This is not meant as a pronouncement of truth. I am not so knowledgeable that I can pretend to know the complexities of history, etc. But I just had one of those 'flashes of intuitive insight' and, whether I am on track or not, thought I would share it here. Women have been repressed by many male-dominated cultures. This repression has even been given a false legitimacy by various (male-dominated) religions. Anyway, it just suddenly occurred to me that it might be because many men fear them. Because they have power. I am not talking about brute physical strength here, although it is well-known that women do have a greater tolerance for pain than men, which is interesting in itself. I am talking about the force of Nature, including (but not limited to) that amazing and alluring attraction a straight or bi male can feel when seeing the beauty of a woman. We can't control the attraction, so instead we seek to control them. And if you will bear with this more abstruse perception I had, women's eyes tend to be larger than mens' - the eyes being the 'windows to the soul', and incidentally wisdom is personified as a Goddess in quite a few cultures. Is it that many men cannot 'handle' this, that it strikes some sort of discomfort in them, when they are confronted with an embodiment of Goddess-energy? Some men take this further in a perverted way, and seek to even humiliate women; just witness much of the porn on the net, and how women are generally treated there. I think it's a reaction to womens' true power. There is a part of an inferior, lesser man that fears women, and the only way he feels he can deal with this is to pummel them down for it. (By the way, I had better mention that rightly speaking, men are supposed to be a manifestation of 'God-energy'; whether we are living up to this in general, is another matter). Ok I'm clearly not denigrating men here per se. I like men, in fact I am one myself. :icon_bigg Just saying...I saw something that gave me a sudden flash of insight, and suddenly all of this information seemed to flood in, in an instant. And I think that a man who really has truly grown up, ie, is an emotional adult, would not have this fear. Which might suggest that lots of us guys are not fully emotionally mature, perhaps. By the way, I'm not saying more women are emotionally mature in general, than are men. On a more abstruse level: ever since we took the plough to the Earth, we began to subjugate it, bend it to our will. No longer would we just gather what the Earth naturally provided; we would make it yield more in accordance with our wishes. Now I'm aware that this was a response to the needs of urbanization and growing populations, but I do sense a parallel here. In many cultures, the good Earth is personified as female. And just see what we've done to her in the last few hundred years especially! And we have had a few thousand years of Patriarchal religious systems, which still tend to predominate in most cultures today. I suspect that if our religions were more Goddess-centred, and if the Earth was not portrayed as something 'given' to Mankind to subdue and bend to his will, and instead was portrayed as Divinity itself, as worthy of veneration as any God of the sky - then maybe the current rape of this planet would not be happening, either.
I don't mean to discount the views that you have shared; however, it is not that men fear the power of women. It was not that they have a beauty that men could never resist. It is simply that it hasn't been until recent centuries that they've ever had to resist anything at all in regards to the respect or care of the opposite sex. Women were susceptible to oppression because they are the child-bearing sex. After the introduction of agrarian society, women were expected to bare children until their final breaths. They were locked away to crank out child after child while we simultaneous have these formations of religion, ideology, government, and social structure within society. Their voice was stolen and by the time anyone could call attention to it it was far too late. It isn't complex. It isn't natural. It is purely unfortunate.
Actually, this is a problem that can be summed in the quote ' if you want to test a man(or woman) give him power' or ' power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely' Child bearing, having to stay at home while the man went hunting resulted in women being phisically weaker, while men where killing machines, so they gained phisical power and advantage, and that power corrupted them. This phisical power, became traditional/cultural power, as this dominance-submission got ingrained in both men and women as generation passed by, after a while, many women believed this so much that they would even collaborate in subyugation of any rebelling woman. And they would teach their daughters 'the proper way'. This is my theory. Now, this is a lot more complex than what i said, we would have to analize how does ings like testosterone and progesterone and other hormones and many other factors affect this, but i think there is a lot that have to do with social conditioning.
I know my musings were rather abstruse. It's just that, as I'm currently not seeking to be with a woman sexually, when I see an attractive one, there is an absence of that old feeling I used to have of wanting to 'have' her, I mean of course sexually. Now, I see them more as 'fellow human beings', and less as sexual objects. And this absence of wanting to be with them in that way, seems to be giving me a different perspective.
I think that this has changed a lot. A woman is much more likely to be oppressed in her own household than in the "outside world," such as school and the work place. The reason is because a woman may have gone into the relationship or marriage with those dynamics in place. She coupled with a tyrant, a jerk, and/or a control freak. Outside of tangible abuse, she has no protection. She has more protection in an academic or work environment. In school, it's almost entirely based on merit. In the workplace, it will be based on picking an employer where it's not a "good ole' boys" club. There are many women executives and prominent politicians. I think this concept of repression becomes less valid as each year goes by but there's no denying it was a major issue in the past.
It's kinda weird to read some of these ideas, since they seem based around what we see today, culturally, and then trying to push it back tens of thousands of generations. How women are treated in a society changes with the society, and how that society develops, and there are a lot of factors. And if you want to root out the truth, you will need to look back very far into the past. There isn't any one reason why it happened, but it is woven into the fabric of society as it evolves, much like language. I haven't seen much in the research side of things to enforce the idea that fear is a factor so much as things like: - What survival strategies worked way back, and were woven into early societies. - What technology developed, such as agriculture, that changed the dynamics of production in that society between the sexes. - Changes to risk/reward approaches in a society to handle high-risk needs of that society. - How the concept of property developed (or didn't) in a society. As that society develops, you get some weird notions woven into the gender roles as a side-effect. Plus, the idea of men fearing women doesn't really explain the women who help perpetuate out of date gender roles. But it is interesting to note how native Americans largely managed to avoid a lot of the gender role cruft that Europe developed, prior to colonization, providing more evidence that it is how we construct the society that leads to this form of oppression. Much like African Americans face a form of oppression in the US that Japanese do not, in part due to older ideas that allowed slavery to happen in the first place. We still haven't purged that crap from the fabric of US society yet.
People want power. Men are (generally) stronger (physically) than women. Men subjugated women to gain power over a weaker (generally, physically) sex. Doesn't justify it. Doesn't make it right. Doesn't mean it should persist. It just means that it did and we should be ashamed.
This assumes the concept of women as a weaker sex came about prior to the oppression, as a cause, rather than the concept developing at the same time, or even after the fact as a sort of justification for the altered roles in the society.
No, we're talking about physiological differences which did not alter due to society over the last several thousand years. That's not enough time. And of course, there are women who are stronger than men and men who are weaker than women, but they are rarities.
Wow I'm the only woman on this thread , well I think it's has to do with people thinking women are the weaker sex and also child raring . It's like the world thinks women should just look pretty and pop out kids.:dry: also keep women in the house and with a bunch of kids a great way to control them .
You say men are afraid of their sexy powers(okay you didn't phrase it quite like that), but in my opinion that's barely the most intimidating thing about women. People try to act like women are so dainty and fragile, but most of the ones I know have a certain emotional intensity and passion that to me seems a lot more intimidating than any physical strength men have over women. If men are afraid of anything, it would be that. Of course any broad statement about a specific group is bound to have tons and tons of people who don't fit in to it though. In the end the real reason women have been oppressed is because somebody started oppressing them. It caught on and eventually got ingrained in to our culture to the point where it's hard to dig ourselves out. I notice you talk about male dominated religions, and I've heard that said about Christianity before. However I disagree. Many christian sects, including the first one, Catholicism believe in Mary as a sacred mother of not only the church, but all of humanity. People pray to her every day. Also, if you read the Bible, Jesus was willing to talk to women in public at a time when that was forbidden. He never treated them like they where any less than his male followers. Even Mary Magdalene, a prostitute was not excluded from joining Jesus. Of course that doesn't discount some of the things the church has done against women, but if you look at the underlying theology, none of the things they have done where actually justifiable by New Testament scripture. Also there are now many much more feminist branches of Christianity, such as the Episcopalian church, which I am a member of.
