DISCRIMINATING AGAINST FEMALES IS UNSAFE FOR CIVILIZATION:
Why did Athenian direct democracy fail? A case can be made that it did, because Athens was too sexist.
Some will raise their eyebrows, as I accused Aristotle to have fostered monarchism and plutocracy, by teaching directly the plutocrats who extinguished Greek democracy (for 22 centuries!) Thus, Aristotle destroyed democracy.
However, in the history I narrated, Sparta, urged by the (Athenian philosopher) Demosthenes and his friends, went to war against Macedonia’s Antipater, and his army of mercenaries. And Sparta nearly won. Athens sat on her hands (Athens went to war later, way too late, after Sparta had been completely defeated).
Why did Athens not support Sparta in a timely manner against Aristotle’s Executor (that’s Antipater)? It may have had to do with sexism.
[The Pythia was a woman; the sanctuary started with the worship of Gaia. Ethylene vapors helped.]
Sparta was a fascist system, but, in some ways, it was way more advanced than Athens, or all other Greek cities. In particular, Sparta was a very anti-sexist society: girls were trained like boys, in the nude, for the toughest physical activities. They had lots of freedom, in many ways.
The enmity between Athens and Sparta may have been born from the former being sexist, and the other, just the opposite. The crowd of thinkers around Socrates, which was very attracted to Sparta’s charms, may have been so, because of this trait precisely: see below.
In any case, Athenian society suffered from an excess of aggressivity at the start of the Peloponnesian war, and more caution from a feminine input may have done the difference (Athens’ annihilation of Melos, and attack against Syracuse, after throwing Alcibiades in Sparta’s arms are example of ill conceived aggression which voting mothers in the Assembly would have certainly voted down).
A sexist society is at a disadvantage: not only are the women forced to be moronic, but they can only teach their children moronically, being morons themselves.
Maybe that’s why the Middle East, thanks to the sexist interpretation of the Qur’an has been so stupid, for so long, overall. Sexism does not just oppress women, it oppresses boys: it makes them less intellectually performing than if their mothers were fully endowed. In any case, it clearly does not help. (The same argument can be extended in favor of direct democracy: in a direct democracy people vote directly on laws and decisions, as they did in Athens; so they are motivated to become more intelligent, creating a virtuous spiral up of ever greater smarts, as evidenced in Switzerland.)
Giant corporations imposing the notion that female nipples are unsafe, are not just moronic, but are themselves, considering their enormous clout and power, unsafe for civilization (be it only because they foster stupidity).
Why we need sexual equality to be institutionally imposed has to do, ultimately, with brains. Yes, female brains may be different in some genetic ways, from males ones (because, maybe, of different neurohormones, sometimes). And it’s true that, overall, female mental performance in the last 3,000 years, has come short.
The latter situation is entirely due to sexism, the poor man’s plutocratic impulse. Up to around 1850, even in the USA and Britain, a woman who married entered what was called “civil death”.
The general abuse women were submitted to is in striking contrast with the long recognized fact that top female brains have been as capable as males ones: this is evidenced by the many leaders, who, even millennia ago, were women. The Magna Mater, Great Mother, Cybele Cult, which reigned over Middle Earth for millennia had God as a woman (the Virgin Mary of the Christians is a pale echo of that).
Carthage was founded by a queen, Dido, nearly 29 centuries ago. Even earlier, there had been famous, important, female pharaohs. When the Frankish empire became Western civilization, in the Sixth Century, replacing the decaying Roman State, there were no less than seven reigning queens in a century (I counted them). The last Frankish Queen, Bathilda, is the world’s first monarch on record, who had slavery outlawed. (That’s how slavery disappeared from Europe.)
Even Plato had recognized that females were the intellectual equivalent of men. And he may even have implicitly stated that they were superior: Plato adulated Socrates. And yet.
It is striking that all teachers of Socrates are women. And some are listened to religiously. By everybody. Pythia, the oracle at Delphi, was a towering figure of Ancient Greece: “Know Thyself and nothing in excess” was her motto. Delphi’s Oracle was actually an institution of wisdom managed by women over centuries. Delphic puzzling wisdom taught Socrates what came to be known later as the Socratic method. Socrates claims that the Pythia launched him on his quest for wisdom.
Asphasia of Miletus was Socrate’s teacher of rhetoric. She was a top philosopher (and became Pericles’ second wife, after he divorced, and married away his first one!)
In Plato’s symposium, Socrates says: “.the philosophy of love I learned from Diotima of Mantinea. [she] was my instructress in the art of love, and I shall repeat to you what she said to me..”
The Pythia invented the Socratic method, and Diotema Platonic love.
For the longest time, we were told women could not do science, or mathematics. However Emilie du Chatelet discovered ENERGY, and distinguished it from momentum.
Newton had confused momentum and energy; discovering energy makes Emilie more important than her boyfriend Voltaire. and a more original, and important, thinker than Einstein.
Energy is the core concept of contemporary physics. No less.
In the Twentieth Century, Emmy Noether was a towering mathematician.
There is a problem with women, though: Emilie du Chatelet went one boyfriend too far, and died from the birth of her fourth child, at age 42 (and, slowed down by three children, she had blossomed late as an intellectual; she was a global thinker). Emmy Noether died of an ovarian cyst at only 53.
The fragility of women’s health was greatly due to childbirth. In the European Middle Ages, the average child bearing woman would survive only ten years to the birth of her first child (who would die soon, too!) Now this is history, thanks to higher technology.
In prehistoric tribes, women collaborated intellectually as much as men. A civilization which can make female brains all that they can be, is a civilization with twice more brains. And intelligent children (as women are in the closest contact, and educate them for the first few years). Sexist societies are in contradiction with basic human ethology (the normal behavior of humans, their default state, what they are made to operate optimally in).
The easiest way to a superior civilization, is to let women become as brainy as men are allowed to be.
There are encouraging signs, such as more women registered now in universities of the USA than there are men.
Yet. How can we preach against sexual discrimination while discriminating against female skin?
Patrice Ayme
