Martyrdom of Women

How patriarchy and Christian ideologies seduce women into believing that self sacrifice in service of men is their love and purpose - and how that fantasy collapses

Let’s talk about a woman’s journey through the patriarchal fantasy. We’ll look at what fantasy she is indoctrinated into and the reckoning that follows its collapse - if she’s willing to walk the path of death and rebirth to reject the role she’s been socialized to fulfill.  

In this first part, we’ll look at how patriarchy defines a woman’s purpose through martyrdom and how Christian values culturally promote and sanctify this sacrificial role to perpetuate her exploitation as the divine order of life.  The fantasies that patriarchal Christianity sells to women are designed to seduce them into willingly choosing to fulfill the role of martyr at the expense of her personhood.

In part two, we’ll have some fun discussing a woman’s journey rejecting patriarchal martyrdom, healing and seeking new ways of being by evaluating that process through the archetypal lens of Jesus Christ’s martyrdom as he experienced crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.  

Part two will be more of an abstract exercise paired with resources and knowledge that assisted me personally on my journey healing through a death and rebirth cycle following my own experience of patriarchal annihilation.  

Martyring Women for the Salvation of Men

Ultimately, patriarchy seeks to seduce or subjugate women into fulfilling the role of martyr whose sacrifices of self ensure the salvation of others - specifically men and the social systems built to serve their image.  This is necessary to maintain patriarchal standards where men receive and consume the labor of care from women without participating in meeting human needs themselves.

Women are taught to focus their energy and resources towards recognizing and fulfilling the needs of others and the greater system (family, community, etc.), while men are taught to focus their energy and resources on self. 

This conditioned imbalance means men consume women’s time, labor, and energy to fulfill their basic needs, and thus free men’s resources for higher personal pursuits - career, passions, hobbies, connections.  

All needs that exist between people - the needs of children, the needs of the elderly and vulnerable, maintenance of the home, organization of the household, the welfare of pets and animals, the wellbeing and investments of care into community, etc. - are all realms of care assigned to women.  

When a man proactively participates in these realms of care, maintenance, and unpaid investments, he is lauded as a generous icon and paragon of selflessness.  When a woman neglects these duties, she is shamed as inadequate, selfish, and a dangerous force of improper consumption.

It all goes back to this rotted core belief within patriarchal dynamics that a man’s presence is self evident in its value, while a woman must justify her presence by performing for the benefit of a man and/or towards serving the needs and comfort of the group - whether that’s family, work colleagues, etc.  

Patriarchy seduces women into playing the role of martyr for men and society at large (since society is built on patriarchal foundations).  The patriarchal fantasy sold to women is that it is her duty, strength, and purpose to suffer and labor for the salvation of men and the systems men create.  

Patriarchy instructs women that love, the act of loving, is defined by self sacrifice in the name of serving his needs and desires first and then serving the system’s needs (family system, community system, financial system, etc.).  

At no point - she’ll eventually realize - are her needs considered, valued, or met by others or by these systems.  

Being a loving woman is to become the infrastructure of meeting the needs of others at the cost of being a person herself.

A small but poignant illustration of this dynamic takes place every Christmas morning in households where the woman performs the overwhelming majority of holiday related activities and tasks from all shopping, decorating, baking, cooking, cleaning, organizing, and scheduling around holiday celebrations for the family.  

How many of these women wake up on Christmas morning - after a marathon of effort to make the holidays special for everyone from Thanksgiving through New Years - to empty stockings because their husbands were too self consumed to take the initiative to thoughtfully purchase a few trinkets for her benefit?  Just a few trinkets that reflect a knowledge of things she personally enjoys.

However common, it’s a small example of this dynamic of consumption and erasure.  It demonstrates the truth of male consumption - how that constant appetite to blindly consume makes men ignorant to the person - the woman - creating and performing the knowledge, care, and labor for him to consume.  

Constant expectations to blindly consume has made the average man so ignorant that he doesn’t even see the value in expressing care towards the woman he relies upon. He just assumes that her purpose in life is to perform for his consumption and to benefit his sense of status from having the wife, the kids, the house, and all the other expressions of a lifestyle of success.

Women’s price of admission to participate in society and relationships under patriarchy is the total sacrifice of self in service of saving men from the labor of life, efforts of care, and from experiencing the consequences of their own beliefs, choices, and narcissism.  

Women are sold a fantasy that if she sacrifices enough, if she loves without conditions, if she gives without expectation to receive in return, that then she will be valued and cared for and desired.  Then she will be worthy of a man’s provision and protection and that will be her heaven - the scraps he deems fit for her, the allowances granted for her submission.

As she walks the conditioned path, she will love through service until she is drained, sickened, and abused to the point of total collapse.  In her pleas for help, love, care, and attention as she physically, emotionally, and spiritually collapses from the weight of relentless extraction without the nourishment of care received, she will realize her martyrdom has been consumed and left her with nothing and no man to actually rely upon.

Martyrdom is The Point

Because her martyrdom was the point - the extraction without reciprocation was the point.  The false promise that unrestrained self sacrifice would make her valuable to those benefiting from her annihilation of self in service of others can never pan out.  

She is martyred because she is disposable - her role is not disposable, but her, the woman servicing the role, is disposable.

The social logic of patriarchy responds to her annihilation as evidence of her inadequacy.  The system cannot fail women, that woman must have failed the system.  She must have fallen short. 

Patriarchy is male narcissism and narcissistic systems cannot be held accountable for the results they perpetuate - that kind of accountability is what the system is inherently designed to deflect and prevent.

Patriarchy, capitalism, white supremacy, Christian nationalism - these are all systems of supremacy and all supremacy systems are inherently dysfunctional because the system’s mandate is hierarchical extraction and oppression in service of the dominant class, not meeting human needs.  

These systems all function as narcissistic abuse on a collective scale where one identity (men, capital holders, white people, Christian patriarchal fundamentalists) seeks to subjugate all others under their dominion into a hierarchy of extraction based on prescribed social roles.  

These prescribed social roles are assigned at birth whether through sex, inheritance, race, or familial religious affiliation and do not reflect the worth and potential of any individual. 

This is necessary to perpetuate the narcissistic fantasy animating the elite identity - that their innate superiority is what requires and justifies the subjugation and extraction from the lesser inferior identities down the line.  

Patriarchy is the original blueprint for supremacy systems - all others grow in its image and repeat its successes with new masks in new realms.

Patriarchy, Christianity, and the Seduction of Martyrdom

In America, Christian nationalism is a rising tide in defense and support of a supremacist social order.  Christian nationalism functions less to facilitate loving human connection and spiritual development than to provide moral justification for maintaining rigid hierarchies of supremacy defined by classes a person is born into - not who the person actually is or what they are individually capable of creating and contributing to society.

Politically, Christianity is mostly devoted to sanctifying the patriarchal social order of supremacy where some (women, non-white people, people born outside of inherited wealth) are born to labor and suffer for the salvation of those who exploit them.

We’re evaluating the political motivations of Christian social forces from an aerial perspective here, not discussing the individual merits and beliefs of specific churches or denominations.  There are churches that exist in service of spiritual truths, generosity, and care for their communities - these are not the churches politically mobilizing for fascist ideologies and laser focused on promoting the withdrawal of women’s rights to bodily autonomy and financial independence.  

Let’s continue deconstructing the cultural messages promoted by Christianity as social messages and political communications - we’re not debating the validity of their theological doctrines or spiritual beliefs.  Whether or not they truly believe in the divinity of their values isn’t relevant as they seek to politically impose their will upon those who do not share their beliefs and ideologies. 

From an analysis of myth and narrative, Christianity is the patriarchal interpretation of the archetype of the martyr who dies for the salvation of others, and whose total, willing, loving sacrifice of life and self is what sustains and saves the non-participant, the receiver and benefactor of the sacrifice.  

Christian ideologies and patriarchy function in lockstep to promote salvation as an externally granted phenomena.  A standard that salvation is given or harvested from the annihilation of another.  The crucifixion of the martyred is what grants everyone else salvation.

This belief in the necessity, undeterrable purpose, and reverent honor of martyrdom is leveraged to glorify a woman’s mandate to sacrifice self for the benefit of men, families, communities, and society. 

This is a crucial aspect of the patriarchal seduction sold to women - that willful self abandonment is akin to Christ like glory and purpose.

It promotes an insidious dynamic where recognizing that martyrdom actually isn’t socially or politically required nor desirable if everyone participates in the labor of love and care is shamed as heresy or a rejection of the sacrifices of their savior Jesus Christ.  

Hysterical, holy rolling pearl clutching functions to shut down truthful conversations that we are capable of overhauling our social systems to ensure at least some systems exist purely to support meeting human needs - like federally subsidized, locally administered child care facilities or investing in compensating in-home care workers that support the elderly or disabled.  

Such investments in local infrastructures designed with the mandate to support human needs - not profit from the existence of needs, but to support humans in meeting their own needs and contributing to the needs and wellbeing of others - reduce the manufactured need for women to be martyrs at the expense of their personhood.  

Martyrdom is only required en masse within traditional gender norms where men are alleviated of the mental management and execution of care and doing what needs to be done for everyone’s basic needs to be satisfied. 

Martyrdom is only required when we neglect making the social investments in community structures of care and support. 

Martyrdom is only required if women are intentionally relegated to act as the sole social infrastructure for meeting human needs under private male ownership.  

The disingenuous glorification and sanctification of women’s martyrdom makes it very difficult to have these real conversations. Christian narratives deflect meaningful engagement through hysteria about the rejection of Jesus Christ and ungrateful sinners and all sorts of vague, morally condemning nonsense that functions to obscure the true motivations and realities underlying the social orders they endorses.

Stayed tuned for Part Two next week - which will be more about the abstract processes of deconstructing patriarchal indoctrination and how those processes mirror the biblical journey of Christ through crucifixion, resurrection, and ascension.

PLEASE SUBSCRIBE FOR WEEKLY FREE ARTICLES

CHECK ME OUT FOR LONG CHATS ON YOUTUBE (Coco_Has_Ideas) AND TIKTOK MUSINGS AT COCOHASIDEAS

As always, I’m so grateful to have these conversations with you! My (dog) editor, Maude, thinks you’re most interesting person we could hope to share these ideas with - thanks for being here!

---

In previous posts, we’ve discussed the power dynamics of patriarchy (a system of private for profit ownership of women); how patriarchal standards of masculinity impoverishes men into narcissistic standards of self and idolizes narcissistic abuse and codependency as the highest standard of heterosexual relationships; and how centering men throughout all realms of society, culture, and interpersonal relationships without enforcing any meaningful standards of maturity or accountability causes untold harm to society, women, and children.  

As a result of centering men at the expense of everyone else, cooperative action towards meeting human needs is actively discouraged to ensure women are functionally enslaved as the sole social infrastructure for meeting human needs - under the private ownership of the man who consumes her labor and love without reciprocation or accountability towards meeting any needs himself - not for himself and not to benefit others.

Check out those posts for analysis of the raw dynamics and power structures that animate patriarchal realities.  

xoxo, Coco + Maude