These recent photos are from the forthcoming books of Rasa Von Werder,
"Old Woman / Young Man - Why They Belong Together"
Parts I & II
I see someone posting passionately about Christianity. There is much to say about this. I used to be a Christian minister & I know what I speak of. I left behind the confines of Christianity & see it's great points & the bad points. The bad points are that people aren't practicing it. Jesus Christ came & went, & most of his followers aren't like him! They have a cold & cruel view on the Wiccans & Pagans - which are religions of Mother God. The Christians, Jews & all Patriarchs, are haters of Mother God. Ancient enemies, the Christians were the demons in the Inquisition. I have much to say to this man because I have received as a Christian all the Gifts of the Holy Spirit including the grace of Martyrdom, called the Interior Divine Stigmata. But I know that we must love God as Mother, not Father, & yes, She is NOTHING like the men who run the Patriarchal religions, nothing like them at all.
Bard of Ely
Thank you, Rasa! I had been wondering how you were! I haven't been sleeping so well because of my sadness and worry about Japan and what has happened!
Mercurius Trismegistus
FACEBOOK NEEDS MOTHERGOD!
AntonOftheNorth
Hi Bard!
New to Hub and this article so late to the conversation
Thanks for writing it. Its the first Hub I've seen where I had to think a bit before responding, (and thanks Rasa for joining in. I confess I was not familiar with your work before now.
I've seen a lot more postings in response to this post that I would call much more objectionable than anything Bard has aluded to here about Rasa's work.
I'm not sure how I feel about Matriarchy. I don't have negative feelings about it (male myself, just for the record). I've done a very little anthropological study in some matriarchal based societies. (this provided just for context)
I am leery of any system that excludes members or attributes that are part of it. I don't argue the point that most of the ills in the world can be attributed to patriarchal constructs, but I also feel that a just, whole society must include the values of the whole in some fashion, not just the parts that are considered valuable by the dominant. (I think that's what we have that now with the current patriarchal model, the dominant faction having backed its dominance up with violence). Does matriarchal mean the same kind of exclusion from the other direction?
RASA: MEN ARE NOT EXCLUDED IN A MATRIARCHAL SOCIETY, THEY WORK UNDER AUTHORITY OF THE FEMALE, BUT THEY HAVE IMPORTANT ROLES TO PLAY NEVERTHELESS. BUT THEY DO NOT LEAD WOMEN.
I'm not at all opposed to the notion of women in control of society. My mother was in control of our family, but even she felt that she would accept my Dad's decision on things solely because he was the 'man of the house' and that was how she was taught. I always thought that was silly.
I guess I need to research matriarchy a bit more so I can determine exactly how you define it. Far be it from me to say I don't like something without knowing what it is. Thanks for making me think.
RASA: IN MATRIARCHY WOMEN WORK TOGETHER TO DETERMINE WHAT IS BEST FOR ALL . THEY ARE BENEVOLENT COMPARED TO MEN, THEY ARE JUST , FAIR, THEY CARE FOR THE WEAK. THEY DO NOT USUALLY EXPLOIT, CAUSE ATROCITIES OR GENOCIDES. DURING THE 28,000 KNOWN YEARS OF MATRIARCHY (PROBABLY HAD IT THE ENTIRE TIME OF HUMAN EXISTENCE EXCEPT VERY RECENTLY) THERE WERE NO WARS, NO ARMED WARFARE. WITH WOMEN & MOTHER GOD RULING THE WORLD, THERE WAS JUSTICE & HAPPINESS. LOOK WHAT THE WORLD HAS BECOME. CHAOS, GREED, CRIME, EVERY IMAGINABLE & UNIMAGINABLE ATROCITY AGAINST ALL LIFE . PATRIARCHY IS THE CULTURE OF DEATH, NECROPHILIA. MATRIARCHY IS THE CULTURE OF LIFE , BIOPHILIA, AS EXPLAINED BY MARY DALY.
The Future of Male / Female Relationships
I am shocked to see that you are still ranting about this peer-reviewed scientific scrutiny. Being a man of science that you are, I would have thought that you were taught in college, or at the very least learned of it through where you work, that all to often scientific work that goes against the accepted scientific theories are never published in a scientific journal. It doesn't matter how methodical the processes, how accurate the findings are, or how much evidence there is if the results point to something that contradicts the widely "acceptable" scientific theories the work is squashed and the scientist doing the work suffers sometimes severe damage to his professional career.
I am not alone in this opinion. Richard Horton, editor of the British medical journal The Lancet (which is one of the most respected general medical journals around), has said that "The mistake, of course, is to have thought that peer review was any more than a crude means of discovering the acceptability — not the validity — of a new finding. Editors and scientists alike insist on the pivotal importance of peer review. We portray peer review to the public as a quasi-sacred process that helps to make science our most objective truth teller. But we know that the system of peer review is biased, unjust, unaccountable, incomplete, easily fixed, often insulting, usually ignorant, occasionally foolish, and frequently wrong."
A good example of just how closed minded Scientific Academia truly is is the work done by Michael Cremo in his book "Forbidden Archeology". In this book Cremo has a ton of archeological evidence that has been ignored by the scientific establishment and relinquished to the basements of museums and universities around the world just because they couldn't fit them into the widely accepted theories of mankind's existence.
"If it doesn't fit, get rid of it" seems to be a general rule of thumb the scientific establishment uses to maintain the status quo. You have written that you are open minded but, it seems that you are no more open minded than the scientific establishment you love so well. If you truly were open minded you would not need others in the scientific community to tell you what to believe. You seem intelligent enough to make up your own mind so why do you need others to decide for you what is valid and what is not.
Pierre wrote >I am ALSO trying to get an answer as to how male DNA can "crumble"...
<From a book review at the LBA Literary Agency I will quote a short answer to your question.
"Genetically speaking, the only difference between men and women is that where women have two X chromosomes, men have one X and one Y. This one chromosome difference, out of a total of forty-six, holds the key to understanding the huge difference between the sexes.
But a closer look at the all-important Y chromosome reveals some shocking news for men. It is getting smaller. As the generations pass the Y chromosome is being cannibilized by the female genome and worn away by its own inability to recombine. Women are winning the evolutionary battle of the sexes. "
If you are truly open minded as you state you are why don't you go to a library, check out the book and read it for yourself.
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Teresa – what you wrote is so brilliant & educational it is going into one of my books. I am selecting certain statements from posts, face book, here & elsewhere, for these books - & your explanation is one of the most interesting I have ever read. – Bravo!
Pierre is screaming to us,
“I am in pain. I am afraid. I don’t want to die! I don’t want Mother God to exterminate me!”
He is a pitiful, frightened man, a child who needs a Mother to love & protect him. (BrainFire has been extremely kind & gracious to this screaming menace) But these kind of men are wearing us out. They have done & continue to do, so much damage.
Just as women are now stepping forward & taking over the save the planet & repair it, damaged males like Pierre rant & rave against us to try & slow us down.
That is their very nature – they cannot be trusted or in this case, catered to, as all they do is destroy. Pierre is trying to destroy the valid points in the thread, especially standing against Dr. Bryan Sykes – which is patently ridiculous - & you gave the best answer why he cannot be taken down.
There is another geneticist at London University , Steve Jones, who also agrees with what Bryan Sykes said, in his book,
“Y – The Descent of Men.”
Dr. Bryan Sykes is by no means alone or without peer support! There is actually no one in the field that can stand up to his findings. Dr. David Page tried & failed – Dr. Sykes explains how he failed. (It was a hard-won but pathetic attempt to say maybe we can forestall male extinction.)
Let’s face it, Mother God doesn’t want men around. Neither do I, since I will never disagree with God. This does not mean I hate men or don’t want to have sex with them. I go out with hotties every weekend & planning to build a harem. But as far as their influence on earth, they are the most destructive animal that ever lived & they have to go, & when they are gone, the earth & all life will breath a sigh of relief!
Tidbits from Steve Jones:
Over the last 40 years, though, sperm counts have been falling dramatically. More ominously - for males at least - all the warning signals from the newly dawning clone age suggest that, in the not too distant future, sperm will not be needed at all for procreation. Dolly, the infamous, and much misunderstood sheep, was conceived without masculine assistance. Recently, things have got even wackier: scientists have succeeded in reducing the body cell of a female mouse to half its normal DNA content, and then using it to fertilise the egg of another mouse. The result is a male offspring that has two mothers and no father. Science, it seems, is suddenly telling us what feminists have been saying all along: the future is female. In the final chapter of his new book, Y: The Descent of Men, Professor Steve Jones writes: 'Perhaps... science will cause nature to return to its original and feminine state and men themselves to fade from view.' He is speaking here, as scientists tend to when making predictions, of the bigger picture, of a time maybe five million years hence. The immediate future, though, is not looking so bright for men either. While we have been self-obsessing about the so-called crisis in masculinity, science is telling us that an infinitely bigger crisis is occurring, and one which is not emotional nor social, but biological. Put simply, men are in terminal trouble, and that trouble is linked to the Y chromosome that defines them. 'The chromosome unique to men is a microscopic metaphor for those who bear it,' Jones concludes. 'For it is the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot... From sperm count to social status, and from fertilisation to death, as civilisation advances those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline.'
END OF SPERM REPORT!
End of sperm report
Geneticist Steve Jones says science is now telling us what feminists knew all along - the future is female. The male of the species is doomed as the Y chromosome withers away
* Sean O'Hagan
* The Observer, Sunday 15 September 2002
Here are some interesting biological facts about the male of the species. Most boys, a month or so before birth, have an erection for about an hour a day. At 20, nearly all young men are in a state of sexual arousal for three hours out of every 24 - though most of these erections occur during sleep. Every time a man has sex, he produces enough sperm to fertilise every woman in Europe . In an average lifetime, he will produce two thousand billion sperm.
On the down side, as it were, all this excessive over-production amounts to relatively little. In the involved and obstacle-strewn act of procreation, each single sperm makes a journey that, in terms of its own length, is the equivalent of the distance from London to Edinburgh . Only a few hundred survive, and just one makes it into the egg. Over the last 40 years, though, sperm counts have been falling dramatically. More ominously - for males at least - all the warning signals from the newly dawning clone age suggest that, in the not too distant future, sperm will not be needed at all for procreation. Dolly, the infamous, and much misunderstood sheep, was conceived without masculine assistance. Recently, things have got even wackier: scientists have succeeded in reducing the body cell of a female mouse to half its normal DNA content, and then using it to fertilise the egg of another mouse. The result is a male offspring that has two mothers and no father. Science, it seems, is suddenly telling us what feminists have been saying all along: the future is female.
In the final chapter of his new book, Y: The Descent of Men, Professor Steve Jones writes: 'Perhaps... science will cause nature to return to its original and feminine state and men themselves to fade from view.' He is speaking here, as scientists tend to when making predictions, of the bigger picture, of a time maybe five million years hence. The immediate future, though, is not looking so bright for men either. While we have been self-obsessing about the so-called crisis in masculinity, science is telling us that an infinitely bigger crisis is occurring, and one which is not emotional nor social, but biological. Put simply, men are in terminal trouble, and that trouble is linked to the Y chromosome that defines them. 'The chromosome unique to men is a microscopic metaphor for those who bear it,' Jones concludes. 'For it is the most decayed, redundant and parasitic of the lot... From sperm count to social status, and from fertilisation to death, as civilisation advances those who bear Y chromosomes are in relative decline.'
The author of this apocalyptic study of male biological decay and decline seems remarkably unperturbed by the litany of bad news he has recounted in his remarkable and eminently readable book of evidence. Shoeless, he is reclining on a huge couch in the upstairs living room of the spacious house in London 's Camden Square that he shares with television documentary producer, Norma Percy. On the walls, there are numerous drawings and watercolours of snails, whose biology Jones has studied in depth for the last 40-odd years. He has that slightly crumpled look that my old science teacher had, but, thankfully, is a whole lot more patient, answering my stumbling, layman's questions about biology and genetics with a mixture of benign understanding and an often disorienting attention to evidential detail. Jones talks like he writes: precisely, sometimes provocatively, and with a tendency to deliver the most mind-blowing information in an almost throwaway manner. It's just that, as in the book, all the dizzying, encoded semantics of hard science keeps getting in the way. When transcribing the tape afterwards, I lose count of the number of times I ask him to 'run that one past me again'.
Nevertheless, alongside the altogether more combative Richard Dawkins, he is as close to a populariser as contemporary cutting-edge science gets. An earlier book, The Language of the Genes , was a surprise bestseller, one of the first to alert publishers to a new and lucrative audience eager to make some sense of the brave new world of genetic science. His previous work, Almost Like A Whale, was, he says, a 'pastiche' of his hero, Charles Darwin's seminal study, On the Origin of Species. The new book, apparently, is a 'parody' of Darwin 's The Descent of Man and Selection in Relation to Sex. Jones wrote both, he says, for money, citing his hero in his defence - ' Origin of the Species was a popular science book written in a hurry.'
Jones was born in Wales . His grandparents were 'dyed-in-the-wool Protestants', while both his parents 'escaped' into science. He underwent 'the ultimate form of sophisticated torture' at a boys' school in Birkenhead , where, he admits, he was 'a bit of a nerd'. He enrolled at Edinburgh University in 1962, having been 'turned down everywhere else', and, almost by accident, found himself in the best genetics' department in Europe . He remained there for 10 years, but talks with some regret about having 'wasted much of my career working on the emptiest subject, the genetics of snails, while many of my contemporaries have turned into the best cutting-edge genetic biologists of our time'.
Jones's populist books, one senses, are a late attempt to make up for all this squandered time. He refers to himself as 'an old-fashioned pinko', and his drive to popularise science, and genetics in particular, may be motivated to some degree by a lingering socialistic desire to educate, and even empower, the masses. His prose is pithy, often arresting. 'Ejaculate, if you are so minded and equipped, into a glass of chilled Perrier' runs the opening sentence of his new book, which, were it ever to make it onto school curriculums, would certainly solve the age-old problem of how to interest adolescent boys in science. The book's subtext is chilling: that which defines masculinity is also killing men. Tell me in simple terms, I plead, why the male Y chromosome is deteriorating.
'Basically,' he says, taking a deep breath, 'the Y chromosome is a male signifier. It evolves quite rapidly, but downhill. We now have the human DNA sequence and the surprise is to find that most of it is not functional. It's either decayed, or it's simply redundant. That's true for the entire human chromosome sequence. If you look at the Y, though, that truth is multiplied maybe 30 times. It's only got 20 genes on it, most of which are employed keeping the cell it's in alive.'
In his book, Jones predicts that the final upshot of this already sorry state of affairs will be a world without men - 'the Y chromosome will eventually disappear and be taken over by another sex-determining mechanism'. If this seems more Philip K. Dick than Darwin , Jones, even more disturbingly, cites the evolution of the common slug as a possible future role model for the evolution of men. 'I've just been in the Pyrenees working with slugs which are hermaphrodite. Again and again, you can see evolutionary lineages that have gone all-female. Now, it has to be said that they often fail, but you never see evolutionary images that go all-male.' 'Obviously not,' he adds, just in case I haven't quite got the picture. 'They would die.'
The more immediate bad news is that more of us are dying anyway. Men's cavalier attitude to their own health - just one in eight know where the prostate is located - is illustrated time and time again in the more scrotum-tightening medical sections of the book. The chapter entitled 'Hydraulics for Boys' will tell you much more than you ever need to know about the elaborate system of 'pumps, valves and fluids' that enable erection. Elsewhere, Jones shows that science often tries to kill us before it tries to cure us: food packaging, oestrogen in the water supply and feminising hormones in milk are all possible causes of the alarming decline in sperm counts across Europe . 'Something is going wrong with men,' says Jones, gravely, 'and we don't know what it is.' He professes bafflement at the often conflicting nature of the scientific literature on maleness. 'It's odd, but anything to do with men immediately begins to get shifty, unfocused.'
Having already taken on the 'determined ignorance' of the creationist lobby, and had his windows smashed more than once by one of their more irate members, Jones' current bête noire is the 'masculinity industry' that has burgeoned in American academia. His book, he says, is 'a counterblast to the enormous amount of literature on men which is 'just gas, just horse shit'. He was astounded to find a whole section of the same at UCLA, most of it, he says, 'dealing with so-called male dilemmas, and inner men trying to break out', all of it, 'meaningless and unreadable'.
I ask him if he has read Robert Bly's Iron John, the book that kick-started the whole genre of male emotional narcissism back in the early Nineties. He looks aghast. 'There's room for myth in people's lives but that is just badly written, clunking rubbish.' He shakes his head in despair. 'There are over 500 courses on men's studies in American universities. I mean, what the hell are they on about? This idea that if you understand how men work, emotionally or even biologically, the problems affecting men will simply go away. It's nonsense. Poverty or illiteracy is not just going to go away if men look deep within and find their warrior selves. These people are positing biological solutions to problems that are overwhelmingly social or political. The whole notion of men's studies falls on that argument to a considerable extent.'
In person, Jones is both affable and occasionally chippy - he mentions other scientists' salaries more than once. Science, you feel, has allowed him to refine his natural scepticism to an art. He is scathing about the Human Genome Organisation which he calls 'a money grabbing operation', but simultaneously self-deprecating: 'In the early Seventies, there was huge resentment among other biologists who were sitting on the sidelines sniping, like me.' He is singularly unimpressed, too, by the current tendency, voiced most loudly in the media, that genetics will be the answer to all our ills. 'Genetics as a whole is the great over-hyped science,' he says, 'and geneticists know that even if they don't say it. All that genetics really is is anatomy plus an enormous research group grant. It's what anatomists did in the fifteenth century - looking at the heart and seeing how it worked. Now, we are doing the same with DNA .'
Revealingly, too, the same kind of fears and superstitions attend genetics as once did anatomy. 'We are going through the body-snatching phase right now,' laughs Jones, 'and there are all these Burke and Hare attitudes towards geneticists - that they are playing God and that DNA is sacred. No, it's not. It's no more sacred than your toenails. Basically, we are not going to make long-term medical progress without understanding how the genes work.'
That said, we have entered an era where, as Jones puts it, 'the whole of medicine has become genetics', and where accordingly the ethics of science are going becoming almost as complex as the science itself. Human cloning, Jones insists, 'if it hasn't happened already, will happen soon for one reason or another'. Already, though, there are definitive ethical issues surrounding the taking, rather than the, making, of life. What genetics is mainly used for on a day-to-day clinical basis is pre-natal diagnosis, and pregnancy termination.
'Abortion is still an issue that causes huge ethical problems in many countries,' says Jones, 'but here, like so many things in Britain, it is simply glossed over because it's too unappealing. No one is going to blame a couple for terminating a pregnancy if muscular dystrophy or cystic fibrosis is diagnosed, but the issue now is where do you stop, and who decides. The gene for dwarfism was found a few years ago; it's a genetic error in the father's sperm. Now, people who are dwarfs are not ill in any real sense. They are valid functioning members of society, and much of the prejudice is gone, or so we'd like to think. It is not a severe birth defect but in nearly every case of pre-natal detection to date, there has been a termination. Now, there's an ethical problem but you don't ever hear about it amid all the ill-informed bollocks spouted about cloning.'
Steve Jones tells me that his aim in writing Y: The Descent of Men was to 'explore the new science of maleness in a no-bullshit way'. That, too, would seem to be his approach to all things scientific. 'There's a tendency these days to use science as a religion,' he says towards the end of our meeting, 'and to see geneticists as the high priests of that religion. But, the irony is that, as geneticists know more, they get less and less confident.'
'The one thing that scientists ought to be is humble,' he says, sounding for a second more like a priest than a professor, 'because they, more than anyone, know how little they can explain.'
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