In The Selfish Gene, Richard Dawkins[43] proposed honest advertising as the evolutionary explanation for the loss of the baculum. The hypothesis states that if erection failure is a sensitive early warning of ill health (physical or mental), females could have gauged the health of a potential mate based on his ability to achieve erection without […]
Tertullian is sometimes criticized for being misogynistic, on the basis of the contents of his De Cultu Feminarum: “Do you not know that you are Eve? The judgment of God upon this sex lives on in this age; therefore, necessarily the guilt should live on also. You are the gateway of the devil; you are […]
The impact of his views on sin, grace, freedom and sexuality on Western culture can hardly be overrated. These views, deeply at variance with the ancient philosophical and cultural tradition, provoked however fierce criticism in Augustine’s lifetime and have, again, been vigorously opposed in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries from various (e.g., humanist, liberal, feminist) […]
by Rebecca Lesses. Lilith, Adam’s first wife, had a fearsome reputation as a kidnapper and murderer of children and seducer of men. … God created Lilith from the earth after the creation of Adam. They immediately began to fight over who would be on top during sexual intercourse. Lilith said, “We are equal to each […]
by Diarmaid MacCulloch. Much was now purged from Judaic religion that had once been acceptable, even in the Jerusalem Temple: notably Asherah, God’s long-standing wife, now recast as one of the seductresses who had turned the people of God from the right path. She was the most prominent victim of Jerusalem’s theological spring clean, which […]
by Janet Howe Gaines Lilith’s relationship with Adam is a different matter. Their conflict is one of patriarchal authority versus matriarchal desire for emancipation, and the warring couple cannot reconcile. They represent the archetypal battle of the sexes. Neither attempts to solve their dispute or to reach some kind of compromise where they take turns […]
by Emily McLemore Women’s sexuality was posited as opposite: their bodies were considered passive, but women themselves were considered “profoundly sexual.” The womb was central to the understanding of female anatomy and determined women’s passivity in contrast to men’s activity, as well as her association with the physical body. Moreover, women were characterized as open […]
By Stephen Greenblatt. The New Yorker. Augustine and Monica experienced something remarkable: they felt themselves climbing higher and higher, through all the degrees of matter and through the heavenly spheres and, higher still, to the region of their own souls and up toward the eternity that lies beyond time itself. And “while we were speaking […]
By James Boyce. Published on May 14, 2015. Augustine drew heavily on custom, theology and tradition to buttress his case. He accepted that original sin was not fully expounded in the Bible, but was adamant that unless it was accepted, even good Christians would be tempted to seek salvation through holy living and end up […]
By Suzanne M Harvey. Females need to select high quality males to ensure the best genes for their offspring, and a penis that works predominantly through haemodynamics takes a lot of energy to produce. Therefore this is an honest signal of the most healthy males in the same way that the healthiest stags grow the […]
Chapter in part II of Sacred Tropes: Tanakh, New Testament, and Qurʾan as Literature and Culture by Roberta Sabbath – 978-90-47-43096-4 characterized as a handmaiden of Inanna and, as such, may have been a temple harlot responsible for promoting the land’s fertility through sacred sexual intercourse. As a negatively numinous figure Lilith is identified in […]
by John Ince. 2003, Vancouver : Pivotal Press. Scriptural antisexual dogma legitimates erotophobia, makes it seem moral and valid. Further, such dogma insulates erotophobic attitudes from rational debate.
by Kenneth Maxwell 1996. The Sex Wars https://link.springer.com/chapter/10.1007%2F978-1-4899-3462-8_5 In ancient Rome there were several categories of marriage having different and confusing legal status. Divorce was easy, often with no more formality than the husband’s declaration that the marriage was ended. The system encouraged promiscuity, and because of the uncertainty of fatherhood, the practice was to […]
by Peter Brown. For the Roman population to remain even stationary, each woman needed to produce 5 children, so pressure on young women was “inexorable”. Median age at marriage may have been low as fourteen.
by Raine Eisler. It is remarkable, that given the fact that much of the bible is based on Canaanite and Mesopotamian myths, that the female divine is absent. Even though the goddess was very important to the Hebrews until the destruction of the second temple.
Augustine, one of the greatest teachers of western Christianity, derived many of these attitudes from the story of Adam and Eve: that sexual desire is sinful; that infants are infected from the moment of conception with the disease of original sin; and that Adam’s sin corrupted the whole of nature itself.
by Gerda Lerner. Surrender for money was at first a religious act; it took place in the temple of the goddess of love, and the money originally went into the temple treasury
by Merlin Stone. Published 1976, New York: The Dial Press. Professor R. K. Harrison wrote of the Goddess religion, “One of its most prominent features was the lewd, depraved, orgiastic character of its cultic procedures.” … Professor W. F. Albright, one of the leading authorities on the archaeology of Palestine, wrote of the female religion […]
by Andrea Dworkin But Greer has another side which allies itself with the worst of male chauvinism… In an interview in the Amerikan Screw, reprinted in Suck under the tide “Germaine: ‘I am a Whore, ’ ” she stated: Ideally, you’ve got to the stage where you really could ball everyone — the fat, the […]
by Bertrand Russell. Augustine may have had problems getting it up: “[Lust] arouses the mind, but does not follow its own lead by arousing the body.”