At the beginning of May, I posted an article about Roman Catholicism and the search for – and lack of – the divine female in mainstream modern religion. I had one rather intriguing response from a gent in the comments section:
“Whilst I appreciate scholarly findings about the greater role of women in antiquity in religion and society I don’t like this trawling for crumbs of comfort. I would not want to bother looking for evidence of black people in the Bible in order to justify my right to be equal. Finding snippets of info to make better the whole rotten construct of the patriarchal religion. Far better to find a religion where women are the centre and power of thing and then find snippets of where men fit in. Then again better still not to have a religion at all.”
Which is valid, of course, but I think that there are more than just crumbs to find. There’s a goddess-shaped gap in our society. The contemporary worship of (mortal) women at places like Club Pedestal is a shameful secret for many men. Any fetish for powerful women is dismissed as merely a sexual perversion that must be kept secret from friends, family and colleagues. I’m not a religious person, but I know how much influence patriarchal religion continues to have on every society in the modern world. No matter how much we collectively ignore it, we continue to be affected by its values, and I feel that we’re not being told the whole story.
You see, so much of what we’re taught about religion, politics and social history has been written, recorded or unearthed by men. Our perception of the past is tainted by the personal interpretations of its translators and editors. At best, historical texts and artwork are more ambiguous than we realise and the conclusions reached by our educators – whether religious or secular – aren’t always as objective as they claim to be. As a result, we can’t assume that we’ve been told all the information.
If many of my teachers were to be believed, the majority of women didn’t do much except tempt men, weave tapestries and plop out the occasional male heir until some time in the ‘seventies when we suddenly developed coherent thought and set fire to our bras. Even the scant information we’re given about the worship of female deities is treated as something fluffy and frivolous. Women who, in all likelihood, held positions of religious and social authority in the ancient world have been reduced to creatures as patchy and degraded as the relics they have left behind.
Many people see the ritual adoration of Dominatrices as a way of countering this imbalance, albeit in a small and sometimes misguided way – whether it’s through kneeling at her feet, giving pleasure, or offering up your own sweet agony or humiliation as a sacrifice. I’ve been trying to find a way to put this into words lately but the founders of fetish site “Woman Worship” have beat me to it. So, on that note, to find a far more succinct version of what I’ve been trying to express (and where I nicked the image below from) click this link.
