Woman’s creation : sexual evolution and the shaping of society
by Elizabeth Fisher.
As long as the masculine role is aggrandized and the female role derogated, as long, that is, as nature is seen from a male-supremacist view, human sexual encounters will be tainted. We are imprisoned in a conquest vocabulary which places females in the “submissive position.” Convention equates the female’s role in sex with surrender rather than admitting that, animal or human, surrender-aggression is involved for each sex, a reciprocal relationship in which sometimes the female approaches the male and the male refuses or accepts and vice versa; reciprocity exists among animals as among people, though on different and more shallow levels, and both sexes participate. Among mammals, rape does not normally occur, and it is the female who calls the tune, whereas among humans, with the invention of sexual coercion, it is more often the male who leads.
https://archive.org/details/womanscreationse00fish
Publication 1980 New York: McGraw-Hill Book Co.
reprint of 1979 ed. published by Doubleday, New York
Elizabeth Fisher (1925-1982) ,was a writer and editor who in 1969 founded Aphra, a former feminist literary magazine, Fisher was the author of Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society, which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1979. She attended Smith College, and in the 1950’s worked in Rome as a cultural columnist for The Rome American.
Elizabeth Fisher
Elizabeth Fisher, a writer and editor who in 1969 founded Aphra, a former feminist literary magazine, died last Friday at her studio in Sag Harbor, L.I. Miss Fisher, who also had a residence in Manhattan, was 57 years old. Her body was found by the Sag Harbor police. The cause of death is being investigated by the Suffolk County Medical Examiner’s Office. Miss Fisher was the author of “Sexual Evolution and the Shaping of Society,” which was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize in 1979. She attended Smith College, and in the 1950’s worked in Rome as a cultural columnist for The Rome American.
She is survived by her husband, Angelo Savelli; a daughter, Ellen Herold Streeter; her parents, Max and Evelyn Friedman, and a grandson.
Reviews:
P4-5
Whither Patriarchy?
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The traditional answer is that it is a fact of nature, the result of the male animal’s superior strength. …
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A more recent theory has it that in its origins the human species was socially organized as a matriarchy before the present patriarchal system was instituted…
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A third theory, which has only very slowly gained ground among scientists, both ethologists and physical and social anthropologists, has it that humanity, being based on co-operation, has its origins in primitive egalitarianism and that this egalitarianism may even apply to the sexes, that the earliest humans shared tasks and that dominance is inherent neither in the animal world nor in humanity.
P6
As long as the masculine role is aggrandized and the female role derogated, as long, that is, as nature is seen from a male-supremacist view, human sexual encounters will be tainted. We are imprisoned in a conquest vocabulary which places females in the “submissive position.” Convention equates the female’s role in sex with surrender rather than admitting that, animal or human, surrender-aggression is involved for each sex, a reciprocal relationship in which sometimes the female approaches the male and the male refuses or accepts and vice versa; reciprocity exists among animals as among people, though on different and more shallow levels, and both sexes participate. Among mammals, rape does not normally occur, and it is the female who calls the tune, whereas among humans, with the invention of sexual coercion, it is more often the male who leads.
P7
In The Elementary Structures of Kinship he [Claude Lévi-Strauss[ described all human relations in terms ‘of men, with women as the medium of exchange connecting them.
…
[But] the elegant symmetry of Lévi-Strauss’s theory had no relation to the Australians’ reality. ..
The tribes under discussion did not recognize paternity. For them a woman was a being who produced children regularly throughout the period between puberty and menopause.
P11
In any case, the notion that the male animal possesses a passive female is hogwash. No one possesses anyone. Animals meet, mate, and part, sometimes immediately, sometimes after the rearing of the young, even, as is presumed in the case of gibbons, wolves, and Canada geese, after a lifetime. There is no notion of possession in the limited mind of a male animal. Possession is a figment of human imagination. ..
The female wild mouse… is about as passive as Mae West. She marks her burrow with her own brand of perfume—her urine—a sign which says, in effect, “Hey, fellows, come up and see me. I want you.” Or possibly “it,” because what she wants is sex—or, in the language of the biologists, “relief of genital tension.”
P12
The female mouse copulates with numerous males in succession. Once copulation has begun, males do not fight or interfere.’ The other mice wait patiently until the female is ready for them: they also service who only stand and wait. This is what occurs also among humankind’s closest animal relatives, the chimpanzees, and there is certainly a long tradition of promiscuity or free sex in human life, whether in the recent custom of sexual swinging or in various sanctioned and unsanctioned forms throughout our existence….
Animal behaviorists often attempt to explain the order in which females copulate with males in terms of hierarchy, but actual observations are inconsistent with rigid theories about
brute strength and bullying power being the directive behind sexual relations—at least where animals are concerned.8
[Primate males] cannot copulate without her aid and cooperation. Harry Harlow, famous psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, demonstrated this fact on rhesus monkeys, by
rearing them in isolation so that they had no chance to learn about sexual behavior. (Afterward, being left with a batch of virgin monkeys, civilized humans introduced tape into the
monkey cosmos. In order to breed the unco-operative females, the psychologists invented “a restraining device to hold the female in proper-position . . we call it the rape rack:”10)
P14
Still, why not call it Flo’s “period of sexual desire”? According to Goodall, she was followed constantly by a crowd of eager chimpanzees, so it must have been she who decided when, though whether copulations were indiscriminate or chosen does not come out in the report—only that there were seven in succession one time, twenty another. Nor was there any fighting or restiveness on the part of the waiting males, any particular dominance order observable.
P15
[In 1971 Suzanne Chevalier-Skolnikoft wrote] “All normal animals probably have the capacity for both male and female sex roles throughout their lives,” she concluded.
In a purely physiological basis, female primates demonstrate, at certain given moments, a more intense sex drive and greater capacity for coitus than the male—behavior human males tend to characterize as “insatiable” or the afore-cited “sexual mania.”
P16
In 1971, Naomi Weisstein commented on the limitations of psychology as a science. She describes the self-fulfilling prophecy built into experiments—how subjects perform to bear out the expectations of the experimenters...
P19
A year-long study of chimpanzees in the Budongo Forest, in Uganda, by a husband-wife team, Vernon and Frances Reynolds, confirmed Goodall’s report. They concluded that dominance interactions formed a minute fraction of observed
chimpanzee behavior. No evidence of a linear hierarchy of dominance among males or females was found, nor were any permanent leaders of groups discernible. Both study projects reported that in the wild the apes mate most frequently during moments of social excitement-on arrival at a particularly rich feeding place or at a meeting of two large groups-and that, as mentioned before, they are sexual swingers, though it is in the nature of the primate physiology that the female gets to swing more than the male.
P21
Chimpanzees not only groom each other; they communicate by calls and gestures and touch. They greet or reassure by touching; they embrace, they pat, they kiss, they reach out a hand to beg. She theorizes that either these gestures in humans and chimps have evolved along parallel lines or they have a common origin in a remote ancestor of both species. Today’s encounter groups, “please touch” therapies, etc., testify to the felt need when this kind of nonverbal emotional communication dwindled among humans.
…
Engels, for instance, assumed that monogamy was an advance desired by the females so that they would be spared the necessity of “surrendering” to many males.
P23
among gorillas it is the female who approaches the male. Since the upright posture would preclude a visible indication of desire among early hominid females, during our earliest evolution it must also have been the human female who approached the human male.
P38
Even a slight exposure to ethnographic literature points up the contrast with Western mother-child relations, where sexuality is culturally repressed. We can hardly imagine an American mother engaging in labial, clitoral, or penis stimulation of her infant without guilt or social condemnation, yet this is an accepted and expected pattern in many societies where mothering and sexuality are closely linked.2
As Western taboos have begun to loosen, more and more women acknowledge the eroticism of the mother-infant relationship. The sensation of nursing is another kind of orgasm.3
P40
Robert Briffault‘s three-volume The Mothers is on the surface a great glorification of women, in actuality a not-so-subtle put-down. Не speaks of sex as a nasty business made beautiful by the tenderness and love transferred from the maternal relationship, and “maternal love is sacrifice.”
P76
Since promiscuity has remained – a constant in human society throughout history, despite the strongest societal controls at times, and since it is a relatively universal characteristic among the primates, it would have been more rather than less prevalent in our remote past. Out of the family of mother and infant and older children would develop close relations between brothers and sisters-words that evoke the strongest connotations of loyalty for most human groups. We shall not look for a father as father until millions of years later-perhaps nine or eight thousand years ago.
P77
Male protection of females is not characteristic of foraging societies; it is a phenomenon that seems to have grown with the conquest syndrome, myth and reality, and with the invention of war, which will not be seen in human society until millions of years later-about 5000 B.P.
P78
However, the early hominid brain would hardly have encompassed the abstract idea of possession, which comes much later in evolution, nor would any hominid male conceive of copulation as meaning male possession of females.
P92
There are those who say that estrus never did disappear in the human female, that it is merely masked by culture. Lionel Tiger and Robin Fox make this claim in The Imperial Animal, and Mary Jane Sherfey, a psychoanalyst, also has a long discussion about cornification, the second half of the menstrual cycle in the human female, in which she makes a fairly ambiguous implication for the same claim.1 She cites Kinsey’s report on sexuality in the human female as supportive evidence.
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It used to be assumed that sex was the glue which kept primate societies together, a premise known as Zuckerman‘s theory of sociology in primates, after its originator, the English primatologist who had based so many theories of human and monkey social organization on his London Zoo studies of the hamadryas baboon. Of course, in the nineteen thirties when…
P93
..an active female can be derogated as a “masculine” woman. Mary Jane Sherfey’s The Nature and Evolution of Female Sexuality is a peculiarly contradictory effort to reconcile Freudian theory with newer biomedical information.
P97
the dangers of aggression—in the female. As Wolfgang Wickler tells it:
In general females in heat appear to become more aggressive. . . . In the rhesus monkey, oestrous females often cross group boundaries, according to Carpenter: “Estrus only makes it possible for the female to penetrate and to be tolerated within a foreign group.”
Washburn and DeVore (1962) state that oestrous in baboons disrupts all other social relations; the female leaves her preference group and child (if present) .
Most authors agree that the rank of the female is altered for the heat period . . . The female in oestrus even takes food morsels from the hands of the male.
‘That females in oestrus leave their preference group and follow the highest-ranking male is an indication that they are very “self-confident” during this phase.
P98
For John Pfeiffer, it goes beyond primate activity. “The typical pattern among mammals involves regular bursts of sexual frenzy which take precedence over all other activities. At every ovulation or
immediately after, all nonhuman females including occasional nursing females come into estrus, or ‘heat.’ Sexual activity is so concentrated during such periods that it tends to interrupt the
care of the young and all other forms of behavior. . . .
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On the other hand, the aforementioned claim by Mary Jane Sherfey, a practicing psychoanalyst, not a prehistorian or an ethologist, that estrus—“the ungovernable sexual drive of women”—never did disappear was advanced to justify the status quo ante. “The forcible suppression of women’s inordinate sexual demands was a prerequisite to the dawn of every modern civilization and almost every living culture. Primitive woman’s sexual drive was too strong, too susceptible to the fluctuating extremes of an impelling aggressive eroticism to withstand the disciplined demands of a settled family life.”
P99
While most historic civilizations have involved forcible sexual repression of the female, this is not necessarily the case in nonliterate cultures. We have paid a high price for female sexual repression: the thinking which says because it happened that way, that was the way it had to happen, ignores the lesson of science.
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My own thinking on the disappearance of estrus and birth seasons involves looking not at why it happened but at how it happened. To look for a cause and tell us that estrus disappeared because it would interfere with the human family is circular reasoning which tells us nothing. It sees the human family—an extremely varied and far from immutable phenomenon—as a given and sees it usually in the current nuclear form, despite the many contradictions from ethnography and history.
P103
Sex is, after all, not only the source of love poetry but an indirect force in all religion and art. The meshing of sexual drive with emotion and with the higher centers, in all its complexity and pervasiveness, may be little understood but it is not in doubt. Whether the sexual energy is tapped by sublimation, as Freud felt, or by direct involvement, on the model of Wilhelm Reich, is far from clear. I would guess that they are both right in part; that it can work either way and both ways. According to Reich, the relation between sexual gratification and sublimation is not mechanical, ie, the more suppression of sex, the more achievement in other areas; it is functional. Sexual energy can be sublimated to some degree, but if the diversion goes too far, sublimation changes into the opposite, an interference with the capacity to work.
P104
Perhaps the emphasis on male possession of females stems from the male fear of being twice possessed by woman—once inside her womb and a second time, partially, inside her vagina. Since he is the more vulnerable one, it is he who has felt the necessity to assert and enforce the opposite: that she is weak, vulnerable, and possessed by him.
P105
Thus we may owe culture to the fact, also, that we have more sexual energy and more diffusion of sexual energy into other pursuits. This is a more positive view than the negative Freudian claim that
repression and sublimation were necessary for humanity; not so much repression as diversion and diversity were the human qualities.
The loss of estrus is vaguely recognized by both ethologists and physical anthropologists as a crucial marker on the road to humanity. It is significant particularly to those attached to the idea of the “pair-bond” and to the notion of a male-female-child grouping as an inherent characteristic of humanity. They see it as useful for maintaining the nuclear family, for attaching a father to the basic mother-child pattern of the primate world.
P106
We lost estrus because we were human, as a concomitant of humanity: we didn’t become human by losing estrus.
The more brain the more sex; primates have more than other animals, and humans have more than primates. And because human sex is so much more than mere brief copulation, there is an enlarged component of sex in other behaviors. Sex is vitalizing and pervasive. Thus the loss of estrus was not a loss but a gain.
…
And there was, as I have said, no visual estral signal among hominid females once they stood upright. There may never have been a visual signal, as there is not among certain monkeys.
P107
In the upright position there was no possibility of a visual genital indication of estrus in the female, though the male’s erection was more visible than that of his chimpanzee or gorilla cousin’s. To the extent to which verbal relating was unestablished, it would have been the female who selected the male for mating, rather than vice versa, as is conventionally felt to happen among humans.
…
The invisibility of the female organ might have contributed to the loss of estrus, the visibility of the male’s erection to human male vulnerability and the imposition of forcible male dominance in later human history.
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If we think of the female hominid approaching the male, we can see the periods of sexual license which have existed in many human cultures as atavistic relics of prehuman society. Dionysian festivals of Greece, medieval weddings in Germany and Sweden, the katayausa of the Trobriand Islanders described by Malinowski, various celebrations among the Australian Aborigines and the Ojibwa permitted and encouraged pubic mating with the woman making the advances, or general promiscuity.
P108
However, the idea that a male would have much voice in choosing a female or would have maintained any kind of individual long-term control over her of her offspring is a modern invention; there would have been no place for such a phenomenon in the lives of early hominids 26
…
But males, too, have other interests, and their cyclicity is on a much smaller time scale—in terms of hours, days, weeks. Constant sexual expression is not possible for them either, as many a frustrated woman has been forced to accept under monogamous conditions. The myth of the ever-ready human male is a cultural stereotype which oppresses the male no less than the female.
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But standing up did make us more vulnerable, in intercourse as in other pursuits. Some primates perform their sexual acts in the middle of the group, often with youngsters running up to peer curiously, to touch or otherwise harass the linked couple. For us sex implies surrender, hence the usual desire for some privacy.
P112
About the possibilities for malignity, motivated and motiveless, which began with humanity, and that linking of aggression and sexuality which is a human expression, not an animal one, and, in my view, a recent one, we must hypothesize and dig for connections. We can only speculate on the sexuality of early hominids and humans, through erectus, and on the development of conscious control over sexuality which led to the disappearance of estrus and to human groupings, in whatever forms they took in the long beginning of our species’ existence.
…
From the sparse evidence, we cannot know when societal controls on sexual encounters began, though conscious control and elaboration of sexual encounters and family and friendly relations are incipient in the incipient human brain.
P124
Females can identify with the mother and expect to achieve her power; males have had to reach outward and compensate for their inability to bear children. Womb envy precedes penis envy—which last has been well discussed by Shulamith Firestone as a symptom and symbol of an already existing power relationship.10
P128
Chastity and lifelong monogamy are rare among small-scale foraging societies today and sexual experience is allowed for in most nonliterate cultures. “There are no virgins in the villages —for every female child begins her sexual life very early,” said Malinowski of the Trobriand Islanders, a statement which applies among African San, Australian Aborigines, Samoans, Arctic Eskimos, Amerindian Utes, and many other nonliterate cultures with both complex and simple material attributes.19
Childish sexual play merges gradually into full intercourse.
P143
Colin Turnbull writes of the elima of the Mbuti Pygmies, the month-long festival during which young girls learn about love-making and take the initiative with young boys. In the last few decades—with the entry of more women into anthropology and with the spread of sexual enlightenment —we have discovered that there is far less sexual repression among women of nonliterate and noncontact societies than had been assumed by earlier Victorian-conditioned reporters.
P153
The ubiquity of the female genital image and the rarity of the phallus tell us something about the biological knowledge of the people who made Paleolithic art. The phallus is not important to reproduction unless it is known that the male contributes to the making of the baby. Women were still the necessary sex. Analyses of the sculpture and paintings of Eastern and Western areas show
that copulation and procreation were not yet linked in the human mind.
P154
The Australian Aborigine men had not yet invented or discovered their connection with the actual conception of children, so they created various ceremonies of equivalence to female functions—the bloody Australian initiation rites which so horrified and fascinated Western male observers. [slitting the penis into a symbolic vulve – circumcision and subincision]
P156
Whatever the particular etiology of the rites, which vary from tribe to tribe, the element of male compensation for woman’s primary role in nature is evident. In fact, Wogeo men simulate women’s monthly function by cutting their penises with a shell and allowing some blood to flow out.
…
Universal to the cult is the myth that somehow these rituals were all stolen from the women, sometimes that women were killed to get it.
P158
While menstruating women are considered ritually unclean in parts of India and among Christian and Semitic peoples, there are societies where she is particularly desirable.
P188
Since the large harvest of grain encouraged staying in one place, people settled down and became committed to property. More people living closer together produce increased tensions, and with settled living resolution of conflict by fission meant abandoning property in which they had invested labor and emotion.
Evidently human psychology was drastically changed, a process which intensified with time. Nature was personified and came to be seen as an adversary. Sometimes she was a beneficent and all-giving mother, but more often she was capricious, sending storms and blights or withholding rain. Anxiety and aggression increased, and new forms of religion arose to assuage the new insecurities. Farming people were more dependent on the vagaries of nature; with increasing fear arose also the need to dominate the elements, in order not to be in bondage to them, hence the setting up of a new order of relationships, vertical rather than horizontal.
P190 The Discovery of Fatherhood
It has been said that the first domestication was that of woman by man, which set a pattern for later class differences.1 On the contrary, I believe the sexual subjugation of women, as it is practiced in all the known civilizations of the world, was modeled after the domestication of animals. The domestication of women followed long after the initiation of animal keeping, and it was then that men began to control women’s reproductive capacity, enforcing chastity and sexual repression. Originally, land was held in common, and individuals had rights to its use and cultivation but not exclusive ownership. Animals, on the other hand, may well have been the earliest form of private property on any considerable scale, making animal domestication the pivot also in the development of class differences.2
P191
The first villages were not farming settlements; they were villages of mixed practices — plant collecting and hunting — but with stable resources so that people could stay in one place to exploit them. There is consistent evidence for village life and the use of plant food before spotty and dubious evidence for animal herding appears in the record3
P196
Shamans, as they go into their trance, tend to talk in tongues—in the language of birds and animals.
In Mircea Eliade’s words:
relations of friendship and familiarity … are established between the shaman and the animals. . . .In one respect the animals are the bearers of a symbolism and mythology very significant for the religious life; to have contact with them, to speak their language, to become their friend and master means the possession of a spiritual life much more abundant than the simple human life of an ordinary mortal . . .animals possess considerable prestige, inasmuch as they know the secrets of life and nature and even possess the secrets of longevity and immortality. Thus in returning to the condition of the animals the shaman comes to share their secret language and enjoys the fuller life which is theirs . . . friendship with the animals and knowledge of their language represents a
paradisial syndrome. In illo tempore, before the “fall” such friendship was an integral part of the primordial situation.16
P197
One way or another, hunting was a match of wits. Now humans violated animals by making them their slaves. In taking them in and feeding them, humans first made friends with animals and then killed them. To do so, they had to kill some sensitivity in themselves. When they began manipulating the reproduction of animals, they were even more personally involved in practices which led to cruelty, guilt, and subsequent numbness. The keeping of animals would seem to have set a model for the enslavement of humans, in particular the large-scale exploitation of women captives for breeding and labor, which is a salient feature of the developing civilizations.
P198
The origins of selective breeding go back to prehistoric times. Castration of certain males was introduced in the late Neolithic [starts 7000 BC], which meant that humans were practicing a certain selection—they selected some males for breeding and excluded others.17
P205
Paleolithic humans did not know that semen played a role in reproduction, as they did not occupy themselves with seeds and planting and agriculture. In the evolution of consciousness, this fact must be considered as an understratum which will shape the future development of human sexual relations and human customs. The discovery of paternity has been likened to the turning on of an electric light bulb, but it could hardly have happened that suddenly.
P209
The situation is reversed in most nonliterate cultures, where it is taken for granted that women will have sex and babies; it is men who must earn these privileges. Reports from Oceania and Australia and Africa stress how this is arranged, after the birth of a girl child, and emphasize that there is no such thing as a woman who has not been married at least once in her life. Women will almost always have sex immediately after puberty; perhaps they will have experimented with it or been gradually introduced to it before their first menstruation.
210
Margaret Mead thinks civilization develops out of the need to value male fields and devalue women’s. Women achieve naturally and easily through childbirth, while males, seeing no such obvious purpose in the world, have had to invent compensations.
P215
The argument that a matriarchal society preceded patriarchy is often based on a hypothesis of mother-goddess worship in the Neolithic period. Yet in historical times clear reference to fertility goddesses accompanies a progressive decline in the status of women. Emphasis on fertility was an opening wedge in the debasement of the female. The power of generation was removed from the individual woman and credited to a divinity, albeit a female one at first. Fertility worship led to the forced breeding of women; more important, it signified the perversion of sex from pleasure to production.
P218
From the evidence, Catal [~ 6,000 BC] may have been one of the places where the connection was made between animal and human reproduction, for it contains early representations of the bull as a procreatory symbol. The metaphor of the potent, generative bull persists throughout the Bronze Age and survives in many parts of Africa and India as well as in slang references in our own world.
P236
Associating the vagina with a wound comes from the Freudian thesis of castration anxiety, in which the small boy takes his and his father’s bodies as universal models and assumes that the shape of his mother’s and sisters’ genitals is the result of castration, that the vagina is a wound, a “gash” in popular terminology, rather than a normal biological manifestation. But this identification is a projection of a violent and terror-filled culture in which the body is hidden so that the first sight of nakedness comes as a shock and everybody’s genitals are shameful. It is symptomatic of a recent historic mentality to connect sex with wounds and sadism and to link animals thereto. This comes from the direct linkage between war and sexual oppression in the history of civilization.
P237
Psychoanalysts have differed in their views on human sexuality. Freud predicated civilization on its repression. Wilhelm Reich, one of his most gifted students, felt that repressed sexuality was respon-
sible for civilization’s deformities rather than civilization itself and broke with the master over this point.
…
Reich pointed out “that in the authoritarian patriarchy the genitality of men is considered a proof of potency, while the genitality of women is considered a disgrace.” For him, genitality was all, and he saw “a disturbed capacity for gratification” as the pathological basis of sexual aggressions He thought in terms of a primeval age “when love life was free and unrestricted” and traced a line of development which combined Marx-Engels’ thinking with the reports of Malinowski on the Trobriand Islanders to project an economic origin for sexual repression:
With the economic interests of a developing social stratum and the suppression of the sex life of children and adolescents, the sexual experience of the whole community changed. Sexual disturbances and neuroses appeared—sadistic attitudes in the sex life of men and sex negation in the women. . . . Sadism is as prevalent as it is today only when the natural genital functions are hindered or disturbed; in other words, inhibited genitality changes not only into anxiety but also into sadism and perhaps this is the sole origin of sadism. . . . Roheim and most analysts view sadism as a natural manifestation in the area of sex, and its origin is therefore biological.
P239
Karen Horney and, somewhat later, Clara Thompson also took exception to the view of sadomasochism as inherent in human and animal biology, but from rather different points of view. They focus more on the female, ie., the masochistic, side of the proposition: male equals aggression equals sadism; female equals passivity equals masochism—and they place more emphasis ‘on cultural conditioning of women under patriarchy.
…
Writing some years later, in a work not published until after her death, Thompson took an even stronger stand against Freudian “biology”:
Culturally we have been educated to think of women as having less sexual drive than men. Observation of animals does not seem to confirm this, according to Ford and Beach. The sexual drive of the female in heat is insatiable. . . . One female at that time can exhaust several males . . . psychoanalysis thus far has secured extensive acquaintance with the psychology of women in only one type of culture, Facts observed by Freud in a particular part of the Western world have been interpreted as an adequate basis for an understanding of female psychology in general and as evidence for a particular theory about specific biological factors in the nature of woman. I have pointed out that characteristics and inferiority feelings which Freud considered to be specifically female and biologically determined can be explained as developments arising in and growing out of Western woman’s historic situation of underprivilege, restriction of development, insecure attitude toward the sexual nature, and social and economic dependency. The basic nature of woman is still unknown.9
Both these women were practicing psychoanalysts, trained by students of Freud, working with male colleagues whose feelings and male bias had to be considered, if not catered to…
P253
The common impression is that by producing more food farming enabled more people to survive and that the agricultural revolution was the cause of geometrically increasing world populations. New information indicates that it was the increased labor attached to farming that demanded more people. The establishment of fertility worship resulted; it differed from the previous respect for women’s generative powers. The breeding of animals suggested the control of women’s reproductive capacities. Slaves were also captured to fill the need for more labor.
P256
The insecurities of agriculture produce the emphasis on private possessions, while animal breeding, in telling the human male about his role in procreation, suggests the worship of the male sexual organ. In the domestication of cattle and the discovery of castration lay the roots of a religious development which both solved and caused problems. As I have noted, one bull, many castrates, and many cows set a pattern which influences human psychology for millennia to come.
P257
Before the domestication of animals sex had been primarily an erotic pastime, though there must always have been some sense of its mystic nature. From the postfestival orgies of the Australian Aborigines to the Dionysian rites of the Greek matrons of classical times, from the sacred prostitution and temple rites of Near Eastern and Oriental religions down to today’s gropings in the form of group-sex societies, etc., there has always been some recognition of the potential for transcendence inherent in orgasm. The way in which physical release can take us out of our conscious self and give us an illusion of union with the infinite is related to the human striving of religion, art, theater, ritual experience of various kinds. This is the curious ambivalence which makes sex the highest and the lowest, the most elevated as well as the most profane, of human experiences, the source of life-energy which permeates all nonmaterial
and many material creations. It is this that makes orgasm the prototype for all mystic ecstasy (recognized intuitionally perhaps by Wilhelm Reich when he created the artificial construct of the orgone as the mysterious substance, source of healing and creative power for humans). Even when sex is renounced as the direct road, we seek to be transported outside the boundaries of the self, to erase our consciousness in orgies, drunkenness, drugs, religion, art, and varied mystical experiences.
Havelock Ellis recognized this numinous quality, terming it “the miraculous flame of sex.” A sacred source of energy, it is connected with religion and art, in festival and in search of the divine. Originally sex was not a means, to be used in fertility rites, but a mystery – one facet of that human striving for transcendence, the which is inherent in orgasm but which is sought and achieved in many other ways, too, that need to escape the conscious self and merge with something larger which characterizes all religious, mystic, and artistic strivings. It is the paradox of humanity that our human, as derived from primate, nature is to be social, but to think is to be alone, and we are always striving to reconcile the conflict.
In the earlier times, as in many non-Western societies today, babies were something a woman produced from time to time, as sex was something a woman engaged in from the earliest age -sometimes even before puberty. In Melville Island and parts of Africa, for example, it is considered that sexual intercourse is necessary for the maturing of the female, to bring on puberty, while the Eskimo children who play at “putting out the lights,”
P259
the Trobrianders, and the Samoans all engage in sexual play long before they are capable of reproducing themselves. Inhibitions about sex might well be one result of the knowledge that intercourse brings with it babies…
P261
From the long millennia of Neolithic agriculture, we have only tantalizing archaeological hints – the burial arrangements at Çatal Hüyuk, the size of the houses at Neolithic Jericho, the finding of so many female figurines, the composition of the grave goods-on which to base speculations about Neolithic households. Imperfect as they may be, analogies are often made with recently existing matrilineal groups. One of the most thoroughly studied matrilinies was the group of American Indians banded together as the Iroquois League. They provided evidence for the nineteenth-century anthropologist Lewis Morgan, and the book he wrote in turn influenced Engels and in consequence the way in which Marxists today think about early groupings.
P270
With the increase of anxiety after agriculture, it seems to me that once the hoarding mentality occurred, the development of fertility worship was a response, a syndrome which led to expanding power.
Fertility worship set the stage for the temple as an institution – and the Sumerian cult of fertility worship goes back into the fourth millennium. The Uruk vase pictured in Figure 7, dates from that era and is a three-foot-high alabaster vessel. It shows the city goddess Inanna, or a priestess representing her. Clothed and crowned, she welcomes a procession of naked men bearing gifts to the village storehouse. Behind her is the temple, signified by the reed gateposts, the altar with its vases, animals, and fruits, and, on lower registers, the cattle, sheep, and grain that represent material plenty.
P273
The causes of the shift were probably economic rather than racial. The imposition of a superstructure, first theocratic, then military and monarchical, led to demands for the expansion of tribute. The surplus for this tribute was not inevitable; it was an artificial exaction, requiring either force or ideological imposition by the state, which demanded labor and goods. Hence the change from matriliny, which utilizes talent, to patriliny, which maximizes possession and production and control. This change in the status of women in Sumer is taking place during the third millennium, the time when the first kingdoms arose.
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Urukagina’s Reform is the earliest extant record, currently dated to about 2450 B.C.E.
P277
Urukagina forbids women to take two husbands, as they had been wont to do in previous times, on pain of being stoned to death. After Urukagina, a progressive deterioration occurs in the rights and role of women. Sumerian myth usually has the goddess refer to her mother’s house or ask her mother’s permission in marriage; the later Akkadian myths refer to a father’s permission, though the house may still be the mother’s.
…
Four hundred years later, a collection of laws testifies to the value placed on women: men pay for the privilege of marriage with bride price, and a man who divorces his wife must also give her alimony-“a mina of silver.”12 Two hundred years later, in another set of laws both bride price and dowry exist and a man who leaves his wife for another woman must continue to support the wife.13 By the time of Hammurabi, the Babylonian king who reigned from 1785 through 1759 B.C.E. (circa), a husband could divorce his wife at will, though he had to return her dowry.14
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The best-known sacred marriage rite was that between the goddess Inanna, played by a human woman as priestess, and the king, Dumuzi (probable date, circa 2800 B.C.E.), who had married Inanna in legend, and whose role was enacted by later kings as his earthly incarnation. Other parties might also be the principals. After the Akkadians became prominent, Inanna and Dumuzi were translated into Ishtar and Tammuz…
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The subjugation of female sexuality was in process of accomplishment during the thousand years before these texts were written down, and it is delineated in the myths.
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In the third millennium Nammu and other mother goddesses were giving place to Inanna, the goddess of fertility through sexual intercourse. In cylinder seals of the period the fertility goddess is on top in depictions of ritual mating.24 Later representations show her facing her consort; finally she is dominated by him. Thus Inanna’s uneasy union with Dumuzi.
P299
…there is today more evidence for the authoritarian state preceding the power of fathers – patriarchy – than vice versa.
P300
The process began in the third millennium. By the beginning of the first millennium, religion was constructed as a militarist state, and it was indeed inextricably mingled with the worldly state, metaphor, model, and justification for its form and functioning.
We saw how the sacred marriage rite came into the monarchy’s service by the time of the Third Dynasty of Ur, about 2100 B.C.E. The mother goddess disappeared or became a nurse, and the battle was joined between Inanna-Ishtar – goddess of sexuality – and the male gods. These last changed as the kings of different cities achieved power over the country.
P304
…another Sumero-Akkadian phenomenon, the ambivalent and peculiar institution whereby woman’s sexuality is a sacrifice, a prize which she no longer enjoys for its own sake. Along with its other inventions, Sumero-Akkadian civilization may have invented the phenomena of sex for money, sex for sacrifice, and the sacrifice of sexuality by men as eunuchs and by women vowed to chastity as high priestesses. The origins of prostitution lie in the destruction of woman as an active entity. She is neuter, existing for the enjoyment of men.
P305
In literature about the origins of prostitution, tracing a religious etiology to the sacred marriage rite in honor of Inanna or some other goddess of sexual love, procreation, and harlotry, male writers tend to express a prurient joy or a puritanical horror at the supposed sexual freedom – what has been called the school of history as pornography. Actually, it should be seen as the invention of woman as object, a literal sacrifice on the altar of male desire, rather than any kind of equal meeting of desires.
P306
Thus male sex is deemed necessary and good while female sex is evil, inasmuch as it threatens inheritance, male dominance, and other characteristics of the patriarchy. Moreover, if a woman experiences many men, she has a standard of comparison and can criticize the sexual adequacy of the one to whom she is chained in a marriage based on materialist-accumulative considerations.
P309
Freud predicated the existence of civilization on sexual repression and sublimation. Succeeding theorists amplified or modified his original dicta. It was pointed out that the relationship is not a direct one; i.e., you don’t produce more civilization or more art in direct proportion to the amount of sublimation. I have noted that the sublimation must be volitional to some extent. Psychoanalytic scholars as diverse as Reich and Marcuse and Fromm all observed that authoritarian and militaristic regimes always base themselves on severe sexual repression. The repressive nature of civilization
P310
produces alternate responses of numbing paralysis and a chain of self-perpetuating tyranny, whereby each level of the ranking pyramid passes on to a lower level the cruelty and domination received from the one above. The thousands of years of Mesopotamian history are a clear example of the linkage between militarism and war and the division of people into classes of more and less privilege, more and less prosperity, more and less sexual expression. Sexual deprivation of women is combined with the invention of a class of women who exist only to serve male sexual desire, to provide sex on demand or as propitiation, regardless of their own wishes. The mass of men are also controlled by difficulty of access to women or by the price which is put on them, in marriage or in fleeting encounters.
P323
Mortal women are instruments or are absent from this fable. Only the goddess Inanna-Ishtar appears, and she is powerful, independent, and treacherous. Gilgamesh turns her down because of her sexual freedom, because she has been to bed with so many others, all of whom he says have come to a bad end. However, while he resents a powerful and independent woman, as will all men in subsequent history, it is still dangerous to flout her. Because he has refused her, Inanna asks her father Enlil to send out the Bull of Heaven to do battle against him.
P324
By the next millennium, with the destruction of Tiamat, all traces of woman as the supreme creator disappear from official state religion. Never again in the civilized world will woman have the primary importance even of an Inanna, though she may sneak in as a kindly suffering mother in the stories of Isis and Osiris, Mary and Jesus, and as a beneficent spirit in the medieval Shekhina.
The changing stories show the threat posed by woman’s sexuality and how she was tamed. Enkidu feared the harlot and cursed his original entrapment by her, though at another point she was admiringly compared to the wife. There was fear of Inanna-Ishtar, and the way in which that fear was handled demonstrates what has happened to sexuality. From a peaceful and joyous encounter it was translated into a symbol of warfare. This curious mixture of attitudes toward women is a constant in Western culture, and its roots can be found in the perversion of sex into war and killing and sadism for man, while the basic stratum of masochism is set for woman.
P331
About five thousand years ago the first hierarchical, exploitative societies arose in Mesopotamia. They spread out over the next few thousand years and made their influence felt in much of the Afro-Eurasian land mass. Integral to the success of the first organized bureaucracies was the distortion of human sexuality into actual and symbolic production, the repression of female sexuality, and the linkage of war and sex for men. With the worship of material accumulation, people were reified to be used as tools and frequently were treated as possessions themselves. In autocratic societies children were the possessions of their parents; women were first valued as producers of children, later transformed into property. The sexual nexus became an expression of the dominance hierarchy, perhaps the most widespread, the most pervasive, and the most difficult to root out.
P333
This anomaly, whereby a constant state of war, efficiently waged, may result in more strength, more self-expression, and more autonomy for women, will be examined again when we look at the peoples of northern Europe and the Eurasian steppes.
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Greece, particularly in earlier times. In Sparta adultery seems to have been regarded with a tolerant eye. Male citizens were often away at war, and a chief concern may have been increasing the supply of soldiers. Spartan women were much derogated by later Athenian writers for their licentious ways and promiscuity. Spartan husbands were also accused of lending their wives to friends, in order to produce heirs for them. Analogizing with modern Western white views of relaxed Eskimo and Indian sexual customs, it is quite possible that many of the women’s escapades may have been undertaken on their own initiative.
P346
We are often told the Christians introduced the ascetic element into the Judeo-Christian tradition, but scripture does not entirely support this thesis. From the first word “unclean,” to be cried after
lepers, there is a paranoid intensity: “Every swarming thing is an abomination; it shall not be eaten I am the Lord your God; consecrate yourselves therefore and be holy, for I am holy. You shall not defile yourselves…”
Natural body processes are lumped indiscriminately with sickness, menstruation with illness: “This is the law for him who has a discharge and for him who has an emission of semen, becoming unclean thereby; also for her who is sick with her impurity; that is, for any one, male or female, who has a discharge, and for the man who lies with a woman who is unclean.”5
The strictures on sexual intercourse and menstruation follow directly on the prohibitions on lepers…
P347
While there are precedents from nonliterate societies for isolation during natural processes, for the dangerous power of menstrual blood, the particular emphasis on disgust, uncleanness, impurity belongs to civilization, be it Hebrew, Moslem, Christian, or Hindu.11
P348
The Hebrew condemnation of intercourse outside marriage, for men as well as for women, was in contrast to most of the cults surrounding Israel.
P351
In another sense, also, rape and prostitution become allied once a market value has been placed on sex. A woman may sell her sexual services in prostitution; a man may steal them in rape. In the world of the early civilizations theft was recognized and honored in war, as long as one stole not from one’s fellow nationals…
P352
With woman as instrument, we saw how the physical gratification in prostitution is reduced to a minimum, The woman is performing a service, not expressing her needs and feelings, and the man is deprived of a truly reciprocal and therefore participatory experience. What then is the gratification in rape? It is perversion in the most literal sense; instead of pleasure, the gratification is in the conquest. Like the imprisoned animal…
P358
The customs accepted by their Near Eastern and Mediterranean neighbors were anathema to the Hebrews. Homosexuality, typified by anal sex, was an abomination punishable by death and, as we saw in the story of the Levite’s concubine, in practice considered a worse sin than the rape of a virgin. Moreover, the injunctions against “unnatural ways” and the sin of ‘Onan—masturbation or coitus interruptus—became a rigorously restrictive, not to say antisexual, code, which was further developed in Talmudic times, the centuries just before and for several hundred years after the birth of Christ, when the interpretation of religion was hardening into dogma. The strict rules were a prohibition on experimentation and elaboration in heterosexual practice also. Women were not to approach their
husbands to initiate sex, because of their modesty and Eve’s sin: “Thy desire shall be to thy husband and he shall rule over thee.”
…
In line with Jewish emphasis on multiplying the people, however, marital relations were approved—in fact, the number of times per week, as well as the length of time a husband could stay away from his wife, was legislated according to the husband’s profession. Only Talmudic study excused the man from onah, the wife’s right to sexual intercourse.
P359
The first-century Jewish philosopher Philo also believed that intercourse should be only for procreation, explicating thus the biblical condemnation of homosexuality and of intercourse during menstruation, when, he thought, conception would produce deformed infants. Philo criticized immoderate and insatiable desire, deeming unchaste “the rage for sexual intercourse,” even with one’s own wife, and condemned the “passion of love.”16
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* Lucretius advises that the proper position for conception is a tergo, from the rear, “after the manner of wild beasts and quadrupeds because the seeds in this way can find the proper spots in consequence of the position of the body. Nor have wives the least use for effeminate motions; a woman hinders and stands in the way of her own conceiving when thus she acts; for she drives the furrow out of the direct course and path of the share, and turns away from the proper spots the stroke of the seed. And thus for their own ends harlots are wont to move, in order not to conceive
and lie in child-bed frequently, and at the same time to render Venus ‘more attractive to men. This our wives have surely no need of.” https://tinyurl.com/5t2dm5mc
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… Attis, a young shepherd, who castrated himself for love of her. In consequence Cybele’s priests performed the same operation on themselves, becoming eunuchs in her service. Statues of Attis performing the sacrificial act, with his belly exposed and a flint or knife held high in his right hand, are found all the way from Asia Minor to as far west as England. It was under the Roman rule that cults of this sort, focusing on pain and deprivation, spread throughout their provinces.
We saw that the tradition of masochistic women’s cults went back to Sumer, at least, and was perhaps intensified under the Akkadian impact with the increasing severity of male dominance and class and sex oppression. These cults provided outlet and ecstasy. They stem from the first harvest festivals, which in turn relate to the still earlier and universal traditions, documented from ethnographic records, of celebrations allowing for ritualized sexual promiscuity. After ag-
P375
riculture and animal breeding had fostered anxieties and, with the first civilizations, created property and class differentials, these orgiastic celebrations were often translated into the masochistic cults referred to earlier—Inanna-Dumuzi, Ishtar-Tammuz, Cybele-Attis, Isis-Osiris, et al. The cultic rituals, which usually involved the weeping of the mother for the lost child who is also husband-son-brother, took different forms in different countries, allowing for more or less self-expression and more or less aggression or weeping and self laceration.
P379
Significant was the fact that the idealization of chastity was transformed into a loathing for the body and a severe condemnation of sexual acts.
The Christian distaste for the female and her physical functions went far beyond the already phobic attitudes of the Hebrews. Sex was rarely accepted even as a profane activity. The
establishment of a celibate male hierarchy gave an added prurience to the authority the Church assumed over people’s private acts.
‘The history of the early Church Fathers’ pronunciamenti against masturbation, against coitus “not within the fit vessel,” tums up extremes which make the Talmudic judgments mild
indeed. Comparisons of penances for sexual and criminal offences…
381
In the philosophical system based on dualities, mind, spirit, objectivity were usually assigned to men; body, emotion, and subjectivity to women. If woman is all body she is of course incapable of
resisting her body’s impulses. As the weaker vessel she cannot bring to bear the strength of her missing intellectual and spiritual qualities and therefore easily succumbs to Inst, being at the
mercy of her passions, her desires, above all her bodily functions. In this respect, the derogation of sex involved also an enormous increase in the derogation of women.
P402
It was Reich who introduced the revolutionary yet obvious concept that not all orgasms are alike, that some sex is better than others. Today, when orgasm for women is recognized as a desirable end, few of us acknowledge that orgasm has a wide variation, for women and for men….
P404
I have tried to shed some light on the sexual roots of sadism and the desire for dominance which spread throughout the world beginning at a given moment not too long ago in human existence, Solutions must be multilevel, but there will be no solutions, only increasing hierarchy and lack of freedom if we do not get at the causes, the oppressive principle growing out of the relation between man and woman which has mushroomed to be the greatest danger to the world’s survival. As I see it, the dominance hierarchy is the underlying problem.
P405
One problem, however, is the self-perpetuating nature of aggression and conquest, the killing off, subjection, or conversion to dominance-submission ideology of the gentler peoples when they are exposed to the
P406
hierarchically organized dominators. There is hope for humanity, however, if we acknowledge that patriarchy, sadism, and fighting are not inherent in the nature of either civilization or the species.
We have had five thousand years of war and hierarchy; ten thousand years of anxiety leading to sadomasochism, dominance-submission, and power through possession; and, on a con-
servative estimate, two hundred thousand years of being a sharing and friendly species. The prognosis is not an easy one.