I believe that feminism means much more than merely demanding equality, regardless of gender, race, religion, ethnicity, sexual preference or any of those other bad things we're supposed to be regardless of.
Surely, to have real meaning, feminism also has to mean liberation from the ancient male God-ordained, male-serving insistence on female virtue and subservience. Male ownership, in fact.
For thousands of years, male representatives on earth of male gods in heaven have relied on upper-body strength to enforce dominance over females. It's a simple case of "I’ll keep beating you until you do what my ever-loving God tells me to tell you to do."
But the rise of feminism has freed us to live our lives — particularly our sex lives — the way we want to, not the way we're told. This means ignoring those self-serving male gods invented by men back there in those miserable deserts so very long ago.
Anyway, which of the multitude of gods to listen to? Judaism and Islam have one each and can't live on the same patch of desert without slaughtering each other. Christianity has three and a long history of murdering people who don't do what the threesome tells them to do. Hinduism has something like 10,000 and is based on a brutal caste system which damns millions of Dalits (Untouchables) as less than human. Buddhism (thankfully) is more a system of beliefs and practices than a religion. The only similarity these faiths share is that, by and large, they fear and despise women and fantasize endlessly about keeping us chained to the kitchen and bedroom.
If I have to choose a god, I'll go with the females — Isis, Ishtar, Aphrodite, Cybele and Mahimita — with the vague and desperate hope that they, at least, will favour love over war. Even here however, I have to remind myself that religion, like power, has a nasty tendency to corrupt even the best.
Meantime for divine guidance, I study Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, Machiavelli's The Prince, Sun Tzu's The Art of War and anything by Gloria Steinem, Bill Maher and George Carlin.
(Samantha Jones is a Canadian journalist publishing her erotic memoir at www.lulu.com)
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