A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (32 page)

Needless to say, the great experiment to remodel human nature according to the dictates of Marxist social theory failed. After Mao’s death in 1976, as soon as more liberal policies began to be tolerated, beauty parlours began to appear, and Chinese women flocked to them. By the late 1990s, a sexual revolution was sweeping China in reaction to the decades of repression. Bars with lap dancers and go-go dancers began to open. The Chinese say: ‘The Cultural Revolution is the father of the sexual revolution.’
³⁵²

In China, women were often forced to have abortions in order to keep the size of their families down to prescribed limits. Meanwhile, in the Soviet Union, in 1936, just sixteen years after abortion had been legalized, it was banned under Joseph Stalin. To say Stalin like Hitler before him was pro-life is perhaps to miss the point. What is more important is what both have in common with the Chinese communists, and indeed with today’s so-called ‘pro-life’ movement in the United Sates: they are all anti-choice, believing that a woman’s right to control her own fertility must be subordinated to goals more important than any notions she may have of her autonomy. That in itself is a form of contempt.

Both right wing and left-wing forms of totalitarianism are in many ways so profoundly alike that their ideological differences are mostly irrelevant. Both set out to reverse the political and moral revolution of the Enlightenment, which for the first time in history enshrined the idea of the individual’s autonomy, his right to liberty and to pursue happiness, rights that have gradually been extended also to women. The totalitarian assault on the Enlightenment is nowhere more clearly illustrated than in its utter disregard – indeed contempt – for the rights of the individual, and the horrifyingly brutal manner with which totalitarian states treat their citizens. ‘The extreme violence of totalitarian systems,’ wrote the novelist Vasily Grossman, ‘proved able to paralyse the human spirit throughout whole continents.’
³⁵³
It might be argued, as it has been in relation to the Holocaust, that considering the horrors inflicted upon both men and women who fall foul of these regimes there is little point in distinguishing them in terms of the suffering that both endure. Inhuman acts by their very nature deny or ignore the humanity of their victims. However, there is always room for misogyny. Indeed, in such regimes cruelty against women based on misogynistic feelings is often the norm.
Women are frequently punished for their femininity, and for performing their biological role as mothers. Through its systematic mistreatment of women, the totalitarian state often reveals itself at its most frightening.

In May 2002, a group of three defectors offered us a terrifying glimpse of life inside a women’s prison in North Korea, part of a gulag of camps and jails, which currently is estimated to hold about 200,000 people. Human rights organizations believe that about 400,000 prisoners have died in custody there since 1972. The three defectors testified in May that year before the House International Relations Committee in Washington DC. They spoke about their experience as political prisoners in what is the last truly totalitarian state on earth. Created in 1948 as the People’s Democratic Republic of Korea, the country has been ruled by a sort of communist dynasty under Kim Il-sung and his successors since then.

The defectors described how it was common practice to inject pregnant women with abortion-inducing shots. Guards and prison doctors forced mothers who gave birth in custody to either kill their babies themselves or watch as others killed them.
³⁵⁴
One of the defectors, Sun-ok Lee, a fifty-four-year-old economics researcher now living in Seoul, South Korea, has written a book about her time in prison,
The Bright Eyes of the Tailless Beasts.
She was held in Kaechon political prison where, she said, 80 per cent of the prisoners were housewives.
³⁵⁵
She was one of eighty to ninety women held in a cell 19 feet long by 16 feet wide. They slept with no bedding on the floor. They were allowed to shower twice a year. They were permitted to go to the toilet twice a day, at fixed times, and in groups of ten. The special punishment cell was less than two feet wide and just over three feet high, too small to stand upright or to lie down and stretch your legs. If a woman was seen looking at her reflection in a window, she was punished
for the bourgeois crime of vanity and sent to the ‘drop-out team’ for three months or one year.

‘Their main job is to collect dung from the prison toilet tanks and dump it into a large dung pool for supply to the farming teams working at the prison farm outside the wall,’ Mrs Lee told the committee. ‘Two women wade knee-deep at the bottom of the toilet tank to fill a 20-litre rubber bucket with dung using their bare hands. Three other women pull up the rubber bucket from above and then pour the contents into a transport tank.’ The tank was then brought and emptied into a large dung pool. One rainy day in 1991, a housewife from Pyongyang named Ok-tan Lee who had been on the toilet detail all day climbed on to the top of the tank when its lid became stuck. As she tried to force it open, ‘she slipped from the rain-wet surface and plunged into the ground dung-pool. It was so deep she disappeared into the dung. A guard some distance away (they always keep their distance because of the stink from the prisoners) shouted, “Stop it! Let her die there unless you want to die the same way yourself!” She was left to drown there in the dung.’

After recovering from a bout of paratyphoid in 1989, two years after she arrived in the prison, Mrs Lee was told to report to the medical room. ‘When I arrived at the medical room, I noticed six pregnant women awaiting delivery,’ she said. ‘While I was there, three women delivered babies on the cement floor without any blankets. It was horrible to watch the prison doctor kicking the pregnant women with his boots. When a baby was born, the doctor shouted, “Kill it quickly. How can a criminal in the prison expect to have a baby? Kill it.” The women covered their faces with their hands and wept. Even though deliveries were forced by injection, the babies were still alive when born. The prisoner/nurses, with trembling hands, squeezed the babies’ necks to kill them. The babies, when killed, were wrapped in a dirty cloth, put into a bucket and taken outside through a backdoor. I was so
shocked with that scene that I still see the mothers weeping for their babies in my nightmares. I saw the baby-killing twice while I was in the prison.’

Other defectors told the HIRC that on other occasions, the mothers themselves were forced to smother their babies with pieces of plastic, after giving birth in their cells, and if they did not, the guards threatened to beat them. They said that there was special animosity towards women who had been made pregnant by Chinese men. Between March and May 2000, 8,000 North Korean defectors, most of them women, were deported from China back to their homeland as part of a crackdown on prostitution and forced marriage. Estimates are that up to one-third of them were pregnant. The vast majority of them were imprisoned on reaching North Korea. A former factory worker, identified only as Miss Lee (no relation to Mrs Lee) told the HIRC: ‘The guards would scream at us: “You are carrying Chinese sperm, from foreign countries. We Koreans are one people, how dare you bring this foreign sperm here.’”
³⁵⁶

Patriotic feelings about sperm may be thought of as a rather extreme example of nationalism, that mainly twentieth-century phenomenon that has sparked so many wars and conflicts. But unfortunately those wars and conflicts have taught us that it is not so unusual. Nationalism, one of the most divisive forces in history, overlaps with racism, religious sectarianism and tribalism. At times it has reached genocidal proportions as it did in Rwanda in the spring of 1994. Women of the hated group are usually treated with the special contempt born out of misogyny, and subjected to sexual tortures and rape before being murdered. In this dualistic vision of the world, the hated group represents ‘the Other’, and the women of that group are usually seen as the most contemptible aspect of the perceived ‘Otherness’. That is, its feminine form.

The history of the last hundred years is a depressing
chronicle of atrocities carried out under the influence of this intoxicatingly simple view of the world as being divided into ‘us’ and ‘them’. From the Rape of Nanking, then the capital of China, by the Japanese in December 1937, to the Hindu nationalist massacre of Moslems in western India in March 2002, vulnerable women have suffered from the misogyny that always accompanies the racial or religious hatreds stirred up by nationalism. The grotesque mutilations that accompanied these attacks on women were of a sexual nature so that it appeared as if ordinary men had been transformed into so many Jack the Rippers. Behaviour that would be normally seen as proof of psychosis became acceptable. Of course war sanctions acts such as killing of which society normally strongly disapproves. So in some sense the Japanese soldiers and Hindu nationalists, who gang raped and then ripped open the wombs of pregnant Chinese and Moslem women to tear out their foetuses, must have seen their behaviour as sanctioned. And it was, by the profound contempt for women enshrined at some deeper level in their cultures. The Japanese military used thousands of Korean women as ‘comfort women’ during the war, a euphemism for forced prostitution. The soldiers’ name for them was as direct as it was contemptuous: they were called ‘toilets’. In Nanking no one knows the exact number of women raped often as a prelude to being mutilated and murdered. But one figure puts it as high as 80,000. In actions reminiscent of serial killers of women such as Jack the Ripper, the Japanese left the bodies of their victims lying in the streets with their legs splayed open, their vaginas pierced with bamboo canes, sticks, bottles and other objects.
³⁵⁷
The Germans claimed that during the Soviet army’s advance across East Prussia in 1945, ‘all German women who stayed behind were raped by Red Army soldiers.’ One Soviet tank officer later boasted ‘2 million of our children were born’ in Germany.
³⁵⁸
If true, this would make the Soviet invasion of Germany the occasion of the biggest mass rape in history.

Rape in war is as old as war itself, both as a way of taking revenge on the enemy population and as sexual relief for frustrated soldiers. But in the civil wars that followed the break up of Yugoslavia in the early 1990s it acquired a sinister dimension. It became a weapon of ethnic conflict as the Serbian majority launched attacks on the Croat and Moslem minorities. During 1992, Serbian authorities established rape camps, where Moslem and Croatian women were systematically raped and impregnated.

The Serbian Orthodox Church taught for years that the Serbs’ low birthrate was because Serbian women were selfish. They declared it a sin against the Serbian race. Propagandists warned the Serbs that fundamentalist Moslems were kidnapping ‘healthy Serbian women between the ages of seventeen and forty . . . to be impregnated by orthodox Islamic seed . . .’
³⁵⁹
The Serbs believed (as did Moslems and Croatian Catholics) that it was the male who determined the child’s identity, with the female playing no more than the role of incubator to his seed. As we have seen, this misogynistic fantasy goes back to Aristotle. The Serbs therefore saw forced impregnation as a means of reproducing the ethnic group. At the same time it was a means of profoundly humiliating their enemies, especially the Moslems who have a saying: ‘As our women are, so also is our community.’
³⁶⁰
Therefore these unfortunate women were made to carry a double burden, which made their bitter personal humiliation also a devastating humiliation for their community. Their families and husbands often rejected those women who survived the rapes. The all-too familiar identification of a woman’s virtue with the honour of the family or nation or race always means that women are punished twice over for acts over which they have
no control. To the trauma of rape is added the trauma of communal rejection. Many women went mad, and some committed suicide. It is not known exactly how many women suffered sexual violence at the hands of the Serbs. Figures vary from between 20,000 and 80,000.
³⁶¹

The wars in the former Yugoslavia brought up the whole question of rape as a war crime. Traditionally rape in wartime is the least punished offence and women began campaigning to redress this injustice.
³⁶²
In 1993, at the UN conference on human rights held in Vienna, rape and other forms of sexual violence were recognized as war crimes. Further conferences in Beijing and Cairo, which addressed the issue in the context of women’s rights in general, reiterated the declaration, though not without considerable opposition on some issues from representatives of the Vatican and Moslem states. Undoubtedly, this represents a moral advance. But its practical effects will almost certainly be limited.

The problem is the nature of war itself in which the most important moral prohibition of all, that against killing fellow human beings, is removed. Never was this more emphatically the case than in the total wars fought in the twentieth century, which saw the near extermination of entire communities, and not only at the hands of Nazis and communists. Between 1943 and 1945, Allied bombers systematically obliterated German cities, killing about 700,000 men, women and children. When such monstrous violations of ordinary human decency are accepted as legitimate, then it should not be surprising if rape is ignored. Realistically, the only way to abolish rape during war is to abolish war itself.

As we move into the second millennium, that seems extremely unlikely. Indeed, with the rise of nationalism and other dualistic ideologies which dehumanize the hated group on racial, ethnic or religious lines, rape and the sexual degradation of women if anything would seem to be encouraged.