As American cities and the planet burn under fires of hate and plunder, I see no other way out but to call for a female revolt. We men have been at the wheel for eons and have brought the world to the brink. It’s time for women to take over, at least for now.
The idea of a female rebellion is not new. Greek playwright Aristophanes proposed such a radical solution in 411 BCE in “Lysistrata,” an account of one woman’s extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War by convincing the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands as a means of forcing the men to negotiate a peace. They play ends with the signing of a peace treaty amid plenty of painful erections.
In the late 19th century, American women revolted against male irresponsibility by mobilizing nearly 200 thousand into the Women’s Christian Temperance Union’s campaign to close the saloons and outlaw booze. The American family was under threat, and women had had enough.
A true woman is serene until her den is threatened, and then she fights like a lioness to defend it. Now is the time for real women to roar. — Washington Irving
Until very recently, I still harbored the illusion that the sexes could reconcile and return to the harmony and cooperation which reigned for thousands of years during our egalitarian life as hunter-gatherers. Now, I’m not so sure. The growing rise to power of male autocrats, cheered by legions of groveling ‘men’ who have lost their individual power is threatening the den of the world on a social and planetary scale.
These slavish legions of weak men, said Hannah Arendt in her Theory of Totalitarianism, are the product of a specific conjuncture. They constitute the detritus of all social strata which have lost their former social identity and emotional bearings as a result of abrupt political, geopolitical, and economic dislocation. They compose individuals who live on the periphery of all social and political involvements. Bereft of power, organizational affiliation, inexperienced in conventional politics, and lacking conviction, these men offer virgin territory for the totalitarian movements to harvest.
At the end of the First World War, British poet WB Yeats saw the writing on the wall and wrote this in ‘The Second Coming’:
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Twenty years after Yeats prophecy, men were back in the sandbox with their guns and bombs and plunged the world into another bloody episode of anarchy and carnage where 85 million people lost their lives.
Humanity may have left behind the days of world conflagrations but look closely and you’ll see spreading fires of unrest, discontent, strife and looming chaos, against the backdrop of planetary collapse. The Third Coming? I say it’s time for women to roar and save the den.
As for the men, American statesman Frederick Douglass’ once said that there are days when it seems most adult men are beyond repair, and from the look of it, I’m afraid he’s right, but I refuse to give up on the young. So, while women heed my call to revolt and take over the wheel, I will assume my rightful place as a male elder of the human tribe and help initiate the coming generation of men.
Besides an urgent preoccupation with the state of the world, my effort is a way to ‘pay-it forward’ on behalf of my father. Had not it been for his fortune, he would’ve been a Nazi, indoctrinated in a hateful ideology conceived by a man who felt small and powerless and who stoked the fire of racism and hate festering inside the vast majority of German men who shared his sense of despair after their country’s humiliating defeat in World War I.
The most dangerous man is not one with power but one who feels powerless. — Dr. Michael Gurian, author of ‘Saving our Sons’
The loss of power, social identity, and emotional bearings as a result of political, geopolitical, and economic dislocation which Hannah Arendt said were the underpinnings of male discontent, will only get worse. If we now have what many call a “boy crisis” on our hands, we’ll soon face a full-blown catastrophe if we don’t properly guide the young.
Besides helping boys become critical thinkers, teaching them how to harness the power of rage, and confront their innate biases so that natural prejudice doesn’t turn to racial violence, I begin my book with the universal story which gave origin to us all… before race, borders, nations, and diving ideological lines. “We’re all made of stardust,” said astronomer Carl Sagan.
It was not until the Agricultural Revolution, 14,000 years ago, that the distancing between the male and female worldview began to widen; between egalitarianism and male domination. A distancing which grew wider when men began to tell themselves stories to justify their ascendancy. By the time of the Mycenaean Bronze Age civilization, around 1600–1100 BCE, the rule of men was firmly established.
To make sense of this significant shift and it’s ruinous consequences, I take boys on a journey back in time…
Once we settled and built permanent houses, we had room to start accumulating and storing goods, mostly our grain crops and animals and began to worry about stuff. Forgetting how long we had lived and thrived from the land, we worried about whether we had enough food for the future. Before, if we didn’t find food in one place, we just moved. But now, we were stuck in place and depended more on the weather for our survival.
More food meant even more people, so populations began to explode. BOOM!
Larger cities were built to make room for growing populations. By the late 13th and early 14th centuries we started drawing lines on maps and calling them “borders,” which pretty much are imaginary divisions between skin colors, languages, or ways of looking at the world. They are like the outlines in children’s coloring books, yet children, as we all know, are masters at coloring outside the lines. We adults have much to learn from you kids.
Some people now had more than others, so fights broke out. We then started raiding other cities for their food and land. Battles broke out. Then all-out wars. BOOM! KABOOM!
Our growing brains were getting us in trouble. Our late cousins, the chimpanzees, must have been scratching their heads wondering what the heck was wrong with us.
People were not only fighting for food and territory; they also fought over ideas.
To explain this, I’ll tell you the story of two groups of people with very different ideas. It’s a true story, with some embellishments to make it easier to understand.
One group lived on an island called Crete, in ancient Greece, about 3000 years ago. They were the Minoans. I call them ‘Minnows,’ like little fish. The others lived in the mainland, two hundred miles from the Minnows. These were the Mycenaeans. I call them ‘Myce,’ like those furry beasties who scurry across kitchens making old ladies scream and jump on stools holding brooms.
The Myce had come from higher up the Eurasian continent. They were nomadic, which means they were always on the move. They herded cattle, which was their primary food source. They had also learned to tame wild horses. When their previous territory became cooler and drier because of climate change, they spread south and settled in Mycenae, two hundred miles from the Minnows.
Hunter-gatherers had first showed up in this area about twenty thousand years before. Over the next twelve thousand years, the sea level gradually rose, and large game animals were no longer available, so hunter-gatherer populations came to depend increasingly on plants for their survival and the problem became to develop a reliable supply. Girls were really good at this. After all, women in hunter-gatherer societies had developed the greatest knowledge of plants because they were the principal gatherers of this food. It has been estimated that men and women contributed about the same amount of food, in terms of calories, to early hunter-gatherer groups. This is starting to happen again, with both Moms and Dads working to provide for their families.
Archaeological evidence suggests that Minoan society was especially prosperous, peaceful, and happy. It was also a society in which women were as important as men. After all, they saved our butts when large animals became scarce. In the palaces of Knossos, the most important Minnow city in Crete, archaeologists found paintings on walls that show women holding high positions in Minnow society.
Meanwhile, over at Mycenae, the city of the Myce…
There, archaeologists uncovered a very different story, one of a warrior culture ruled by powerful commanders who made themselves rich by conducting raiding expeditions near and far, as well as by exploiting local farmers.
The main differences between the Myce and the Minnows were:
- They spoke different languages.
- Minnows were far more artistic.
- The Myce made burnt offerings to their gods; the Minnows did not. Burnt offerings consist of taking a poor animal that’s happily munching on grass, and then killing and burning it over an open fire to ask an imaginary being up in the sky for help. Sometimes they weren’t even nice enough to kill the animal before throwing it into the flames.
- Palaces in Myceland were heavily fortified. Those in Minnowland were not.
- Weapons were common in Myce, not on Mino.
- Minnow society granted women higher status. Myce, by contrast, were patriarchal — men held all the power and women were excluded from it.
- Goddesses played a greater role in Minnowland as evidenced by the large number of female figurines and paintings found around the ancient city of Knossos. In contrast, the most important and powerful God of the Myce was ‘Sky Father,’ later called ‘Zeus’ in Greek mythology; the bearded guy who throws thunderbolts at people he doesn’t like and is constantly unfaithful to his wife.
- Before the Myce were able to overtake the Minnows, a massive volcano eruption and tsunami — one that may have inspired the myth of the lost city of Atlantis — crushed the Minoan Civilization.
The Myce and their stories took over.
And they were not good stories.
Listen to some of them:
Humans! Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it. Rule over the fish in the sea and the birds in the sky and over every living creature that moves on the ground. [Genesis 1]
Since women give birth to babies like the Earth gives birth to plants out of seeds, it means women are the same as the Earth. But since sometimes the Earth goes dry and doesn’t produce plants, the Earth is evil. If Earth is the same as Woman, then women are evil too. The Earth sometimes also acts all crazy with storms, floods, earthquakes, volcano eruptions, ice ages, and hurricanes. Since the Earth is like a girl, then girls are scary crazy too. [From the Babylonian Creation Myth and the Greek myth of Demeter and Persephone]
When a man sells his daughter as a slave, she will not be freed at the end of six years as men are. [Exodus 21:7–11]
Happy is the one who seizes your infants and dashes them against the rocks. [Isaiah 13:1]
Go and strike and destroy all that your enemies have. Do not spare them, but kill both man and woman, child and infant, ox and sheep, camel and donkey! [Samuel 15:3]
Slaves! Submit yourselves to your masters with respect, not only to the good and gentle masters but also to the cruel ones.[Peter 2:18]
A prophet should not have prisoners of war until he has made a great slaughter in the land. [The Qur’an Verse 8:67]
Do not permit a woman to teach or boss over a man; she must be quiet. [Timothy 2:12]
If the wife of a man who is living in her husband’s house, has persisted in going out, has acted the fool, has waster her house, has belittled her husband, he shall prosecute her. If her husband has said, “I divorce her,” she shall go her way; he shall give her nothing as her price of divorce. If her husband has said “I will not divorce her” he may take another woman to wife; the wife shall live as a slave in her husband’s house. [Code of Hammurabi c. 1700 BCE]
An eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth. [Exodus 21:24]
Boy, oh boy…
Subdue and dominate our Earth and rule over everything; girls are evil and crazy; sell your daughter in slavery, dash the children of your enemies against rocks, slaughter away, keep women quiet… these stories make my blood curl. I feel like that old lady who stands on top of a stool with a broom in her hand trying to squash nasty mice.
What’s crazy is that many have listened to these stories and done exactly what these stories have told them to do. It makes me want to go back to our life as hunter-gatherers.
But we can’t go back.
So why not come up with better stories? Just like Abraham Lincoln did to end slavery. Or like Rachel Carson when writing Silent Spring which started the modern environmental movement. Or Gandhi, who said that if we all started poking people’s eyes because they poked ours, by and by the whole world would be blind. Stories like Buddha’s Second Noble Truth which says that people suffer because they crave stuff they don’t need, believe stupid stories, and because of their hatred and destructive urges.
Buddha started his life as a spoiled brat shielded from the outside world. Before he became known as ‘The Buddha,’ his name was Siddhartha Gautama. He was a prince, living in a luxurious palace with everything a boy could want. His father, the king, made sure he never suffered nor stepped foot beyond the palace walls. He did not want his son to go out into the world and see sick people, old people, or dead people. Only beautiful, young, and healthy people were allowed in the palace.
When he was about 16, Siddhartha married Yaśodharā who gave birth to their son, Rāhula. But even though Siddhartha had everything he wanted, something bugged him. He wanted to go beyond the palace walls and see the world for himself. One day, he ordered his charioteer to take him out into the city. On the road, they encountered a poor person, an old person, and a corpse. As they returned to the palace, Siddhartha passed a wandering monk wearing a simple robe. Siddhartha decided to become a monk, and left the palace, and his wife and son, in search for the answer to the problem of suffering in the world. Once he figured out what he thought was the cure for suffering, he became ‘The Buddha,’ for which the practice of Buddhism is known. Today, there are over 500 million people in the world who practice his teachings.
People like Buddha, Abraham Lincoln, Rachel Carson, Gandhi, and Jesus were heroic people. They were not locusts, like the Myce, but bees, like Minnows, taking care of the garden… trying to erase the vile and destructive ideas that originally spun out of the heads of the Myce. They came up with positive stories which enhance the wonderful unfolding story of our universe that began 13 Billion years ago.
That’s the purpose of this book. To write a better story and guide you on the path of a hero to grow to become a bee.
So now that you know where you come from, where you are, and have heard some of the stories — good and bad — that humans tell each other, you are ready to be trained in the Life Forces you will need to start your own adventure in life…
My call for a female revolt is not one of violence but leadership; a call for women to wrest the reins of power from the many weak and ignoble men who seem hellbent on maintaining the status-quo. To our luck, a growing number of inspiring women across the world have begun to do just that.
While their legions grow, I’ll keep working to ensure that the next generation of men rises to the occasion and joins its female counterpart — as comrades once again — for the urgent work ahead.
Jeffrey Erkelens is the creator of ‘The Hero in You,’ a book for boys (10–13) meant to guide them toward an evolved expression of manhood and help them develop the character strengths needed to become caring and passionate men of noble purpose. Sign up here to receive updates on the book’s upcoming publication.
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Understanding Prejudice – Teaching Boys to Confront their Innate Biases
Critical Thinking in a Crazy World
Warriors Wanted to Save the World!
Tales from a Flying Fish 