51. It is a story composed of two steps: first (on the left), the creation of man by God; second (on
51. It is a story composed of two steps: first (on the left), the creation of man by God; second (on the right), the fall of man due to original sin, that is, due to Eve’s disobedience in listening to the serpent and consuming the apple in the Garden of Eden. The first step creates a world prior to the appearance of women, and by the hand of a God himself understood to be male. This first step of the tale thereby sets up a world of male power and male authority, and more specifically, a world without female authority.The second step introduces the notion that the fall, that is, sin, comes about because of woman, and more specifically, because of woman’s inability to resist temptation, that is, her lack of self-control. Hence is established the thought that woman requires some exterior domination over those instincts that she herself is incapable of mastering through her own will. Through these two steps is generated a tale that has lasted over two thousand years, the myth of man as the figure of mastery and woman as the one in need of a master.Is it not odd that the figure that mediates the second of these steps is a serpent? Of course, the meaning of this symbol is undoubtedly complex, and often represented as female, curving seductively likes the curves of woman. But is there not something unbearably forced about such an interpretation of the serpent, if not outright anachronistic? Are not such interpretations symptomatic of a kind of repression, or a denial, or a refusal?For if the serpent is a symbol of anything, how could it not be, first of all, a symbol of the penis? For Freud, it was simply obvious that the appearance of a snake in a dream symbolized the penis: why would we imagine it is any different in mythology, and why would there be a refusal to even consider the possibility, if not out of the continuation of such a repression?If we accept such a hypothesis, then the interpretation of the doctrine of original sin begins to look like a condemnation of woman on the grounds she cannot resist the power of the penis (and in this regard, it may be significant that the symbol is a penis, rather than, say, testicles). The notion of the irresistibility of the male organ has a long history, of course. But is this history based in historical reality, so to speak, or is it the expression of an invented fear that becomes an excuse: the excuse to maintain control over female sexuality?Interpreting quasi-psychoanalytically, does not the disavowed choice of a serpent to signify original sin then not suggest, through this disavowal, the submerged acknowledgement of the real fear: that it is man who lacks self-control, and that he lacks this self-control precisely over his own sexual organs?Does anyone really doubt that it is the male who is and always has struggled to control his own powerful sexual impulses, and to control all of the “unnatural” directions such urges may push him in, whether they are onanistic, fetishistic or homosexual? It is the male, far more than the female, who is enslaved by his own sexual apparatus, who fails to master his own sexuality, and who consequently engages in all kinds of destructive behaviour at women’s expense, at society’s expense, and at his own expense.If we acknowledge this obvious fact, known by everyone if often historically denied, then the myth of original sin and the doctrine of the fall in the Garden of Eden start to look like a compensatory fantasy designed to project male guilt onto the female, in short, to blame women for man’s weakness. All of Christianity’s metaphysics of guilt (absent, for example, from ancient Greece) starts to look like a desperate attempt to shift attention away from the masculine difficulty in mastering sexuality in a psychically or socially beneficial way.Perhaps what is required, then, is a reinvention of religion. That God could be or is a woman is often stated today, but either jokingly or as an expression of a kind of “turning of the tables”, if not simply of ressentiment. To that extent, the idea of a female God is nothing more than the expression of the weak’s desire for what the strong possesses: power. What we are proposing here is something else entirely: not power, but authority, control. And not just any old control either: female authority and control over that serpent which causes all the problems to be found in the garden of man – authority and control over uncontrolled male sexuality. This is the religion we require today. But achieving such a religion means overthrowing not just two thousand years of mythology according to which it is the female who requires control; it also means overthrowing the psychosexual politics of resentment that simply wants to reverse this situation, to constantly take power over the man, rather than what is truly required: a new world in which men accept the legitimate authority of female sexual control, an authority women will need to earn through renewed understandings of sexual practice. -- source link