VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN – ROOTING OUT THE FOUNDATION OF DOMINATION

The rapist and the predator are not mad, but the expression of a belief system that considers women as inferior beings, available to be used and abused by men. Women have been and are attacked for millennia. An endless list of aggression modes has kept women silent: they have killed us, they have raped us, they have cut our tongues, they have also cut our ears and our noses. A dark power delivered, nurtured and supported by us, mistreats and abuses us.

Domination of women revolves around the triad fear/guilt/modesty. As a result of fear, guilt, and modesty we have taught our daughters and sons that the sole mission of women is to procreate. We have even come to believe that to love means to take care of our offspring and deny ourselves to the point of abandonment. Procreating is not the only mission of women, although we can use that great power to transform the mentalities that keep us subjugated.

The role of the mother is essential in the formation and transmission of beliefs systems (values, attitudes, conducts) and more specifically in the belief system in which the violence against women are grounded. Procreation and education of children is a trap if generation after generation mothers continue to pass on the false idea of men superiority over women. These ancestral chains of ignorance has produced egocentric men and devalued women.

The values that guide a person’s actions stem from deep hidden roots in human history. Each person drags intergenerational chains that generate repeated emotional patterns generation after generation. To understand these roots, we will succinctly review some myths that are an expression of the millennial belief system —still in force— that manifests itself in violence perpetrated against women.

Originally, the Latin term violare referred to the desecration of the sacred, and later accounted for the desecration of the woman’s body as a res (thing) owned by a man. The crime of rape was not linked to women, but to the profanation of women as the property of a man. Thus, the victim was the man, not the woman.

Approximately five thousand years ago, in the third millennium BC, Aryan invaders progressively conquered India, the Middle East, and Europe by imposing their belief system on highly culturally developed populations. These beliefs considered men as superior beings and women as their property used for sexual pleasure, biological reproduction, and to take care of offspring and men themselves. Along with their social norms, the Aryan invaders imposed their cosmogony based on the concept of warrior gods such as Varuna, Indra, Krishna, Zeus, Yahweh by displacing the original cosmogony of the conquered peoples centered on goddesses such as Astarte, Neith, Isis, Parvati, Rhea, Demeter, Asherah.

These nomadic warrior groups, sun worshipers, like the warriors of the mythical Chichimec tribes from Aztlan who invaded North America, considered the solar principle as a universal and unitary wholeness around which they organized their lives. The power of the man was total, while the woman was reduced to domestic life. Men occupied the positions of priests, warriors, kings, and heads of families, reflecting their power in all sectors of religious, political, economic and social life.

Warrior gods and their totalizing principles fused with the indigenous goddesses of conquered territories, creating the syncretism common to the transformation of mentalities. The conquest of territories was done quickly with weapons and death; however, subjugation of minds was a progressive process of crumbling the archaic wisdom shared between goddesses and humans. In that fashion, the multiple, shifting, lunar/solar/venusian wisdom, based on the feminine/masculine cosmic principle, was excluded and replaced by the masculine, mutually exclusive, solar vision.

In this process of transculturation of gynocentric beliefs that did not exclude the masculine, to androcentric beliefs that excluded the feminine, myths were originated around the rape of the ancient goddesses by the victorious gods. The raped goddesses weakened their power in favor of the violating gods. For example, Zeus the main deity of the new Aryan pantheon, syncretized with the ancient Zaminoic, raped his own mother Rhea goddess and lady of Mount Ida. Zeus chased her, she metamorphosed into a snake; he imitated her and by capturing Rhea with the so-called Heraclitan knot, consumed the violation.

Persephone, daughter of the great civilizing goddess Demeter, to whom were dedicated the Eleusinian Mysteries related to Dionysus and the Orphic cults, anathematized by the conquerors, was abducted and raped by Hades (Pluto) her paternal uncle. When

Hades saw the young and beautiful Persephone, he desired and kidnapped her (1).

In despair Demeter searched for her daughter all over the earth, from morning till the end of the day until she found out

that Hades had kidnapped and raped Persephone. Demeter, goddess of life, who had taught humankind agriculture and eschatological knowledge, presented herself deprived of all power before the formerly lowly Zeus, father of Persephone, imploring for help to rescue her daughter. Zeus answered that he did not find any disgrace in having Hades as son in law. Demeter insisted and Zeus ordered his brother for Persephone to live with him half of the year in the underworld, and the other half with her mother Demeter on earth.

The myths of the pre-Aryan goddesses being raped by the Aryan warrior gods were intended to belittle the power of the great goddesses. The authors of the Greek tragedies disseminate the new patriarchal norms in didactic plays that revolved around two main contents: the submission of the goddesses to the gods, and the submission of the woman to the man. Goddesses and women were reduced to their sexuality, a sexuality devoid of power.

Women can also be submitted by rape, as Ovid didactically proposed in Metamorphoses. Philomela, virgin daughter of the King of Athens was raped by her brother in law Tereus, King of Thrace and husband to her sister Progne. Tereus was dazzled by the splendid beauty of Philomela who —Ovid tells us— caused in his heart violent fire. Tereus is presented by Ovid as a victim of Philomela’s beauty since —according to misogynous beliefs— he was incapable of controlling his instincts and therefore absolved of all guilt. Tereus confined Philomela to his palace and raped her. She implored her father and sister for help… in vain she called the gods to help her. In vain she called the warrior gods, who were themselves also rapists. Then, Philomela accused Tereus of having desecrated that which is most sacred for a woman: her virginity.

Tereus married Philomela to repair the damage caused to her owner, his father in law, the King of Athens. Philomela then declared: After my disgrace I found myself as rival of the unfortunate Progne, and you as husband of both of us… if sometime I find myself in liberty, my modesty will not prevent me to divulge your cruelty.

Philomena’s threat implied multiple transgressions: she threatened to act with no modesty by breaking the silence; she violated the statu quo that regarded a woman as an object, and also broke the established order by considering herself aggrieved when she was not even regarded as a person. Even as being considered as Tereus’ property, Philomena did not comply with the obligation required by law and customs demanding total submission of a woman to their owners. When she was raped, the only victim was her father the King of Athens, her owner, and who had a previous agreement with Tereus. As Ovid continues to narrate in his didactic drama These reproaches inflamed Tereus, he drew his sword and cut the tongue of Philomela, who fell on the ground like a snake’s tail. After mutilating the transgressor, he still satisfied his brutal passion a hundred times.

The belief system underlying Tereus’ behaviors, as well as those of his father in law, the King of Athens, Zeus, and Hades are based on the discrimination of women and the perception of men as owners of creation. This belief system is still in force and produces the devaluation of the women and the feminine, and a hyper valuation of men and the masculine. As a result, systematic abuse of women culminates in statistically alarming rates of rapes and femicides in countries like Mexico, and more lower rates in countries with a more punitive legislation and lower corruption rates.

Legislations have changed, but changing mentalities is slow and costly. Costly to women who continue to become victims of rape and femicide.

In societies with higher rates of rape and femicide men learn right from their childhood an exhaustive list of discriminatory practices against women. Several harmful theories have emerged from these toxic beliefs such as the penisneid (penis envy) theory of Sigmund Freud. In his theory Freud believed to have encompassed and understood the deep psychology of women by fancying that the male genital apparatus was enough to account for the sexual economy of both sexes.

The denial of women’s capabilities, by their own and by the dominant male culture, has traditionally kept them isolated and suspicious of each other, with no possibility of organizing and reclaiming their own rights.

Male domination policies based on the pillars of fear/guilt/ modesty preclude women from even imagining the profound change they can generate in humanity as a nurturer of knowledge and educator of mentalities.

By force of fear, guilt and modesty women forget themselves and interpret their biological greatness as a disadvantage generating feelings of inferiority with respect to men. As a result, women become guardians of their own control policies.

Women that have awakened to the unified consciousness recognize that the planet is shared by two equally and necessary kind of anatomically different humans, beside other animal species and fabulous vegetal and mineral worlds. As women, we have no conflict in accepting the differences between man and woman because our own bodies are capable of forming these beings, different in shape but of the same essence. We have never intended to slave men for being different, neither have we harbored feelings of anger, death, or wished to subdue them. Instead, we demand to equally share the Earth with all created beings. We reject any false belief regarding the inferiority of women and superiority of men, knowing that the great values of humankind are not attributes limited to men. We know that a dominating warrior-man is not a model of perfection and that God is not a male entity. We have the opportunity and the obligation to transmit this message to end the millenary struggle of one part of humanity trying to subdue the other part.

Mothers and fathers with a unified consciousness will transmit to their sons and daughters the power of love, the power of interconnectedness and interdependence of all beings. They will not raise arrogant sons and daughters humiliated by lovelessness, the equivalent to first and second class citizens. Instead they will bring up men and women who can harmoniously live together by serving and respecting each others differences.

(1)Ovid, The Metamorphoses, 8 BCE. The sources of Ovid were Herodotus, Apolodorus, Hesiod and the classical Greek playwrights.

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.