The Patriarchy Was Deliberately Created

In advance of a new Substack newsletter, The Patriarchy and the Manosphere, a brief article and some announcements.

The Goddess Asherah feeding goats. The Louvre. Wikimedia Commons.

NOTE: The new Substack—The Patriarchy and the Manosphere—will publish this weekend. Virtually all of its articles will be for paid subscribers only. There’ll be some very cool articles for you to pass along to your friends—many of them actually. But P&M will be a largely paid newsletter to prevent creeps coming on the site for free and harassing the living bejesus out of you and me!

Also, as any of you who are constantly writing know, some income is necessary to pay the rent and keep ourselves stocked with Vitamin D3 and coffee. So I need your help in that regard.

BIG NOTE:

• If you are already a paid subscriber to PolitiSage now or before the end of the month, you automatically have an ongoing paid subscription to The Patriarchy and the Manosphere. You will start getting articles from P&M at your regular email in the next day or two.

• Same if you upgrade to paid now from a PolitiSage free subscription.And it’ll stay that way. You’ll have a paid subscription to both with one subscription, which, for you, will be paid through PolitiSage as long as you want to keep your PolitiSage subscription.

• Beginning February 1st, paid subscriptions to P&M will happen only on its Substack page and cover only a subscription there. So, opting into a paid PolitiSage subscription gets two-for-one access if you do it in the next week.

So here’s the subscribe button! Remember, if you’re already a PolitiSage paid subscriber, don’t do it again! You’re already covered.

---

Now to have some fun …

If you don’t know that bare-breasted lassie in the image above, that’s the Goddess Asherah. She was initially the wife of the Canaanite god El, and then, when El’s influence waned, she became the wife of Yahweh. …

But then, the biblical writer known as “J” engineered an attack on Asherah on the hope that he could create a male-dominant monotheistic religion that excluded not just this goddess of life but all female divinities—and get those pesky women under control.

“J” first appropriated Asherah’s divine symbols—the garden of life, the tree of life, and the serpent that carried the energies of the heaven above and the heaven below to humanity. “J” also wanted to appropriate the functions of this goddess, so he made the male Yahweh the creator of all life (that’s a feminine-energy function, folks) and the creator of the garden (long the province of goddesses).

He then made Eve, which he took from a MALE’s rib (yeah, they give birth all the time!) and blamed Eve for all sin. “J” then took the sacred serpent—which appears on our medical symbol in its original function!—and made it the agent of evil. He made eating from the goddess Asherah’s sacred tree a crime, and he damned the seeking of knowledge. Much, much more on this later.

First we want to look at how patriarchy was created by reviewing the grandmother of all herstorical studies, the seminal book by Gerda Lerner. This is from the Publisher’s Preface I have just written for Paul Zolbrod’s brilliant new book Paradise Revisited: Lines from John Milton’s Paradise Lost and the Navajo Creation Story. Navajo culture is matriarchal / egalitarian and John Milton’s classic explores the most dangerous myth for women ever written. Here then, some notes on Gerda Lerner’s brilliant study. To access pre-publication copies of Paul’s book, please go to www.PleiadesBooks.com

---

The Creation of Patriarchy, Vol. I by Gerda Lerner

_{© 2024 Morgaan Rhys-Davies Sinclair, Ph.D. All Rights. Reserved}

The most dangerous part of any form of human oppression is that it can make people believe that there are no alternatives. We see this in the old fallacies of race, caste, and class. The question for any theory of male domination is why this one form of inequality should be treated as the exception.

– Angela Saini, The Patriarchs

In 1987, Oxford University Press published historian Gerda Lerner’s 387-page The Creation of Patriarchy. This is the book that would begin to answer the questions early feminists had asked: Why have we had no freedom and no power? Has it always been this way? Who is responsible?

Lerner’s spectacular research revealed that The Patriarchy did not, as popularly supposed, always exist. In fact, The Patriarchy has existed for no more than 5,000 years and was preceded by a period of equalitarian balance between man and woman, and god and goddess, that lasted 300,000 years.

Some have postulated that in prehistory there was a Matriarchy that was the mirror-image of the oppressive religio-political machine created by the patriarchal rulers and religious figures. This is not true. The opposite of patriarchy is not male oppression by females: it is equality.

Also, the coming of The Patriarchy, Lerner wrote, was not the result of women’s alleged biological inferiority and closeness to nature—or by their alleged subpar intelligence—or by their alleged congenital moral depravity. Patriarchy was also not an inevitable side effect of settled agriculture or the invention of the plough, as analyses of the artifacts of Çatalhöyük proved.

Rather, The Patriarchy was crafted, intentionally and consciously, beginning in Late Neolithic tribal cultures in the ancient Near East, and it hinged on incest taboo. Whatever we now think this term means, what it originally meant was this:

The prohibition of incest is less a rule prohibiting marriage with the mother, sister or daughter, than a rule obliging the mother, sister, or daughter to be given to others. It is the supreme rule of the gift.

– Claude Lévy-Strauss, The Elementary Structures of Kinship

Relying on incest taboos that disqualified women from mating with close relations, men began to trade women to unrelated tribes as wives to prevent warfare by intermarriage, as assets to pay debts incurred by males, or as chattel to be used as slaves. In return, men received women over whom they could exercise complete control. Women were the first traded commodity and the first slaves, and their subjugation would become the model upon which all subsequent forms of slavery were fashioned.

Lerner established that The Patriarchy was not born overnight but gained ground and influence slowly, coming to flower in Mesopotamia 2,500 years after its first buds appeared. By the time the Code of Hammurabi was written, a woman’s sexuality and powers of reproduction were the personal property of the men in her family. Rulers in political states stressed high birth rates to fund their wealth. Lords granted men control of the women in their families as an exchange for their loyalty, for ultimately, that control was the lord’s to give, not the man’s to take.

In the decades since Lerner’s brave book, further research in archaeology, anthropology, religious studies and mythology have refined some of Lerner’s initial observations, yet her book remains the standard against which all others are evaluated.

---

The Patriarchy and the Manosphere: a new Substack Newsletter

for Conscious Women and Men

---

A few years ago, the McCain Foundation asked a simple, truly devastating question:

Is all present-day terrorism rooted in an attempt by men to regain the control of women lost in the social movements that spread freedom to women worldwide since the coming of the Modern Age in 1895?

Answer: almost certainly.

Then the McCain Foundation went on to detail the Manosphere—a dark outgrowth of a once-beautiful Men’s Movement that had several extremely noble purposes: (1) to reconnect men with nature, (2) to humanize men about the natural rights of women, (3) to support men in being actively engaged in raising their children, and (4) to address some of the inequalities men experienced, largely as a ricochet result of the disenfranchisement of women.

After 9/11—and probably related to it—there was a seismic shift in the orientation of these groups. First, they went militant—armed to the teeth.

Then, there set in a backlash against women. Now women were blamed for “taking men’s jobs” and refusing to date men who made less money than they did. The Great Whine began that “Chad” men—tall and handsome—got 80% of the women and the remaining men got nothing, become “InCels”—involuntary celibates. The Pick-Up Artist now came into being, not that he did not always exist in some form. But these guys are different: they groom themselves and walk and talk and manipulate to get laid, and they hate women. Andrew Tate, the worst of these (at present) has 6.7 million followers and a net worth over $12 million, most of it from selling pick-up courses on the dark web. However, he and bro Tristan owe the British government $22 million in back taxes, and both are still under house arrest in Romania as the on-and-off rape and trafficking charges against them keep not making it to court.

Joining the very dangerous InCels who think that women owe them sex and that rape should be legal — and the Pick-Up Artists who preach that women are trash, only good for sex and maid service, yet demand that their future wives be pure as the driven snow — are the “Men’s Rights Activists” whose proposed solutions to their problems are largely that women be stripped of abortion and driving rights, have their rights to private financial instruments removed, have their voting rights annulled, and be shut out of educational and working opportunities. Preaching all over Facebook reels are guys telling women they need to marry young, skip college, obey their husbands, breed like rabbits, and feel satisfied by fiat.

But we’re not through yet: Enter religion: This is where you get Harrison Butker preaching that a woman’s place is in the home, not in the public sphere. This is where you get J.D. Vance Trad-wifing his brilliant spouse Usha—Stanford law graduate and former clerk to Justice Brett Kavanaugh and Chief Justice John Roberts—immediately upon his being chosen Trump’s VP candidate. And now you get this from incredibly vicious men on Facebook Reels demanding that women not have jobs and coupling it with “I’m your Daddy, obey me” demands because he pays the bills while she does $130,000 (current value) worth of household maintenance and year for free while she’s accused of freeloading.

In the final weeks of Trump’s campaign, he and Vance DOG-WHISTLED the Manosphere—telling men to get out and vote. They did, by the millions.

Trump also promised to free the January 6 insurrectionists, and he did.

Now the MRAs, which constituted three of the five major nexuses of the January 6th Insurrection, are stomping down the streets in Proud Boys kilts and ominous black Oath Keepers garb. I got one in an aisle of Safeway today, and he was reeking rage.

Yesterday, in deference to the Manosphere, the MRAs and Radical Right Christianity, the godless Trump and the Catholic-convert-woman-abuser J.D. Vance addressed an anti-abortion rally to show their support.

The important thing now is to stay abreast of what is going on as possible, and providing that information—and the historical background that lets women know it has NOT always beent his way and it doesn’t have to be this way for our daughters and granddaughters—is the purpose of this new Substack.

Here’s another handy subscribe button:

---

And here are some things to read from the PolitiSage archives. They’ll help. They really will.

---

---

---

---