In his book Moral Monopoly: The Catholic Church in Modern Irish Society, Tom Inglis wrote about the distortion of femininity by the church as a means of achieving control of sexuality and marriage. To gain control of women, the church appropriated and corrupted femininity and inculcated in Irishwomen a sense of shame about their sexuality and difference.
This mission to pervert human nature was linked to the Puritan ethic by which women were forced into an exaggerated femininity, and majored, in Inglis's words, on the portrayal of women as "weak, fragile beings who must be protected from the sexual viper which lurked within them".
It is interesting to observe how today, in a society which has ostensibly liberated itself from the tyranny of the past, this tendency to control human nature has mutated and shifted. Now, in the hands of a new clergy - claiming, like their predecessors, to be assisting us towards a more enlightened era - the Puritan impulse takes a different form.
Now we face a new attempt at suppression, this time of masculinity. Many of those who have correctly identified the past wrongdoing of the church in relation to women now seek to appropriate the obsolete toolkit for use against men. They tell us that masculinity is a social construct, that it is toxic and dangerous and oppressive and violent and bad.
They tell us that young boys need to be educated to become less like their fathers. This endeavour, which has emerged from the desires of a mutant form of man-hating feminism, seeking to obliterate manhood as punishment for alleged and unproven crimes, has recently infiltrated the Irish education system in the form of the Exploring Masculinities programme aimed at teenage boys.
It would be a mistake to conclude that this assault on manhood, male values and masculinity is motivated purely by ideological spite. In fact it is central to the requirements of the would-be new power elites in creating new logics and belief systems to allow them to come to power. They would have us believe they are seeking to dismantle the wrongs inflicted by the previous generation of social engineers, but in reality they are repeating the process from the other direction, and for the same reasons.
When you come to examine closely the tendencies of repressive regimes, you find that their attempts at supression of the human spirit are fundamentally efforts to control the force which distinguishes men from women and finds its most potent expression in the sexual urge. Whether we live in consciousnes of this or not, the sexual force is what keeps us alive.
It is the most fundamental concern of every religion, philosophy and ideology, and all of these systems can be divided into two: those seeking to repress the sexual instinct and those seeking to channel it constructively.
Philosophies which have sought to repress sexuality lay claim to a higher purpose, arguing that sexuality grounds humanity in a corporeal state of existence, and that spiritual transcendence and enlightenment are possible only through asceticism and celibacy. The theory is that this not merely enables the human being to rise above the passions of earthly existence, but also frees him or her from the mundane responsibilities to children and family life.
The argument against this is that, since the sexual force is the most primal, any attempt to deny it is ipso facto anti-life. The Bulgarian philosopher and spiritual master, Omraan Mikhael Aivanhov, has spoken on this subject as follows: "Those who suppress everything are unaware of God's reason for creating both men and women. When I was in Greece, I visited all the monasteries on Mount Athos and spoke with the monks who lived there.
"Though I very much admired their works of art, I derived a great feeling of sadness and boredom from the place. The monks live according to totally misguided conceptions, the main one being that the feminine principle is both harmful and diabolical. They have gone so far in their rejection of the feminine principle that not only is no woman allowed to set foot on the island but also they are not allowed to have a goat on the island because it is a female animal. Do you really think the Good Lord was capable of inspiring such a philosophy?"
Most people in modern Ireland will have no difficulty in agreeing with such sentiments. But before we congratulate ourselves, perhaps we should examine the extent to which our agreement has to do not with an empathy with the essence of the Master's point, but with the ideological viewfinder through which we happen to see things for the moment. What he describes is a more extreme example of what we suffered here under a mutation of Catholic thought.
Having rejected such thinking, we are happy to condemn attempts to suppress the feminine. But what of attempts to suppress the masculine? Why is this better? In what sense is it less diabolical? And do we really think that the Good Lord was any more capable of inspiring such a philosophy than he was of inspiring what we wrongly imagine to be its antithesis?
jwaters@irish-times.ie