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Everywhere on the planet, from the streets of Kabul to the avenues of Paris, from the villages of the Sahel to the skyscrapers of New York, the same line of fracture crosses humanity: the one that separates, hierarchies and often humiliates the female half of the world.

Unseen women, silenced or assigned to the margin, under the weight of men's law.

That it is exercised by direct violence or by the thousand subtleties of symbolic power, male domination is the oldest, most universal and most resistant power system history has known.

But why?

Why does this domination reproduce, from century to century, in different forms but with the same consistency?

The answer is not limited to economy or religion.

She plunges into the depths of the human psychein what Freud called the black continent of femininity.

The belly of fear: the psychological roots of domination

Before being political, male domination is Unconscious case. Since the dawn of time, man has experienced a visceral anguish before the power of the woman The one to give life. She creates, he doesn't. And it is there, in this original biological asymmetry, that a fundamental narcissistic wound arises.

To free themselves from this dependence, men have built entire civilizations on a simple principle: deny the power of the female to exist as autonomous subjects.

Freud spoke of a fear of castration : the man would unconsciously fear the woman as she can « Remove » His symbolic power, that whose body, mysterious and cyclic, escapes his rational control.

Hence the need for control: control of the female body, its sexuality, its fertility, its freedom. Dominance then becomes a collective psychic defenceA armor against the anguish of loss of power.

In this perspective, patriarchy is not just a social system: it is a social system. group unconscious pathology.

The projection of the internal imbalance: Jung and the war of archetypes

Carl Jung had given this dynamic a symbolic face.

He claimed that every man carries in him a female part,Anima, and every woman a male part ,Animus.

But patriarchal cultures taught men to refouler their Anima : their part of intuition, emotion, receptivity, to identify exclusively with the strength, reason, domination.

This refoulement creates an inner tension: what man rejects in him, he project on the real woman which he then perceives as threatening, uncontrollable or even inferior.

Thus, women's domination is also the external projection of an internal imbalance.

The man not only fights the woman: he fights the feminine in him.

From there comes a manhood of defense, that which is built against weakness, against emotion, against vulnerability: so many qualities perceived, wrongly, as « Female ».

The patriarchate would then, according to Jung, the symptom of a humanity that has not yet reconciled its two inner principles: male and female.

Religious and fear of the female body

The great monotheistic religions, in their patriarchal interpretation, have consolidated this original fear in the sacralizing.

In the Bible, Eve is the one who introduces sin; in the Qur'an, woman is the source of temptation; in medieval Christianity, she is in turn Virgin or witch, pure or cursed, never simply human.

This ambivalence nourishes a world view where the female should be contained, veiled, purified, monitored.

Religious institutions, dominated by men, have thus developed a theology of control:

The female body becomes a territory to conquer, to cover, to hide, to discipline.

But beyond dogmas, there is a symbolic stake: control of the sacred reproductive.

By arrogating the monopoly of spiritual power, men wanted separating from the creative function Previously reserved for women.

The priest, prophet or religious leader becomes those who « give spiritual life »symbolically replacing the biological mother.

For example, religion has made it possible to dress with a divine discourse, which was above all a matter of deeply human fear: that of the power of women.

Tradition as a refuge from imbalance

Tradition here plays the role of guardian of the old order.

Under the guise of respect for customs, it freezes hierarchies that serve primarily to reassure.

In African, Asian or Mediterranean societies, the patriarch remains the symbolic pillar of the family: the one who « protect » but especially the one who has the right to say, authorize, punish.

This power is perpetuated because it gives men feeling of existence in a clear role, while women are confined to areas of silence and service.

But behind the custom is often hidden the fear of changeThe fear of losing ancient landmarks, the fear of a world where the male would no longer be the centre of gravity.

Patriarchate, in this sense, is less a conscious will of oppression than a identity refuge It protects men from vertigo of equality.

The economy as an extension of power

As societies became more complex, male domination found a new anchor: economy.

Women's financial dependence has long been one of the most powerful instruments of their submission.

Deprived of inheritance, education or the right to work, they were maintained in a state of economic minority justifying their social dependence.

Even today, in all regions of the world, wage gaps, under-representation in decision-making positions, unpaid domestic work and women's precariousness perpetuate this hierarchy.

The economy becomes the modern extension of domination: what religion did yesterday in the name of the sacred, the market does today in the name of profitability.

But this economic domination is based on a fundamental illusion : the one that performance, productivity, conquest: values say « Male », are worth more than cooperation, attention, or care, values said « Female ».

It is therefore the system itself, in its symbolic foundations, that must be questioned.

A universal legacy and possible reconciliation

What strikes, in all these dimensions: psychic, religious, traditional, economic, is the same root: the fear of the female.

An archaic, almost metaphysical fear of what escapes rational control, of what bleeds, gives birth, feels and forgives.

The patriarchate, in all its forms, would thus be the great device invented by humanity to keep this fear away.

Yet the world is changing.

Women everywhere take up the word, teach, claim, invent other models of power.

They do not seek to dominate in return, but to restore symmetry.

And it may be there, at last, the road to internal and collective reconciliation:

Accept the feminine in itself to free all humanity.

The era of replicas: male fear in the face of women's liberation

But any liberation movement provokes its counter-vagina.

Since women in developed societies have begun to deconstruct domination and regain possession of their bodies and words, a wind of panic blows on traditional manhood.

The Weinstein and Epstein scandals, the movement #MeToo, then the massive denunciations of sexual and gender-based violence cracked a symbolic order old millennia.

For the first time, men are no longer alone in writing the world story.

Their actions, their words, their privileges have been scrutinized by justice, ethics and social conscience.

And some react with a violence in proportion to their loss of power.

This is the rise of masculinism, this reactionary current which presents itself as a defense of « man in danger ».

Under cover of denouncing a « Excessive feminism », he's looking for rehabilitate nostalgic virilitybased on domination and hierarchy.

There is the same psychic spring: Fear.

Fear of losing the monopoly of meaning, desire, status; fear of a world where man would no longer be the center, but a partner.

These movements, first visible in the United States, Canada or Europe, are already exporting to other parts of the world, via social media, populist discourse and ultra-conservative religious currents.

The same arguments arise: « politically correct », rejection of feminism, reaffirmation of male authority, sometimes even justification of domestic or sexual violence in the name of a « Manly nature ».

But this resistance reveals the depth of change.

For if the patriarchate defends itself, it's good that it is wavering.

The apparent disorder of gender relations is not a collapse: it is a metamorphosis.

Women do not ask for revenge; They impose balance.

And the more they speak, the more societies learn to listen differently.

What is being played today is therefore not a « Gender War »but one anthropological mutation.

Men, faced with the end of their monopoly, must now to reinvent oneself psychically, learn to live not against the female, but with him.

It is a painful but necessary passage to a more complete humanity.

The End of Fear

Male domination is not a biological fatality or a simple social construction: it is a conscience diseaseA badly healed fear of life itself.

By refusing the female, the man fell victim to a part of his humanity.

But in recent decades, history has been the opposite.

Women, in raising themselves, force men to look at each other without a mask, to recognize that their power was only a bulwark against anxiety.

The twenty-first century will be that of reconciliation, or it will not be.

Because the future will not be played in revenge, but in the symbiosis : the masculine and feminine, power and care, reason and sensitivity.

Humanity will become adult on the day it understands that the freedom of one is measured only at the freedom of the other.

And maybe, as Simone de Beauvoir wrote,

« You don't be born a woman, you become a woman. »

But at the time of the awakening of consciousness, we must add:

« One becomes fully man only by ceasing to be afraid of the woman. »

*******

Testimony of Laila Rahimi, Afghan professor

« We are no longer living, but shadows »

My name is Laila RahimiI am forty-two years old, and I live in Kabul.

Before the world darkened again, I was a professor of economics at university. I trained enthusiastic students, men and women, who dreamed of rebuilding our country on the basis of knowledge and freedom.

I was also working in a women's entrepreneurship association, where we helped women set up small businesses, free themselves from economic dependency, and exist on their own.

I remember these energy-filled meetings, those bursts of laughter, those hands that would hold each other by promising a better future. We thought that the war was over, that darkness would no longer come back. We were wrong.

It was in August 2021. That very morning I was still in college. After-midi, lTaliban entered Kabul. In a few hours, everything collapsed. The streets have emptied, the cries have been silent, and the silence has settled; This heavy, impalpable silence that looks like fear.

Since that day, we live chained in our own homes.

At first, I was hoping again. We were promised that they had changed, that they would respect women, that they would allow girls to study. But very quickly, truth was imposed as a slap: their first act was to erase our voices.

The universities closed their doors to the students. I remember that day as a mourning. The girls were crying in the hallways, tightening their notebooks against their chests. A guard said coldly:

« Women don't need to learn. They need to obey. »

I wanted to answer, but a weapon pointed at me dissuades it.

So I lowered my head, and I left the room for the last time.

Then, the bans were chained like a rain of black ink: the more the right to work, the more the right to go out alone, the more the right to go to the park, or even to the hammam.

Now, every time I go out, I have to be accompanied by a man from my family: a brother, a husband, a son, even if he is twelve years old. Without this « mahram »I'm an outlaw. If a guard surprises me outside alone, I may be beaten publicly, arrested, or worse.

This obligation to be escorted is a constant humiliation: it reduces every woman to a body incapable of autonomy, a dependent shadow. I can't walk freely on my own street anymore. When I go out, it's just to buy bread or medicine, completely veiled, face covered with a niqab. I feel the eyes on me: cold, suspicious, sometimes hateful looks.

It looks like they're looking for any fault, any gesture that could betray a rebellion.

One day, my neighbor went out alone to buy milk for her baby. She never came home. We said he was taken away for « religious rehabilitation ». Nobody saw him again.

And then there's health.

Before, women could go to the hospital without fear. Today, all this has disappeared. The new laws prohibit women from being examined by men.

But the cruel paradox is that there are almost no more women doctors: they too have been expelled from their posts, forbidden to practice. Hospitals are empty. The sick die in silence, for lack of care. Women give birth alone in unworthy conditions. Others succumb to benign infections because they cannot be seen by a male doctor.

And when, by miracle, they find a nurse still in exercise, a man must accompany them to the hospital; Otherwise, they can't even walk through the door.

As for our mental health, no one talks about it anymore. The women here no longer cry: they slowly extinguish, in a resigned torpor. Desperation has become a national disease. Some girls, deprived of school, spend their days fixing the walls. Others don't get out of bed anymore.

The silence of the houses is deafening. Many people are said to have died by hanging or swallowing pills. But nobody speaks aloud about it: misfortune is now a crime too.

For me, reading has become an act of survival. I hide my books under the carpet, between two boards of the floor, as we hide weapons.

When everyone sleeps, I release my books: a French novel, a manual of economy, a collection of Persian poems; and I read a few pages in the light of a candle.

These words remind me who I used to be. They remind me that I am not only a submissive body, but a living thought. Each line is a breath, each sentence an act of resistance.

Sometimes I get on the roof at night. I look at Kabul asleep, rare lights, wandering dogs, the wind that flows freely over us. I breathe this air that I no longer have the right to feel in broad daylight. I close my eyes and see my students, their smiles, their dreams. Many have fled. Others were forcibly married. But I know that none of them stopped hoping. Because you can ban everything from a woman; Except to think.

I'm not asking for pity. I ask that we be seen, heard, remembered..

The world seems to have forgotten us, occupied us with other wars, other crises. But we are still there, in the shadows, thousands, millions, standing despite everything.

We continue to teach in secret, to treat in hiding, to transmit knowledge in our kitchens and cellars. Every hidden book, every word exchanged, every stolen smile is a victory.

I don't know how long I'll last. But I know that night never lasts forever.

One day, the wind will change.

One day, the schools will reopen.

One day, the women of Afghanistan will go out into the streets again, without a guardian, without fear, without a veil imposed.

They will hold by hand not stones, but books. And their voices, long stifled, will fill schools, markets, universities again. I dream of that day. I dream of walking alone, feeling the sun on my skin, talking without shaking. And when he comes, I'll just say:

« We're back. We never ceased to exist. »