Behind the ban-the-burka brouhaha lies a curious phenomenon
which is common to most ultra-conservative religions, whether they are
Christian, Judaic or Islamic – a deep
fear of sexuality. This translates, in an illogical hop, to woman-blaming.
It was there 3500
years ago in the original Adam and Eve creation myth. Innocence is lost when
Eve is tempted by the serpent to eat an apple from the forbidden tree.
Forbidden because it brings knowledge of good and evil and along with it shame
which didn’t exist before. All Eve’s fault. 
Step forward a
millennium or so and the dualist-Gnostic Christians landed on the bright idea
of making Lucifer/Saturn the creator of the material, physical world, while God
ruled the soul. Life’s journey was a rescue mission to free the spirit from the
leaden overcoat of the evil flesh.
It’s a deep-rooted
archetype which has manifested through doctrinal zealotry into a hatred and
contempt for women as the embodiment of the Luciferian realm – mother,
temptress, slut.
Christianity,
obsessed by its notion of original sin of which sexuality was a major
component, had to fantasise the Madonna as a sexless mother who underwent an
immaculate conception and remained celibate thereafter. Mary Magdalene was acceptable as the reformed
whore, since redemption was and is highly prized as a defeat for the forces of
evil and base desire. 
Even primitive
cultures seem to have been hung up on the uncleanliness of women with an
ingrained dread of menstrual blood. Women were banished into isolation for
their monthly period, deemed to be at risk of withering crops, turning milk,
making livestock miscarry and ruining fishermen’s luck. This taboo continues in Orthodox Judaism in
its prescriptions against intercourse during menses, with the rationale that it
upholds family purity. And in Hinduism where it is frowned on to go to the
temple for prayer while menstruating.
All this for a
regular, normal occurrence described by a gynaecologist as the ‘weeping of the
disappointed uterus’ as the female body clears out the unused material of an
old cycle ready to start again.
The Protestant
reformer John Knox’s harangue against ‘the monstrous regiment of women’ in 1558
was aimed primarily at a Roman Catholic Queen but behind his political and religious
diatribe was a clear indication of what he thought of the female of the species
– blind, weak, sick, impotent, foolish, mad.
‘And such be all women, compared unto man in bearing of authority.’ Just
his bad luck that Mary was succeeded by Queen Elizabeth 1 who took offence at
his views on female sovereigns and blocked his further progress.
Sluts, dirty and
stupid as sanctioned by religious edict – and this is half the human race?
With the arrival in
Europe of a fundamentalist strand of Islam, mediaeval and tribal attitudes we
thought had been banished in the West are emerging again. In certain
communities women’s sexuality is under the control of fathers, uncles and
brothers growing up and then husbands. Forced marriages and honour killings are
an extension of the women-and-women’s sexuality-as-property belief. Female
genital mutilation, widespread in certain countries, brutally excises women’s
sexual impulses, trapping her in a mutilated body and reinforcing her enslaved
role.
Any criticism raises
a furore of outrage, echoed in the bitterly hostile battles over contraception
and abortion in Catholic countries and the USA.
Women’s issues
should be decided by women. Those brainwashed into Stockholm Syndrome by their
male captors and patriarchal zealots, would (some of them) gradually begin to
think for themselves. It sounds as if I
hate men. Truthfully I prefer them to women and never in my worst nightmares
thought the day would come when these arguments would have to be raised again.
None of which
answers the question of why, since time immemorial, women have been viewed with
dread, contempt, revulsion and ludicrously scapegoated as the prime sexual
predators. The iron fist of control only comes down over what feels
threatening.
I’m too long in the
tooth to grasp the complexities of the binary, non-binary gender stramash. But
on reflection, anything that blurs the old male/female fault line might prove
to be a blessing as we head for Aquarius – either the 2000 year epochal Age just getting
under way, or the concentrated celestial influence from the mid 2020s, under the
sway of this most androgynous of planets.
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