“She could just pack up and leave, but she does not visualize what's beyond ahead.”
―Nuria Ano
―Nuria Ano
I am writing this to honor the woman and children who continue to suffer from Domestic Violence, and to raise awareness as to how D.V. is caused and perpetuated in our society as well as around the world.
I have worked as an advocate for woman and children (as well as men), all my life, and I see the substratum of abuse seeded in the Judeo/Christian/Muslim ethos. This has made me unpopular in many circles, because churches are involved in so many outreaches, all-be-it misguided ways to help, those in need. But what the churches don’t want to see, is that they are the ones causing what they are seeking to cure.
Double Bind
Those of you that know my writing, know that I’m constantly pointing to double bind, double speak, and otherwise mindfuck situations that we are facing more and more in our modern world. As Virginia Satir wrote about in “The Drama of the Gifted Child,” conflicting messages that are internalized by the child creates disassociation, anxiety, and many neurotic symptoms, so too our modern world is rife with conflicting messages, paradoxical, ambiguous, and contradictory meanings and intentions that leave people in a state of angst and stress.
Just like the disease of addiction leaves one in a state of ‘the more you have the more you want’, our society and institutions betray and belie the very intentions they espouse. Examples include; our mental health and educational systems which, because they are so broken, are causing the very things they are seeking to fix i.e. mental illness, and ignorance. Similarly, the “War on Drugs” campaign has contributed to addiction, and modern technology, although marketed as a way to bring people closer, actually contributes to people’s sense of alienation, isolation, and overall stress.
The same is true of our religious institutions. But how are the three Abrahamic religions contributing to the cause of Domestic Violence? It is because they are fundamentally anti-feminine, and by extension, anti-women. It is because they teach and propagate a woman’s subjugation, subservience, obedience, and degradation to and by men.
In these religious traditions, women are seen as the cause of the original and continuing “fall of man.” In Greek culture, which is the foundation of all Western culture, Pandora was the first human woman created by the gods. Each god helped create her by giving her unique gifts. Zeus ordered Hephaestus to mold her out of earth as part of the punishment of humanity for Prometheus’ theft of the secret of fire, and all the gods joined in offering her "seductive gifts". Here we see the seeds of the Abrahamic religions, which are fundamentally anti-feminine, attributing mythologically all blame, punishment, suffering and seduction of humanity to woman.
This kind of cultural matrix breeds contempt and fear that men develop in relation to the feminine. Homophobia is a kind of male fear reaction of a man’s own feminine softness. (I will acknowledge, there is a positive movement among Christians as being more accepting of homosexuality-52%).
According to the Greek myth, Pandora opened a jar (pithos), in modern accounts sometimes mistranslated as "Pandora’s box" releasing all the evils of humanity—although the particular evils, aside from plagues and diseases, are not specified in detail by Hesiod—leaving only Hope inside once she had closed it again.
This, of course is the same story as Eve and her apple, seducing innocent Adam into his fall. Just as Eve is taken from Adam’s rib, she doesn’t even merit having her own clay to be fashioned, she is dependent on a man!
At the same time, women are held up as iconic, transcendental objects that are to be worshiped as long as the woman remains ‘contained’ and held in the masculine projection, in other words, if she ‘behaves and keeps her place’. We can call this the virgin/Madonna/whore, schizoid, projection that all three Western religions subject women to.
But women play into this dynamic, (another view that has made me unpopular in D.V. circles, are my views that women participate in their own abuse). Women allow themselves to be worshiped and cast in the light of the masculine projection, they internalize what they are 'supposed' to look like, how to act, and how to be the man’s “better half.” They raise their sons to be the man of the house, king of the castle, and wear the pants in the family.
One of several aspects of feminism from the 60’s is that, in the extreme, women became just like men. That is to say they became aggressive, cut throat in business, pissed standing up in urinals, and became evangelical Republican’s hunting with shotguns.
These women again played into the masculine shadow by joining the dark side. Now-a-days women are wanting to go into combat, fighting brutally in cages (mixed martial arts), and becoming corporate executives ‘raping and pillaging’.
When I first brought these issues up years ago, I was at a conference sponsored by churches, there were preachers, and a ‘former’ domestic violence perpetrator on a panel that was now working as a counselor to ‘help’ victims. He would put his hands on the woman sitting next to him when he made a point, even touched her leg one time, it made my skin crawl!
Needless to say, shortly after, I soon was not working in the D.V. field. My approach, in working with perpetrators was a no non-sense, cut the shit approach, where I would build rapport, and then challenge the men on their beliefs and attitudes of entitlement, insecurity, superiority, and their own lack of contact with their own feminine nature, which is soft, feeling, able to nurture, able to appreciate and savor beauty, sensitive, and as spontaneous and undomesticated as nature Herself.
Men are enculturated to believe they are weak if they show or feel emotion other than anger. This is also a myth that has been so damaging to men and boys.
Religion, for early 60’s feminists, was the body that carried the disease of patriarchy, both a symptom and a sickness tied to women’s subordination and inferiority to men. A world without religion for them would have been a return to conditions resembling primitive social organization and societies, before the advent of patriarchy co-opted religion to serve man’s interests of dominance and control. This is reminiscent of Lennon’s song “Imagine no religion…”
As long as the three Abrahamic religions exist in their present form, women will never be free and equal. These traditions need to be directly challenged for their anti-feminine traditions.
Consider the Catholic churches view that women cannot merit the status and role of being a priest. But women stay in the church trying to change it from the inside, this is equivalent to a Black person being in the KKK, or a Jew being part of the Nazi party, trying to change it from the inside!
I appreciate religion as an empowerment for women, but look where it has got them over the last 100 years! Domestic violence rages on.
Religion, and the cultural matrix it engenders, has in large part, been responsible for the subjugation and degradation of women.
Over the centuries, the anti-feminine Biblical views have been absorbed into the fabric of our culture as nothing less than "The word of God."
What the Bible says about Women's Rights
Genesis 3:16
Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.
Isaiah 3:12
As for my people, children are their oppressors, and women rule over them.
1 Corinthians11:3
But I would have you know, that the head of every man is Christ; and the head of the woman is the man; and the head of Christ is God.
1 Corinthians 14:34-36
Let your women keep silence in the churches: for it is not permitted unto them to speak; but they are commanded to be under obedience as also saith the law. And if they will learn anything, let them ask their husbands at home: for it is a shame for women to speak in the church.
Ephesians 5:22-24
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as unto the Lord. For the husband is the head of the wife, even as Christ is the head of the church: and he is the savior of the body. Therefore as the church is subject unto Christ, so let the wives be to their own husbands in everything.
Colossians 3:18
Wives, submit yourselves unto your own husbands, as it is fit in the Lord.
1 Timothy 2:11-15
Let the woman learn in silence with all subjection. But I suffer not a woman to teach, nor to usurp authority over the man, but to be in silence. For Adam was first formed, then Eve. And Adam was not deceived, but the woman being deceived was in the transgression. Notwithstanding she shall be saved in childbearing.
Titus 2:4-5
Teach the young women to be ... obedient to their own husbands, that the word of God be not blasphemed.
1 Peter 3:1
Likewise, ye wives, be in subjection to your own husbands.
In the Bible's book of Deuteronomy it says that if a man marries a woman and then decides that he hates her, he can claim she wasn't a virgin when they married. At that point her father must prove she was a virgin. (How is not explained.) If he can't, then the girl is to be stoned to death at her father's doorstep.
1. If you see a pretty woman among your captives and would like her for a wife, then bring her home and "go in unto her." Later, if you decide you don't like her, you can simply "let her go." (Deuteronomy)
2. If a betrothed virgin is raped in the city and doesn't cry out loud enough, then "the men of the city shall stone her to death." (Deuteronomy)
3. In the book of Esther the king apparently decrees a sex contest among young virgin women to see who can best please him. (There is debate on how.) He eventually chooses Esther. However, since women are viewed as inherently dirty, Esther must be "purified" for twelve months before she can be made queen. (Esther)
4. Paul points out in New Testament Romans that "the natural use" of women is to provide men with sex. (Romans)
5. Heaven is to be inhabited by 144,000 virgin men who have not been "defiled" by women. (RE 14:1-4) [One wonders how this squares with God's command to, "Be fruitful and multiply...(Genesis )]
6. A group of sexual depraved men beat on the door of an old man's house demanding that he turn over to them a male house guest. Instead, the old man offers his virgin daughter and his guest's wife: "Behold, here are my virgin daughter and his concubine (wife); let me bring them out now. Ravish them and do with them what seems good to you; but against this man do not do so vile a thing." The women were subsequently ravished and killed. (JG))
7. In Exod. we see that it is permissible to sell one's daughter (but apparently not one's son) into slavery.
8. According to St. Jerome, "Nothing is so unclean as a woman in her periods; what she touches she causes to be unclean." In Leviticus it states, "If a woman conceives and bears a male child, she shall be ceremonially unclean seven days...if she bears a female child she shall be unclean two weeks...."
9. "A woman dropped a stone on his head and cracked his skull. Hurriedly he called to his armor-bearer, 'Draw your sword and kill me, so that they can't say a woman killed me.' So his servant ran him through, and he died." (Judges)
10. Under God's direction, Moses' army kills all the adult males, but they mercifully just take the women and children captive. When Moses learns that they left some women and children alive, he angrily says: "Kill every male among the little ones, and kill every woman that hath known man by lying with him." Throughout Bible history God is said to demand that thousands, if not millions, of men, women and children be slaughtered. And they are.
11. A man has an obligation to produce a child with his brother's widow. If he refuses, his sister-in-law is to spit in his face in front of the elders. (Deuteronomy 25:5-9) And in case you are Jewish, you may be familiar with the Jewish prayer: "Blessed be the God who has not created me a heathen, a slave or a woman."
Most Old Testament law dates back centuries to Jewish tribal law and would be considered not only immoral but illegal today. At the same time, fundamentalist, Bible-carrying Christians claim they are the for-all-time, the inviolable Word of God. And we all know the terror that extreme Islam has and continues to inflict on women. It’s time to raise awareness and bring people together to challenge the 2,000 year old campaign against women!
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