Two centuries ago, we humans ourselves began to discuss why societies are so divided between men and women in terms of rank and function.Some particularly intrepid women have asked these kinds of questions before, like the Frenchman Christine de Pisan, who wrote La Cite des Dames, The City of Ladies, in 1405; but not until positivism and the gods The arrival of the final death will cause the populace of the Western world to scorn the immutability of the natural order and begin to question the cause of things on a large scale, and despite the objections of many men and women, this intellectual curiosity has to compulsorily include The many whys related to the nature of femininity: the nature of women is different, alienated, subjugated.

①Robert Graves (1895-1985): British poet, novelist, critic and scholar of opinion literature.One of his most controversial scholarly works is The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of the Myth of Poetry (1948).In it he argues that the existence of one of the most important religions originating in the distant past and continuing up to AD is based on the worship of a goddess - Annotation. ② Willendorf (Willendorf): located in Austria, where people found a Paleolithic Venus statue, 11 centimeters high, carved on limestone-annotation. There is actually no clear answer to those questions: how the hierarchy was established, when it happened, and whether it has always been the case.A number of theories have been put forward, none of which have been fully demonstrated, which refer to an earliest matriarchal stage in humans.Speaking of great almighty goddesses, like the white goddesses of the Mediterranean described by Robert Graves.Perhaps it was not a matriarchal stage, but simply a social equality between the sexes, with women and men having their own special territories.Women reproduce, and perhaps it is this amazing ability that makes women so powerful.From the prehistoric fertile Venus seen so far (such as Willendorf's Venus ②: fat, big belly, cute) to many later female images, those strong stone goddesses of the Neolithic Age, all involve that ability.

Engels argued that when humans ceased nomadic pastoralism and settled in farming villages, women's subordination arose simultaneously with private property and the family; men needed to secure some of their own sons and daughters, pass their property to them, and thus control women.My thinking is that maybe it's the female's ability to reproduce that scares the males, especially when they become farmers.In the nomadic and hunting life before this, the values ​​​​of the two sexes were clearly distinguished: females reproduce, breastfeed, and raise; males hunt, protect.These basic functions are interchangeable in their value.But what special things do men do later in life in agriculture?Women can tend the land as well as men, and perhaps even better from a magical point of view, for fertility is their kingdom, their domain.They presumably see women as too powerful, which is indeed reasonable.Perhaps men's desire to control stems from this fear (and their superiority in physical strength).

That suspicion of femininity is already evident in the early myths of human civilization, in creation stories, which on the one hand try to limit women to a submissive role, but at the same time endow women with a harmfulness that goes far beyond our subordinate status. ability.Eve hurt Adam and all mankind because of the temptation of the snake; according to Greek mythology, Pandora, the first woman created by Zeus to punish mankind, did the same thing: God gave Pandora a box full of disasters, and she Driven by irrepressible female curiosity it was opened, and all disaster was unleashed.Both of these main stories present women as effeminate, flippant, and irrational.On the other hand, curiosity is an essential element of wisdom, and in these myths it is the woman who has the courage to ask herself what is out there, the desire to discover what is hidden.In addition, the disasters that Eve and Pandora brought to the world are death, disease, and time, which constitute the essence of human beings. Therefore, myths and legends have endowed them with a grand role that people like and hate—as human beings. creator of .

The story of Night Demon is even more magical.Jewish tradition holds that Eve was not Adam's first woman, and that the night demon existed before Eve.The night-ghost wants to be equal to men: for example, when she is forced to make love to Adam under his body, she is outraged, a position she finds insulting, and demands the same rights as men.Adam used his greater physical strength to try to force her to obey, but the Night Demon abandoned him.Ye Yao was the first feminist in the universe, but her gentle request was naturally unacceptable to the patriarchal god of that era. He turned Night Yao into an infanticide witch and sentenced her to suffer a hundred deaths a day. the suffering of her children, this terrible punishment symbolizes the power of men over women.For perhaps lurking in the myth of the night-ghost are forgotten memories of the possible transition from an ancient, non-sexist world (where women were as strong and independent as men) to a new order of men established later.

In short, in fact, whether in the East or the West, North or South, women have been regarded as second-class citizens for thousands of years.Sex-based infanticide (female infants killed after birth as a burden, as opposed to coveted boys) has been a common practice throughout human history, whether Romans or Chinese or Egyptians. This is a very widespread and common practice that is performed almost openly even today in many so-called third world countries.This reflects the humble value assigned to women, who come into this world with the fundamental misfortune of being undesired. Since human beings today are still the product of the improvement and evolutionary thinking of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, people tend to think that the society they live in today is generally better than the society of the past and worse than the society of tomorrow, as if things will change with time. The passage is irresistibly handled well.On the other hand, this false view is so obvious that it is not worth arguing.Thus in the case of women it has become customary to think that equality has been gradually attained to its present height.This is not entirely true.Because the situation for women in the West today, while seemingly better than ever, has not been a linear journey: there have been moments of greater freedom for women, followed by times of reaction, sometimes of repression to lurid proportions, For example, the capture and punishment of witches in the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries may have been a response to the boiling of humanism and liberalism in the Renaissance.Thousands of people have been executed in Germany, Italy, England, and France, and 85 percent of those burned alive for witchcraft were women of all ages, including girls.In some villages in Germany 600 people were executed every year.In Toulouse, four hundred women were sent to the fire in one day alone.Some writers put the death toll in the millions.Sentences for burning witches were sometimes haphazard (they were associated with the devil and drank the blood of children), but also for their sins of giving other women contraceptive pills, abortions, or administering drugs to ease the pain of childbirth.That is to say, they were burned at the stake precisely because they displayed a control over their own lives, possessed forbidden medical knowledge (which women could not learn), and possessed a certain degree of independence.