THE CONVENIENTLY FORGOTTEN HISTORY OF BOY-RAPE

With all the church scandal recently involving pedophile priests you'd think it was a modern invention. People are shocked and outraged, (rightly so) but once again their ignorance of history leads them to think that firing, fining & imprisoning those responsible will magically make the problem go away, a quick fix. One has to admire the church's cunningness in whitewashing the history of boy-rape. Always insisting is just a few 'bad apples' and then blaming the acceptance of the homosexual lifestyle as the cause of all immorality in the world. A quick review of history will show that pederasty was once not only common but institutionally promoted by none other than the religious leaders of their time. It was perpetrated not by gay men but by straight men including their own fathers. It wasn't about love or sex but power and control. Let me make myself clear, I do not condone nor accept pedophilia, what pisses me off is how the church is trying to deflect the issue and thus guilt by shifting the topic to 'those immoral homos'.

Pederasts past and present use boys for sexual purposes to make up for the traumas of their own childhood, "the male child representing his ideal self, whose youthfulness protects him from annihilation (death anxiety)." The boy is the smooth, maternal breast, the penis is the nipple, and raping the boy is an act of revenge toward the mother, showing that the pederast is in total control, dominating the boy to overcome his sense of emptiness and abandonment. As one pederast put it, "I want to hold him in my arms, control him, dominate him, make him do my bidding, that I'm all-powerful." The pederast's sexual targets are so interchangeable that he often seduces hundreds of boys in his lifetime. The sexual use of boys is not to be thought of as "a lack of impulse controls" or even as "only a different object choice" as most historians claim; pederasts are driven not by their sexual instincts but by their overwhelming anxieties.

Domination rather than tender love was in fact the central aim of all sexuality until modern times. Raping boys was by far the preferred sexual activity of men; it was considered more "according to nature" than heterosexuality, "an ordinance enacted by divine laws." Pythagoras, when asked when one should have sex with women rather than boys, replied: "When you want to lose what strength you have." As one historian of sexuality put it, "The world was divided into the screwers, all male and the screwed, both male and female." Because the boy represented the ideal self with whom the rapist merged, he must be without hair: "I like the smooth surface of the young boy's body, I don't like hair on it, I can't stand it..." So as soon as boys reached puberty, they were felt to be useless for sexual purposes, and all pederastic poetry mentions the first hairs terminate the boy's attractiveness. According to graffiti and poetry, the boy is most often raped anally. Lucilius compares sexual relations with boys and women: "She bloodies you, but he on the other hand beshits you." While the vagina is "castigated in invective as smelly, dirty, wet, loose, noisy, hairy, and so on...no such feeling seems to have been applied to the anuses of pueri." Boys' anuses were called "rosebud", sometimes compared to the sweetest of fruits, the fig, other times again equated with gold. The only precaution taken was to depilitate boys' anuses, says Martial and Suetonius. Indeed, as Martial put it, men must only penetrate the anus of boys, warning a man who was stimulating a boy's penis: "Nature has divided the male into two parts: one was made for girls, the other for men. Use your part." Boys were far preferred over women; Propertius vowed, "May my enemies all fall in love with women and my friends with boys."

It was important that the boy not experience pleasure, only "pain and tears...of pleasure he has none at all." In particular, "initiatory" pederasty was always anal, involving a fantasy of "the intrinsic spiritual value of sperm, one needs to ejaculate into the boy's anus in order to make him a man." Parents taught boys in antiquity to "Put up with it: not as a pleasure, but as a duty." Physicians were regularly expected to provide ointments and other lubricants for anal penetration of boys and they were asked to repair the rectal tears and other injuries that were the usual results of the rapes.

Pederasty was widespread in preliterate tribes around the world, from the "customary pederasty" of Australians and the sexual use of berdaches in North and Central American tribes-where boys were dressed as girls beginning in infancy for raping-to the "boy-wives" of Africa. All early civilizations practiced boy rape and even had boys serve as temple prostitutes, including the ancient Hebrews, Sumerians, Persians, Mesopotamians, Celts, Egyptians, Etruscans, Carthaginians, Chinese, Japanese, Indians, Aztecs, Mayans, etc. The rape was expected to be violent; men were expected to take along with them when going out in the streets "scissors, to make a hole in the trousers of the boy and a small pillow to put in the boy's mouth if he should scream..." Tutors and teachers often raped their pupils along with beating them; as Quintilian warned, "I blush to mention the shameful abuse which scoundrels sometimes make of their right to administer corporal punishment.

Fathers in Greece chose the penetrator of his boy, often obtaining gifts or favors in return. Aristophanes shows one father in Birds complaining to another, "Well, this is a fine state of affairs...You meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from the bath, and you don't kiss him, you don't say a word to him, you don't hug him, you don't feel his balls! And yet you're supposed to be a friend of ours!" Pedagogues were hired to guard boys against rape by unapproved men, but the pedagogue might assault the boy himself. Boys in Greece were blamed if their failed to find a pederast for themselves; every boy was expected to have one.

Greek and Roman soldiers brought boys along with them on campaigns to use sexually. Slave boys were often furnished to guests for sexual use. Doctors prescribed sex with boys as therapy. Boy brothels and rent-a-boy services were widespread, and pederasts chosen by the father could even sell his rights to rape a particular boy to another man. With the number of boys prostitutes worldwide still in the millions, it is not surprising that every city in antiquity had its boy-brothels; in Rome, boys could be picked up at the barbershop or at the exit of any of the games. All men, even when married, were expected to have sex with boys. "Almost all of the great democratic leaders of Archaic Athens were...pederastic." Wives found it hard to compete with their husbands' boys. Juvenal says wives were "always hot with quarrels...bitching away...about his boy-friends," and Martial describes a wife yelling, "Bumming a boy again! Don't I have a rump as well?"

A few early Christians began to object to using boys sexually. John Chrysostom complained about fathers taking their boys to banquets where they were made to perform fellatio on men "under the blankets," recommending that boys be placed in the care of monks at the age of ten to avoid seduction. But most medieval authors gave the pro-pederast advice of antiquity, with medical books recommending sex with boys as "less harmful [than] sexual union with women [which] leads more quickly to old age..." The reason men in medieval times waited until their 30s to get married was because they routinely used young boys for sex until then; in Florence, for instance, only a quarter of the men in the fifteenth century were married by the age of 32. Since over a third of most households had servants or apprentices, sexual relations between masters and male servants were even more common and even acceptable than between masters and female servants. Tutors and teachers in schools were expected to use their students sexually, and those who protested that it was a "vice so inveterate [and] so strong a custom" that it was "hardly likely to be discouraged" were thought odd.

But placing boys as oblates into monasteries only made them available for rape by monks, who could not keep their hands off them. One abbott wrote about an infant boy brought to the monastery by his father:

...the man turned the child over to me altogether, and I received the baby with pleasure and joy and a clean heart. [But] when the boy got older and had reached the age of about ten...I was tortured and overwhelmed by an obscene desire, and the beast of impure lust and a desire for pleasure burned in my soul...I wanted to have sex with the boy...

Sex with boys was the central obsession of monks beginning with the early anchorites who went to the desert; Macarius saw so many monks having sex with boys in the desert that he strongly advised monks not to take them in. But the need was too strong, and even rules such as those requiring boys to have escorts when going to the lavatory did not prevent monks from routinely using their oblates sexually. So many monks raped their novices that there was a common saying, "With wine and boys around, the monks have no need of the Devil to tempt them." Priests also commonly used confessions to solicit sex with boys, but early Christian penitentials assessed penances only for the boys, since they were blamed for their own rape. Peter Damian said in the eleventh century that sex with boys in monasteries "rages like a bloodthirsty beast in the midst of the sheepfold of Christ with bold freedom" and suggested both the man and boy be punished as accomplices for a "sin against nature."

So acceptable was pederasty in medieval times that parents continued handing over their boys for sexual use to friends and others from whom they expected favors. Bernardino of Siena condemned parents as "pimps" of their own sons, saying the fathers, pederasts themselves, were the ones most responsible, taking money or gifts from their sons' rapists. Boys were so likely to be raped in the streets "a boy can't even pass nearby without having a sodomite on his tail" that Bernardino urged mothers, "Send your girls out instead, who aren't in any danger at all if you let them out among such people...this is less evil." Mothers, too, colluded in the seduction of their sons. "When a boy started to mature sexually...his mother gave him a bedroom to himself on the ground floor, 'with a separate entrance and every convenience, so that he can do whatever he pleases and bring home whomever he likes.'"

When beginning in the fifteenth century some more violent pederasty disputes began being handled by courts, the huge number of cases prosecuted revealed that every place boys were gathered, from schools and monasteries to taverns and pastry shops-were "schools of sodomy" where pederasts gathered to violate boys. In Florence, according to the thorough analysis of court records by Michael Rocke, "in the later fifteenth century, the majority of local males at least once during their lifetimes were officially incriminated for engaging in homosexual relations" with boys. Since many pederasts were never incriminated in court, since courts were reluctant to try any but the most violent cases of boy rape, and since pederasts past and present usually rape dozens of boys each, these early court statistics reveal as nothing else the universality of pederasty in history. If the majority of men were hauled into court for cases in connection with their pederasty, the number of boys actually being raped must have been nearly everyone.

As more parents evolved into the intrusive and socializing modes of modern times, they were more and more reluctant to hand over their boys for use by pederasts. Tutors began being monitored to see that they were not pederasts, and reformers began to warn that servants too often "take liberties with a child which they would not risk with a young man." Some suggested that public female brothels should be encouraged as "the best chance of keeping men away from boys." The rape of boys in British public schools, "with the full knowledge and collusion, even the approval, of their elders," nevertheless continued into the twentieth century, where every older boy and even teachers had a younger boy as their "bitch" to use sexually. Only slowly in recent decades has it become acceptable to defend children against sexual attack, and only in the most psychogenically advanced nations has the rate of sexual abuse of children dropped to only half of the children born.

RELIGION IS INCOMPATIBLE WITH MENTAL HEALTH

According to Webster’s New Word Dictionary, religion is: “(1) belief in a divine or superhuman power or powers to be obeyed and worshipped as the creator(s) and ruler(s) of the universe; (2) expression of this belief in conduct and ritual.”

The Comprehensive Dictionary of Psychological and Psychoanalytical Terms (1958), define religion as “a system of beliefs by means of which individuals or a community put themselves in relation to god or to a supernatural world and often to each other, and from which the religious person derives a set of values by which to judge events in the natural world.”

It seems silly to say that someone is religious because he happens to be philosophic or ethical; and unless we rigorously use the term religion to mean some kind of faith unfounded on fact, or dependency on some assumed superhuman entities. Every Atheist has some kind of philosophy and some code of ethics; and many Atheists, in fact, have much more rigorous life philosophies and ethical systems than have most deists.

If religion is defined as man’s dependence of a power above and beyond the human, psychotherapists find it to be exceptionally pernicious. For the psychotherapist is normally dedicated to helping human beings in general, and his patients in particular, to achieve certain goals of mental health, and virtually all these goals are antithetical to a truly religious viewpoint.

Let us look at the main psychotherapeutic goals. The psychotherapist tries to help his patients to be minimally anxious and hostile; and to this end, he tries to help them to acquire the following kind of personality traits:

1. Self-interest. The emotionally healthy individual should primarily be true to himself and not masochistically sacrifice himself for others. His kindness and consideration for others should be derived from the idea that he himself wants to enjoy freedom from unnecessary pain and restriction, and that he is only likely to do so by helping create a world in which the rights of others, as well as his own, are not needlessly curtailed.

2. Self-direction. He should assume responsibility for his own life, be able independently to work out his own problems, and while at times wanting or preferring the cooperation and help of others, not need their support for his effectiveness and well-being.

3. Tolerance. He should fully give other human beings the right to be wrong; and while disliking or abhorring some of their behavior, still not blame them, as persons, for performing this dislikeable behavior. He should accept the fact that all humans are remarkably fallible, never unrealistically expect them to be perfect, and refrain from despising or punishing them when they make inevitable mistakes and errors.

4. Acceptance of uncertainty. The emotionally mature individual should completely accept the fact that we live in a world of probability and chance, where there are not, nor probably ever will be, any absolute certainties, and should realize that it is not at all horrible, indeed – such a probabilistic, uncertain world is most conducive to free thought.

5. Flexibility. He should remain intellectually flexible, be open to change at all times, and unbigotedly view the infinitely varied people, ideas, and things in the world around him.

6. Scientific thinking. He should be objective, rational and scientific; and be able to apply the laws of logic and of scientific method not only to external people and events, but to himself and his interpersonal relationships.

7. Commitment. He should be vitally absorbed in something outside of himself, whether it be people, things, or ideas; and should preferably have at least one major creative interest, as well as some outstanding human involvement, which is highly important to him, and around which he structures a good part of his life.

8. Risk-taking. The emotionally sound person should be able to take risks, to ask himself what he really would like to do in life, and then to try to do this, even though he has to risk defeat or failure. He should be adventurous (though not necessarily foolhardy); be willing to try almost anything once, just to see how he likes it; and look forward to some breaks in his usual life routines.

9. Self-acceptance. He should normally be glad to be alive, and to like himself just because he is alive, because he exists, and because he (as a living being) invariably has some power to enjoy himself, to create happiness and joy. He should not equate his worth or value to himself on his extrinsic achievements, or on what others think of him, but on his personal existence; on his ability to think, feel, and act, and thereby to make some kind of an interesting, absorbed life for himself.

Now, does religion, faith unfounded on fact, or dependence on some supernatural deity – help human beings to achieve these healthy traits and thereby to avoid becoming anxious, depressed, and hostile? The answer, of course, is that it doesn’t help at all; and in most respects it seriously sabotages mental health. For religion, first of all, is not self-interest; it is god-interest.

The religious person must, by virtual definition, be so concerned with whether or not his hypothesized god loves him, and whether he is doing the right thing to continue to keep in this god’s good graces, that he must, at very best, put himself second and must sacrifice some of his most cherished interests to appease this god. If, moreover, he is a member of any organized religion, then he must choose his god’s precepts first, those of this church and it’s clergy second, and his own views and preferences third.

In a sense, the religious person must have no real views of his own; and it is presumptuous of him, in fact, to have any. In regard to sex-love affairs, to marriage and family relations, to business, to politics, and to virtually everything else that is important in his life, he must try to discover what his god and his clergy would like him to do; and he must primarily do their bidding.

Masochistic self-sacrifice is an integral part of almost all organized religions: as shown, for example, in the various forms of ritualistic self-deprivation that Jews, Christians, Islamists, and other religionists must continually undergo if they are to keep in good with their assumed gods.

Masochism, indeed, stems from an individuals’s deliberately inflicting pain on himself in order that he may guiltlessly permit himself to experience some kind of sexual or other pleasure; and the very essence of most organized religions is the performance of masochistic, guilt-soothing rituals, by which the religious individual gives himself permission to enjoy life.

Religiosity essentially is masochism; and both are forms of mental sickness. In regard to self-direction, it can easily be seen from what just been said that the religious person is by necessity dependant and other-directed rather that independent and self-directed. If he is true to his religious beliefs he must first bow down to his god; to the clergy who this god’s church; and third, to all the members of his religious sect, who are eagle-eyedly watching him to see whether he defects an iota from the conduct his god and his church define as proper.

Religion, therefore, is even more about dependency. For a man to be a true believer and to be strong and independent is impossible; religion and self-sufficiency are contradictory terms.

Tolerance again, is a trait that the firm religionist cannot possibly possess. “I am the Lord thy God and thou shalt have no other gods before me,” saith Jehovah. Which means in plain English, that whatever any given god and his clergy believe must be absolutely, positively true; and whatever any other person or group believes must be absolutely, positive false.

Democracy, permissiveness, and the acceptance of human fallibility are quite alien to the real religionist – since he can only believe that the creeds and commands of his particular deity should, ought, and must be obeyed, and that anyone who disobeys the is patently a knave.

Religion, with its definitional absolutes, can never rest with the concept of an individual’s wrong doing or making mistakes, but must inevitably all to this the notion of his sinning and of his deserving to be punished for his sins. For, if it is merely desirable for you to refrain from harming others or committing other misdeeds, as any non-religious code of ethics will inform you that it is, then if you make a mistake and do commit some misdeeds, you are merely a wrong-doer, or one who is doing an undesirable deed and who should try to correct himself and do less wrong in the future. But is it is god-given, absolute law that you shall not, must not do a wrong act, and actually do it, you are then a mean, miserable sinner, a worthless being, and must severely punish yourself (perhaps eternally, in hell) for being a wrongdoer, being a fallible human.

Religion by setting up absolute, god-given standards, must make you self-deprecating and dehumanized when you err; and must lead you to despise and dehumanize others when they act badly. This kind of absolutistic, perfectionistic thinking is the prime creator of the two most corroding of human emotions: anxiety and hostility.

If one of the requisites for emotional health is acceptance of uncertainty, then religion is obviously the unhealthiest state imaginable: Since its prime reason for being is to enable the religionist to believe a mystical certainty.

Just because life is so uncertain, and because millions of people think that they cannot take its vicissitudes, they invent absolutistic gods, and thereby pretend that there is some final, invariant answer to things. Patently, these people are fooling themselves – and instead of healthfully admitting that they do not need certainty, but can live comfortably in this often disorderly world, they stubbornly protect their neurotic beliefs by insisting that there must be the kind of certainty that they foolishly believe that they need.

The trait of flexibility, which is so essential to proper emotional functioning, is also blocked and sabotaged by religious belief. For the person who dogmatically believes in god, and who sustains this belief with a faith unfounded in fact, which a true religious of course must, clearly is not open to change and is necessarily bigoted.

If, for example, his scriptures or his church, tell him he shalt not even covet his neighbor’s wife – let alone have actual adulterous relations with her! – he cannot ask himself, “Why should I not lust after this women, as long as I don’t intend to do anything about my desire for her? What is really wrong about that?” For his god and his church have spoken; and there is no appeal from this arbitrary authority, once he has brought himself to accept it.

Any time, in fact, anyone unempirically establishes a god or a set of religious postulates which have a superhuman origin, he can thereafter use no empirical evidence whatever to question the dictates of this god or those postulates, since they are (by definition) beyond scientific validation.

The best he can do, if he wants to change any rules that stem from his religion, is to change the religion itself. Otherwise, he is stuck with the absolutistic axioms, and their logical corollaries, that he himself has initially accepted on faith. We may therefore note again that, just as religion is masochism, other-directedness, intolerance, and refusal to accept uncertainty, it also is mental and emotional inflexibility.

In regard to scientific thinking, it practically goes without saying that this kind of cerebration is quite antithetical to religiosity. The main canon of the scientific method is at least in some final analysis, or in principle, all theories be confirmable by some form of human experience, some empirical referent. But all religions which are worthy of the name contend that their superhuman entities cannot be seen, heard, smelled, tasted, felt, or otherwise humanly experienced, and that their gods and their principles are therefore distinctly beyond science.

To believe in any of these religions, therefore, is to be unscientific at least to some extent; and it could be contended that the more religious one is, the less scientific one tends to be (a raving maniac need not be either).

In regard to the trait of commitment, the religious individual may – for once! – have some advantages. For if he is truly religious, he is seriously committed to his god, his church, or his creed; and to some extent, at least, he thereby acquires a major interest in life.

Religious commitment also frequently has its serious disadvantages, since it tends to be obsessive-compulsive; and it may well interfere with other kinds of healthy commitments – such as deep involvements in sex-love relations, in scientific pursuits, and even in artistic endeavors. Moreover, it is a commitment that is often motivated by guilt or hostility, and may serve as a frenzied covering-up mechanism which masks, but does not really eliminate, these underlying disturbed feelings. It is also the kind of commitment that is based on falsehoods and illusions, and that therefore easily can be shattered, thus plunging the previously committed individual into the depths of disillusionment and despair.

Not all forms of commitment, in other words, are equally healthy. The grand inquisitors of the medieval catholic church were utterly dedicated to their “holy” work, and Hitler and many of his associates were fanatically committed to their Nazi doctrines. But this hardly proves that they are emotionally healthy human beings.

When religious individuals are happily committed to faith, they often tend to be fanatically and dogmatically committed in an obsessive-compulsive way that itself is hardly desirable. Religion is fanaticism – which is a rigid form of holding to a viewpoint that invariably masks and provides a bulwark for the underlying insecurity of the obsessed individual.

In regard to risk-taking, it should be obvious that the religious person is highly determined not to be adventurous nor to take any of life’s normal risks. He strongly believes in unvalidatable assumptions precisely because he does not want to risk following his own preferences and aims, but wants the guarantee that some higher power will back him.

Enormously fearing failure, and falsely defining his own worth as a person in terms of achievement, he sacrifices time, energy, and material goods and pleasures to the worship of the assumed god, so that he can at least be sure that this god loves and supports him. All religions worthy of the names are distinctly inhibiting – which means, in effect, that the religious person sells his soul, surrenders his own basic urges and pleasures, so that he may feel comfortable with the heavenly helper that he himself has invented. Religion, then is needless inhibition.

Finally, in regard to self-acceptance, it should again be clear that the religious devotee cannot possibly accept himself just because he is alive, because he exists and has, by mere virtue of his aliveness, some power to enjoy himself. Rather, he must make his self-acceptance utterly contingent on the acceptance of his definitional god, the church and clergy who also serve this god, and all other true believers in his religion.

In the final analysis, then, religion is neurosis. From a mental health standpoint Voltaire’s famous dictum should be reversed: for if there were a god, it would be necessary to uninvent him.

Think about it, ever wonder why the vast majority of serial killers, mass murderers, and lunatics in general can all be linked to their religious upbringing.

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Condensed from:
http://www.machineslikeus.com/articles/CaseAgainstReligion.html
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EVIL PARENTING OF YORE (PART 3)

CHRISTIAN FAMILY VALUES...NOT! PART 3

To summarize PARTS 1&2: The theory "Psycho-genetic Evolution" postulates that the way society and more specifically how mothers treat their children has an direct affect on future generations. Those societies that abuse, mistreat or neglect the children are destined to stagnate if not devolve in inovation and progress. While those that love, encourage and respect their children benefit from the creativity unleased by healthy minds. The modern stereotypical nuclear family is a fairly recent innovation and not the norm throughout most of history, although the church tries hard to claim the credit for family values, they actually did more to cause countless generations to suffer through unimaginible horrors through ignorance and superstitions. It wasn't until free-thinkers and nonbelievers started appreciating their children that the rapid explosion of new ideas and scientific progress was allowed to flourish. PART 3 continues with more examples of how we treated children in the past...

MUTILATING CHILDREN'S BODIES
The powerful need to mutilate children's bodies is found in nearly all cultures in some form, and reaches back to the Paleolithic caves where handprints on the walls show clearly that children's fingers were cut off in the widespread belief by many cultures that the Devil demanded a child's finger to appease his wrath. These finger sacrifice rituals are documented in many cultures, as far back as the Neolithic with finger bones, right up through ancient Greek times, when, Pausanias reported, finger sacrifice rituals were still performed to pacify pursuing demons. Finger amputation was also endemic in Ocean, Polynesia and among North American Indians.

But more often it is the genitals, head or feet of children which are assaulted; as the Canadian Intuit Eskimos say, "A hurt baby is more lovable!" and mothers who feel affectionate toward their infants are reported as commonly "slapping it, squeezing it tightly, or biting it until it bursts into tears." Cutting off parts or all of the girl's genitals is a widespread practice, possibly reaching back to Paleolithic times since a stone knife is often used, and is still practiced in preliterate tribes from Africa to Australia, where the girl's vagina is torn open with a stone knife and the child is then gang raped. Historical evidence dates from ancient Egypt, where mummies have been found with clitoral excision and labial fusions, and Greek physicians regularly advocated the removal of a girl's clitoris if it was "overly large" so she would not be overly lustful.

There are over 100 million Arab females today who have had their genitals chopped off, having been told that "if the clitoris is left alone, it will grow and drag on the ground, and if left uncircumcised, they will be wild and...grow up horny." Often the girl's labia are cut off in addition to the clitoris, and the remaining flesh is sewn together, leaving only a small opening for urination. The vagina must therefore be cut open again before intercourse, and the women have great difficulty giving birth and often are further cut to allow the baby to pass through. The ritual which is not a religious rite and is nowhere mentioned in the Koran,is accompanied by the joyful shouting and chanting of the women, "now you are a woman," "Bring her the groom now." "Bring her a penis, she is ready for intercourse," etc. It is not surprising that the overwhelming majority of circumcised girls grow up to be frigid. Female circumcision was practiced historically in various groups from Russia to Latin America, and was even inflicted on girls "who masturbated too much" in Europe and America in the nineteenth century, using a red hot iron to burn away the little girl's clitoris.

Circumcision for boys might be thought of as less traumatic since it involves only removal of the foreskin, a far less painful and serious mutilation. Yet in many cultures circumcision of boys is quite painful, as when Moslem boys are circumcised between the ages of 3 and 7 in a painful, bloody ceremony, after which "he is placed on his mother's naked back [so] that his bleeding penis presses against her. His mother dances along with the other women until he stops crying." Circumcision of boys practiced from Egypt and Africa to Peru and Polynesia, makes them into "little mothers," with the peeling away of the foreskin uncovering the glans so that it can act as a maternal nipple. That circumcision of boys is still practiced so regularly in America is a testimony to the continuing ubiquity of parental assault on the sexuality of children.

But the more serious genital mutilation of boys that occurred throughout history, East and West, was castration. Eunichs were found in most cultures, beginning as a sacrificial rite to early goddeses: "piles of freshly severed genitals lay beneath the altars in Egyptian temples, where hundreds of virile youths were initiated daily into male prostitution." In addition, castration was necessary to satisfy all the men who preferred hairless castrated boys to rape, plus all those used as harem keepers, palace officials, boy singers, actors and many other roles thought to require castrates. Nero was said to enjoy the use of eunuchs in his orgies, even marrying one of them. When parents sent their boys to aristocratic households for sexual use, they were said to sometimes cut off their genitals and keep them in a jar. Eunuchs were especially popular in Byzantium, while in the West Verdun was widely known as "the great eunuch factory." In some Italian towns, boys who were destined for the clergy were castrated at an early age; in Naples, signs hung above stores, "Boys castrated here." Many cultures castrated boys when they are just infants, claiming they "really wanted" to be girls. They are then used as women, sexually and otherwise, when they grow up, as in the hijras of India or the berdaches of American Indian tribes. The testicles of these boys were either torn from them, crushed or seared off them with red-hot irons, usually between the ages of 3 and 7; in China, "both the penis and scrotum were removed with one cut." Castration of boys continued until recently in the Middle East, followed by burial of the mutilated boy in hot sand for several days to reduce hemorrhage-only one in five surviving the bloody operation. Some societies had variations of circumcision that approached castration, as in some Arab tribes where they performed salkh, which "consisted of flaying and removing all of the skin of the penis..."

The ancients' more usual assault on boys' genitals, called infibulation was less painful, though longer lasting. Since they were so deprived of maternal love, ancients saw the boy's glans as an exciting nipple ("it strikes terror and wonder in the heart of man") and felt they needed to hide it, so they drew the prepuce foreword, drilled two holes in it, and closed it up with a ring, pin or clamp. Infibulated penises are regularly shown in drawings of Greeks and Roman athletes and was popular until modern times. The same practice in the East is called mohree, sewing or cauterizing the prepuce over the glans, preventing erection; to this day some Japanese athletes use infibulation to prevent the loss of their strength, which could evaporate through the glans. One is tempted to give the Aztecs the prize for the most sacrificial parenting, since they were routinely sacrificed, cut, tied to cradleboards, holes drilled in their lips, drugged, burned over fires, starved, stuck with spines, thrown naked into icewater, tortured and battered nearly every day of their lives. But this would be a mistake. Aztec childhood was simply more fully described, by visitors from Europe. Equally graphic were those who described the ancient Chinese habit of beheading or strangling children who were "guilty of addressing abusive language to his or her father or mother" or of the nineteenth-century Yugoslav practice of smearing infants with excrement and holding them over the fire or pushing them into a bread-oven to cure "bewitchment."

Parents in traditional societies couldn't keep their hands off their little babies; they simply were compelled to hurt and torture them. The first thing most Western societies did to the newborn up until the twentieth century was cut the ligament under their tongue with their thumbnail, assaulting them in advance for what they experienced as maternal tongue-lashing. Then their heads and genitals would be forcibly "shaped": Long heads would be reshaped, indeed all babies' heads would be reshaped to make the conform to the desired shape. The nose would be corrected...the nurse would gentle stretch the end of the foreskin every day...The scrotum would also be massaged.

Particularly widespread was the impulse to burn children. Traditional Arab children had burn marks all over their body from being burned by their parents with red-hot irons or pins. English newspapers often reported parents "stirring up the fire with [children's] feet so that their toes rotted off. The regular use of applying burning Mona to the child's body is still common in Japan. Pouring scalding hot water ("iron water") over children was supposed to be curative in Eastern European therapy. Similar results are ascribed to the Italian medieval practice of, "as soon as children be born, they cauterize or burn them in the neck with a hot iron, or else drop a burning wax candle upon the place...they think the brain is dried, and by pain the humour which doth flow is drawn to the hinder part of the head." Every kind of excuse is given for the torture of children. Parents of every period force children who have soiled their bed, to consume their own excrement.

THE LACK OF EMPATHY TOWARD CHILDREN
Every childrearing practice in traditional societies around the globe betrays a profound lack of empathy toward one's children. This should not, however, be simply seen as a result of poverty or even "the brutality of human nature." These parents are in thrall to their own mothers' alters, demanding the torture and sacrifice of their grandchildren. A typical example of this thralldom can be seen in the following observation of a visitor to Italy who describes a popular religious festival:

The most striking object of the solemnities is a procession [in which] a colossal car is dragged by a long team of buffaloes through the streets. Upon this are erected a great variety of objects, such as the sun, moon, and principal planets, set in rotary motion...The heart sickens at sight of it [for] bound to the rays of sun and moon, to the circles forming the spheres of the various planets, are infants yet unweaned, whose mothers, for the gain of a few ducats, thus expose their offspring, to represent the cherub escort which is supposed to accompany the Virgin [Mary] to heaven. When this huge machine has made its jolting round, these helpless creatures...having been whirled round and round for a period of seven hours, are taken down from this fatal machine, already dead or dying. Then ensues a scene impossible to describe-the mothers struggling with each other, screaming, and trampling each other down. It not being possible, on account of the number, for each mother to recognize her own child among the survivors, one disputes with the other the identity of her infant...The less fortunate mothers, as they receive the dead bodies of their infants, often already cold, rend the air with their fictitious lamentations, but consoled with the certainty that Maria, enamoured of her child, has taken it with her into Paradise.

Indeed, almost every mother who could afford to send their newborn out to wetnurses did so, even when the wetnurses fed them pap, not breast milk, and even though their child was more than likely to die from the wetnurse's callous treatment. In fact, mothers in the past seemed unable to even empathize enough with their infants to notice when they were hungry. Doctors throughout the centuries in all parts of the world routinely reported that "babies should only be fed two to three times in twenty-four hours." Héroard's diary of little Louis XIII showed that despite over a dozen nurses and caretakers being assigned to provide for his needs, he was regularly malnourished, even close to death. Even princesses as late as the eighteenth century were regularly reported to be "naked and dying of hunger." Mothers and nurses in the past were closer than one wishes to admit to the mother chimpanzees, who cannot empathize with their weaned babies enough to give them food or water or even to show them how to get it, so that one-third starve to death during the weaning crisis. Human mothers, however, go far beyond this lack of empathy, and purposely starve their children in fasting or punishment rituals so beloved by many societies in the past. When babies cried, mothers heard their own mothers' demanding voices, and only wanted to quiet them, so they would as likely feed them beer, wine or opium-available in every store as Godfrey's Cordial, Dalby's Carminative or Syrup of Poppies, which would either narcotize them enough to quiet them or would kill them. The use of opium on infants goes back to ancient Egypt, where the Ebers papyrus tells parents: "It acts at once!" Physicians complained of the thousands of infants killed every year by nurses "forever pouring Godfrey's Cordial down their little throats, which is a strong opiate and in the end as fatal as arsenic." At all costs the baby must be quieted.

There is no conscious guilt on the part of mothers who allow their children to starve to death, since they blame the children "for wanting to die." Many mothers and wetnurses didn't breastfeed at all, but just gave infants pap, "gruel" (bouillie), made of water or sour milk mixed with flour, which has very little nourishment and was so thick that "soon the whole belly is clogged, convulsions set in, and the little ones die." In Bavaria, for instance, mothers considered nursing their children "disgusting," while the fathers were totally lacking in empathy, telling their wives "those breasts are mine" and threatening to go on a hunger strike if the mothers nursed their baby. All sort of past childrearing practices contributed to the starvation or malnutrition of infants. Newborn babies were usually not fed at all for the first week or more, since the mother's colostrum was believed to be poisonous to the baby. Swaddled babies were hung on a peg or put in a cradle in another room, where their hunger cries could not be heard; in addition, tight swaddling makes infants withdraw into themselves so they refrain from crying when hungry. Infants sent out to wetnurse, after not being fed during the journey, were given to women who often attempted to nurse up to five or more babies at a time as they worked in the fields, while "the child is left to himself, drowning in his own excrement, bound like a criminal..." Particularly malnourished were those babies fed on pap by nurses, sometimes taking on as many as 40 children at a time, most dying, while mothers continued to send them their subsequent babies.

Most historians have been as little able to feel empathy for infants sent to wetnurses as the mothers themselves were, claiming it "reflected not so much a lack of love for them as a deep fear of loving them," or that was just "a harmless convention not a rejection of the child."From the eighteenth to the early twentieth century, less than 5 percent of the babies born in Paris were nursed by their own mothers, rich or poor alike. Six percent of eighteenth-century Parisian parents that wetnursed their babies were noble, 44 percent were master artisans and tradesmen and 24 percent were journeymen or other workers; over a third of the children died during their time at wetnurse, a mortality rate at least double that of maternal nursing, with the mortality rate of foundlings placed at wetnurse being a deadly 92 percent. Parents, of course, knew these enormous infant mortality figures when they condemned their innocent babies to wetnurse.

Mothers knew their own mothers would be jealous if they cared about the newborn rather than devoting themselves to the grandmother, so they rarely inquired about the baby at wetnurse. One unusual mother who actually visited her baby at wetnurse was warned by a relative that "such exaggerated love was a crime against God, and he would surely punish it." Besides, "many young mothers say...'If I turn nurse, I should destroy my husband's life, and my own too.'"Upper-class mothers almost never nursed their babies, saying, "Nourish an infant! Indeed, Indeed! ...I must have my sleep o'nights...And a new gown to wear at the Opera...What! Must the brat have my paps too?" Defoe called suckling babies by ladies of quality "a thing as unnatural as if God had never intended it." Newborn babies were experienced as demon alters-dragon-snakes (drákoi)-until they were exorcized at baptism. Breast milk was supposed to have been made from the mother's blood, and mothers imagined that "every time the baby sucks on her breasts, she feeleth the blood come from her heart to nourish it,"making her feel like the baby depleted her of her very life's blood. Doctors beginning with Soranus agreed that mothers who nursed their babies would "grow prematurely old, having spent herself through the daily suckling."In addition, since it was believed that "sperm would spoil the milk and turn it sour,"for most of history maternal breastfeeding meant no sex for the mother while nursing. Still others rejected breastfeeding because it felt too sensual,violating the anti-sexual prohibitions of their family upbringing.

The trip to wetnurse began the infant's traumatic life experiences. "The infants were bundled upright in groups of four or five in pannier baskets strapped to the backs of donkeys. Those who died on the journey were just thrown out en route."Once there, their parents "seldom inquired about the survival of their infants and were often uninformed as to their whereabouts."Mothers sent each newborn to wetnurse "despite the killing off, one by one, of their children. "Hung from a nail like a bundle of old clothes...the unfortunate one remains thus crucified [with] a purple face and violently compressed chest." The wetnurses' superstitions included a belief in favor of cradle cap and of human wastes, which were thought to have therapeutic value,"so infants were rarely washed and lived in their own feces and urine for their entire time at nurse: "Infants sat in animal and human filth, were suspended on a hook in unchanged swaddling bands or were slung from the rafters in an improvised hammock...their mouths crammed with rotting rags."

Wetnursing was practiced by societies all over the world, from Europe to Asia, as far back as records exist.233 The Code of Hammurabi even allowed the wetnurse to sell the baby if the parents couldn't pay her the contracted amount. The first improvement did not come until the seventeenth century, when wetnurses began more often to be brought into the parents' homes, especially in England, Holland and America. The next step was for the mother to nurse herself. The decision was made purely for psychogenic reasons; no new invention nor social condition caused the change. Nor was it due to a change in the opinions of experts-the pro-nursing tracts of Rousseau and others had little affect on the near-universal wetnursing practice in France, for instance, while in America, even in the South where slave nurses were available, mothers usually nursed themselves by the eighteenth century. Advanced mothers began by telling each other they would find new delights in nursing their own infants. Rather than a draining of vital blood, nursing could actually be a pleasure to the mother! The new middle class took the lead in maternal nursing, while-even in England-the upper classes gave their infants to wetnurses well into the nineteenth century; Victoria was the first English monarch who was not put out to wetnurse. All of these changes took place before the advent of sterilized bottle feeding in the twentieth century. Infant mortality in these areas immediately plunged, and mothers began to work out how to face the new emotional challenges of relating to their babies.

SWADDLING THE EVIL INFANT
Since "infant humans are inclined in their hearts to adultery, fornication, impure desires, lewdness...anger, strife, gluttony, hatred and more,"they had to be tightly tied up so they "be not crooked nor evil shapen"and will not "tear its ears off, scratch its eyes out, break its legs, or touch its genitals, "would undoubtedly "fall to pieces," and would certainly "go upon all four, as most other animals do." Worse, infants are always on the verge of turning into your own angry mother; there is so much "viciousness in all children [if you] pamper them the least little bit, at once they will rule their parents." Infants are so violent that even their heads must be "firmly tied down, that they might not throw off their heads from their shoulders." Physicians complained "mothers and nurses bind and tie their children so hard [they] made me weep {as they] lie the children behind the hot oven, whereby the child may soon be stiffled or choked..." The swaddling process was much the same for millennia:

[The mother] stretches the baby out on a board or straw mattress and dresses it in a little gown or a coarse, crumpled diaper, on top of which she begins to apply the swaddling bands. She pins the infant's arms against its chest, then passes the band under the armpits, which presses the arms firmly into place. Around and around she winds the band down to the buttocks, tighter and tighter...clear down to the feet, and...covers the baby's head with a bonnet [all of which] is fastened with pins.

Swaddled Albanian infants were described as follows in a 1934 study: The child began immediately to passionately scream and tried to free himself...This seemed to be a signal for the mother to rock the cradle violently; at the same time she covered the head of the baby with a white sheet. While the baby's miserable screaming made a strong impression to us, it seemed to be an everyday thing to the mother, to which she did not react except by rocking the cradle as strongly as possible. The traditional "benumbing shaking" of the baby and "violent rocking" of the cradle "puts the babe into a dazed condition in order that he may not trouble those that have the care of him," is sometimes supplemented by "a piece of linen rag stuffed into its mouth" to stop the screaming. Because straight pins were used to keep the swaddling bands in place, "nurses, blinded by passion and prejudice, do not hesitate to beat the helpless babe, without examining whether its cries are not occasioned by a pin..." Because every visitor to the home represents the jealous grandmother, infants are usually kept in dark rooms and their faces are covered by blankets to ward off the "world full of angry, malevolent, burning, glaring looks, a world dominated by evil and fear...usually represented by an older woman...Sharp objects are placed into the cradle or stuck between the swaddling bands-knives, needles, forks, nails-to protect against incubi..." Salt was rubbed into the baby's skin, irritating it terribly, excrement was sometimes smeared on its nipples, infants were made to drink their own urine and neighbors would often spit on it, saying: "Ugh, aren't you just ugly," all to ward off jealous "evil eye" spirits.

Few traditional mothers or nurses heeded doctors' pleas "not to let them lie in their filth,"so that during their first year of life they were usually "covered with excrement, reeking of a pestilential stench [their] skin completely inflamed [and] covered with filthy ulcerations [so that] if touched...they let out piercing cries."

The effects of swaddling upon every human born during the past ten millennia were catastrophic. Besides having "the pressure force blood to their heads and make their little faces purple," besides "crushing his breast and ribs" and "compressing the flesh almost to gangrene, the circulation nearly arrested," swaddled infants were severely withdrawn, listless and physically retarded in the onset of walking, which often didn't begin until from two to five years of age. The effects of swaddling on all adults' emotional lives is even more profound. Because of the lack of warmth and holding, there is a lifelong deficit in oxytocin and oversupply of cortisol, the stress hormone, resulting in a lifetime of rage and anxiety states.

THE HISTORY OF CHILD BEATING
Despite belief to the contrary, mothers beat their children today "at a rate approaching twice that of fathers," and mothers in the past were even more likely to be the child beaters than today. If the mother could not spare the time to beat her child, or if she complained "I have a little pain in my back with whipping Susan today, who struggled so that I have got a wrench," she could always hire a "professional flagellant" who advertised their child-beating services in newspaper ads or, like one mother, she could hire a "garde-de-ville to whip her three children once a week, naughty or not." After all, until just recently, all experts advised that mothers should "let the child from a year old be taught to fear the rod, and cry softy...make him do as he is bid." Since "God has given every mother the power [and] placed in your hands a helpless babe...if it disobeys you, all you have to do is to...inflict bodily pain so steadily and so invariably that disobedience and suffering shall be indissolubly connected in the mind of the child." And since your child needs you so much, "he does not bear a grudge against those who have hurt him...However much his mother whips him, he looks for her and values her above all others.""After thou hast beat him...then he hath forgotten all that was done to him before and will come to thee...running...to please thee and to kiss thee."

Children throughout history began being beaten in the womb. Pregnant mothers in the past were usually beaten by their husbands, a practice they had a legal right to do until the twentieth century. The beating process was ritualized, to relieve the parents' guilt and to enhance its sexualization. Children often would be forced to "ask for God's blessing on the flogging," "the wife then bares the child's bottom with delight for the flogging," "the child must ask to be beaten...(Batty rhapsodizes on God's wisdom in providing children with bottoms so they can be beaten repeatedly without permanent damage)." After the beatings, the child would often be made to kiss or thank the beating instrument or the beater for the beating. Parents usually are described as being out of control, "fearce and eager upon the child, striking, flinging, kicking it, as the usual manner is." Even mothers who wrote about being nice to their children, stressed the need to flog until "the plough of correction makes long furrows on their back."

Professional floggers hired by parents used more openly sexually sadistic equipment: Preparations consist in having ready a strong narrow table, straps (waist-band with sliding straps, anklets and wristlets), cushions, and a good, long, pliable birch rod, telling her to prepare by removing her dress...For screams increased strokes must be given. If a girl tries very hard indeed to bear it bravely, then, perhaps, I give ten instead of twelve.

Children of wealthy parents were, if anything, more severely beaten than others, by both their caretakers and parents. Louis XIII was routinely "beaten mercilessly...On waking in the morning...he was beaten on the buttocks by his nurse with a birch or a switch...his father whipped him himself when in a rage..." On the day of his coronation at eight, after being whipped, he said he "would rather do without so much obeisance and honor if they wouldn't have me whipped." Noble parents demanded nurses whip their children; Henri IV wrote: "I have a complaint to make: you do not send word that you have whipped my son...when I was his age I was often whipped. That is why I want you to whip him..." The beatings were usually bloody.

Laws did not protect children against cruelty until the modern period unless they were beaten to death; as one thirteenth-century law put it, "If one beats a child until it bleeds, then it will remember, but if one beats it to death, the law applies." Since children were beaten with the same instruments as criminals and slaves, floggings could be accomplished with whips, shovels, canes, iron rods, cat-o'-nine tails, bundles of sticks, shovels, whatever came to hand. Parents could avoid killing them, said Bartholomew Batty, if they would not "strike and buffet their children about the face and head, and lace upon them like malt sacks with cudgels, staves, fork or fire shovel...[but instead] hit him upon the sides with the rod, he shall not die thereof."

When children went to school, the beatings continued with increased ferocity. Beatings were considered the basis for learning, since, as one educator said, "fear is good for putting the child in the mood to hear and to understand. A child cannot quickly forget what he has learned in fear." Children were beaten for every error, such as "being flogged for not marking the ablative case," and since sexual sadism was rampant among teachers throughout the centuries the floggings being administered to children "stripped in front of the whole community and beaten until they bled". Schoolmasters were often described as taking "the most pretty and amorous boys...into his lodgings and after a jerke or two [a blow with a rod or a whip] to meddle with their privities..." Many books and articles have been written detailing the "erotic flagellation" of British schools, but the erotic content of school beatings was well-known everywhere since early times. Children wondered why "We are taught during our first five or six years to hide our buttocks and shameful parts; then...along comes a teacher who forces us to unbutton our trousers, push them down, life our shirt, show everything and receive the whip in the middle of the class." fainted."316

No child in antiquity and the middle ages can be found who escaped severe physical abuse-at home, at school , in apprenticeship, all suffered from "battered child syndrome," from infancy until adolescence. The Old Testament not only demands beating children, it says children who curse their mother or father "shall surely be put to death" and of stubborn sons, "All the men of the city shall stone him to death with stones." Spartan boys were flogged in public contest to see who could endure the longest, and ritually whipped at altars which became filled with their blood. Chinese parents punished children by "a hundred blows with a bamboo...strangulation [or] having his flesh torn from his body with red-hot pincers." St. Ambrose praised tutors for being "unsparing with the whip," Augustine "lived in dread of the whip of his teacher," and Martial "jokes about the complaints of neighbours living next to a schoolroom: the sounds of students being beaten awakens them annoyingly early in the morning."

By the middle ages, a few reformers, began questioning whether whipping children "day and night" was wise. Still, little changed for most children, except that by the seventeenth century sometimes if they were whipped to death during apprenticeship the master could be convicted of manslaughter. Small infants were the first to be exempted from whippings; "a babe at six months cries when its mother gives it into the arms of another person...the child ought not to be whipped for this..." By the eighteenth century's socializing mode parenting, we find the first children in history who could be said not to have been beaten at all,particularly in America, where European visitors agreed "one and all that American children were badly spoiled." Mothers discovered for the first time in history that they could have "a deep, unquenchable love for her offspring," and would abjure all "whipping, caning, slapping, ear-pulling or hair-dragging," favoring chastising words or locking up in a room instead. By the early twentieth century, twelve percent of white Americans in one study claimed never to have been spanked.

The number of daily tortures routinely inflicted upon children in the past seem beyond comprehension. From birth, children had to endure constant freezing practices, including ice-water bathing and baptism: Children were baptized by being plunged into a large hole which had been made in the ice [on the river} Neva, then covered with five feet of ice...the priest happened to let one of the children slip through his hands. "Give me another," he cried...I saw that the father and mother of the child were in an ecstasy of joy...the babe had been carried straight to heaven.

Ice-water bathing was a widespread historical practice from antiquity to modern times, "the colder the Bath the better...use every Day," so that "the shock was dreadful, the poor child's horror of it, every morning, when taken out of bed, still more so." The excuse given was that it was necessary for "hardening" the child, "to toughen their bodies by dipping them into cold water like white-hot iron," so that when the "little infant [is washed] in cold water...itself in one continuous scream [the] mother covering her ears under the bed-clothes that she may not be distressed by its cries" it can be hardened to life's cruelties. The mother took the naked baby and a pot of hot water into the backyard...poured the water on the snow, melting it and creating a pool which could serve as a washing basin for several days; all she had to do the next day was to break the iceMost societies used these Spartan hardening practices: Russians complained about traditional hardening such as being put to bed wrapped in wet cold towels, and Colonial New Englanders regularly complained that they were made to sit with wet feet "more than half the time."

THE ABANDONMENT OF CHILDREN
Abandonment of children may seem less traumatic than tying up, beating and terrorizing them, but they suffered as much. They were given away by their parents as most children in history were, under one excuse or another. Newborn infants who were abandoned on the side of the road, of course, almost always died, two-thirds of the babies who were abandoned to foundling homes beginning in the modern period usually died from maltreatment in the institutions. Visitors to these foundling homes regularly described the children there as: stunted creatures, neither childlike nor human...they sit close-packed against the wall or gathered into knots, dull and stupefied...Never played with or cuddled.It is a room of filth, filled with ceaseless crying, where their lack of decent covering, their misery and consequent infirmities combine to bring about their death within a few days. Most of the children abandoned in foundling homes were legitimate so it is no wonder that it was proposed that a motto be carved over the gate of one foundling home: "Here children are killed at public expense."

Babies not abandoned to foundling homes could be sold by their parents as slaves during most of history; there are still hundreds of thousands of chattel slaves around the world today, even more in debt bondage. Public auctions of children were common throughout Europe and Asia well into modern times. One American colonist described the sale of children in debt bondage that took place as ships arrived in Philadelphia: "Many parents must sell and trade away their children like so many head of cattle; for if their children take the debt upon themselves, the parents can leave the ship free and unrestrained..."

The one institution to which parents could abandon their children and know they were likely to live was the religious order. Parents knew monasteries and nunneries were abusive, "there is an inscription over the gate of hell: 'Abandon all hope, you who enter'; on the gate of monasteries, the same should appear",but they nevertheless paid good money to them to dump their children in them permanently. Most oblates were children of aristocrats, so there is no argument for economic necessity, and gave large gifts to the religious orders to take their children, usually at around five years of age. The child became a holocaust, a sacrifice, to God, and the cloister "became a cruel life of hard labor, boring routine, beatings, and fear of sexual sin and assault. In return, the parents could expect "clerical prayer and, ultimately, salvation". The children held the legal status of slaves of the monastery, and they were endlessly whipped, naked, regularly starved in severe fasts, only allowed to sleep for five hours a night and used sexually by clerics and older boys. Although most monks were earlier oblates, oblation began to decline in the late twelfth century, as wealthy parents decided they preferred to hire servants to whip, starve, torture and sexually abuse their children in their own home.

Another widespread abandonment practice throughout history was fosterage. Fosterage was found mainly among royalty and other well-to-do parents [and] was so common that the remark that 'all the children grew up at home' was offered as an unusual occurrence....sons obtained new networks of kin relations, but bonding with the mother was most often precluded, and-most surprising to the modern reader-she did not seem to have desired her son's company. Children might be sent to fosterage "for affection or for payment" as soon as they returned from wetnurse, usually to other family members, and not returned until adolescence. Since so many families simply traded children with each other, the custom was puzzling unless one realizes that adults emotionally were able to treat foster children more abusively, working them like slaves, beating them, using them sexually, than if they had kept their own children and not traded them to others. Fostering in archaic civilizations was so common the mother's brother was often called the "upbringer" or "fostering brother," and "among Hittites, Greeks, Romans, Celts and Germans, mother's brothers [would] supervise initiation and...ritually sodomize his ward..." Fosterage was practiced in all complex civilizations in every continent on earth, right into modern times. Parents would simply ask the uncles or grandparents if they "needed a child" and shipped one off to them without tears. If one sent one's child to royalty and it was killed by abuse, one was expected to thank the foster parent and bring another.

There was little difference between fosterage, adoption, apprenticeship and service. All involved virtual slavery without rights for the children. The opinion of the Italian at the end of the fifteenth century that "the want of affection in the English is strongly manifested towards their children...they put them out, both males and females, to hard service in the houses of other people...few are born who are exempted from this fate, for every one, however rich he may be, sends away his children into the houses of others; whilst he, in return, receives those of strangers into his own" Half of all persons who came to the colonies in the American South were indentured children. England continued to send hundreds of thousands of children to Canada and Australia for fosterage well into the twentieth century; a Canadian minister complained about England' practice using Canada as "a dumping ground for the refuse of the highways...waifs, strays, and the children of vicious and criminal tendencies..." The practice continues in many areas of the world for tens of millions of children today.

Obviously, despite the achievement of empathic childrearing among some parents today, most of humankind still has a long way to evolve to get beyond severe abuse and give their children the love and respect they deserve. The ubiquity of severe child abuse and neglect in historical sources makes even the most horrific descriptions found in contemporary clinical and child advocacy reports seem limited in comparison. It is no wonder that historians have chosen to hide, deny and whitewash the record here uncovered, in order to avoid confronting the parental holocaust that has been the central cause of violence and misery throughout history.

EVIL PARENTING OF YORE (PART 2)

CHRISTIAN FAMILY VALUES...NOT! PART 2

To summarize PART 1 in a nutshell. "Psycho-genetic Evolution" is a theory that how a mother raises her children effects his/her psyche and can be passed down through generations. In order for society in general to evolve we must raise our children free from abuse, neglect and ignorance. My purpose is to show how the 'nuclear family' we think has always been the norm is anything but. It wasn't until we went against religious dogma and ignorance that chidren finally were raised emotionally 'healthy' and therefore were capable of thinking outside the box which lead to innovation and scientific advancement. You can't think altruistically if you've been raised in an evironment of abuse and neglect, you're main concern is survival.

Since nearly all of the cultural evolution of Homo sapiens sapiens has taken place during the past 100,000 years-only about 5,000 generations and since this time span is too short to allow the human gene pool to mutate very much, epigenetic evolution of the psyche,the evolution of the architecture of the brain occurring during development in the womb and during early childhood-must be the central source of cultural change, rather than genetic evolution.

Environmental change cannot explain cultural evolution since culture has often evolved while the ecology has devolved because of soil exhaustion. The point is that the degree of steepness of the environmental ladder doesn't determine whether people chose to climb it you still must want to climb and you must be innovative enough to invent or adopt ways to conquer each rung.

But what is usually overlooked is that genetic evolution only provides the capacity for adult behavioral variations assuming a specific developmental environment. The road from genotype to phenotype is a long one. What trait actually appears in the mature individual depends upon the actual course of epigentic development, beginning in the womb and continuing throughout childhood an extraordinarily complex and variable journey for each individual. The most important environments are the mother's body and behavior, and the most important competition for survival not in the sperm or ovum but at the neural level, in the brain, with the mother acting as the agent of natural selection.

Scientists have prenatally stressed mice, who are as adults found to be more aggressive, and then taken the male mice and mated them with other females and found that their grandsons were also more aggressive than non-stressed males-thus showing how environmental stress can be passed down genetically. Others have shown dramatically how stressed children "change from being victims to being victimizers" because of imbalanced noradrenaline and serotonin levels, which then can be passed down through both genetic and epigenetic changes.

The evolution of the psyche is first of all accomplished by removing terrible abuses of children and their resulting developmental distortions, allowing the psyche to produce historical novelty and achieve its own inherent human growth path. Civilization is not, as everyone including Freud has assumed, a historical taming of the instincts. Nor does the evolution of mankind proceed from bad to worse, with early societies being "indulgent" toward their children and modern societies more often abusive. The reverse is true, that culture evolves through the increase of love and freedom for children, so that when they grow up they can invent more adaptive and happier ways of living. Because we were all children before we were adults, childhood evolution must precede social evolution.

Every abandonment, every betrayal, every hateful act towards children returns tenfold a few decades later upon the historical stage, while every empathic act that helps a child become what he or she wants to become, every expression of love toward children heals society and moves it in unexpected, wondrous new directions.

Children throughout history have arguably been more vital, more gentle, more joyous, more trustful, more curious, more courageous and more innovative than adults. Yet adults throughout history have routinely called little children beasts, sinful, greedy, arrogant, lumps of flesh, vile, polluted, vipers and infant fiends. Although it is extraordinarily difficult to believe, parents until relatively recently have been so frightened of and have so hated their newborn infants that they have killed them by the billions, routinely sent them out to extremely neglectful wetnurses, tied them up tightly in swaddling bandages lest they be overpowered by them, starved, mutilated, raped, neglected and beat them so badly that prior to modern times it's hard to find evidence of a single parent who would not today be put in jail for child abuse.

THE MISSING FATHER
The problem with the overly monolithic conception of a "patriarchy" wherein men dominate women both in society and in the family is that while no "matriarchal" society has been found, there is little evidence that until modern times most fathers were absent in historical families. In our promiscuous chimpanzee ancestors, fathers were quite absent in child-rearing, so there are no "families," only grandmothers and mothers moving about with their children. It is also likely that there were no Neandertal families to begin with, since women and children lived in separate areas from the males in caves. Although a "gynocratic state" is slightly approximated in such tribes as the Iroquois, the Navajo, the Ashanti, and the Dahomeans, the families themselves in preliterate cultures are usually run by women, who often live in separate spaces from their husbands. In some, like the Ashanti, they have a visiting husband...in which the husband and wife live with their respective mothers [and] at night the man 'visits' his wife in her house. In others, men spend much of their time in their own cult houses, and women in separate family or menstrual huts, segregating themselves of their own accord. Even when men lived with their wives, females took care of the children, although cross-cultural studies conclude that in the majority of societies mothers are not the principal caretakers or companions of young children...older children and other female family members mainly looking after them. Even when the children are somewhat older, fathers are generally not the ones that teach them skills. Boys learn their bow-and-arrow hunting knowledge and techniques and their tracking skills mainly from other boys not their fathers.

The historical family is in fact a gynarchy, composed of the grandmother, mother, aunts, unmarried daughters, female servants, midwives, neighbors called "gossips" who acted as substitute mothers, plus the children. Fathers in traditional families may sometimes eat and sleep within the gynarchy, but they do not determine its emotional atmosphere, nor do they in any way attempt to raise the children. To avoid experiencing their own domination and abuse during childhood by females, men throughout history have instead set up androcentric political and religious spheres for male-only group-fantasy activities, contributing to the family gynarchy only some sustenance, periodic temped children lived shut away from men. They rarely showed themselves in public but stayed in apartments men did not enter; they rarely ate with their husbands...they never spent their days together. In Greece women had a special place. Larger houses at any rate had a room or suite of rooms in which women worked and otherwise spent much of their day, the women's apartments, the gynaikonitis, which Xenophon says was "separated from the men's quarters by a bolted door. In two-story houses, the gynaikonitis would usually be upstairs. The men's dining-room, the andron, was located downstairs near the entrance, guarding the women's quarters: Here men in the family dined and entertained male guests. Vase-paintings do not depict Greek couples eating together. This mainly vertical organization of most homes lasted well into the eighteenth century, when a new "structure of intimacy" began to be built, with rooms connected to each other on the same level.

Thus Herodotus could assume his reader would easily recognize families where "a boy is not seen by his father before he is five years old, but lives with the women,and Aristotle could assume his readers' assent that "no male creatures take trouble over their young." Ancient Greek, Roman and Jewish men had all-male eating clubs where women and children were not welcome. Plato has Socrates suggest a possibly better home arrangement, with dinners at which citizens will feast in the company of their children....In general, however, children ate with their mothers, not their fathers...Eating and drinking, far from offering the whole family an opportunity for communal activity, tended to express and reinforce cleavages within it. Boys tended to remain in the gynarchy of their own or others' homes until their middle teens.

The family in Egyptwas matriarchal. The most important person in the family was not the father, but the mother. The Egyptian wife was called the Ruler of the House. There is no corresponding term for the husband. In rural Greek villages even today the mother owns the house, passes it on to her daughter as dowry, and continues to rule the house when her daughter has children. Indeed, the husband was rarely with his family in antiquity, legislators sometimes suggest that in order to prevent population decline it would be a good idea for husbands to visit their wives occasionally and not just have sex with boys. Plutarch puts it "Love has no connection whatsoever with the women's quarters; it is reserved for pederastic relations with boys." When Socrates asks, "Are there any people you talk to less than you do to your wife?" his answer was, "Possibly. But if so, very few indeed." Men stayed in the thiasos, the men's club, with other men, and had little to do with their children. Greek boys stayed in the gynarchy of their own home until they at the age of about ten were forced to be eromenos, sexual objects, in the andron of a much older man's home. Greek girls stayed in the gynarchy until they were about twelve, when they too were raped by a much older man, a stranger chosen for them by their family to be their husband. The father might try to enforce an occasional dominance of the gynarchy by beating the women and children, but usually it was the women of the household who wielded the family whip on their children.

The gynarchy ruled supreme in early homes. In Byzantium, women had separate spheres with strict exclusion of men from the family, where "men live in light and brightness, the palaestra; women live in the gynaecaeum, enclosed, secluded." This was even true of supposedly patriarchal Chinese families. The Chinese gynarchy was described by visitors as living in women's apartments behind the high walls of their husbands' compounds, dominated by women who are reputed to terrorize the men of their households and their neighbors with their fierce tempers, searing tongues, and indomitable wills. When father and son do work together, they have nothing to say, and even at home they speak only when there is business to discuss. [Otherwise] they mutually avoid each other. Indonesian fathers are simply not present very much, the woman has more authority, influence and responsibility than her husband.

The examples can easily be extended around the world and into the Middle Ages:

The female world was highly structured, like a little monarchy-that monarchy wielded by the master's wife, the 'lady' who dominated the other women in the house. This monarchy was often tyrannical. The chronicles of French families at the end of the twelfth and the beginning of the thirteenth century paint a picture of shrews reigning brutally over servants whom they terrorized, and over their sons' wives whom they tormented. Indeed, a female power existed which rivaled that of men. Men were afraid of women, especially their own wives, afraid of being incapable of satisfying a being who was seen both as a devourer and as a bearer of death. Men are shown as being excluded from the traditional "gynaeceum" the nursery, the kitchen, the work bees, even the laundry. While husbands are hopefully told in moralist's instruction manuals about the "Duties of a Husband" to instruct their wives, the sections on the "Duties of a Father" to care for their children are nowhere to be found until modern times. Most fathers agreed with Abelard, who, after he got Heloise pregnant, sent her away, admitting, "Who can bear the screams of children...Who can tolerate the unclean and continuous soilings of babies?" As Buchan wrote, "Men generally keep at such a distance from even the smallest acquaintance with the affairs of the nursery [and] is not ashamed to give directions concerning the management of his dogs or horses, yet would blush were he surprised in performing the same office for [his] heir..." Since children of the upper classes were sent out to wetnurse and then to school, many adults could agree with Talleyrand when he stated that he "had never slept under the same roof with his father and mother." Fathers were so distant that most could agree with Vandermonde, who said, "One blushes to think of loving one's children." When their children died, most fathers, like William Byrd, revealed no signs of grief, writing in their diaries the night of the death only that they had "good thoughts and good humor."

By the nineteenth century, some fathers began to relate to their children with some empathy, yet even they were seen as rare, as when Grigorii Belynskii was described as "the only father in the city who understood that in raising children it is not necessary to treat them like cattle." Even those who began at this time to criticize "paternal neglect," like John Abbott, said it was the father's sole task "to teach his children to obey their mother." It wasn't actually until late socializing mode fathers came along that they actually began some caretaking, pushing prams and otherwise trying to live up to the New Fatherhood proclamations of the twentieth century. Yet even though there are some fathers today who are helping mode parents and who spend equal time with their wives caring for their children, various time surveys in America still show that working fathers spend only about 12 to 18 minutes per day with their young children, without even counting the one-third of all babies who are born to unmarried women. The gynarchy, it appears, still reigns supreme, and fathers around the world have yet to seriously embrace the tasks and joys of fatherhood.

GIRLS HAD WORSE CHILDHOODS THAN BOYS
The problem with having only women raising children is that parenting is an emotionally demanding task, requiring considerable maturity, and throughout history girls have grown up universally despised. When a girl was born, said the Hebrews, "the walls wept." Japanese lullabies sang, "If it's a girl, stamp on her." In medieval Muslim cultures "a grave used to be prepared, even before delivery, beside the woman's resting place [and] if the new-born was a female she was immediately thrown by her mother into the grave." "Blessed is the door out of which goes a dead daughter" was a popular Italian proverb that was meant quite literally. Girls from birth have everywhere been considered full of dangerous pollution-the projected hatred of adults-and were therefore more often killed, exposed, abandoned, malnourished, raped and neglected than boys. Girls in traditional societies spent most of their growing up years trying to avoid being raped by their neighbors or employers and thereby being forced into a lives of prostitution. To expect horribly abused girls to magically become mature, loving caretakers when as teenagers they go to live as virtual slaves in a strange family simply goes against the conclusions of every clinical study we have showing the disastrous effects of trauma upon the ability to mother.

Mothers earlier in history mainly saw their children as their own screaming, needy, dominating mothers, forming a "hypersymbiotic relationship" wherein the child is expected to make up for all the love missing in the mother's own life, cure her post-partum depression and restore her vitality. The need to shut up the mother's angry voice in babies lead to their being tied up, neglected and beaten. Tiny infants were experienced as being so destructive that, according to Augustine, "If left to do what he wants, there is no crime he will not plunge into." In fact, infants were felt to be so full of badness that when they died they were often buried under rain gutters so the water would wash off their inborn pollution. The baby in the past must not need anything, but must just give love solely to the emotionally-deprived mother.

CHILD SACRIFICE AS PUNISHMENT FOR SUCCESS
The act of having a child is, says Rheingold, "the most forbidden act of self-realization, the ultimate and least pardonable offense," and brings with it inevitable fears of maternal retribution for one's success and individuation. Mothers in antiquity hallucinated female demons-Lamia, Gorgo, Striga, Empusa, so jealous of their having babies that they sucked out their blood and otherwise murdered them. Even today peasant villages fear the outbreak of "angry, malevolent, dangerous" hallucinations that surround the newborn and threaten the mother and even keep the nursery room boarded up with the door barred to prevent the intrusion of dangerous spirits. All early societies invented sacrificial rituals wherein babies were tortured and killed to honor maternal goddesses, from Anit to Kali, vowing that, "although Mommy wants to kill me for having sex and making a baby, if I kill the baby instead [usually the first-born was sacrificed], I can then go on having sex and other babies with less fear of retribution."

The severely immature parents of the past felt under such constant threat for success by malevolent forces that their own children were constantly being used as poison containers for their disowned feelings. As one informant in a contemporary rural Greek community put it, "When you're angry a demon gets inside of you. Only if a pure individual passes by, like a child for instance, will the bad leave you, for it will fall on the unpolluted." A typical child sacrifice for parental success can be seen in Carthage, where archeologists have found a child cemetery called The Tophet that is filled with over 20,000 urns containing bones of children sacrificed by the parents, who would make a vow to kill their next child if the gods would grant them a favor,for instance, if their shipment of goods were to arrive safely in a foreign port. They placed their children alive in the arms of a bronze statue of "the lady Tanit...the hands of the statue extended over a brazier into which the child fell once the flames had caused its limbs to contract and its mouth to open...the child was alive and conscious when burned...Philo specified that the sacrificed child was best-loved."

Child sacrifice was the foundation of all great religions, depicted in myths as absolutely necessary to save the world from "chaos," that is, from terrible inner annihilation anxiety as punishment for success. The Sacred Executioner: Human Sacrifice and the Legacy of Guilt, portrays the entire history of religion as dramas featuring a vengeful, bloodthirsty Sacred Executioner, demonstrating that the role of children, from Isaac to Christ, was to act as sacrifices for the sins of the parents. Behind even male gods demanding sacrifice are Avenging Terrible Mothers of Death, Inanna, Tiamat, Ishtar, Astarte, Lilith, Hathor-Sekhmet, Izanami, Chicomecoatl, all demanding revenge for the hubris of daring to be a parent.The wealthier the family, the more children had to be sacrificed to the goddess, representing the infant's furious grandmother.

Child sacrifices have been found from the beginning of human history: decapitated skeletons of early hominid children have been found, with evidence of cannibalism, as their parents ate them on behalf of the spirits of their life-devouring grandmothers; young children were buried with their skulls split by an ax at Woodhenge/Stonehenge; decapitated infant sacrifices to the Great Goddess were found at Jericho; early Arabians sacrificed their daughters to "the mothers;" the serpent goddess of the Aztecs demanded skull and heart sacrifice of children, including the eating of the children's bodies and covering themselves with their blood; Mayan and Incan sacrificed children are still being discovered in the South American mountains, along with children who have been killed by drug dealers to ward off revenge for their successful cocaine runs. The need to sacrifice children to ward off fears of success was so powerful that right through medieval times, when people built new buildings, walls or bridges, little children were sealed in them alive as "foundation sacrifices" to ward off the angry, avenging spirits, of parents who felt envious of the accomplishments of their children.

Over and over again death wishes are revealed in the historical sources, breaking out when interacting with children. Epictetus admitted, "What harm is there if you whisper to yourself, at the very moment you are kissing your child, and say 'Tomorrow you will die?'" Another recalled his mother tucking him into bed nightly with the words, "Soon my son you will exchange the bed for the grave, and your clothes for a winding sheet." The deaths of children were rarely mourned: mothers were commonly reported to have "regarded the death of various daughters at school with great equanimity" and fathers to "cheerfully remark when two of his fifteen children died that he still had left a baker's dozen."

As we will see in the sections that follow on infanticide, mutilation and abandonment, parents are the child's most lethal enemy.

INFANTICIDE AS CHILD SACRIFICE
Mothers who feel like killing their newborn children today are clinically found to be deeply depressed and lonely, because, according to Rheingold's study of 350 filicidal mothers, "It is only the fear of being a woman that can create the infanticidal impulse...having a child is the most forbidden act of self-realization...punishment is inescapable and punishment means annihilation...To appease the mother she must destroy the child, but the child is a love object too. To preserve the child she must renounce mother... She is trapped in a desperate conflict: kill mother and preserve the baby or kill the baby and preserve the mother." Mothers in the past routinely chose killing the baby, by the billions, driven to it by her devil alter (her own destructive mother image in her head).

It is likely that overall infanticide rates of both sexes exceeded 30 percent in antiquity and only slowly declined to the very small rate in advanced societies today. Multiplying these infanticide rates by the 80 billion human births in the past 100,000 years, a weighted average infanticide rate for the entire 80 billion births was likely at the very least 15 percent, or 12 billion children killed by their parents.

Even this astonishing figure is not the whole story of infanticide. Every study of infant death rates among children sent out to wetnurses and abandoned in foundling homes shows much higher death rates, running to over 70 per cent and higher, even in modern times. Doctors of every age agreed that "the most profound cause of the terrific waste of infant life [is] neglect...neglected by their own mothers and neglected by the nurses to whom they were abandoned..." Since parents who sent their children to wetnurse and foundling homes knew quite well they would likely not see them again, some were sent to so-called "killing wetnurses" with a small sum of money under the tacit assumption that they would not be returned. These "delayed infanticide" acts must be added to the estimated rate of child killing, increasing it by at the very least a third, or a total of 16 billion children killed by parental acts over the entire historical span. No wonder people in the past so often said that everywhere in their areas "you could hear coming out of the bottom of latrines and ponds and rivers the groanings of the children that one had thrown there."

Although poverty played some part in this holocaust of children, it is doubtful if it was the main cause of child deaths. In the first place, the cost of bringing up a girl is no more than the cost of bringing up a boy, so the differential infanticide rates are certainly parental choices. When, for instance, Arabs dug a grave next to the birthing place of every new mother so "if the newborn child was a female she could be immediately thrown by her mother into the grave," it was likely hatred of girls, not poverty, that was the motive. Secondly, if scarce resources were the main cause, then wealthy parents should kill less than poor. But the historical record shows exactly the opposite: historical boy/girl ratios are higher among wealthy parents, where economic necessity is no problem at all. Even in early modern England, the infant mortality rates for wealthy children were higher than the same rates for ordinary farmers, day laborers and craftsman. Thirdly, many wealthy high civilizations such as Greece, Rome, China, India, Hawaii and Tahiti are very infanticidal, especially among their elite classes. As one visitor to Hawaii reported, there probably wasn't a single mother who didn't throw one or more of her children to the sharks. There were even societies where virtually all newborn were killed to satisfy their overwhemling infanticidal needs, and infants had to be imported from adjoining groups to continue the society. Finally, many nations-like in Japan until recently-kill their children selectively in order to balance out an equal number of boys and girls, a practice called mabiki, or "thinning out" the less promising ones, again revealing a quite different motive than the purely economic. It is most certainly not economics that causes so many depressed women on the delivery tables even today to implore their mothers not to kill them after they have given birth. Women since the beginning of time have felt that their children "really" belonged to God, and that "the child was a gift that God had every right to reclaim." When killing her child, therefore, the mother was simply acting as her own mother's avenger.

Usually it was the mother or one of the other women of the gynarchy who did the killing, usually violently, smashing in the baby's head, crushing it between her knees, asphyxiating it against her breasts, sitting on it, or throwing it alive into the privy, with the mother sometimes earning the nickname of "child-stabber" or "child-crusher." It helped to have gynecological writings like Soranus's on "How to Recognize the Newborn That Is Worth Rearing" to rationalize the infanticide. It helped to share the blame for the murder with your children, who were often made to help the mother kill their newborn siblings, and who would then be more likely to restage the murder upon their own newborn.

Opposition by society to infanticide was negligible until modern times. Jews considered any child who died within thirty days after birth, even by violence, to have been a "miscarriage." Most ancient societies openly approved of infanticide, and although Roman law, in response to Christianity, made infanticide a capital offense in 374 C.E., no cases have been found punishing it. Anglo-Saxons actually considered infanticide a virtue, not a crime, saying, "A child cries when he comes into the world, for he anticipates its wretchedness. It is well for him that he should die...he was placed on a slanting roof [and] if he laughed, he was reared, but if he was frightened and cried, he was thrust out to perish." Prosecutions for infanticide before the modern period were rare. Even medieval penitentials excused mothers who killed their newborn before feeding them. By Puritan times, a few mothers began being hanged for infanticide. But even in the nineteenth century it was still "not an uncommon spectacle to see the corpses of infants lying in the streets or on the dunghills of London and other large cities. The English at the end of the century had over seven million children enrolled in "burial insurance societies;" with the infant mortality rate at 50 percent, parents could easily collect the insurance by killing their child. As one doctor said, "sudden death in infants is too common a circumstance to be brought before the attention of the coroner." Free medical care for children was refused...'No, thank you, he is in two burial clubs' was a frequent reply to offers of medical assistance for a sick child.

Century after century, the children in traditional societies who survived remembered the cries of their murdered brothers and sisters, feared their murderous parents, believed themselves unworthy of living, irredeemably bad, and grew up to inflict the killings on their own children.

TO BE CONTINUED IN PART 3

EVIL PARENTING OF YORE (PART 1)

CHRISTIAN FAMILY VALUES...NOT! PART 1

I stumbled across the following theory "Psycho-genetic Evolution" while trying to research the history of child rearing to refute today's "Christian Family Value" argument. I knew that the so called 'nuclear' family so heralded and held up as the ideal christian family was a recent 'invention'. Invented to deflect Christianity's real effect of harming children emotionally, stunting intellectual growth, and keeping society stagnant in ignorance. Fabricated to justify their patriarchal institution of marriage where the FATHER plays the lead role and used as the modern justification against gay couples adopting children.

You know the stereotypical, loving father, adoring mother, dutiful son and caring daughter we see in Rockwell paintings. We have been conditioned to believe it has been that way since well 'Adam & Eve'. That contrived happy family is historically inaccurate and boldface fabrication from a church trying to improve its image. History has been purposely hidden, changed and made up to fool us into our modern way of thinking. Boy was I surprised, my image of past family life wasn't even close! I imagined an aloof and stern father and the phrase "children should be seen and not heard" (familiar to those raised on Disney films). It was much much worse.

Throughout most of history children were scorned, neglected, abandoned, considered evil or a curse, sexually abused, or sold as slaves. It wasn't until free-thinkers and unbelievers began to question the status quo that our idea of the nuclear family began to transform family life (for the better) beginning around the 18th century and that's when scientific progress and human inventiveness was finally allowed to blossom. NO THANKS AND NO CREDIT TO THE CHURCH CAN BE GIVEN. DO NOT LET THEM FOOL YOU. The only way we can evolve our potential as humans is if todays parents foresake and abandon religion outright and give their children the gift of a guiltless, constructive and purposeful life, free of superstitious dogma.

We will see that fathers played little role if any in raising children. It was the mothers that raised children. In societies that permitted love between mother and children, they thrived and the next generations benefited. While those societies that fostered ill-will between mothers and children they stagnated under emotional deprivation and the next generations fared even worse.

Since for most of history mothers raise boys who then go off and hunt, farm, build things and fight wars rather than directly contributing much new to the psyche of the next generation, the course of evolution of the psyche has overwhelmingly been dependent upon the way mothers have treated their daughters, who become the next generation of mothers. Since early emotional relationships organize the entire range of human behavior, all cultural traits do not equally affect the evolution of the psyche, those that affect the daughter's psyche represent the main narrow bottleneck through which all other cultural traits must pass. The study of the evolution of the psyche depends more on developing a maternal ecology than on studying variations in the physical environment.

The evolution of the psyche and culture has been crucially dependent upon turning the weak bonds between mother and daughter of apes and early humans into genuine love for daughters (and sons). This means that historical societies that create optimal conditions for improving the crucial mother-daughter relationship by surrounding the mother with support and love soon begin to show psychological innovation and cultural advances in the next generations, so that history begins to move in progressive new directions. In contrast, societies that cripple the mother-daughter emotional relationship experience psychogenic arrest and even psychogenic devolution. Only in modern times have fathers, too, begun to contribute to the evolutionary task of growing the young child's mind.

Paralleling the term "hopeful monster" that biologists use to indicate speciating biological variations, the idea that the mother-daughter emotional relationship is the focal point of epigentic evolution and the main source of novelty in the psyche can be called the "hopeful daughter" concept. When mothers love and support particularly their daughters, a series of generations can develop new childrearing practices that grow completely new neural networks, hormonal systems and behavioral traits. If hopeful daughters are instead emotionally crippled by a society, a psychogenic cul-de-sac is created, generations of mothers cannot innovate, epigenetic arrest is experienced and meaningful cultural evolution ends.

The task of "fathering" of playing a real role in forming a child's psyche is in fact a very late historical invention. Most fathers among our closest ape relatives don't have much to do with their children, and a nurturing role during early childhood for the human father turns out to be a far more recent historical innovation than has heretofore been assumed. The major epigenetic changes in the structures of the brain, therefore, have mainly been evolved by females, not males. Fathers until recently have affected their children's psyches mainly through family provisioning and by establishing some of the conditions for mothering, but it has mainly been the mothers who have produced epigenetic novelty; so to discover the laws of cultural evolution one must "follow the mothers" through history. This is why only the psychogenic theory posits that for most of history women and children are the ultimate source of historical change.

Imagine how the U.S. could progress if we could rid ourselves of RELIGIOUS dogma and the attendant emotional damage once and for all and not pass it down to our children.

I'll give two examples here, more insidious and horrendous examples in PART 2. Some parts will be very graphic and disturbing...but true. This will be a extreme eye opener for most of us.

For example, in China before the tenth century A.D. men began to footbind little girls'feet as a sexual perversion, making them into sexual fetishes, penis-substitutes which the men would suck on and masturbate against during sex play. Chinese literature reports the screaming cries of the five-year-old girl as she hobbles about the house for years to do her tasks while her feet are bound, because in order to make her foot tiny, her foot bones are broken and the flesh deteriorates. She loses several toes as they are bent under her foot, to emphasize the big toe as a female penis. This practice was added to the many brutal practices of what was perhaps the world's most anti-daughter culture, where over half the little girls were murdered at birth without remorse and special girl-drowning pools were legion, where beating little girls until bloody was a common parental practice, and where girl rape and sex slavery were rampant. This vicious anti-daughter emotional atmosphere extreme even for a time that was generally cruel and unfeeling towards daughters was obviously not conducive to mothers producing innovations in childrearing when the little girls grew up. Therefore China which was culturally ahead of the West in many ways at the time, became culturally and politically "frozen" until the twentieth century, when footbinding was stopped and boy-girl sex ratios in many areas dropped from 200/100 to near equality. The result was that whereas for much of its history China punished all novelty, during the twentieth century rapid cultural, political and economic evolution could resume.

Japan, which shared much of Chinese culture but did not adopt footbinding of daughters, avoided the psychogenic arrest of China and could therefore share in the scientific and industrial revolution as it occurred in the West.

The same kind of epigenetic arrest can be seen in the damage caused by genital mutilation of girls among circum-Mediterranean peoples that began thousands of years ago and continues today. Since "hopeful daughters" do not thrive on the chopping off of their clitorises and labias, the present cultural and political problems of those groups who still mutilate their daughters' genitals are very much a direct result of this psychogenic arrest.

THE SIX CHILDREARING MODES
"Psycho-genetic Evolution" proposes six modes of childrearing which societies unevenly evolve. Most modern nations today contain all six stages in varying proportions. They have been empirically confirmed by five book-length historical studies in addition to the over 100 scholarly articles on the history of childhood during the past 26 years in The Journal of Psychohistory. The following list summarizes the historical evidence on childrearing modes.

1a. Early Infanticidal Mode (small kinship groups): This mode is characterized by high infanticide rates, maternal incest, body mutilation, child rape, tortures and emotional abandonment by parents when the child is not useful as a an erotic object or as a poison container. The father is too immature to act as a real caretaker and is emotionally absent. Prepubertal marriage of little girls is common, similar to cults like The Children of God. The schizoid personality structure of the infanticidal mode is dominated by alters, in which adults spend much of their time in ritual and magical projects, so they are not able to evolve beyond foraging and early horticultural economic levels nor beyond Big Men political organization.

1b. Late Infanticidal Mode (chiefdom to early states): Though infanticide rates remain high and child rape is still often routine, particularly royal and pedagogic pederasty the young child is not as much rejected by the mother, and the father begins to be involved with instruction of the older child. Child sacrifice as a guilt-reducing device for social progress is found in early states as the use of children as poison containers became more socially organized. Infant restrictions devices such as swaddling and cradle boards begin, sibling caretakers replace child gangs and sibling incest is widespread. Various institutionalized schemes for care by others become popular, such as adoption, wetnursing, fosterage, and the use of the children of others as servants. Beating is now less impulsive and used as discipline, and because the child is now closer emotionally and used more for farming chores, discipline becomes more controlling and brutal, leading to complex societies whose innovations are paid for by genocidal slaughter and the enslavement of women and children.

2. Abandoning Mode (beginning with early Christianity): Once the child is thought as having a soul at birth, routine infanticide becomes emotionally difficult. Early Christians were considered odd in antiquity: "they marry like everybody else, they have children, but they do not practice the exposure of new-born babes."These Christians began Europe's two-millennia-long struggle against infanticide, replacing it with abandonment, from oblation of young children to monasteries, a more widespread use of swaddling, wetnurses if one could afford them, fosterage, wandering scholars and child servants. Child sacrifice was replaced by joining in the group-fantasy of the sacrifice of Christ, who was sent by his father as a poison container to be killed for the sins of others. Pederasty continued, especially in monasteries, and girl rape was widespread. The child was thought to be born full of evil, the parent's projections, so was beaten early and severely. Abusive child care was not mainly due to economics, since the rich as well as the poor during the middle ages had high infanticide, abandonment, sexual molestation and physical abuse rates. The borderline personality structure of Christianity stresses clinging to authority figures as defense against emotional abandonment and constant warfare against enemies to punish others for their own imagined sinfulness for deserving abandonment.

3. Ambivalent Mode (beginning in the twelfth century): The twelfth century ended the oblation of children to monasteries, began child instruction manuals, began to punish child rape, expanded schooling, expanded pediatrics, saw child protection laws, and began to tolerate ambivalence, both love and hate for the child, marking the beginnings of toleration of a child's independent rights. The child was seen less as a sinful poison container and more as soft wax or clay that could be beaten into whatever shape the parent wished. The reduction of splitting defenses of the late medieval narcissistic personality structure produced the advances in technology and the rise of cities associated with the period and eventually the rise of the early modern state.

4. Intrusive Mode (beginning in the sixteenth century): The intrusive parent began to unswaddle the child and even the wealthy began to bring up the infant themselves rather than sending it elsewhere or at least have the wetnurse come in to the home thus allowing closer emotional bonds with parents to form. The sixteenth century particularly in England represents a watershed in reduction of parental projections, when parents shifted from trying to stop childrens' growth to trying only to control it and make it "obedient." The freedom of being allowed to crawl around rather than being swaddled and hung on a peg and the individuation of separate child beds and separate child regimens meant parents approached closer to their children and could give them love as long as they controlled their minds, their insides, their anger, their lives. The child raised by intrusive parents was nursed by his or her mother, not swaddled, not given regular enemas but toilet trained early, prayed with but not played with, hit but not battered, punished for masturbation but not masturbated, taught and not sent out as servants to others and made to obey promptly with threats and guilt as often as physical means of punishment. True empathy begins with intrusive mode parents, producing a general improvement in the level of care and reduced child mortality, leading to the early modern demographic transition to later marriage, fewer births and more investment in each child. The end of arranged marriages, the growth of married love and the decline of domestic violence also contributed to the child's ability to achieve emotional growth. A healing of splitting and an increase in individuation produced the scientific, political and economic revolutions of the early modern period, so much so that some British and American parents were often called "strange" by visitors because they "pampered" their children so much and hit them so little. Men didn't cling to their hypermasculine social alters as much and discovered they had a "private self" that was emotionally involved with their family life.

5. Socializing Mode (beginning in the eighteenth century): Obviously something new had entered the world when society could claim that "God planted this deep, this unquenchable love for her offspring in the mother's heart." During this period the number of children most women had dropped from seven or eight to three or four, long before any medical discoveries were made in limiting reproduction, because parents now wanted to be able to give more care to each child. Their aim, however, remained instilling their own goals into the child rather than producing individuation: "Is there not a strange fullness of joy in watching the reproduction of your traits, physical, mental and moral, in your child?" The use of mainly psychological manipulation, along with spanking of little children, remains the most popular model of "socialization" of parents in Western European nations and the Americas today, training the child to assume its role in the parents' society. The socializing mode built the modern world, and its values of nationalism and economic class-dominated representative democracy represent the social models of most people today.

6. Helping Mode (beginning mid-twentieth century): The helping mode involves acknowledging that the parents' main role is to help the child reach at each stage of its life its own goals, rather than being socialized into adult goals. Parents for the first time consider raising children not a chore but a joy. Both mother and father are equally involved with the child from infancy helping him or her become a self-directed person. Children are given unconditional love, are not struck and are apologized to if yelled at under stress. The helping mode involves a lot of time and energy by parents and other helpers during the child's early years, taking their cues from the child itself as it pursues its developmental course. Birth rates tend to drop below replacement as each child is recognized as requiring a great deal of attention. The helping psychoclass, though few in number today, is far more empathic toward others and less driven by material success than earlier generations. Though Dr. Spock's child care book was late socializing mode, some of the "Spock generation" adolescents after the mid-century were actually products of helping mode parents and felt empowered to explore their own unique social roles and go beyond nationalism, war and economic inequality.

Parents from each of the six childrearing modes co-exist in modern nations today. Indeed, much of political conflict occurs because of the vastly different value systems and vastly different tolerance for freedom of the six psychoclasses. Cyclical swings between liberal and reactionary periods are an outcome of a process whereby more evolved psychoclasses introduce more innovation into the world than less evolved psychoclasses can tolerate. The latter try then to "turn the clock back" and reinstate less anxious social conditions to reduce their growth anxiety, and when this fails, the nation attempts to "cleanse the world of its sinfulness" through a war or depression.

Now that you are familiar with the history and terms used discussing this 'theory' read PART 2 where the historical horrors and abuse will be exposed further. No matter how rough you THINK your childhood was...you ain't got nothing on history's kids (most of whom didn't live to tell about it).

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Condenced and inspired from http://www.psychohistory.com/htm/eln07_evolution.html