Culture: Men, Women, and Violence

We have little evidence about the origins of how culture develops in terms of the roles of how the relationships between men and women and the family evolved over centuries. Except for some isolated societies probably mythological all cultures have been male dominated and their religious underpinnings monotheistic and always interpreted by some form of male priesthood. I know of no exceptions.

Only until the 20th century was there clear changes to this andropower and almost entirely in northern Europe. I have often asked myself how did this phenomenon develop. Was it in the formation of families based on women’s dependency on men to survive during the hunting-gathering period, or the nature of child bearing and women’s isolation and freedom to organize with other women? Clearly politics was men’s domain, and they were physically suited for it. They even selectively banned women from their meetings. Or was it in the psyche of men, perhaps the innate fear of female power and endurance. And if so, they could control it by organizing men and creating a single god to lay down the rules as long as they were the interpreters.

Women by their nature, their romantic inclinations and their power to seduce men to take care of her colluded in this process. The men, once they had won the women over and with a religiously sanctified marriage that gave men all the decision making powers and control over the women, there was no possibility to reverse this process. Once set in motion the women gradually enforced the rules over the other women in order to survive, even to the point of extreme cruelty, viz. cutting clitorises so women would be denied sexual pleasure. In the 19th Century in America women could not yet own property, get divorced, have rights over their children and were confined to few available positions: prostitution,