Jun 20, 2025
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NY Times Publishes My Porn Letter
by Doniphan Blair
The NY Times section were Doniphan Blair's letter about pornography appeared. illo: NY TimesPLEASE support our GoFundMe campaign to cover research expenses for our articles and rebuilding the cineSOURCE site.
EXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT,
Doniphan Blair—meaning me, this author, yours truly—got published in the New York Times, the goddamned New York Times. Admittedly, it was only a letter to the editor, but, hey, it was in the Sunday, June 1rst edition, under the title “Politics and Perils of Pornography”, alongside other responses.
Although only 100 words, my letter allowed me to broach one of my favorite subjects, matriarchies, albeit squeezed into the difficult question of porn.
“As bad as new porn always seems,” was how I opened, (see whole text here), but soon segueing to my theme, “It is based on ancient traditions. In fact, our interest in fantasy, sex and role-play have produced something resembling porn all the way back to the polytheist temples.”
Although that was far as I could go, into the history of matriarchies, before returning to the subject at hand, I was able to conclude with another one of my favorite topics: romance. “This is evidence that our fantasies cannot be repressed or shamed out of existence, but only managed and channeled into expressions of partnered, romantic sex.”
Given the radical implications of ancient matriarchies, ever-increasing pornography and the crisis of modern romance, I thought I might survey some of my writing on those subjects, starting when I interviewed Muslim women filmmakers in 2011, reviewing a show of nude paintings by women in 2020, or my analysis of the romantic evolution of Japan, from 2016, among other essays.
From My Article about Muslim Women Filmmakers, 2011
Women's Voices Now (left to right): Miriam Wakim, Director of Development, 26, Lebanese-American; Cassandra Schaffa, Director of Festival Operations, 27, Czech-Puerto Rican; Catinca Tabacaru, Executive Director, 29, Romanian-Canadian; Oluchi Enemanna, Project Manager, 23, Nigerian; Betsy Laikin, Project Manager, 27, American; Mona Pajwani, Project Manager, 32, Indian. photo: Yura LiaminAlthough she will probably hate me for saying this, if there ever was a matriarchal revolutionary, it is Catinca Tabacuru: 29, Romanian-Canadian [third from left in photo] but rather American, a graduate of Berkeley and Duke Law, an art dealer and human rights worker, and now a film festival director. Indeed, her Women's Voices from the Muslim World: A Short-Film Festival is coming March 17-19 [2011] to the Los Angeles Film School.
The spot light is hard for Tabacuru. Articulate and outspoken, she is also modest and collaborative. Indeed, her small team has done an incredible job of networking with related organizations, launching the festival on a shoestring, and even negotiating a possible collaboration with the State Department—talk about walking into the patriarchal lion's den!
Moreover, matriarchal references are problematic. The very existence of pre-historical matriarchies is denied by most academics simply since they don't mirror patriarchies but with women on top. Similarly, excessive seduction or cooperation was rejected by most first and second wave feminists because they just wanted to be treated equally to men and didn't want to confuse that goal with alternate paradigms. But those women weren't dealing with revanchist patriarchs who, in reaction to Women's Lib and modernity, want to lock women into burkas and kitchens and resurrect a mediaeval Islam.
"If we are talking about a reformation of Islam," says Tabacuru, "That is going to take a while. I don't really want to wait for all of Islam to reform in order to make sure women can drive in every country."
Hence, Tabacuru's quest, beautifully summarized by her organization's name: Women's Voices Now!
See full article here.
Judith Linhares's 'Look Back', 2008, recently appeared in the '#PussyPower Show' at David & Schweitzer, Brooklyn. photo: courtesy J. Linhares'Nude in the Age of Trump and Porn' Digested, from 2017
The female body is a powerful weapon, it turns out, to the surprise of those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places.
In Ghana, in 2005, 200 women protestors threatened to take off their clothes to shame into action the male delegates attending a peace summit for the Liberian civil war. Many observers agreed, their body-image activism broke the deadlock.
More recently, at the Women’s March on January 21st, bold placard statements and sometimes-strange sculptures reclaimed the word and the image of “pussy.”
Yes, it is a fraught subject, with feral fascination notorious among men and exaggerated in the age of Trump and porn, but the mystical and moral qualities of the nude remain unbowed.
The "naked body provides a vivid reminder [of] harmony, energy, ecstasy, humility, pathos,” according to British art historian Kenneth Clark, in his acclaimed book, "The Nude" (1963). “[It] arouses memories of all the things we wish to do with ourselves, and first of all, the wish to perpetuate ourselves," he adds, emphasizing what scientists often fail to mention: the importance of biology to aesthetics.
Simply put: the curvy female body is the site of 99% of reproduction and, as such, is an apt icon for life and evolution. The male nude, meanwhile, is interrupted, visually and morally, by the linear, sometimes violent and often indiscriminate phallus.
Indeed, reproduction depends on communication, cultural as well as genetic. Starting at a distance with the surveying of potential mates, reproduction becomes physical in the defining moment of foreplay to sex but only reaches fruition with the raising of the next generation. Indispensable to this biology among humans are the "three Cs," communication, culture and cooperation, with some form of romanticism at its center.
This four-and-a-half inch limestone statue is about 27,000 years old and was found in 1908, near Willendorf, Austria. photo: courtesy Naturhistorisches Museum, ViennaNo wonder the female nude became our first real art, with the Venus figurines appearing around 45,000 BC and enjoying a popularity run of 40,000 years (incredibly summarized in Grace Paley's short "You Gotta Believe"). Although they finally faded in the face of patriarchal bullying and self-consciousness, the nude was soon reinvented by the Greeks.And it has been reinvented almost every generation since.
Indeed, over the entire last two-and-a-half millennia, the nude has largely held its own, dominating the provocative space between sacred and profane, until a recent publishing revolution upended that aesthetic and moral balance.
Starting in 1999, but going full bore in the new millennia, online computers graduated from dialup to DSL and gained high-resolution access to the World Wide Web. Along with a repository of humanity's knowledge and art, this included an avalanche of garish, over-lit portrayals of the naked form, mostly female.
Although pornography has been with us since ancient times and expanded greatly with the printing press and then, in the 1960s, with Playboy, Penthouse and, finally, Hustler Magazine—an acme of biology unaesthetically portrayed, it is now overwhelming our culture. By the time kids today turn 18, over 90% report viewing internet porn, significantly more than those who have Googled a Modigliani nude, let alone gazed on one in a museum. Moreover porn accounts for at least 20% and as much as one third of all internet traffic.
While this is a frightening development for those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places, we have to be realistic. Titillation, self-love and sexual exploration have been with us for a long time and, being personal activities, are difficult to repress or censor, leaving us where we started: our imaginations.
Given about a half-a-million women, and some men, went to Washington, DC, and tens of thousands more to the 400 marches nation- and world-wide, many with banners saying "Pussy Grabs Back," we may be witnessing a new movement in public and gendered image-making.
In fact, the New York art scene just had a notable season of self-image exploration by women, culminating with an all-star group show, "#PussyPower", at the David and Schweitzer Gallery, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the inspiration for which was primarily political.
See full article here.
My Investigation of Japanese Romanticism, 2016
Amaterasu coming out of her cave, by Utagawa Kunisada, the most commercially successful artist in 19th C Japan. image: U. KunisadaWhile men had to be granted dominion in “Genesis”—it was a patriarchal text, after all—Adam is hardly the great warrior or genius, given he both blames Eve AND depends on her for knowledge. Moreover, many of the following Biblical stories tell of powerful women, and the Jewish Sabbath is essentially a matriarchal holiday, run by and for women (Christian women work on their sabbath, Jewish women do not).
The Japanese had a similar matriarchy-to-patriarchy transition. Like the Greeks, they developed a robust warrior class, which veered queer to veto pussy power. Indeed, they also defeated invasions by a neighboring super-power twice in one generation: the Mongols (1274 and 1281 CE). As with the Jews, they continued to honor women in the family and culture but more so in their religion, a fully female polytheism, unlike the Greek pantheon led by Zeus.
The supreme being of Japan’s ancient Shintoism is the sun goddess Amaterasu. While only a small percent of modern Japanese practice Shintoism (less than half are religious, the vast majority Buddhist), it remains the nation's cultural foundation; a female priest crowns each new male emperor, who is mythically descendent from Amaterasu, and its cultural and psychological effects continued to permeate.
With Japan’s unification, in the 3rd C CE, and its importation of new ideas (Confucianism, Buddhism) and tools (writing) from China, it entered its classical period. Capitalizing on the new cultural opportunities, women known as Saburuko began selling their services as entertainers and artists as well as prostitutes, a powerful trifecta since Shintoism eschewed sexual shame and featured sacred prostitution, as in ancient India and the Middle East.
Classical culture climaxed a couple of times but massively in the early 11th C with “The Tales of Genji”, by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman. Nominally centered on Genji, the son of an emperor and a lowly concubine, who was reduced from royalty to commoner, it concerns a near-endless series of relationships with women, some seemingly incestuous, others generating offspring, all exploring feelings, etiquette, court culture and the power of love. This was a quantum leap from the quests, conquests and imposition of rules men had been recording since the invention of the technology of writing.
In fact, "Genji" was the world’s first “novel” or “romance,” terms originally interchangeable in Latin-derived languages. (Romance's first syllable, meanwhile, references Italy’s founding tribe, city and empire, although Rome did little to advance its eponymous philosophy until Dante.)
“Genji” generated a romantic revolution, replete with the incessant exchange of poetry (often just two lines), enumerable love affairs (often clandestine), and art and aesthetics featuring affairs of the heart and imagination. In part because Shintoism has no central text, “Gengi” seemed to provide a powerful, indigenous worldview around which society could gather. The genre continued in Lady Sarashina’s “As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams” (11th C) and “Confessions of Lady Nijo” (14th C), among others.
The Greeks wrote little poetry and less about love, preferring the physicality and drama of theater. Sappho (7th C BCE), their only full-fledged romantic poet, was an educated woman, probably even a matriarch, from the island of Lesbos, which gave name to that gendered worldview, though she was also passionately bisexual. Not much Sappho survived Hellenism's civilizational collapse, only a few thrilling lines, “For love is the military power which no soldier or sailor can withstand,” among them.
Two troubadours from Avignon, one playing the popular nine-stringed lute, circa 1350. image: unknownThe Christians, for their part, attempted to outlaw male lust, which empowered both the fertility faiths and violent men, with a cult of chastity. By venerating Christ’s virgin mother Mary, they enshrined matriarchal wisdom and love as well as a hoped-for restraint, although they took centuries to establish a celibate priesthood, and until today to start enforcing it.
Removing religion from society’s tumult was a logical defensive technique also used by the Greeks, Hindus and others, although it was considered anti-life by Protestants, Jews, Muslims and most eastern religions including Shintoism. Despite the sexual repression, Christianity was intensely romantic, with a handsome personal deity who loves you and will forgives all your sins, not to mention its promise of eternal life and unbreakable, sacred bond with the procreative partner.
By the time Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) declared his devotion to Beatrice to become Italy’s first romantic poet, southern France and northern Italy had fallen for the Cathars, a Christian sect elevating asceticism, purity, pacifism and female feelings but also a second cosmological force, Satan. For that reason, the Catholics declared them a heresy and attacked them in the bloody Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), destroying their defenders and massacring their civilians, including their poets and musicians, eventually called troubadours.
Conflating love of the Lord with that of the beloved, the troubadours advocated for both a public Christian devotion and a private sexual one, in keeping with the Jewish, Muslim and Sufi poets of neighboring Spain's first Golden Age (9-11th C). Fleeing the Albigensian Crusade, the troubadours crisscrossed Europe, singing of love and freedom, which uplifted the peasants but transported the queens and knights, whose illicit love was more sacred than marriage, they claimed, since it was given freely.
Japan also fostered clans of skillful knights, the samurai, who joined with empowered women, if not queens. Their warlords finally took over in the Edo Period (1630-1868), installing the shogun and closing Japan to the outside world, although Zen mystics, artists and women continued expanding its intellectual horizons. “Life of an Amorous Woman” (17th C) by Ihara Saikaku, a man, combined humor, sex and love to showcase a more masculine romanticism. Becoming the "Gengi" of its day, it kicked off the fantastic "floating worlds" period.
In Europe, troubadour feminism was eventually subsumed by the morality of the Protestants, who often covered women’s bodies and outlawed dancing, music and drink, much like modern radical Islam. Japanese women, however, carried on as influential writers, performers and priestesses, as well as lovers, while wearing their favorite finery and consuming their share of sake.
Combining traditional skills with pithy conversation and exquisite taste were the geisha, Saburukos times ten, many from fallen samurai families. In fact, their robes, the kimono, derived from the dress of the samurai’s gay adjuncts, suggesting an amazingly queer-tolerant, gender-competitive society. Gay men also contributed extensively to the arts, naturally, and controlled outright the popular Kabuki theater, which prohibited women.
The geishas were the queens of the Floating Worlds of Kyoto, Tokyo and Osaka. But, unlike the denizens of other red-light districts world-wide, they blended male fantasy and gratification with their society’s highest arts, generating yet again the earth’s most advanced romanticism at that time.
Isolated from the real world, like the island of Japan itself, the Floating Worlds were divided from day labor but also the home, which was controlled by women, in the Confucian manner. Until recently, most Japanese men’s salaries were sent directly to their wives, compelling them to beg for booze money when on benders, a once-common sight Saturday nights across Tokyo.
The famous modern geisha Sada Yacco, who updated its traits and styles, circa 1900. photo: unknownBit by bit, the men took over public life, but not creatively enough to save Edo society, which atrophied in the late 18th C. Eventually, the young samurai began to rebel, although they were divided between expelling the European traders and missionaries, who had trickled in, or embracing them and going modern. The choice was made in 1853 by the black gunships of Commodore Perry, who forced open Japan to American trade, in a catastrophe of national shame and unequal treaties.
But, as with the 3rd century imports from China, it triggered new thinking and tool use, and a determination to become equal to the invaders, leading to the Meiji Restoration. Named for Emperor Meiji, who took the throne at fourteen and ruled from 1868 to 1912, he may have contributed little. Meanwhile, a wily band of oligarchs steered Japan through years of crisis and rebellion, ended samurai feudalism and instituted a constitutional monarchy with a diet. They also achieved an amazing technological leap.
At the same time, the first schools for women were starting; some women were still prominent, like author Higuchi Ichiyō (1872-96), geisha Sada Yacco (1871-1946), and poet and feminist Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), the first tp translate "Genji" to modern Japanese. Others developed their own foreign affairs. Nine months after Perry, there began to appear mixed-race kids, starting in the main Yankee port of Yokohama, while many Japanese became fascinated with American culture.
Empowered by western equipment and ideas, which they started studying zealously in the newly-opened universities, and their refocused patriarchal zeitgeist, the Meiji Restoration triggered an outpouring of male energy so massive the Japanese built an industrialized society in ONE generation. While much manufacturing was still done in huts, they soon fielded a fully mechanized army, even more astounding given their gun prohibition during the two centuries prior to Perry (because they allowed commoners to kill samurai).
While Emperor Meiji wrote poetry about peace, the oligarchs preferred the European playbook of power politics and raw materials extraction, colonizing Korea in 1873, invading northern China in 1885 and then annexing Taiwan. While not that remarkable in a century of European colonization of the Far East, Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 shocked Moscow elites, who blamed the Jews, and surprised the world.
Meanwhile, their refined romanticism continued, exemplified by Sada Yacco, who modernized geisha styles and became the Prime Minister’s mistress and then an admired actress, touring the US and Europe, where Japanese culture had, in turn, become a fad.
Japanese homosexuality, pornography and prostitution also continued apace, as detailed in Mori Ogai’s fascinating “Vita Sexualis” (1909). On top of explaining how he grew into a well-read modern man and doctor—the surgeon general of the Japanese Army, in fact—Ogai recalls many youthful adventures and societal secrets.
One is how almost every Japanese attic held an old book of sexy wood prints, if you could only ferret it out, although Ogai was initially confused when the men pictured seemed to have three legs. While the Greeks idealized small, symmetrical penises, Japanese artists preferred the exaggerated erections typical of matriarchal phallus shrines, which the women depicted in the woodcuts appeared to enjoy immensely, along with the occasional orgy or bestiality.
Those books included work by some of Japan's greatest artists, who found porn a lucrative side gig. Katsushika Hokusai, the early 19th C painter of the famous “Great Wave Off Kanagawa”, also did “Dreams of the Fisherman’s Wife”, which graphically portrays her intimate enthusiastic involvement with an enormous octopus.
'Dream of the Fisherman's Wife’, by Katsushika Hokusai, considered Japan's greatest 19th C artist. image: Hokusai, 1814By the 1920s, the films of Yasujiro Ozu, the books of Junichiro Tanizaki and Japan’s emerging democracy were showcasing a highly hybrid culture, which, as we can now see, is a Japanese specialty. Alongside the traffic jams, fanatic photo hobbyists, “modern girl” flappers and importation of all other things Western, from whiskey to classical music, they preserved Shinto rituals, emperor worship and extensive indigenous culture, including a healthy fish diet (making the Japanese some of the most long-lived people on the planet).
“Tanizaki is a special case,” noted the English-American author Pico Iyer, who married a Japanese woman and lived there for decades, in his “Nymphets in the New Japan” (New York Review of Books, 6/8/17). “Part of what gives his work their often lurid fascination is the gusto with which the novelist indulges his delight in everything girlish,” perhaps a vestige of romantic matriarchies. “The other part, is that he so unflinchingly measures the cost of such obsessions,” the male moral backlash.
Alas, military success inflates male egos. After decades of skirmishing around northern China and internal Japanese assassinations, corruption and power grabs, the militarists took over and decided to demonstrate their resolve by seizing China’s northern-most province, Manchuria (1931).
Japanese imperialism was romanticized by many in the East and some in the West as a necessary push back against Western imperialism, but not so much after the "Rape of Nanking," which killed up to a quarter-million civilians in 1938. Indeed, Japanese fascism, racism and emperor- and warrior-worship, as well as extreme violence, already evidenced an out-of-control patriarchy, which new reports of torture, grotesque medical experiments and mass murder only confirmed.
War was opposed by Japanese communists, Buddhists and pacifists, like George Ohsawa (inventor of macrobiotics), as well as some women and artists. The great naval commander Admiral Yamamoto was so opposed to the invasion of China and, later, attacking the United States, he was subject to assassination attempts. Emperor Hirohito publicly recited an anti-war poem by his grandfather, Meiji the Great. But it was not enough to offset sixty years of unparalleled patriarchal as well as industrial and military success.
Indeed, the vast majority of Japanese intellectuals endorsed the war effort. Even the pioneering poet and feminist Akiko shifted from her staunch pacifism after the First Battle of Shanghai (1932) and endorsed "bushido," the ancient samurai code of honor, (although some say an exaggerated version was popularized in the late 19th century), even calling on the Chinese to embrace Japanese domination, despite the butchery.
See full article here.
Cleopatra, the 1st century BCE Egyptian queen and great matriarch, married Roman emperor Marc Anthony after coming to see him in a purple-sailed flotilla, dressed as the Goddess Isis. photo: unknown A Chapter from My New Book, 'My Half Century with Islam': The Third Middle East Secret: Matriarchies
Monotheism is metaphorically masculine and intellectual, hence best contemplated at a distance, to shield supplicants from its infinite conceptual power and macho anger, while goddess worship is more local, intimate and human. Goddesses are cosmic mothers whose grandmothers created the earth and who can birth new gods, imbue idols with spirit, and merge with devotees psycho-sexually. Such full-body communion was imitated by Dionysus and Bacchus, the male Greek and Roman fertility gods, during their festivals.
Sufism also derived from those fertility cults, according to a few scholars, which suggests why the Wahhabis were so opposed Sufis as well as women. Whether or not that is Sufism's actual origins, goddess culture is a hard fact, which brings us to a third secret of the Middle East (after “Sufis saved Islam” and “Some Sufis became decadent”): Matriarchies.
Middle Eastern societies were almost entirely patriarchal, according to most European, American and Arab academics, since the invention of writing in the Third Millennia BCE, if not long before, but a minority of scholars disagree. Given how polytheist gods are born from goddesses, as men are from women, a polytheist heaven headed by a god, or a society ruled by men, remains somewhat or largely matriarchal, especially in the early years of patriarchy, no matter how many restrictive laws they passed. Some women operated and even dressed patriarchally, but the vast majority preferred womanly wiles, wisdom or private pressure to achieve their objectives, not public intimidation, brute force or other male strategies, which made their achievements harder to recognize or record and easier to downplay or erase. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that there were a few female rulers and many goddesses, priestesses and oracles as well as family heads and intellectuals all across the ancient Middle East. Indeed, some polytheist temples featured ceremonial sex, either on the altar or with "sacred prostitutes" skilled in soothsaying, music and ritual as well as sex (still exemplified by Japan's "geishas"). Precisely because she was so respected, the pagan Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Hypatia was murdered in 415 CE. More average matriarchs, meanwhile, ran religion in the community or home, the so-called "kitchen" gods, and managed village and family life, notably the choosing of the mate—which is also called "sexual selection" and is the critical but little known second half of evolution identified by Darwin a decade after "natural selection"—sex itself, midwifery, nursing, childrearing, weaving, singing, dancing, preparing better tasting food and healing/witchcraft.
Monotheism was a rebellion against the priestess status quo, which included public sex, seduction of visiting dignitaries and teaching women how to influence men through the base psychology of fetish and witchcraft but also the sophisticated mentation of aesthetics and romance, as well as the basic biology of desire. The prophets were so outraged, they excoriated "the daughters of Zion" for walking "with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes" and "making a tinkling with their feet" (wearing bangles, Isaiah 3:16), and anthropomorphized entire cities as fallen women. “Jerusalem… committed her whoredoms with… all them that were the chosen men of Assyria… with all their idols she defiled herself,” (Ezekiel 23:4-7), or Babylon was “the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth,” (Revelation 17:5). The Jewish patriarchs tried to deter idol worship, sensuousness and extramarital sex by prohibiting the portrayal of human likenesses and the sexier arts, like dancing, and by threatening women with death for adultery. That was understandable in the eighth century BCE, during the shift to patriarchy in nomadic cultures, where men sometimes traveled for up to years. Sunni Islam's elimination of figurative art in its entirety a millennia and a half later, however, was unprecedented for a civilization, given humanity's reliance on self-consciousness, mirrors and art to help us visualize our bodies and selves in nature and society (which is why the Partisans of the Nude art movement was so important for the 20th century Middle East).
'When God Was a Woman', by Merlin Stone, broke new ground and was highly lauded when it came out in 1976 but wasn't all that accurate. photo: unknown Regardless of patriarchal or feminist critiques, or scholars who ridicule matriarchal history as exaggerated or invented (arguments exacerbated by errors in popular '60s-era books, like "When God Was a Woman" by Merlin Stone, 1976), Islam is only 14 centuries old. Hence, there are plenty of archeological findings, writings from the day and ongoing folk tales, as well as sacred texts, which speak volumes from between God-dictated lines. For example, it is widely accepted that Muhammad’s first wife, Khadija, was an older, wealthy businesswoman, who was his boss but also his suitor in marriage—a great matriarch, in other words! Or that Islam’s holiest building, the Ka’aba in Mecca, is cared for today by a clan called Guardians of the Old Women. Until about 1400 years ago (it will be exactly that long in 2029), the Ka’aba housed dozens of polytheist idols, mostly depicting goddesses, and was surrounded by hundreds more. It was also encircled by brass and leather panels bearing poems, some ribald, by the winners of Mecca's popular poetry contests. Yes, Muhammad destroyed the Ka’aba's figurines in December 629 after conquering Mecca peacefully, through negotiation, but he kept one, the Ka’aba Stone, as the central icon of his new, idol-less faith, in keeping with syncretism, the universal tradition of blending religions or repurposing of older beliefs, buildings or symbols. Unfortunately, the Ka’aba Stone was engraved with a "yoni" (a "Y" mark signifying vagina), which obviously served to preserve matriarchal memories, especially after being touched by millions of Muslims during their Hajj pilgrimage. Interestingly, the Ka’aba is called “al-Haram,” meaning both “sacred” and “forbidden," which helps illustrate its history of theological gender switching but adds the task of integrating opposites, a popular theme in Arab culture.
"I personally believe all the world is a matriarchy” is a single-sentence revelation from “Afghanistan” (1973), the exhaustive book by Louis Dupree, a respected American anthropologist. Dupree lived for over a decade in an Afghan village and reveals another side of that desert and mountain society, which is notoriously misogynist unless you’re familiar with its Queen Gawhar Shad, from 15th-century Herat, its female fighters, from the fierce Pashtun people (also known for their homosexual practices), or its poetry, see “Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry” (2010), edited by Sayd Majrouh, an Afghan-born, Sorbonne-educated philosopher and folklorist. Afghanistan has a tradition of “landays,” two-line poems also found elsewhere in the Middle East, generally used by women—men prefer epics—often to communicate with men they sexually select, surreptitiously in the street or via messages carried by confidents. Inflamed by their society's social suffocation, such liaisons frequently led to marriage, after the lovebirds convinced or outlasted their opposing families (which could take 20 years), or wild sex, as described in some Landays. “Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields; So we can love each other or fall beneath the blows of knives.” When their relatives come to kill them, according to Majrouh, who was himself murdered by extremists (Kabul, 1988), the men flee, but the women traditionally stand and take it, a la Hashashin, albeit for love, romance and pleasure not hate, politics or money. Dupree also notes extensive, secretive extramarital sex, which most villagers ignored but some machos escalated into "honor killings," the euphemism for offended men murdering their own sisters, wives, mothers, daughters or cousins (an obviously deleterious practice, psychologically and evolutionarily). This strong and secret female side of Afghanistan shows that even centuries of arranged marriages, confinement and punishment, sometimes severe, could not erase women's longings for matriarchal freedom, romance and sex.
In fact, the Middle East is home to humanity's first written love poem by an unknown Babylonian woman living around two millennia BCE and rather sexy, even by post-internet-porn standards. It includes the line, “In the bedchamber dripping with honey let us enjoy over and over your allure.” The first extant, first-person, written poem, meanwhile, is two centuries older but also Babylonian and on love, albeit for Inana, the goddess of sex and war. It was penned by Enheduana, the high priestess of Ur and beloved daughter of Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian Empire, the earth’s first multi-nation civilization (nation being a multi-tribe and tribe multi-clan), which flourished around 2300 BCE. Sargon was the son of a great matriarch, as he announces in his autobiography (which also chronicles the origins of agriculture): “[M]y mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not… in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes… The river bore me up and carried me to Akki [probably Baghdad], the drawer of water [who] took me as his son and reared me [and] appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, [the Goddess] Ishtar granted me her love.”
A statue of Afghanistan's revered tenth century female poet, Rabi’ah Balkhi, probably in Tajikistan. photo: unknown The first great poetess of the Sufis, and the Persians in general, was Rabi’ah Balkhi, of tenth century Balkh, Afghanistan (Middle Easterners sometimes take their birthplace as their last name). Indeed, she remains highly revered regionally, from poetry classes to girl names or those of institutions, like Kabul's Rabi’ah Balkhi University (which is still called that, in January 2025, despite the Taliban reconquest of 2021). Rabi’ah fell madly in love with a slave, Bektash, refused to break it off, and was attacked by her relatives. As she bled out, however, she inscribed her romantic musings on the wall in blood, including the lines: "I knew not when I rode the high-blooded stead; The harder I pulled its reins the less it would heed,” and “When you see things hideous, fancy them neat; Eat poison, but taste sugar sweet." Persian, Arab and Jewish women were known for their romanticism, passion and libidos, which is the natural result of a matriarchal society's encouragement of female sexual expression and male sexual selection of those traits. Much of this is detailed in the eyeopening book, “Nine Parts of Desire: The Hidden World of Islamic Women” (1994), by the increasingly respected researcher and novelist Geraldine Brooks.
Rumi’s father, Bahuaddin, who lived three centuries after Rabi'ah, was also a resident of Balkh and a talented writer and Sufi. He tells the tale of “the husband of a woman who composes songs and sings them in public. One day he arrives home unexpectedly and finds her with another man. He storms out, vowing divorce. Later he remembers the prepared meals, the clean clothes, the warm bed and the excitement of living with a woman who sings beautiful songs she composes herself,” (“The Drowned Book”, translated by Coleman Barks, John Moyne and Baha Al-Din Valad, 2004). Having so many smart and sensual women starring in so many folk tales helps explain why so many Muslims are so desperate to control their women. They think it will help Islam evolve from “jahiliyyah,” “the time of ignorance and chaos,” code for matriarchal polytheism, into a law-abiding, functional and masculine monotheist civilization.
See full article here.
Thanks for reading to the end of this article, which indicates your interest in the somewhat taboo topics of ancient matriarchy, porn and romance. They are fascinating subjects, worthy of investigation both for their own sake and to shed light on current dilemmas. For more info, please email me .
Posted on Jun 20, 2025 - 06:36 PM
by Doniphan Blair
The NY Times section were Doniphan Blair's letter about pornography appeared. illo: NY TimesEXTRA, EXTRA, READ ALL ABOUT IT,
Doniphan Blair—meaning me, this author, yours truly—got published in the New York Times, the goddamned New York Times. Admittedly, it was only a letter to the editor, but, hey, it was in the Sunday, June 1rst edition, under the title “Politics and Perils of Pornography”, alongside other responses.
Although only 100 words, my letter allowed me to broach one of my favorite subjects, matriarchies, albeit squeezed into the difficult question of porn.
“As bad as new porn always seems,” was how I opened, (see whole text here), but soon segueing to my theme, “It is based on ancient traditions. In fact, our interest in fantasy, sex and role-play have produced something resembling porn all the way back to the polytheist temples.”
Although that was far as I could go, into the history of matriarchies, before returning to the subject at hand, I was able to conclude with another one of my favorite topics: romance. “This is evidence that our fantasies cannot be repressed or shamed out of existence, but only managed and channeled into expressions of partnered, romantic sex.”
Given the radical implications of ancient matriarchies, ever-increasing pornography and the crisis of modern romance, I thought I might survey some of my writing on those subjects, starting when I interviewed Muslim women filmmakers in 2011, reviewing a show of nude paintings by women in 2020, or my analysis of the romantic evolution of Japan, from 2016, among other essays.
From My Article about Muslim Women Filmmakers, 2011
Women's Voices Now (left to right): Miriam Wakim, Director of Development, 26, Lebanese-American; Cassandra Schaffa, Director of Festival Operations, 27, Czech-Puerto Rican; Catinca Tabacaru, Executive Director, 29, Romanian-Canadian; Oluchi Enemanna, Project Manager, 23, Nigerian; Betsy Laikin, Project Manager, 27, American; Mona Pajwani, Project Manager, 32, Indian. photo: Yura LiaminThe spot light is hard for Tabacuru. Articulate and outspoken, she is also modest and collaborative. Indeed, her small team has done an incredible job of networking with related organizations, launching the festival on a shoestring, and even negotiating a possible collaboration with the State Department—talk about walking into the patriarchal lion's den!
Moreover, matriarchal references are problematic. The very existence of pre-historical matriarchies is denied by most academics simply since they don't mirror patriarchies but with women on top. Similarly, excessive seduction or cooperation was rejected by most first and second wave feminists because they just wanted to be treated equally to men and didn't want to confuse that goal with alternate paradigms. But those women weren't dealing with revanchist patriarchs who, in reaction to Women's Lib and modernity, want to lock women into burkas and kitchens and resurrect a mediaeval Islam.
"If we are talking about a reformation of Islam," says Tabacuru, "That is going to take a while. I don't really want to wait for all of Islam to reform in order to make sure women can drive in every country."
Hence, Tabacuru's quest, beautifully summarized by her organization's name: Women's Voices Now!
See full article here.
Judith Linhares's 'Look Back', 2008, recently appeared in the '#PussyPower Show' at David & Schweitzer, Brooklyn. photo: courtesy J. LinharesThe female body is a powerful weapon, it turns out, to the surprise of those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places.
In Ghana, in 2005, 200 women protestors threatened to take off their clothes to shame into action the male delegates attending a peace summit for the Liberian civil war. Many observers agreed, their body-image activism broke the deadlock.
More recently, at the Women’s March on January 21st, bold placard statements and sometimes-strange sculptures reclaimed the word and the image of “pussy.”
Yes, it is a fraught subject, with feral fascination notorious among men and exaggerated in the age of Trump and porn, but the mystical and moral qualities of the nude remain unbowed.
The "naked body provides a vivid reminder [of] harmony, energy, ecstasy, humility, pathos,” according to British art historian Kenneth Clark, in his acclaimed book, "The Nude" (1963). “[It] arouses memories of all the things we wish to do with ourselves, and first of all, the wish to perpetuate ourselves," he adds, emphasizing what scientists often fail to mention: the importance of biology to aesthetics.
Simply put: the curvy female body is the site of 99% of reproduction and, as such, is an apt icon for life and evolution. The male nude, meanwhile, is interrupted, visually and morally, by the linear, sometimes violent and often indiscriminate phallus.
Indeed, reproduction depends on communication, cultural as well as genetic. Starting at a distance with the surveying of potential mates, reproduction becomes physical in the defining moment of foreplay to sex but only reaches fruition with the raising of the next generation. Indispensable to this biology among humans are the "three Cs," communication, culture and cooperation, with some form of romanticism at its center.
This four-and-a-half inch limestone statue is about 27,000 years old and was found in 1908, near Willendorf, Austria. photo: courtesy Naturhistorisches Museum, ViennaIndeed, over the entire last two-and-a-half millennia, the nude has largely held its own, dominating the provocative space between sacred and profane, until a recent publishing revolution upended that aesthetic and moral balance.
Starting in 1999, but going full bore in the new millennia, online computers graduated from dialup to DSL and gained high-resolution access to the World Wide Web. Along with a repository of humanity's knowledge and art, this included an avalanche of garish, over-lit portrayals of the naked form, mostly female.
Although pornography has been with us since ancient times and expanded greatly with the printing press and then, in the 1960s, with Playboy, Penthouse and, finally, Hustler Magazine—an acme of biology unaesthetically portrayed, it is now overwhelming our culture. By the time kids today turn 18, over 90% report viewing internet porn, significantly more than those who have Googled a Modigliani nude, let alone gazed on one in a museum. Moreover porn accounts for at least 20% and as much as one third of all internet traffic.
While this is a frightening development for those of us hailing from more innocent or politically-correct places, we have to be realistic. Titillation, self-love and sexual exploration have been with us for a long time and, being personal activities, are difficult to repress or censor, leaving us where we started: our imaginations.
Given about a half-a-million women, and some men, went to Washington, DC, and tens of thousands more to the 400 marches nation- and world-wide, many with banners saying "Pussy Grabs Back," we may be witnessing a new movement in public and gendered image-making.
In fact, the New York art scene just had a notable season of self-image exploration by women, culminating with an all-star group show, "#PussyPower", at the David and Schweitzer Gallery, in Bushwick, Brooklyn, the inspiration for which was primarily political.
See full article here.
My Investigation of Japanese Romanticism, 2016
Amaterasu coming out of her cave, by Utagawa Kunisada, the most commercially successful artist in 19th C Japan. image: U. KunisadaThe Japanese had a similar matriarchy-to-patriarchy transition. Like the Greeks, they developed a robust warrior class, which veered queer to veto pussy power. Indeed, they also defeated invasions by a neighboring super-power twice in one generation: the Mongols (1274 and 1281 CE). As with the Jews, they continued to honor women in the family and culture but more so in their religion, a fully female polytheism, unlike the Greek pantheon led by Zeus.
The supreme being of Japan’s ancient Shintoism is the sun goddess Amaterasu. While only a small percent of modern Japanese practice Shintoism (less than half are religious, the vast majority Buddhist), it remains the nation's cultural foundation; a female priest crowns each new male emperor, who is mythically descendent from Amaterasu, and its cultural and psychological effects continued to permeate.
With Japan’s unification, in the 3rd C CE, and its importation of new ideas (Confucianism, Buddhism) and tools (writing) from China, it entered its classical period. Capitalizing on the new cultural opportunities, women known as Saburuko began selling their services as entertainers and artists as well as prostitutes, a powerful trifecta since Shintoism eschewed sexual shame and featured sacred prostitution, as in ancient India and the Middle East.
Classical culture climaxed a couple of times but massively in the early 11th C with “The Tales of Genji”, by Murasaki Shikibu, a noblewoman. Nominally centered on Genji, the son of an emperor and a lowly concubine, who was reduced from royalty to commoner, it concerns a near-endless series of relationships with women, some seemingly incestuous, others generating offspring, all exploring feelings, etiquette, court culture and the power of love. This was a quantum leap from the quests, conquests and imposition of rules men had been recording since the invention of the technology of writing.
In fact, "Genji" was the world’s first “novel” or “romance,” terms originally interchangeable in Latin-derived languages. (Romance's first syllable, meanwhile, references Italy’s founding tribe, city and empire, although Rome did little to advance its eponymous philosophy until Dante.)
“Genji” generated a romantic revolution, replete with the incessant exchange of poetry (often just two lines), enumerable love affairs (often clandestine), and art and aesthetics featuring affairs of the heart and imagination. In part because Shintoism has no central text, “Gengi” seemed to provide a powerful, indigenous worldview around which society could gather. The genre continued in Lady Sarashina’s “As I Crossed a Bridge of Dreams” (11th C) and “Confessions of Lady Nijo” (14th C), among others.
The Greeks wrote little poetry and less about love, preferring the physicality and drama of theater. Sappho (7th C BCE), their only full-fledged romantic poet, was an educated woman, probably even a matriarch, from the island of Lesbos, which gave name to that gendered worldview, though she was also passionately bisexual. Not much Sappho survived Hellenism's civilizational collapse, only a few thrilling lines, “For love is the military power which no soldier or sailor can withstand,” among them.
Two troubadours from Avignon, one playing the popular nine-stringed lute, circa 1350. image: unknownRemoving religion from society’s tumult was a logical defensive technique also used by the Greeks, Hindus and others, although it was considered anti-life by Protestants, Jews, Muslims and most eastern religions including Shintoism. Despite the sexual repression, Christianity was intensely romantic, with a handsome personal deity who loves you and will forgives all your sins, not to mention its promise of eternal life and unbreakable, sacred bond with the procreative partner.
By the time Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) declared his devotion to Beatrice to become Italy’s first romantic poet, southern France and northern Italy had fallen for the Cathars, a Christian sect elevating asceticism, purity, pacifism and female feelings but also a second cosmological force, Satan. For that reason, the Catholics declared them a heresy and attacked them in the bloody Albigensian Crusade (1209–1229), destroying their defenders and massacring their civilians, including their poets and musicians, eventually called troubadours.
Conflating love of the Lord with that of the beloved, the troubadours advocated for both a public Christian devotion and a private sexual one, in keeping with the Jewish, Muslim and Sufi poets of neighboring Spain's first Golden Age (9-11th C). Fleeing the Albigensian Crusade, the troubadours crisscrossed Europe, singing of love and freedom, which uplifted the peasants but transported the queens and knights, whose illicit love was more sacred than marriage, they claimed, since it was given freely.
Japan also fostered clans of skillful knights, the samurai, who joined with empowered women, if not queens. Their warlords finally took over in the Edo Period (1630-1868), installing the shogun and closing Japan to the outside world, although Zen mystics, artists and women continued expanding its intellectual horizons. “Life of an Amorous Woman” (17th C) by Ihara Saikaku, a man, combined humor, sex and love to showcase a more masculine romanticism. Becoming the "Gengi" of its day, it kicked off the fantastic "floating worlds" period.
In Europe, troubadour feminism was eventually subsumed by the morality of the Protestants, who often covered women’s bodies and outlawed dancing, music and drink, much like modern radical Islam. Japanese women, however, carried on as influential writers, performers and priestesses, as well as lovers, while wearing their favorite finery and consuming their share of sake.
Combining traditional skills with pithy conversation and exquisite taste were the geisha, Saburukos times ten, many from fallen samurai families. In fact, their robes, the kimono, derived from the dress of the samurai’s gay adjuncts, suggesting an amazingly queer-tolerant, gender-competitive society. Gay men also contributed extensively to the arts, naturally, and controlled outright the popular Kabuki theater, which prohibited women.
The geishas were the queens of the Floating Worlds of Kyoto, Tokyo and Osaka. But, unlike the denizens of other red-light districts world-wide, they blended male fantasy and gratification with their society’s highest arts, generating yet again the earth’s most advanced romanticism at that time.
Isolated from the real world, like the island of Japan itself, the Floating Worlds were divided from day labor but also the home, which was controlled by women, in the Confucian manner. Until recently, most Japanese men’s salaries were sent directly to their wives, compelling them to beg for booze money when on benders, a once-common sight Saturday nights across Tokyo.
The famous modern geisha Sada Yacco, who updated its traits and styles, circa 1900. photo: unknownBut, as with the 3rd century imports from China, it triggered new thinking and tool use, and a determination to become equal to the invaders, leading to the Meiji Restoration. Named for Emperor Meiji, who took the throne at fourteen and ruled from 1868 to 1912, he may have contributed little. Meanwhile, a wily band of oligarchs steered Japan through years of crisis and rebellion, ended samurai feudalism and instituted a constitutional monarchy with a diet. They also achieved an amazing technological leap.
At the same time, the first schools for women were starting; some women were still prominent, like author Higuchi Ichiyō (1872-96), geisha Sada Yacco (1871-1946), and poet and feminist Yosano Akiko (1878-1942), the first tp translate "Genji" to modern Japanese. Others developed their own foreign affairs. Nine months after Perry, there began to appear mixed-race kids, starting in the main Yankee port of Yokohama, while many Japanese became fascinated with American culture.
Empowered by western equipment and ideas, which they started studying zealously in the newly-opened universities, and their refocused patriarchal zeitgeist, the Meiji Restoration triggered an outpouring of male energy so massive the Japanese built an industrialized society in ONE generation. While much manufacturing was still done in huts, they soon fielded a fully mechanized army, even more astounding given their gun prohibition during the two centuries prior to Perry (because they allowed commoners to kill samurai).
While Emperor Meiji wrote poetry about peace, the oligarchs preferred the European playbook of power politics and raw materials extraction, colonizing Korea in 1873, invading northern China in 1885 and then annexing Taiwan. While not that remarkable in a century of European colonization of the Far East, Japan's victory over Russia in 1905 shocked Moscow elites, who blamed the Jews, and surprised the world.
Meanwhile, their refined romanticism continued, exemplified by Sada Yacco, who modernized geisha styles and became the Prime Minister’s mistress and then an admired actress, touring the US and Europe, where Japanese culture had, in turn, become a fad.
Japanese homosexuality, pornography and prostitution also continued apace, as detailed in Mori Ogai’s fascinating “Vita Sexualis” (1909). On top of explaining how he grew into a well-read modern man and doctor—the surgeon general of the Japanese Army, in fact—Ogai recalls many youthful adventures and societal secrets.
One is how almost every Japanese attic held an old book of sexy wood prints, if you could only ferret it out, although Ogai was initially confused when the men pictured seemed to have three legs. While the Greeks idealized small, symmetrical penises, Japanese artists preferred the exaggerated erections typical of matriarchal phallus shrines, which the women depicted in the woodcuts appeared to enjoy immensely, along with the occasional orgy or bestiality.
Those books included work by some of Japan's greatest artists, who found porn a lucrative side gig. Katsushika Hokusai, the early 19th C painter of the famous “Great Wave Off Kanagawa”, also did “Dreams of the Fisherman’s Wife”, which graphically portrays her intimate enthusiastic involvement with an enormous octopus.
'Dream of the Fisherman's Wife’, by Katsushika Hokusai, considered Japan's greatest 19th C artist. image: Hokusai, 1814“Tanizaki is a special case,” noted the English-American author Pico Iyer, who married a Japanese woman and lived there for decades, in his “Nymphets in the New Japan” (New York Review of Books, 6/8/17). “Part of what gives his work their often lurid fascination is the gusto with which the novelist indulges his delight in everything girlish,” perhaps a vestige of romantic matriarchies. “The other part, is that he so unflinchingly measures the cost of such obsessions,” the male moral backlash.
Alas, military success inflates male egos. After decades of skirmishing around northern China and internal Japanese assassinations, corruption and power grabs, the militarists took over and decided to demonstrate their resolve by seizing China’s northern-most province, Manchuria (1931).
Japanese imperialism was romanticized by many in the East and some in the West as a necessary push back against Western imperialism, but not so much after the "Rape of Nanking," which killed up to a quarter-million civilians in 1938. Indeed, Japanese fascism, racism and emperor- and warrior-worship, as well as extreme violence, already evidenced an out-of-control patriarchy, which new reports of torture, grotesque medical experiments and mass murder only confirmed.
War was opposed by Japanese communists, Buddhists and pacifists, like George Ohsawa (inventor of macrobiotics), as well as some women and artists. The great naval commander Admiral Yamamoto was so opposed to the invasion of China and, later, attacking the United States, he was subject to assassination attempts. Emperor Hirohito publicly recited an anti-war poem by his grandfather, Meiji the Great. But it was not enough to offset sixty years of unparalleled patriarchal as well as industrial and military success.
Indeed, the vast majority of Japanese intellectuals endorsed the war effort. Even the pioneering poet and feminist Akiko shifted from her staunch pacifism after the First Battle of Shanghai (1932) and endorsed "bushido," the ancient samurai code of honor, (although some say an exaggerated version was popularized in the late 19th century), even calling on the Chinese to embrace Japanese domination, despite the butchery.
See full article here.
Cleopatra, the 1st century BCE Egyptian queen and great matriarch, married Roman emperor Marc Anthony after coming to see him in a purple-sailed flotilla, dressed as the Goddess Isis. photo: unknown Monotheism is metaphorically masculine and intellectual, hence best contemplated at a distance, to shield supplicants from its infinite conceptual power and macho anger, while goddess worship is more local, intimate and human. Goddesses are cosmic mothers whose grandmothers created the earth and who can birth new gods, imbue idols with spirit, and merge with devotees psycho-sexually. Such full-body communion was imitated by Dionysus and Bacchus, the male Greek and Roman fertility gods, during their festivals.
Sufism also derived from those fertility cults, according to a few scholars, which suggests why the Wahhabis were so opposed Sufis as well as women. Whether or not that is Sufism's actual origins, goddess culture is a hard fact, which brings us to a third secret of the Middle East (after “Sufis saved Islam” and “Some Sufis became decadent”): Matriarchies.
Middle Eastern societies were almost entirely patriarchal, according to most European, American and Arab academics, since the invention of writing in the Third Millennia BCE, if not long before, but a minority of scholars disagree. Given how polytheist gods are born from goddesses, as men are from women, a polytheist heaven headed by a god, or a society ruled by men, remains somewhat or largely matriarchal, especially in the early years of patriarchy, no matter how many restrictive laws they passed. Some women operated and even dressed patriarchally, but the vast majority preferred womanly wiles, wisdom or private pressure to achieve their objectives, not public intimidation, brute force or other male strategies, which made their achievements harder to recognize or record and easier to downplay or erase. Nevertheless, there is ample evidence that there were a few female rulers and many goddesses, priestesses and oracles as well as family heads and intellectuals all across the ancient Middle East. Indeed, some polytheist temples featured ceremonial sex, either on the altar or with "sacred prostitutes" skilled in soothsaying, music and ritual as well as sex (still exemplified by Japan's "geishas"). Precisely because she was so respected, the pagan Egyptian mathematician and astronomer Hypatia was murdered in 415 CE. More average matriarchs, meanwhile, ran religion in the community or home, the so-called "kitchen" gods, and managed village and family life, notably the choosing of the mate—which is also called "sexual selection" and is the critical but little known second half of evolution identified by Darwin a decade after "natural selection"—sex itself, midwifery, nursing, childrearing, weaving, singing, dancing, preparing better tasting food and healing/witchcraft.
Monotheism was a rebellion against the priestess status quo, which included public sex, seduction of visiting dignitaries and teaching women how to influence men through the base psychology of fetish and witchcraft but also the sophisticated mentation of aesthetics and romance, as well as the basic biology of desire. The prophets were so outraged, they excoriated "the daughters of Zion" for walking "with stretched forth necks and wanton eyes" and "making a tinkling with their feet" (wearing bangles, Isaiah 3:16), and anthropomorphized entire cities as fallen women. “Jerusalem… committed her whoredoms with… all them that were the chosen men of Assyria… with all their idols she defiled herself,” (Ezekiel 23:4-7), or Babylon was “the mother of harlots and abominations of the Earth,” (Revelation 17:5). The Jewish patriarchs tried to deter idol worship, sensuousness and extramarital sex by prohibiting the portrayal of human likenesses and the sexier arts, like dancing, and by threatening women with death for adultery. That was understandable in the eighth century BCE, during the shift to patriarchy in nomadic cultures, where men sometimes traveled for up to years. Sunni Islam's elimination of figurative art in its entirety a millennia and a half later, however, was unprecedented for a civilization, given humanity's reliance on self-consciousness, mirrors and art to help us visualize our bodies and selves in nature and society (which is why the Partisans of the Nude art movement was so important for the 20th century Middle East).
'When God Was a Woman', by Merlin Stone, broke new ground and was highly lauded when it came out in 1976 but wasn't all that accurate. photo: unknown "I personally believe all the world is a matriarchy” is a single-sentence revelation from “Afghanistan” (1973), the exhaustive book by Louis Dupree, a respected American anthropologist. Dupree lived for over a decade in an Afghan village and reveals another side of that desert and mountain society, which is notoriously misogynist unless you’re familiar with its Queen Gawhar Shad, from 15th-century Herat, its female fighters, from the fierce Pashtun people (also known for their homosexual practices), or its poetry, see “Songs of Love and War: Afghan Women’s Poetry” (2010), edited by Sayd Majrouh, an Afghan-born, Sorbonne-educated philosopher and folklorist. Afghanistan has a tradition of “landays,” two-line poems also found elsewhere in the Middle East, generally used by women—men prefer epics—often to communicate with men they sexually select, surreptitiously in the street or via messages carried by confidents. Inflamed by their society's social suffocation, such liaisons frequently led to marriage, after the lovebirds convinced or outlasted their opposing families (which could take 20 years), or wild sex, as described in some Landays. “Give me your hand, my love, and let us go into the fields; So we can love each other or fall beneath the blows of knives.” When their relatives come to kill them, according to Majrouh, who was himself murdered by extremists (Kabul, 1988), the men flee, but the women traditionally stand and take it, a la Hashashin, albeit for love, romance and pleasure not hate, politics or money. Dupree also notes extensive, secretive extramarital sex, which most villagers ignored but some machos escalated into "honor killings," the euphemism for offended men murdering their own sisters, wives, mothers, daughters or cousins (an obviously deleterious practice, psychologically and evolutionarily). This strong and secret female side of Afghanistan shows that even centuries of arranged marriages, confinement and punishment, sometimes severe, could not erase women's longings for matriarchal freedom, romance and sex.
In fact, the Middle East is home to humanity's first written love poem by an unknown Babylonian woman living around two millennia BCE and rather sexy, even by post-internet-porn standards. It includes the line, “In the bedchamber dripping with honey let us enjoy over and over your allure.” The first extant, first-person, written poem, meanwhile, is two centuries older but also Babylonian and on love, albeit for Inana, the goddess of sex and war. It was penned by Enheduana, the high priestess of Ur and beloved daughter of Sargon the Great, founder of the Akkadian Empire, the earth’s first multi-nation civilization (nation being a multi-tribe and tribe multi-clan), which flourished around 2300 BCE. Sargon was the son of a great matriarch, as he announces in his autobiography (which also chronicles the origins of agriculture): “[M]y mother was a high priestess, my father I knew not… in secret she bore me. She set me in a basket of rushes… The river bore me up and carried me to Akki [probably Baghdad], the drawer of water [who] took me as his son and reared me [and] appointed me as his gardener. While I was a gardener, [the Goddess] Ishtar granted me her love.”
A statue of Afghanistan's revered tenth century female poet, Rabi’ah Balkhi, probably in Tajikistan. photo: unknown Rumi’s father, Bahuaddin, who lived three centuries after Rabi'ah, was also a resident of Balkh and a talented writer and Sufi. He tells the tale of “the husband of a woman who composes songs and sings them in public. One day he arrives home unexpectedly and finds her with another man. He storms out, vowing divorce. Later he remembers the prepared meals, the clean clothes, the warm bed and the excitement of living with a woman who sings beautiful songs she composes herself,” (“The Drowned Book”, translated by Coleman Barks, John Moyne and Baha Al-Din Valad, 2004). Having so many smart and sensual women starring in so many folk tales helps explain why so many Muslims are so desperate to control their women. They think it will help Islam evolve from “jahiliyyah,” “the time of ignorance and chaos,” code for matriarchal polytheism, into a law-abiding, functional and masculine monotheist civilization.
See full article here.
Thanks for reading to the end of this article, which indicates your interest in the somewhat taboo topics of ancient matriarchy, porn and romance. They are fascinating subjects, worthy of investigation both for their own sake and to shed light on current dilemmas. For more info, please email me .
Posted on Jun 20, 2025 - 06:36 PM
