It would seem that women can never get it right, no matter what they do. In so many societies they have to become men to be marginally accepted; being female and doing typically female things is devalued and denigrated. Starhawk, the witch, had a lot to say about that and how women themselves must stop valuing the male/competitive model as though it is the default model.
The female model of power is not as competitive; it is more community-building, immanent, generative, and facilitative. Yet societies fear our abilities. Starhawk posited that this came from the fact that we always know who our children are but men can never be totally sure without a paternity test. As simplistic as this sounds, it is a thing that underscores a lot of the male domination of female power in the world. Or as my husband once put it, every hetero man fears the hold pussy has over him; every man fears squandering his resources for another man’s genes. Women are pickier than men about their sexual partners (due to the huge physical consequences of pregnancy that women may have when they DO have sex) and as such, men must compete.
Though it seems silly to pin all this on reproduction, sex is so tied to that in subconscious ways and sex is the biggest drive we have. In my women’s studies class we learned how in every society, women’s reproductive abilities are regulated, bound, and restricted to be in favor of male desires to further their genes. Girls are fine until puberty, and then all the societal restrictions set in. After menopause, women become free again. This was true even in antiquity and is still true in modern societies as well as primitive ones.
Sacrifice rituals in antiquity are tied to males seeing that women could bleed and not die and women gave life in blood so shedding blood = life became a reason for blood sacrifice. The whole Christian religion is based on that blood sacrifice = life ideology as are many other religious practices in the past. That power women have is so dangerous that societies now and in the past have made women’s blood either sacred or taboo, something to be feared and women to be reviled. In short, we are hated for our ability to give life and for the certainty that that life carries OUR genetic material. Every aspect of female subjugation can be traced back to these things.
How can humanity change things when the very physical differences between the sexes are what drive the male dominance issue? The uncertainty of paternity will always be there; what can people do to stop regulating women and also allow men some certainty in their support of their own genetic offspring?
The Iroquois had a great way of living that dealt with this issue. Men and women had sex but the men lived in their mother’s longhouses. They could visit their female sexual partners, but it was the uncles that acted as fathers to any offspring. These arrangements meant that the resources from men were not directly tied to supporting their own genetic offspring. Instead, they supported their sister’s offspring or their mother’s younger offspring. That way Iroquois males supported those that had genetic ties to them but not their direct genetic offspring. This gave all parties a lot better life and women had freedoms during their reproductive years without having to deal with male domination. Women always knew any pregnancy would result in a child that was well fed, housed, and cared for by her brothers and the mother-clan of the long house so they were less choosy about who they had sex with (partners didn’t have to be the strongest or wealthiest). This gave the men more available women to have sex with and sexual frustration and competition were not as much of an issue. Iroquois women also owned all the land and the food sources so males could not go to war without female approval or they would starve during the war. This gave women the power to prevent the unnecessary loss of their children’s lives in wars they disagreed with. This shared power model of the Iroquois worked and had a part in the shared powers ideology we see in our current Constitution.
