Notes about Sexuality and Religion

P16

if the system of patriarchal dominance had a historic origin, it could be ended under altered historical conditions.

P19

Feminist critics have revealed the circular reasoning, absence of evidence and unscientific assumptions of Wilsonian sociobiology

P21

Marxist analysis has been very influential in determining the questions asked by feminist scholars. The basic work of reference is Frederick Engels’s Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State, which describes “the world historic defeat of the female sex” as an event deriving from the development of private property

P22

the assumption that there is one formula and one pattern for the sexual division of labor is erroneous. The particular work done by men and women has differed greatly in different cultures, largely depending on the ecological situation in which the people find themselves.

…

Engels theorized… Once having acquired such private property, men sought to secure it to themselves and their heirs; they did so by instituting the monogamous family. By controlling women’s sexuality through the requirement of prenuptial chastity and by the establishment of the sexual double standard in marriage, men assured themselves of the legitimacy of their offspring and thus secured their property interest. Engels stressed the connection between the breakdown of older kinship relations based on communal property ownership and the emergence of the individual family as the economic unit.

…

Engels concluded: The overthrow of the mother right was the world historical defeat of the female sex. The man took command in the home also; the woman was degraded and reduced to servitude; she became the slave of his lust and a mere instrument for the production of children.23 Engels used the term “Mutterrecht,” hereafter referred to as “Mother Right,” derived from Bachofen, to describe matrilineal kinship relations, in which the property of men did not pass to their children but to their sisters’ children. He also accepted Bachofen’s model of the “historic” progression in family structure from group marriage to monogamous marriage.

P23

Engels also called attention to the institutionalization of prostitution, which he described as an indispensable prop for monogamous marriage.

…

(1) He pointed to the connection between structural changes in kinship relations and changes in the division of labor on the one hand and women’s position in society on the other.

(2) He showed a connection between the establishment of private property, monogamous marriage, and prostitution. (3) He showed the connection between economic and political dominance by men and their control over female sexuality.

(4) By locating “the world historical defeat of the female sex” in the period of the formation of archaic states, based on the dominance of propertied elites, he gave the event historicity.

P24

The “exchange of women” is the first form of trade, in which women are turned into a commodity and are “reified,” that is, they are thought of more as things than as human beings. The exchange of women, according to Levi-Strauss, marks the beginning of women’s subordination.

P26

Bachofen‘s work influenced Engels and Charlotte Perkins Gilman and is paralleled in the thought of Elizabeth Cady Stanton. A wide array of twentieth-century feminists accepted his ethnographic data and his analysis of literary sources and used them to construct a wide range of differing theories.33 Bachofen’s ideas also strongly influenced Robert Briffault as well as a school of Jungian analysts and theorists whose work has had wide popular appeal and currency in twentieth-century America.  Bachofen’s basic framework was evolutionist and Darwinian; he described various stages in the evolution of society, leading steadily upward from barbarism to modern patriarchy. Bachofen’s original contribution was to claim that women in primitive society developed culture and that there was a stage of “matriarchy” which led society out of barbarism.

The ethnographic evidence on which Bachofen and Engels based their arguments has been largely disproven by modern anthropologists. Such evidence as held up turned out to be evidence not for “matriarchy” but for matrilocality and matriliny.

P30

There is not a single society known where women-as-a-group have decision-making power over men or where they define the rules of sexual conduct or control marriage exchanges.

P45

Guatemalan Indian…Women manipulate men’s fear that menstrual blood will threaten their virility by making of menstruation a symbolic weapon.

…

One can easily postulate that those tribes which did not develop men skilled in warfare and defense eventually succumbed to those tribes that fostered these skills in their men.

…

Freud saw the origin of male aggressiveness in the Oedipal rivalry of father and son for the love of the mother and postulated that men built civilization to compensate for the frustration of their sexual instincts in early childhood.

P46

Susan Brownmiller sees man’s ability to rape women leading to their propensity to rape women and shows how this has led to male dominance over women and to male supremacy. Elizabeth Fisher ingeniously argued that the domestication of animals taught men their role in procreation and that me practice of the forced mating of animals led men to the idea of raping women.

…

It seems to me far more likely that the development of intertribal warfare during periods of economic scarcity fostered the rise to power of men of military achievement.

P47

C. D. Darlington offers one explanation. He sees exogamy as a cultural innovation, which becomes accepted because it offers an evolutionary advantage….desire in humans to control population to “optimum density”…Tribes achieve this by sexual control…resorting to abortion, infanticide, and homosexuality when necessary.

P50

This practice becomes institutionalized in incest taboos and patrilocal marriage patterns. Elder males, who provide continuity in the knowledge pertaining to production, now mystify these “secrets” and wield power over the young men by controlling food, knowledge, and women. They control the exchange of women, enforce restrictions on their sexual behavior, and acquire private property in women. The young men must offer labor services to the old men for the privilege of gaining access to women. Under such circumstances women also become the spoil for the warriors

…

It should be noted that in Meillassoux‘s scheme the control over reproduction (women’s sexuality) precedes the acquisition of private property.

P52

Thus, the first appropriation of private property consists of the appropriation of the labor of women as reproducers.[Danish anthropologist Peter] Aaby concludes:

If we follow Aaby’s argument, which I find persuasive, we must conclude that in the course of the agricultural revolution the exploitation of human labor and the sexual exploitation of women become inextricably linked.

P53

The earlier societies were often matrilineal and matrilocal, while the latter surviving societies were predominantly patrilineal and patrilocal. Nowhere is there any evidence of a reverse process, going from patriliny to matriliny. The more complex societies featured a division of labor no longer based only on biological distinctions, but also on hierarchy and the power of some men over other men and all women. A number of scholars have concluded that the shift here described coincides with the formation of archaic states

P65

The brewery employed forty male workers, who were free men, and six female slaves.

P66

We should also notice that, in the very first effort by a king to establish law and order by proclaiming an edict, one of the aspects of regulation concerns the gender role of women: that is, their right of remarriage and their speech toward men.

P75

we can begin to appreciate how deeply rooted patriarchal gender definitions are in Western civilization. The matrix of patriarchal relations between the sexes was already firmly in place before economic and political developments fully institutionalized the state and long before the ideology of patriarchy was developed.

P77

The oppression of women antedates slavery and makes it possible…

Women’s sexuality and reproductive potential became a commodity to be exchanged or acquired for the service of families…

P80

The practice of raping the women of a conquered group has remained a feature of warfare and conquest from the second millennium B .C . to the present. It is a social practice which, like the torture of prisoners, has been resistant to “progress,”…

I am arguing that the sexual enslavement of captive women was, in reality, a step in the development and elaboration of patriarchal institutions, such as patriarchal marriage, and its sustaining ideology of placing female “honor” in chastity.

P94

Hypergamy depends on the enforced chastity of lower-class girls prior to marriage. The purity of a daughter or sister might make her eligible to become the wife or concubine of a nobleman or to be selected for temple service. Thus, female purity becomes a family asset, jealously guarded by the men in the family.

P102

In the [Mesopotamian] law codes under discussion we see a great deal of attention focused on the legal regulation of sexual behavior, with women being restricted much more severely than men…

P110

The customary right of male family members (fathers, brother, uncles) to exchange female family members in marriage antedated the development of the patriarchal family and was one of the factors leading to its ascendancy.

P112

Marriage by purchase and marriage by contract coexisted from the time of Hammurabic law onward. The two forms of marriage applied to women of different classes.

P113

The strict obligations by husbands and sons toward mothers and wives in Hammurabic and Hebrew law can thus be seen as strengthening the patriarchal family, which depends on the willing cooperation of wives in a system which offers them class advantages in exchange for their subordination in sexual matters

P118

These laws embody the concept that the marriage exchange is not a transaction involving an individual couple but rather involving the rights of male members of one family to female members of another family.

P121

The patriarchal family, first fully institutionalized in Hammurabic law, mirrored the archaic state in its mixture of paternalism and unquestioned authority. But what is most important to understand in order to comprehend the nature of the sex/gender system under which we still live is the reverse of this process: the archaic state, from its inception, recognized its dependence on the patriarchal family and equated the family’s orderly functioning with order in the public domain. The metaphor of the patriarchal family as the cell, the basic building block, of the healthy organism of the public community was first expressed in Mesopotamian law.

P122

During the second millennium B .C ., class formation had taken place in such a way that for women economic status and sexual service were inextricably linked.

P123

German physician Iwan Bloch tells us that it develops as a byproduct of the regulation of sexuality: “Prostitution appears among primitive people wherever free sexual intercourse is curtailed or limited. It is nothing else than a substitute for a new form of primitive promiscuity.”

P124

…we must note his insight that the origin of prostitution derives both from changing attitudes toward sexuality and from certain religious beliefs, and that changes in economic and social conditions at the time of the institutionalization of private property and of slavery affected sexual relations.

P125

Cultic sexual service by men and women may date back to the Neolithic period and to various cults of the Mother-Goddess or of the so-called Great Goddess in her many manifestations.

P126

The basis for the ritual of the Sacred Marriage was the belief that fertility of the land and of people depended on the celebration of the sexual power of the fertility goddess.

P127

Rich sexual imagery with its joyous worship of sexuality and fertility permeated poetry and myth and found expression in statuary and sculpture. Rites similar to the Sacred Marriage also flourished in classical Greece and pre-Christian Rome.

P129

Here is Herodotus‘ account:

Every woman born in the country must once in her life go and sit down in the precinct of Venus [Mylitta], and there consort with a stranger. . . . A woman who has once taken her seat is not allowed to return home till one of the strangers throws a silver coin into her lap, and takes her with him beyond the holy ground. . .Such of the women . . . who are ugly have to stay a long time before they can fulfill the law. Some have waited three or four years in the precinct.

P130

Worshipers regularly brought offerings of. food, oil, wine, and precious goods to the temple to honor the deities and in the hope of thus advancing their own cause….

Priests may also have encouraged or permitted the use of slave women and the lower class of temple servants as commercial prostitutes in order to enrich the temple.

P132

Enkidu agrees, and the harlot leads him to Gilgamesh, whose best friend he becomes. The temple harlot is an accepted part of society; her role is honorable— in fact, it is she who is chosen to civilize the wild man. The assumption here is that sexuality is civilizing, pleasing to the gods. The harlot does “a woman’s task”; thus she is not set off from other women because of her occupation. She possesses a kind of wisdom, which, tames the wild man. He follows her lead into the city of civilization.

P133

It is likely that commercial prostitution derived directly from the enslavement of women and the consolidation and formation of classes. Military conquest led, in the third millennium B .C ., to the enslavement and sexual abuse of captive women…

The ready availability of captive women for private sexual use and the need of kings and chiefs, frequently themselves usurpers of authority, to establish legitimacy by displaying their wealth in the form of servants and concubines led to the establishment of harems.

P134

As the sexual regulation of women of the propertied class became more firmly entrenched, the virginity of respectable daughters became a financial asset for the family. Thus, commercial prostitution came to be seen as a social necessity for meeting the sexual needs of men. What remained problematic was how to distinguish clearly and permanently between respectable and non-respectable women.

MAL § 40 reads as follows:

P135

On closer examination we can see that the distinction between the women is based on their sexual activities. Domestic women, sexually serving one man and under his protection, are here designated as “respectable” by being veiled; women not under one man’s protection and sexual control are designated as “public women,” hence unveiled.

P140

Fathers, empowered to treat the virginity of their daughters as a family property asset, represent an authority as absolute as that of the king. Children reared and socialized within such authority will grow into the kinds of citizens needed in an absolutist kingship…

From 1250 B.C. on, from public veiling to the regulation by the state of birth control and abortion, the sexual control of women has been an essential feature of patriarchal power.

P143

In the symbol of the goddess’s vulva, fashioned of precious stone and offered up in her praise, they celebrated the sacredness of female sexuality and its mysterious life-giving force, which included the power to heal. And in the very prayers appealing to the goddess’s mercy, they praised her as mistress of the battlefield, more powerful than kings, more powerful than other gods.

P145

The anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday…  analyzed 112 creation stories and the societies in which they occurred and found clearly defined patterns. She also found a clear correlation between gender definitions in creation stories and a people’s mode of acquiring food and their child-rearing patterns:

P148

The goddess Ishtar, for example, was described as free with her sexual favors, the protector of prostitutes, the patron of ale-houses, and simultaneously the virginal bride of gods… Female sexuality was sacred to her service and honored in her rituals. Ancient people saw no contradictions in these contrasting attributes. The duality of the Goddess represented the duality observable in nature— night and day, birth and death, light and darkness. Thus, in the earliest known phases of religious worship the female force was recognized as awesome, powerful, transcendent.

P149

With the domestication of animals and the development of animal husbandry, the function of the male in the process of procreation became more apparent and was better understood. [Ref Cult of the Mother Goddess Edwin O James]

P152

It seems to me likely that historic changes in society, which emphasized kingship and military leadership, would lead men to reach for a male god symbol to embody that newly realized principle of symbolic creativity.

P163

The tribes recognized a bond of blood which imposed upon them the responsibility for blood-vengeance; that is, an injury to a member of the tribe had to be avenged by the death of his attacker or by the death of a member of the attacker’s family. Among nomads, in the absence of a regular judicial system, this form of retribution protected the rights and integrity of the tribes.

P164

The semi-nomadic tribes conquering Canaan… must have experienced large-scale catastrophes brought on by war and by various epidemics, which are described in the Bible as plagues or pestilence. The combined pressure of the need for agricultural labor in settling a desert environment and the concurrent loss of population due to wars and epidemics crisis in the very period when the rudimentary principles of Jewish religious thought came into being may explain the Biblical emphasis on the family and on woman’s procreative role. In such a demographic crisis women would most likely have agreed to a division of labor which gave their maternal role primacy.⁵

P165

Deborah’s prophecy comes true when Sisera is killed by Jael, the wife of Heber, who lures him into her tent by an offer of hospitality and, while he is sleeping, drives a tentpin into his temple with a hammer.  [Judges 4 – 5].

P167

The stories of the patriarchs in Genesis offer some indications of a transition from matrilocal and matrilineal to patrilocal and patrilineal family organization in some of the tribes

P170

As they did in Mesopotamian societies, Hebrew men enjoyed complete sexual freedom within and outside of marriage….

Polygamy, which was widespread among the patriarchs, later became rare except for royalty, and monogamous marriage became the ideal and the rule.

P185

David Bakan, in a highly original and stimulating interpretation of the Book of Genesis, argues that the central theme of the book is the assumption of paternity by males. When men make the “scientific” discovery that conception results from intercourse between men and women, they understand that they have the power to procreate, which previously they had believed only the gods possessed.

P186

With this explanation Bakan follows Engels’s argument, which we have earlier discussed, but he adds: “A major metaphorical device . . . is to conceptualize the male sexual exudate as ‘seed.’ This way of thinking attributes all the genetic endowment to the male and none to the female.”

P191

Circumcision was widely practiced in the Ancient Near East, for reasons of hygiene, as preparation for sexual life, as a sacrifice and a mark of distinction. Babylonians, Assyrians, and Phoenicians did not practice it, but some Egyptians and many Mesopotamian people did. That the practice was ancient is attested by pictorial evidence dating back to 2300 B.C . and by references to flint knives being used in the ceremony, which would mean it antedated the Bronze Age.26 Commentators all agree that the rite underwent a decisive transformation in Israel, not only by the religious significance attached to it but by its being moved from puberty to infancy. Among most peoples, circumcision was a puberty rite, which presumably prepared men for sexual and procreative life.

P192

Psychoanalytic theory has suggested that the penis is the symbol of power for men and women in Western civilization and has regarded circumcision as a symbolic substitute for castration. This explanation leads us to a historical reference of interest: at the time of the writing of the Bible and earlier, priests and priestesses of the fertility-goddess Ishtar dedicated their sexuality to the goddess.

P193

After he is befriended by a harlot, who “civilizes” him by having sexual intercourse with him for seven days, the animals flee him….

And the harlot says to him: “Thou art wise, Enkidu, art become like a God.”³⁰ The acquisition of sexual knowledge separates Enkidu from nature.

P196

In the Biblical story the knowledge which is forbidden to humankind is of a dual nature: it is moral knowledge, the knowledge of good and evil, and it is sexual knowledge. When human beings acquire the knowledge of good and evil, they take upon themselves the obligation for making moral decisions, having lost their innocence and with it their ability to carry out the will of God without moral considerations….

The other aspect of knowledge is sexual knowledge; that is made clear in the line describing one of the consequences of the Fall, “and they knew they were naked” (Gen. 3:7). In this, the consequences of Adam and Eve’s transgression fall with uneven weight upon the woman. The consequence of sexual knowledge is to sever female sexuality from procreation. God puts enmity between the snake and the woman (Gen.3:15). In the historical context of the times of the writing of Genesis, the snake was clearly associated with the fertility goddess and symbolically represented her. Thus, by God’s command, the free and open sexuality of the fertility-goddess was to be forbidden to fallen woman. The way her sexuality was to find expression was in motherhood.

P197

It will be echoed and reaffirmed in the covenant: there shall be only One God, and the fertility goddess shall be cast out as evil and become the very symbol of sin. We need not strain our interpretation to read this as the condemnation by Yahweh of female sexuality exercised freely and autonomously, even sacredly.

P198

To the question “Who brought sin and death into the world?” Genesis answers, “Woman, in her alliance with the snake, which stands for free female sexuality.”

P202

Athens… Many female children were exposed at birth and left to die, with the decision over their fate always made by the father. Premarital and marital chastity were strictly enforced on women, but their husbands were free to enjoy sexual gratification from lower class women, heterae, and slaves and from young men.

P203

Sparta…All girl infants were reared to adulthood, but infanticide was practiced on weak and sickly male children. In Sparta, adultery was not as strictly proscribed as in Athenian society, and Spartan society, emphasizing the need for healthy warriors, was relatively indifferent to whether a child was born legitimately or not. In its sharp contrast in matters of sexual regulation and polity, Spartan society seemed to Greeks of other cities to represent a clear-cut choice of direction: relative equality and high status for women combined with oligarchy and unfreedom as against the strict regulation of women combined with democracy. This choice is reflected in the political thought of both Plato and Aristotle^.7

P212

The sexuality of women, consisting of their sexual and their reproductive capacities and services, was commodified even prior to the creation of Western civilization. The development of agriculture in the Neolithic period fostered the inter-tribal “exchange of women,” not only as a means of avoiding incessant warfare by the cementing of marriage alliances but also because societies with more women could produce more children.

P213

In every known society it was women of conquered tribes who were first enslaved, whereas men were killed. It was only after men had learned how to enslave the women of groups who could be defined as strangers, that they learned how to enslave men of those groups and, later, subordinates from within their own societies.

…

By the second millennium B.C. in Mesopotamian societies, the daughters of the poor were sold into marriage or prostitution in order to advance the economic interests of their families. The daughters of men of property could command a bride price…

…

The product of this commodification of women— bride price, sale price, and children— was appropriated by men.

…

Claude Levi-Strauss, to whom we owe the concept of “the exchange of women,” speaks of the reification of women, which occurred as its consequence. But it is not women who are reified and commodified, it is women’s sexuality and reproductive capacity which is so treated. The distinction is important.

P214

But women always and to this day lived in a relatively greater state of un-freedom than did men. Since their sexuality, an aspect of their body, was controlled by others, women were not only actually disadvantaged but psychologically restrained in a very special way.

…

The gender-defined role of warrior led men to acquire power over men and women of conquered tribes.

P216

From the second millennium B.C. forward control over the sexual behavior of citizens has been a major means of social control in every, state society. Conversely, class hierarchy is constantly reconstituted in the family through sexual dominance. Regardless of the political or economic system, the kind of personality which can function in a hierarchical system is created and nurtured within the patriarchal family.

P217

The system of patriarchy can function only with the cooperation of women.

Note 24 Chapter 1

An opposing biological-deterministic theory is offered by Mary Jane Sherfey, M .D ., The Nature and Evolution o f Fem ale Sexuality (New York, 1972). Sherfey argues that it was women’s unlimited orgasmic capacity and their perpetual estrus which posed a problem for emergent community life in the Neolithic period. Women’s biology fostered conflict among males and inhibited group cooperation, which caused men to institute incest taboos and male sexual dominance in order to control the socially destructive potential of female sexuality.