'Womb
Envy' and the 'Devalued Man':
How Women Invented Agriculture and Men Have Punished
Them For It Ever Since
by
Craig White
"The
Birth of the Myth That Men are Closer to God" is the title
of an article carried recently in The Washington Post, written
by Robert McElvaine, a professor of History at Millsaps College
in Jackson, Mississippi. It starts out more or less about the Taliban,
but it quickly moves on to that much more dangerous movement, the
Religious Right in America (well, he says Judaism and Christianity,
and appears to mean any traditionalist interpretation of either).
While
McElvaine’s piece purports to explain religious "myths"
about men and women, to my mind he, as a believer, retells one version
of our official modern myth. The article is all the more appealing
as a result: myths are fun, and McElvaine retells a good one, with
feeling and gusto: the story of how women invented agriculture.
(As they taught us in school, a myth is a story set in the distant,
unverifiable past that explains some feature of our lives, right?
(And it would be really hard to verify who invented agriculture!))
So, according to this recently conceived myth, long ago, men were
hairy, violent, and stupid, and inordinately (and foolishly) proud
of their superior hunting skills. (Women painstakingly and non-violently
gathered seeds and roots, while men killed mastodons.) Then, women
(being superior mentally, as they still are) began noting, in a
creative leap, the connection between seeds in the ground and the
plants that sprang up later. Cleverly, they began sacrificing some
of the seeds they gathered, placing them in the ground, and some
months later reaping the results. Soon they were providing more
food than men. Feeling that their hunting role had been "devalued,"
the men were jealous! (The explanatory power of this myth is obvious
already.) At this point, in their jealous rage, men wickedly made
the false deduction that the male role in human reproduction was
like the female (or later, human) role in agriculture: planting
the seed in the ground, which only provided a warm, dark, wet place
for the seed to grow. Male jealousy (which persists to this day),
made men assign this creative element to themselves, leaving women,
dirt-like, to provide nothing but a place for the seed to grow.
Additional male revenge for being driven from the joys of hunter-gathering
to the sweat of agriculture with sticks and hoes included the assigning
of creative powers to male gods, even though "earlier"
stories referred to "Mother Earth and to nature as a feminine
force." (I had a little fun with my own summary, but I think
the elements of the story are there as McElvaine told it.)
It’s
an engaging myth, with some intriguing explanations of how the modern
world came to be! If only it had been presented as a myth, so more
people could enjoy it as such! As science, it’s devoid of any scintilla
of evidence, which might cause some people, not realizing its proper
value as an amusing myth, to dismiss it. A shame. Even as myth,
however, I have to question some of the details. For example, if
the invention of agriculture led to the notion of impregnation as
planting a seed, did early people really think of Earth as Mother,
but not of Sky as Father? Didn’t the earlier stories (if they really
were earlier) about Mother Earth suggest that She got impregnated
by Father Sky? The clouds and rain and the lightning bolts and all
that? (No rain, no growth.) Wouldn’t that imply that fertility was
seen, from the earliest days of the "Mother Earth" paradigm,
as a collaborative effort, with an important male contribution,
rather than a purely female quality? Moving forward in mythical
time, if the invention of agriculture led to these "creative
male" myths that devalue women, why do we have goddesses of
earth and harvest getting sacrifices from the oh-so-patriarchal
Greeks and Romans? In both theory and practice, they seemed to believe
the female contribution to fertility was extremely important. But
that doesn’t fit too well with the myth at all. Anyway, isn’t Earth,
rather than a degrading comparison, a rather natural, benevolent,
even majestic metaphor for woman as reproducer? After all, anyone
can see that the great, beautiful earth gives us life. How? A seed
goes in, and then there is quiet, mysterious growth for months,
hidden from view, growth that never occurs with a seed on a shelf
or in a jar. Finally, new life springs forth. That’s a degrading
comparison? And, in the end, let’s not forget it’s a metaphor. If
women are Dirt in this kind of story, are men violent, senseless,
ephemeral airheads, as they would be if the thundercloud image is
taken as literally as the Earth image? Maybe the Mistaken Metaphor
of Woman as Dirt has been pushed too far as an explanation for men
feeling superior.
Now
I come to Genesis, in which, McElvaine asserts, the Fall is women’s
discovery of agriculture. It seems odd to me, if the Genesis creation
story makes women dirt-like, that the story does not simply portray
woman as created from dirt. In fact, the Genesis story makes woman
the last and most refined product of creation, "Human 1.1"
as it were. The "dirt woman" theme he reads in Genesis (as elsewhere)
would work far better if woman were made next to last, from dirt,
and Adam were made from Eve. That way, she would be closer to dirt,
and he would be the refined one, the final product. Since it’s the
other way around, the effect is quite spoiled. It also seems to
me that McElvaine goofed on a rather important verifiable detail.
This professor of history asserts baldly that "in many languages,
starting with Hebrew, woman means "out of man." I wish he would
name one language other than Hebrew, for in that language, "ish"
is man, and "ishah" is woman, according to my Bible footnotes.
Sounds more like the feminine form of the same word, to me–I believe
it’s simply the standard Semitic ending for a feminine word. Genesis
actually says nothing about the meaning of the word, it simply quotes
Adam as saying, "She shall be called woman, because she was
taken out of man." I'll believe McElvaine’s "fact"
about the "many" other languages when I see them cited,
in a dictionary.
I
don't mean to say, in all my McElvaine bashing, that there's nothing
to "womb envy." The fear and envy of women are real, I believe,
and based on reality, not modern myths. Women have the power, not
only to bring forth children, the most astonishing and worthwhile
talent there is in a world where we all die (and creative, come
to think of it), but they shape the children in a way fathers can
only do with extraordinary care and investment of time. At any given
time, they really do hold the future of the world in their hands,
despite the patronizing males who spring up in every generation.
And, they are tough in some areas where men are jelly. (And they
are often deeply good in areas where few men score any points at
all.) I think Camille Paglia has some very interesting things to
say on why men fear women, and on the relations between the sexes.
If you want deep, chthonic stuff about where male fear comes from,
try Paglia. It’s better written, too.
McElvaine
has other serious points besides explaining why men are jealous.
At one point he says,"Women can do all the important things
men can, but there are some essential things that women can do that
men cannot: bear and give birth to children and nourish them from
their bodies." Pardon me, but doesn’t that first phrase beg
the question? What are "all the important things men can do"?
Maybe he never saw a big, international-level mixed doubles tennis
match. Seriously, maybe he’s forgetting the fact that physical strength
made an undeniable difference in your chance of survival in battle
until very recently, and still does, for all we know–there’s never
been any test of the hypothesis that a group of women could carry
off a modern battle. Perhaps McElvaine never read Michael Levin’s
Feminism
and Freedom, or Goldberg’s The
Inevitability of Patriarchy. String me up: just as I really
think women, on average, do some things much better than most men
(and not just having babies), so I actually believe that men, on
average, do some things better than most women. Now, I have recently
developed more appreciation than I used to have for the argument
that war is an ugly and destructive occupation–I’m more or less
with the feminists on that point. But if my country actually has
to be defended, I’d rather have men on the front lines doing it.
And I suspect that all the stories of risk-taking male entrepreneurs
and daring male traders are not lies cooked up by the patriarchy.
I’ve nothing against women proving themselves in any field of endeavor
whatsoever, but the assertion that "women can do all the important
things men can" is an unqualified and meaningless (but very
politically correct) assertion.
At
one point McElvaine casually mentions Thomas Aquinas, as a kind
of throw-away icon of male prejudice. He doesn’t even provide an
out-of-context quotation, just tosses in his name. That’s interesting
to me. I’m not a great Aquinas scholar, and I don't know the quotes
that enrage the feminists, but I know what Aquinas said to Muslims
about polygamy. He said the end (telos) of marriage is friendship,
but the condition of friendship is equality. However, the possibility
of taking other wives, Aquinas told Muslims, destroys the possibility
of equality in marriage, thereby keeping marriage from achieving
its end, friendship. (Summa Contra Gentiles III, 123 and 124) Funny,
he doesn't sound like the Taliban monster he's supposed to be.
In
another sour note for me, McElvaine appears to take Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale as a serious warning for America. The premise
of Atwood's paranoid parable has always struck me as so bizarre
that it makes an excellent litmus test for lunacy – anyone who takes
it the least bit seriously has a tenuous connection with reality,
at best. I once looked around at a group of "Promise Keeper"
friends of mine and thought of Atwood's parable. I had seen these
monstrous males with their wives–being gently corrected, being teased,
asking permission, seeking favor, having their very lives organized.
The idea that this was the germ of an American Taliban movement
was beyond hilarious exaggeration, it beggared belief.
Speaking
of the Taliban, the proximate cause of McElvaine’s piece, a friend
just told me he read a book about the Taliban, and learned that
the Taliban themselves said it was not that they did not want to
educate women, but that it was not their priority, and they were
afraid of foreigners corrupting women. They said they would get
to it when they had time. It’s a small thing, and it doesn't make
me a Taliban fan by any means, but it did make me ashamed that I
had taken at least part of my view of the Taliban from CNN. Aarrggh!
That’s sort of like getting any part of your view of Yasir Arafat
from Ariel Sharon. Or, perhaps, your view of anything important
from the Washington Post, which apparently takes seriously half-baked
myths from a History professor who states as fact that women invented
agriculture and that "woman" in Hebrew means "out
of man."
December
26, 2001
Craig
White [send him mail]
has been a foreign service officer with the US State Department
for the last ten years, where he attempts to speak up for limited
government, limited intervention in the affairs of other countries,
and the primacy of diplomacy over war.
Copyright
© 2001 LewRockwell.com
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