We all know that history has been written by the victors. That means, since most of the warriors were male, history is very much male-oriented. What is not so obvious is that the pantheon of gods that kept humanity going primarily served the interests of males.
We can see this clearly when we consider the problems of human reproduction from the point of view of religious syncretism, i.e., the process by which a given religion incorporates practices belonging to a different one. For instance, Baptism did not exist in Judaism, a religion from which much of Christianity originated. But at that time, Mithraism, a popular religion in the Roman Empire, required its followers to be inducted by immersion in bathwater. It’s from this practice that the early Christians developed baptism.
Let us now look at the way in which human reproduction takes a central part in religious practices. Males have, or had, two requirements about their female partners: that they be virgin, and that they be fertile. The first –virginity– was meant to ensure that the infant born was indeed the biological child of the legal father. The second –fertility– was considered necessary in order to guarantee the existence of an heir to the family fortune, which, in many cases, particularly for royal infants, had to be male.
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