As the popular adage so aptly puts it: “Where there is man, there is manhood!” “. And always to the detriment of women, could add Tristane Banon, French novelist and columnist who publishes The Peril Goda biting rant against religious obscurantism.
For the author put in the spotlight in 2011 after speaking out against Dominique Strauss-Kahn accusing him of sexual assault and attempted rape, religious writings, whether from the Torah, the Bible or the Koran, never wanted the emancipation of women. Through short chapters, it takes as proof the common ground from which the religions of the Book originate. Born in the heart of patriarchal societies giving man the task of organizing a system rooted in his own interests, the three monotheisms have striven throughout the centuries to reduce women to mere procreators. This role devolved to the woman would come from the visceral need of the man to be sure of his paternity to keep the family goods away from illegitimate hands, assures Banon.
And this is where the crux of the problem lies, she believes, since today the fundamentalist currents, which she considers to be on the rise in the West, are turning to sexist injunctions from another era than they judge to be the divine word. To each his own interpretation of the sacred texts, and for the most rigorous, the opportunity to impose their views. She recalls the determination of Muslim extremists to order the wearing of the veil – a “clothing of submission to the man” -, the impossibility of ultra-Orthodox Jewish women to be able to divorce without the approval of their husband or the violence committed by the Catholic traditionalists in their anti-abortion raids. Faced with these identity withdrawals, of which women are the first victims, the author attacks the refusal of certain feminists to tackle systemic sexism in religions, for fear of offending communities.
The one to whom we owe the controversial gender peace, in which she denounced a radical feminist vision centered on the exclusion of men, specifies however not to target believers. She also emphasizes that she herself was born of the three religions of Book. “My grandfather was Muslim, my mother is Catholic and my father, Jewish,” she writes. She recognizes that there are humanist men of faith who are open to changes in the world and capable of separating the wheat from the chaff.
The objective of the essay is ambitious, because it tries in a hundred pages to return to the genesis of each of these three religions which, over the course of their complex and turbulent history, have established strict rules for the separation of the sexes. With a keen sense of synthesis, Tristane Banon offers a fresco that goes from Antiquity to the present day. She notes that Aristotle was the first philosopher to theorize the notion of “weaker sex”. It is with contemporary tutelary figures such as Simone de Beauvoir and Élisabeth Badinter that the author goes back in time to injustices. The rejection of women from public and religious life based on a supposed moral as well as biological inferiority is a very old tradition.