Patriarchy – Page 2 – Feminism and Religion

Patriarchy, Thy Name is Cruelty by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Andrew Young famously said that ‘anything is legal if 100 businessmen decide to do it.” I would add a more modern take. Nothing is too low, too immoral, too illegal if 5 or 6 Supreme Court justices decide to allow it.

Their recent decisions could fill a book on how corrupt they are. (I’ve discussed this before. But this post is looking at immigration and the cruelty that this administration is fomenting. We have always been a cruel nation. Patriarchy has honed cruelty as its worked to crush women’s bodies while silencing women. How else would women have agreed to our loss of power? Carol Christ has written eloquently about this. Immigration policy has blown the lid off this pot. Perhaps because it is too new, too shocking. Because ICE is in our faces with agents flooding neighborhoods and engaging in unfettered cruelty.

For example, when ICE raided an apartment building in the Bronx on Feb 24th, they arrested 19 year old Merwil Gutiérrez. When they realized they had the wrong person, their response was “take him anyway.” Read that again, “take him anyway.”

Merwil Gutiérrez was then deported to the notorious prison CECOT in El Salvador. For months, his family couldn’t find him. He was eventually sent to his native Venezuela.

The ‘Current’ of Patriarchy: Feminization of Rivers in Indian Mythology by Dhruv Kabra

The Ganga, Yamuna, Saraswati, Kaveri, and Godavari are all goddesses. In contrast, the mountains- Meru, Kailasa, Himalaya are male gods or their celestial abodes. Perhaps this is not just a coincidence but a deliberate gendered imagination that reveals how patriarchal structures flow through the very geography of the sacred.

Indian rivers are predominantly personified as women, with the lone masculine river, Brahmaputra serving as a subversive exception that divulges the somewhat gendered logic of sacred geography.

The Containment of Divine Power

Ganga, the most revered river goddess in India, is born in the heavens, but her descent to earth is mediated by Shiva. His matted locks absorb her torrent, lest her power shatter the earth. Ganga’s sacredness is based on her containment. Feminine energy is revered, but only if domesticated by a male god.

Pasang Lhamu Sherpa: The Fearless Sherpa Lady Who Conquered Everest and Shattered Patriarchy by Bikash Khanal

Introduction: Beyond Being a Mountaineer a Feminist Icon of the Himalayas

When we hear the name Mount Everest, the world’s highest mountain, we involuntarily think of rugged, macho explorers battling ice and thin air. Pasang Lhamu Sherpa’s existence defies that stereotype. Not only was she the first Nepali lady to reach the summit of Everest, but she was a living testament to feminine strength, determination, and will. Her life is a stirring affidavit to feminism in its very extreme forms, where gender discrimination is as hard to overcome as the mountains themselves.

Early Life: A Sherpa Girl Raised Among Giants Dreams beyond Tradition

Born in 1961, in the high-altitude town of Lukla, Pasang Lhamu Sherpa was brought up in the shadow of the Himalayas, under a centuries-long patriarchy-dominated culture. Sherpa women had assumed support roles—cooks, caregivers, assistants to climbing expeditions—while the men assumed the risky climbs.

But ever since childhood, Pasang was captivated by the mountains, her aspirations reaching as high as the mountains themselves. Defying cultural expectations that she seek domesticity, Pasang applied herself diligently and acquired competence which would make her a trailblazer in the years ahead.

The Erotic as Power, Notes on Audre Lorde by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I’ve long kept a tract of Audre Lorde’s seminal piece The Uses of the Erotic near my computer. “The Erotic as Power” is her subtitle. If you haven’t read it, please do. It is in her book Sister Outsider. And you can find it as a stand-alone here. It was written in 1978.

Lorde points out how the erotic is the opposite of pornography, in fact pornography is ultimately a denial of the erotic because it emphasizes sensation without feeling. “The erotic is a resource within each of us that lies in a deeply female and spiritual plane . . .” She goes on to note how it is through our bodies that we recognize and access this power. But she goes on, “We have been taught to suspect this resource, vilified, abused and devalued within Western society.” In the hands of patriarchy this amazing and important resource often lies out of reach because it has become a source of shame and a sense of inferiority for women.[1]

I would add to the definition of patriarchy that one of its main goals is to damp down, even destroy, the erotic. We have seen this play out over thousands of years of history. Women are often viewed as either saints or sinners. Saints are denuded of this deep earthy power and sinners are those who flaunt it, or at least in the eyes of patriarchy.

#ShareTheirStories, June 2025 Edition

Photo from Amnesty International. For more information and to support his petition click here.

This is a project that FAR has started to share the stories of immigrants who are targeted by the US administration. It is our belief that when people are recognized as human beings, it is harder to dehumanize them and to take away their civil rights. We are facing a devastating situation where in the United States people are being “disappeared” without any recourse to the legal system. The viciousness of what is happening is growing. Some of those arrested have been released but it is a small drop in the bucket of the flood of arrestees, most not even receiving a day in court and some caught in legal mazes that show no sign of ending.

Take Mahmoud Khalil, whom we have already discussed. He was arrested in March due to his outspoken Pro-Palestinian views. In May, U.S. District Judge Michael Farbiarz in New Jersey ruled that Secretary of State Marco Rubio likely violated the Constitution when he stripped Mahmoud Khalil of his green card and ordered him deported. Even so the Judge declined to release him because he has not proven “irreparable harm” caused by his detention. I think an elementary school child can even understand the irreparable harm one suffers by being detained, esp. in Trump prisons that are designed for harshness. And to add to it, Khalil is a new father who only got to hold his son while in prison after a flurry of lawsuits.

Did We Ask for a King? by Esther Nelson

Northrop Frye (1912-1991), a Canadian literary critic, is probably best known for his book THE GREAT CODE: THE BIBLE AND LITERATURE (1983). In it, he demonstrates how the Bible is foundational for our understanding of Western literature, a body of work replete with Biblical allusions.

Today, most of us are not familiar enough with the Bible to appreciate where many literary themes take root. We fail to see how its stories—gathered over centuries—relate to us. Not only does Western literature mine from Biblical text, our lives as we experience them mirror much of Biblical story and narrative.

I was raised on the Protestant Bible. To this day, I experience the world through Biblical story. There is nothing sacrosanct (to me) about the familiar text. The Bible is not unique.

On Terumah: (Eco)Feminist Reflections on the Tent of Meeting.

The Torah portion for March 1, 2025 is Terumah, consisting of Exodus 25:1-27:19. Terumah in Hebrew means contribution, and the parshah begins with the deity requesting donations from the willing hearts of men (yes, only men) of precious metals and stones as well as dyes, linens, wools, and skins. Terumah then provides the instructions for how to build the Tent of Meeting and all of its components. In this post, I want to focus on four aspects of the post from the perspective of ecofeminism and feminism: beauty; the misuse of nature, the concept of home, and the indwelling or immanence of the divine.

Broken Human Bonds by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

Author’s Note: I originally wrote this in the fall when Andrea Robin Skinner started going public with her own story. It has taken me a while to contemplate posting it. It feels like this is such a common story that it needs to be shared. We all need to know that we are not alone and that each of us is lovable.

Whenever I hit a personal and/or emotionally raw topic, my first instinct is to turn to Tarot cards to see what lessons I need to learn. I use Rachel Pollack’s Shining Tribe deck (more on that later). I have been finding myself in this situation recently with the revelations of Andrea Robin Skinner, daughter of the renowned Nobel Prize winning writer Alice Munro. Andea waited until her mother died before she revealed publicly that her step-father began sexually abusing her when she was nine years old. When she had told her mother about it, Munro blamed Andrea for damaging her marriage. The stepfather at issue publicly called Skinner even though a child at the time, a “homewrecker.” He did this in a letter which included death threats. Abuse, blame, threats tools of patriarchy all. Skinner’s own mother didn’t seek to protect daughter but chose instead to shield the abuser. A betrayal of the most primal sort!

Re-claiming Friday the 13th and Other Tidbits by Janet Maika’i Rudolph

I am struck by how language affects our thoughts, values and even our actions. One standout for me is Friday the 13^thwhich is a day accused of being cursed and holding bad luck in modern beliefs. There is even a series of horror films created in the date’s honor. But why has this date been declared so negative? Like so much, the answer is that it is a suppression of women and our strength. Although I have heard different explanations for its meaning, my favorite is this; there are 13 moons in a solar year. That means that a woman will menstruate 13 times in that solar year. Thirteen is a symbol of women’s power. And Friday? Friday is the only day of the week named for a Goddess. In English it is Freya’s day named in honor of the Norse Goddess of love. In Spanish it is viernes, in French vendredi, both named for Freya’s counterpart Venus. I present to you that this makes it an extremely powerful day. Perhaps a horror for misogynists but for we women a day to celebrate.

I have also been thinking about the roots of the word “history” – his story. Many in feminist communities, including here at FAR, counter it with “herstory” – her story. But truly our past is not broken up into genders for the arc of the past affects us all, perhaps differently but all of us nevertheless. We all breathe the same air, live under a culture’s laws, etc. … Here are some names I have been playing around with as replacements: Ancestorstory. Ourstory. Hustory.

Resistance Checklist: Do It Loud. Do It Quiet by Karen Tate

Despite what you’re hearing out there, because it’s outdated information just being repeated in the echo chamber, Trump did not win by a landslide. He has no legitimate mandate. As of this writing one percentage point of the population separates how many votes each candidate got in this election and counting has not finished.

Many of us might still be recovering from the election disappointment and we’re trying to find our way forward. Consider this:

“Many of us have been brought up on stories of praying to God the Father to save us, waiting for our prince to come, submitting to the greater wisdom of our husband or priest to guide us. We need to move from this way of being, into our own agency. But we must also recognise that we cannot do it all, nor do it alone, in the martyr mother myth so many of us have learned to embody.
This is not the time for being nice, biting our tongues or not rocking the boat. And yet these are also not times for making enemies or picking fights. Can we find other ways of engaging and challenging, visioning and contributing to transformation? What might these look like?” From Weaving Our Way Beyond Patriarchy – a compendium of over 80 women’s voices, launching today exclusively from Womancraft Publishing. com