There is a big mystery about the 20th century that no-one seems to comment on. Throughout the last five thousand years of history it has been accepted that men are the dominant sex. This was true up until the end of the 19th century when women all over the world had less rights than a slave. Yet a hundred years later in the 21th century, women in the West have equal opportunity. What suddenly happened in the 20th century that women have gain more rights and power than they had over the last four thousand years?
In answer to this question people look to the work of the Suffragettes, women’s Liberation Movement and Feminists. Yet to be frank women have had it easy. If we say compared the Feminist struggle with say with the civil rights struggle of black people in USA, there is no comparison. The savage violence that black people have had to endure is incredible, with white lynch mobs being able to hang black people without fear of the law, and even today the majority of the prison population in USA are black people.
It is true some Suffragettes and Feminists have been victims of violence but it has not been in the same league as endured by black people, or even trade unionist fighting for workers rights. So why has it been the case that men have successfully kept women in virtual slavery for thousands of years, have suddenly caved in to Feminists demands, and gone belly up, without hardly a fight? Though I have to say this is not true in many Moslem countries where Feminists have been beaten up and murdered.
If you take a cork and hold it underwater it is very easy to hold it down but it will only stay there while you keep holding it in that position. If at any time you arm gets tired or you get fed up with keeping the cork underwater, and then let go, the cork will automatically rise to the top. This concept gives a good metaphor of what is happening today in the politics of female power.
For anyone who has read the history of patriarchy over the last five thousand years what it very striking is the great efforts needed to keep women powerless. Up until the end of the 19th century, there were laws to ensure that women couldn’t own any property or wealth. As the law stated that everything a woman had, was either owned by her father or husband. The law also make it very difficult for any woman to inherit property. Women were also barred from all jobs and professions except being a housewife, farm labour, servant or prostitute. So women were unable to acquire any wealth of power in her own right. Husbands were also encouraged to dominate their wives, and women had to swear to obey there husbands when they were married. The law even gave husbands the right to beat their wives with either a stick or whip.
In other cultures the laws oppressing women were even more strict than in the Western world. It was traditional for the Somalis people of Somalia, Kenya, Ethiopia and Djibouti for a bride to start married life with a flogging from their husbands. It seems the newly wedded husband would wait for her in the bridal chamber with a whip in his hand. This was also true with the Sifon people of Tibet, who traditionally would again start of married life with the husband whipping his bride. In many places like Sicily, Ethiopia and Eastern Europe where is was commonplace for men to choose their bride through kidnap and rape. A young man would pick out which girl he wanted to marry and then with a few friends kidnap and rape her. The girl was then force by social custom to marry her rapist. This went on in Sicily up until the 1960s and it still goes on in Ethiopia.
In India there is the custom of “Suttee”. This is where when a husband dies his wife is put on the funeral pile to be burnt alive. So what is the origins of this very barbaric custom? It seems that in the past women would frequently poison their husbands, so to discourage this, all women were made to die with their husbands. So the Suttee tradition was created by a brutal sex war between men and women in India. Which men won by simply being more violent than women.
In China there was the tradition of foot binding. Again this is a very strange custom, but the end result is that women were left crippled. So this tradition suggest that at one time men were so frighten of women running away, that they had to cripple them to stop them doing this.
Yet we are taught at school and in our history books that men have always been the dominant sex going back to early Stone-Age. The irony is that if it is natural for men to be the dominant sex, why do then men had to create very oppressive laws and customs against women? If it is natural for men to be the dominant sex then they shouldn’t need any laws, custom or propaganda to force women into submission. For instance, the only reason way we have laws against stealing is because many people do steal. If people didn’t steal there would be no reason to have laws against this behaviour. The same is true of all customs and traditions. The custom of marriage with people swearing to be true to each other, is only needed because people do tend to have sex outside of marriage. If pair bonding was completely natural for human beings, then we wouldn’t need customs like marriage, enforced by laws and social censure.
This then means that oppressive laws and customs to keep women in a subservient position, suggests that it is not natural for women to be the submissive sex. If it was natural for men to be the dominant sex then there would be no reason for men to have oppressive laws and customs to keep women in bondage.
The great fear men have of women strongly suggests that it might be natural for women to be the dominant sex. Men then found they could dominate women through violence and intimidation. Which has been true over the last five thousand years. Now it seems many men today do not want the inflict violence onto women, and this will allow women to take their rightful place as the rulers of our world.
William Bond
http://groups.yahoo.com/group/DivineGoddess
