In this judge Roy Moore thing, in Harvey Weinstein, in Steven Seagal, Kevin Spacey, all these things, are we seeing the end of three thousand years of patriarchy?

This is a notion that was put into religious law 3,000 years ago, arguably longer than that - some believe the Bible was written 6,000 years ago - but a broad consensus is the Old Testament around 3,000, the New Testament around 2,000.

And in that document essentially women were defined as the property of men - as chattel.

And this continued for literally all these thousands of years. In fact, I'm guessing you could have found this kind of thing in the Epic of Gilgamesh from 7,000 years ago.

Now, in tribal societies there are different roles for the two genders, and frankly in most tribal societies there's a role of great honor for people who are gay or trans, but there's not an absolute sense of this is the superior this is the inferior.

I wrote about this at some length in The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight and it's not new and it's not a secret.

The whole idea of patriarchy - the idea of defining women and girls as simply property - is deeply embedded in our culture. And it's thousands of years old and it has been one of the most destructive pieces of our culture ever.

In fact, I think that I could build a case that the reason the world is melting down, the reason we have conflicts all over the world, the reason we're having territorial wars, the reason we're having wars over water, the reason that we're having wars over resources, all of these things are the result - in my opinion - of the oppression of women.

Why is that? Wait a minute, how do you draw a straight line from that?

-Thom


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