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The Sisterhood is Powerful

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The Sisterhood is Powerful article

Back in the 1980s, feminists had the slogan, “the sisterhood is powerful”.  This seemed to be a good idea and was used in the Greenham Common Campaign, when women surrounded the Greenham Common military base in Britain to prevent it using cruise missiles. 

Yet women were not able to make the idea of sisterhood work in their normal lives and the whole idea gradually faded away.  So why not?  Perhaps the reason is that the whole patriarchal system has been designed to break up the sisterhood.

Sisterhood works very well for the bonobo ape.  The general public generally knows that the closed related species to humans is the chimpanzee.  But fewer people know that another ape, the bonobo is also as closely related to us.  What is interesting in both species, is that the chimpanzee is a male dominated and the bonobo is female dominated.  It seems the bonobo females dominate the males through sisterhood. 

Like in humans and chimpanzees the male bonobos are larger than the females.  Yet if a male attempts to use his larger size to bully or intimidate a female, every female bonobo within hearing range will rush to her defence and drive the male away. 

This is in total contrast to chimpanzees, where if a larger male, bullies or beats up a female she is totally on her own and no other female will dare intervene.  So for this reason it is easy for male chimpanzees to dominate females but with bonobos the females have countered this through a powerful sisterhood.

So could this work for humans?  It could, but a mentioned before the patriarchal society has been designed to undermine the sisterhood through marriage and taboos on sexual behaviour.

In most animals species, they only have sex when the female is in season, but this is not true with bonobos, chimps, dolphins, humans and some species of monkey.  Bonobos seem to have sex all the time because they use it to defuse tension.  It seems that when bonobos have a dispute they ease the tension by having sex together.  This includes not only sex between male and female but same sex as well.  It seems all bonobos are bi-sexual. This is why bonobos are called the, make love not war ape.

So it is patriarchal customs that prevent this.  Most patriarchal societies advocate marriage which means all females are encouraged to marry a man.  So like with the chimpanzees in that relationship in any dispute the man has the advantage of his greater size and strength to get his own way.  And as we live in separate houses the woman cannot call on the help of her sisters if the man was to use violence and intimidation.

In recent years many of the strict taboos about marriage have eased and this has helped women.  In the past if a woman was married to an abusive man it was very difficult for her to get out of the marriage.  But now with easy divorce and not a social stigma if a couple doesn’t get married, it means that it is a lot easier for women to leave abusive men.

All patriarchal societies also have taboos about sexuality.  They do not encourage women to have sex outside of marriage, and also up until recently all homosexuality was made a criminal offense.

So what would happen if we were to follow the bonobo example and have a far more liberal attitude towards sex?   This was tried out in the 1960s in the hippy movement with their love-ins and sex was freely available.  Unfortunately, they were also liberal with drugs and it was drug taking that destroyed the hippy movement because most hippies ended up as drug addicts.

One of the ideas that come from the hippies and later the New-Age movement was the idea of living in communes.  What seems to happen was the in time the men argued among themselves and left the communes and it end up with female only communes. 

So perhaps if women could live in communes and be bi-sexual then they can come together in a powerful sisterhood.

What makes Men Evil

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Why are men Evil?

There is a case for claiming that most of the evil of the world comes from men.  After all it is men who mostly fight wars, commit genocide as well as rape and murder.  It is true that individual women also do all these things, but for women it is unusual, whereas for men it is commonplace.  

According to a study done by the Stockholm University, the difference in domestic violence between men and women is about 9 to 1.  Nine men commit violence on women compared to just one violent woman.  But the figures will be higher when talking about genocide and war.  You can name a few women who fought in wars but nothing compared with the millions of men who killed other people in combat and genocide.  The same is true for serial killers.

So why is there such a big difference in the sexes?  To understand this, we have to look to nature.

When we study animals similar to humans, what we find is that male animals fight and compete with each other for dominance and access to females.  In contrast to females who rarely fight each other and devote their time in caring for their off-spring.

So we see that male animals are focused on aggression, competition and fighting.  Whereas, female animals are more focused on loving, caring and nurturing their young and the same is also true for human beings. 

As children, boys like to play with toy guns while girls like to play with dolls.  Feminist mothers have tried to challenge these stereotypes claiming it was caused by culture conditioning.  But their attempts to change this in their children have failed.  In spite of the efforts of feminist mothers they found that boys still like fighting and competing against each other, as well as enjoying violent films and video games.  Whereas, girls still like to play with dolls and love cute animals.

So if that is the case, will we always live in a world of war and violence?  It would be true if the world continues to be ruled by men.  Unlike, most other animals who are dominated by their instincts, we can choose to change our world if we want to.

In sociology there is a big debate on people’s behaviour about how much does culture conditioning, influence our behaviour.  As it is very clear that we are all very strongly influenced by the culture we live in, but this is not the full story.  We are also strongly influence by our basic instincts.  So in the nature V nurture debate, both positions are true.

Yes, it is true that men’s basic instincts drive them to be aggressive, competitive and even violent, but the degree men are like this, is dictated by culture conditioning.  The military discovered this thousands of years ago.

In spite of what people might read about military history, it is not natural for men to want to kill other people.  This has caused a big problem for any military commander because soldiers who are adverse to killing other people, are useless in battle.  There has been many cases in military history where small armies of men have defeated armies that were far larger

The reason for this is that a small army of psychopaths who are so brutalised they can kill without any qualms.  Will easy defeat a far larger army of ordinary men who do not wish to harm or kill another human being.  This is why; soldiers have to be conditioned or trained to be killers.  The trouble with this is that solders conditioned to be like this will not only kill other solders but can go on to kill women and children.

In the past military leaders trained their solders to kill, by brutalising them and teaching them to hate.  New recruits were subjected to physical violence and then later encouraged to do the same to other men.  They were also taught to hate the enemy they were fighting.  In other words, the military had to train men to hate and kill before they could become effective soldiers.

Nowadays, this conditioning has become more sophisticated by the use of behaviourist psychology where killing becomes an automatic response for solders.  The problem is that these soldiers don’t stay in the military and come back into civilian life, get married, bring up children.  So they end up influencing their families and society as a whole, with what the military has taught them. 

Another thing that happens to solders who have fought in wars is they become so traumatized by the experience that more solders who have been involved in the horrors of war commit suicide afterwards, than die in the conflict.

This then explains the big difference in violence between the USA and Canada.  Both countries are similar in their culture but the levels of violence in the USA are far greater. According to the Washington Post, there is: 1 death for every 28,000 people in the United States vs. 1 death for every 215,000 people in Canada.  That is about a 1 in 7 difference.

So why is there a big difference between the two countries?  The answer could be that the USA has a far larger military and use far more solders to fight in wars, than Canada.  The result is that the USA has far more men trained to kill and are traumatised by war.  Poverty is also higher in the USA and this also increases crime and violence.  So it is not surprising that the levels of violence in the USA are very high.

It has been claimed that one of the most evil group of men in the 20th century were the Nazi party in Germany, but few people ask why they were like this.  If we look at the life of their leader Adolf Hitler, we find as a boy he was beaten frequently by his step-father, who hated him.  Then as a young man he served in the trenches of the First World War which some historians have claimed was the worse war men have experienced.  As a soldier Hitler was treated for shell-shock or what we now call, posttraumatic stress disorder.

Some people claimed that Adolf Hitler was mentally ill, and looking at his early life, this is not surprising. Clearly his early experiences had taught him how to deeply hate other people.  This wasn’t a big issue while he was only a common soldier but became a disaster when he ended up as leader of a powerful nation.

Nearly all the leaders of the Nazi party fought in the First World War and were trained to kill and were traumatised by this.  They also experienced the humiliating, Treaty of Versailles (1919) which condemned the German people to widespread poverty.  The purpose of this Treaty was to punish the German people for starting the war.  But not Germany’s leader, Kaiser Wilhelm II, who was the dictator who led the German people into the war.

The Nazis who wanted revenge on the people whom they thought wreaked their country.  They started off blaming the Jews but not the Kaiser.  Then they went on to have vengeance on the countries that defeated them in World War One, which caused the Second World War.  This showed that having ex-military men rule a country was a really bad idea.

We didn’t get a popular Nazi party in Germany after the World War Two because the Western countries became frightened of the Soviet Union.  So they built up German industry because they wanted the German people on their side against the Communist threat.  So in the end of this war the allies unwittingly got it right, and punished the leaders and not the people for starting this war.  The result has been that since then Germany has been a peaceful and prosperous democratic country that has never threatened any other country with war.

So it is clear from this, is how cruel and brutal men became, has a lot to do with how they are treated by other men.  Warfare and poverty clearly brutalises men and brings out the worst side of them.  Then brutalised men go on to do the same to other men including their own sons, creating a vicious cycle of hate and violence.

Yet this happens far less with women.  Over the years women have been treated far worse than men by the patriarchal system.  Yet, few brutalised women become killers. Neither have they formed themselves into Amazon armies and fought back against their oppressors.  Or have tried to conquer the world, which armies of men have tried to do.  Instead women are more likely to try to civilize men and teach them how to love and care for others.

Many male dominated cultures have seen women’s attempt to teach boys and men how to love as a threat and discouraged men from mixing with women.  Telling men they will become ‘soft’ and ‘weak’ if they listen to women. 

So if we want to live in a peaceful and caring world then the answer is obvious and that is to allow women to rule our world.  This is because women have far less interest in violence and warfare than men.  Women will be more strongly influenced by their maternal and nurturing instinct to not only rule a peaceful world but also a world without poverty.

So a world ruled by women will not only benefit women but men as well, as they will bring out the better side of men and not brutalise men as what happens in male dominated societies.

Women And Politics

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