Male's function is more important in the formalization of religions than women; women create ritual, and religion’s standing depends largely on ritual in the same way as life depends on women who create life even though it's actually men who protect and sustain conditions for it.
Religion is made of belief, law, hierarchy, and that structure is masculine. But a structure is sustained through daily repetition, through ceremony, sacrifice, through what is done in the home and in the body. This is ritual, and ritual is by its attempt to mimic the cyclical nature of life, consciously more feminine.
Religion’s standing, therefore, is measured not by what men believe but by what women practice.
Once men lose control over women, that is, once the structures of religion and morality begin to falter behind ritual, we may find ourselves in a situation where women no longer devote themselves to ritual to sustain religion and male authority, but for their own sake. And ritual practiced for its own seld expression and sake no longer sustains religion.
Secularization does not begin with men claiming power for themselves through the Reformation, rather than granting it to the feminine Church. Why? Because Protestant secularization actually begins at another decisive moment: when women are politically emancipated. Until then, certain spheres that already lost their religious mystical power remained under male control—the Church, the state, science, and the economy. The man who put himself in the Church’s place did not secularize these spheres; he transferred the sacred from one institution to another that he himself headed, and the female rituals - be it to state, party, or socialism - followed. These spheres were not fully secularized until women themselves entered them. And saw there something they couldn't relate to. That was not essential to most of them. If that is so, we can see that the loss of male control—particularly when comparing Russia with Britain, and one generation with another—is what pushes these spheres toward secularization. In other words, the decisive change is men’s loss of control and sexual liberation, rather than women’s emancipation in itself.
Women do not bring about secularization. They can also create different forms of ritual within masculine structures and adapt their own functions accordingly. Within these spaces, they can gain representation without necessarily gaining power. Once they seek power beyond ritual, or beyond their place in a myth—that is, once control slips from men’s hands—something in the sacred dimension of sexuality begins to break down. The man’s willingness to sacrifice diminishes, as does the woman’s willingness to sacrifice herself, because there is no longer anyone to desire her.
Essentially, a woman who will not sacrifice for a man will not sacrifice her femininity for a child; and a woman who will not sacrifice her femininity for a child will see no reason to sacrifice anything for God. In effect, she herself becomes God, since all that remains is female self-sacrifice in pursuit of power—in other words, sexism.
Sacrifice between the sexes is the original model for all sacrifice: the man learned to sacrifice for what he controlled, the woman for what controlled her, and from both came the lesson of sacrifice for God. As this chain of sacrifice between the sexes contracts, the meaning of sacrifice and religious ritual devoted to God also becomes distorted. What remains is a religion no longer capable of giving renewed expression to relations of power, control, order, fate, and meaning between the sexes.
Nationalism and socialism were themselves full of female imagery, apparently in an attempt to postpone the inevitable. Mechanization rendered redundant women’s essential role within the economic unit: their occupation with tasks throughout the day. When machines took over the tasks, they also took away women’s indispensability, and with it the justification for control. Nationalism and socialism sought to fill the void with representation—the woman as nation, as homeland, as class—in other words, to restore ritual to her in place of the role she had lost. As long as she remained under male control, the arrangement held. Once that control was lost, representation could not save the structure, because representation without control is ritual without sacrifice.
Without male control, female sacrifice loses its purpose. No ritual is passed on to the next generation. Religion falters, and morality disappears.
