A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (39 page)

If evolution helps explain why we are different both as men and women and as individuals, it does so without imposing any moral or legal imperative to discriminate based on difference. More importantly, if Darwin’s theory helps us recognize the function of differences between the sexes then it can defend us against those who for whatever ideological reason want to ignore or eradicate them and in the process do violence to human nature. Ultimately, however, woman’s equality is not derived from any theory of human nature but rather from concepts of justice, equality and the integrity of the individual based on philosophical and political principles that we have evolved since the Enlightenment.

‘There is, in fact, no incompatibility between the principles of feminism and the possibility that men and women are not psychologically identical,’ writes Pinker. ‘To repeat: equality is not the empirical claim that all groups of human beings are interchangeable; it is the moral principle that individuals should not be judged or constrained by the average properties of their group.’ That is, if it were found that most women spend more time in beauty parlours than in the library reading Plato, that is not an argument for depriving them of the vote – no more so than it would be if it were proven that a majority of men prefer to watch football and drink beer than to solve geometrical problems.

Evolution may not explain misogyny, but it can help us understand how women and men interact sexually. This in turn can lead to greater comprehension of the roots of some of the conflicts between the sexes that seem to transcend time and culture. Look, for instance, at the evolutionary reason for love poetry, which demonstrates that not every form of confrontation
between women and men is necessarily destructive. At some point in our evolution as a species, the human female suppressed her oestrus cycle. Unlike nearly all the females of our closest relatives in the animal kingdom, the primate ovulation is hidden in human females. ‘So well concealed is human ovulation,’ writes the physiologist and zoologist Jared Diamond, ‘that we did not have accurate scientific information on its timing until around 1930. Before that, many physicians thought that women could conceive at any point in their cycle, or even that conception was most likely at the time of menstruation.’
⁴³²
Determining whether or not the female is receptive to sexual advances is much easier for the males of other primates. At the right time of her cycle, the buttocks of female primates turn a bright red and swell up. The males respond, and gather round, with the alpha males having first choice. But from pubescence onwards, human females maintain a constant display associated with sexual receptivity throughout their cycle. The human male’s task is to decipher whether or not she is in fact ready to receive his attentions. Frequently she is not, and has to be convinced:

Had we but world enough and time,
This coyness, Lady were no crime.
We would sit down and think which way
To walk and pass our long Loves Day . . .
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on they Forehead Gaze.
Two hundred to adore each breast
But thirty thousand to the rest . . .
But at my back I alwaies hear
Time’s winged chariot hurrying near,
And yonder all before us lye
Desarts of vast Eternity.
⁴³³

Had the oestrus cycle still been functioning, all the poet would have to do is show up at the right time of the month and his not-so-coy mistress would have felt compelled to mate with him or indeed, with any available male. But because of the nature of human sexuality, with us there is always doubt, and women have the power to choose the mate they think will be the most suitable. Men must seek to influence her choice. Some have produced great art in the process. So it is largely thanks to the suppression of the oestrus cycle that we have love poetry. Perhaps this is also why poets (and creative artists in general) come out of this confrontation between the sexes better than priests and philosophers. They bear witness that misogyny is only a part of the story of woman’s relationship with man. For them, its conflict and its contradictions can be transcended through art.

It is no coincidence that central to this revolution within human sexuality is choice. The suppression of the oestrus cycle frees human females from the element of compulsion, keeps males attentive to her, and allows her greater opportunity to pick and choose a mate. Ovulation has been crucial to evolution. Just as importantly, it makes possible a wide variety of relationships between women and men that go beyond the purely procreative, allowing the complex social interactions that are characteristic of all human cultures where the sexes can relate to each other at many different levels – as lovers, friends, companions and work colleagues. It reminds us that women’s right to choose is central not only to their own integrity, but to the very roots of what makes us human and distinguishes us from other primates.
⁴³⁴
It is no wonder then than the expansion of the right to choose has throughout history been crucial for women. The right to choose her mate, and control the circumstances under which she would mate with him, marked an important stage in women’s history.
Now the battle for choice centres on her right to control her own fertility.

If choice is so central to woman’s evolution (and therefore human evolution), then so too is her sexuality, and her right to display or emphasize it. It is one of the characteristics of cultures where misogyny is part of society’s ‘common sense’ that they seek to suppress that right. In some cases, as with the Taliban in Afghanistan (see
Chapter 8
), it reached such levels of paranoia that anything associated with female sexual allure, such as lingerie, would inspire in them something akin to terror. This fear is usually associated with efforts to confine women’s sexuality to its procreative role, so it is not surprising that mothers loom large in the minds of many misogynists. They have problems relating to a woman at any other level. Typically, of course, they disguise their opposition to women’s sexual display patronizingly, in terms of ‘protecting them’ against exploitation by wicked chauvinists – both the Nazis and the Moslem fundamentalists followed that hoary tradition in the reasons they gave as they tried to suppress make-up and beauty parlours (see
Chapter 7
). But their actions and their obsessions reveal only their own inability to relate to sexually mature women.

A deep ambivalence towards women’s beauty remains in our own culture as part of our inheritance of the Judaeo-Christian hostility towards the body. When Mary Wollstonecraft famously called on women to ‘resign the arbitrary power of beauty’ or they would ‘prove they have less mind than man’(see
Chapter 6
) she was echoing that hostility. The vast majority of women rejected the dichotomy between mind and body, and more than two centuries later, they continue to do so. As the psychologist Nancy Etcoff has observed, ‘the solution cannot be to give up a realm of pleasure and power that has been with us since the beginning of time.’
⁴³⁵

The solution is not to reject beauty, but to reject misogyny. Since the Enlightenment, and the rise of modern democracy, with its emphasis on personal autonomy and the recognition of the right of the individual to pursue his or her happiness, both women themselves and men who have supported them in their struggle for equal rights have challenged the belief on which misogyny rests that women somehow violate the moral order of the world. Women are increasingly included and seen as an essential part of that moral order, even in cultures where traditional attitudes resist such change. Misogyny is no longer part of the ‘common sense of society’. Man need no longer be at war with himself and at odds with the person with whom he can have the most productive, pleasurable and satisfying relationship.

Perhaps we are close to waking from the long-lived fantasy that is at the core of misogyny and are at last learning to treat it, the world’s oldest prejudice, with the contempt that it deserves.

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