This weekend is Mother's Day, in a lot of the world that is. (Not unexpectedly the Brits celebrate theirs on 4th Sunday in Lent. Go figure; always no reason to be different.) Anna Jarvis, an early 20th-century woman's activist pushed to get it recognized, only partly successfully of course, but recognized nevertheless. Some countries picked it up; others refunctioned their own similar holidays honoring women, so there is no universally accepted day of celebration. And yes, it's one of those pseudo-holidays that Hallmark or one of those greeting card manufacturers breathed life into in order to increase sales. But, the fact remains that we still have a day to honor mothers, in spite of everything modern culture tries to do to ignore, if not outrightly suppress, them.
You don't have to be a zealot of political correctness to know that we live in a man's world, that our societies for the greatest part are patriarchal. This is one of those little understood aspects of life that has always fascinated me, for it never ceases to surprise me to what ends some folks will go -- mostly men, of course -- to justify this as some natural order of things. Nothing could be farther from the truth. Male dominance or patriarchy, and I'm referring to human beings now, is a cultural, not a biological or natural state of affairs.
Throughout most of nature, males are larger and stronger than females, but this is also not a given. It seems that among birds of prey, females tend to be larger than males; the female great white shark is larger and stronger than the male, and there is certainly a difference when considering propagating vs. social relations: praying mantises and black widow spiders have the final word on who's in charge; elephants, for the most part, live in female-dominated herds, while males are more of loners and only show up for mating; lion prides are organized by the females; but hyenas, lemurs and the bonobo all live within a strict matriarchal order. Given this wide range of set-ups, only a bean-counting statistician would insist "natural" male dominance, and I'm pretty sure that they do.
Biologically, however, at least as far as human beings are concerned, no case can be made for male superiority at all. Mothers conceive and gestate the young; mothers give birth (well, except for among seahorses, I understand, and you've got to love the irony of at least one species providing an exception). The only thing that men contribute to thee young of the species is 50% of the DNA and the determination of gender, otherwise, males are pretty much observers in the whole affair. Even a cursory reflection upon biology class and the X and Y chromosome lesson shows us that Y-chromosomes are complete, the X-chromosome is noting more than a crippled X (that is, one of its legs is missing) so in essence, boys are merely crippled girls. The fact that more boys then girls are born in the natural population is due to the fact that infant mortality is higher and later reckless behavior lead to more early male deaths. Male-female populations don't balance out till around 20 years-old or so. And, with males being more observers than participants in the whole new-life thing, it was the Anglo-Saxons of yore and the Jews to this day who correctly observed that the bloodline actually runs through the mother, not the father. Nature takes care of itself, it always has, and it could probably well use less of our help in getting along. (Of course, in regard to this gender thing in general, the Americans (unsuprisingly) have lost the plot and now find it one of their highest legislative and juridical priorities to sort out biology apparently gone wrong. Truth be told, nothing's changed in nature, just the way certain obviously ignorant and sexually-inhibited individuals choose to see nature, but there's nothing new about that either.)
The next biggest justification, and certainly one of the pieces of evidence I would take to support my own case for cultural choice as opposed to biological selection, is religion. The religionists all seem to have got together defend male dominance. We have to remember, however, that there is a huge difference between what religions' sacred texts say, what they mean, how they are interpreted and, finally but most importantly, collected into whatever articles of faith that are used to organize their affairs. Christians love to go on and on about how Eve caused the Fall from grace and were made subordinate to their husbands; even more love to use the writings of St. Paul to justify male domination (having converted out of Judaism and as desirous as he was to bring Gentiles into the fold, it is not surprising that he would take over any number of their "beliefs" in order to further his cause). You can open practically any newspaper or read any online new site and find all kinds of evidence of male domination in most Muslim societies and communities. The fact that the Indians and Chinese would resort to infanticide should a female child be born first provides evidence for their own fanaticism of male domination. Of course, what most people don't realize about religion generally is that there is an exoteric side to it, the one that you actually see and most often get to experience, but there's also an esoteric, or hidden side, where the real tenets of the faith can be found. (For example, since the notion of bloodline referred to above, or consider that the majority of Jesus' followers were women, that they were treated as equals if not more (for example, the controversial role played by Mary Magdalene, especially in the Gospel bearing her name) and that it's been well documented that later redactors of the Pauline texts even changed women's names to men to serve their theological needs.) It would seem the things that we need to take at face value, like biology, we don't, but the things where a bit more discernment is needed, say, with the texts, well, why go to all that trouble once you've got them saying what you want them to say anyhow? But what we should be aware of, in every instance, is the fact that when we start to speak of "civilization", we find men wanting to or actually calling the shots.
Well, I'm beginning to think civilization is the problem. What this implies is that the opposite of civilization isn't barbarism, as we've been told to believe. Let's think about this for a minute: civilization meant the rise of the city-states, the old Babylonian and Mesopotamian empires ... society was organized well enough that surpluses were possible, resources were accumulated, food became plentiful and could be distributed among a larger number of people. All of these are good things are they not? And, of course, they are, but the fact that some folks are managing their resources and processes well implies that that there are other who are not. It also implies that there are others who perhaps want more than they'd otherwise be entitled to. In other words, the whole idea of not having enough which at some point turns into having more than anyone else enters the picture, and once these feelings take over, well, the next thing you know -- religious texts or no -- stealing, raiding, robbing, pillaging, plundering and other forms of aggression and violence against others suddenly becomes the norm. And here we are -- voila -- a mere 10 millennia later and there still isn't enough to go around for all the rich folk. What we need to remember, however, it was at the time that this civilization got off the ground that the women were kicked out of power (yes, there is strong evidence that pre-civilizational societies were matriarchal) and the men took over. In a perpetual act of what appears to be gross psychological compensation, we are privileged to live in a world so advanced, so powerful, so dominated by male aggression that we literally stand on the brink of annihilation, and most people I know -- men and women -- are standing by cheering these louts on. If you can inject enough testosterone into anything or anybody, if it has a mind, it will lose it. And that's where we are.
Now, I dare any of you who are now thinking I'm exaggerating to prove me wrong. Look at the state of something as irrelevant as sports these days: a male-dominated, rape-condoning, destructive, greed-machine that serves primarily to distract us from real issues that need resolving. What about international diplomacy: Their machos fighting our machos in a loser-loses-everything-winner-takes-nothing chest-beating with deadly consequences. Politically: the rapid rise of violent-imbued, rightist ideology from the entire American political caste to the Front National in France or the Polish and Hungarian proto-fascists, to our coddling of the new Turkish sultan who in turn has become the poster boy for male-dominance and misogyny. I could go on and on, and where is the voice of reason among them? Nowhere because at some point women wanted to become men and partially succeeded (e.g., Thatcher, Merkel, Fiona, etc.) but failed in the end because, well, they might act like men, but in the end, they just aren't.)
Too many people these days think that if you don't believe this then you must believe that, if things aren't one way then they have to be other. Nothing could be further from the truth, but nothing is more telling of how we moderns think. Whether the days of the matriarchy were good or bad is something we'll never know. We do know it was good enough to get us to written history and the documentation of millennia of blood-letting and conquest. We do know that for whatever benefits civilization and male-dominance may have brought us, it's at the end of its rope. We can't take much, if any, more of male aggression, violence and death, of hyper-masculinity. Matriarchy had its chance. Patriarchy had its chance as well. It's time to move to something more inclusive, an Integrum, if you will, in which men and women, male and female, integrate.
The Ancients ... even back in the days of the Matriarchy, when myth was first taking shape and being used to describe who and how we are as human beings ... knew the principles of essential balance, the complementarity of male and female; the need for allowing each his or her due and to make his or her contribution. We've forgotten that, too, of course. Or maybe we consciously, willfully, viciously drove it out of our minds. I wish it were the former, but it feels more like the latter. We've got our problems with gender equality over here in Europe, to be sure, but we've still at least got it written into our constitutions and there's still some hope we're going to "get it" before the next wave of mind-numbing PC washes over us from across the pond. Maybe.
So, I for one, will be celebrating Mother's Day, as I always have and hopefully always will. I still open and hold open doors for women, because that's how I was raised, but then again, I don't let doors I go through slam in anybody's face. And I will continue to recognize women for what they are: equal partners, our (we men's) better half, and more than ever our hope for any kind of tomorrow. If we don't manage to turn the hypermasculine, violent patriarchs around -- or at least put them in their proper place -- they'll manage to finish off the planet before we can do anything about it. And yes, I still say Mother Earth. Go figure.
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