A society led by fear and a feeling of scarcity, that happens to be an environment in which the masculine takes charge?
source: umirror.in
A system of society or government in which men hold the power and women are largely excluded from it.
This, however, is just a definition. What I find more interesting than anything is where this came from.
Mid 17th century: via medieval Latin from Greek patriarkhia, from patriarkhēs ‘ruling father’.
Now, what would have been meant by ‘ruling father’? Was this truly in the simple sense of the meaning above, or even simpler: the male head of the family in that time with his partner as equal? During the Celtic times for instance, the woman was just as much the head of the family as the man. Sometimes even more so. Queen Maeve was an excellent example of a Matriarch with great powers, not subduing to her male Patriarch 'colleagues'.
So what happened?
I believe it’s no secret that the world throughout the ages has been ruled by men in general with men at the head of many government entities and systems. But this doesn’t mean automatically that these ‘men’ were and are ‘men’ in the true sense of the word. Quite the opposite. Most religious leaders, from the pope to the Dalai Lama, were and are men. In most religions with multiple gods, there are more male gods than females and a male is always the 'main' god. In the three Abrahamic religions, the male is prominent. Jesus, Mohammed, Abraham, Moses...there are no female prophets. If anything, the woman is seen as the temptress or nuisance. Eve was the one who 'tempted' Adam to eat the forbidden fruit and Mary Magdalene was a prostitute while Moses and Jesus were heroes. We can see this attitude towards women still today. Men are bros and women are hoes. Even in fairy tales we can see this. The knight in shining armour or Prince Charming are there to rescue the (poor little) damsel in distress, while the evil queen and witch are only out to cause trouble. We've all grown up with this, these books and these stories and we've all been conditioned into thinking the male is the alpha, while the female just hangs on for dear life and maybe she'll have the chance to shine when she pushes the evil witch into a burning oven.
source: http://www.pelicanweb.org
Most jobs that require muscle power and body strength (I will not mention any, you can figure that one out for yourself) will be better done by men. Jobs that need precision and require minuscule tools to handle them, will oftentimes have better results if they are done by women. I say ‘most’ and ‘often’ because I know there are always exceptions to the rule. I’ve seen a female friend of mine pick up a few crates of heavy bottles in a bar with the ease you would only expect from the Hulk himself. A woman through and through, the physique of a woman, but with muscles that would make even some men jealous.
I, and I believe most people with me, want to be able to do what I like, without restrictions if I can handle the job. If I can’t I need to move on to something else. And reasonable people will do just that, because they will realize that it just wasn’t for them. They will then go on and find their own way and happiness in what they do. Or so I hope. Isn’t that what we all want for each other? That every single one of us is happy and free to lead the life they want? It is for me.
Society led by fear and a feeling of scarcity, that happens to be an environment in which the masculine takes charge?
OK, I am probably going to say things that don’t actually answer the question in a way it was meant to be. And to be honest: I don’t care.
The argument of FEAR has struck some chords in me that have been
tingling for a long, long time.
I have thought about this for an even longer time. Ever since I was a teenager.
It was when I read a book that had me in tears. Not tears of joy, or tears because it didn’t have a happy ending. Well it didn’t. But that was not why I cried. I cried because it shook me to the core. It is the only book that I ever read where I had tears flowing down my cheeks through it all.
My mother started to get worried about me and all I could say was that I was crying because of the injustice that fear had caused.
It was a book about the Salem Witch Trials. I’ve read many books and stories about it since, but never did it have the impact on me as it had then. It is the one book that made me look into other subjects, related but different.
From that moment on, I read about the Spanish inquisition. The Catholic Church and its influence. All the different popes and their (oftentimes prominent) families, several other religious leaders and their ‘crew’ of faithfuls. And I started questioning my history teacher, my religion teacher (Catholic) and even our priest at Church. My main question was WHY? Why in history, were there people so evil that they accused others of things they didn’t even know or understood. Why were these people killed in the most horrific ways? Ways that no one here can reasonably understand nor imagine.
HOW could people have lived with themselves knowing it was them who caused these killings? Was mankind truly so evil? And there it is, the word man in mankind. No one had the answer to those questions. So I started reading more. I read about the Knights Templars. More books about the Roman and Spanish inquisitions. About witchcraft. The occult. I wanted to know it all and try to find the answer in those books. I found none. That was...until I started to see patterns.
And I started to connect the dots. I think it was my first true wake up call. Especially when I realized that it did happen again and it is still happening. All over the world, people are accused of things they did or did not do and those people are ‘taken care of’.
What I didn’t know then, was that it was all connected and came back to one thing:
Fear. Fear to lose something, like power. Fear of the unknown. But mostly fear of loss of power.
Fear: our greatest enemy!
When the Catholic church became powerful, man, they truly became powerful.
Just to think there was ONE man, who pretty much got to decide the fate of all his followers and could have someone killed on a whim, is something that opened my eyes to a lot of other things. They had their fingers in everything. Looking back into history, we can find no less than three popes directly related to the influential De Medici family. We find Borgias. Now, our history teaches us the Borgias family were monsters. De Medici weren’t so much. But is that truly the case? Why and how did they have family members that became pope, if they didn’t play some dirty games somewhere down the line?
The Catholic church truly were involved in everything. The Medici family were bankers. The word medici is plural for medicus which means: physician. Think about it. They backed famous artists. There were politicians in their family. And the list goes on.
It connects some dots, or at least it should. I am sure they had a man taking the role of patriarch and the popes they produced definitely did.
The Spanish inquisition and the why?
I’ve always had my own theory about this subject in our very, very dark page in history.
At the time, the government, kings or queens, weren’t really the government. Just like they aren’t now. The Church was. They were the ones with the power. They scared their followers into submission with fear of hell and damnation. It was easy, because those followers had never seen a book, let alone a bible. They were also the medics, the doctors.
When someone had an illness, they drained some blood from them, or used leeches to make them better. Sometimes it worked. Oftentimes it didn’t.
But in the smaller communities, there were people, men andwomen, but mostly women, who knew how to cure some illnesses with herbs and plants. This happened all the time and was never an issue.
BUT, if those ‘regular’ people would start helping more and more people, and the Church wasn’t, the Church would lose all credibility. And they couldn’t have that. Especially if those people were women.
And the witch hunts began.
The mere nature in which this happened, shows us more than enough about the kind of people we were dealing with. It was the fear of loss of power that triggered these events. And it showed that torture and brutal murders wasn’t a step too far to keep this power. It also kept any others, who would even consider going against them, in line - possibly including royals and other government entities.
Has the world changed since then?
No. It hasn't. True, there are no public hangings of witches. At least not in the world as we know it.
But the fear for the loss of power still haunts those who so desperately need and demand a feeling of self-worth . Fear and the feeling of scarcity, for men have always been quite low in number compared to women. And the only way to capture a feeling of control and power, is to suppress.
I once had a discussion with someone about the Maltese cross he had stuck to the sleeve of his jacket. I asked him about it and the negative image it had due to its correlation with the Nazi's during WWII. He explained that he was wearing it, because it meant to be the symbol of masculinity. I found this strange since everyone could see he was a male and I didn't see the point of trying to prove this to anyone just like I didn't have to wear anything to prove I'm a woman. Later, this same person showed me and everyone that knew him, that it was insecurity really that made him wear it. He wasn't proving it to anyone else but himself. He was a patriarch in its nastiest form. Proving self-worth by trying to suppress the (stronger) female presence in his life.
The first thing that came to my mind when I read the subject here, was a video I saw a while back. I believe it was a commercial video for a jeans brand with actor Jason Momoa. You can see it below:
When I first saw the video my first thoughts were: now this is a real man! This is what a man is supposed to be like. If he has a family, be the family man as much as he can. Play with his kids, be an excellent father and husband. To me, this is the patriarch in its truest sense, no matter how differently this is defined in the dictionary and with this patriarch, we would automatically have the matriarch standing right beside him. Not above, not below, but equal. The patriarch the way he has manifested in our history, is far from what we call being truly masculine or a 'real man'.
This one is:
