The objectification of women happened at the dawn of patriarchy
There is a common belief that viewing porn conditions men to objectify women, turning them into emotionless sex objects. This is a fallacy. The objectification of women happened at the dawn of patriarchy. This conditioning has been handed down from one generation to another via epigenetic inheritance.
The formation of patriarchy
As I wrote in What is ancestral trauma?, all of today’s key issues, including the destruction of the environment, misogyny, anxiety, and sexual issues such as porn addiction, stem from age-old traumas that occurred during the formation of patriarchy.
The sequence of events was as follows:
- Climate change, leading to…
- ‘Mega-droughts’, leading to…
- Desertification (spread of desert), leading to…
- Insufficient food and water sources, leading to…
- Famine, leading to…
- Breakdown of social and emotional structures, leading to…
- The rise of toxic masculinity (to fight for food) AND
- Breakdown of the mother-child bond, leading to…
- Separation from/sexualisation of the breast, leading to…
- Emotional pain surrounding all things feminine, leading to…
- Denigration/objectification/traumatization of the feminine, leading to…
- The establishment of masculine, abstract, idealistic, left-brain hemispheric dominance, leading to…
- Rise of patriarchy to reflect the new emotional reality of toxic masculinity AND denigrated/objectified/traumatized femininity
The end result is an invisible psychological paradigm that I call the Patriarchal Operating System.
Geographer James DeMeo writes in Saharasia that this happened between the late Stone Age (c. 4000 BC) and the end of the Iron Age (c. 500 BC in the Near East) in the equatorial belt stretching from North Africa across to Central Asia. Patriarchal cultures then diffused in a gradual process of world domination.
DeMeo writes that as famine bit, “The very old and young were abandoned to die. Brothers stole food from sisters, and husbands left wives and babies to fend for themselves. While the maternal-infant bond endured the longest, eventually mothers abandoned their weakened infants and children.” In cases of extreme starvation, parents even resorted to eating their own children.
Subjective to objective
Physical abandonment required emotional abandonment. To abandon—or even eat—one’s own children requires a complete shutdown of the emotions to handle the trauma, i.e. a total shutdown of the feminine aspect of being.
This was achieved by repressing all emotions, transforming the feminine from subjective (personal and emotive) to objective (depersonalised and emotionless).
This was achieved by repressing all emotions, transforming the feminine from subjective (personal and emotive) to objective (depersonalised and emotionless).
This involved shifting the centre of our awareness from balanced left/right brain to abstract, left-brain hemispheric dominance. The left brain, detached from all feeling, perceives everything as objects—including itself.
The objectification of women has continued ever since.
As practical photography developed in the second half of the 19th century, it wasn’t long before porn images appeared. Technology had simply caught up with what had been percolating in the male collective unconscious for six millennia and externalised it in sexualized images of women.
When men are attracted to porn, in the sexualised images of women they’re simply seeing a reflection of the ancient conditioning lying in the gutter of their psyche, in the collective male unconscious. Because of the universal principle of ‘like attracts like’, the sexualised images resonate with the damaged DNA and—bingo—another man is hooked on porn.
I don’t say this to defend porn, but to get at the truth of what’s truly happening when viewing it. Only by understanding the truth can we devise therapies to liberate men from porn—and, crucially—from the underlying objectification of the feminine.
Photo by Ian Dooley on Unsplash