General Discussion
In reply to the discussion: Where have societies' views of women come from? [View all]Gravitycollapse
(8,155 posts)Western society seems to have taken a rather wrong turn around 300 years ago, at the start of the Victorian era.
With the proliferation of the religious confessional, so too came the obsession with applying the confessional to our every day lives. This, in turn, began a complex process by which we converted human sexual practice into sexual rhetoric. The consequence of this was the creation of normative sexuality, normative bodies and abject bodies. Men and the phallocentric model of medicalized sexuality placed the female body wholly in the category of abject. Vaginas were viewed as sources of weakness and hysteria.
On top of this religious absurdity came the advent of capitalism. Heteronormative sexuality was incentivized as economically and socially efficient. It provided for the necessary workforce to maintain production of means for ends. Through this, the female body necessarily became a conduit for production of human capital, and eventually capital in all form. Women lost their agency because their reproductive capacity became an essential element of the capitalist machine.
All of these mechanisms continually constructed an ideology around the debasement of women and the building up of men as leaders of industry, intelligence and morality. Women were merely abject, stupid, insane, baby factories; incapable of possessing identity without it first being filtered through the male.
And the cycle continues.