Redressing the Balance: The Feminine Principle
in Human Society
Not long ago, a BBC headlines stated: “UN peacekeepers failed DR Congo rape victims “. According to UN statistics, 8300 rapes were reported in the Congo in 2009 and the UN believes that many, many more went unreported. Those specific mass rapes of women and female children were mainly carried out by Congolese and Rwandan rebels. A few days ago we read that lesbian women in South Africa being subjected to systematic rape. When I worked for a very brief period in Uganda, stories about rape and mutilations of women and female children described a normal practice of the LRA. The practice of rape is neither new nor confined to Africa. Far from it. The practice of rape - and forced submission via rape - is as old as war and suppression itself. It has been, and still is, happening right now all over the world. Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Serbia, Bosnia, Iraq, Afghanistan ... are just a few other countries which come to my mind.
But we don’t need to look to extreme scenarios such as war to see the horrendous treatment women are regularly subjected to. Another story that made the headlines lately was that of an Iranian woman, accused of adultery and sentenced to dead by stoning, after having received many lashes. Women in India are still pushed into the fire, albeit it is outlawed; China’s one child policy led to a male overpopulation as female foetuses were aborted; girls being abducted and forced into marriages is not a rare occurrence in certain countries; female genital mutilation is still rife in many parts of Africa, and European men regularly use very young female sex workers that have been trafficked into Europe from all over the world and travel to certain countries to buy sex with under aged girls, forced into prostitution by poverty, coercion and brutality. The list of such atrocities could be endless; there are innumerable well-authenticated stories, so the facts are known, and yet very little seems to change.
Whatever the economic, political and religious reasons – and make no mistake our religions, from Judaism to Christianity and Islam have contributed massively to this development - it is important to understand that the way ‘half of humanity’ is regarded and treated is an indicator of the low worth placed on the feminine within human societies. The implications of this are at the best destructive and at the worst threaten our very existence. Human kind – or better MANKIND - has lost the most basic, natural understanding that the feminine, as a principle, is as important as the masculine to create a sustainable whole. The live giving, life preserving, the nurturing, the emotional, the compassionate, the sharing, the deep, the yin has been systematically neglected, belittled, bashed, humiliated, mutilated, tortured, hunted and killed by the male principle that has taken over our thinking and behaving on every level in Society.
But we don’t need to look to extreme scenarios such as war to see the horrendous treatment women are regularly subjected to. Another story that made the headlines lately was that of an Iranian woman, accused of adultery and sentenced to dead by stoning, after having received many lashes. Women in India are still pushed into the fire, albeit it is outlawed; China’s one child policy led to a male overpopulation as female foetuses were aborted; girls being abducted and forced into marriages is not a rare occurrence in certain countries; female genital mutilation is still rife in many parts of Africa, and European men regularly use very young female sex workers that have been trafficked into Europe from all over the world and travel to certain countries to buy sex with under aged girls, forced into prostitution by poverty, coercion and brutality. The list of such atrocities could be endless; there are innumerable well-authenticated stories, so the facts are known, and yet very little seems to change.
Whatever the economic, political and religious reasons – and make no mistake our religions, from Judaism to Christianity and Islam have contributed massively to this development - it is important to understand that the way ‘half of humanity’ is regarded and treated is an indicator of the low worth placed on the feminine within human societies. The implications of this are at the best destructive and at the worst threaten our very existence. Human kind – or better MANKIND - has lost the most basic, natural understanding that the feminine, as a principle, is as important as the masculine to create a sustainable whole. The live giving, life preserving, the nurturing, the emotional, the compassionate, the sharing, the deep, the yin has been systematically neglected, belittled, bashed, humiliated, mutilated, tortured, hunted and killed by the male principle that has taken over our thinking and behaving on every level in Society.
