A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (30 page)

Weininger repeats the Fall of Man myth at a philosophical level. ‘For matter is in itself nothing, it can only come into existence through form,’ that is, through desiring a woman
who is ‘the material on which man acts.’ She is ‘sexuality itself’. According to Weininger:

The dualism of the world is beyond comprehension: it is the plot of man’s Fall, the primitive riddle. It is the binding of eternal life on a perishable being, of the innocent in the guilty.

Plato, Genesis and the Doctrine of Original Sin are combined in Weininger’s thought, as woman binds man into perishable matter, and the eternal form degenerates into the transient world. He concludes that as the instrument that brings about this Fall, ‘Woman alone then is guilt.’
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Weininger was Jewish, but his anti-Semitism is as much a characteristic of his work as is his misogyny, though he dissociates himself from anything as vulgar as advocating persecution ‘practical or theoretical’ of the Jews. He draws parallels between women and Jews. Like women, Jews are ‘without any trace of genius’. Jews and women are similar in ‘their extreme adaptability’ and ‘their lack of deeply-rooted original ideas, in fact the mode in which, like women, they are nothing in themselves, they can become everything’. Both too are ‘double-minded’, never truly believing in anything and therefore entirely untrustworthy.
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Not surprisingly, Weininger also regards the empiricists as contemptible. No true Aryan, he asserts, would build a system of thought based on anything so superficial as the evidence of the senses or the need to validate theories by experiment. He despises the English because of their reliance on empirical thought, which he scorns as shallow.

The ultimate aim of
Sex and Character,
as stated by the author at the beginning of the book, is to deal with the question of woman’s emancipation, which fills him with anxiety, since he views it as a threat to the concept of
humanity. He returns to the question in his conclusion and laments the fact that New Zealand has granted women the right to vote, putting it on a par with enfranchising imbeciles, children and criminals. He relates emancipation to prostitution and the Jews’ pernicious influence. Not surprisingly, he arrives at a position similar to that of the Christian ascetics of the fourth century, and concludes ‘coitus is immoral’.

Not long after
Sex and Character
was published in 1903, Otto Weininger committed suicide. The book had generally received scant or unfavourable attention. But the young man’s death cast a tragic aura over him and his work, and his ideas soon took on the status of a cult in Viennese circles where, according to sexologist Ivan Bloch, even heterosexual men began to ‘renounce women in horror’.
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His impact spread to France, Germany, England and America, where his work was hailed by the prestigious literary critic Ford Maddox Ford, who declared that a ‘new gospel had appeared’ among men.
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Weininger influenced such thinkers as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, also a Viennese, and has more lately impressed a handful of feminists. Germaine Greer praises his work in
The Female Eunuch,
arguing that his theories of women were merely based on what he saw around him. In this she carries on a long tradition within feminist thought that shares some of the assumptions of traditional misogyny, including contempt for aspects of the feminine, such as concern for beauty.

However, his true significance in the history of misogyny is found elsewhere. At the level of ideas, he vividly and powerfully crystallizes the main currents of contempt for women flowing from traditional Judaeo-Christian and Greek philosophical thought. More importantly, he is the expression of a worldview that is both anti-Semitic and misogynist, which found a powerful resonance in another young man who haunted the cafes and streets of turn-of-the-century Vienna
and absorbed its fetid atmosphere of prejudice and hatred – Adolf Hitler (1889–1945).

There are remarkable similarities not only in the thought but also in aspects of the lives of Hitler and the three philosophers Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Weininger. All were alienated, sexually insecure men who (as far as is known) never formed mature, stable relationships with women, or enjoyed steady home lives. Their sense of isolation was accompanied by an overwhelming belief in their own destiny. When Weininger declared after his book was published, ‘There are three possibilities for me – the gallows, suicide or a future so brilliant that I don’t dare think of it,’ Hitler would have understood. Their misogyny, based on fear of women (and perhaps of an underlying fear of intimacy itself), was also linked to other prejudices, especially anti-Semitism.
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To paraphrase Hamlet, rarely do prejudices come as single spies, but rather in battalions. The atmosphere of Vienna at the turn of the last century was poisonously anti-Semitic.
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In the mind of Weininger, women’s emancipation, prostitution and Jews were all linked. He writes that what the women’s movement is about is ‘merely the desire to be “free”, to shake off the trammels of motherhood; as a whole the practical results show that it is a revolt from motherhood towards prostitution, a prostitute emancipation rather than the emancipation of womanhood as a whole is aimed at.’ He claims that it is only because of the cunning influence of the Jews, that we ‘bow before it’ and see it as other than it really is.
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Hitler echoed these ideas, denouncing women’s rights as a ‘phrase invented by the Jewish intellect’.
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In his warped vision, Jews, prostitutes, Marxists and modern women were part of a sinister plot against motherhood and ‘Teutonic’ civilization.

Hitler arrived in Vienna in 1908 as a nineteen-year-old aspiring artist but failed in his attempt to gain entrance to
the Academy of Fine Arts. In his ample spare time, he used to lecture his friend August Kubizek, with whom he for a time shared a room, on the evils of prostitution. Occasionally he took Kubizek on tours of the city’s red-light district, which inspired further rants about sex and moral decadence. Later, he would blame the Jews for the spread of prostitution, as well as for the spread of liberal ideas. He once launched into a furious diatribe when Kubizek, who was studying piano, brought a woman home to give her piano lessons. He told his friend women were incapable of benefiting from such learning.
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Like Weininger, Hitler advocated abstinence from sex (as from alcohol and meat). He was also against masturbation. Another friend said of him that he ‘had very little respect for the female sex, but very austere ideas about the relations between men and women’.
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His ideal woman was, in his own words, ‘a cute, cuddly, naïve little thing – tender, sweet and stupid’.
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All sorts of mostly lurid rumours have accumulated over the years about Hitler’s sexuality. He obsessed about women, Jews and syphilis in his autobiography,
Mein Kampf
, and five of the six women with whom he had any kind of relationship committed suicide, including his twenty-three-year-old niece Geli Raubal, about whom he was pathologically jealous. ‘My uncle is a monster,’ she once said.
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In September 1931, she was found dead in his Munich apartment, shot in the head with his pistol. He was almost certainly asexual, and while he seems to have derived some pleasure from the company of pretty young women, his behaviour indicates a tremendous fear of women in general.
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He liked to refer to the malleability of the masses as ‘feminine’, showing his contempt for both the mobs that he roused with his speeches and woman with whom he compared them. Tragically, he would leave the bloody stamp of his obsessions, misogynistic as well as racial, on the history of the twentieth century.

With the rise of the National Socialist movement, out of which the Nazis sprang, Hitler went from being a vagrant with fanatical ideas to a charismatic leader with the power to turn them into political reality, in all their murderous horror. From the beginning, the Nazi party was a powerful engine of misogyny as well as of racial hatred. It came out of the all-male culture of the trenches, beer-halls, the paramilitary organizations and ex-servicemen’s associations set up by former German soldiers, embittered and angry at Germany’s defeat in the First World War. There was also a distinct homosexual trait running through the Nazi cult of the warrior and ‘superman’. (This became especially noticeable in the Nazi Party’s original paramilitary organization, the SA.) Hitler’s own contempt for women fitted well with the fledgling party’s prevailing attitude. At the very first general meeting of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party in 1921, party members passed a unanimous resolution that ‘a woman can never be accepted into the leadership of the party and into the governing committee.’
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More broadly, Nazism’s misogyny was one expression of a deep-seated paradox that it shares with many fundamentalist and conservative movements, including those that Islam, Christianity and Orthodox Judaism have more recently produced. While exploiting technological progress, without which it could not fight its wars, or maintain its dominance, at the same time National Socialism remained fiercely hostile to modernity. To the Nazis, no more blatant and worrying expression of modernity could be found than the emancipated woman of the 1920s, with her high heels, lipstick and cigarettes. Between the years 1918 and 1933, Germany had developed a modern hedonistic culture, where nightclubs flourished, Hollywood movies were the rage and sexual experimentation was rife.

The Nazis’ rigid exclusion of women from its power structures,
and their long-term goal to remove them altogether from public life, did not prevent women from supporting the up-and-coming agitator. As Hitler himself recognized, women had ‘played not an insignificant part’ in his political career.
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A few even worshipped him as a new messiah.
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In some ways, the National Socialist line followed the same theme of ‘
kinder, küche, kirche’
– ‘children, kitchen, and Church’ – that the other conservative parties extolled. At first German women gave their support to these more traditional rightwing parties. But in the election of November 1932, women voted Nazi in as large numbers as did men.
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Given what happened later, it is surely one of the great ironies that women proved so crucial to Hitler’s success. However, it is hardly surprising that in an age of uncertainty, rapid change and threatened communist revolution, Hitler’s message was for many German women reassuring in its emphasis on the timeless values of home and family. As one sentimental Nazi poem expressed it:

Mothers, your cradles
are like a slumbering army
Ever ready for victory,
They will never be empty.
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Most women probably did not take the militarization of motherhood seriously or see its sinister metaphor directly linking the cradle to war as a prediction of what was to come. But Hitler took it very seriously. German women were an essential part of his war machine’s production line. However, Nazi propaganda managed to disguise the brutal reality as it conjured up an Arcadian vision of lost innocence, a time when the world was a simpler place, and women were purer, content to be mothers, without perverse social or political ambitions. Two of the party’s most notorious misogynists, Julius Streicher
and Ernest Rohm, chief of the SA, helped propagate a cloyingly sentimental vision of German motherhood. Not surprisingly, both men were fixated upon their mothers. Streicher edited the lurid weekly
Der Sturmer,
which at its height had a circulation of nearly 1,000,000. It combined anti-Semitism with violent, pornographic depictions of helpless German maidens being raped by demon-like Jews. Streicher’s excesses embarrassed even some Nazis, who wanted
Der Sturmer
suppressed. But Hitler tolerated Streicher and his obsessions, perhaps because they resembled one of the Führer’s own recurring nightmares: a naked German woman chained and helpless as a Jewish butcher creeps up upon her from the rear and a watching Hitler is unable to save her.
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Streicher furiously protested in 1923 that the French army that occupied the Rhine in the post-war settlement employed black soldiers. He wrote: ‘When a Negro soldier on the Rhine misuses a German girl, she is lost to the race forever.’
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He also believed that a single act of intercourse between a Jew and a German woman would prevent her from ever having a ‘pure-blooded Aryan child’ and campaigned (successfully) to have marriages between the races outlawed.

Misogynistic cultures dwell on such fantasies of rape or seduction of ‘their women’ by alien forms. In the phantasmagorical minds of Nazi and inquisitor, the demon Jew played the same perverse role to the purebred Aryan maiden as the incubus did to the witch. It repeats a common misogynistic obsession linking something seen as crucial to male security, such as honour, to a woman’s virtue. In Nazi ideology preserving the German woman’s virtue was identified with preserving racial purity. Frighteningly, this pathology became a social policy. The Nazis passed laws forbidding German women to have sex with the ‘lesser’ races, such as Jews or Slavs. During the war, in the absence of German men, thousands
of Poles were employed to work on farms to help the lonely and no doubt often frustrated German wives and widows. From denunciations made to the German secret police, the Gestapo, it appears that even in cases where a German woman was raped at the hands of a Polish worker, she was publicly punished. Her head was shaven and she was pilloried. The men were hanged, whether the relationship was consensual or not. In contrast, when German men slept with Polish women the Gestapo merely noted it.
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