emmanuel reynaud holy virility the social construction of masculinity

you shall win your food from it all the days of your life. It
will grow thorns and thistles for you¯none but wild plants
for you to eat. You shall gain your bread by the sweat of
your brow until you return to the ground; for from it you
were taken. Dust you are, to dust you shall return.'» (ΙΙΙ: 17-
19)
After this long account of the life of 'man', the allusion to
returning to dust completes his identification with the human
being who was created from that same dust, but who was not
yet a 'man' because he still had all his 'ribs'. This final sleight of
hand endeavours to make us forget that the creation of 'man'
was that of a mutilated human being, missing a part of itself,
called 'woman', and whose sexuality is limited to an external
phallus/snake. In spite of this final attempt to conceal the reality
of the myth, it is nevertheless apparent that it is through his
own mutilation that man establishes his domination over
woman.
[Introduction / 13]
Mutilation as foundation
This division of the human being into 'man' and 'woman' by the
unequal mutilation of the individual depending on the anatomy
of the sexual organs is the basis on which the entire
JudeoChristian ideology is built. The Bible itself, once the sex
categories have been defined through the myth of original sin,
hardly does more than illustrate how they work. And so, from
the next verse of the following chapter, man immediately uses
'his' wife so that she can carry out her allotted task without
delay and bear children:
«She conceived and gave birth to Cain. She said "With the
help of the Lord I have brought a man into being". Later
she had another child, his brother Abel. Abel was a
shepherd and Cain a tiller of the soil.» (IV: 1-2)
And these first sons of 'man' see their life so much as a struggle
that after Abel's clear victory, «Cain attacked his brother Abel
and murdered him.» (IV:8) The fight to the death between men
for power begins with the myth of the farmer who eliminates the