Do you believe that religion is the historical root of misogyny? [View all]

[Zorra]

And is this historical root of misogyny also the root of homophobia/transphobia?

If not, what other primary plausible historical reasons are responsible for the prevalence of misogyny throughout the ages?

I found this article posted below to be interesting and the premise to be valid, and am looking for more good reference material on ideas concerning the historical roots of misogyny, and would appreciate it if anyone could post this type of material if they know of some offhand.

Thanks.

Misogyny and Homophobia

There was and continues to be a profound connection between misogyny and homophobia in our culture. Misogyny is defined as a fear and hatred of women. It manifests itself psychologically in the repression of everything in the psyche that is tradition- ally connected with the feminine. Among other things, this includes all emotions, feelings of compassion, all spiritual feelings, all dependency, and all need of community. In the future I would prefer to refer to misogyny with the word “feminaphobia.”

Over sixty years ago, G. Rattrey Taylor in his classic book Sex in History (New York: Vanguard Press 1954, Chap. 4, pp.72ff.) attempted to expose some of the culturally conditioned attitudes on sexuality. He found a universal phenomenon in cultures based on a patriarchal principle. These cultures with few exceptions tend to combine a strongly subordinationist view of women with a repression and horror of male homosexual practices. The institution in today’s culture which continues to hold on to the clearest expression of that form of patriarchy, including its homophobia, is the Roman Catholic Church.

In contrast, those cultures based on a matriarchal principle are inclined to combine an enhancement of the status of women with a relative tolerance for male homosexual practices. Taylor concludes that the tradition of the Christian West has been fundamentally based on patriarchal culture. This may help to explain certain striking anomalies from an ethical viewpoint in that tradition.

One of the most remarkable of these anomalies is the almost complete disregard of lesbianism in western Christian tradition. Although the Holiness code in the Old Testament, for example, explicitly condemns under penalty of death male homosexual practices and female bestiality, no mention is made of female lesbian practices. (This should not be surprising when we recall that King David had reputedly a harem of nearly a thousand women.) Apart from a disputed reference to unnatural female acts by Paul in Romans 1:26, there is no other reference to female lesbian activity in Scripture and scarcely any at all in all the other documents of Christian tradition.