A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (38 page)

However, there are two problems with Marxist or Marxist-based theories of misogyny. The first is that there is fairly compelling evidence that misogyny is found in cultures where the kinds of property relationships and economic conditions that are said to be at its root do not exist. According to some anthropologists, such as David Gilmore, it is even found in cultures in which women have relatively high social status and which could not be described as patriarchal. The second objection arises from an element within misogyny itself – its hallucinatory aspect. Capitalists may indeed feel the need to prove that the working class is mentally inferior, and slave owners sought to denigrate Africans as being less intellectually developed, but there was no equivalent to the phantasmagoria associated with misogyny, in which women had the power to cause other women to miscarry, fly through the air on broomsticks, make men’s penises disappear, with a mere touch blight
men forever with ill fortune, suckle cats, have intercourse with multi-pronged demons and give birth to the Devil’s off-spring. There is only one prejudice that makes similar claims on a consistent basis over the centuries, and that is anti-Semitism.

Though anti-Semitism has been a prejudice largely limited to the Christian civilization that developed in Europe during the centuries following the fall of Rome, it bears more than a passing resemblance to misogyny, to which it offers some interesting parallels as well as contrasts. For about 1,500 years, anti-Semitism was part of the ‘common sense’ of society – a belief that was taken for granted as part of the cosmic and social order, so much so that it was hardly commented upon. Jews like women were held ‘to violate the moral order of the world’ mainly because of their role in the death of Jesus. Jews were deemed responsible for denying his divinity and women, because of Eve’s role in the Fall of Man, were blamed for necessitating the Incarnation in the first place. Both Jews and women through the late Middle Ages and early modern period in Europe were attributed incredible powers to blight crops, poison wells, force cows and other men’s wives to miscarry. Both Jews and women were ascribed these powers though the vast majority of them occupied the lowest and weakest rungs of society. Clearly, neither represented a real threat to anyone.
⁴²³
This did not save either from vicious outbursts of communal violence. For Jews, it occurred on a fairly regular basis. For women, it took this form during the witch craze, which persisted with peaks and troughs of intensity for almost 300 years (see
Chapter 4
).

Anti-Semitism shares another characteristic with misogyny and that is its protean nature. It flourished in Europe, especially in Germany, long after the religious reasons behind it had become part of history. It was transformed from a religious into a secular prejudice. Race replaced religion as
the motivation for the persecution of Jews. In this form it thrived with peculiar intensity, as we have seen, in the intellectual circles of early twentieth-century Vienna. There, in the first decades of the last century, anti-Semitism and misogyny came together in a lurid alliance in the minds of people like Otto Weininger and Adolf Hitler. The two streams of hatred flowed together throughout the horrors of the Nazi period.

Malleable as always, misogyny likewise underwent a secularization process from the seventeenth century onwards as the power of Christianity declined among the intellectual elite. So-called ‘scientific’ explanations for what were viewed as women’s intellectual and moral inferiority replaced those derived from religious authority, as they did as justification for early twentieth-century anti-Semitism.

The caricature of the demon Jew is largely confined to Christian anti-Semitism. But the hallucinatory character of misogyny is a characteristic of it wherever it manifests itself. The demon or devil woman in various guises is found in many very diverse cultures, including Jewish, Hindu, Germanic Burmese Buddhism, Moslem, and in many African tribal beliefs. They are most famously represented in the monstrous female creatures of Classical Greek myth – the Gorgon, the Furies, Charybdis and Scylla. Unlike the Demon Jew, the Devil Woman remains a popular motif, finding its way into mass culture in songs like ‘Devil Woman’, by Marty Robbins, which begins:

Devil woman, you’re evil,
Like the black coral reef . . .

Misogyny, like anti-Semitism, is ‘out of proportion to any objective or social conflict’.
⁴²⁴
Yet, even anti-Semitism, for all
its irrationality, has origins in a time and a place, however remote and irrelevant today. It can be traced to the struggle from the late first century
AD
onwards over who would be the inheritors of the revealed truth of the scriptures, Jews or Christians, and how that truth should be interpreted. But there is no social or political or ideological conflict in which men and women automatically find themselves on opposite sides, their opinions determined solely along gender lines. History proves that women can be as pro-war as men, even though the lives of their sons are at stake, and despite the fact that women are the most vulnerable when social order breaks down as the result of prolonged or traumatic conflict. Indeed, women sometimes incite violence against other women. During the Rwandan massacres, Pauline Nyiramasuhuko, a member of the government, allegedly incited Hutu men to rape Tutsi women before killing them. Ironically, she had been the Minister for Women’s Affairs. The
New York Times
called her ‘the minister for rape’.
⁴²⁵
She is currently standing trial for genocide, the first woman in history to face this charge.

Even on issues involving women’s rights, many women were on the side of the men who opposed them, including the right to vote. Today, women are often the most vociferous opponents of the pro-choice movement. Their identity as women carries no ideological imperative. It is subsumed by another category, more important to their sense of themselves. So clearly as history shows and commonsense suggests, misogyny cannot be explained as an outgrowth of any social, political or ideological dispute that is somehow innate to the relationship of women and men. Undoubtedly some social, economic or political problems can exacerbate the conflict between women and men, like the economic dependence of the one upon the other. But such circumstances cannot account for its origins. In this, it is unlike any other prejudice that we know of.

I began this history in the world of the eastern Mediterranean as it was almost 3,000 years ago where a complex belief system originated that has been more decisive than any other in influencing our views of woman and her role and status. I believe that this system, a product of Greek and Judaeo-Christian thinking and mythology, carries an important clue to the origins of misogyny in general that takes us beyond the level of social structures in our search for an explanation.

In the dominant version of the Fall of Man myth common to both Greek and Judaeo-Christian creation myths, man came before woman, created autonomously by the gods or God. Man therefore was seen not only as having a special relationship to the Divinity, but also as being somehow separate from the rest of nature itself. He was a separate creation, set apart from nature, with a unique relationship to his creator. The creation of woman ended that relationship, and introduced into man’s world all the features associated with nature. Man was suddenly subjected to the same needs and limitations as any beast, including copulation, the pangs of birth, the struggle for existence, the experience of ageing and of pain, the debilitation of various illnesses and finally the ignominy of death. In the words of the French novelist Louis-Ferdinand Céline, this was ‘the horror of reality’.
⁴²⁶
But the true horror was the realization that man was not autonomous, rather he was dependent. ‘There is also our mother, Eve, who wakes Adam from his dream of paradise and obliges him to confront the real world: work, history, death,’ wrote the poet Octavio Paz.
⁴²⁷
Pandora, in the Greek myth, performs the same disillusioning role. As both Eve and Pandora remind us: autonomy is not an option.

At a less sophisticated level, the fear of the loss of autonomy, of being no longer distinct and separate from nature, is mirrored in the phobias of engulfment through the agency
of women that are common to many cultures throughout the world.

Men do not surrender their illusion of autonomy easily. The solitary God of the Jews, Christians and Moslems, created the universe out of nothing, without the agency of any female being. Of all gods, he is the only one without any sexual feelings for the creatures he has created and rarely shows appreciation of their beauty. On the contrary, women’s beauty often angers him. The creator has no link to his creatures other than his need to have them enhance his own sense of uniqueness in the cosmos or to punish them if they fail to do so. He is always there as a role model, albeit one that has proven to be impossible to emulate, though that has not stopped some men from trying. In a sense all misogynists, from Plato and Aristotle, to Tertullian and St Thomas Aquinas, to Rousseau, Nietzsche, and Hitler, have in one way or another sought to prove that it is possible for man to reassert the uniqueness of his relationship to God or to the cosmos – or however he chooses to describe the ultimate truth he identifies with his destiny. It creates a kind of dualism in which woman is the lesser truth, tethered to sexuality that keeps getting in the way. She has to be rejected and denigrated as the ambassador of the mutable world from which he seeks to assert his independence and over which he strives to establish his superiority. They would agree with Katharine Hepburn who proved herself a Platonist in
The African Queen,
when she remarks to the character played by Humphrey Bogart: ‘Nature, Mr Allnut, is what we are put in this world to rise above.’
⁴²⁸

But ‘rising above’ nature consists of understanding it and humankind’s relationship to it. Although we are the only species capable of that understanding, we still can neither rise above nor sink below nature. We are still inseparable from it.

The myth of autonomous man has been a long time falling.
Ironically, it was revived at a philosophical level in the very theory that has done so much to provide an intellectual basis for the attack on misogyny that has its roots in the Enlightenment. The Blank Slate theory tried to banish human nature through its claims that all differences between individuals were social inscriptions, including all sexual differences other than those that were anatomical and biological. This allowed reformers seeking to improve women’s status to argue that sexual differences often cited to prove women were somehow ‘inferior’ were in fact the product of her upbringing and education. Remove these obstacles, and women will prove to be the same as men. The Blank Slate hypothesis was based on a dangerous dualism that saw man as apart from the rest of nature. Human history was somehow separate from natural history. The behaviour of men and women was not rooted in anything innate – unlike the rest of the living world – but in social structures.
⁴²⁹

The history of misogyny demonstrates that dualistic systems of thought tend to be unfavourable to women, none more so than the Fall of Man myth and its claim that man enjoys a privileged relationship to the rest of nature but one that woman undermined. The Blank Slate theory perpetuates this division at a philosophical level. Though it played a positive role during one phase in the struggle to end prejudice against women, in the end it is a disservice to women to argue for their equality based on its premises. There are two reasons why this is so. The first is that scientific developments since the nineteenth century have called into question some of its basic assumptions. We do not want to argue for women’s equality based on false premises. And second, acting as if it were true leads to the denial or denigration of actual differences between women and men at the expense of our shared human nature.

Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution radicalized how we
view nature and its role in shaping human behaviour, casting doubt on the Blank Slate theory. According to Bertrand Russell: ‘The doctrine that all men are born equal, and that differences between adults are due wholly to education, was incompatible with his emphasis on congenital differences between members of the same species.’
⁴³⁰
Because of this unsettling claim, the theory of evolution, perhaps the most revolutionary scientific theory since the earth was displaced from the centre of the cosmos, has enjoyed the dubious distinction of being attacked from both the right and the left. The basis of their objections is fundamentally the same. Evolution denies that humankind stands apart from nature, either in terms of a special relationship to God, as stated in the Judaeo–Christian Fall of Man myth in Genesis, or as part of a special exemption from the natural processes that shape the rest of the living world, as implied by the Blank Slate theory.

The overwhelming evidence is that human behaviour is shaped by inherited characteristics as well as by social factors, and that as much as Galapagos tortoises we are a product of evolution. And that includes our sexual behaviour. What does this mean for misogyny? Some feminists fear that arguing that some differences between women and men are innate will lead to the justification of discriminatory behaviour towards women and therefore they cling to the Blank Slate hypothesis. By doing so they are, writes Pinker ‘handcuffing feminism to railroad tracks on which a train is bearing down’.
⁴³¹
In fact, the evolutionary view of human nature protects us from the misogynistic possibilities inherent in the Blank Slate theory. Those who believe that human nature is determined by social structures have often graduated from arguing that men and women can be the same to demanding that they should be the same. Social systems based on this model punish women for putting on makeup or any form of behaviour that is seen as refusing to conform
to the asexual ideal. They agree with Plato that since mothering is merely a biological function with no behavioural consequences, babies can be taken from their mothers at birth to be raised by the state in communal nurseries.