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[asheris]

Very interesting commentary in the Sunday StarTribune.

An excerpt:

How men created God in their image
Robert S. McElvaine

Published Nov 18 2001

It could be the Taliban mantra: ''Women may not.'' Under Taliban rules, women could not work, attend school, go out in public unless accompanied by a male relative. If they took off their burqas in public, they could be beaten; if they committed adultery, they could be stoned to death.

We know women have had no rights in Afghanistan. What we struggle to fathom is the impulse beneath the seemingly relentless drive to dehumanize half the country's population -- and the fact that this effort was made in the name of religion. The men who ruled Afghanistan invoked Islam to justify their actions. I agree that a kind of religion motivates the Taliban, but the religion in question isn't Islam. It's the religion that the Woody Allen character in the director's latest film, "The Curse of the Jade Scorpion," identifies as his own: insecure masculinity.

These men are terrified of women.

The bizarre will of terrorist hijacker Mohamed Atta, including the provision that no women be allowed at his funeral or gravesite, is just one example of their sexually insecure mind-set. In Afghanistan, that mind-set led to the creation of a ghastly religion-based dystopia. In the United States, of course, we don't treat women with the brutality of the extremist Muslims who wrap their masculine insecurities in the cloak of Mohammed. But we should realize that male envy of and hostility toward women is also deeply imbedded in other religions, including Judaism and Christianity.

From the Torah to the Taliban, men throughout history have enjoyed telling women what they may not do. In just the past decade, questions concerning women's "place" have caused bitter controversy in various Christian churches. Consider Pope John Paul's vehement reaffirmation of the doctrine that women may not be priests, or the Southern Baptist Convention's 1998 proclamation that a wife "is to submit graciously to the servant leadership of her husband."

What has led religions to play a major part in the subordination of women for thousands of years are the prehistoric conditions on which they are based, which reach back to the Neolithic Age and the dawn of agriculture -- a female invention that dramatically transformed the human condition.

The story that Christians call "the Fall of Man" is an allegorical representation of the "fall" that men experienced as a result of women's invention of agriculture (symbolized by Eve's eating from the Tree of Knowledge): Once food could be intentionally produced, the traditional male role of hunter was greatly devalued. This story, like many other myths in other cultures, blames women for the loss of the hunter-gatherer way of life, which from a great chronological distance came to look like paradise to men who were obliged to go "forth from the Garden of Eden, to till the ground" and earn their bread doing the "woman's work" of farming. And women's punishment was henceforth to be totally subordinate to men.

Hell hath no fury like a man devalued -- and it was devalued men who retold the story of women inventing agriculture in the symbolic way it comes to us in Genesis, and then used that myth as a basis for dominating women.

Devalued men also gave birth to the notions that creative power and God are male. Creation had always appeared to be a female power, as reflected in early references to Mother Earth and to nature as a feminine force. But when men began to place seeds in plowed ground, an irresistible metaphor arose. The apparent analogy of a seed being planted in furrowed soil to a male's "planting" of semen in a female led to the conclusion that men provide the seed of new life and women constitute the soil in which that seed grows.

This monumental error in understanding (in fact, of course, each parent provides half of the "seed") has profoundly affected recorded history. What had seemed a principally female power was transformed into an entirely male power. No longer apparent bystanders in reproduction, men now claimed to be the reproducers, while women were reduced to the soil in which men's creations grow: in a word, dirt.

...

The full article.

He's got a book out, Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History, that sounds like it could be an intriguing read.