While the emasculation of the male, including the ‘reassignment’ of genitalia, is acclaimed as ‘progressive’, as is much else in the name of ‘human rights’ and ‘equality’, it has been symptomatic over the course of millennia of civilisations in the epoch of decay, to the extent that the phenomenon had been ritualised and given religious sanction. In Babylonia, Ishtar/Inanna was the goddess of male emasculation, transsexuality and gender ambiguity;
androgynous, marginal, ambiguous … She is betwixt and between … Central to the goddess as paradox is her well-attested psychological and physiological androgyny. Inanna-Ishtar is both female and male … [in one place stating] ‘Though I am a woman I am a noble young man’.856
Rivkah Harris, formerly Associate Professor of Religion at Northwestern University, in her study on gender in Mesopotamia describes Ishtar as basically a Communistic icon, symbolising the levelling of all distinctions into an amorphous mass in the name of equality:
She shattered all gender and socioeconomic distinctions—being both a royal queen and ‘the harlot of heaven … set out for the alehouse’857 And in all this she was the role model for her followers. Among her powers was this from a Sumerian poem: ‘To turn a man into a woman and a woman into a man are yours, Inanna’.858
A hymn to Inanna relates the cross-dressing processions, which culminate in blood-letting:
The people of Sumer parade before you.
They play in the street ala-drums before you.
The people of Sumer parade before you.
I say, ‘Hail!’ to Inanna, Great Lady of Heaven! …
… The male prostitutes comb their hair before you.
They decorate the napes of their necks with coloured scarves,
They drape the cloak of the gods about their shoulders.
The righteous man and woman walk before you.
They hold the soothing harp by their sides.
Those who follow wear the sword belt.
They grasp the spear in their hands.
The people of Sumer parade before you.
The women adorn their right side with men’s clothing.
The people of Sumer parade before you.
I say, ‘Hail!’ to Inanna, Great Lady of Heaven!
The men adorn their left side with women’s clothing.
…The ascending kurgarra priests raise their swords before you.
The priest, who covers his sword with blood, sprinkles blood,
He sprinkles blood over the throne of the court chamber.
The tigi-drum, the sem-drum, and the ala-tambourine resound!
In the heavens the Holy One appears alone.859
Harris states of the worshippers:
Their transvestitism simulated the androgyny of Inanna-Ishtar. It was perhaps the inversion of the male/female binary opposition that thereby neutralized this opposition. By emulating their goddess who was both female and male, they shattered the boundary between the sexes.860
The Canaanites had a fertility cult where the wearing of clothes of the opposite sex and the carrying of implements associated with the opposite sex were used in rituals, probably involving eunuch-priests dressed as females and male and female prostitutes. ‘Homosexual activity and bestiality were considered ways of having intercourse with the gods and thus affecting the course of nature’.861 The Hebrews, surrounded by these practices, were continually drawn to them, hence the many strictures against a variety of cultic activities, such as: ‘The implement of a man shall not be borne by a woman, nor shall a man clothe himself in the attire of a woman, for whoever does this is an abomination to Yahweh your God’.862
The worship of Ishtar/Inanna spread outward from Sumer, among many nations, and much to the lament of the prophets, was endemic among the Hebrews in periods of religious and cultural regression. However, it seems that the cult of Ishtar/Inanna and associated practices were an aberration even within Babylon, and had originated from Uruk. An ancient text states:
Babylon a ruin, he turned to Erech,863 the city of hierodules,864 courtesans, and sacred prostitutes to whom Ishtar (the goddess of love) was husband and master, the city of eunuchs and sodomites, the merrymakers of Eanna865 (Ishtar’s temple), whose maleness Ishtar had turned to femaleness, in order to terrify man.866
The transsexual nature of Inanna necessitated a change in outlook among the Babylonians who had previously abhorred the practice. Rome followed a similar pattern.
It is significant that when Rome started morally degenerating amidst the Second Punic War (218–201BC), the Romans resurrected Ishtar worship, centuries after its disappearance, and brought a statue of Cybele (one of many variations) to Rome from distant Phrygia. The statue was paraded through Rome, installed at a temple, and a festival was instituted, in the hope of victory. The cult’s priests were eunuchs, which meant they were all foreigners since, until the reign of Claudius, a eunuch could not become a citizen. The priesthood (galli) were castrated in honour of Cybele’s consort/son Attis, whom she drove mad due to his infidelity, causing him to self-mutilate. A fractured psyche emerged in Rome’s later years from a civilisation that had placed honour on manly self-discipline:
There was a tendency to associate the galli with the figure of the cinaedus,867 which, at first, literally meant ‘wanton’ but, above all, was the name given to the adult man who might display any feminine trait. The association between both falls back on the idea that becoming effeminate would be gradual. Both were effeminate; some because they had in fact been castrated, others because they behaved as if they had been. However, if the presence of the gallus was not only permissible, but also, sometimes, esteemed because of his religious services, the cinaedi were, in general, execrated. The biggest fear seemed to be associated with those who were willing to take the final step toward the ‘abyss’ of effeminacy: self-castration. They were then regarded with horror and disdain for making themselves cinaedi voluntarily. Invectives and curses contained in the polysemic concept of cinaedus were hurled at them: the galli were Orientals, dancers, unhinged, weak and inclined to being the ones penetrated (pathicus), since they were either unable or unwilling to penetrate anyone.868
The galli and cinaedi are honoured today among our ‘progressives’.
Might we speak of a continued oppression of the ‘transgressors’ of sexual norms and gender? The Roman world did not have a conceptual apparatus to classify what today is known as ‘sexual orientation’, much less would the individual who might demonstrate a greater inclination towards some kind of sexual act in Antiquity earn a specific fixed identity that might characterize all their social actions.869
Yet in normal circumstances, relations outside the male-female family bond were regarded as an abomination. The young Egyptian, for example, was expected to find a wife and raise children. Daughters were especially important because inheritance was through the female line,870 indicating that patriarchal families do not imply the repression of women. The abhorrence for the dark god Seth involves the rape of his brother Horus. The act was ‘… certainly looked upon as a mark of ignominy for the sufferer; but it is abominated not as an expression of triumph by the enemy so much as for the shame attached to the act itself, just as the eating of excrement is abominated’.871 Seth was not only homosexual but was an abortionist,872 symbolic of Seth as a god of sexual sterility, an aberration of the divine order. Interestingly, Seth was regarded by the Egyptians as ‘foreign’, and his wives Anat and Astarte were of Canaanite origin.873
The revived cult of the Castrating Goddess proceeds with a scientific façade; the modern magic. The American Psychological Association promotes transgenderism as the healthy option to resolve identity confusion, while also promoting that confusion. Not only has transsexuality in an ongoing variety become the new ‘normal’, but traditional maleness has been deemed ‘toxic’.
According to official APA ideology, there ‘is a particular constellation of standards that have held sway over large segments of the population, including: anti-femininity, achievement, eschewal of the appearance of weakness, and adventure, risk, and violence. These have been collectively referred to as traditional masculinity ideology’.874 These traditional attitudes are considered to be impacting on physical and mental health, such as the internalisation of emotions causing suicide; hence ‘traditional masculine ideology’ needs to be eliminated for the welfare of males.
However, reading the APA manifesto, it is apparent that this concern for the welfare of men and boys is a façade. The entirety of the document is infused with a strategy for normalising transgenderism, and for deconstructing the ‘patriarchy’, using stereotypically leftist jargon:
When working with boys and men, psychologists can address issues of privilege and power related to sexism in a developmentally appropriate way to help them obtain the knowledge, attitudes, and skills to be effective allies and potentially live less restrictive lives. Male privilege tends to be invisible to men, yet they can become aware of it through a variety of means, such as education.875
Men and boys will thus reach happiness when they are liberated from their traditional gender roles; from their responsibility as providers and defenders. Such antiquated ‘restrictive’ concepts are not required in modern liberal-capitalism. Such a weight of the past can now be lifted from man’s shoulders and he too can become an interchangeable unit. The male no longer has any sense of purpose. Perhaps that is the actual reason for male health issues?
Gender is said to be a social construct that is separate from biological sex: ‘When trying to understand the complex role of masculinity in the lives of diverse boys and men, it is critical to acknowledge that gender is a non-binary construct that is distinct from, although interrelated to, sexual orientation’.876
Further fractures of identity are described as arising among those departing from the traditional norm by forming other sub-group identities: ‘Men not meeting dominant expectations often create their own communities within which they develop cultural standards, norms, and values that may depart from dominant masculinity. For instance, in racial and ethnic, youth, or gay communities, boys and men may develop forms of resistance in action and attitudes that challenge the expectations of dominant masculinity…’877 Hence yet another breakdown in social cohesion that is then expected to recombine through intersectionality. Within the subgroups of multiple genders, there are further breakdowns according to race, ethnicity, and age.
Sub-identities form and re-form ad infinitum because any identity is a social construct, without organic attachments or biological imperatives. Hence, what might have been hardwired in the male and female over tens of millennia as survival mechanisms, maintained by custom, religion, and society, can be discarded like yesterday’s clothing for the latest fashion. While the APA speaks of mental and physical health issues of men and boys caused by traditional expectations, such as ‘stoicism’ and the ‘internalisation of emotions’, it could be that the causes of problems among males are due to the disparaging and repression of hardwired male traits that are supposed to be discarded on the basis of new ideologies.
Boys and men who are members of more than one minority group may have an especially difficult time resolving identity-related conflicts. For example, gay boys and men of color may experience racism in the LGBT community, while also experiencing homophobia/heterosexism in their racial/ethnic community and may choose to turn on and off certain aspects of their identities as they move between different cultural contexts. Similarly, multiethnic and multiracial boys and men may feel pressure from their families to embrace one portion of their identities while experiencing demands from peers to accentuate different ones. These types of vacillations can result in identity confusion and contribute to the development of mental health problems.878
The preceding passage indicates a recognition that it is ‘identity confusion’ that might cause ‘mental health problems’. Yet the answer of the APA is to accentuate the mobility of multiple identities, rather than encouraging a sense of permanence and rootedness in belonging to something tangible. All is in flux. Internal conflicts resulting from this multiplicity of identities are to be resolved through therapy, and other forms of social engineering. This is done not by discouraging the multiplication of identities but, on the contrary, by the imposition of their acceptance as the new normal. Here we come to the crux of this issue: the normalisation and reinforcement of the ability to ‘turn on and off’ identities ‘while moving between different cultural contexts’. The role of the psychologist is to
strive to reduce and counter the damaging effects of microaggressions by teaching boys and men from historically marginalized backgrounds skills to cope with racism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, ageism, ableism, and other forms of discrimination.879
The suppression of microaggressions implies the existence of microidentities, which means the fracturing of the personality rather than its integration or what Jungian analytical psychology calls individuation. Subidentities included above are race, gender, age, and disability. Female disabled in this scenario require their own subidentity and its demands against the male-abled. Black female disabled require their own identity against White male-abled. Black female disabled lesbians and Black disabled transgendered require their own identities contra White hetero-male-abled. Young Black female lesbian/or transgendered disabled, elderly or middle-aged each surely have their own histories or herstories and grievances. What of the need to combat Achondroplasiaphobia and associated discrimination and stereotyping? Or is dwarfism a social construct that can be discarded in favour of another identity, and is doing so implicitly insulting? What of coulrophobia, particularly relevant to the sensibilities of liberals?
Like all social engineering, it is sold as being for one’s own good. The problems cited for resolution are those that have been manufactured or aggravated by the Left and their sponsors. Fundamental solutions are not sought, indeed they must be deflected. The Old Left for example demanded a living family wage; not women’s integration into the production process in the name of ‘liberation’.
Sociocultural factors such as increasing rates of women entering the paid labor force and the shifting structure of American families from predominantly married, two-parent households to a wider variety of family compositions may be contributing to the evolution of new fathering behaviors and roles. Many fathers by their own volition have reframed traditional masculinity norms and roles of fathers (e.g., breadwinning) to be stay-at-home fathers or fill more nontraditional roles in the family such as co-parenting. This includes spending more time with their children, assuming more childcare tasks, and filling new paternal roles such as the primary caregiver as a stay-at-home dad.880
Just as women were convinced that integration into the workforce would be ‘liberating’, now the young are to be inculcated with ‘progressive’ ideas about the obliteration of traditional occupation roles, again for the sake of economic integration. This works in conjunction with the subverting of binary gender in the interests of ‘economic inclusion’:
A particular focus of career education with boys includes encouraging them to explore the full range of career options, not just those that men have traditionally pursued. In addition, psychologists strive to address the difficult barriers and the culture-specific issues impeding the educational and career development of racial and ethnic minority, immigrant, boys with cognitive disabilities, and low-income boys by creating partnerships with schools, health care facilities, social service agencies, and businesses to provide them with mentors to guide and inspire educational striving. …881
In commenting on the APA manifesto, Stephanie Pappas, a science writer at Stanford University Medical School, quotes Ryon McDermott, psychologist at the University of South Alabama, who co-authored the APA document, stating: ‘What is gender in the 2010s? It’s no longer just this male-female binary. If we can change men, we can change the world’.882
In critiquing the manifesto, Dr. Rob Whitley883 calls it an ‘ideological document’, driven by ‘social ideologies’ rather than ‘the best available scientific evidence’.
… This is especially so in fields such as psychiatry, which have been historically tainted by political abuse. For example, Soviet psychiatrists invented a fake category of mental illness named ‘sluggish schizophrenia’ which was used to label and confine anti-communist political dissidents.
Sadly, the APA document appears to be driven by a similarly ideological approach in its continuous pathologization of ‘traditional masculinity’, while ignoring considerable evidence that aspects of traditional masculinity can be beneficial for men’s mental health.
So, far from such factors in ‘traditional masculinity’ as ‘achievement’, ‘adventure’, ‘risk’, and ‘success, power and competition’ having been ‘shown to limit males’ psychological development’, such traits form the basis of cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT), where clients are encouraged to ‘be adventurous and take risks’, and to confront ‘anxiety-provoking situations’.884
Among the doctrinal flaws that liberal-capitalism and socialism share is a faith in ‘progress’. Marx referred to the ‘wheel of history’, without seeing that the socialist wagon would fall over a cliff. Liberal historian Francis Fukuyama saw the triumph of the free market and democracy over the world (globalisation) as literally ‘the end of history’: man would have reached his apex and there would be nothing better to accomplish. Dr. Fukuyama’s optimism was reminiscent of that of the 19th century Darwinian who, buoyed by the Industrial Revolution, thought that this was the apex of human achievement. Nothing had been so great in history as that which industrial civilisation had achieved. Auguste Comte, one of the founders of sociology, formulated positivism on the basis that humanity went through a procession of epochs ending in the triumph of science and reason over faith. Positivism has remained the basis of socialist and capitalist historical and social analyses. The Right sees cycles of rise and fall, and looks at Marx’s ‘wheel of history’ as one on which the spokes gradually fall off the hub.
Hence the tendency to see change as intrinsically ‘progressive’, whereas the ‘change’ might — and often is — a symptom of the old age. As we have seen above, the latest ‘modern’ fad of transgenderism has been around for millennia as an aberration. Likewise, feminism is just another recurrence of a civilisation in decay. We see in prior civilisations the same notions of feminism and egalitarianism as our own.
Mother goddess, moon, phallic and serpent worship are telluric cultic manifestations throughout cultures and races across the world. The Dionysian orgies of telluric cults dramatise a reversionary, Communistic spirit, where all become one; a nebulous mass, focused on descent to the underworld; a perverse fascination with having humanity crawl back into an amorphous slime.
Politically, one sees the Left embracing the telluric. It is politicised Dionysianism. Historically, Spartacus, leader of the slave revolt against Rome (73 B.C.), was said to be the incarnation of Dionysus, and the Roman Senate sought to prohibit the Dionysian cult as subversive. Here was Bolshevism two thousand years ago. ‘Feminist cultural historian’ Professor Lucia Chiavola Birnbaum writes of the Dionysian cults, describing a form of proto-Bolshevism:
Radical democracy is implicit in celebrations of Dionysus/Bacchus and carnivals: everyone celebrates. … During Saturnalia slaves became masters, and the people elected a king of the festival... Celebration of all life in dionysian and bacchic rites included the loosening of marital bonds, alarming conservatives, who feared that loosening patriarchal familial ties would lead to the loosening of patriarchal social stratification. … Bacchanalia were festivals described by a Roman writer as dear to ‘proletarians, women, and slaves’.885
Birnbaum describes the Dionysian and Bacchanalian rites as ‘the ultimate egalitarian festival [which] in authentic manifestation carnival turns everything inside out, bottom to top, front to rear, and unveils, unmasks and uncrowns’.886 Again, there arises the hatred of the family and of marriage which makes the reversion of the rites so appealing to ‘modern’, ‘progressive’ women.
To Birnbaum and other feminists, the ‘Dark Mother’ is the origin of religious belief, and ‘dark’ or ‘black’ refers both to the soil and to Black African origins, Birnbaum promoting this latter theory in her book Dark Mother: African Origins and Godmothers.887 Hence the notion, popular among feminists, serves to attack not only patriarchy but in particular White patriarchy. The claim is that there existed at the most primordial level a universal egalitarian, pacifistic matriarchy of hunter-gatherers, worshipping a dark goddess. If this were conceded to be historically accurate, it means nothing more than that this was the situation at the most primitive, undifferentiated hunter-gatherer level of existence, and that feminism, like the Left in general, aims to return to a regressive state. This is the paradox of ‘progress’.
Anthropologist Professor Joan Bamberger comments on the theory:
Because no matriarchies persist anywhere at the present time, and because primary sources recounting them are totally lacking, both the existence and constitution of female-dominated societies can only be surmised. The absence of this documentation, however, has not been a deterrent to those scholars and popularists who view in the concept of primitive matriarchy a rationale for a new social order, one in which women can and should gain control of important political and economic roles.888
Bamberger traces the theory to 1861 when the Swiss jurist and classical scholar Johann Jakob Bachofen published Das Mutterrecht (‘Mother Right: an investigation of the religious and juridical character of matriarchy in the ancient world’). Bamberger wrote:
If anthropologists and scholars of classical jurisprudence no longer read Bachofen, the advocates of the current feminist movement do. They have rediscovered in his theory of mother right a scholarly precedent for the privileged position of females in primitive society.889
Bamberger sees as problematic feminist allusions to legends across the world of a pre-historic matriarchy, which also recount that, so far from being idyllic, these societies were brutish and women lost their power when their tyranny became intolerable.890
Feminism has played a significant role in the globalisation of the former Soviet bloc states. The Network of East-West Women, founded in New York in 1991, is one of many ‘gender-focused NGOs’, as Susan Zimmerman calls them, spreading through Eastern and Central Europe, backed by Foundations and other globalist agencies, and is part of the offensive against Russia’s resistance to globalisation. Among the funders are Ford and Soros, John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, United Nations Development Fund for Women, Vanguard Fund.891 Soros and Ford, the U.S. State Department (Erin Barclay), and the New School for Social Research (Ann Snitow, NEWW chair) are represented on the Board of Directors.892
Gender studies aided in the process by subverting the education systems. Susan Zimmermann refers to this as the ‘internationalization of gender as part of the neo-liberal transitions package’.893 Others saw it as the ‘academic Macdonaldization of gender’.894 Much of the influence is facilitated by opening up to academic international exchanges.895 Ioana Cirstocea refers to ‘entire armies’ of feminists arriving in Eastern Europe during the 1990s ‘to establish networks, conduct research projects, organize meetings and conferences’. The New School for Social Research assisted Czech sociologist Jirina Siklova to establish the first gender studies department in Prague in 1989.896
Cirstocea states that apart from NEWW, the ‘gender field’ in Eastern Europe ‘is mainly structured by the Open Society Institute (OSI)’,897 the omnipresent foundation of George Soros. She points out that OSI had been ‘involved in reforming Eastern European public spaces even before the collapse of the communist regimes’. In Yugoslavia, OSI supported the Inter-University Centre, where international feminist conferences were held during the 1980s. OSI’s involvement with ‘gender issues and feminism’ is indicated by the amount of funding it gave to associations during the first post-Soviet decade and by the establishment of gender studies at the Central European University (CEU), founded by Soros, which was a centre for feminist studies, conferences, translations of feminist literature from ‘militant resources’, and training for the region,898 prior to being closed by the Hungarian government. Both NEWW and the Soros-sponsored Network Women’s Program were particularly involved in the CEU projects.