40+

But beyond these causes, I see the ultimate source of sexism in our misinterpretation of human nature at the time in our evolution when we developed consciousness. 

·         My journey back in time and across the earth in search of the origin of sexism has tracked it down to a universal and literally stone-age-old misinterpretation of human nature. It dates from and lived in a matriarchal social order. Because we didn’t grasp that male and female,  represented by mind and instinct, make up the two halves of the psyche (and therefore are two sides of the same thing), we fatally upset the balance between them. This imbalance manifests first /was first implemented/fostered by the goddess religion‘s downplaying of men’s role as fathers. It then continued to be upheld by the patriarchal social order’s subsequent devaluation/oppression of women.

 Snared in a straitjacket of sin and guilt we learned--and have never since unlearned--that the only thing entitling us to live a decent (if never happy) life is going through, in one form or another, the ordeals of sacrifice, suffering and death. 
 As a result, the purpose of having a conscious mind/implications of consciousness/ never became clear to us and 

A major reason why we haven’t managed to build a more equitable society is, I suggest, that both sexes apply an equally distorted view of the other. Patriarchy’s sexism, or overt discrimination against women, has all the time been counterbalanced by a reversed sexism, or covert discrimination against men. Because the psyche is made up equally of a male and a female part/principle, men and women exercise as much power in society. What happens if society prevents one sex from wielding its power openly, is simply that it takes its power underground where it works on sabotaging society’s professed goals. Patriarchy reduced woman to the role of wife and mother and forced her to lead, on the surface, a dull, voiceless and plantlike existence. Women’s power, which could only be exercised through sex and motherhood, therefore developed in the dark, where values antagonistic to the patriarchal ones could freely proliferate. It is the unchallenged exercise of this hidden female power that provides men with an ongoing incentive to wield coercive power over women, and this is how the vicious circle of strife between the sexes keeps going. /shouldn’t this sum-up come earlier? At start of Part III?/

*Although the feminist movement has alerted us to the wrongs done to women and started to correct them, we have so far ignored the wrongs done to men. But if our goal is an equal society, we must look both sets of gender-biased attitudes squarely in the eye and promptly admit that we all harbor them (though we have largely repressed and rationalized them)--for only then do we have a chance to uproot them. Modern psychology tells us we have to face our hidden emotions and re-experience them before we can establish healthy relations with ourselves and others. But this we must also do collectively. Society is like an individual who has never worked out his relationship with his parents: it is still beholden to its ancestors, i.e. to the values inherited from them, including its outlook on man. Collectively we take on guilt for the trauma we once suffered, and, not knowing any other way to get rid of it, we transfer our guilt to someone or something in our present life that has nothing to do with our original trauma./I’ve said this before/ (continues on p. 161)

*If we learn to see ourselves, or parts of ourselves, as evil we start hating it and since what we hate is a part of ourselves, we become destructive. We can’t eliminate aggression and anger, but we can learn to see them differently. We must be friends with our aggression, it is a resource to tap into, to protect human growth, a will to communicate. Be happy for your anger. Let it out, understand it and canalize it, because it is only when you rationalize it away that it will make you sadistic./

our robust resources for battle and putting up, because it, which prevents us from direct and rousing contact with each other. Battle is what we need because there is no other way towards full status as human beings but to put up a fight against the many obstacles that exist (the belief we have to be forced against our will, reason, our whole arsenal of thought, will, feeling being one of the worst) and eliminate them. Confrontation on all levels as a principle of life, mutual exchange, as the hotbed/breeding ground/soil in which the human tree can grow and ripen. Man as man’s rejoicing, his wellspring and creation.

I think it is about time we realized that there is nothing holy or larger than thou about any religion or philosophy; they are all products of the human mind and more or less fallible. The reason we let them stand above us is that they have always been upheld by worldly authorities whose vast physical powers have scared us into silence. Yet now when we are so much freer, so much more able to live with uncertainty and when nothing stops us from putting our trust in ourselves, we are still lost. Judging from the catastrophic increase in physical, psychosomatic and mental problems in the modern “godless” world, we seem to lack the appropriate strength to make it without authorities and feel neither safe nor capable enough on our own.

One of the reasons, I suggest, is that we simply don’t know who we are. So busy have we been following orders that we have never done our first duty, which is exploring ourselves, learning to respect what our strongest drives are and to carefully develop them. It is inside us that our motivations can be found and it is them we should follow, not ideologies, philosophies or any norms that are imposed on us from the outside, and which claim to be unchangeable.

For if love, as I believe, is part of the instinct for self-preservation, we have a bottomless need for love—and as much for giving it as for receiving it--in a sense, we are destined to love each other. It is only when we can’t love ourselves that we can’t love each other, and when we can’t satisfy this crucial double need that we redirect its uncanny power towards destroying the very things we do love: ourselves, each other, nature.

For us love is, I suggest, an inborn pattern preparing us to act and react in a “species-specific” way.

Most important of all, let’s not forget that we choose our life. /Regardless of the culture we live in and how we were brought up, as adults we are responsible for how much of it we embrace and allow to influence us and how much of it we discard and find substitutes for. By all means, let’s not/ So that we don’t /get to the point when we/ say at the end of our life (as the man did in Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Ilych), “What if my whole life has been wrong?” But rather, with Henry David Thoreau, “If you advance confidently in the direction . . . uncommon knowledge.”/something is missing here/

/Or, as French writer Gustave Flaubert wrote in a letter to his friend and colleague George Sand, “Spend! Be profligate! All great souls, that’s to say all good ones, expend all their energies regardless of the cost. You must suffer and enjoy, laugh, cry, love and work, in other words you must let every fiber of your being thrill with life. That’s the meaning of being human, I think. . .”/ or else quote DHL/

I suggest modern society as a whole has /indeed/ reached a crisis, tottering as we are on the brink of self-annihilation as a species—whether through nuclear, chemical and biological holocausts or through environmental catastrophes such as the pollution of air, water, soil and climate.

41. Conclusion

On your mark!

We already live in a time when the gender roles are in flux. The concept of femininity has been expanding for several decades and the concept of masculinity has reached a crisis. Humanity marches on and old verities don't apply anymore. To be born in the body of one sex no longer means that you have to live in any particular way.

As old boundaries are loosening, and how to live is becoming a matter of individual choice, one thing becomes clear: it's on ourselves we need to turn the spotlight. Because it's the thoughts, feelings and attitudes we are least conscious of that most need changing. (A free test of our unconscious biases is 
available on www.projectimplicit.com ).

Many people deny that sexism still exists. One reason may be that they don't even know they are sexists. Few of us really chose to become that way, we just grew up with it. Having come to believe that women are inferior to them, men more or less take for granted that being sexist is the normal and natural way to relate to women. And women who resent the inferior position of their sex take for granted that being sexist in reverse is the normal and natural way to relate to men.

It’s not that we want to be this way, it just has become a habit so ingrained as to seem like a substance in the blood. But it is not in our blood! Only in our heads. And these we can turn around. So if we really want to change that habit, what we need is really effective methods. For starters maybe confronting the uncomfortable truth that because of our upbringing (plus unfamiliarity with the contents of our unconscious) we have indeed all, women and men, been grossly unfair both to ourselves and each other.

For a man this could mean seeing that the real reason why he hits his wife is not anything she does or says, but an anger at her sex born of his unconscious fear of female power. For a woman it could mean becoming aware that the deepest reason why she always finds fault with her husband is not anything he does or doesn’t do, but a generic anger at the male sex.

But let's give ourselves some slack. It's not our fault that we were born and bred in a sexist society. That children must take over their elders’ view of the world is an inescapable part of the human condition. As is the fact that it takes at least a quarter of our lifetime to form our own view--and even longer to assert it. So let's just accept this. Then go on to forgive ourselves and each other for the past realizing that we simply couldn't help it.

As adults, however, we can help how we act, because we can decide if we want to stay in the worldview we've inherited, or to modify it or discard it. Everybody has the inner resources to do so, although the outer conditions may not be accessible to everyone everywhere. (As for instance in places where having a mind of your own means imprisonment or death). At the same time we can't defend our present behavior by referring to how we were brought up or what was 'done' to us in the past. Once grown up we act as we choose to act, consciously or unconsciously. To passively follow a prevailing pattern is a choice too.

Get set, go!

Before discussing what constitutes a healthy non-sexist behavior we have to answer a key question. Why do we hold on to the tragic old misconception of what it means to be human that was implicit already in the world's first organized religion and which is still haunting us today? Keeping in mind that the way we see ourselves is the way we look at everybody else, hasn’t the time come to produce a fairer, more constructive description of ourselves?

Let's face it: we were not meant to be perfect nor do we need to be. Life for us is a never-ending experiment, trial and error, a road not yet taken, bound to be lined with mistakes. But mistakes are not wrongs. They are steppingstones to new insights, chances to learn new and better ways.

So let's throw out the window all the negative baloney we're jam-packed with: you can't, you shan't. you're wrong, you're not worth it, etc. And in with affirmations, like we deserve respect, we deserve happiness, it's the birthright of every human being to thoroughly enjoy life.

Human beings want to live as the animals do, from inside out following their own species-appropriate kind of life. If held up to impossible standards like perfection, we will react with righteous rage and destructiveness. As will any elephant forced to walk on a tight-rope! Einstein put it this way, "Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life thinking it is stupid."

Writes Tomas Tranströmer in his poem Romanesque arches,

"Don't be ashamed to be a human being, be proud!

Inside you one vault after another opens endlessly.

You'll never be complete, and that's as it should be."

*

What then is healthy non-sexist behavior? A topic worth brainstorming about! Perhaps something like emotionally adult behavior? One that displays a fair balance between the male and female components of the psyche--harmonizing feeling and thinking, passion and reason, spontaneity and reflection. In more concrete terms: being able to live with uncertainty, comfortable in the knowledge that there are no pat answers or any truths that last forever.

Maybe establishing a reasonably stable center inside oneself so as to allow—even exult in—continuous change and growth. Also flexible enough to admit when we are wrong and, instead of indulging in guilt for some mistake, going on from there to make a better choice next time. Or as the embroidery says on a cushion in the home of one of my friends, “A woman who can’t change her mind probably doesn’t have one.”

Conflicts will never cease coming up—for they are natural ingredients in human interaction--but we can change the way we look at them. Especially if we use one of the superb human assets, our sense of humor, and especially if we direct it at ourselves. One day, I'm convinced, we'll not see conflicts as incentives to hostile encounters but as invitations to stimulating contests and new chances to probe our resources. To become, in the words of American psychologist Abraham Maslow, "everything we are capable of becoming."

I predict a future, however long in coming, when we regard the use of force as lunatic behavior; when, rather than project our discord onto others, we start by tracing its causes back to ourselves and the circumstances that formed us. When we realize that the only important thing is what's going on in our mind and become open to another way of seeing. This is what the spiritual movement A Course in Miracles talks about, for by 'miracle' they mean a shift in perception.

Or as Fridtjof Nansen, Nobel Prize Laureate in 1922, said (according to the magnet I bought at the Nobel Museum in Stockholm), "The impossible is what takes a little longer."

*

But what am I saying? Am I some kind of Rousseau who believes human beings are naturally good, just perverted by culture? Another Pollyanna who thinks we can live without pain and suffering? Isn’t it rather natural to feel guilty and sinful at times, and aren’t there values and goals worth sacrificing for?

Of course it's appropriate to feel ashamed if we've done what we know we shouldn’t have (whether we want to label it 'sin' is a matter of taste). And some sacrifice may indeed be needed for tasks worthy of pursuing--like setting aside our comfort and waving farewell to rationalizations and defenses. What I want us to steer clear of is the metaphysical overtones to our guilt, the doomsday atmosphere created by overlords we think we must pay fealty to. We're not to blame for half the things we accuse ourselves of (though maybe for some others!) nor are we responsible for having been brainwashed at a time in our personal life (or in history) when we'd not yet come into our own.

Our only allegiance is to what we know within to be the right way; and if we need the guidance of some religious belief to find it, that of course is a choice. The essential thing is to act at nobody else's urging but our own, since we alone are accountable for the course of our life. The work we must do is with ourselves. It's about unmasking our own self-deception. I don’t know if we can eliminate suffering, but I'm sure we can learn to live with considerably less of it than we do now.

In case we’re afraid to challenge established ways of thinking, let’s recall Nelson Mandela’s words when he was inaugurated as president of South Africa, “The need to subordinate ourselves is not only an outdated response to fear but a way of escaping from responsibility, a wish not to face the iron law that we, and only we, alone or in groups, are the creators of our life and our world."

Rather than a Rousseau or a Pollyanna, what I think I am is an existentialist. I believe we are responsible for the choices we make, including what we do with the contents of our unconscious. Optimist as I am I predict that the time will come when we realize that we only see enemies in others because we're not friends with ourselves, and only need power over others because we don’t have power over ourselves.

We can change. Some have done it and more will follow.

                                                                  

                                                               the end

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40. Wrapping up

So why did I go on this lengthy journey through time, across continents and cultures, questioning, analyzing and speculating? I wanted to understand why we live in a sick society and in particular what prompts the universal practice of misogyny.

In Lewis Mumford's book The Condition of Man I read the following: “People whose course of life has reached a crisis must confront their collective past as fully as a neurotic patient must unbury his personal life: long-forgotten traumas in history may have a disastrous effect upon millions who remain unaware of them.”

That society has reached a crisis seemed to me beyond doubt, tottering as we are on the brink of self-annihilation, whether through nuclear, chemical and biological holocausts or through environmental catastrophes like the pollution of air, water, soil and climate.

Can it be, I asked myself, that society's destructive behavior patterns are the effect of long-forgotten traumas in our collective past? So that the reason we keep repeating these patterns is that we haven’t unburied their underlying traumas?

Backed by Freud’s idea of repetition-compulsion  I then postulated that if a society never examines, and manages to exorcise, the mental shock dealt it by some frightful events early in its history, there is a risk that the morbid behavior it gave rise to recurs in generation after generation.

I embarked on my theory of a Malevolent Matriarchy because I became intrigued with the ritual of male sacrifice in the goddess cults of the early farming communities; not only because this weird phenomenon is depicted in mythologies all around the world but because the belief system that created it still  keeps its grip on humanity. I see in this once widely practiced custom the long-forgotten trauma buried under sexism.

A brief summary of my Thought Adventure or theory of The Origin of Sexism

The reason we live in a misogynist society is that men suffer from an inferiority complex vis-à-vis women for which they compensate by oppressing women. This complex goes back to prehistoric times when the female ranked higher than the male; first because of a superstitious belief that she produced children by magic; later, because in the early farming villages males were sacrificed to a Great Mother Goddess, women ruled and men were oppressed.

I postulate that for most of our history as a species humanity lived under some form of matriarchy or mother-rule. By this I mean that, for sheer survival reasons, life in the human group centered around mother and offspring. At the dawn of consciousness when women's monopoly on parenthood was threatened by the discovery of men's role in procreation, the benevolent female reign turned into a dictatorship.

But as consciousness kept evolving and villages grew into cities that depended on large-scale work by males, men turned the tables on the matriarchs. The anger that their inferior status had amassed in men now exploded in various forms of exaggerated aggressiveness, or the overcompensation characteristic of the inferiority complex. They stripped women of power and introduced a patriarchal rule as oppressive of women as the matriarchal rule had been of men.

Question: Why is misogyny still around? If it was an inferiority complex incurred in a previous matriarchy that made men oppress women, why aren't men rid of it by now after reigning supreme for about six millenniums?

There are three main reasons:

1)  Men don't know that they suffer from this complex. After seizing power they quickly buried it in their unconscious, rationalized their fear of woman as 'woman equals evil' and topped it with a doctrine of female inferiority authorizing them to put women down. But forgetting one's feelings doesn't erase them. Since men never examined theirs, they never got rid of their complex--nor of the incentive for devaluing women. And ever since, not realizing that they keep compensating for feeling inferior, men have believed their actions to be proofs of male superiority.

2) Women reinforce men's inferiority complex. To compensate for being deprived of a voice in society they built a shadow society of their own in the home, and created an enhanced mother role that gave them permission to put males down  Of these acts of misandry the most detrimental to masculine wholeness is reducing fatherhood to at the most an auxiliary role in child-rearing. Because this parental inequality prevents them from having an impact equal to women's on the hearts and minds of their children, men are robbed of their full share in what may be the most consequential of powers--that of shaping the fabric of tomorrow's society.

Question: But how important is parental inequality? Do men care?

Though some fathers may not be aware of being discriminated against or are too timid to assert their paternal rights, more and more of them are today demanding equal parenting. But to accept such a concept will take time, because the sum and substance of it--that the paternal role is as indispensable as the maternal in the raising of children and therefore demands as much time--calls for a radical transformation of the entire social structure.

3) The third major thing that keeps the male inferiority complex alive is the bias against the male sex to be found in the universally accepted definitions of masculinity and femininity. Womanhood is everywhere seen as innate in a woman, but a man can only gain manhood through his own efforts. Men are denied the safety women have knowing that their value as human beings is intrinsic.

As to the origin of this bias I put my bet on the matriarchs. Who but they could have had the audacity to stamp the male as less favored by Nature or not as grounded to the earth as the female? That we haven't corrected this nonsense is just one example of how stuck we are in the quagmire of obsolete ideas. We remain glued to past thinking all the way down into prehistory.

Question: But aren't men blissfully ignorant of this bias against masculinity?

They may not be conscious of it but since it's the root cause of their inferiority complex, this unfair estimation of their sex is what impels men to overcompensate. In their race to prove a usefulness equivalent to women's innate value, patriarchy's men applied the power of their newly awakened conscious minds to show they could build civilization. At the same time they withheld that power from women and thus for eons denied society the potential contributions of half of its human population.

*

                                                                     

Ultimately, I track down the origin of sexism to our misreading of human nature at the time when we developed consciousness. Because we didn't grasp that mind and instinct (symbolized by the male and female principles) make up the two halves of our psyche, we fatally upset the balance between them. We never learned to construct our behavior in harmony with the laws of nature.

We cut off the conscious mind from its vital link to the instincts and allowed it to operate in a vacuum--much like a director who, convinced that he knows better than the playwright what the play is all about, compels both actors and audience to go along with his own far-fetched interpretation.

But since ignoring them did not make the instincts disappear, they got to work undermining society's conscious goals. An extreme example of such a split on a national scale was Nazi Germany. In her memoir The War, French author Marguerite Duras writes that despite being ”one of the grandest civilized nations in the world, the age-long capital of music,” Germany “systematically murdered eleven million human beings with the absolute efficiency of a national industry."

*

Contributing to our staying sexist (and to being prejudiced in general) is the misanthropic view of humanity that has held us hostage throughout history. Sin and guilt, expiable only by obedience to various authorities are still staple ingredients in the state of consciousness of peoples everywhere. The lot of humans is to live in constant fear of punishment for wrongdoings that our very nature was designed to make us commit.

I hold this offensive and totally arbitrary outlook on humanity responsible for the mess the world is in. I think that what has led us to take destructive and self-destructive behavior for granted is that we accept the insane idea that suffering, including sacrifice and violent death, is not only inevitable but our just deserts. We blame others to throw the burden of constitutional guilt off our shoulders and ease the chafing feeling that we are never right, never good or lovable enough. This is a defeatist view that also fosters self-righteousness and social hypocrisy. We can’t be honest, we dare not show who we are, not even to ourselves.

*

So it’s only against the backdrop of the pre-patriarchal matriarchy’s oppression of men--and the fear of womanhood it planted in the male psyche--that we can understand the phenomenon of misogyny. Likewise, it’s only against the backdrop of the subsequent patriarchy’s oppression of women--and the repressed anger it accumulated in women--that we can understand the phenomenon of misandry.

Today, gradually though not universally, it's becoming accepted that the sexes should enjoy equal rights (which would express the built-in balance of power between complementary forces of nature). Yet despite much brain wrestling almost no real, tangible gender equality manifested in actual living conditions has yet materialized, And why? Because we are still mired, women as well as men, in these two types of sexist behavior.

What then are we to do if we want to erase sexism in all its shapes and forms? For some reflections on this, see the next, and last, post.

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39. The Libido

We all know and accept, I think, that our sexual drive is a constant presence in life representing a primal urge to live on every possible level. That the libido plays a part in all we do including problem-solving and constructive thinking, providing the kindling on the fire that makes successful business deals, legislative bills and peace accords. I also think we know that children are sexual beings already as babies and that, to ensure their sexual and psychological maturity, we must respect their auto-erotic needs.

That's why I call the taboo patriarchy imposes on free and unconstrained sexual activity one of the worst crimes committed against humanity. The repercussions on society of polluting this fountain of simple and easily available joy are so manifold that it's hard to take stock of them. But maybe the most seminal effect is the difficulty the sexes 
have to form whole and satisfying relationships with each other.

I have suggested that men have a twofold fear of woman--in her capacity as both
authority figure and sexual being, And I have described the universal phenomenon of misogyny as born of a hostility to the entire female sex that this fear had fomented in men; a hostility so momentous as to corrupt men's natural instincts. I'll  now take a look at male sexuality

Male sex
So far there hasn't been much public discussion about male sexuality. Because it's relatively easy for a man to release his sperm, it's been taken for granted that this also gives him an orgasm. But research shows--and many men know--that there is indeed a difference between orgasm and evacuation of sperm. Men can release sperm without experiencing any lust or very little (and sometimes feeling flat-out displeasure). They can also have non-ejaculatory orgasms, which are less intense and pleasurable but which can be quite enjoyable for older men, according to Shakti Amarantha in her article Ejaculation vs Orgasm. What's the difference? (Thought Catalog). "Orgasm," she writes, "happens in the brain, ejaculation in prostate and urethra. In brain scans, orgasms look like an epileptic fit--an electric storm that sweeps over the brain," 

Although a good amount of research has been done on male orgasm since Kinsey's first studies in the 1950's, "there is still much we don't know or understand," writes men's health expert Jerry Kennard in about.com/abouthealth. More is known about female orgasm than male. 

In his article in Den manliga Orgasmen, ed. Tor Nörrestrander, the Danish physician and sexologist Preben Hertoft says that being able to have an orgasm has got nothing to do
with technique or finding new stimulation. It has only to do with a man's personality, in particular his ability to enjoy intimacy. Because being able to experience intense pleasure at the release of sperm is a matter of feeling secure enough to let oneself go and about enjoying the dependence on one's partner without fear of losing control. 

I've found no statistics on how common the lack of orgasm is in men during sex with women, But some studies indicate it's more frequent than expected. Can the very scarcity of such information be linked to the current pressure on men to 'perform?' So that  the anxiety caused by this pressure may actually prevent them from even taking pleasure
into account when measuring the degree of their sexual satisfaction? Is it possible, in other words, that to many men what counts for sex to be successful is not how pleasurable it is but simply that they can do it--and rate as good performers?!

If this is so, it sheds light on fear of intimacy and commitment, a problem common in men (though by no means only in them), Because if we had believed that  the typically male angle on sex--getting laid as fast and as often as possible--sprang from a macho need to dominate women, we may have to reconsider. And ask instead if it doesn't spring from a wish to avoid women, to flee from dependence and closeness--and in essence from their own need of women? A proof, it seems to me, that the age-old but unacknowledged male fear of womanhood, the creator and foundation of the male inferiority complex, is still alive and kicking.

Sexual attraction
Some people wonder what will become of the sexual attraction once the sexes realize how alike they are. Will open display of men's feminine side and of women's masculine side take away the thrill of the differences, the mystery of the otherness? If, as the French say, the psyche is indeed genderless (l'âme n‘a pas de sexe), isn't the body too? 

I think the effect will be just the opposite. First, once both men and women feel that their 'bisexual' psyche is accepted, the less reason they will have to resent and envy each other. Second, only when they can be wholly themselves, free from old restrictions, will the sexes be able to fully appreciate the real differences between them. And the real differences are physical. 

Why haven’t we invented more imaginative and refined ways to savor everything that’s delicious about the corporeal presence of the opposite sex? Like how men and women look, sound, smell, dress, move their bodies and handle objects—all the things the French refer to when they exclaim, Vive la différence! 

Ways other than having sex I mean. Hopping into bed with everybody we are sexually attracted to can be just a bit crude, don't you think, and tiring too, not to speak of impractical? But shouldn't there be alternative modes of enjoying our libido needs, some middle way between infidelity and no sex at all? Because there's no reason we should shut down all sexual feelings except those we have for our spouse or significant other. 

In our modern world where working men and women constantly intermingle and there’s plenty of room for sexual interplay, why not practice more of the old sophisticated art of flirting, the tried and true form of lovemaking that stops short of intercourse? Why not make sexual love also a delicate game to play in the mind--yes, in glances, words and laughter too, but primarily in fantasies and dreams that mesmerize and satiate the soul! 

Of course to allow ourselves to exult in the attraction we feel for others and others feel for us we must first have learned to look at our sexuality without a hint of sin or shame, and to
treat it with respect as  both a source of joy and as our responsibility. It may take long to get there depending on how far behind we are and how much we want it, but get there we will!

Let me now sum up this blog, which has been an outline of my theory of  how the sexist society began and why we still live in one. See next post. 

    

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