A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (24 page)

By the middle of the eighteenth century, Britain dominated the Indian subcontinent both politically and economically, a rule that would last until 1947 when India became independent. The British and other Europeans were shocked, confused
and fascinated by Indian sexual attitudes and behaviour. Writing about the numerous temple prostitutes found in India, the eighteenth-century missionary Abbé Dubois declared, ‘A religion more shameful or indecent has never existed amongst a civilized people.’
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Europeans easily found evidence of the low social status of women; it complemented many of their own, Western-based prejudices. But all around them, the newcomers could not ignore the evidence of India’s exuberant sensuality. They beheld the extraordinary stone carvings of the vast Hindu temple of Konarak, depicting couples (and sometimes triples) making love with an almost indolent ease, unthinkable to the Western imagination; their entwined bodies with full-breasted women instead of ripe fruit garlanding the sacred place like a voluptuous vine. They read the
Kamasutra,
written between the third and fifth centuries
AD
, with its unselfconsciously fastidious guide to sexual pleasure – not, as in works such as Ovid’s
The Art of Love,
for the joy of the man only – but with the full recognition of the woman’s sexual needs to be fulfilled. In this and in other ways, India exalted erotic relations between men and women to a plane unknown in the West. Indeed, in some Hindu and Buddhist sects, rituals of orgiastic intercourse were seen as the principal path to enlightenment, the way of escaping what the Mexican poet Octavio Paz has termed the ‘dualistic trap’.
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The great religions of the Eastern civilizations are profoundly different from Christianity in that they are not, essentially, philosophically or theologically oriented. Nor do they have a mission – a conviction that they are the holders of an absolute truth regarding the salvation of all mankind with a historical imperative to spread it. Instead their beliefs about the world and the human race’s place in it have given rise to complex ethical systems in which ideas are ritualized. They are
also completely ahistorical. That is, their beliefs have only personal, not historical consequences; their aim is to allow the individual to achieve happiness in this world (Hinduism, Taoism and Confucianism), or to escape suffering, most radically by extinguishing any sense of self (Buddhism). They do not share the missionary need of Christians and Moslems to convert or exterminate the unbeliever. That means that, unlike Islam and Christianity, their misogyny has largely been internal. But what Taoism, Confucianism, Hinduism and Buddhism do have in common with Christianity and Islam is their profound dualism in which the world is seen as being in a permanent state of tension, if not conflict, between body and spirit, self and nature, the one and the many, life and death, male and female, being and non-being.

Except for Confucianism, which was less a religion than a code of etiquette and ethics, these Eastern religions shared a belief with Christians and Platonists that the world of the senses is fundamentally an illusion that prevents us from achieving a higher state of being. But unlike Christianity, they posited that dualism could be ended in this world through the practices of certain rituals. However, though the body was viewed as an obstacle to this goal, it was not held to be evil, a sign of our falling away from the divine as it is in Christianity. None of the Eastern religions had any concept equivalent to sin, which made the work of the first missionaries who arrived in India and China in the seventeenth centuries extremely frustrating. Even in the most ascetic expressions of these beliefs, and both Buddhism and Hinduism produced traditions of holy men and monks who forswore this world for a life of contemplation and physical deprivation, Puritanism as the West understands it does not exist. Though scholars have linked Eastern asceticism with misogyny in Indian and Chinese societies, the impact this has on women’s status remains full of
contradictions. Indeed, in Taoism, as in the Tantric versions of Hinduism and Buddhism, the body, and in particular sexual pleasure, were viewed as a path to immortality. Among the practitioners of the Tantric disciplines, it was a release from the cycle of birth, death and reincarnation, a path to Nirvana in which the self is dissolved. In all these rituals, women played an essential role.

Taoism holds that the world is kept in balance between the interaction of two forces yin (female) and yang (male). This interaction gives rise to change, according to the
I-Ching
or
Book of Changes.
There are two keys to a long life. The first lies in the retention of semen – a belief found in many cultures around the world. The second key, held to be just as vital, is the imbibing of vaginal secretions. Taoists believed that while man produced a limited amount of his precious fluid, woman’s supply was infinite. In China, it led to elaborate sexual rituals, the aim of which was to rouse the woman to orgasm, but not the man. Not surprisingly, cunnilingus was popular among the Chinese: ‘The practice was an excellent method of imbibing the precious fluid,’ according to one authority.
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In a series of texts, known as Bed Treatises, produced between the Sui and Ming dynasties (
AD
581–1644), methods of retaining semen whilst absorbing as much of the female fluid as possible are outlined in minute detail. The ultimate aim was to unite the male and female fluids, obliterating sexual dualism, and achieving (it was believed) a kind of immortality.
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The treatises were eventually suppressed under the conservative Qing dynasty (1644–1912), along with the erotic novels of the Ming years (1368–1644), though some continued to survive on the Chinese black market.

Tantric Buddhism in India was a rebellion against the rigidity of the Hindu caste system and its religious rituals based on the belief in reincarnation (which held that a person’s behaviour in
this life determines his or her status in the next). Tantrism’s sexual rituals were orgiastic, beginning with the banquet, in which food was eaten from the body of a naked woman lying face up; the devotees then had intercourse in public. They believed that through sexual ecstasy they could break free of the cycle of reincarnation and reach the state of Nirvana. One historian has compared Tantrism to the sexual revolution of the 1960s, its sexual permissiveness a challenge to moral, social and political authority.
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It appalled the Abbé Dubois, on his visit to India in the eighteenth century. He was the first European to describe what he called the ‘infamous feast’.

However, one does not have to go to the extremes of Tantric Buddhism to realize that Indian sexual practices differ from those of the West in their recognition of woman as a sexual being. From the
Kamasutra,
to the Tantric rituals, Indian eroticism sees the woman as an active participant, and the aim of both men and women is to give pleasure to each other. Likewise, among the Chinese, sexual relations between men and women were not dominated by a sense of sin or shame but by the need to manage desire and passion. In the Confucian
Book of Rites
husbands are instructed that ‘even if a concubine is growing old, as long as she has not yet reached 50, [you] shall have intercourse with her once every five days.’
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In that sense, a kind of sexual equilibrium is attained, which seems the very opposite to the misogyny that developed in the West and that tried to deny women their sexual nature. Yet, however much the recognition of female sexuality expressed itself both in the Indian and Chinese civilizations, it did not protect women from being treated with contempt in other ways.

In the teachings of Confucius (551–479
BC
), which dominated Chinese thinking for at least 2,000 years, a complex ethical system was constructed, along with a precise etiquette to govern social relations. It was a patriarchal system, in which
relations within the family reflected both the order of the cosmos, and the structure of the state. China was a polygamous society for much of its history – polygamy was only finally outlawed in 1912 with the collapse of imperial rule. It had a very large middle class, with most men possessing between three and a dozen wives and concubines. There were also luxurious establishments where the rich might visit courtesans. Although, in accordance with Confucian doctrine which aimed always at balance and order, the husband was expected to look after his wives and concubines’ economic and sexual needs, in other ways women were treated with disdain. As the Chinese poet Fu Hsuan expressed it:

Bitter indeed it is to be born a woman,
It is difficult to imagine anything so low! . . .
No one sheds a tear when she is married off . . .
Her husband’s love is as aloof as the Milky Way,
Yet she must follow him like a sunflower the sun.
Their hearts are soon as far apart as fire and water.
She is blamed for all and everything that may go wrong.
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Women were completely segregated from males from a very early age. Casual physical contact between men and women was to be avoided because it aroused passions – Confucius did not teach that the body was evil, just that it was dangerous.
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According to
The Book of Rites,
‘A man and woman shall not give anything directly one to the other from hand to hand. If a man gives something to a woman, she receives it on a bamboo tray.’
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Women who wanted to attend public festivities had to carry a portable folding screen behind which they placed themselves in order not to be seen.
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Traditionally, there was no role for women in public affairs. ‘They will cause disorder and confusion in the empire,’ wrote the statesman
Yang Chen in the second century
AD
, ‘bring shame on the Imperial Court . . . Women should not be allowed to take part in government affairs.’
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Most women, it seems, even those belonging to the higher classes, did not receive much if any education, and remained illiterate. As in Ancient Athens, only courtesans were expected to be able to read and write. Women’s instruction was usually limited to learning sewing, embroidery and playing a musical instrument. Even those who were educated, such as the woman scholar and historian Ban Zhao (
AD
40–120), whose father belonged to the court circle and who advocated that girls should receive at least elementary instruction, were so in order that they should grow up more aware of their subordinate status. Their fate was to be obedient wives, the mothers of sons. A wife who did not produce a son could be displaced by a concubine who did. The prejudice against girl children persists into modern times: It has become common for pregnant women to abort the foetus if it is female, creating a growing imbalance between the numbers of men and women in certain areas. According to researchers, there are 111 males for every 100 females now throughout the country.
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It has also led to an illegal trade in baby girls, who are sold by poor peasant women who already have one or two children, to supply child-hungry families in the big cities.

Chinese standards of female beauty always emphasized the demure, the delicate and the diminutive, with a special emphasis on small feet. From the tenth century onwards, this predilection took a nasty twist with the rise of foot-binding. From an early age, the outside three toes of the girl’s feet were tightly wrapped, bending them back towards the ball of the foot, with the goal of achieving the ‘lotus foot’. According to the archaeologist Heinrich Schliemann, who travelled through China and Japan in the late nineteenth century:

A young girl, pockmarked and gap-toothed, or with thinning hair, but with a little foot no longer than three and a half thumbs, is considered a hundred times more beautiful than one who, by European standards, would be considered exceptionally lovely but who has a foot four and a half thumbs long.

He observed that it effectively crippled women, distorting their instep, and made them waddle ‘like geese’.
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Foot-binding mainly affected upper-class women and courtesans. It was only with the Chinese Revolution and the establishment of the People’s Republic in 1949 that this misogynistic mutilation was banned. Confucianism was also suppressed in the 1950s as counterrevolutionary, though Taoism (or some version of it) survived as a cult.

In India also, the voluptuous eroticism that exalted female sexuality coexisted with a host of discriminatory practices that lowered women’s social status. In the Indian epic of the fifth century
BC
The Mahabharata
the birth of a daughter is hailed as a misfortune, and it is declared, ‘women are the root of evils; for they are held to be light-minded.’
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Over 2,000 years later, the situation has not changed, except that with the advance of technology it is now easier for parents in India to avoid having daughters at all. Even though they are outlawed, pre-natal sex tests are used to determine the foetus’ sex; if it is a girl it is commonly aborted, leading as in China to a growing disproportion in the numbers of men to women. In the 2001 census, it was revealed that in children under age six, there were 927 girls for every 1,000 boys.
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Like Chinese women, Indian women did not in general receive an education, unless they were the sacred prostitutes who worked in the Hindu temples. The Abbé Dubois noted: