Gurdur

@ Hinduwoman:
I should add that the databank / list is not just about "religious problems", but rather about atheism, agnosticism and religion as they impinge on societies, including developments within religions; in essence, all news items links that I or others find noteworthy.

Also: since I am a regular cash donator to organisations such as Amnesty International, and aid organisations similar to Medicin Sans Frontiers, you can see why I despise de Kooning's hypocritical and arrogant abuse so much. He also gets abusive to others in other forums by the same methods of 'argument'. I see absolutely no point myself in getting into discussions of any kind with him.

I wouldn't normally yammer on about this; I just thought a small note about where I'm coming from may be in order.

brighid

Now, the question to me is this: Why, despite the scriptural evidence in many religions (Islam, Hinduism, etc.) that woman have a religious equality to men are women still oppressed, restricted, beaten, tortured and murdered for no other reason than being a woman?

There is always a motivation behind the oppression and generally that is fear and ignorance – two of the greatest evils on this Earth. What is it that these men fear about women? What factors lead them to believe that women are inferior and therefore deserving of the hostile and inhuman treatment our sisters face all over the world and through out our collective histories?

I think it is a much more complex issue that just religion, culture or politics. Or maybe it is more base and primal.

Here is an example of a matrilineal/matriarchal Islamic society. http://www.sas.upenn.edu/~psanday/eggi2.html
In investigating the site you will notice the low incidence of violence and other factors typical of patriarchal and other male dominated societies. So, is it their religion, their culture or something else that is responsible for the behaviors and ethics of this society.

Here are some links to matriarchal societies present day and past:

Indonesia’s Maldives: http://www.saunalahti.fi/~penelope/F.../Maldives.html
South Bougainvilles Nagovisi, North East India’s Khasi Garo and the Machiguenga of Peru: http://www.saunalahti.fi/~penelope/F...KhasiGaro.html

Then there is the San of the Kalahari Desert, the Japanese Ryuku of Okinawa, the Mexican Zapotec, the Cherokee, Iroquois, Huron, Pueblo, Hopi, Zuni and Navajo Indians of North American and the Innu of Canada. Actually, the list is quite extensive. In most of these societies, women had equal rights to property, marriage, political and religious positions. Some even had more authority than men and often times the decision making was left to the men. Many of these women were also warriors, fighting side by side with their male counterparts. A few of these societies were even oppressive to men.

You will also notice that when that when most of these societies came into contact with either Christianity or Islam – or shall I say when they were conquered by them – these practices where suppressed and those cultures almost entirely destroyed through genocide and Christianization or Islamization of the populous.

Women have experienced isolated and rare statuses of equality within the Abrahamic religious and political influenced societies. Our own Western society has only made modern advances in the status of women and I would say that we still have a long way to go.

Here is a time line of the Women’s Suffrage Movement in the US: http://www.suffragist.com/timeline.htm

Neo-pagan movements are very much female centered and revered. Most teach of the equality of the male and female the necessity each poses to the other as harmonious parts of the universe. In many movements a priest and a priestess work in conjunction in ritual as representative of the god and goddess. Other movements are predominantly female in their clergy and membership. There has been a strong draw to pagan movements among women because of the reverence feminine spirituality is given. Something that has been severely lacking in our Christian-centric Western society. These religions are the minority and therefore have little influence over societal norms or political action. But, within the circles I have experienced women enjoy a greater equality than in Christian, Judaic or Islamic circles, particularly the Orthodox ones.

So, the issue is complex – but we can find many historical and modern day examples of women having equal and preferred status to men. Unfortunately, those societies tend to be isolated or no longer exist as with our Native American cultures and religions.

Brighid

lpetrich

And what might that be? Some metaphysical sort of femininity?

lpetrich

brighid:
Now, the question to me is this: Why, despite the scriptural evidence in many religions (Islam, Hinduism, etc.) that woman have a religious equality to men are women still oppressed, restricted, beaten, tortured and murdered for no other reason than being a woman?

LP:
It would be hard to call such equality a general principle in the scriptures of most major religions; there may be female-friendly parts, but there are often female-hostile parts.

For example the Koran states that if you cannot find two men to give testimony in some case, then you may settle for one man and two women. Also that pagans "pray to mere females". Men will get a whole harem of pretty ladies in the Muslim Paradise, while there is nothing on what women will get.

[brighid on matrilineal and "matriarchal" societies...]

Matrilineality is counting descent by the female line, and a related custom, matrilocality, is for a man to move to his wife's household. However, a woman may be dominated by her brother instead of her husband. Even so, one does have to wonder why a proud male would move to his wife's village instead of having his wife come to his village.

I think that it's unlikely that there are any true matriarchies, in which women have dominated men the way that men have often dominated women; what apparently happens / had happened in such societies is that both sexes share in decision making and high social status.

This is relevant to the early-matriarchy controversy over Neolithic Europe, a hypothesis revived by Marija Gimbutas; such historically-known societies as what brighid mentions may be good analogies for Neolithic Europe.

brighid:
Women have experienced isolated and rare statuses of equality within the Abrahamic religious and political influenced societies.

LP:
Even before the Abrahamic religions were invented, there was gross sexism. Consider the speakers of the ancestral Indo-European dialects. Though much of the vocabulary is for commonplace sorts of things, there are some words that tell us about the IE speakers' societies. For example, one can reconstruct terms for a husband's relatives, but not for a wife's relatives; this suggests that a woman had moved into her husband's household (patrilocality) instead of vice versa.

There was also the custom of "wolf marriage" or marriage by capture; for more, see URL http://www.ucalgary.ca/~chilton/Kurgans.htm

It's difficult to recover names of major Indo-European deities; there has been only one big success, and that is with one whose name translates into something like "Father Sky".

brighid:
Neo-pagan movements are very much female centered and revered. ... But, within the circles I have experienced women enjoy a greater equality than in Christian, Judaic or Islamic circles, particularly the Orthodox ones.

LP:
So neopaganism does tend to avoid the very common coexistence of female deities/quasi-deities and sexism. For example, much of Christianity has had such a coexistence in the form of female saints, including turning Jesus Christ's mother into some sort of mother-goddess. And one can find examples of that in European historical pagan religions and Hinduism also.

lpetrich

hinduwoman:
Yes, nowadays there are a grwing number of formally ordained women priests in hinduism. ...

LP:
Interesting to see; other religions have started to have female priests / clergywomen / ...

hinduwoman to deKooning:
what exactly is meant by womanly functions?
The only way woman differs biologically is in bearing children.
Atheism is not going to take that away from her, unless she wishes it.

LP:
At least that's the really big difference; there are lots of smaller-scale differences,
such as women being shorter and being less bulky than men, at least on average.
As to temperament / psychological features, I think that there is a lot of overlap between
the two sexes, even if they are not, on average, completely alike.

As to how much is biological and how much is learned/societal/cultural, that is a murky question,
because natural selection can operate on a societal level, with certain sorts of societies
being common because they succeeded in defeating or assimilating certain other sorts of societies.
Here's a simple example: consider a society of peaceniks and a society of warniks.
They confront each other, and the warniks conquer the peaceniks because they are better at fighting wars.
The result is all warniks and no peaceniks.

This may explain why the male sex tends to dominate,
because women who successfully assert themselves in society may have fewer children
than those who are bullied into submission and baby-machine status.
Meaning that the less sexist societies get outbred by the more sexist ones.

Also, men are, in a sense, the more expendable sex,
because it is easier for a man to produce a large number of children than a woman.
Thus, societies that do not risk women in battle may produce more children
than those that do, meaning that societal natural selection will keep women off of the battlefield.

And why might men be bigger and stronger than women? Why not the opposite?

Indeed, over much of the animal kingdom, when one sex is bigger, it is the female.
This can sometimes go to extremes, as in the case of certain deep-sea fish
where some males will attach themselves to a much bigger female.
And this can be dangerous for the males in some cases, as with spiders;
a male spider looks like a potential meal to a female one because he is smaller than her.

Why this is so can be seen from the resources each sex must invest in offspring.
Females produce eggs or give birth; this requires a lot of resources.
Males produce sperm; this requires very little resources.
Thus, females sometimes get bigger than males because of their bigger contribution
to the next generation.

This also means that when members of one sex compete for members of the other,
it is usually males that compete for females, since the females have a bigger investment
than the males.
Sometimes, the sex roles are reversed, as in the case of certain Australian crickets
where the males produce big sperm capsules that the females eat;
since the males are the biggest contributors, the males are choosy
and the females competitive.

Female choosiness explains why the males of many species of birds are much brightly colored
than the females;
the males advertise their good health with spectacular-looking feathers,
while the females may have more practical sorts of feather colors, such as camouflage colors.

Male competitiveness combined with living in groups often results in
males competing for groups of females, and for a male keeping rival males away from "his" group.
Males need not be very dominant otherwise; among horses, herds of mares follow regular migration routes,
and the stallions simply follow them around and keep other stallions away.

And to be successfully competitive, a male may end up growing big and strong -- bigger and stronger than the females.
Which one often sees in such cases. Sometimes. however, this bulk is fake, as in the case of manes.

Another approach appears when raising some offspring starts to overwhelm the females;
an additional caretaker is sometimes recruited, and that caretaker is one with the same sort
of genetic interest as the mother: the father.
Thus, monogamy appears, and it is common in birds.
Both sexes will usually share in the task of feeding the babies,
and the sexes often look very similar.
Bird couples usually last only the length of a breeding season, however,
and bird monogamy is often imperfect.

Our species appears to be intermediate between the competitive-male approach
and the monogamous approach;
competitive-male tendencies may be why men have tended to dominate in human societies.
This is a big and interesting subject, but my patience has run out.

Viewpoints

On the matter of male domination, I would argue that it is also a matter of the preponderance of the ego abetted by gross strength. Therefore, subjugation, even if it be gender-nonspecific becomes a pyramidal contruct. To have strength but to be gentle takes courage to overcome lower proclivities to use it to one's advantage. In the non-human primate world, it might well be a matter of biology, but in the human primate domain, it could be a subtle issue of the unfolding of consciousness. Display and utilization of power to an utterly selfish end predominating with increasing denseness of the ego. I am building up this argument on an upanishadic premise of enlightenment.

Bill

Quite a lengthy and informative post, it seems to me.

There have been some modern studies of "primitive" human societies in Africa and South America, and the correlation with monogamous social rules was pretty much a function of the male/female ratio in the society. Too much of an excess of EITHER males or females led to some degree or another of non-monogamous social behaviors working their way into the fabric of the society in question. Our modern "civilized" population is fairly balanced between the sexes, so monogamy makes at least some degree of sense. If, however, there really were "two girls for every guy," it would be silly to enforce a rule of monogamy.

And, if you carefully read the Old Testament itself, there must have been an excess of females (due to males being killed in ongoing wars, etc.) or else there would have been no real need for the polygynious (multiple wives) rule set of the Old Testament. The biological goal would always be to recover balance through reasonably rapid breeding, and the strategy of protecting females and sending males out to do battle is the biologically correct strategy to follow.

In any case, our primate "ancestors" would seem to follow an "Alpha-male" sort of tribal organization, sonething which is, yet again, seen in primitive tribes of humans to this day. This is, yet again, not a monogamous social order. Even well into modern times (i.e., relatively recent British royalty), a royal male could have one or more mistresses on the side with few (if any) consequences.

The religious heirarchy is, in most societies, just the flip side of the civil government heirarchy, so male dominance in one will generally lead to male dominance in the other. Since human reproductive strategies favor "protected females" who are placed "out of action" for long periods of time for pregnancy and child-rearing, it really isn't any wonder that most social orders in humans develop as "male dominated." The wonder is that we get ANY female dominated ones!

== Bill

(P.S. I really had to resist tossing out the joke response to the topic herein: On her back, of course! As you see, at the end of the day, I couldn't resist it. )

[ August 26, 2001: Message edited by: Bill ]

jess

Bill: As moderator, I was holding my breath waiting for that reply.

I can breathe now...

Laume

Well there is Wicca or Witchcraft that sees both the male and female aspects as equals, some covens even are female dominated, though equality is stressed. I recently read a book my Ann Moura called Green Witchcraft and I liked a lot of what she said, though I don't practice any religion. Even though she tries to draw connections to the past like Celtic traditions, the Wicca that is practiced today is modernized. Of course I am no expert on any of it!!

doodad

It has been my experience that women are treated equally and do assume responsible positions in the local Protestant churches.
As a side note, are women treated as equal in the world of atheists? Are their any stats on it? I know atheism is not a religion but it seems to be somewhat of a culture.