Other countries have men and women with the same hormones and yet they don’t have the same statistics. Try again…….
Also, newborn baby boys and girls have identical brains. It’s only when you add in socialization and eventually, hormones, that you get any differences at all. And even then, the differences between individual humans is vastly greater than the intrinsic binary differences between males and females. Hardly anything in the world is actually binary, as evidenced by the fact that 1 in every 2000 births is intersex.
Socialization begins in most families immediately — or even before the child has arrived, with “gender reveal” parties and pink and blue clothing. Even families who conscientiously avoid putting their children into gendered boxes cannot escape it because the whole rest of the world is geared that way. It’s one of the most harmful fundamentals of patriarchy — that to be a man you must look and be a certain way and to be a woman you must fit other boxes. To a very large extent, this is what homophobia is about — punishing and othering those who refuse to conform to a binary standard of sexuality.
Up until about 6–9 thousand years ago, the foundations of societies across the globe were based, not in warfare and domination, but in largely cooperative and egalitarian societies. They weren’t Utopian, but they did not have some of the traits that some people consider to be inherently masculine as a part of the fabric of everyday life.
We know that art, particularly religious or mythical art, reflects not only peoples’ attitudes but also their particular form of culture and social organization. The Goddess-centered art we have been examining (from the Paleolithic, Neolithic and early Chalcolithic eras), with its striking absence of images of male domination or warfare, seems to have reflected a social order in which women, first as heads of clans and priestesses and later on in other important roles, played a central part, and in which both men and women worked together in equal partnership for the common good. If there was here no glorification of wrathful male deities or rulers carrying thunderbolts or arms, or of great conquerors dragging abject slaves about in chains, it is not unreasonable to infer it was because there were no counterparts for those images in real life.10 And if the central religious image was a woman giving birth and not, as in our time, a man dying on a cross, it would not be unreasonable to infer that life and the love of life — rather than death and the fear of death — were dominant in society as well as art.
Eisler, Riane. The Chalice and the Blade . HarperOne. Kindle Edition.
