Little Weirds(26)
“Men with penises and ballsacks,” I think, while looking down to see that I have somehow splattered my pajamas with curry and have only noticed it right now.
Men did it. And they saw the Women having babies out of their bodies. And they saw the babies growing up into what could be a workforce, and they decided to take a crucial and revolting step, which was to make Women and children into property, and to condemn their own spirits and identities to be mostly defined by what happens to their property.
I start to understand that before the “greed event,” lots of bad things had already occurred, killings and rapes and theft and abominations of all kinds, but these bad things were never harnessed into a system. And then, says this British woman, they were. I was made into a system. Somebody did it. He is not a mystery person—his name was Hammurabi and he was a real man and he did it. He said that he did it. It wasn’t an admission; it was a declaration. He was proud.
My colon is now apparently filled with lava?
What this man created is this: the Code of Hammurabi. It was etched onto an obsidian phallus. It is physically scratched into a big hard ancient dick. And to be fair (although why must I, after all of this, be fair?!), the Code of Hammurabi has many different laws etched into its dark knob. Some are laws that are meant to keep the peace, but they are all spoken in a deeply misogynist voice, and so, in my opinion, they are unjust and they are void.
The Code of Hammurabi is one of the first examples of legalized patriarchy, and it instilled these violent and demented ideals: A woman is the property of a man. A woman does not deserve to have as much as a man and she should not ever have as much as a man ever again.
It says that in order for the men to thrive, women must be kept in line and controlled. It says, This starts now. It says women are worth something great to us, and because of that we must say that they are less than us, and we must never let them know what it is about them that we are trying to take for ourselves. It says, Women can’t. They must not. It says, Women are property. Men decide what women can do with their bodies. Men own women. We are all separate and must stay divided. Women are beneath, less than, but also, watch out for them, really do watch out! But act like you are not “watching out” or scared—act like a good guy who is protecting the holy object.
It says, Act like you are innocent. It suggests, Tell them they are crazy.
It seems that I can’t finish the second beer. Suddenly I am exhausted, angry, and near faint. I am thinking of ancient men and ancient stones and granaries and bird-gods.
After I walk the geriatric dog, who is my old friend, and after I wash my dear little face, I get into my bed, which could fit four of me. I lie in the bed and scratch my legs with my feet and feel morose and incredibly young. I get ready to sleep fitfully.
I think about the Tigris and Euphrates and what they whisper to each other now when they meet, constantly, at their problematic delta. “Holy fucking shit, man,” says the Tigris. “This is not our fault,” says the Euphrates, reading the other river’s mind.
It seems to me, as I lie here with my dog, who may very well have been born in Mesopotamia because he is so very old, that once you make it permissible to look away, that is when you irrigate your spiritual landscape with something foul.
The Code of Hammurabi is the first evidence of legalized patriarchy. Does that send a shiver through your bones? Does that make you feel like we are currently ruled by fucking mummies who hate our mommies? Because that is what it is.
Does it not seem unnatural that the basis of the interactions between genders in our species is something that was created by a psycho who took too much from an already generous river, thousands of years ago? Does it make you sick to know that the same men benefiting from this code are also the duds who are adjusting their popped collars, fixing their necklaces, wearing a ton of deodorant, and confidently saying, Okay, babe, but…to play the devil’s advocate…like…think about hunter-gatherer stuff. Like, isn’t it just the way that nature works?
Nature does not work that way. Nature does not give a shit about low thinking like that. Nature invited us to be more than apes, more than cave people. Nature pushed us to change. Instinct is real but so are the facts that we lived communally and that human remains have been found buried with tools, both genders buried with tools, buried with babies from the other humans who dwelled next door. We lived in groups, we acted in a friendly way toward each other. We partied together. That is what we were inclined to do.
Me too, even though I currently live alone and do not want to really use tools and I don’t know how to change a diaper and I’m afraid of that thing that happens when sometimes a baby poops and the poop goes all the way up their little back like a bad backwards shit-dickey.
The Code of Hammurabi’s Penis was put in the Louvre, where Mona Lisa is about to fully smile and most likely totally crack up any day now. Because this code thrust Patriarchy into that ancient world, it influenced the creation of every other piece of art in that museum. Every piece of art that was created after the Code was somehow affected, and also all of our clothes and food and politics and religion and marketplace and how we have sex and who we do it with and how we talk to each other and what colors we think we are allowed to connect to and wear and use in our work and put on our signs and see in our minds.
I don’t care if it is ancient or has some good points. I don’t care anymore about tradition that represents many things but certainly the oppression of more than half of humanity.