According to the United Nations, Human rights are universal and inalienable.
They are universal because everyone is born with and possesses the same rights, regardless of where they live, their gender or race, or their religious, cultural, or ethnic background, and they are inalienable because people’s rights can never be taken away.
All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.
You can’t give someone rights, you can only withhold their rights or stop withholding their rights. That’s the difference between a right and a privilege.
According to the bible, however, such equality does not (and should not) exist.
A source of control, the purpose of organised, monotheistic religion is to uphold division between people, and no more evident is this than in the division we see between men and women…
We live in a society that is governed by the patriarchy, where women, even in the 21st century are, in many ways, still considered ‘lesser than’ their male counterparts.
What do we call God?
‘Father.’
Our Father, who art in heaven, hallowed by thy name.
We’re told that a man, ‘God’, ‘Father’, is responsible for creating everything.
‘God made the earth in seven days.’
What do we call earth, however?
‘Mother.’
Mother Earth.
Like in a game of chess where the king always trumps the queen, the father always trumps the mother.
Man always trumps woman.
Man always trumps earth.
And God said, Let us make man in our image, after our likeness: and let them have dominion over the fish of the sea, and over the fowl of the air, and over the cattle, and over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth.
– Genesis 1:26–28.
It is through corruption and greed that the earth is warming at an unprecedented rate.
It is because of man that the planet is dying.
Even what is hailed as being one of the most romantic/magical things in life, marriage, was founded on a need for men to control women.
Walking down the aisle, a woman’s father is traditionally the person to ‘give her away’, as though by virtue of being a woman she belongs to a man, ‘because how could she possibly survive on her own?’
Why are women defined by the men they know (daughter of their father, wife of their husband, mother of their sons), and not as human in their own right?
First, the property of her father, and then the property of her husband, such inequality between men and women is stark and prevalent throughout every aspect of society, from marriage, as above (marriage was literally a property transfer from father to husband), to work, where the median pay gap in the UK, as of 2024 is 1.2%.*
*And while this is considerably better than could be seen in prior years, (even just last year, for example, the pay gap sat at a far more oppressive 6%), the fact that there is a gap at all, however small, highlights the view of women in society, still, as being ‘lesser than’…
‘All animals are equal but some animals are more equal than others.’
Alas, religion facilitates the continued subordination of both the earth and women in its depiction of man as the ‘creator.’
And from the rib that the Lord had taken from the man, he made a woman and brought her to him.
– Genesis 2:22.
Unlike spirituality which seeks to understand the bigger picture, zooming out on the micro to understand the macro, the realisation that we are all one, our differences illusory, (man, woman, HUMAN), organised religion operates under the same principle as society, fearmongering to force compliance.
Ignoring the macro, we believe that a man in the sky is looking down on us and judging us for who we happen to fall in love with, when the reality, first of all, is that ‘God’ is not a man, (and how egotistical of us to think that a human, just like us, could be), and that where we are all one, gender is but a construct anyway…
We don’t fall in love with a man or a woman, but with a human.
When gender is a construct then, there can be no hierarchal order between men and women, yet there overwhelmingly…
is.
Why?
Because, again, we focus too much on the micro.
Having been blindsided to the macro, we think that the same man-made rules of society (men=superior to women) also govern the creation of life.
We align ourselves with this theory, despite it making no rational sense (how could a woman have been made from a man’s rib is the primary question that I have on my mind right now), because the alternative is to accept that there are just some things that exist too far beyond human comprehension…
And with a fear of the unknown, we’d rather believe a lie than seek to find the truth.
We’d rather uphold the continued oppression of women than demand change.
Like telling us ‘You only have that car because I haven’t stolen it’, men tell us that we should be grateful for what (little) we have when the reality is that we are all entitled to human rights simply by virtue of being human.
Men don’t deserve a medal because they took our rights away and then allowed us to have them back. To suggest that they do is like suggesting that slave owners should’ve been rewarded for allowing their slaves freedom.
‘White people freed black people from slavery.’
Ahem… Who was enslaving said black people in the first place?…
They wouldn’t have needed freeing if they weren’t enslaved to begin with, and the same is true of women and voting, for example.
Women were not born without a right to vote, men took it away from us to claim all the power for themselves.
Full of life, just like yourself, with hopes and dreams and goals, vulnerabilities and shortcomings and feelings, a history and an existence that parallels your own, I want women to be the subject, not the object.
– Jill Soloway.
Why are men so desperate to have power?
(Wo)man was not created by god, or for god. Woman created god.
The irony is that men only have lives, let alone rights, because women allow them to, (in a very literal sense), yet still women are deemed to be ‘lesser than’, despite the fact that every woman made every man…
(Unless you subscribe to the bible’s version, whereby man supposedly made woman by… a rib? A belief that, as of 2022, 31.6 percent of the global population still believe).
It’s unsurprising that we have such a skewed view toward women and their position in society when the most widely practiced religion in the world, Christianity, centres its teachings on the fact that women are ‘below’ men.
A woman’s purpose in life, according to the bible?
To please men.
The Lord said, it is not good for the man to be alone. I will make a helper suitable for him.
– GENESIS 2:18–20.
Never the main character, a woman’s sole purpose in life is seemingly to assist men, as per the assumption that it is a man’s natural state to be in power, and a woman’s to be the subordinate.
Men=Dominant,
Women=Submissive.
If women are naturally submissive though, as we are told they are, then men wouldn’t spend so much time telling them that they need to be [submissive]…
Despite society becoming increasingly secular, particularly in the West where in 2018, for example, just over a third of people in the UK identified as Christian, compared with two-thirds 25 years earlier in 1983, people have swapped worshipping ‘God’ for worshipping celebrities, thus allowing the oppression of women to continue.
Whether it be watching YouTube videos and hearing from the likes of self-proclaimed misogynist, Andrew Tate, at a darts venue clapping for the walk-on girls, or at a gallery observing all the nude paintings of women by male artists (always the creation, never the creator. Male artist, female muse), the patriarchy is upheld, even when the influence of religion is dwindling, throughout every aspect of society.
Covert or overt, it is there, and it is for this reason that it’s important to keep men ‘on our side.’
Radical, separatist feminism, which dubs all men as ‘the enemy’, does little to incentivise men to stand with women to call for change.
The fact is that we cannot swap misogyny for misandry and call it equality, any more than we can swap religion for capitalism and call it freedom.
When the patriarchy is so ingrained in society, when men are still taken more seriously than women, and few things bring them [men] closer together than the violence they commit against women, it is only through us all coming together, men, women, and everything in between, to educate each other, that we will see real systemic change happening in society.
This is the call for change.
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