Miscellaneous

Riane Eisler Quote of the Week

By Fannie

"Insects...have bodies that are imprisoned in hard outer skeletons, or shells. Their minds too are imprisoned, in miniscule brains with little room for the memory storage or the complex information processing that is the basis of learning. Therefore a social organization in which each member fulfills a narrowly circumscribed and predetermined role and the sexes are completely specialized is appropriate for social insects like bees or ants....

By contrast, humans are the life forms with the most flexible and least specialized physical structures. Both women and men have the erect posture that frees our hands to make and use tools. Both sexes have the highly evolved brains, with the immense memory storage and extraordinary information processing capacity, that make us as flexible, as versatile- in short, as human- as we are.

Thus, although a rigidly hierarchical social structure like andocracy [patriarchy], which imprisons both halves of humanity in inflexible and circumscribed roles, is quite appropriate for species of very limited capacity like social insects, it is truly inappropriate for humans." (172-173)

Tell that to those peddlers and enforcers of the gender complementarity myth.

Full post as published by Fannie's Room on April 16, 2010 (boomark / email).