Trump 2: The Specter of Sphere Sovereignty

On the Misogynist Quest to Restrict Women to the Private Sphere

Unattributed Image from EBur.

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I will need to say this so often you’ll get tired of hearing it, but it’s as important a reminder as can be:

It has not always been this way. Before the coming of The Patriarchy in the West, which developed in the ancient Near East slowly, over a period of 1,500 years, there were 300,000 years of equity—not matriarchy, just equity.

In the Americas, some ancient peoples were patriarchal, the Aztecs, for instance—and some cultures were gylanic (gender-equal), like the Hopi and the Navajo. Early on, the ancient Chinese disenfranchised women, while in the Mongolian heights, women were shamans. And famously, in the pre-Mycenaean culture of the island Crete, the island of great pan-Mediterranean sea traders centered in the spectacular city of Knossos, men ran the government and women ran the religion, and women were sea captains and farmers and enjoyed every other trade and function and were never pictured in art with children. After the Mycenaen invasion, women’s images began to appear in the peripheries of wall art, with men featured and centered. Now women were always pictured with young children or infants. It took a LONG time for men to drag women out of the public sphere and confine them to the home, but they managed it, and they intend to effect it again.

One extraordinary case was that of ancient Athens. Patrician women were largely confined to the home, which was woman’s “sphere.” She got just enough education, it is said, that she could run the house efficiently. But once married, she had, according to some scholars, no life outside the home. Instead, once a year she had the Thesmophoria. For a weekend, men were forced to leave the city and adult, married women overtook the Acropolis. They celebrated fertility rites that may have been adopted from ancient Egyptian culture. The Thesmophoria may have been the only time during the year that married women of any status saw their mothers, grandmothers, and sisters. Everything that happened during the Thesmophoria was a secret—and men were dying to get in and learn what was going on. They probably never did—but Aristophanes was so curious that he wrote a play called Thesmophoriazusae (Women at the Thesmophoria). WorldHistory.org has a good description:

The Thesmophoriazusae (also called The Poet & the Women or Women at the Thesmophoria) is a two-act comedy play written in 411 BCE by the great Greek comic playwright, Aristophanes. The play's principal focus is on the Greek tragedian Euripides and his struggle with the women at the Thesmorphoria, a festival for women only held throughout Greece over a period of several days every fall. The festival honored the goddesses Demeter—sister of Zeus and goddess of agriculture—and her daughter Persephone. It promoted fertility both in the fields and at home. The celebration was held in the autumn for it was at this time of year when Persephone descended into the netherworld to be the wife of the god Hades. The play tells of the plight of Euripides as the women of Athens have grown tired of his portrayal of them in his plays and have finally plotted to kill him. Fearing for his life and curious as to the nature of his possible death, Euripides convinces his elderly relative Mnesilochus to go to the festival in the guise of a woman and speak on his behalf. As one might expect it does not go well for the old man and only the wit and wisdom of Euripides—using scenes from his own plays—saves his friend from possible misfortune.

But I digress. Later, I promise, we’ll talk more about the women of Athens—the prostitutes, the (very rich) courtesans, the foreign labor force, and the priestesses of the Temple of Athena—and the woman (not man) who trained Aristotle.

But meanwhile, this confinement to the home—and the Calvinist “sphere sovereignty”doctrine invented by the sexist Abraham Kuyper—is, in the West, the equivalence of the marriage and married-woman protocols created by male-dominant cultures to CLAIM THE ENTIRE PUBLIC SPHERE FOR THEMSELVES, the public sphere comprising ALL of the following ALL the time:

• Freedom of movement in the public arena.

• Control of all government apparatuses and all law.

• Control of all religious positions at the level of the priesthood.

• Control of all religious dogma.

• Control of all monies at the public and private level.

• Control of women’s rights to congregate and communicate, including the right to write and publish personally.

• Control of women’s sexuality as the father’s to give and the husband’s and government’s to control.

• Control of women’s education.

• Control of women’s work—including the institution of total work bans or work limitations, lower pay, refusal of promotion, refusal of military service and the like.

• Control of women’s inheritance and access to financial instruments.

• Control of women’s attire.

• Control of women’s voting rights.

• Control of women’s images in public advertising and news presentations, from a total ban on a woman’s face (burqa, niqab) or hair (hajib) to airbrushing out a woman’s face in photographs (Hassidic news publications).

• Control of women’s attendance at public events of any kind.

• Control of women’s access to divorce (see Covenant Marriage, coming soon).

• Control of a woman’s access to solitary local, national, or international travel.

• Control of the law enforcement and legal response to the abuse of women, including rape (Brock Turner discussion coming).

“SPHERE SOVEREIGNTY” IS THE CALVINIST DOCTRINE THAT THERE ARE SPHERES OF RESPONSIBILITY WED TO AUTHORITY. AMONG THE *MANY, MANY* PROBLEMS WITH THIS CRAVEN THEORY IS THAT IS THAT THE AUTHORITIES OF THE PUBLIC SPHERE—MEN!—HAVE TOTAL CONTROL OF THE AUTHORITIES OF THE HOME SPHERE, WOMEN.

IN EXTREME EXAMPLES, MEN USING THIS SYSTEM AGAINST WOMEN HAVE *ALL THE RIGHTS* IN THE CULTURE — ALL OF THEM.

Sphere Sovereignty, practiced in some form by so many religions and cultures, is exactly where Trump 2 power players want to take this culture, and they include J.D. Vance (who just Trad-wifed his brilliant Usha)—Mike Johnson, who is in a Covenant Marriage with his wife, who has fewer marital rights than he does!—and Pete Hegseth, the sexual abuser and grand larcenist former Fox News host, who has overtly praised Sphere Sovereignty. We’re going to deal with all three of these people going forward.

And many of Trump’s Cabinet nominees and close associates have sexual abuse in their backgrounds or openly advocate a massive roll-back in women’s rights and blame women’s suffrage and feminism for all the ills of society.

In secret—and we’ll get to this next time—they are suffering BACKLASH RAGE that the total control of women, the public sphere, AND ALL THE CASH was taken from them by human rights’ movements.

And they want it back.

‘Til next time.

Thank you so much for joining us.