Misogyny, sexism, gynophobia

Julia Gillard

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard became a global online sensation when she launched her now-famous attack on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, accusing him of sexism and misogyny. The YouTube video has been viewed over 2 million times, and the speech reproduced on countless numbers of news portals and blogposts. Ms Gillard’s indignation was well justified, and her passionate anger was an inspiration to women all around the world who continue to suffer from being diminished and put down by men.

But why does this still happen, in a world where more than half of university graduates are women (in the West at least), and where most major countries have or have had women political leaders? How often do we find ourselves talking about ‘misandry’ - the equivalent fear or hatred of men on the part of women? (The word isn’t even in my spell-check.) Yet women “hold up half the sky” in the words of the Chinese proverb, and male and female, men and women complement and are indispensible to one another. Doesn’t it seem strange that such a fundamental distortion in the way we perceive and value one another should have arisen – and what does it mean?

On one level the answer lies in the continuing influence of patriarchy and the unequal power relations between men and women – still prevalent even in countries like Australia, the UK and the USA – and most commentators on the incident and its repercussions have focused on men’s unwillingness to accept women as equals in the domains of politics and business. But I want to dig a bit deeper: what are the roots of this condition, and what effect does it have on our consciousness and the way we relate to each other?

The Willendorf Venus

Anthropologists generally assume that most ancient cultures were matriarchal and matrilineal, so far as can be interpreted from the few artefacts that have survived from these far-off and pre-literate societies. Note that matriarchy shouldn’t be taken to be the mirror image of patriarchy: while the latter almost always involves an ideology of possession and domination by a ruling group, many would argue that ancient matriarchal or matrifocal societies were governed by a quintessentially feminine vision of inclusiveness. In any case, none of these societies survived, and we know of no cultures more recent than Minoan Crete which could possibly be called matriarchal. Ideologies and practices of dominance and possession seem everywhere to have accompanied the transition to a settled and agricultural way of life, with the emergence of formal power structures and of cultural transmission across generations.

Despite this, a veneration for the female principle in some form seems to have been a feature of almost all cultures, until very recently.

And this has typically involved several facets at least of the feminine:

Guan Yin

Mary

- the Compassionate, as represented by Guan Yin in Buddhism,
- the Mother, as represented by the Hindu deity Parvati or by Mary in Christianity
- the Sexual, as represented by Aphrodite in the Greek pantheon, or Mary Magdalene in Christianity. (Though it could well be argued that Magdalene stands for male repression of female sexuality.)

In the polytheistic cultures of Asian religions this tradition has continued to this day – though it has to be said that it doesn’t necessarily go with a better deal for women. (The spiritual tradition doesn’t serve to challenge patriarchal power structures, in other words.) However, the great religions of the West are all monotheistic, and, as I pointed out in last week’s post about Brazil, the three facets of the Christian God are all male – like the Prophet Muhammad, all the prophets and indeed the God of the Old Testament. In Catholic Christianity some space is made for the veneration of the female principle (in whatever ‘edited’ form this may be), but Protestantism swept this away as idolatry and superstition, a belief which has persisted into the post-religious and post-spiritual culture which dominates today in the English-speaking world. And this culture, unsurprisingly, remains male-dominated – with a dominance that’s no longer even tempered by any veneration of the female principle, or recognition of complementarity.

Hillary Clinton

Margaret Thatcher

It should go without saying that gender is irrelevant to a person’s suitability for high office, so women like Julia Gillard, Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher have taken their rightful places in the political arena purely as a function of their abilities. Yet Margaret Thatcher, as the first female British Prime Minister, brought no feminine ‘inclusiveness’ or nurturing qualities to the post; despite her promise “where there is division, to bring harmony”, she was one of the most divisive figures in recent British history. As for Hillary Clinton, she operates in the service of an American foreign policy which continues to support Israeli aggression in Palestine and which uses drones to kill unarmed non-combatants in countries with which the US isn’t at war. Nothing very healing about that.

Norse Goddess Freya

Ultimately, it diminishes all of us to obliterate fundamental energetic and spiritual differences in the name of gender-blindness. If women politicians are no more than men with ovaries, they’re doing us all a disservice precisely by not bringing all of themselves into their work in the world. Life itself, and all forms of growth and development, come from the fusion of male and female in dynamic balance with one another, and what our wounded planet needs now is a much stronger emphasis on the feminine to balance the out-of-control and survival-threatening left-brain and male dominant culture which has ruled for the past many hundred years. It will take more than a handful of ‘ballsy’ women political leaders to bring that about.