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[117] Eve‟s Seed: History and „Control of Reproduction‟ Religion of Masculine Insecurity: ―What is history? The lie that everyone agrees on...‖ – Voltaire
[118]
In Eve‟s Seed: Masculine Insecurity, Metaphor, and the Shaping of
History, and Eve‟s Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History, Robert McElvaine described it thus: ―Karl Marx had it wrong. Class has, to be sure, been a major factor in history; but class itself is a derivative concept that is based on the ultimate causative power in history: sex. Marx‗s famous formulation must be revised: The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of struggles based on the division of our species into two sexes, jealousies emanating from this division, exaggerations of the differences between the sexes, misunderstandings about sexual reproductive power, and metaphors derived from sex. Together, these closely related matters constitute the most important, but largely neglected, set of motive forces in human history. Control -- or the claim of control -- over the means of reproduction has been even more fundamental to history than has control of the means of production... [118.1] Robert McElvaine ―throws down the gauntlet to academics and nonspecialists alike, daring a radical rethinking of the basic 'truths' on which cultures have been constructed.‖ He argues that ―there is nothing unique to Islam about male insistence on the subordination of and male control over women and their bodies.‖ McElvaine says misogynistic rulers may be religious fanatics, but their religion is not Islam, but Woody Allen‗s religion in his 2001 movie, The Curse of the Jade Scorpion: ―insecure masculinity‖. [118.2] Eve's Seed reviews ―some 94 centuries of human history, stretching from 8,000 B.C.E. and the invention of agriculture through the Middle Ages‖, to 20th century America, explaining how and why sexually insecure – ―not-a-woman‖ – men seek validation of their manhood by pursuing power, and have used their power to disproportionately influence the shaping of cultures. Daniel Aloi (02 August 2005): Men overcompensate when their masculinity is threatened, Cornell study shows, Cornell University http://www.news.cornell.edu/stories/aug05/soc.gender.dea.html 105
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