The power of women - and how they are kept down (Frauenberg)

Today we travel to southern Styria/Austria to the Frauenberg Temple Museum (near Leibniz). This museum, which has existed since Celtic times, displays finds of female statues that were worshipped as a kind of Isis cult and destroyed by the Roman colonizers (their faces were brutally cut off and they were buried). Very close to the other Roman excavations in Wagna (which are also supervised by the archaeologists of the Temple Museum), a concentration camp was built during the Nazi era, but we didn't learn more about its details during the tour (there seems to be a taboo on talking about it here). Instead, you learn a lot about Celtic rituals and there are lots of great events for families on the Frauenberg (pottery, celebrating together by the fire, various guided tours/exhibitions): https://www.tempelmuseum-frauenberg.at

If you spend a lot of time studying history, cultural studies, religious studies and political science, you learn a lot about the roots of today's patriarchal system. For example, that before the very stereotypical portrayal of gender in the 20th century, there were so many currents that produced one extreme or another from time to time. Gender is still legally seen as something that plays a role in whether a person is given more or less power in certain areas. Even though it has long been proven that gender is a fluid category and modern social and gender research has confirmed that there are more differences between men and men and between women and women than between men and women. Discrimination (differentiation and inequality) on the basis of gender is simply not accurate.

Of course there are biological differences, and if you like, even something like female and male energy, but there are just as many similarities, so differentiating and legitimizing power differences is no longer tenable in the 21st century. This fact naturally threatens traditional power structures, which is why many people continue to try to keep women down and reduce them to certain roles (the “good” mother, the model wife, the sweet girl, the pure innocent, the perfect career woman, the model Barbie, etc.). All of these terms fall far short of truly describing women and their diversity.

The term heroines or goddesses/divine femininity comes closest to what we observe in research: On top of it all, that most women nowadays fulfill everything and burn out through the course of it. Even without children, they are expected to do twice as much. And for men who still feel offended by the scientifically proven truth and because the system is changing rapidly (in favor of both genders, by the way, because only true equality produces fulfilling relationships), I recommend walking in women's shoes for a day.

This is also not about dismantling religious guidelines, because each person can and should decide for themselves what they believe in and how they want to implement this in their everyday life - but the freedom of their neighbor must not be endangered as a result (for example through extremism & fundamentalism). Freedom and fulfillment for all can only come about if we gradually free ourselves from dysfunctional patterns that only generate profits and maintain power for a few.