A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (23 page)

Pamela’s purity is clearly for Mr B an irresistible incitement to lust. The English middle classes were not the first to discover
the powerful sexual allure of the virtuous woman – the original ‘good girl’, Lucretia, was raped because her virtue was so sexually provocative. As the supreme Puritan Angelo put it in Shakespeare’s
Measure for Measure
(Act 2, Scene 3):

Can it be
That modesty can more betray our sense
Than woman’s lightness . . . Angelo,
Dost thou desire to use her foully for those things
That make her good?

The answer from the Mr Bs of this world is a resounding ‘Yes’.

The success of
Pamela
among women raises another, more interesting question. Clearly, it indicates that a sizeable section of women identified with a character who is at best unbelievably naïve and at worst incredibly manipulative. It should not be surprising that women readers should have absorbed these misogynistic stereotypes, but it remains somewhat ironic that exercising their power for the first time as an important part of the reading public they helped make them into a bestseller.

With the growth in power and influence of the middle classes, the ideal of the sexless woman became a standard for society, not only in England, but also in the philosophical and social writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau in France in the late eighteenth century, and in North America. This standard stressed that the differences between men and women fully explained their different status, the most important of them being the strength of sexual desire in one and its relative absence in the other. Women found themselves dehumanized, this time in the name of purity.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78), probably one of the most influential misogynists of all time, took the ideal of
the pure woman who uses her virtue as a sexual allure and turned it into an inescapable fact of nature. Dissembling and manipulation were assigned to her as her defining characteristics. ‘Whether the woman shares the man’s passions or not,’ he wrote, in an account of the ideal woman and her education in what became an international bestseller, ‘whether she is willing or unwilling to satisfy it, she always repulses him and defends herself, though not always with the same vigour and therefore not always with the same success.’
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This is merely a roundabout way of asserting that women say ‘no’ even when they mean ‘yes’, the same logic that has frequently been used as a defence in rape trials.

Rousseau stood on the brink of the French Revolution. He was a product of the Age of Enlightenment, but the harbinger of the Romantic movement, the intellectual, artistic and moral revolution that would replace it. The old authorities, philosophical and religious, had been overthrown. The universe was now seen to be governed by laws that the human intellect could discover and understand through the use of reason. But it was reason – meant to rid the world of outmoded prejudices – that Rousseau invoked to justify his belief that woman was ‘the sex that ought to obey’.
²¹⁵
He asserted: ‘Women do wrong to complain of the inequality of man-made laws; this inequality is not of man’s making, or at any rate it is not the result of mere prejudice, but of reason.’
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That reason was derived from what he saw as the natural order of things. Since nature has entrusted woman with the care of the children, she ‘must hold herself responsible for them to their father’.
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The keystone of Rousseau’s thinking was that man was corrupted the further away he grew from nature. Civilization, and all its iniquities, including selfishness, inequality and greed, is a result of the ‘natural man’ being uprooted from his original state of existence, which Rousseau
equated with innocence. However, one thing had not changed – and should not change – and that was the ‘natural’ subordination of women to men. The will of nature now replaced the will of God in determining the fate and status of women.

Not surprisingly, in Rousseau’s vision of primitive man, men and women lived separate lives, mating when they met, and then moving on, with the women raising their offspring by themselves without any help or concern from the fathers. It was an eighteenth-century version of the old myth of male autonomy. He also returned to the Greeks for a model of how women should be treated, and admired their policy of segregation of the sexes as practised in its most extreme version by the Athenians. He practised the contempt for women that he preached, dumping the five children that he had with his mistress Thérèse le Vasseur in foundling homes. She could neither read nor write. He seems to have enjoyed the feeling of intellectual superiority that he derived from this relationship, for though he taught her to write, she never learned to read, nor count, nor remember the names of the months of the year.
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Nor is it surprising that Rousseau admired the novels of Richardson, since he too believed that ‘chasteness inflames’ men’s desires, and nothing was quite as sexy as a simpering virgin who knew her place.

However, another view of women, a glimpse of which we caught in Defoe’s novel
Roxana,
challenged Rousseau and Richardson’s version of misogyny. It might seem something of a paradox that this counter-view, in which women were seen as highly sexual beings, capable of achieving independence and status, found its most dramatic and uncompromising expression in eighteenth-century pornography. But then, the relationship between misogyny, pornography and the status of women is one of the most contentious that can be found.

While it is probably a safe generalization that philosophers
and priests have done more harm to women than pornographers, it is not an assertion that most people will today readily accept. But there are many things about pornography that people will not accept, including what exactly it means. To describe something as pornographic is like asserting that such and such an organization is terrorist: it is primarily a value judgement, describing something – acts or things or goals – of which you disapprove. The problem is, values change, and what seemed pornographic to a Victorian lady would not seem so to an American teenage girl who is a fan of rap music.

However, one thing is certain: pornography is inextricably linked to the emergence of modernity. It was not called pornography at the time – in English the word only came to be used in its current sense in the mid-nineteenth century, but many characteristics of the genre were established at the dawn of the modern age which remain typical of it today. The explicit description in words or pictures of sexual acts is still pornography’s hallmark. But its satirical and political dimension, which in France especially made it an important vehicle for anticlerical and antigovernment attacks right up to the French Revolution, had disappeared by the late 1790s. Until then, pornography had played a vital propaganda role in the events leading up to the Revolution, and its association with social disorder and political radicalism was one of the reasons it was later suppressed in England.

At first, during the sixteenth and most of the seventeenth century, the distribution of pornography was restricted to upper-class circles. But the invention of the novel did for early pornography what the video recorder did for its twentieth-century descendant. By the early eighteenth century, a popular pornography industry existed in France, and by the middle of the century in England. From there in 1748, came what perhaps was the biggest-selling pornographic book of all time:
Fanny Hill: or, The Memoirs of A Woman of Pleasure,
by James Cleland.
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One of the most popular forms of pornographic writing in the eighteenth century, the fictional autobiography or ‘confessions’ of whores and prostitutes, directly challenged the image of the sexless, pure woman, the perennial victim of male lust, that was taking hold among the middle class in England and exalted in the works of Rousseau in France. The memoirs of the ‘libertine whore’ as she has been called,
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describe women who are sexually aggressive, self-confident, capable of almost limitless sexual pleasure, financially successful, and usually indifferent or hostile to the ordinary notions that define conventional femininity, such as motherhood and marriage. Sexual differences between men and women in fact are all but erased in the search for pleasure, fulfilment and domination. In the world of the libertine whore, women are as passionate as men, and as willing to fulfil their own desires. The most extreme example is the Marquis de Sade’s
The History of Juliette: or, The Fortunes of Vice.

Sade (1740–1814) remains the most infamous writer of all time, from whose name we derive the word ‘sadism’. He spent almost half his life imprisoned, mostly for what would now be regarded as petty or non-crimes, and wrote most of his work behind bars. Three-quarters of that work has been lost or destroyed, and what remains suffered from severe censorship.
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It presents a picture of sexual excess unrivalled in the history of literature, in which sadistic orgies are as carefully choreographed as the dance steps in Broadway musicals.

It is not surprising that in this work Sade was accused of attacking the very idea of what it is to be human. However, Sade was writing within less than a century of the last woman who was tortured and burned alive as a witch. We, who lie on the other side of the horrors of the twentieth century, are not
so shocked by his revelations about the lust for power lurking in the human heart.

Juliette is a new species – a sort of Tyrannosaurus Sex. Though in the tradition of the libertine whore bent on achieving autonomy, Juliette does so regardless of the cost to the other human beings who are her victims (both male and female), whom she tortures and murders for sexual fulfilment. In the world of Juliette, there are no men and no women, there are only the powerful and the weak, the master and the slave, those who are willing and able to use their power to achieve their aims and those who cannot and who become their victims. ‘A zealous egalitarian,’ she tells a king, ‘I have never considered one living creature any better than any other, and as I have no belief in moral virtues, neither do I consider that they are differentiated by any moral worth.’
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Sade mocks and derides Rousseau’s vision of the ideal woman by showing that if as he believed – and history tends to bear him out – the instinct for power is part of human nature, then women can possess it as much as men, and will be every bit as cruel in exercising it. Juliette shows she can sink to the same depths of inhumanity as any man. Her capacity for evil is not moderated by her gender. Through cruelty and violence, therefore, Juliette achieves a kind of equality with men unique for a woman in the history of literature and ideas, but only in a world where absolute contempt for women has been replaced by absolute contempt for the weak.

It was not the kind of equality that women were seeking in the real world. That would emerge as the legacy of the Enlightenment unfolded in the following century, along with its contradictions, to confront misogyny on fresh grounds in both Europe and new, or little known, worlds.

Misogyny is far from unique to Western civilization. That became clear to Europeans as, from the early sixteenth century onwards, they began expanding into regions of the world with which before they had little or no contact. They encountered complex civilizations at least as old as (and sometimes far older than) their own, and equally (if not in some ways more) sophisticated. Meanwhile, in other, previously unexplored or unknown areas, they discovered cultures that were, at a technological and social level, simpler than anything they had ever seen. But one thing they all shared: Neither the primitive nor the sophisticated societies lacked for prejudices against women.

Sometimes these prejudices took on an almost universal character, as with the taboos relating to menstruation. From the Macusis tribe of South America, who hung pubescent girls in the highest hammocks, then submitted them to a beating
with rods,
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to the Hindu Brahmins of India, who believed that a visit to a menstruating woman was one of the seven things a man might do to forfeit his chance of a happy or a long life,
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all over the world men’s terror of menstruating women invested them with extraordinary powers to do harm.

However, it was not the crude superstitions of tribes – who lived sometimes at the level of Stone Age man – that most impressed Europeans at the beginning of the modern era, but the complex and often profoundly contradictory views of women that they encountered when they began developing trading relations with the powerful civilizations of the East, particularly those of India and China. Hinduism and Buddhism had developed in India over 1,000 years between 1500
BC
and 500
BC
, with Taoism and Confucianism in China emerging between the seventh and fifth centuries
BC.
Both civilizations retained traces of much earlier cultures, with what some have interpreted as matriarchal elements. In the earliest Chinese creation myth, for example, it was a goddess Nu Wa who moulded the human race from clay. Archaeological investigation of the earliest civilizations in the Indus valley reveals a plethora of terracotta figurines of naked women, and the later Hindu pantheon contains several powerful goddesses, including Parvati, Durga, Sakti and Kali.
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Whatever conclusions we might draw from this about the status of women in these early societies, one thing is beyond doubt. Sexual and religious rituals in both civilizations recognized and at times exalted the role of women. Yet, alongside this was a profound contempt, especially noticeable in Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism.