wrong and dangerous things. Not to mention that they run a very good chance of being abandoned, rejected and/or abused by their very own family members.
This is a strange time. We've managed to go a little ways toward getting past sexism and racism in our political choices, but at the same time, there's this "renaissance" (I would say recidivist slide) of women ostentatiously "taking their husband's names," and, far worse, a spate of benighted anti-gay legislation which has gone so far as to re-write state constitutions to deny the right of marriage to a specific group (on the basis of sexual orientation or preference), and also to deny the option of domestic partnership to heterosexuals who don't want to legally marry. The effect on my state, Florida, is catastrophic. First there's the despicable homophobia and anti-American tenor of the constitutional amendment passed here. And then there are the disastrous consequences for our senior-citizen-heavy population. Many single seniors live together without marriage because marrying means losing a significant part of their already pathetic Social Security benefits. Now they face not being able to register as domestic partners, which means they have no rights if a partner gets sick, no access to a partner's health benefits, etc. etc. Sickening.
Let me be clear on one point. If a woman desperately wants to change her name upon marriage, it's a free country. But the overwhelming trend of women "taking their husbands' names" is an ongoing expression of a pretty clearly discernible, long-standing patriarchal sentiment, which is that women are here to support and enable men (and children), and not to lead lives of their own or have goals of their own. This system has not redounded to the psychological or economic benefit of homemakers, whose vital work I think should be explicitly part of the Gross Domestic Product. Full-time homemakers of either gender should be awarded Social Security in their own right, not as derivatives of their spouses, and ideally, they should be officially allotted a given share of the annual family income, so they never have to beg, cajole or manipulate in order to get their hands on spending money. And don't get me going on so-called "no-fault" divorce, which seems to assume that someone who hasn't held a paid job for years can somehow jump right back into paid work! What very few people realize is that only about 15% of women who divorce are awarded ANY alimony at all, and as for child support, the frequency with which men skip out on paying it is disgusting.
But I digress. Which I do tend to do. To get back to the resistance of the larger society to both "two-name" heterosexual marriage and, far more aggravatedly, gay/lesbian marriage: of course, what both these options do is to undermine the paradigm of patriarchal marriage. They offer models of marriage that go against gender-role assumptions and assume equal partnerships instead of complementarity. A large percentage of our fellow citizens don't want to see, and don't want their children to see, that there are quite a few different ways to do coupledom, including ones which don't necessarily involve hierarchy, dominance/submission, procreation, or the "disappearing" of one partner into another. They want to force everyone into "one-size-fits-all" (it never does) gender roles and marriage molds, ones they find familiar and comforting, ones that don't require individual thought and don't necessitate the taking of individual responsibility or individual stands.
This is intimately connected to our culture's love of dualism, the idea that there are only two answers to any given question, one labeled "right" and one labeled "wrong." Every situation is reduced to an "either-or" choice, with no option labeled "both-and." More on this next time.
Sunday, November 23, 2008
An Introduction to (Neo-)Paganism
Here's a brief piece I wrote for a panel discussion at a college reunion, almost ten years ago:
Starting in 1991, I came back to the belief system I think I was born with. It's called Goddess spirituality, eco-spirituality, eco-feminism -- the big, catch-all term is Neo-Paganism. None of these names fit completely, and some of the words are given a negative spin by popular culture.
It's partly rooted in ever-growing amounts of archaeological evidence of non-patriarchal pre-Christian cultures in Africa, Asia, and Europe. These societies, which existed for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, were egalitarian, co-operative, highly creative and largely peaceful. They saw the spark of the divine in everything living, and when they personified this divine essence, they called it Goddess -- later, they also called it God.
For me, it's also a personal re-connection to remembered moments in my childhood, experiences of wonder, times when I felt good about myself and the whole world, energized, 100 per cent alive.
But it's not all “going back.” My belief system rejects dualism, the idea that something must be either "this" or "that" -- so it can reach back and look forward at the same time. Neo-Paganism makes no claim to being some "authentic" revival of specific beliefs from 3,500 or more years ago. After all, it's Neo-Paganism, and it's about living in this, present world. It's about remaining aware of both the wider world, and the specific places we each live in: their seasons, climate, and geography, and the needs of that particular community. Because we insist on honoring where we are, what we come from and what we've become a part of, Neo-Pagans come in at least as many flavors as Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream -- but we DO share some basic principles.
First, to Neo-Pagans, the divine is immanent, NOT transcendent. It's not somewhere "above" us humans and the rest of the world, or "out there" -- it IS, and it IS in EVERYTHING, including us. All creation is born of a Great Mother and is part of Her substance, so everything is connected.
Second, Neo-Pagans accept no cast-in-stone hierarchies, and no all-powerful gurus. It's a woman-positive belief system -- for example, since we believe in Goddess, we can't well question women's right to be priestesses -- but it's not a belief system for women only. For men and women, Neo-Paganism gives the opportunity to explore and integrate all aspects of one's personality, to "think outside the box." We're also called to live in the body -- live juicy and messy, without denying the body and the emotions, without seeing the mind and spirit as separate from the body, superior or somehow more "pure." I believe I get one life, one wonderful gift, one chance to experience this beautiful world, through the medium of my body -- and I am grateful to my body, and love it.
At the same time, Neo-Paganism is a very demanding belief system. It's not about unlimited license or moral relativism. The one binding rule, the Wiccan Rede, could be called "How to be Stricter than the Ten Commandments in Eight Words or Less." It says, "IF you harm NONE, do as you will." Think about it. I am to harm nothing -- not myself, or anyone or anything else. So I'm required to "live lightly on the earth", to be constantly aware of the obvious and not so obvious impact of my actions. I have to take responsibility for everything I do, and examine and recognize the amazing power of my intentions and my expectations.
You can see why this is unlikely to become a majority religion! It's a lifelong learning process, without any promise of a future repeat performance. But it suits me, and quite a few others: there are now [1999] at least 200,000 Neo-Pagans in the United States alone.
Starting in 1991, I came back to the belief system I think I was born with. It's called Goddess spirituality, eco-spirituality, eco-feminism -- the big, catch-all term is Neo-Paganism. None of these names fit completely, and some of the words are given a negative spin by popular culture.
It's partly rooted in ever-growing amounts of archaeological evidence of non-patriarchal pre-Christian cultures in Africa, Asia, and Europe. These societies, which existed for hundreds, sometimes thousands of years, were egalitarian, co-operative, highly creative and largely peaceful. They saw the spark of the divine in everything living, and when they personified this divine essence, they called it Goddess -- later, they also called it God.
For me, it's also a personal re-connection to remembered moments in my childhood, experiences of wonder, times when I felt good about myself and the whole world, energized, 100 per cent alive.
But it's not all “going back.” My belief system rejects dualism, the idea that something must be either "this" or "that" -- so it can reach back and look forward at the same time. Neo-Paganism makes no claim to being some "authentic" revival of specific beliefs from 3,500 or more years ago. After all, it's Neo-Paganism, and it's about living in this, present world. It's about remaining aware of both the wider world, and the specific places we each live in: their seasons, climate, and geography, and the needs of that particular community. Because we insist on honoring where we are, what we come from and what we've become a part of, Neo-Pagans come in at least as many flavors as Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream -- but we DO share some basic principles.
First, to Neo-Pagans, the divine is immanent, NOT transcendent. It's not somewhere "above" us humans and the rest of the world, or "out there" -- it IS, and it IS in EVERYTHING, including us. All creation is born of a Great Mother and is part of Her substance, so everything is connected.
Second, Neo-Pagans accept no cast-in-stone hierarchies, and no all-powerful gurus. It's a woman-positive belief system -- for example, since we believe in Goddess, we can't well question women's right to be priestesses -- but it's not a belief system for women only. For men and women, Neo-Paganism gives the opportunity to explore and integrate all aspects of one's personality, to "think outside the box." We're also called to live in the body -- live juicy and messy, without denying the body and the emotions, without seeing the mind and spirit as separate from the body, superior or somehow more "pure." I believe I get one life, one wonderful gift, one chance to experience this beautiful world, through the medium of my body -- and I am grateful to my body, and love it.
At the same time, Neo-Paganism is a very demanding belief system. It's not about unlimited license or moral relativism. The one binding rule, the Wiccan Rede, could be called "How to be Stricter than the Ten Commandments in Eight Words or Less." It says, "IF you harm NONE, do as you will." Think about it. I am to harm nothing -- not myself, or anyone or anything else. So I'm required to "live lightly on the earth", to be constantly aware of the obvious and not so obvious impact of my actions. I have to take responsibility for everything I do, and examine and recognize the amazing power of my intentions and my expectations.
You can see why this is unlikely to become a majority religion! It's a lifelong learning process, without any promise of a future repeat performance. But it suits me, and quite a few others: there are now [1999] at least 200,000 Neo-Pagans in the United States alone.
Saturday, November 22, 2008
More Thoughts on Faustian Questions
To go along with what I just posted about the afterlife, here are a few more thoughts generated by my viewing of "The Damnation of Faust" this afternoon at the movie theatre. An aside: nothing is more civilized than going to an opera broadcast with friends, a bar of decadent dark chocolate, some prosciutto sandwiches and a thermos of home-made mulled wine, all enjoyed in the obscurity of one's movie seat without disturbing anyone around you. But nothing is more annoying than people who talk nonstop during such a broadcast, displaying the bad habits they've developed in front of their TV sets at home. We put the kibosh on that when it popped up in our immediate vicinity, but continued to be disturbed by folks farther away yammering on and on. Augh!
One of the great themes of the Faustian drama is, of course, Faust's restless boredom with all that ordinary life has to offer, his demand for omniscience, omnipotence, eternal youth. There are many stories that reiterate this theme, from the fairytale of "The Fisherman and his Wife," one of the rare instances in which it is a woman who wants to be God, to John Adams' new opera "Dr. Atomic," already mentioned in a previous post, in which the "man who would be God" is Robert Oppenheimer.
Hand in hand with the impossible demand for unlimited power and personal immortality goes the (usually male) impossible demand for the perfect, pure partner. As soon as the love object has been sexually enjoyed and thus polluted, or displays any normal human failings, it (usually she) is summarily jettisoned. In the same essay I quoted in my previous post, I explored this dynamic as acted out by the 9/11 hijackers:
"[The] Islamic notion of paradise, somewhat less ethereal than the Christian one and geared to satisfy the imaginations of hyper-patriarchal males, is a magnet for the terroristically inclined. In a September article in the online Asia Times, Arif Jamal, an expert on jihad or Islamic holy war, points out the incentives the Koran offers to men willing to be mujihadeen (holy warriors):
"'The mujahideen [are] assured of entering Paradise before the first drop of their blood [falls] to earth... The martyrs are promised 72 houris [each] in Paradise. These houris [perpetual virgins, black-eyed and nubile] are more beautiful than all the beauties of the world combined. I have studied more than 600 wills of mujahideen... There is hardly any will that escapes this concept. All the mujahideen have mentioned the houris as an important incentive for waging jihad. The Paradise with houris is the prime objective of these mujahideen... they refuse to get married because they want to get married in Paradise.'
"In his final instructions to them, apparent September 11 hijacker-in-chief Mohammed Atta reassured his fellow fanatics, 'You should feel complete tranquillity, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.' When Palestinians commit a suicide bombing in Israel, their deaths are announced in Palestinian newspapers as weddings: 'The Wedding of the Martyr Ali Khadr Al-Yassini to the Black-Eyed in Eternal Paradise.' (NY Times Sunday Magazine 10/28/01, "What Makes a Suicide Bomber?" p. 51.)
"But these young men aren't committing murder-suicide simply to get sex. Certainly not sex as we know it. The 72 houris are part of a whole package promised to each [male] martyr, which includes guaranteed ever-lasting heaven, no pain, no death, no judgement day. The most important thing about the houris is that they are perpetual virgins. Flesh-and-blood women can never aspire to such purity: they are considered innately evil and seductive, permanently sullied by their menstrual bleeding and even more defiled and devalued once they have been sexually "used." By contrast, a man can have as much contact as he wants with a houri without being contaminated by the filth of mortal femaleness.
"It all hangs together: an obsession with impossible purity, hatred and fear of real women, of the dirt and imperfection of real life, even of one's own physicality, one's own body. Mohammed Atta's last will and testament stipulates that no woman be allowed to mourn him, attend his funeral or even go near his grave. He disdained his own body so much that he stipulated that the man who was to wash his genitals after his death wear gloves, so his impure sexual parts would theoretically remain untouched.
"But let's not kid ourselves that this thought complex is the exclusive property of Islamic fundamentalists. Consider orthodox Judaism, which demands that women cleanse themselves of their menstrual pollution each month, and be banned from synagogue for twice as long after the birth of a female child as after the birth of a male. Any man who touches a menstruating woman has to ritually purify himself and still remains unclean until sunset that day; if he has sex with a menstruating woman, he is unclean for a week.
"As for Christianity, early "church father" Tertullian (ca. AD 200) makes it clear: '[W]oman [is] the obstacle to purity, the temptress, the enemy...her body is the gate of hell.' The all-male Catholic church hierarchy couldn't stand the thought that Mary, mother of Jesus, might be a normal, fleshly woman. So the New Testament mentions of Jesus's younger siblings are explained away, to make sure no-one dares think she actually had sex with her husband Joseph, and by the mid-19th century, she was declared a perpetual virgin. Just like the houris.
"It's a given in male-monotheist religions: the immaculate super-woman, a figment of the imagination, is set up as an impossible standard that "standard-issue" women can never meet. This fills women with despair and self-hatred, while men may cultivate exaggerated expectations, sure to be disappointed.
"I could write a Ph.D. dissertation about how male-monotheist cultures associate women with the body, the emotions, what is "lower," and "nature," while men are associated with the soul, the intellect, what is "higher," and "culture." (If you want to read a really good feminist book on this subject, try Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, or Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity.)
"Of course, all the dualistic nonsense about the desirability of a mind-body split and greater female fleshliness automatically conferring superiority on males is unadulterated baloney. Emotions and states of mind don't have a gender, and various quantities of all of them are parcelled out to every human being. As for the supposed ideals of pure mind and pure spirit, our marvelous brains are organs of the body, and if the rest of the body doesn't function, the brain is kaputt! Without the senses, we would be incapable of experiencing or learning anything. No emotion: no joy. About as appealing as the stereotypical heaven I heard about as a child.
I wonder why so many men, and not a few women, presume to despise the miracle of our one life on this earth, and spend the precious days allotted to them bewailing having been born at all, focused monomaniacally on the supposed flaws of embodied living. Mohammed Atta is certainly not alone in his self-hatred, misogyny and contempt for all the world. Variants of that attitude are thickly strewn throughout all male-monotheist belief systems. Atta's will warned people (by which term he meant men) not to be "distracted" by life, to fear God and not allow themselves to be "fooled" by the things life on earth offers. I am completely baffled by someone who thinks the emotion we should feel toward the force behind our creation is fear.
"Of course, this whole line is easier to swallow if you are someone with few perceived options in life, or are unhappy or dissatisfied with your position in the hierarchy you believe the world should embody. Which also links up to why I feel haunted by the afterlife, for the belief in an individual, personal, eternal ever-after, in either "heaven" or "hell," has been used for thousands of years by ruling classes of whatever ilk as a rationale for oppression and exploitation of the vast majority of people. If "the meek" -- read the poor, the disadvantaged, the put-upon -- really believe it will be "their turn" in some vague, glorious post-apocalyptic by-and-by, they are far more likely to resign themselves to the inferior, unpleasant place they occupy during what they think is just their present round on the planet. Karl Marx was wrong about a number of things, but he was right when he said that religion -- or at least the spectre of the afterlife -- is the opium of the people.
"Opium, carrot, and stick as well. A lot of folks believe we can't "be good" unless the carrot of "heaven" and the stick of "hell" are constantly dangled before our eyes. Now I don't think that we're all pre-programmed for saccharine-sweetness, but the vast majority of us can learn to view ourselves as okay individuals, treat others with basic courtesy and take responsibility for our own actions. As one clever T-shirt saying has it, "No child is born a bigot": instead, we absorb the plupart of our problematic thought patterns from our environment. I'll tell you what believing I have only one go-around does for me. It has helped me go from being a type A with a vengeance to an A minus who takes time to appreciate the world around me every day and is moving toward acting out of understanding and joy rather than anger and despair. For some reason, a lot of folks think that if we allow ourselves to accept that we have just one life, we'll drown ourselves in heedless hedonism. Instead, that acceptance motivates me to try to be my best self, to want to make right what I've done wrong, make amends for my mistakes, and do all this with some consistency and promptitude. I still drop the ball quite regularly, but because I can draw strength and pleasure from my connection to everything around me, I stay pretty much on course. "
Needless to say, these will not be my last words on this subject! Stay tuned!
One of the great themes of the Faustian drama is, of course, Faust's restless boredom with all that ordinary life has to offer, his demand for omniscience, omnipotence, eternal youth. There are many stories that reiterate this theme, from the fairytale of "The Fisherman and his Wife," one of the rare instances in which it is a woman who wants to be God, to John Adams' new opera "Dr. Atomic," already mentioned in a previous post, in which the "man who would be God" is Robert Oppenheimer.
Hand in hand with the impossible demand for unlimited power and personal immortality goes the (usually male) impossible demand for the perfect, pure partner. As soon as the love object has been sexually enjoyed and thus polluted, or displays any normal human failings, it (usually she) is summarily jettisoned. In the same essay I quoted in my previous post, I explored this dynamic as acted out by the 9/11 hijackers:
"[The] Islamic notion of paradise, somewhat less ethereal than the Christian one and geared to satisfy the imaginations of hyper-patriarchal males, is a magnet for the terroristically inclined. In a September article in the online Asia Times, Arif Jamal, an expert on jihad or Islamic holy war, points out the incentives the Koran offers to men willing to be mujihadeen (holy warriors):
"'The mujahideen [are] assured of entering Paradise before the first drop of their blood [falls] to earth... The martyrs are promised 72 houris [each] in Paradise. These houris [perpetual virgins, black-eyed and nubile] are more beautiful than all the beauties of the world combined. I have studied more than 600 wills of mujahideen... There is hardly any will that escapes this concept. All the mujahideen have mentioned the houris as an important incentive for waging jihad. The Paradise with houris is the prime objective of these mujahideen... they refuse to get married because they want to get married in Paradise.'
"In his final instructions to them, apparent September 11 hijacker-in-chief Mohammed Atta reassured his fellow fanatics, 'You should feel complete tranquillity, because the time between you and your marriage in heaven is very short.' When Palestinians commit a suicide bombing in Israel, their deaths are announced in Palestinian newspapers as weddings: 'The Wedding of the Martyr Ali Khadr Al-Yassini to the Black-Eyed in Eternal Paradise.' (NY Times Sunday Magazine 10/28/01, "What Makes a Suicide Bomber?" p. 51.)
"But these young men aren't committing murder-suicide simply to get sex. Certainly not sex as we know it. The 72 houris are part of a whole package promised to each [male] martyr, which includes guaranteed ever-lasting heaven, no pain, no death, no judgement day. The most important thing about the houris is that they are perpetual virgins. Flesh-and-blood women can never aspire to such purity: they are considered innately evil and seductive, permanently sullied by their menstrual bleeding and even more defiled and devalued once they have been sexually "used." By contrast, a man can have as much contact as he wants with a houri without being contaminated by the filth of mortal femaleness.
"It all hangs together: an obsession with impossible purity, hatred and fear of real women, of the dirt and imperfection of real life, even of one's own physicality, one's own body. Mohammed Atta's last will and testament stipulates that no woman be allowed to mourn him, attend his funeral or even go near his grave. He disdained his own body so much that he stipulated that the man who was to wash his genitals after his death wear gloves, so his impure sexual parts would theoretically remain untouched.
"But let's not kid ourselves that this thought complex is the exclusive property of Islamic fundamentalists. Consider orthodox Judaism, which demands that women cleanse themselves of their menstrual pollution each month, and be banned from synagogue for twice as long after the birth of a female child as after the birth of a male. Any man who touches a menstruating woman has to ritually purify himself and still remains unclean until sunset that day; if he has sex with a menstruating woman, he is unclean for a week.
"As for Christianity, early "church father" Tertullian (ca. AD 200) makes it clear: '[W]oman [is] the obstacle to purity, the temptress, the enemy...her body is the gate of hell.' The all-male Catholic church hierarchy couldn't stand the thought that Mary, mother of Jesus, might be a normal, fleshly woman. So the New Testament mentions of Jesus's younger siblings are explained away, to make sure no-one dares think she actually had sex with her husband Joseph, and by the mid-19th century, she was declared a perpetual virgin. Just like the houris.
"It's a given in male-monotheist religions: the immaculate super-woman, a figment of the imagination, is set up as an impossible standard that "standard-issue" women can never meet. This fills women with despair and self-hatred, while men may cultivate exaggerated expectations, sure to be disappointed.
"I could write a Ph.D. dissertation about how male-monotheist cultures associate women with the body, the emotions, what is "lower," and "nature," while men are associated with the soul, the intellect, what is "higher," and "culture." (If you want to read a really good feminist book on this subject, try Susan Griffin's Woman and Nature: The Roaring Inside Her, or Bram Dijkstra's Idols of Perversity.)
"Of course, all the dualistic nonsense about the desirability of a mind-body split and greater female fleshliness automatically conferring superiority on males is unadulterated baloney. Emotions and states of mind don't have a gender, and various quantities of all of them are parcelled out to every human being. As for the supposed ideals of pure mind and pure spirit, our marvelous brains are organs of the body, and if the rest of the body doesn't function, the brain is kaputt! Without the senses, we would be incapable of experiencing or learning anything. No emotion: no joy. About as appealing as the stereotypical heaven I heard about as a child.
I wonder why so many men, and not a few women, presume to despise the miracle of our one life on this earth, and spend the precious days allotted to them bewailing having been born at all, focused monomaniacally on the supposed flaws of embodied living. Mohammed Atta is certainly not alone in his self-hatred, misogyny and contempt for all the world. Variants of that attitude are thickly strewn throughout all male-monotheist belief systems. Atta's will warned people (by which term he meant men) not to be "distracted" by life, to fear God and not allow themselves to be "fooled" by the things life on earth offers. I am completely baffled by someone who thinks the emotion we should feel toward the force behind our creation is fear.
"Of course, this whole line is easier to swallow if you are someone with few perceived options in life, or are unhappy or dissatisfied with your position in the hierarchy you believe the world should embody. Which also links up to why I feel haunted by the afterlife, for the belief in an individual, personal, eternal ever-after, in either "heaven" or "hell," has been used for thousands of years by ruling classes of whatever ilk as a rationale for oppression and exploitation of the vast majority of people. If "the meek" -- read the poor, the disadvantaged, the put-upon -- really believe it will be "their turn" in some vague, glorious post-apocalyptic by-and-by, they are far more likely to resign themselves to the inferior, unpleasant place they occupy during what they think is just their present round on the planet. Karl Marx was wrong about a number of things, but he was right when he said that religion -- or at least the spectre of the afterlife -- is the opium of the people.
"Opium, carrot, and stick as well. A lot of folks believe we can't "be good" unless the carrot of "heaven" and the stick of "hell" are constantly dangled before our eyes. Now I don't think that we're all pre-programmed for saccharine-sweetness, but the vast majority of us can learn to view ourselves as okay individuals, treat others with basic courtesy and take responsibility for our own actions. As one clever T-shirt saying has it, "No child is born a bigot": instead, we absorb the plupart of our problematic thought patterns from our environment. I'll tell you what believing I have only one go-around does for me. It has helped me go from being a type A with a vengeance to an A minus who takes time to appreciate the world around me every day and is moving toward acting out of understanding and joy rather than anger and despair. For some reason, a lot of folks think that if we allow ourselves to accept that we have just one life, we'll drown ourselves in heedless hedonism. Instead, that acceptance motivates me to try to be my best self, to want to make right what I've done wrong, make amends for my mistakes, and do all this with some consistency and promptitude. I still drop the ball quite regularly, but because I can draw strength and pleasure from my connection to everything around me, I stay pretty much on course. "
Needless to say, these will not be my last words on this subject! Stay tuned!
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
