I Figured Women Out!

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your not educated in history enough for me to argue with. you think you know something, when you have no concept.
Like, your wanting to argue about gay, when it was totally acceptable in ancient times.

Man has dominated woman since the dawn of time, there is a reason for this, for their fears.
and woman has used this fear to their own advantages. they are not helpless against mans whims.
man hungers for womans love and acceptance, which gives woman power over man.
I am not sure if unleashing them is a vary good idea. man will suffer. while woman gains their own needs.
there would be no balance. man becomes slave to woman if they want to reproduce or have family.

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The accelerating pace of change since the 50s has magnified the influence, the power and the dissemination of myths. As everything changes from the political map to the distribution of wealth, as human ingenuity leads to scientific breakthroughs which offer salvation and at the same time destruction, as strains on the family grow, the imagination hunts for stories to explain the pervasive malaise.

One of the stories in mass circulation today is a very old one, but it’s taken on new vigour: women in general are out of control, and feminism in particular is to blame. It is odd to think that misogynist jokes used to attack women for wanting to trap men into marriage. Now the attacks run the opposite way. The tabloids bitterly quote young mothers who say: “So who needs men?” Feminism today has become a bogy, a whipping boy, routinely produced to explain all social ills. Women struggle for equality of choice in matters of sex, their grasp of sovereignty over their bodies; are blamed in particular for the rise in family breakdown, the increase in divorce, and the apparently spiralling delinquency and violence of children. In these lectures I will be looking at the mythic accretions clustering stickily to these themes: men are no longer in control, mothers are not what they used to be, and it’s the fault of Germaine Greer, Cosmopolitan and headline stars who choose to be single mothers like Michelle Pfeiffer. By holding up to the light modern mythical nodes of this kind I hope to loosen in some cases their binding grip on our imaginations. Replying to one story with another which unravels the former has become central to contemporary thought and art, text as well as image. The idea of a kind of cultural kontakion, the Greek antiphonal chorus across the nave of response and reply, invocation and challenge opens a new angle of view.

The she-monster is hardly a new phenomenon. The idea of a female untamed nature which must be leashed or else will wreak havoc closely reflects mythological heroes’ struggles against monsters. Greek myth alone offers a host - of Ceres, Harpies, Sirens, Moirae. Associated with fate and death in various ways, they move swiftly, sometimes on wings; birds of prey are their closest kin - the Greeks didn't know about dinosaurs - and they seize as in the word raptor. But seizure also describes the effect of the passions on the body; inner forces, madness, art, folly, personified in Homer and the tragedies as feminine, snatch and grab the interior of the human creature and take possession. Ungoverned energy in the female always raises the issue of motherhood; fear that the natural bond excludes men and eludes their control courses through ancient myth, which applies various remedies. In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, when Orestes has murdered his mother Clytemnestra, the matriarchal Furies want justice against the matricide - but they find themselves confronting a new order, led by the god Apollo. Orestes is declared innocent, and in a famous resolution which still has power to shock audiences today, the god decrees:

The mother of what’s called her offspring’s no parent
but only the nurse to the seed that’s implanted.
The mounter, the male’s the only true parent.
She harbours the bloodshoot, unless some god blasts it.
The womb of the woman’s a convenient transit.

In this brutal act of legislation, the god of harmony declares that henceforward, in civilised society, only the father counts. The mother is nothing more than an incubator.

The spectre of gynocracy, of rule by women, stalks through the founding myths of our culture: both Theseus and Hercules fight with the Amazons - and vanquish their queens. The Amazon’s separatist queendom made them tantalising but also monstrous in the eyes of the Greeks; the terrible massacres of their army depicted on stone reliefs and vases redounded to the fame of the Greek heroes as surely as cutting off Medusa’s head.

In the folklore of the past, classical and medieval, the female beast was sometimes cunning and purposely concealed her true nature: the Sirens lured men with their deceitful songs, and later tempted fierce anchorites in the desert, approaching St Anthony for instance, with honeyed words, hiding their diabolical nether parts under sumptuous dresses. Male beasts, as in Beauty and the Beast, or male devils, as in the temptations of St Anthony, don't possess the same degree of duplicity; you can tell you’re dealing with the devil on the whole, but when evil comes in female guise, you have to beware: the fairy queen may turn to dust in your arms, and poisonous dust at that.