There are a few things feminists believe in; the most important among them that they're champions of equality (actual equality itself far less so). However, recently I stumbled over a pretty interesting article about another feminist shtick - the idea that in the days gone by, there was a glorious past age where everybody lived in harmony with everybody, which was presided over by wise and benevolent matriarchs.

Now one feminist who felt indebted to the scientific method, Cynthia Eller, poked holes into the construct of that mythical feminist past and ultimately rejected it due to its dubious veracity, not without writing her extensive take on it entitled " The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory. Why an Invented Past Won't Give Women a Future". Here is an excerpt of said book.

What I considered interesting about her take is less the idea of a matriarchal past itself, but more what actually holding and promoting that idea tells us about feminism.

  1. First of all, the article flies in the face of those people who are still cocksure that feminism has originally been about equality and it's only the fault of some fringe radfems like Andrea Dworkin and braindead 3rd wave tumblrinas that it's equated with the idea of female superiority and the strive for female supremacy - because what these second wavers (and influential key figures of the feminist movement, like Gloria Steinem, no less) reminisce about is a mythological age where women ruled supreme, were revered as goddesses, while men toiled away at the periphery, living their lives to serve women. Apart from that, the feminist idea of the future is one that is about " women either recovering their past ascendancy, or at last establishing a truly egalitarian society under the aegis of the goddess." I.e. male supremacy is dismissed as destructive and dysfunctional, but female supremacy is still seen as desirable, and even equality only tolerable under the auspices of a female-defined social order - in other words, not actually equality, which feminism never really was about despite all claims to the contrary.
  2. As she outright says it herself, the whole thing is a revenge fantasy without factual value; but at the same time she defends the idea of a feminist mythology with the reasoning that a myth doesn't have to be true to be powerful, and compares it to the similarly fantastic myths of ancient religions. Apart from the fact that scientologists defend the Xenu-myth with a similar line of reasoning ("Christians also believe in the virginal birth of Jesus Christ") I think it's actually pretty ironic that she claims insignia for feminism which are actually more befitting to a religion.
  3. Ultimately, that feminists defended and actually believed that myth at the end of the 20th century (and in not too few cases still today) does not only put their devotion to the ideal of equality into doubt (see #1), but also their capacity for logic and reasoning: because believing that it took the species of the homo sapiens dozens of millenia to figure out that sex leads to pregnancy (and that kids tend to look like the guy the mother had sex with in the weeks before her menstruation stopped) is tantamount to believing that everyone was functionally retarded until 5000 years ago.

Thoughts?