Hi, I am Hully's DS. Hully said I could ask you a question!

[Hullygully]

For R.S i have been asked to think, and collect, 10 key points WHY women have suffered from sexism in the past. I can think of HOW, but I am interested in WHY. I would be really interseted and grateful in any thoughts you may have! Thanks!

I also hope that he shares his sources with his mates.

I'm late to this but all oppression is about feeling better and more superior by making someone else feel worse - power. It is also about fear. Fear of being the oppressed and not having power.

That is why human beings look for differences. We divide to rule. It still happens and we've all been part of it in one way or another.

Think of the most obvious causes of "otherness" and you will find discrimination and fear (whether black, Jewish, French, female etc etc).

i think it is deeper than fear in the case of women - i do think it is what men give each other to make up for their varying status' in a way. so the male world is built on oppression and power and getting stuff and inequality but whatever your place in that hierarchy you were allowed 'your woman' to do with as you will and give you a bit of ownership and power of your own even if you had none in the public sphere of men.

men used women to forge links between their groups as well - trading their daughters as wives which forged alliances and trading relationships. gifts have always been formalisers of relations and ways of establishing bonds, daughters were the gifts supreme really and by exchanging them and having them living in with your group and reproducing your offspring (under the fathers rule in patriarchal groups and the maternal uncles rule in matriarchal ones) you intertwined your interests.

i think that gifting of women between men is a big part of it along with the obvious controlling the means of reproduction that became more important later when we got into agriculture and were able to produce surplus to pass on between generations and when considerable labour needed to be harnassed in order to farm.

it's also classic displacement isn't it? your boss treated you like an underling at work and humiliated you with your lack of power and you couldn't fight back but you could come home at the end of the day and roar at your wife and kids and feel like a king. so in their bully games with each other we essentially always bore the brunt and were their buffers against feeling totally degraded and for the rich men that meant we were their buffers against mass revolt.

and i do think that's part of why right wingers want women to go back to being owned by men - it creates more social harmony in the world of men and capitalism if the workers have a wife and kids under them. it appeasses the masses.

I was ruminating over the powerful women of the past discussion upthread over the weekend and it occured to me that, while some women in the past did weild huge power, it was often because they were not tied to a man. Abbesses spring to mind as an obvious example though, ultimately, they were required to submit to the power of a Bishop who, of course, can only be male (even to this day)

Look at Queen Elizabeth the first. She managed to stay in control of her country precisely because she managed to dodge the marriage issue her whole life. What would have happened if she married? Her lands (i.e. England) would have become a vassal state of her husband's. Clever woman that Bess.

Finally, have you notices Hullyson, that god is always referred to as "he". Once you give the ultimate power the characteristics of the ruling class, you underline the inherit superiority of men. For another example of this look at the most common pictures of Jesus. Why is he white, blue eyed and often bordering on blonde? The man, if he existed, was Jewish and Middle Eastern. Yet, as the Western word conquered, their missionaries took with them images of god made in their likeness to spread the word amongst the heathen.

Good points slug. We identify with people genetically similar to us. Orwell uses this very well in his novel 1984 where all the representations of Big Brother are different to look like the people in that particular ghetto.

Am I too late to add my point? I think the religion is a red herring. Most faiths actually empower women (it was a woman who whom Jesus first revealed himself, a woman who discovered the tomb empty and Jesus himself confided in many women friends who probably were also apostles) but it is the leaders of religion who choose to re-write the rule book and oppress women.

There is always a power struggle within humanity. Anything that is seen as different is also seen as a threat. Which includes women, blacks, homosexuals, children, etc. Ignorance breeds fear which in turn breeds hatred. Every animal pack has a dominant male (note, not a dominant female) and human beings sometimes display these very animal instincts. The urge to dominate is everywhere and sexism is just a small part of the bigger picture.

That's my theory as to why.

Not convinced by the empowering women argument at all.
I can't help but think of the way Shariah law treats women's testimony as half that of a male, or the way Judeao Christian tradition excludes women from postions of power, or the way women are considered unclean in Buddhist temples.....(I could go on). Religion might give women concessions, but it's always tied into her "role" of submissive helpmeet.

Nor am I convinced about the alpha male in animal packs. Wolf packs are usually dominated by a female, as mongooses and meerkats, macaques and grivet monkeys. Lemurs are almost exclusively female dominated across the whole family, with only a few exceptions.

no i call bollocks on that one too. yay jesus talked to women - a MAN deigned to talk to women woo hoo! nope.

plus you are talking in utter androcentric terms sircliff - note you outlined femaleness as an example of difference thus relegating male as normal or fully human.

maybe mentioned already but I would say because the fact that they are the ones who bear and birth children it makes them vunerable/the weaker sex in the eyes of many and has been so historically?

I don't know how old you are or whether this answer is suitable but I have always felt that as well as the childbirth aspect, the reason is that, as kickass said, humans are animals and as we grew more civilised, the physically stronger sex analysed and grew suspicious of the feelings that the 'weaker' sex aroused in them. Attraction and desire are powerful and overwhelming feelings for anyone, let alone a group that defines itself by its strength and brain and that is why so many men cannot get further than the 'witchcraft' explanation, why they put us on an unwanted pedestal or revere virginity, why there is this need to treat sex as a war game. For me, that's why subjugation of women is and has always been such a near-universal fact of life, perpetuated by ancient and modern civilisations.

Until we got the washing machine, pill and the Internet, that is...

swallowedafly - I think you are looking too deeply into my post. I was explaining WHY men fear women, to them we ARE different. Me making that point does not mean that those are my views, far from it.

And the religion point I was making, well slug you just made it for me. You see men took over religion and relegated women to second class citizens. However if you go back to before men decided to wipe women out of the Bible altogether, you will find many women prophets - Ruth was just one of them. There is also strong evidence of a gospel written by Mary Magdalene which has been cast out by a church made up of men who denounced her as a prostitute without a shred of evidence. They did that in order to dismiss the important role she had in the New Testament.

Jesus didn't just talk to women, he revealed his true self to them. It was not to Peter or any of the disciplines that he first told of his parentage, it was to a woman. He confided in a woman that he was the son of God. That's pretty important and again, the church doesn't like to dwell on that. Not forgetting his mother herself of course, whom the church raised up on a pedestal and made her a virgin born without original sin - for which there is not one jot of evidence. Another example of how men try to oppress women's sexuality. There is every evidence however that Mary and Joseph had a normal healthy married relationship and that Jesus had siblings.

Religion itself is not sexist, it is the men who twist religion to serve their own needs which is. Just as religion does not condone violence, but rather it is men who use it to justify their own violent streaks. Religion is prone to manipulation just as much as anything, but if you go right back to before Constantine you'll find that women played an important part in the church as priests and temple leaders even. So when the catholic church harps on about not having women priests, just remind them that they did used to have women priests at the very beginnings of the church, before it was corrupted by man.

the very creation story is sexist fgs. the identifying of god as male/a father is sexist and contrary to what the natural world would suggest.

realistically if god was real and disagreed with sexism he'd have been very, very explicit about it - you wouldn't have to go reading between the lines - there'd have been a commandment saying thou shalt stop raping and beating and oppressing and chopping up the genitals of and buying and selling and marrying against their will and etc etc etc against women. he'd have also made a big point of sending his supposed 'child' in female form.

or was he a bit thick?

sorry. tosh.

or maybe the oppression of half of his creation wouldn't have seemed important enough to tackle head on?

the level of mental gymnastics required to convince oneself religion is not sexist is incredible and renders the persons rationality and integrity to a shred of what it could be.

Thanks for such a reasoned debate, always nice to chat with someone who respects your opinions. You see, if you are talking about respect in a thread, isn't it nice to deal some out too?

The creation is a story that did not come from the mouth of God but from the mouth of a prophet in the Old Testament. That story was not affirmed by Jesus and is largely regarded by those in religion (apart from the creationists of course) to be just a story.

Jesus preached equality and respect to all and showed by example. For instance he spent a long time chatting to Mary and Martha, even when questioned by his disciples about what he was doing wasting his time with two women. He had the utmost of respect for women. He refused to judge a woman about to be stoned to death for adultery and the woman to whom he revealed his true self was a woman who was herself an adulterer by her own admission.
There are many more examples of just how important women were in the Bible but these examples were taken out of the Bible and Gospels when the official book was put together by men.

You are ranting against a religion you have been taught by men. That is not how that religion started nor is it how it is meant to be taught.

In fact there is a growing debate that the Holy Spirit is a female and in fact the word 'he' in Arabic is not always for a woman.

There is nothing to suggest that God cannot be female. Remember, the Bible was translated by men and there are many confusing arabic terms that could mean one gender or another. So when Jesus refers to his father, what's to say that he does not mean his mother? Or both?

All religions originally were female worshipping, I collect goddesses, the house is full of swollen bellied and breasted women.

I have no idae what Jesus did or didn't do as wasn't there, but when the myths of Jesus were written up, some 30 years after his death when the cult began, the women were certainly written out.

Karen Armstrong is v interesting on all this btw.

i'm not ranting actually.

will leave you clutching at straws and doing mental gymnastics.

You are right Hully, there is now growing evidence that women played a much stronger role in the New Testament than the church will ever admit to. Their presence was always a strong one. There were women at the last supper, it was written that he had the supper with his disciples NOT apostles and with his disciples there were many women, doubtless Mary and Martha among them.

One of the reasons the catholic church says there can be no women priests is because they were not present at the Last Supper. But they were. Jesus washes the feet of the disciples, he shared food with the disciples. The religion we assume to be correct now is far from it.

I am a raving atheist but I think the his (sic) tory of religion, organised and otherwise is absolutely fascinating, and does indeed offer many stark insights into the development of male power.

Do you have any recommendations of Karen Armstrong literature Hully? I wouldn't mind reading some of her stuff.

Here is the evidence on women being present at the last supper. It was first published in a catholic mag, shame they didn't take it on board.

Sir Cliff, I have read:

her autobiographical stuff and these:

The Gospel According to Woman: Christianity's Creation of the Sex War in the West (1986)
The Bible: A Biography (2007)
The Case for God (2009)

There are lots more - v interesting.

well they wouldn't, would they??

Ooh, all sounds good. I might have to order a few of those. I love reading about women's role in the Bible, the more I delve into it the more I see of a huge cover-up.

Yes the catholics are blatantly sexist but there are many more women out there writing extremely good articles for the catholic journals that are now being published (there was one time an article like that would never get past the editor) and I can only think that's a good thing, because if nothing else it raises peoples awareness of these issues.

So, did your son write up his findings, Hully?

I would be interested to hear his thoughts now, and maybe even a thankyouverymuch for all the help he got?