emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

een numerous attempts to reconstruct the past: from
Bachofen's [10] theory of matriarchy and his 'Mother Rights' to
the recent hypothesis about 'matriarchal societies in the old
world' by Ernest Borneman, [11] there are many scenarios. Yet
the prepatriarchal period is still a mystery and looks as though
it will remain one for a long time to come.
Why are human beings separated into two groups? Why and
how have men taken a dominant position? It would no doubt be
interesting to be able to answer these questions; many people
have tried recently, but the dire shortage of tangible information
encourages them to give free rein to their fantasies. Instead of
admitting their ignorance of the 'origin', as soon as the subject
of male-female relationships is raised everybody takes
advantage of the opportunity to invent a history of the
beginning. The fantasies include fear of castration, penis envy,
vagina envy, desire to give birth, a fire jealously guarded by
women against the threat of masculine urine, a corral of
pregnant women who wait for the men hunters to return, etc.
Formed by projections of present conditions into the past, such
fantasies would be of little consequence if it were not for the
fact that they are used to construct a justification of the present.
[introduction / 9]
When one is not concerned with maintaining patriarchy but with
destroying it, what is the point of inventing an 'origin'? To what
extent can the reconstruction of a long-forgotten past contribute
to our understanding of the present situation? Is it really
necessary to know how power came about in order to convince
ourselves that it is unjustifiable?
Although we cannot satisfy our curiosity about the origin of
patriarchy, we can still study the ideological description of it
with some hopes of understanding its modern forms. It is not
feasible here to study all the myths of the different patriarchal
cultures; I shall confine myself to the one which concerns us
most directly. Judeo-Christian civilisation. The genesis and
basis of its ideology have the advantage of being easily
accessible, thanks to the opening pages of the Old Testament.
Naturally we do not find any explanation of the hierarchical
division of human beings into sexes, because the ABC of any
patriarchal ideology is precisely to present that division as
being of biological, natural or divine essence. On the other
hand, we can get a clear picture of patriarchal logic which, from
the division of the sexes, develops into the appropfiation of
women and the struggle for power among men. The distinctive
feature of the Old Testament account of the Creation is that it
divides into two separate narratives which offer contradictory
versions of the creation of human beings. They do not always
appear as such because of the mechanisms of patriarchal
thinking and deceptive language, where to be human and to be
a man are considered one and the same thing; but nevertheless
they are divergent.
[10 / Introduction ]