GENDER SOLIDARITY – HUMAN SOLIDARITY

Once WE wake up from the lethargy that made us for millennia complicit in the discriminatory powers against women, what is the next step? Once we decide not to continue transmitting knowledge for the submission of a part of humanity, what is the next step? When we understand with our hearts the barbarism that for millennia we have not only endured but also legitimized and preserved as guardians, what is our next step?

It is common that when one of us rejects with anger and pain the subjugated role of women transmitted by intergenerational chains, react by rejecting her existence as a woman and try to blend in with men: this rejection prevents the healing that allows us to transform our lives and the lives of others; it will never be by rejecting who we are as we can become integrated people and make prevail a vision of life different from the conquering warrior vision in place for millennia and from which the vast majority of the inhabitants of the Earth – humans, animals, vegetables, minerals and aquifers— are victims today. Although we mimetize ourselves with men, we will continue to be marginalized by the dominant power because of our biology understood from this androcentric matrix perspective as a subaltern biology created to satisfy the biological and affective needs of men.

But not only do they enslave us but we enslave ourselves by our biology that we have learned to despise. However, the truth is hidden behind the diverse expressions of domination of women that range from laws written in books considered sacred to very current events that force us to demand #NotOneMore, not one more victim, nor a misogynist policy more that hide and legitimize violence against us. The tolerance that has caused damage  against ourselves and against other women has ended. We have transform the complicit silence into acting solidarity.

For this same biological capacity that has kept us and still keeps us attacked, paralyzed, silent in passive complicity, in tacit collusion, we have the power, the authority and the responsibility to unite, reconcile this great fragmented humanity, so as not to continue being relegated nor relegating ourselves due to gender reasons, so that violations and feminicides perpetrated by men trained by the dominant culture to hate, to despise and to subdue women are never again recorded in the anonymous statistics records.  Let’s free our creative capacity; let us free the new human generations from lies about the inferiority of women and the superiority of men.

To change the way of thinking it is necessary to understand the historical origin that underlies the beliefs we want to change. For this purpose, I will trace below some laws of the ancient Middle East related to rape; I choose, among other sources that would also allow us to reach the same conclusions, the Code of Hammurabi and the book Deuteronomy (Debarim).

In the Code of Hammurabi, exposed in ancient Babylon in the temple of the solar god Tammuz and in the public squares of the kingdom for the knowledge of all subjects, Sumerian pre patriarchal contents written around the year 2 430 BC are intermingled with added transition contents by the legislators of the sixth Amorite monarch, Hammurabi (1722-1686 BC). In this context of transition, from assimilation of the pre-patriarchal to the patriarchal, there is the law regarding the violation that we will analyze next. The law says: ‘If a man has kabbalum (the word means to violate, muzzle, paralyze, immobilize, bind, dominate) the wife of another and this woman has not yet met another man, and is still living at her father’s house,  and they are surprised together, that man will receive death; the woman will be released ’.

The broad meaning of the term kabbalum leaves no doubt: the victim, a young virgin who is still under the power of her father and has not yet become the property of her future husband, was physically dominated in such a way that she did not leave room for patriarchal suspicions in as to the fact that it happened with her consent. It is clarified in the Hammurabi Code that the woman ‘who has not yet met a man and lived in her father’s house’. These facts are decisive to consider her innocent: that she was a virgin and that she lived under the authority of her father. These conditions reappear written more than a thousand years later in Deuteronomy.

In Deuteronomy, recorded by Jewish and Judeo-Christian religious traditions as the fifth book of Moses, we read: ‘If a man finds a young virgin who is not engaged, and seizes and lies with her, and they are discovered, then the a man who slept with her will give fifty shekels of silver to the girl’s father, and she will be his wife because he has raped her; he cannot fire her in all his days ’(22,28-29). We observe in this relationship between men that the only thing that is taken into account is the damage to the property of the father, compensated with the fine and the mandatory marriage of the rapist to the daughter who is now  with no commercial value due to the loss of her virginity. The new owner will have the right to use his property at will with the obligation stipulated by the marriage to meet her basic needs. It is a transfer of title in which the only insulted is the father, since in this legal case the girl is not committed yet to any man waiting to be her owner.

In case the young virgin was committed to marry, it is stipulated that: ‘If there is a young virgin who is committed to a man, and another man finds her in the city and lies with her, then you will take both of them to the door of that city and you will stone them until they die; the young woman, because did not “give voices” in the city, and the man, because has raped his neighbor’s wife; in this way you will remove the evil from the midst of you ’(22,23-24). Thus, in case the victim was under a marital commitment and still living with her parents, the rape is considered adultery and the rapped woman as adulteress. In this case, the victim is the virtual owner, the committed man who has not yet had sex with his future wife.  It is unthinkable within these psychosocial coordinates, that the committed man would accept a woman as his wife in those conditions.

Another hypothesis considered in Deuteronomy is the probable innocence of a young woman: ’But if the man finds the young woman who is engaged in the field, and the man forces and lies with her; then only he who sleeps with her will die, you will do nothing to the young woman; there is NO sin worthy of death, because as in the case when a man stands against his neighbor and kills him, so is this case; when the man found the young woman in the field, she “gave voices’, but there was no one to save her ’(22,25-27).

As It can be seen if the incident occurred in the city, the legislation would presuppose that the girl did not shout because she was complicit in the act; the possibility that the aggressor had prevented her from shouting is not considered; it is concluded that if her cries were not heard, it was because she consented, therefore it would not be a forced robbery as in the case of the victim outraged in the field, but adultery considering both the rapist and the woman raped, as accomplices of the robbery of the property of the man to whom she was destined.

In the event that the raped woman was married, the Mosaic law stipulates that ‘If a man is found lying with a married woman, the two will die, the man who slept with the woman, and the woman; in this way you will take away the evil of Israel ’(22,22). The possibility that the woman had been forced is not contemplated.

The woman persecuted by scribes and Pharisees, faithful followers of the Mosaic law, which presents the Gospel of John (8,1-11) was persecuted alone even though she was ‘surprised at the very act of adultery’ (8.3) . If she was caught in the act, where was the man with whom she was caught? The law of Moses stipulates for both man and woman death by stoning. The obligatory question is: where was the adulterer? Although this text of the Gospel of John does not appear in the oldest manuscripts and is considered a later addition, it forces us to reflect on solidarity between men, solidarity that Jesus reversed by solidarity not with men, but with the cause of women . Too bad that the dominant Christianities without Jesus that we suffer and have suffered for two thousand years do not take into account this and other teachings of Jesus against the misogynist order.

The social imaginary that underlies these mosaic laws is still valid today. Legislation has changed, but mentalities have not changed, at least these aggravating beliefs against women have not expired in general, so doubts against women’s probity are always latent in the social imaginary. Even in cases where it is legally proven that the woman was a victim of rape there is a tendency to question the victim with conjectures such as that the victim was in the wrong place or at the wrong time or dressed in an improper way, or that she led somehow to the attack. Suspicions against women remain latent in the social imaginary.

Classic children’s stories are didactic forms of teaching dominant beliefs. The Little Red Riding Hood, a classic story of the oral tradition of Western Europe written for the first time by Charles Perrault – who suppressed cruel details of the oral tradition that I will also avoid here – later recreated by the Grimm Brothers, who added a happy ending, is about A girl who disobeyed two preventive rules to avoid women of any age risky situations: changed the safe path for a shortcut in the forest and spoke with a stranger. In the story, the wolf first ‘ate’, symbolism of rape and femicide, the grandmother later ‘ate’ (raped) the girl.

We know from statistics that the circumstances in which the crime of rape occurs and the profile of the victims are variable: women are raped regardless of age: they are raped from babies to old women; Anywhere: houses, streets, fields, schools, parking lots. The identity of the rapist is also variable: father, stepfather, relatives close to the victim or unknown men, although the highest rates correspond to men close to the family. The only constant profile of the rapist corresponds to a male subject who commits a crime that is a consequence of ancestral global contempt for women.

Corollary of the story of Little Red Riding Hood: women are responsible for what might happen to them if they disobey the security rules envisaged and imposed for them.

 Let’s stop and think about our deepest beliefs, that although we try to hide from ourselves, are the root of the discrimination we tolerate. It is essential to know and transform the hidden discriminatory beliefs that we transmit consciously and unconsciously through explicit and implicit messages. Discriminatory beliefs inherited from our female and male ancestors that taught us to fragment humanity into victors and vanquished, as well as many other forms of fragmentation.

Let us heal ourselves to generate healthy lives and manage to transform the history of humanity from what it is today, a recount of struggles, deaths and abuses, into a peaceful history. For this we must begin by pacifying our hearts, making our lives benign, which we can only achieve if we fully understand the interconnection of all that exists and learn to value life in its extraordinary beauty.

It is not the biology of men that makes them rapists and femicides, it is not an insatiable, uncontrollable biological need that makes them slaves of their sexuality; it is not a biological determinism that would prevent them from controlling their instincts but their thoughts, their feelings, their beliefs that women are not people but things that are naturally capable of being submitted.

United, ceasing to live as fragmented consciousness, women and men will achieve the pacification of our beings and we will be able to live in an awareness of integration, awareness of love and compassion, expressing in our daily living the certainty that ‘The Earth is a single country and humanity its citizens’ (Bahá’u’lláh).

Women know how to be supportive, although we have been taught that our great solidarity must be limited to children, to our family. Part of our task is to unlearn the forms of control that limit our cohesion and dare to be supportive between us, increasing this solidarity until we annul the gender policies that separate us from each other.

The mother is the most supportive figure that exists. Women have the power of the mother in our hearts, not only in our biology. In fact, the greatest power to care for, nurture, protect, lies in our hearts and not in our biology. If we rescue this great power and free it from the typecasting produced by gender policies, we will build protective networks around our lives; weaving these networks of solidarity we will end up transforming the established exclusionary dominant order into inclusive justice.

It is up to all mankind to reformulate the policies imposed by the dark financial, political and religious interests of the minorities that govern the planet and keep our consciences fragmented; powers that have made us their human farm trained in insecurity and fear.

Women, by our ability to create, think, feel, give birth, nurture, love, we have the power to unite all the scattered fragments of the Earth.

#NotOneMore

Acerca de la autora

Aída Reboredo Arroyo

Es autora de libros y artículos; cofundadora del primer centro de estudios de la mujer en México. Es Psicóloga Clínica con estudios de maestría y doctorado realizados en Francia y Brasil. Fue profesora universitaria en diversas instituciones académicas de la Ciudad de México y de Veracruz, así como cofundadora de las Agencias Especializadas en Delitos Sexuales.

Últimas entradas

• Psicología28 agosto, 2021EL MENSAJE DE UNIDAD – Jesús y la mujer de Siquén
• Psicología25 julio, 2021LAS VIDAS PASADAS – Psicoterapia de regresión a otras vidas
• Conciencia unificada11 abril, 2021HIJO DE HOMBRE – Las enseñanzas de Jesús de Nazareth
• Espiritualidad6 marzo, 2021Y DESPUÉS DE MORIR, ¿QUÉ PASARÁ? —Entre el espíritu y la materia