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This is Part 2 in a short series looking at the myth of women as inherent nurturers. You can read part one (free to everyone) here.
The myth of the Woman As Nurturer has been used to great effect across millennia to deny us liberation, equality and freedom while reducing our singular capacity to reproduction. In order to avoid acknowledge how men collude to annihilate women’s presence in the world, this insistence on our reproductive responsibilities has been cleverly framed as being “for our own good”.
How?
By insisting that we are born to do this. That without passing another human into the world, we will never know what it means to be happy or at peace within it.
But where did this really start? The theorising about it, I mean, not just the casual enforcement of it. Well, for that we have to go back to one of the worst moments in history. We think we have it bad now with male podcasters, but imagine a place where they roamed the streets. Where they gathered in cloistered open spaces, speaking to large crowds whose capacity to swallow absolute garbage knew no bounds. Imagine their ludicrous ramblings were collated in books, and then passed down for generations as revered treatises on the human condition and how it just is.
I am of course talking about Ancient Greece. The birthplace of philosophy, and the heralding of all the gobshite men who continue to waffle on about it today.
Sigh. Let’s wade in.
The Philosopher’s Bone: Dead White Men and the Blokes Who Love Them
I was chatting with my cousin recently about the entrenched belief that ‘western civilisation’ has been articulated and defined by a procession of cis white men, starting with the Greek philosophers. That these men were tightly gatekeeping the who of those allowed to articulate and define (or at least be remembered for it) is rarely taken into account; in general, when considering the cultural evolution of human history, it’s from a bunch of men that most people take their cues. When countering the garbage about women being *emotionally* called to populate the earth, we have to go all the way back to the navel gazing Greeks and their rampant misogyny.
Artistole (who, along with Socrates and Plato, are still referred to variously as ‘the fathers of philosophy’ or ‘the fathers of western civilisation’) is particularly popular with boyfolk. Gosh, do they go on about him! He wandered here, he wandered there, waxing lyrical about important subjects like logic, happiness and the human condition. Despite studying under Plato for twenty years, he ended up rejecting most of his former teacher’s theories and ideas - the kind of rebellion that no doubt adds to his appeal amongst sallow faced young men making their way through the world with copies of Camus’ The Stranger in their back pockets.
An endless number of breathlessly written odes to Aristotle’s genius have been written, with this one by John Sellers among the most recent.
The blurb on this book almost singlehandedly defines exactly why I hate men who love philosophy. Here it is, reproduced in its entirety, with emphasis added by me:
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