Any full analysis of patriarchy

Any full analysis of patriarchy should take into account the veiling, sequestering, and regimentation of women in Muslim societies; the tradition of foot binding in China; the suttee tradition of the Indian subcontinent; the deeply institutionalized practice of clitoridectomy among many cultures in 26 different nations across the African continent, a mutilation affecting 2 million girls each year; the near ubiquitousness of wife beating around the world; and the fact that polygyny - multiple wives - is an accepted practice in far more cultures than not. It ought to examine the fact that 67 percent of married women in Papua New Guinea describe themselves as battered, with at least one in five hurt severely enough to require hospitalization at least once. It should note that in Pakistan the mortality rate for girls is half again as high as that for boys, who are better fed; and that in many parts of Africa and the Middle East women cannot visit health clinics without their husbands' permission. We might hear more about the problem of patriarchy outside the West if more non-Western women were freer from grinding poverty and, in some instances, rigid cultural restrictions against expressing themselves. In Bangladesh, one must remember, feminist poet Taslima Nasrin has been placed under fatwah, the Muslim death sentence, for writing the wrong thing.

- from Demonic Males: Apes and the Origins of Human Violence, Dale Peterson and Richard Wrangham, 1996

Do you really think a God who created the universe, billions of galaxies, stars, billions of planets- would promise to reward some little things in a pale blue dot (i.e Earth) for repeatedly saying that he is the greatest and kindest and for fasting? Such a great creator can't be so narcissist!

-Taslima Nasrin

A cheering section

Women have very rarely engaged in combat, but have often played auxiliary roles in mobilization and logistics. Before hostilities commenced, they might shame cowards, taunt the hesitant, and participate in dances of incitement. Among some groups, women have accompanied war parties to carry weapons and food. During combat, they might serve as a cheering section, supply first aid, or collect spent enemy missiles to resupply their own warriors....

from War Before Civilization, Lawrence Keeley, 35.

While in intense dental agony

Cavities ...[were] one of humankind's oldest miseries. Terrified of tooth extraction, people often suffered intense and chronic pain - and many of these people were history's major policymakers. It is surprising that history books omit the fact that, for instance, Louis XIV and Elizabeth I (to mention only two policy-shaping figures) often had to render major decisions while in intense dental agony. Louis, in 1685, signed the revocation of the Edict of Nantes (which had granted religious freedom), causing thousands to emigrate, while he was in the throes of a month-long tooth infection. It had developed into a raw, unhealing opening between the roof of his mouth and his sinuses.

Elizabeth, on the other hand, suffered chronically from deep, massive cavities but feared the misery of extraction. In December 1578, an unrelenting tooth pain kept her awake day and night for two weeks, necessitating drugs that were themselves heavily disorientating. ... Throughout the weeks of misery, she had continued to oversee legislation that affected the lives of millions of subjects.

... A volume of speculative history could be written on the effects of severe and protracted dental pain on policy-making.

- from the endlessly quotable Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things, Charles Panati, 212.

An acute epidemic disease

Incidentally, it is not absurd to class this ecological role of humankind in its relationship to other life forms as a disease. Ever since language allowed human cultural evolution to impinge upon age-old processes of biological evolution, humankind has been in a position to upset older balances of nature in quite the same fashion that disease upsets the natural balance within a host's body. ... Sooner or later, and always within a span of time that remained minuscule in comparison with the standards of biological evolution, humanity discovered new techniques allowing fresh exploitation of hitherto inaccessible resources, thereby renewing or intensifying damage to other forms of life. Looked at from the point of view of other organisms, humankind therefore resembles an acute epidemic disease, whose occasional lapses into less virulent forms of behavior have never yet sufficed to permit any really stable, chronic relationship to establish itself.

- Plagues and Peoples, William McNeill, 1976, pg. 22.

More than meaningless etiquette

Among the Germanic Goths, a man married a woman from within his own community. When women were in short supply, he captured his bride-to-be from a neighboring village. The future bridegroom, accompanied by a male companion, seized any young girl who had strayed from the safety of her parental home. Our custom of a best man is a relic of that two-man, strong-armed tactic; for such an important task, only the best man would do. From this practice of abduction, which literally swept a bride off her feet, also sprang the later symbolic act of carrying the bride over the threshold of her new home.

A best man around A.D. 200 carried more than a ring. Since there remained the real threat of the bride's family attempting to forcibly gain her return, the best man stayed by the groom's side throughout the marriage ceremony, alert and armed. He also might serve as a sentry outside the newlywed's home. Of course, much of this is German folklore, but it is not without written documentation and physical artifacts. For instance, the threat of recapture by the bride's family was perceived as so genuine that beneath the church altars of many early peoples - including the Huns, the Goths, the Visigoths, and the Vandals - lay an arsenal of clubs, knives, and spears.

The tradition that the bride stand to the left of the groom was also more than meaningless etiquette. Among the Northern European barbarians (so named by the Romans), a groom placed his captured bride on his left to protect her, freeing his right hand, the sword hand, against sudden attack.

from Extraordinary Origins of Everyday Things by Charles Panati, 1987