culture

We are not what we think we are, of that I am sure. And yet, what we think we are shapes our behavior, the quality of our relationships, our values, feelings of right and wrong, justice, and compassion. The key to personal and social transformation, which as we will see, are the same thing, is ‘identity.’

A breathtaking scientist, author and friend, Howard Bloom, writes about social biology, how independent particles, molecules, simple organisms team up to form super-organisms, how they share information, act in unison, form even bigger networks or gangs called species, on and on. Zooming back these appear as continents, oceans, planets, solar systems and galaxies, all moving, changing, forever.

Where do we draw the line that separates ‘me’ from everything else? The sieve-like membrane we call skin is so full of holes it forms no boundary at all. 30% to 40% of our body weight is bacteria and other parasite-guests hitching a ride. Without these micro-beasts we would not be. Is the bacteria living inside each of us – us? If not, we are a little more than half of what we think we are.

Perhaps we are defined by our thoughts which seem to emanate from nowhere between our ears, in the black hole just behind eyes. But thoughts just don’t happen, nor do feelings. Thoughts and feelings are shadows first cast by sensations coming from out there and then bouncing around like pinballs inside, triggering feeling and thinking bells along the way. Take away out there and in here disappears too. Inner and outer give rise to each other, and I am both.

Every now and then something new appears, a fresh perception. Musing about the reciprocal nature of what we are – suddenly, after reading a particularly explosive paragraph Howard had written, there it was. What I call me, my social-cultural identity, my personal ego or image of self-inside and the outer images that make up the culture-outside are the same. Looking through different ends of a toy telescope the inner and outer appear completely different – but they are, in fact, the same process, both are images.

Right, wrong, do this, not this, good boy, bad girl, language, the names we give things are all embodied reflections of the collective super-ego we call culture. Growing up, needing to belong, we personify these collective images as a self-image, and that’s what I think I am, but am not.

Compassion? Wisdom?
Sorry, no one by that name lives here...

My son recently graduated from college. He could have been one of these UC Davis students. The well fed skin-head on the right is the riot clad officer hosing our children with pepper spray as they sit, Gandhi style, arm in arm, nonviolently. This act, not by students but by our friend the civil mercenary, and others like it around the world (see below), rips the thin skin of civility off our eyes. Serving and protecting, yes, but who and what? Watching his unaffected cruelty, like food poisoning, vomits up the question, How could he do such a thing?

In 1981 when a friend was nearly raped and murdered by a stalking stranger I asked the same question, Why would a man do such a thing? How can a man who supposedly loves his wife beat her so violently it caused brain damage? Or a coach, scream at an eight year old for dropping a ball? Violence is so easy, so natural. Or is it?

Years ago friend and author Howard Bloom introduced me to the works of James W. Prescott, PhD. In a breathtaking book called the Lucifer Principle Howard takes us on a tour of human nature down through the ages and explains how violence is in our blood, how in many ways we breed violence. Plant a child in a violence producing culture and you will get a violent adult. The opposite is also true. Plant a child in nurturing, affectionate, pleasurable rich soil and you get an empathic, intelligent and perhaps even a compassionate culture. I wonder how nurtured, playfully touched, and unconditionally accepted our pepper spraying officer was as a child?

In light of increasing militarized police activities, that I hope we have all been watching, I asked Howard if I could share the chapter in the Lucifer Principle focusing on Prescott’s works. He said yes, of course. Violence is easy and so natural. So are empathy, wisdom, real intelligence and compassion. Please see for yourself.

The Importance of Hugging – Why some cultures seem abnormally prone to revel in violence?

A personal note about current events and our kids…

Freedom and any form of democracy depend on you and I being informed. The Germans were well informed in 1933, but as you know, their information was cherry-picked, censored, opinion replaced facts.

After WWII the Nuremberg trials revealed how easily the entire population was misled by propaganda. When news is biased (censored or contains propaganda) people are misled. The Fairness Doctrine was established to prevent this from happening in the US. When Reagan, then followed by Clinton, eliminated the Fairness Doctrine religious-political-corporate opinion radio and other one-sided information streams that mimicked news formats emerged, similar to the way Infomercials mimicked documentaries.

Robert F. Kennedy Jr. described how American’s are the most entertained (distracted), least informed people (by design) in the world. What he is saying is that in our era of tsunami floods of information much is intentionally misleading (censored or propaganda). Here is a great example of what this looks like.

The social, economic and yes political forces at work right now have a direct and lasting impact on our children and will for generations; on jobs, food, education, healthcare, retirement, the nature and quality of our local police, civil rights, free speech, the right to privacy, and as of today even ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is on the chopping block, replaced by ‘prolonged detention’ without charges, just suspicion. Back to the Inquisition?

Occupy Wall Street is shining a light on this and corporate-government-media is fighting back using its ‘play-book,’ ignore them, diversion, distraction, show them football and reality TV instead.

What can we do? Don’t rely only on talk radio and corporate media for news. Seek diverse, international news services available on the net. Read the talk by Kennedy. If there is an Occupy Movement in your town, bake some cookies, sit down and have a chat.

Michael Mendizza

PS,
Egyptian security forces, their version of our man in blue, are now using a powerful incapacitating gas against civilian protesters in Tahrir Square casing multiple cases of unconsciousness and epileptic-like convulsions among those exposed. Yippee, more fun than pepper spray, bleeding from the lungs for more than 15 hours. Several deaths have been reported, something our kids can look forward to.

I must be a psycho or suffer from multiple personality disorder. Part of me gazes out, soaking in the world and can’t find anything to be thankful for. Not one thing. The other part, gentle as a lam, could walk hand in hand with St. Francis of Assisi through a forests of wild beast turned peaceful by the simple fact that we were not acting like the wacked out human beings that we are. We are the mad species and every creature, tree and blade of grass in the garden knows it. That’s why we were tossed out long ago.

Indeed, each of us is brimming with boundless innate goodness. And every one of us is carrying around a brain chock full of nonsense, calling ourselves Democrats, Republicans, all the ideologies, all the religions, nationalities, casts, races and the self-centered money-power-politics this collective madness spawns.

Our hypocrisy is so vast, so blatant. We teach our little children about the first Thanks Giving when the nice Indians helped the Pilgrims. We don’t tell them that Columbus boiled their grandparents in oil or that we, white God serving men and women, used biological warfare (smallpox) to steal these first nation people’s land and murder off their culture. We are a greedy, selfish, self-righteous lot and proud of it.

We are a Christian nation. So was Spain when the King and Queen cooked up a plot called the Inquisition, that genocidal scheme to rid themselves of the Jews and conveniently confiscate their property. This mad hatters party sucked out of the western psyche the worst depravity possible, new heights of satanic-barbarism in the name of God and goodness – and the bash lasted over three hundred years.

Things have not gotten any better. Benjamin Franklin understood the Boston Tea party and the American Revolution, Paul Revere, George Washington and the new American flag had nothing to do with tea. The war was fought, not for religious freedom, a double speak cover story, but freedom from the clutches of the Central Bank of England, the same folks that our Occupy Wall Street Patriots are fighting today. OWS is today’s Boston Tea Party, but instead of British soldiers, the mercenaries of the central bankers, our rag-tag-band of merry men and women are fighting the same mercenaries dressed in different costumes.

How can a sane person, if you can find one, be thankful realizing that we have been working overtime during the 20th and first decade of the 21st century to top the Inquisition and its murderous madness for profit? One in three Americans lives (if you can call it that) at or below the poverty levels. Walking through the typical market is like trying to find water in the Death Valley. There is no food in the grocery store, at least none that won’t stunt your growth, make you explode like the Pillsbury Dough Boy, rot your teeth, clog your arteries and dull what’s left of your mind. That will be $150 per bag, thank you and have a nice day. Even preschoolers are on dope-for-profit drugs pushed every night by lovely fantasy ads on the telly.

By nearly every measure the madness that banished us from the garden eons ago has gotten progressively worse. We grow less aware each day how truly crazy we have become. Go down to the local loony-bin and sit on a bench with grannie. Go on, have a good chat. Does she think she is crazy? No more that Newt Gingrich, the good-ol-boys at the Pentagon or the Pope.

And yet, living in the thick of it as most of us do, I am profoundly grateful for the little moments of innocent beauty; the delight of a three year old nose to nose on the floor with tail-wagging collie. I am deeply moved by the communal experience of a hand touching mine. I am blessed to be able to say something that brings peace to another’s anxious moment. To reach through the mental madness and tug on that thin string that connects me to every living thing.

Of all the molecules in the physical universe mine get to feel the wet salty mist when a wave crash on the rocks below. I get to feel the sun on my face. I get to dream. I get to laugh and cry. I get to create and experience the way others express the same creative zeal. I am blessed to look up and see the blueness of the sky. When I am still I can feel what others are feeling, almost hear their thoughts and they mine. Wow, how great is that? I have the privilege of being able to type this rant, pop it in a make believe bottle and toss in into the internet-sea knowing it will land on some distant shore and pop out like a genie. Not that it matters, the joy is in the simple intimate act of creating. The meaning of life is what we make of it.

Most of all I am thankful because I know a species can pretend to be insane for only so long. We have reached the end. Like children playing hide and seek, sooner or later – the truth pops out. Joseph Chilton Pearce called it The Biology of Transcendence, that luminous light that knows, that is kind, compassionate, generous, caring, full of curiosity, humor, affection and intelligence, that stands strong in the face of all this madness and with such grace.

Notice all these amazing possibilities are not ideas. They are not beliefs, not dogma, not rules, or answers on a test, grades, trophies or stories found in what some claim to be a holy book. This amazing bundle of ever-changing possibilities is what I really am - and I get to see and experience what pops out next. I can’t wait!

When the bouncing ball hits bottom, where does it go? It goes up and up, and up, so high we can only watch with wonder the unfolding miracle that we are just about to become. And for this precious moment, yes, I am profoundly thankful.

Michael

I love social media (sometimes) because it helps us see that we are not alone and crazy. Others are as concerned as we are. What we need to do, each and every one is to pick a cause, get upset and get involved. Each of us must become pro-activists, passionate and skilled at creating nonviolently the world we know is possible, one driven not by books, religious-political propaganda and dogma, not by fear and greed, by the flowering of innate human kindness, creativity and values.

Regarding our recient newsletter:

Recall how with the fake Swine Flu pandemic ‘mandated’ was the buzz, teachers, nurses – the goal was ‘everyone’ in the world. Mandated! So the terrorists, the boggie man won’t get us. False hopes and false fears are converted into ‘false flag’ acts, designed to herd the population in profitable directions. (False Flag events are those created by a local government that points to ‘the other guy,’ the feared enemy to get the local population to go to war or give up their liberty, or do whatever they are told for the good and safety of the people. The Romans did it, Hitler did it. The USA-CIA are the best in the world at this.

Fear is ‘always’ the screen behind which our informed choices and civil liberties are taken away – and by who – by ‘the government’ that we have been sold to believe is there, like a loving parent, to protect and save us. BUT, this loving government, regardless of the original intent, has been infiltrated by corporations, that are not people, stock holders who are protected and yes mandated by law to do one thing and one thing only, that is, to make shareholders MONEY.

The soul job of a corporation and therefore the government they control with money - is to make money. One of the heads of Monsanto is now the head of the FDA, the very government body that is there to ‘protect’ us from Monsanto. Look under every department, every cabinet post, every section of the pentagon, health, and education and this same corporate corruption of the original intent of the agencies that shape our lives is there. Even the Supreme Court.

Do you really think that the members of the Supreme Court would proclaim that corporations can donate to political campaigns anything they want - wityout limits - if it did not benefits the corporations from influencing government policy?

To really appreciate what is taking place with this issue and with our government, and that means education, finance, health, corporate media, Fox-talk double speak news, our environment, our very way of life, we must wake up from the dream that the FDA and the CIA are there to protect US. After we sober up from this well publicized enchantment by design – we can act. And not before.

To get some perspective on this I offer an extremely important talk given by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

Michael Mendizza

Click to download the full PDF

Robert F. Kennedy, Jr, New York City, 2004

Corporate consolidation (of government) is happening now. We are seeing the privatization of the American government and we have a government now that turned FEMA over to somebody who pays them campaign contributions. And the head of the Forest Service is a timber industry lobbyist Mark Gray, probably the most rapacious in history [Rapacious means to "rape". Not in the sexual sense but the older sense of plunder and destruction.]. The head of public land and mining industry lobby, Steven Griles, believes that public lands are unconstitutional.

The head of the Air Division at EPA is the utility lobbyist Jeffrey Homestead who’s represented nothing but the worst air polluters during his entire career. The head of Super Fund is a woman whose last job was teaching corporate polluters how to evade Super Fund. The second in command of EPA is a Monsanto lobbyist.

I did another piece in this month’s Vanity Fair that shows that the top 100 environmental officials in the Department of Commerce which regulates Fishery, Department of Interiors, Department of Energy, Department of Agriculture, at the FDA, on the EPA and even the relevant division for the Justice Department are virtually, without exception, lobbyists from the worst of the worst of the worst of these polluters. And this is happening throughout our government, not just in the pollution but everywhere else where you’re getting corporations who are now running American government.

What happens when you allow corporations to run our government? What you get is plunder. And I have to say this, the American people have to understand that there is a huge difference between free market capitalism, which is a good thing because it makes us more efficient, more prosperous, and more democratic, and the kind of corporate-crony capitalism which has been embraced by this White House.

The reason they shouldn’t be running our government is because corporations don’t want the same thing for America as Americans want. Corporations do not want free markets and they do not want democracy. They want profits and the best way for them to get the profits too often is to use our campaign financing system which is just a system of legalized bribery, to get their hooks into a public official, they use that public official to dismantle the market place, to give them monopoly control, and then to privatize the commons, to turn over our Treasury, our air, our water, our public lands, our wild life, our fishery, the shared resource of our society that give context to our community, that connects us to our past, that are the source of our values and our virtues and our character as a people, and we are turning that over, for profit, to these corporations.

We have to remember this, legally corporations cannot do good things. They cannot do true philanthropy, they can’t do things that are good for our country or for our community. When you see Wal-Mart bringing bottled water down to the Katrina victims, they’re not doing that to be good guys, they’re doing it because they think that over the long run the public view of them will be enhanced and that that will enhance their shareholder value and their dividend distribution. If they have another reason for doing it, any one of their shareholders can sue them and they will win that lawsuit. It is called wasting corporate assets. It is against the law in this country for a corporation to turn itself into a philanthropy. And if they’re caught doing it their board members will be punished and their shareholders can sue them.

We want corporations to be this way, to focus narrowly. We don’t want them to turn into philanthropies because nobody would invest in them. We want them to focus narrowly on shareholder value, BUT, we would be nuts to let them anywhere near our government because we designed them to plunder and that’s what they’re going to do to us if we let them run our country. That’s what they’re doing now. That’s why from the beginning of our national history, our greatest political leaders, Republicans and Democrats, have been warning Americans against the domination of corporate power.

Teddy Roosevelt, a Republican, said that America would never be destroyed by a foreign enemy, by an Osama bin Laden, but he warned that our Bill of Rights, our Constitution and our treasured democratic institutions would be subverted by malefactors of great wealth who would steal them from within.

Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, in his most famous speech ever warned Americans against a domination by the military industrial complex. Abraham Lincoln, the greatest Republican in history, said during the height of the Civil War in 1863, “I have the South in front of me and I have the bankers behind me and for my country I fear the bankers more.” Franklin Roosevelt, during World War II, said that the domination of government by corporate power is “the essence of Fascism.” Benito Mussolini, who had an insider’s view of that process, said essentially the same thing. He complained that Fascism should not be called Fascism; it should be called Corporatism because it was the merger of state and corporate power.

What we have to understand in this country is that the domination of business by government is called Communism and the domination of government by business is called Fascism.

Our job is to walk that narrow trail between free market capitalism and democracy, holding big-government at bay with our right hand and big-business at bay with our left. And in order to do that we need an informed public that is able to recognize all the milestones of tyranny. To do that we need an aggressive and independent press that is willing to stand up and speak truth to power, and we no longer have that in the United States of America.

RFK, Jr.

Click to download the full PDF

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We are attracted to experiences that feel good and turn away from those that hurt, pleasure and pain. Both are driven by millions of years of natural intelligence.

Affectionate touch, eyes that assure care and trust, warm cuddling, the life giving sensation of mother’s breast, being held when frightened, all the experiences we call nurturing involve pleasure. Like a beautiful flower, delicate and radiating, the female body percolates with pleasurable possibilities. Life’s continuity depends on pleasure. See Sex At Dawn.

Puberty transforms pleasure into reproductive sexuality, still deeply rooted in nurturing, but with a twist. The game changes. Clearly the enchantment of female pleasure is something few males can resist, which is, after all, nature’s intelligent design.

Being the source of pleasure the value and importance of the female body’s pleasure potential increases, at least in the often sensory deprived male imagination. Anything that valuable, like gold, becomes a commodity to be possessed and controlled. Doing so brings social power. The stakes are indeed high.

Anything that brings pleasure, whether it is substances or sex - individuals, governments and political-religious organizations step up to the gaming table and play their controlling hand. They make up rules, pass laws, boast of divine revelation, and have for centuries to possess and control - pleasure.

It is well know, to control one’s currency is to control its people, and controlling pleasure, in this regard, is worth its weight on gold. Ask the Mafia, similar in the way it profits from pleasure as the church and governments. No? Just glance at the 300 year Catholic Spanish Inquisition with its witch hunts and how many of its torturous techniques were sadistic sexual pervasions.

One of the easiest ways to control the enchantment and political power of pleasure, and therefore entire populations, is to reduce its potency. Locate the most sensitive pleasure producing tissues and remove it, claiming of course that an old bearded man seated on his cloud throne demanded so. Do this over and over and like any Big Lie (referring to Joseph Goebbels’s the German Reich Minister of Propaganda famous remark), becomes the truth.

Like Shakespeare’s ‘rose’ a lie, be it by the church, the government, Fox or the Wall Street Journal, is still a lie. It is well documented. Female and male circumcision was invented to reduce and therefore control pleasure and this unnatural and completely unnecessary procedure is forced. Like hooded prisoners at Guantanamo or the Inquisition, young girls and boys by the millions are held down by force, their legs spread and the most sensitive tissues, that nature evolved over millions of years is cut off, in most cases inflecting unbearable pain.

James W. Prescott, PhD, argues that circumcision, female and male, is a form or torture, illegal, demanding equal protection under 14th Amendment of the United States Constitution. Jim cites The General Assembly of the United Nations on December 10, 1948 that adopted and proclaimed the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, specifically Article 5: "No one shall be subjected to torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.”

Jim’s position is clear and lucid as the arguments raised by Joseph Chilton Pearce in The Death of Religion and Rebirth of Spirit, and by Sam Harris in End of Faith, both startling analyses of the clash of faith and reason in the modern world.

Pleasure is not nearly as demonic as is the behavior of those who seek power by controlling and profiting from it.

See more…

Michael Mendizza

“The addict’s reliance on the drug to reawaken her dulled feelings is no adolescent caprice.
The dullness is itself the consequence of an emotional malfunction not of her making.”

Gabor Mate, MD, Author,
In the Realm of Hungry Ghosts, Close Encounters with Addiction

More on Pleasure, Pain and the Developing Brain

The development of each new human being involves the complete evolutionary process of life on the planet. Native traditions recognize and honor this fact. Western civilization, driven by an anti-feminine passion for male intellect does not, thus the classic mind-body split. One self-world view nurtures the deep ecology that we are, the other attempts to dominate and control nature, including our own.

In each of us is the entire process of creation, what Joseph Chilton Pearce calls Evolution’s End. Each stage of development anticipates the past and creates the necessary foundation for the next unknowable leap forward to unfold. The developing fetus in the liquid world of the womb, for example, has no use for lungs and yet creates lungs anticipating an oxygenated environment it ‘knows’ nothing about. The entire spectrum of human development implies this unfolding anticipation and unknowable expectation.

For my sons, Memorial Day 2011

God Bless America blared from the flag waving Harley as boy scouts, soon to be men, marched between white lines. Memorial Day, a national glance inward to mourn the lives mangled and lost ‘serving’ freedom and civic liberty. I almost wept, not out of patriotic duty and honor but for the deep feeling of shame and betrayal that this and past pageants endure.

While I honor the ultimate sacrifice brothers and sisters have made through the ages, some urgent, some heroic and necessary, so many lives, however, have been mangled for reasons – that had they known – they would have wept too.

Responding to Touch the Future and National Institute for PLAY’s important PLAY SCIENCE DVD:

Creative play is the foundation for social-political freedom and liberty which is not possible when abnormal brain development is induces by a failure of affcctional bonding in the maternal-infant –child relationship.

Depression, stereotypical rocking behaviors and compulsive stimulus-seeking behaviors, all produced by sensory deprivation to the developing brain that is induced by failed maternal-infant/child affectional bonding, robs the developing offspring of the capacity to engage in touching and body movement that is essential for creative/spontaneous play; and to later development of behaviors associated with personal freedom and liberty.

Violence, particularly child abuse, is another destructive consequence of these early life experiences that prevents the development of creative/spontaneous play, which is the foundation for social-political freedom and liberty.

Figure 1, a photo montage, illustrates the pathological emotional behaviors induced by early
deprivation of physical affection. Figure

2 illustrates the avoidance of physical contact with other animals and humans in mother-deprived monkeys; and positive affectional behaviors in monkeys reared with their mothers.

Table 1 presents how our Two Cultural Brains are formedby Pain and Pleasure, which determines the kind of Culture we become.

Explore the full essay

OPEN LETTER TO FIRST LADY MICHELLE OBAMA

ON THE HIGH RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN IMPAIRED BREASTFEEDING BONDING AND INFANT MORTALITY NOT ACKNOWLEDGED BY THE SURGEON GENERALʼS CALL TO ACTON TO SUPPORT BREASTFEEDING 2011; CALLS FOR WEANING AGE OF EVERY INFANT/ CHILD BE RECORDED AND PUBLISHED AS PART OF THE IMMUNOLOGICAL RECORD BY THE NATIONAL CENTER FOR HEALTH STATISTICS, CENTER FOR DISEASE CONTROL AND PREVENTION; AND ESTABLISH BY LAW THE GENDER EQUALITY OF REPRESENTATION IN THE CONGRESS.

The excess health risks associated with not breastfeeding are well known and acknowledged by The Surgeon Generalʼs Call to Acton to Support Breastfeeding 2011 but the psychosocial effects are little mentioned except to note the enhanced feeling of bonding by breastfeeding with no mention of its powerful relationship to infant mortality (p.3). Child Obesity, not mentioned, is a lesser health risk than infant/child mortality.

http://www.surgeongeneral.gov/topics/breastfeeding/calltoactiontosupportbreastfeeding.pdf
http://www.violence.de/prescott/letters/IM_BF_Homicide_Stats_Update_2010.html

The 2010 AAP Policy Statement: Child Fatality Review. Pediatrics 2010; 126; 592-596
http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/reprint/126/3/592.pdf states:

The preventable death of a child is an unparalleled tragedy for a family. Similarly, a nationʼs ability to reduce child mortality rates is a measure of that society’s overall well being, and failure to address preventable causes of child mortality is a national tragedy. Each year in the United States, more than 17 000 infants and children die from injury, which remains the leading cause of child mortality in the United States.1 Add to this the number of preventable noninjury deaths, including many deaths related to prematurity, and it becomes clear that a majority of American child deaths are preventable.

Introduction

This author has initiated a dialogue on this AAP Policy Statement that can be found In Pediatrics Online. http://pediatrics.aappublications.org/cgi/eletters/126/3/592

Breastfeeding Mothers are rarely violent toward their nursing infants and children which points to a solution for preventing the high infant mortality rate and its relationship to homicide.
http://www.violence.de/prescott/letters/IM_BF_Homicide_Stats.pdf

This writer wrote DHHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius on 27 January 2011, which outlined these facts with additional supporting evidence but have received no acknowledgement of this and other communications.
http://www.violence.de/prescott/letters/Lt_Sebelius_DHHS_1.27.11.pdf

Additional Commentary and Letter of 22 February 2011 to First Lady Obama HERE.

"There is a good principle that created order, light and man; and a
bad principle that created chaos, darkness and woman."
Pythagoras (circa 582-507 B.C.)

(In Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1949/2009).
Gender Inequality has existed ever since human history has been written. Pythagoras has given a moral definition of being male and female that has set humanity and its civilizations on a collision course with the extinction of Homo sapiens. No species on this planet is as violent toward its females and her offspring than Homo sapiens.

There is not a theistic religion on this planet that has affirmed the full equality of the feminine with the masculine, which has set in stone the perpetration of violence against women and her children. Prescott (1989,1995ab) has reviewed this history in essays:

Genital Pain vs. Genital Pleasure: Why The One and Not The Other? “Violence Against Women: Philosophical and Religious Foundations of Gender Morality”; “OPINION: The challenge: achieve gender equality”; and “A Proposed “Bodily Sovereignty” Amendment To The U.S. Constitution”.

http://www.violence.de/prescott/truthseeker/genpl.html
http://www.violence.de/prescott/women/article.html
http://www.violence.de/prescott/letters/Gender.pdf
http://www.violence.de/prescott/letters/Bodily_Sovereignty_Amendment.pdf

Simone de Beauvoirʼs The Second Sex originally published in France (1949) and recently reprinted in a new translation by Alfred A. Knopf (2009) is considered the authoritative translation of her work and the leading intellectual document of the feminist cultural movement. It is the foundation for restoring full equality between man and woman that was lost with the passing of the hunter-gathers some 8,000-10,000 years ago.

A few quotations The Second Sex:

“What is a woman?” (p.5).

“The female is female by virtue of a certain lack of qualities”, Aristotle said. “We should regard women’s nature as suffering from natural defectiveness.” And Saint Thomas in his turn decreed that woman was an “incomplete man,” an “incidental” being” (p.5).

“Humanity is male, and man defines woman not in herself, but in relation to himself; she is not considered an autonomous being. (p.5).

“He is the Subject, he is the Absolute. She is the Other.3 “ (p.6)

“Why do women not contest male sovereignty?” (p.7)

Additional commentary HERE.