The Mother: Victim and Vector

There is a need to consider the differences between man and woman in terms of the way they tend to think. Just why this difference exists is not entirely clear but it is sure to be strongly related to adaptive mechanisms related to differences in gender roles.

The woman's role has differed from the male's, of necessity. As the bearer of the Young, which requires an extended period of protection and care before the offspring can provide for its own needs, her role has been more confining than that of the male. The woman and child have to be protected and provided for and, normally, spend a long period of intense interrelationship. The establishment and maintenance of a safe 'nest' has ever been the woman's chief concern and focus.

Toward this end she has to be the pragmatist, manupulating the man and other aspects of her environment, using and odoing what-ever was neccessary to achieve this end. Forther, the role of mother meant endless work and attention to small details.

Being largely dependent upon the producrivity and protection of the male, her behavior has characterictically been largely determined by, or dependent upon, the male´s activity. This may account for what appears to be more emotionally based and manipulative behavior than the male. Her role, historically, ahas provided Little time or opportunity for intelectual pursuits and complex patterns of behavior based upon inductive reasoning. She is probably more adept at accessing sublingual activities of the brain.

NOw, in modern societies, we see a diversification of the woma's role virtually as wide as human endeavor itself, from truck driver to politicaian to scientist to astronaunt. The woman is still fulfilling the role of mother and nest-tender even though she usually also spends a large part of her time as bread-winner. Even though job requirements may necessitate behavior determined by unemotional reasoning, she would appear to be as emotionally biased as her forebears, behavior and decisions being determined more by hoy it 'feels' than by being the end product of a reasoning process. Both men and women are inclined to make emotional decisions. However, the women appears to be more emotionally determined than the man.

Should this be true, it has serious implications for society since it is the mother who is the primary transmitter of cultural information to the very Young child. In the child's earliest and most formative and vulnerable years, it is primarily the mother who plants the first sedes of societies' fantasies and insanities.

The woman more often accepts the packaged belief systems of the clture and transmits these to the children. It is usually she who imparts the belief in a god, who implants a wide array of fears and feelings of insecurity and who leaves the child largely defenseless in terms of accurate reasoning patterns. It is also the woman who usually begins the process of instilling the belief in the child that sex is evil and dirty. She is both the victim, and the vector, the carrier and transmitter of cultural diseases.

The man also imparts hos share of irrationality, of course, but it is the woman who spends the most time with the very Young child, It is she who has the closest and most influential contact with the child during those first few years of greatest impressionability and vulnerability.

 

RELIGION AND SEX

 

From the mist of time before recorded history, even before the codification of man's 'evel' nature, religión has player the primary roll in defininf sexul roles in the various cultures throughout history.

Sincé sexuality is a vital natural drive which greatly affects everyone, it becomes the source of great power for any instutition which can gain dominion over its expression. Instilling belief in this área transfers tremendous power to the institutions The technique used by western religions is to first condemn the drive as something basically evil and unclean; something for which one should feel guilt, then to proscribe all but a narrow menas and set of circumstances under which the expression of the drive is sanctioned. Naturally, that expression will be in line with the fulfilling of the religion's agenda.

The greatest leverage for control and manipulation is probably in the instilling of guilt feelings and taboo. These can be generalized and used to steer behavior in virtually any direction, the taboo generating public rage toward any transgressor. This is one of the primary menas of undercutting self-reliance and the generation of dependency. The destruction of self-sufficiency becomes an important precursor to maintaining a following. It is an important precondition in gaining dherents who will not stray from the dogma.

In Western cultures the manipulation of sexuality has been the primary means of 'keeping the woman in her place', that is, pregnant and in the nest, producing more followers for the church. It has been the primary mechanism for keeping her role as that of a baby Factory, and promary teacher of the culture's various dogma.

She provides the institutions, especially the religions, with increasing numbers to exploit, already infected with basic indoctrination; the preliminary hoooks, in the form of the beliefs she has instilled in the child already firmly in place.

This area of manipulation by the religions has been the primaty menas of keeping men in control as leaders. this control is still intact while millions of women do battle with very personal demons in their own private hells.

I can immediately recall three cases of permanent damage due directly to religious teachings. All three were women deeply inmersed in the same religión, although at different times and in different circumstances. They represent different damage from different perspectives, but religión strongly affecting the lives of all these women.

One was a Young woman about 20 years old with a seemingly healthy sex drive, at least in that it was too stron to be denied. However, after each sexual encounter, after having reaching a climax, she would experience nausea and spend considerable time in the bathroom, retching. After all, sex was dirty, evil and disgsting. this woman wold eventually overcome her passions, becoming frigid and a 'ball buster', a large part of the 'evel' projected onto men.

Another was a college student in a design class who exhibited conceptual distortions in every area of activity. In one instance, the class was given the assignment of designinga 'feelie box' that would provide a tactile experience representing a lover. The box was to have a curtained hole through which one cold reach in and achieve a tactile experience representing some aspect of that stident's idea of a lover. This girl's box was fitted with a large pon cushion, with many pins, all pointing outward. When asked why?, she explained that they represented her most dominant feelings about touching someone, discomfort of an electric shock.

Here was a Young woman who had come to physical maturity with no commentsirate emotional or factualknowledge development in terms of her own sexuality. Naive and ignorant, life for this woman will never match the preconceived idealizations she has internalized in place of the stuff of real life. She will always feel cheated and never feel at one with herself or with nature. the world will never match her expectations. This girl eventually joined a religious order.

The third was a woman in her late thirties who was the mother of ten living children, She was robustly healthy and had a powerful sex drive. However, she had reached a compromiso between the sexual pleasures she enjoyed and he guilt it generated. When caught inthe cascading throws of climax she would gasp: "Give me a baby! Give me a baby!". Even so, she expressed that shs still felt she was doing something wrong.

Significantly, all three were Roman Catholic. All three had been from families who were deeply involved in the religión, had been immersed in it all their lives, and would not quiestion any aspect of the dogma.