Wednesday, June 28, 2017

Bring Back the Matriarchy

Pay close attention. There will be a quiz at the end of this post.

So, don’t just revel in the entertainment value of these bizarre human customs. Thanks to Janice Zarro Brodman’s new book  Sex Rules: Astonishing Sexual Practices and Gender Roles Around the World we now know more about the sexual customs and gender roles that are practiced around the world. Just in case you thought that feminists were chasing rainbows, it turns out that the world they envision still exists… somewhere.

In a bow to French president Emmanuel Macron, the Apanyekra-Canela indigenous community of Brazil arranges for teenage boys to have sex with many women, but only women who are beyond childbearing years. As you know, in our own Puritanical culture, when an older woman chooses to initiate a teenage boy into the mysteries of sex she will be facing hard time. How can you not see that as a new way to repress female sexuality?


“[They believe that] horny young guys should get it on with women in their late 40s and 50s. Sex with older women will make him strong and courageous, while sex with a young woman — even his wife — will make him weak and nervous.”

If a man should stray from this belief and hook up with a female his own age, he is “shamed and hazed before the whole village,” and is forced to “walk down a line of dancing women, all laughing and teasing him.”

As for how this makes him strong and courageous,  your guess is as good as mine.

And then Africa’s nomadic Wodaabe tribe has its own special customs. In an amazing role reversal men are made to compete in beauty pageants for female attention. Consider it an exercise in male pride.

There, the Post explains:

“Women are free to have sex with anyone they wish” and often pick their partners from the tribe’s popular beauty pageants — which feature men on display. For the guys, the preparation is lengthy and painstaking.

“First, shave your hairline way back,” Brodman writes. “Then smooth a layer of red clay all over your face. Carefully apply thick black eyeliner and black lip paint. Draw a white line down the center of your nose so it will look even longer than it is. Slip into your finest embroidered tunic, [then] pop on your headdress of ostrich feathers and horsehair.”

During the pageant, the men are expected to dance for the women, including having to “vibrate [their] throat, lips and mouth, roll [their] eyes to show how white they are, flash those pearly teeth, while stretching on tiptoes into the air like a bird.”


 Culture: The Wodaabe believe bright eyes, white teeth and a sharp nose make a man beautiful - and the make up enhances these beatures

If you are seeking true gender equality, you can move to Indonesia and join the Tau Tau Wana tribe:

Meanwhile, the Tau Tau Wana of Indonesia believe more in gender equality than female dominance, but their version of equality would have many guys running for cover.

“They figure men and women are the same and everyone should get to do everything,” Brodman writes, “including having periods.”

The way Tau Tau Wana men “get” their periods is not for the squeamish, Brodman writes: “They go through rituals that slice the penis, which bleeds to make them mature, just as a woman’s periods do for her.”

One might argue, after famed Swiss sociologist J. J. Bachofen that these practices show a more natural and more original human condition, one where women ruled in a primal matriarchy. One might also argue that these practices lend credence to the views of Friedrich Engels, who followed Bachofen by suggesting that this primal matriarchy (and the joys of female sexuality) had been repressed by the patriarchy through the institutions of private property, the family and the state?

Has it been downhill ever since? Do we need a revolution, as Engels suggested, to overthrow the patriarchy and capitalism? Is that the only way that women will get back in touch with their sexual power?

Someone who believes that the most primitive organizations are the truest ones might accept such beliefs.

Otherwise, you will find a better answer to today’s quiz question: What do all of these communities have in common?

I am sure you have already guessed. They are all hopeless;y primitive and are probably on their way to extinction. If they have not been overrun by neighboring enemy tribes, it’s because they have nothing worth plundering.

So, if you are dreaming of a feminist paradise where women are in charge, where men are whining and mewling, you will have to ask yourself how many of your creature comforts, how much modern sanitation, how many modern conveniences, how much of your lifespan, how much of the internet you would be willing to give up in order to see men menstruate?
These men are forced to menstruate and dress up as women
These men are forced to menstruate and dress up as women

10 comments:

Ares Olympus said...

So these are some forms of primitive tribalism, and certainly it doesn't look attractive to any modern male, whether or not modern females see it better, I'd also have doubts. I suppose "having nothing to plunder" is an advantage in this ways, but we know this is never true, land is often worth taking.

Authors like Daniel Quinn claim tribalism is in our genes, and even that it is central to the adaptability of our species, given our extreme vulnerability. So each tribe becomes an incubation unit of culture or religion, and when circumstances change, different tribal groups will change in different ways, and the successful solutions will propagate and be copied by others. The modern world attempts to escape that primitive superstitious fearful tribal world, and reduces tribal influences, first reducing extended families to a nuclear family unit, and then reducing the family to individuals with money to protect them. And there are power advantages to this reduction, as long as the monolithic culture gains in power.

Anyway, so we may be at the summit of that path if the rate of our consumption and destruction of the natural systems slows down. Like when our debt system fails, things may fall apart relatively quickly, and our tribal genes may reassert their adaptive values, and people who have a mind for tribalism may have an advantage in such a period. And all the interpersonal skills we lost from our reductive consumer society will instantly be in high demand.

Tribalism might even be the centrality of what it means to be conservative - to have belonging in a tribe, and a will to defend its boundaries. The old primitive tribes can't work in a world of billions, but Quinn sees a "new tribalism" that will arise as individual risks increase and opportunities decline. And surely there are unlimited "degenerate" tribes that will form and look equally unattractive from the outside. The unplanned experiments are already in progress.

James said...

Where did you get the picture of my family reunion? Those are my East Texas relatives (we talk about them much).

James said...

Actually we don't talk about them very much. They get a little strange up in those piney woods.

David Foster said...

There was a commune in upstate New York in the 1800s that followed the practice of having older women initiate young men into sex. Lasted from 1848 till 1881, the present Oneida company is its descendent.

Deana said...

We do not need to go far abroad to see up close all the "advantages" of a matriarchy. Any urban area in America will provide you with blocks and blocks of human beings who have lived in a matriarchy for at least the last three generations. Its effects are devastating. Chaos reigns and spills over into the rest of society in a million ways every single day.

I don't want any part of it.

Deana said...

dfordoom -

I adore Ms. Paglia but I think it it is important to clarify that we are not saying all of this in an effort to bash women. The point of all of this is that women were never designed / intended / supposed to dominate every facet of society. Feminists want to hold all of the power, have all of the say so, and have the last word. It has been an unmitigated disaster.

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said...

If these primitive cultures are not already hurtling toward extinction, we can help accelerate the process lightning quick by connecting them to the electrical grid and give them the hypnotizing magic of the Glowing Box -- the weapon of mass cultural destruction.

Elephants are matriarchies. So adorable, but best kept in zoos, lest they stampede through your village and wreck everything.

I'm 100% with Deana's comments.

n.n said...

Men and women are equal and complementary. Our bodies are complementary. Our perceptions are complementary. Our perspectives are complementary. In societies that recognize and respect the equal and complementary nature of men and women, the synthesis of masculine and feminine qualities realizes an optimal fitness. A reconciliation of moral, natural, and personal imperatives that are internally, externally, and mutually consistent.

Ares Olympus said...

Ignatius Acton Chesterton OCD said... Elephants are matriarchies. So adorable, but best kept in zoos, lest they stampede through your village and wreck everything

I've read that young male elephant may get more out of control when the older bulls are murdered (i.e. "herd thinned") by humans. The younger makes are left untrained, with just hormones to guide them, not unlike human society without mature male guidance, or is that your point?
http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v408/n6811/full/408425a0.html
http://thesestonewalls.com/gordon-macrae/in-the-absence-of-fathers-a-story-of-elephants-and-men/

James said...

AO,
You on to something about young bull's behavior controlled by older bulls. Somehow or another elephant's (mostly young bulls) know when and where there will be a lot of over ripe plantains (bananas). They eat alot of them and since being overripe is a condition of fermentation they get drunk. Then they seem to agree "let's go to town and raise some hell" to terrorize local villages, unless they run into an older bull especially one in must who simply says keep it up and I'll beat your ass.