Buddhism, gender, and ideals vs. reality - and compassion

Buddhism is a tremendously varied religion. At one end, it's a pure philosophy of life; at the other, among the people who've practiced it as a religion for thousands of years in the streets of Southwest Asia, you have an absolutely bewildering array of phenomenon that seem to contradict the philsophy of Buddhism entirely.

Two things stand out for me primarily about this discrepancy.

First: Buddha(s) are actually physically worshipped as god(s) in areas.

Secondly: The philosophy of Buddhism is very egalitarian. All may achieve enlightenment, because Buddha nature is in everything. Buddha himself apparently stressed the gender egalitarian nature of the Middle Way in his teachings. However...

The PRACTICE of it in those Southwest Asian streets, though, could scarcely be farther from the philosophy. This frankly stunning discrepancy is embodied in the deep bias against women. Buddist Asian countries continue to see women as 'unclean' (apparently a cultural legacy of the Indian subcontinent, says one website; I don't have enough information to confirm or deny this). Menstruation pollutes them. (It seems incredibly odd to me that other foul bodily discharges, urine and feces, aren't seen as polluting. What. a. coincidence, hm?) Women are second-class citizens in every way; it's apparently widely taught and accepted in Southeast Asian Theravada Buddhism that a woman cannot become a buddha. Women exist to serve men - after all, the very Buddha himself wasn't considered a home-destroyer when he abandoned his wife and day-old newborn son to go seek enlightenment. Nor were any of his hundreds of married male followers considered home destroyers; the question never even arose. Yet, when a party of four hundred women applied to be accepted as nuns, he turned them down out of fear that they would be destroying their homes. The master of the house can leave any time he likes - but the servant is bound to the house in chains, the servant IS the house. She is an object, an automaton, she is entirely defined by what she does. She is not a person.

Of course the universe of Buddhist writings is vast (and all of it was written down beginning hundreds of years later, apparently) and particularly the Pali Canon contains much explicitly poisonous antiwoman writing written hundreds of years after the Buddha's passing by men with agendas, men steeped deeply in the Indian subcontinental cultural background that taught the looking down at of the female.

One of the things I have noticed over time is that the majority of men's eyes tend to glaze over when women's issues are brought up. These things don't actually personally affect -them-, and so deep down they honestly truly don't care about them.  Another subset of men get very angry, as they feel personally threatened by any such discussion. Such men tend to either begin quoting religious beliefs, justification for male superiority garnered from any kind of scientific sounding source they can - or they simply break outright into female bashing. The last subset of men is regrettably scarce; they recognize that they do not exist in a vacuum, and that the way the female half of the race is treated and respected directly affects their own happiness in profound ways that may not be as immediately apparent as the gratifying servitude of a wife who is willing to subsume herself and her desires to cleaning up after you so that you don't have to sully yourself with such things.

To the human ego - women and men alike are saddled with the damn thing - short term enlargement and boosting and gratification are incredibly addicting. Choose a group of people who are different than you in some especially physical way - race, gender - and demonize them. It is incredible that this is ever done in the name of religion, but it is.

I have seen an explanation that the Pali canon writing monks were trying to cure themselves of attatchments and desires, and what easier way to do that than to demonize the object of your attatchments and desires? This seems like such a fundamental beginner's error that I am absolutely amazed such hatred ever made it into *Buddhist* scriptures.

In the intervening millennia, how come nobody has ever apparently spotted the deeply rooted egotism of this poison and called it out?

During the Buddha's lifetime, monks were handing their robes to nuns to be washed for them; the nuns were the servants of the monks the same way they'd be if they'd been their wives. Too, regardless of how long a nun had been a nun for, she had to bow deeply to any monk, even if he had taken ordination only that very day.

I'm not sure at this time whether the Buddha laid down that second rule; I truthfully doubt it, because he put a stop to the first. When he found out the nuns were serving the monks, he called both groups to him and told them to stop it; the spiritual path liberated even women from the way of the householder. They weren't objects to be used anymore.

At the root of this I see a very, very deep involvement in the stereotypical male ego (that fortunately not all men possess.) Men are of course only human, and they had - and in Southeast Asia, continue to have - a very 'good thing' going- lifetime free domestic service from entities that aren't really 'human' - the objects called 'women.' They never have to lift a finger to do anything 'unclean' in the way of household tasks, which they view as magnificently below them.
 
That's why I adore some schools of Zen so much; they attack this problem of ego at the root. According to Alan Watts, the domestic chores were very deliberately parceled out among the monks and often the most senior monk of them all was the one who cleaned the toilet.

There was a deep respect for these things; they were not used as tools of abasement, but as a recognition that our very process of life depends upon them and that instead of being denigrated and seen as unworthy of us, these things should be done with care and respect.