The illogical nature of patriarchal dogmas

The following extracts are from « Broken Daughters, starting at part 7 and working backward.  I selected them because they reveal the internal logic of patriarchal thinking.  One sees this kind of thinking in Freud, in secular authorities and in many systems of religious beliefs.  They are not restricted to fundamentalism, although in that case they become more obvious, less dilute.

1.  Love. Love isn’t an emotion. Our hearts are evil. They are so inexplicably evil that you should never, ever, under any circumstances, trust it. If your heart says left, you better go right. “Love” in a fundamentalist sense means that you submit to your husband fully. You put up with him abusing you. That’s love. You put up with him not making enough money, having his babies every year, cleaning his house and washing his laundry, cooking his food and fulfilling his sexual needs not because of affection but because of “love”, the love that doesn’t know affection for each other, only duty and submissiveness to an authority.

2.  Why did [my father] not give [my mother] praise then? I stumbled over yet another idea. My mom might not be submissive enough. .....

3  Another suggestion of the book [To Train Up A Child by Michael Pearl] is that spanking produces happy, cheerful and content kids. In reality that means: If your child has a bad day, is grumpy and whiney, spank it until it laughs again. I don’t know if that makes sense for you, it certainly doesn’t for me.

 4.  My mother read a lot about raising children God’s way. Though I was spared by the horrors of “To train up a child”, the Pearl’s guidebook to send your child through living hell at this point in my life, my parents were defenders of spanking. A lot, and early. Sin was a child’s nature and you could only get rid of it by beating it out of your kids. I was a nice baby, but that changed soon enough. At a few months age, I apparently started showing signs of terrible sin. I was crying – a lot. I didn’t sleep through the night anymore. My mother was helpless. At that point, my mother was a few weeks pregnant again. I did not stop being a bratty baby. She had a miscarriage a few weeks after I started this “sinful behaviour”. My mom was devasted. He and dad met up with a few elders of the fundamentalist church we went to to get council. They concluded that my sin had brought evil into the house and the Evil One had caused the miscarriage.

Let us work out how these patriarchal principles reverse cause and effect and obfuscate logic
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1.  In the first passage, logic is obfuscated by the idea that your internal coordinates are all wrong.   Whatever you have a natural inclination to do, you should do the opposite.  That is the only way to rectify evil.  Personally,  I once acknowledged that I could tell what would be beneficial for me to do in life by what a particular fundamentalist Christian strongly demanded I ought not to do.   My life has come out very well as a result of using my own instincts and accepting that I had to read his injunctions in the reverse.

2.  The second passage.  We can see once again a reversal of logic so that it flows in exactly the opposite direction.   If the appointed leader isn't do his job look for the answer in those he has power over.   The powerless are to blame for those having power not expressing it appropriately.

3.   Violence produces happiness -- this is expressed as an explicit principle of life.   If someone is having problems, if they are down, it is possibly because they haven't been kicked enough.  Kick a person enough when he is down and he will rise up again, and thank you for it.

4.  Children are inherently sinful and their sin is a disease that can spread to contaminate the whole family, causing misfortune to their parents.  Children really are that powerful.  By comparison to children, parents seem to have no power at all -- the exact opposite to what we all know is actually true.

I hope I have elucidated the outrageous and calamitous nature of patriarchal reasoning and how it reverses cause and effect necessarily and consistently.

From my own experiences having been brought up in a Christian household, and from ongoing experience and studies, I have concluded that patriarchal ideology of any sort is wholly dependent on turning things back-to-front, to make reality look inside-out -- the opposite to what it should.

I've also discovered that this way of thinking is so widespread that often we invoke patriarchy's back-to-front reasoning without even realizing it.  Many secularists are as guilty of this as their raging fundamentalist brothers and sisters.

Even Freud is not devoid of mental gymnastics, in contempt of plain logic.   I believe I have finally understood the core Freudian notion of the Oedipus Complex as a prohibition against following your heart -- for you will surely f*ck your mother and kill your father, if you do so -- the worst outcome possible and the most evil.  Priestly reasoning illogically enjoins one to follow the opposite of what one's heart dictates, or at least submit to the priest and his form of "reason". Failing to submit to patriarchal authorities (who obfuscate logic), you will only end up physically proving how evil you actually are. Herein is the quintessentially patriarchal double-bind.