When Riane Eisler published her international bestseller
The Chalice and the Blade in 1987, it was hailed as a comprehensive
cultural history and a key to transforming human relations.
Eisler's insight, based on meticulous historical research
and analysis, is that there are two distinct models of relationships,
from our most intimate relationships to our international
relationships: the domination model and the
partnership model. She says:
If we look at human society using the templates of the
partnership and dominator models, we begin to see that in
all the seeming randomness around us there are actually
patterns. Take for example, three very different societies:
the Masai of Africa, Nazi Germany, and Khomeini's Iran --a
tribal society, a highly technologically developed Western
society, and a Middle Eastern theocracy.
Underneath all the surface differences, all three are rigidly
male dominant societies. Moreover, they are all highly warlike.
The Masai were the scourge of Africa --the most warlike
of African societies. The violence of Hitler's Germany and
Khomeini's Iran is well-known. But the institutionalized
violence is not only in warfare, but many other areas--wife
beating, genital mutilation of women among the Masai, the
brutality directed against women not only in Iran but many
other fundamentalist Muslim regimes. And in all three there
was strong-man rule, be it in the family or in the state.
And it was absolute, authoritarian rule. So in Iran the
Mullahs will tell you that they have the only direct telephone
line to God, and you had better listen to them--or else.
This dominator configuration of rigid male dominance, a
high degree of institutionalized violence, and strong-man
or authoritarian rule in both the family and state is discernible
in very different societies and groups. In the United States,
you see the same kind of configuration in the rightist-fundamentalist
alliance. "Get women back into their 'traditional'
(a code word for subservient) place." And a lot of
emphasis on "holy wars" and on strict obedience
to "divinely ordained" commands. But it isn't
only that war is holy in the religious sense in the dominator
model. The Nazis thought war was holy--because war is holy
in the dominator model. These patterns or configurations
compose what I then called the dominator or androcratic
and the partnership or gylanic models of society.
Each has a clear configuration. But we didn't see that configuration
because we weren't looking at a very key component in it,
which is the status of women and of so-called feminine values,
such as caring, nonviolence, and compassion. (and I would add all things of beauty) In other words,
at the relationship between the female and male halves of
humanity, and with this, between stereotypes of "masculinity"
and "femininity."
Close Discussion
