YouTube Transcript:
The Gods of Our Fathers - documentary on the rise of patriarchy and civilization

[Music]
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we human beings have taken over the
whole planet but now we must learn to
share it or else we will lose it we have
to outgrow tribalism patriarchy all our
old ways and we have to move fast
because we're running out of time
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[Applause]
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I've always enjoyed a good revolution so
kitchens are an interesting place to be
these days this is where the basic power
balance between men and women is being
renegotiated at last and if we get it
right the whole human race will be the
winner most males behave quite decently
as individuals but when human beings get
together in large groups we behave very
badly wars tyranny the huge gulf between
rich and poor north and south and all
those things are directly connected with
the imbalance of power between men and
women male domination is right at the
heart of what's wrong with math
civilization or just one of the hundreds
of thousands of everyday people who want
to partake in this inaugural celebration
everybody and I mean everybody's gonna
get a great show today America is
inaugurating a new president and all the
old hopes for peace and justice and
equality are having an outing but
compared to its stated ideals the United
States is a grave disappointment
America's militarize up to its eyeballs
and it spent much of its history
fighting wars and other people's
territory native Indians Mexicans
Filipinos Vietnamese all classes of its
own citizens have spent generations in
the back of the bus and even now not one
of its 42 presidents has come from the
female majority of the population go
talk to congressman Broun Elizabeth
Curtis was just surprised herself by
being elected to Congress she doesn't
fit the mold and not just because she's
a woman she's also been a full time
peace activist for years and last year
she earned less than the minimum wage
house meets at 11
good bye lovie have fun you and Barbra
Streisand my another reception
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this reception is for all the women who
were elected to Congress in 1992 there
were almost twice as many of them as
ever before Elizabeth first glad hands
the crowd like any traditional
politician but she's not it is time for
those of us who have been disempowered
in many ways who felt that we are on the
outside of the mainstream to understand
that in fact we can be incredibly
powerful
okay I need my senator clementa I think
this is a very male institution here you
know when the hundred and third Congress
came in and we're we're we're of color
we're women
it's a marvelous group of people but
once we got into the whole of the
Congress I suddenly realized how few of
us they really were less than 10 percent
is female you look at those portraits in
the rotunda and somebody from outer
space would say this is a country made
up of white men there's no women old
people of color in their statute it's
manifest destiny writ large we just wipe
out parts of our history the founders of
the American Republic were trying to
escape from the evils of the past they
thought all they had to do was create a
democracy they didn't realize that the
pattern of violence and oppression was
part of civilization itself now we do
and we even have a name for it the
patriarchal
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some king or Emperor gives the orders
those who enforce them have lots of
power and privileges people at the
bottom have no rights at all the poor
slaves almost all women and Outsiders
can just be killed if they get in the
way in fact American warplanes were
bombing Iraq on inauguration day
what I think about now is we play this
terrible game of cat-and-mouse is there
are thousands of children dying in
Baghdad from the last time we were
bombing what are we doing when do we
begin to say that an Iraqi child's life
is the same as the life of a white
America until we do that we'll go on
having wars Americans have been trying
to break out of the old pattern for over
two centuries and there has been
progress
there's no king now and no slaves and
women have the vote but hierarchy and
violence still rule the world
men still rule the world this has been
the pattern of our history for so long
that many people think it's just human
nature and there's no point in asking a
pig to fly but before we abandon hope we
should be sure whether the patriarchal
order is natural or not and the key
evidence for that is not here it's
deeply buried in a different
you
thousand years ago the options began to
grow narrower it was probably women who
invented agriculture since gathering
plants was traditionally a woman's job
but farming changed everybody's roles
and created a new way of doing things
all over the world the village way
[Applause]
people have probably lived on this spot
for about 8,000 years and at the start
it would have been what's called an
autonomous village there were no cities
yet no kings no soldiers just hundreds
of independent villages each living its
own quiet life and decisions probably
still got me the old hunter-gatherer way
everybody came together and talked
things over
until they reached a consensus panitch
alchemy is an anthropologist and the
villages she studies are in 20th century
Egypt but the economic realities in a
village like this have not changed much
in thousands of years but I would dare
say anywhere the social fabric would
completely collapse without the input of
women in economics everything to do with
the essential day-to-day life of
villages must be processed through women
if men cultivate the wheat it has to be
picked over and put through a mill to
become flour and then to be processed
into bread which is the lifeline of
everyone
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the main investment of any rule of
household
besides the land is the cattle that they
own this is the woman's domain before so
means women are so central to the home
but sometimes they hardly ever leave it
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it's the fact that there is so much live
capital
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unlike hunter-gatherers villagers owned
things and to make sure this valuable
property stayed in the family almost all
the earliest cultures passed it down
through women babies have fathers too
and the villagers knew it once obtained
animals it's obvious that making babies
requires a male input but you can't
really be sure which male is the father
while you always know who the mother is
so men's property went to their sisters
children when they died not to their own
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the status of men dropped steeply when
human being settled in villages once
their value to society had come from
their ability as hunters but the wild
game was quickly hunted out near the
villages and when hunting lost its
importance so did the people who used to
do it we don't actually know who sat at
the head of the table in the autonomous
villages but we do know that in some
places women were buried in the center
of the house with the valuable household
goods and men were buried out at the
corners with the children
archeologists find up to a hundred
female fertility figures for every male
symbol fertility was the key to whether
the villages lived or died and fertility
was traditionally female magic men were
never actually oppressed there was never
a matriarchy in that sense but you can
see how men might have felt marginalized
in the early village cultures so what's
that got to do with us well first of all
the huge changes that happen when
hunter-gatherers settled down in the
autonomous villages show just how
flexible this thing called human nature
is male domination is natural and
neither is equality of the sexes it all
depends same goes for whether we're
warlike or peaceful democratic or
authoritarian change the way we live and
you may also change the way we behave
towards each other
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men were just not very important in the
autonomous villages and people who don't
feel important tend to feel resentful
instead you realize of course that we're
talking about the raw material for a
revolution here and the revolution
dually happened so long ago that it
isn't in the history books but thousands
of years later we can see the results of
it all around us
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now women are at the bottom of the
pecking order
men run practically everything and
there's military all over the place what
happened the Middle East is the best
place to look for answers because over
half the people on earth live in
cultures that stem from here there are
various kinds of histories and the one
that got recorded is not the only one
but more importantly it is the history
of the dominant to us it's the dominant
group it is it is male history it is the
state's history the archive isn't I see
and the documents I consult in the
Egyptian National Archives down there on
the Nile is they are documents of stated
fashion whether they are police records
prison accounts medical treatises now
for important purposes these are all
written by men women are excluded and
when they appear they appear in a very
marginal way call it funny studies the
history of militarism in Egypt today
he's celebrating his doctorate with
French mostly young scholars who spend
their working days trying to piece
together researches the live women in
medieval Islam she's a history professor
at the American University of Cairo
women have always been neglected in
history so not just as a woman but also
as a historian I'd like to bring out
what has been neglected invisible
silence I learn a lot from it because it
explodes myths
unfortunately the sources that I used
have been written by men expressing the
patriarchal view of what is important
the army the state the bureaucracy what
my students call boring history the
women hooda studies left no written
records so she looks for clues in the
writings of medieval Islamic scholars
who to figures out what women were
really doing from the demands of the
male scholars that they stopped doing it
first of all a woman should go out only
for an assessment if she does she should
go in long an unattractive garment
sounds to me a woman should work close
to the walls of houses in order to make
way for men men should make the road
difficult and narrow for women as
religious scholars they viewed the
female body as threatening to the order
of the main world the nudity of the
female bodies is frowned upon and this
is a very sensitive subject on the part
of our religious scholar because he
hates women prancing in the public bath
you know walking around nude because
they exchanged domestic news about
themselves about their husbands and they
competed among themselves in terms of
you know like clothes and jewelry and
what did my husband get it was trouble
for the man at home I always encountered
this in my research you know about women
that the female body in public space
caused chaos and again I'm wondering
whether this is not also a male
retention of the past you know when
material power was expressed through the
years sexuality of the female
when the male revolted against that
sexual dominance he started taming it
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women's fertility made them powerful in
the village times but those times did
not last
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around 5,000 years ago a great change
swept across the world the era of the
autonomous villages came to an end
nobody really knows why but in half a
dozen places around the world a new way
of living arose it was the point where
human beings stopped just fitting into
the world and began to subjugate it
[Music]
in Egypt in Mesopotamia in China in
Central America
great numbers of villages were united
under single rulers human beings
invented the state and patriarchy was
born at the same moment all the early
States were pyramids of power and
privilege with a single man at the top a
fairy a god-king a sacred person and how
could a single man get so much power
only by terror
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the tombs around here belonged to the
kings and Nobles of Egypt's first
dynasty they died about 5000 years ago
so there's not much left of the tombs
now except the outside walls of
mud-brick but once the interiors were
lined with inlaid cedar and filled with
gold and ivory in all manner of precious
things and some of the kings may have
been quite decent men when they were
alive but this is what happened when
they died
they strangled scores are hundreds of
the people who've worked for the King
concubines bodyguards minor officials
servant girls and buried them nearby to
serve Him in the next world around the
tomb of Jer the third king of unified
Egypt are the graves of 317 other people
the great majority of them young women
and these were not the Kings enemies
there were people he knew but murdering
hundreds of people and burying them with
the king is almost normal in the
earliest kingdoms Egypt Mesopotamia
China they all did it absolute power
corrupts absolutely welcome to
civilization but the terrible things
they did had a purpose terror is a
primitive form of mass communication put
up enough images like this and you don't
have to station so
you
one quarter of early Mesopotamian laws
were about controlling women the man
wants to make sure that the the children
are his and one way of doing it is to
regulate you know marriage and to say to
the woman you know I have to control
your movement the legacy of Mesopotamia
is still visible today in all parts of
Cairo the wealthier houses contain
harems where women were segregated in
order to prevent social contact with men
who were not part of the family you have
this ideology in architectural form the
house is enclosed by high walls the male
space is on the ground floor so that
there's easy access for the male
visitors and the female spaces are on
the upper floors where they could
overlook these male spaces
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I'd served the purposes of secluding the
women from strange Maine eyes at the
same time it allowed women privacy to
socialize without interference from
females
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segregating women and making them wear
veils were just part of the process of
turning women into private property
women had to wear veils in Mesopotamia
4000 years ago
so did respectable women in classical
Greece and Rome women in medieval Europe
were still veiling their hair and even
in our grandmother's time women still
wore veils on special occasions today
almost everybody has forgotten that the
veil comes from an ancient upheaval that
also brought us tyranny endless war but
he does
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every state echos the first state
hierarchy militarism male domination
[Applause]
the meeting place
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please
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[Applause]
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[Applause]
like anybody trying to run a mouse
civilization Bill Clinton must get
millions of people to pay taxes work
together obey orders from a distant
Capitol that's so hard to do that until
recently all math societies hadn't be
dictatorships but Bill Clinton doesn't
have to be a dictator
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he can actually try to talk people into
cooperating because he has all the
technology of mass communication is
available to party or persons but the
common ground we call America but what
was it like before mass media go all the
way back to ancient Egypt 5,000 years
ago no human being has ever lived in
anything bigger than a village and
suddenly here we are in the world's
first unified state and we have a little
problem how to rocket think of the
number of people involved 50 thousand a
hundred thousand half a million and
remember that the ancient Egyptians
stitch and everybody lived in a world
with no mass communications no radio no
television no books no newspapers hardly
anybody could even read and write so
they had no way to talk things over as a
mass society no way to reach a consensus
no way to agree voluntarily and what
ought to be done so somebody had to give
the orders and everybody else had to
obey
when we left the villages we had to
leave equality behind to a mass society
without mass communications has to be a
dictatorship
but he doesn't have to go in for
militarism and it doesn't have to
destroy women's rights
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Egypt was one of the few ancient
kingdoms where all the elements of
patriarchy did not arrive at the same
time in fact the early Egyptians at
least accepted no more the patriarchal
order than they absolutely had to the
very first Kings behaved quite badly but
my society in Egypt did not become a
permanent nightmare of exploitation and
depression as soon as they could the
Egyptians moved away from the terror of
the founding times they even gave up
building pyramids eventually and
satisfied themselves with more modest
temples in fact Egypt became the great
exception a mass society that managed to
keep a lot of the old village values
you
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before the coming of Judaism
Christianity and Islam
patriarchy was dominant but it tolerated
the presence of goddesses so he received
goddesses juxtaposed to gods in the
religious ideologies the early early
period the more dominant the female
figures
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you
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beneath the sands lies the city of La
who briefly Egypt's capital over 3,000
years ago Nick Miller the curator of
Egyptology at the Royal Ontario Museum
is overseeing the dig the sharp contrast
that has always impressed me there's
this difference between the status of
women in Egypt and that in shall we say
classical Greece the ancient Greeks were
a very peculiar Bunch indeed and they
were basically terrified of their women
folk I don't say that lightly I really
believe this if you will go over Greek
mythology you will find that almost all
the monsters are female and that must
surely mean something this did not
happen in Egypt a man had his women folk
around him
this gives the whole court life a kind
of a feminine quality the art shows
extremely fine linen garments on the
women through which the bodies show very
clearly
[Music]
women's clothing particularly which I
have kind of an interest in at this time
it does develop new styles appeared in
many cases you can date a picture on a
tomb wall by the fashions of the moment
it was not a misfortune to be born a
girl in ancient Egypt nobody'd even
heard of the veil why this huge
difference between Egypt and other
places ancient Egypt lived along a river
in a desert so wide that early armies
couldn't cross it to the north was open
sea so for almost 2,000 years
ancient Egypt was safe from attack by
other civilized States but Egypt's luck
eventually ran out around 1600 BC the
first invaders arrived it was the end of
Egypt as the great exception first came
the Hyksos and then came the Hittites an
even more aggressive law and in the
course of organizing itself to fight
them off
Egypt became like everywhere else this
temple was built over 3,000 years ago by
Ramses the third one of the first
Pharaohs to glory in being a conqueror
and a killer there's the great Pharaoh
in his war chariot pulled by horses that
look like New Kingdom harley-davidsons
trampling the foe underfoot
there's the Pharaoh ten times larger
than life holding a bunch of doomed
captives by the hair and there are the
Pharaoh scribes counting the severed
hands and various other severed bits of
his slaughtered enemies this was when
Egypt finally accepted the full
patriarchal package once other
civilizations can reach out and hurt you
you have to militarize that's what
happened in 19th dynasty Egypt and it
had an immediate impact on women with
the exception of the 19th dynasty which
was a military dynasty under Ramses the
first you have the beginning of a new
approach a new presentation of the
kingship they saw themselves as
reforming the increasingly effeminate
and ineffectual ways of the latter part
of the 18th dynasty we're not like those
guys who Miss ruled you before we are
men we are warriors
we are the new conquering kings of the
Empire and they represent their sons in
a way that the earlier Kings had not
representations of the royal princes in
the 18th dynasty even the ones who
ultimately become King are very rare
indeed under the 19th dynasty you have
the boys rows of them ramses ii brags of
having had 108 sons and those presumably
were only the legitimate ones
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the picture in the 19th time students
wanted an increasingly masculine
presentation nice guys finish last the
Chinese the Incas Mesopotamians Millions
Aztecs even Egyptians they all went the
same way in the end first a reasonably
Pleasant and tolerant culture and then
smash along comes the local version of
the patriarchal revolution and its
tyranny slaughter and depression
forevermore which still leaves one big
question maybe the most important one
why was it necessary in every
patriarchal culture to destroy the
status of women
[Applause]
poverty babies with the average woman
have if nobody was pushing her around it
would certainly not be the six children
that were the norm in our grandmother's
generation in cultures that let women
make their own choices small families
are the norm because women know the
children are a lot of work big families
are a legacy of militarized societies
military power requires lots of people
especially soldiers that means lots of
babies especially boys but you can't get
a high birthrate of women are really
free to choose so you have to reduce
them to a state where their best hope of
security and respect is their children
or more precisely their boy children
[Music]
truly niala see the passing down of
possessions and property and name from
father to son means that you must have a
son if you're so unlucky as not to have
a boy this is big trouble one recourse
is to try to attain a boy by for example
giving your inheritance
to a nephew that obliges him to take
care of you and respect you
women who don't produce sons wind up
being destitute for that very reason you
can't afford to alienate your brothers
or uncle's or any milk in the source of
weakness for women is the fact that they
are replaceable that a man can take
another woman instead of his wife it's
not that their functions are replaceable
it's the fact that they are personally
there are so many other women to choose
from the McNish is exhilarating women
try to overcome this oppression by
practicing maximum freedom within the
space that is allowed to them
they just know the boundaries they know
where not to go and within that they
have because of woman's intelligence
women have created a stake in patriarchy
and have tried to play by the rules and
get the most out of it
you're not going to upturn the culture
what people write in newspapers or how
the country is ruled you're not going to
change that anyway I'm talking about
making the most out of scarce resources
in a culture of poverty that is devalued
and doesn't have a voice the rulers had
to destroy women's freedom to get the
birthrate
they needed men support do that but most
men love their mothers and their wives
and their daughters why would they
collaborate and hurting them besides a
fully militarized patriarchy was not
good news for the average male for every
general there are thousands of foot
soldiers and being a foot soldier is not
good for your health
a few men ended up on top but most men
were less free less rich and maybe even
less safe than before so why did men go
along with the patriarchal revolution I
suspected in most places there was an
unspoken deal made right at the dawn of
civilization the patriarchs had to buy
men's support and what they had to offer
was status here was a way to reverse the
huge loss of status men had suffered
back when we all moved into the villages
any competent tyrant would spot the raw
material for a deal here
so here's an offer you can't refuse
throw your lot in with us back
patriarchy and we'll make you superior
to all women you'll have to obey us but
from now on you'll have control over
your women and you can be certain well
pretty certain that they're your kids
what's more your kids will belong to you
not your wife and your property will go
to your sons not your sister's kids oh
and we'll change the religion - from now
on God will be male and so will all his
priests and they'll all back your new
male privileges
[Music]
around 2,000 years ago
new religions swept away the old pagan
beliefs in almost all the mass
civilizations of the old world the new
religions of the Middle East turned the
universe into a perfect hierarchy with a
single male sky God at the top and the
goddesses who always play the major role
in earlier religions were demoted to
mere Saints or at best the mother of the
god
[Music]
early Christianity and Islam all
segregated worshippers by sects their
rules for women were patriarchy these
rules
[Music]
[Applause]
and those who interpret God's will of
course are exclusively made
[Music]
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in Islam God becomes much more abstract
as an idea as a concept
[Music]
Oh
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Oh
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linguistically speaking is referred to
as a male God however it's really a very
abstract concept of divinity and
definitely there's no tolerance of any
female divinity there in their structure
and rules Christianity and Islam
represent the final triumph of
patriarchy
[Music]
yet the new religions were a paradox for
at the same time they were actually a
revolt against inequality the very core
of patriarchy they proclaimed that all
human beings were basically equal and
that's probably why they spread so fast
however little the new religions changed
things in practice they were a sign that
people would break with patriarchy if
they had the chance maybe not oh we have
[Music]
[Laughter]
[Music]
the veil has made a comeback in Egypt
recently and fundamentalism is on the
rise but looks can be deceiving
even though there is no law that says
women should wear the veil in Egypt we
see it all over the Muslim world you
know why are women wearing the veil and
why they willingly wearing the veil we
know that some are pressured to wear it
and I think that it's panicking the
insecurities of patriarchy and its need
to say to women you should be more
controlled patriarchy is right to panic
because these young women behave in ways
unimaginable to their grandmothers and
they put on the veil it's not in
submission to some 4000 year old law off
and it's just a tactic to move outside
the house you know still our to meet me
but I get that
Ali Anakin's event can finish be able to
go still mushiya mark say ok thou fat
about tobacco jumbo I mean an alarm
listen up together
[Music]
fidelity table inaudible vistas a slay
me man if my Malaysian ilaha darkest
Nina McDonald de la ley of la savate
Murdock are the marks in elected are we
are we early
Lee Miller had have enough left so pack
it in the sector
[Music]
the modern economy pulls women into the
workforce and education gives them new
ideas such rapid change has provoked a
fundamentalist backlash
it's the same struggle that started
centuries ago in the West and it isn't
over there yet either
if you put it in perspective we can say
that the new right has become a
universal phenomena it takes the
manifestation of women veiling in this
culture it takes other forms and in
other cultures there are fascist
movements in other countries that demand
certain forms of behavior I'm sure there
are similarities I think the world
economy is going through a crisis and
people always turn to religion or
conservatism to what they know
all across the globe a communications
revolution is undermining the old ways
televisions bringing the images and
ideas of an emerging global culture to
traditional societies and that's already
having an impact on the power balance
between sexes everywhere
people see a very alien world much of it
is foreign it's about places people have
never been and will never go to but
people are avid to learn just how on
Islamic the stories can be one incident
was caused by television for young girls
decided to escape from the village and
go through Cairo and become TV stars
they were of course brought back some
early and they didn't get very far
but this had a great impact on the
village that television can be
subversive not this year not this decade
but patriarchy is slowly collapsing
even though male hierarchy and privilege
still predominate everywhere even though
every country in the world is still
militarized
[Music]
after 5,000 years patriarchy is not just
in our institutions it's in our heads
but it is not in our genes
the problem is not human nature
it's that math societies are still
trapped inside the ancient machine they
know thousands of years ago to deal with
the problems of thousands of years ago
the machine called patriarchy was the
only way to run an early mass society it
was refined to both the killing machine
and a breeding machine as the early
civilization started fighting one
another and we conquered the whole
planet with thousands of years ago
[Music]
but now our weapons have become so
destructive that we can no longer afford
to type major Wars and we don't actually
have to live in patriarchal
dictatorships anymore
mass communications mean that we can be
democratic
patriarchy no longer makes sense as an
institution
[Music]
I think we have built enormous monuments
to man's domination there was a
photograph of all the new members of
Congress we were all lined up on the
steps and I was on the top step and
ready to have this photograph taken and
two of the new members two white males
just on the photograph with a student
and I am lost as if I'm not there it's
sort of symbolic there's no me and I
think I have to learn somehow to be able
to move that aside and say I'm here to
photographs like this may one day seem
as bizarre as those old pictures of the
Soviet leaders lined up on top of
Lenin's tomb and it will be as normal
for women to hold power as it is for men
to do the dishes somebody that bought
something dinner with you at an auction
that's right I don't have to take them
to do that so we stand amongst tonight
basically what you do is you eat and
drink in this job that's a no-no you try
to avoid both the drinking but you look
like you're eating at drinking
there's no golden age coming no happy
ever afters but patriarchy is in retreat
in every front and the vital front is
right here where men and women are
changing the most fundamental human
partnership the process is often
confusing and painful but we are
changing it and that's a good reason to
be hopeful about the human race if we
can achieve equality between the sexes
then the other big problems like war and
nationalism and north/south are not
insoluble either and a century from now
people may have to explain to their kids
about patriarchy the way we have to
explain about slavery and wouldn't that
be nice
[Music]