The Burning Times: fascinating docu on women's power before Christianity

[sakura]

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ANd why women are feared to the extent that they are accused of witchcraft and killed for it

SAF, Susie Orbach says things that are very similar to that.

GB - I'm not sure either. I guess everything was a bit more supernatural to prescientific people. But menses is regular and understandable/predicatable even if you don't really understand the physiology. Much more comprehensible than infection before there was germ theory for example.

Also it would have been obvious to people with more day to day contact with blood - human and animal, and with life and death that menstrual discharge is not the same as blood. It has blood in it, but it's not the same stuff.

My late night theory is that as with food taboos, taboos around menstrual cleanliness are 'about' enforcing group identity and preventing intermixing. E.g. Like the gypsy menstruation taboos which are ostensibly about relationships between men and women, but which have the effect of making everyone outsde of community unclean because they don't follow the table -- so keeping people in the community.

Follow the taboo. ...

taboos around menstrual cleanliness are 'about' enforcing group identity and preventing intermixing

You don'T think taboos about menstruation are to do with woman-hating then?

I think it can also be about controlling women. Many women (worldwide) of childbearing age who are neither pregnant nor breastfeeding a young baby do not menstruate because they don't have an adequate diet. A menstruating woman can be seen by a misogynistic society as a woman who is using up too many resources.

That was speculation by the way! I don't know if societies do explicitly say that about menstruating women, but it could be a motivating factor.

SAF was in reply to your observation that men and women can not live in separate societies in the way that other groups can because men and women's reproduction are tied together.

I don't think the 'behind enemy lines' analogy makes sense. Men compete with other men, and women with other women in terms of 'success' in comanding the resources to have more descendants.

Anyway, 'tis late and this is well OT.

But men also co-operate with other men, and women co-operate with other women, and women and men compete against each other when attempting to command resources.

So I don't see a contradiction between what Himalaya and SAF are saying.

Have you never seen a man's open disgust at menstrual blood? I have. Many times. I wasn't being controlled by them. THe first was a gay friend I was travelling with, the second was my brother and the third was a boyfriend I had.

Sheer visceral disgust based on (in my opinion) the general feeling in many cultures towards women's bodies. That's why those skeletons are on the catwalk in the fashion world. MAny models will not be menstruating because it's a sign that women's wombs are functioning and they can [shock horror] do something that men will never be able to do in their wildest dreams. Men hate being reminded of their biological inadequacy

Ok, I see we've now stopped talking about witchcraft or history - though agree with Brian that The Burning of Bridget Cleary by Angela Bourke is a wonderful book, and should be read by everyone who found that part of the discussion interesting. However, you can't easily generalise from it; for various reasons, Ireland didn't even have a full-on witch hunt, ever. But there's no doubt that Michael Cleary meant it - however, WHAT did he mean? Something pretty strange, I think. Think you are all maybe underestimating the way the world was just full of possibilities you rule out because you don't believe in them.

' But I think there is also the simple fact that women who are pregnant or who have just given birth are easy to control because they are physically more vulnerable than people who are not in that situation. That makes it possible for people who want more power to control pregnant women, by force if necessary.'

We (Britain) has done an excellent job in institutionalising this and co-opting other women (midwives) in to do the controlling. The patronising way in which women get treated by midwives during pregnancy and labour never fails to astonish me.

... catching up very slowly, but gb, you said I might be being too mean to tyr and he used the phrase 'sting a bit' to refer to women changing their names, not being treated as livestock. He didn't. He said 'Your friends reduced to mere "livestock." And willingly too. That has to sting a bit.'

He's exactly as nasty as he comes across, I'm afraid.

Caught up! Sorry, double-posting.

I have read that menstruation is actually something much more common now than it has been for much of history. I agree it's partly because badly-nourished women don't have periods (though I think that's very plausible - there's a thing called 'greensickness' which the Early Moderns thought teenage girls got, which is basically anemia, as far as I can tell - they were presumably menstruating and losing iron, and you 'controlled' it by diet, presumably by stopping periods). Looking at diets for, say, certain nuns, it'd be surprising if they were well enough to menstruate.
But also, married women would likely be pregnant quite a lot. We know in some times women would miscarry time after time - you might not associate a woman losing blood with fertility at all, but the opposite. And although some women were married at 14 or earlier, it seems they didn't usually start periods as early as we do.

I'm rambling, but I do think it's understandable if people didn't recognize periods as regular and therefore 'normal'. I've also heard the Elizabethans thought you were most fertile during your period - but I think they also had a very different sense of fertility than we do (they can't have assumed it was just those few days or they'd surely have worked it out pretty soon!).

I don't to be honest buy either the idea that earlier societies would necessarily believe women's periods were a sign of power (not regular enough, etc.), or that they'd necessarily think it was horribly unnatural that women 'bleed but don't die'. There are ancient taboos about menstruation, but my impression is that English-speaking society today is much more disgusted by it than it has been for the last few hundred years, certainly more vocally disgusted. It's one of the favourite arguments about why women are 'dirty' and need to become paranoid about their bodies in order to avoid being 'dirty'.

Probably way behind the discussion but a friend of mine who lived in Japan for a bit told me that they have a ceremony to celebrate a girl's first period where they serve rice dyed red. No idea whether thats true or not but would be good if it was celebrated rather than hidden away.

I was thinking though ... is it so very different from, say, the American South? Again you get a situation where the discriminated group live amongst the discriminating group, and the two are reliant on each other. I think the fact that women live alongside men in a mutually dependent way only makes the discrimination more sly and more internalized.

I mean, if you want to discriminate against a group you can easily separate off from yourself, you can do that physically, with real barriers between you and them. If you are trying to subjugate a group that lives amongst you, you have to do it by making that group internalize those barriers. I think you're right the good woman/bad woman thing is partly doing that, but I think it's also to do with getting women to police other women, and making women think that their own bodies are inherently tending towards being 'dirty' or undisciplined.

(Incidentally, speaking to DH and he comments that it's a bit of tell-tale misogyny that your Chris Knight thinks men would be really keen to have sex with women when they couldn't see their faces! It is a pretty funny theory, isn't it, that men and women wouldn't think 'hmm, this sex business is fun, let's do it more often, and in the daylight so we can, erm, see each other!' I thought it was fairly well understood that as a species we're visually attracted to each other, too.)

Sorry, indeed he's not your Chris Knight. Colloquialism; faintly belittling (to him).

I do agree - I just think that all kinds of discrimination shade into each other, and people use the one to reinforce the next. But totally agree about the divide within our own psyche. I think the good woman/bad woman is getting played out in terms of motherhood/career (reading the other thread about that), too.

This is something I find really difficult to talk to people about in RL - lots of people seem to find the idea that women are, or can be, a group that needs to cling together as very strange, or even offensive - lots of people will say it's sexist to talk about women as a group in this way. Depressing. Do you have a good answer to that one? I usually end up rambling about the way women have been discriminated against as a group and just being told 'yes, but not any more/ yes, but what about the men who're discriminated against too yada yada yada' ... it's so frustrating. And as you say, it's not that I don't realize we live with and love and give birth to men - it's just that some of the things done to women are peculiar to women, aren't they? And happen inside women's minds?

Oh, I like that idea of original sin! That's very clever. I think I agree. I'll have to check, but I think in Arabic the word for 'woman' is cognate with the word for 'mirror' - as if women are that in which a man sees his reflection/opposite self, maybe? On shaky ground here though (I wish I spoke Arabic).

I think it's maybe why we are so inclined to think in binaries, which I don't think is a very feminine trait (probably because we're used to being shifted off into the gray areas ourselves). Binaries are a really good tool for minimizing or dismissing sexism - because sexism is bound up with so many things, every time you object to it you're told 'oh, that's not the real issue, you're complicating the real issue'. So we're told not to distract from struggles about working class v. upper class or one race v. another race, because we're complicating a binary pattern by insisting there's also sexism in there. (That made sense in my head. It may not on paper!)

[and being told"yes but not any more/yes but what about............]

yes-i find this difficult also LRD.
i think its possibly because sometimes women are desensitised[is this the right word?]to discrimination and stuff.
i was going to put up a thread about this yesterday.
this come to mind yesterday after you put youre link up[monkey]
i saw this story and bawled my eyes out.
yet-just before[or just after]id been telling another woman on another thread
basiccally"oh i get called names all the time-it dont bother me"[it dont]
then Dittany posted on here about women in india and i thought"yep-i know"
then i thought"hang on-whats happening here"!
then i realised that im desensitised to a certain extent to womens suffering
because of the things ive seen/been through in my life-it seems normal![to a certain extent]
seeing that a monkey had that done to it is not the norm in my life and it really jolted me.
so i think that that women could be desensitised right across the board and cant always see discrimanation and stuff?
can you see what im saying?