Violence Against Women

The theme of this blog is the adventures of the Sunrise and the Skipper of the Sunrise. Thus, I write about life in Apalachicola on my boat and related happenings (by the way, I found that the starting motor fault on my little car was due to a bad wire that supplied power to the starting circuit--for unknown reasons, it only had half the necessary voltage-- so I just ran a new wire straight from the battery). However, it is not my nature to be isolated from world and domestic events, so I want to make an explicit comment inpired the horrendous murders in Isla Vista, California, a place I know.

I am guessing that maybe four thousand years ago, there occurred some not trivial inventions in the populations of Homo Sapiens around the world. These were patriarchy and the worship of the "Sky Gods," modes which displaced the previous culture of matriarchy and worship of the "Earth Gods." I cannot speak of all the continents and all the peoples, but our Indo-European ancestors (ancestors of some of us) fully adopted these new modes, with concomitant militarism and authoritarianism, and came charging out of the East, heading west to Europe and South to India, conquering all the matriarchal tribes in their path. These were the Celts, the Aryans, the Greeks, the Latins, the Germans, and surely others, all establishing cultures that emphasized patriarchy and sky gods. Women, who previously ran the show, so to speak, were relegated to a role of servitude, as were the conquered peoples.

The modern world created by the sky god culture is about as much of a cock-up as I can imagine, with pollution, the possibility of nuclear annihilation, destruction by war, aberrant killings, violence against women, abject poverty, and global warming just some of the results.

It is not that matriarchy and the Earth Mother disappeared from our culture and our world. History shows that the patriarchy has kept quite busy repressing feminism. Think of the destruction of the Isis cults in the Mediterranean and burning of witches throughout Europe, the annihilation of Native Americans and other "indigenous" peoples. These days, women struggle to throw off the yoke of the patriarchy and establish themselves, but the patriarchy is battling desperately to maintain its privilege, a one-sided battle, because feminism does not fight with the same tools. Thus, women are murdered and repressed.

The matriarchy had a good, long run, probably in the hundreds of thousands of years. The patriarchy, in just a few thousand, has come close to destroying the whole world. This way cannot continue and I cannot imagine a patriarchal culture that can control itself; nor is it really possible to reinstate a matriarchal culture (although one might emerge if we do endure apocalyptic nuclear war or extreme global warming). So, what we desperately need is a balance, the yin and the yang forming unity.