So to recap from yesterday: every change of civilisation, nationality, or whatever it is that we watch as separate episodes on the History Channel now, was actually military age men going to new places, killing or displacing the military age men already there, and being incorporated well or less well into the pre-existing society of women and children.
Men knew, in a warlike society, they were always going to be in danger of being displaced. They couldn't guarantee a woman's chastity by actually being around and sharing their resources all the time - by following the marriage contract, in short - because they couldn't guarantee they would win or survive their military encounters. So they told a bunch of folk stories about how awesome women who were raped and then killed themselves were, and how fucking dreadful women who wanted to fuck invaders were. It worked fantastically, as now we have this legacy of helpless guilt and weirdo sexuality on both sides of the gender split, but not fantastically enough to keep history from marching on.
Men being displaced by new men because of a failure to live up to the marriage contract didn't always work by the displacers winning a military encounter and the displaced dying or running away, though, and there are two interesting examples of this from Greek history or story-telling. The more famous and less convincing one is of the pre-Hellenic Lemnian women, who murdered all of the Lemnian men as they slept, in retaliation for being displaced by Thracian slave-girls. The women then managed to bear the next generation, and make their appearance on what would be an episode of something on the History Channel about the Myceneans, by fucking Jason and the Argonauts.
It's an interesting story, but just a story. Robert Graves* reckons that Lemnos was a gynocracy supported by an armed female religious class that visiting Myceneans - rather violent and male chauvinist - could only understand in terms of the men all having been murdered. What is rather more than just a story are the stories about the Epizephyrian Locrians, which I promised you yesterday but unfortunately you're not going to get today, as I have to go to work now. But I will say that in their case, the Locrian men broke the marriage contract not by being killed or defeated in battle, and not by rejecting their wives for slave girls, but by being rather too good at battle. It's a ripping yarn. Stay tuned.
* Who I adore but whose POV on the pre-classical and classical world was strongly influenced by hallucinogenic mushrooms.
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Am I seriously the first person to write about the Epizephyrian Locrian chicks on the Internet?. Mostra tutti i post
Visualizzazione post con etichetta Am I seriously the first person to write about the Epizephyrian Locrian chicks on the Internet?. Mostra tutti i post
giovedì, gennaio 08, 2009
mercoledì, gennaio 07, 2009
Womania
Conversation with my boss yesterday whilst waiting for printout of press release about the bankruptcy of yet another company I cover:
Me: Fuck, this printer stinks.
Boss: Stinks of what? Not like it's going to blow up?
Me: No, it stinks . . . (sniffs freshly printed sheet) . . . it stinks of printer, you know, except more than most printers do.
Boss: (shrugs) Just try not to breathe when you're printing things out.
Economic crashes make my olfaction more sensitive. I think it's an evolutionary survival mechanism women developed. Men developed a good one for icy sidewalks useful at present here in Scandinavia Sud where the Belges haven't yet figures out how to spread sand or clear pavement ice, which is to walk with a low centre of gravity, ie to lumber, ie to carry all your weight in your bum. That's why they don't slip around as much as women, who are top-heavy. Also women wear much stupider shoes.
Which brings me to the subject of today's, and probably tomorrow's post, which is women and their history. This past vacation in Aspromonte and Syracuse has been a hell of an eye-opener on two things, in a not absolutely unrelated way - the history of women, and the history of the Christian church. But women are by far more important, representing 54% or so of our race, so let's start there, in part in atonement for my rather sneery 'humanities' undergrad programme, which gave them/women's studies minimal airtime.
Actually let's start with the F-word, who I'd love even if he were a woman, but thank heaven he's not, because I don't understand how to bring women to orgasm. The F-word was on a Viking kick in December and for some reason this nudged him into seeing geographical and ethnical history from a women's perspective - a perspective he pointed out was much more continuous, much less choppy, and much more, shall we say, true than the typical Rise and Fall of the Babylonians Egyptians Greeks Romans Goths Celts Saxons Vikings Franks blah blah blah, which is how men have historically presented history, because, well, that sort of choppy, discontinuous minority perspective is an accurately male perspective of history.
Let's consider what generally happens, as the F-word spelled it out, when a bunch of men, say, Vikings, successfully invade, say, Britain:
Celtic military age husband (to wife and children): Well, we're fucked and you're too heavy to carry while I run, so I'm off. This represents the fall of the Celtic et cetera. Bye.
(Wife watches him go, watches Viking bash through front door)
Celtic wife: Oh, thank god you're here, that coward ran off and left us all alone. My, what big muscles you have. If you don't hurt the children I'll blow you.
Viking: Jeg liker du veldig godt!
Of course sometimes the women and children were sold abroad into slavery. And Europeans carrying out Crusades, for example, had a nasty habit of slaughtering every Christian, Moslem, and Jewish thing in the cities they invaded, because we Europeans are utter barbarians, morbid barbarians at that, and always have been, but that's something for when I write about the Christianity of Southern Italy. But generally speaking, women took what they could get - took care of their children, and muddled on with the changes in skin tone and language of their men as best they could. The Jews knew this. That's probably why they measured descent through the matrilineal line, even if their religion doesn't exactly traditionally empower women otherwise, and that's certainly why the Jews are so lonely in their ability to tell you where they came from over the millenia.
Tracing descent matrilineally, however, isn't an exclusively Jewish phenomenom. Someone else who traditionally traced their descent that way was the Epizephyrian Locrians, an offshoot of the Spartans who went to my father's region of Calabria about 2700 years ago. There are some interesting theories as to why they went there, and why they traced descent matrilineally, that I'll look at tomorrow when I have that little bit more time.
Me: Fuck, this printer stinks.
Boss: Stinks of what? Not like it's going to blow up?
Me: No, it stinks . . . (sniffs freshly printed sheet) . . . it stinks of printer, you know, except more than most printers do.
Boss: (shrugs) Just try not to breathe when you're printing things out.
Economic crashes make my olfaction more sensitive. I think it's an evolutionary survival mechanism women developed. Men developed a good one for icy sidewalks useful at present here in Scandinavia Sud where the Belges haven't yet figures out how to spread sand or clear pavement ice, which is to walk with a low centre of gravity, ie to lumber, ie to carry all your weight in your bum. That's why they don't slip around as much as women, who are top-heavy. Also women wear much stupider shoes.
Which brings me to the subject of today's, and probably tomorrow's post, which is women and their history. This past vacation in Aspromonte and Syracuse has been a hell of an eye-opener on two things, in a not absolutely unrelated way - the history of women, and the history of the Christian church. But women are by far more important, representing 54% or so of our race, so let's start there, in part in atonement for my rather sneery 'humanities' undergrad programme, which gave them/women's studies minimal airtime.
Actually let's start with the F-word, who I'd love even if he were a woman, but thank heaven he's not, because I don't understand how to bring women to orgasm. The F-word was on a Viking kick in December and for some reason this nudged him into seeing geographical and ethnical history from a women's perspective - a perspective he pointed out was much more continuous, much less choppy, and much more, shall we say, true than the typical Rise and Fall of the Babylonians Egyptians Greeks Romans Goths Celts Saxons Vikings Franks blah blah blah, which is how men have historically presented history, because, well, that sort of choppy, discontinuous minority perspective is an accurately male perspective of history.
Let's consider what generally happens, as the F-word spelled it out, when a bunch of men, say, Vikings, successfully invade, say, Britain:
Celtic military age husband (to wife and children): Well, we're fucked and you're too heavy to carry while I run, so I'm off. This represents the fall of the Celtic et cetera. Bye.
(Wife watches him go, watches Viking bash through front door)
Celtic wife: Oh, thank god you're here, that coward ran off and left us all alone. My, what big muscles you have. If you don't hurt the children I'll blow you.
Viking: Jeg liker du veldig godt!
Of course sometimes the women and children were sold abroad into slavery. And Europeans carrying out Crusades, for example, had a nasty habit of slaughtering every Christian, Moslem, and Jewish thing in the cities they invaded, because we Europeans are utter barbarians, morbid barbarians at that, and always have been, but that's something for when I write about the Christianity of Southern Italy. But generally speaking, women took what they could get - took care of their children, and muddled on with the changes in skin tone and language of their men as best they could. The Jews knew this. That's probably why they measured descent through the matrilineal line, even if their religion doesn't exactly traditionally empower women otherwise, and that's certainly why the Jews are so lonely in their ability to tell you where they came from over the millenia.
Tracing descent matrilineally, however, isn't an exclusively Jewish phenomenom. Someone else who traditionally traced their descent that way was the Epizephyrian Locrians, an offshoot of the Spartans who went to my father's region of Calabria about 2700 years ago. There are some interesting theories as to why they went there, and why they traced descent matrilineally, that I'll look at tomorrow when I have that little bit more time.
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