It Was Never a Fair Game
Once again, it is International Women's Day. We ladies get thrown the annual bone: “Here you go, girls. Satisfy yourselves with that,” and we're supposed to be somehow grateful. I don't know, maybe we should enjoy it while it lasts. At the rate our handlers and their useful idiots are going, women will be erased completely before you know it. With men-pretending-to-be-women taking over the runway, the magazine cover, the maternity ward, the locker room, the swimming pool, and the awards ceremony, I don't know what we'll have left.
For now, we women exist, but I have to wonder how even one of us stands a chance at not betraying herself when every institution—the Church, the State, the School, the Law, the Hospital, the Corporation, yes, even the Family—that comprises our society was built and maintained by men for the overwhelming benefit of men.
Let's take a look at how this came about, with the help of Camille Paglia in Sexual Personae. Oh, and you can tamp down those prejudices that are rearing their ugly heads right now. Most self-described feminists hate Camille because she doesn't play by their rules. I find plenty in her book to argue with, but that doesn't change the fact that most of her insights are brilliant. Here, we'll just focus on her introductory anthropology lesson, taken from page 1 and page 9:
Society is an artificial construction, a defense against nature's power. Without society, we would be storm-tossed on the barbarous sea that is nature. Society is a system of inherited forms reducing our humiliating passivity to nature. We may alter these forms, slowly or suddenly, but no change in society will change nature. Human beings are not nature's favorites.* We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force. Nature has a master agenda we can only dimly know. ...
The identification of woman with nature was universal in prehistory. In hunting or agrarian societies dependent upon nature, femaleness was honored as an immanent principle of fertility. As culture progressed, crafts and commerce supplied a concentration of resources freeing men from the caprices of weather or the handicap of geography. With nature at one remove, femaleness receded in importance. …
Western culture from the start has swerved from femaleness. The last major western society to worship female powers was Minoan Crete. And significantly, that fell and did not rise again. The immediate cause of its collapse—quake, plague, or invasion—is beside the point. The lesson is that cultic femaleness is no guarantee of cultural strength or viability. What did survive, what did vanquish circumstance and stamp its mind-set on Europe was Mycenaean warrior culture, descending to us through Homer. The male will-to-power: Mycenaeans from the south and Dorians from the north would fuse to form Apollonian Athens, from which came the Greco-Roman line of western history.
Both the Apollonian and Judeo-Christian traditions are transcendental. That is, they seek to surmount or transcend nature.** Despite Greek culture's contrary Dionysian element, which I will discuss, high classicism was an Apollonian achievement. Judaism, Christianity's parent sect, is the most powerful of protests against nature. The Old Testament asserts that a father god made nature and that differentiation into objects and gender was after the fact of his maleness. Judeo-Christianity, like worship of the Olympian gods, is a sky-cult. It is an advanced stage in the history of religion, which everywhere began as earth-cult, veneration of fruitful nature.
Sexual Personae was published in paperback in 1991 and was still causing a bit of a sensation when I began working at Barnes & Noble in 1992. My prejudices kept me from reading the book back then, but I finally did in 2020, going through it slowly and methodically, taking pages of notes, doing the same, at the same time, with Jordan Peterson's Maps of Meaning. The two played beautifully together, but I never finished Peterson's book. Maybe someday. For now, I'm back in the pages of Paglia's and I'm happy to be there. It's amazing what you can learn when you let down your guard and let things into your brain.
*I think molds and fungi are.
**Nature: identified with women, remember?