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.228 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.229 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.230 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.’231 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.232
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.233 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.’234 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.235 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.’236
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.237 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’.238 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.’239 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 t
he 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.240
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:
These prostitutes are the only females in India who may learn to sing, to read and to dance. Such accomplishments belong to them exclusively, and are, for that reason, held by the rest of the sex in such abhorrence, that every virtuous woman would consider the mention of them an affront.241
The great temple of Rajarajeshvara in Tanjore is said to have housed some 400 sacred prostitutes.242 The association between prostitution and education remained a bar to making progress for women in that field until the late nineteenth century. In spite of laws imposed by the British against soliciting and using premises for the purposes of prostitution, the custom persisted through to independence, when local authorities attempted crackdowns.243
The Mahabharata makes clear that traditionally Hinduism was especially fierce in its taboos against menstruating women. In some cases, a woman was whipped if she even touched a man while she was having her period. A Brahmin could not eat food that had been looked at by a menstruating woman.244 From the medieval period onwards, there was a growth in the preference for child-brides, which meant an increase in the fatalities these young wives suffered giving birth. As for the fate of widows, it was not an enviable one. Usually, they were not allowed to remarry (though The Mahabharata describes exceptions), and they were expected to live a life of frugality in perpetual mourning, sleeping on the ground and eating one meal a day. As one historian put it, ‘the widow was the spectre at the feast.’245 The Mahabharata recounts tales of heroic women leaping into their dead husbands’ funeral pyres, choosing to die rather than face life without them, in a custom known as suttee or sati, which means ‘the virtuous woman’. However, widows who were not so eager were sometimes forced to burn. In one case, in 1780, the sixty-four wives of the Raja of Marwar were consumed on his funeral pyre along with his corpse.
Underlying such contempt would appear to dwell the dualism, so well known in the Western and Moslem civilizations, of woman as nature and man as spirit or soul.
. . . let man know that women are the continuers of the web of the Samsara [the world of the senses]. They are the ploughed field of nature, of matter . . . men manifest themselves as the soul; therefore let the man before all things leave them behind him, one and all. 246
But while this may seem familiar, resembling a Platonic divide between form or idea and the mutable world of the senses, it does not imply a contempt for women because they are the representatives of matter. The corporality and sensuality of Buddhism is fully realized in men and women, and is allowed to transfigure them both into a higher state of being. The body is not rejected but through eroticism it is seen as one of the paths to enlightenment.
The paradox of India perplexed Europeans, particularly the English, who had the longest and most intimate engagement with its culture. They were appalled at the blatant celebration of women’s sensuality, and at the same time, shocked at the more extreme examples of the contempt and disdain in which women were held at a social level. By the nineteenth century, female infanticide had been outlawed, and steps were taken to try and stop the custom of sati, even when the widow was willing to enter the flames to follow her husband into death. In the twelfth century, after the Moslem invasion of India, the practice had also been outlawed as against the laws of Islam – to no avail. Under the British, the law did not completely succeed and the custom did not die out. The last reported incident of sati occurred in August 2002, when a sixty-five-year-old widow burned to death in the province of Madhya Pradesh. Nor did the Widow Remarriage Act passed in 1856 uproot the deeply held tradition forbidding remarriage. Education for women did not make much progress either under British rule: as of 1939, only 2 per cent of Indian women were attending school.247
The traditional Indian view of women, with all its seeming contradictions, stood in complete contrast to how women were being viewed in Victorian England and in the United States. Whereas in India there was a celebration of female sexuality, coexisting alongside women’s social denigration, in the West the steady improvement in women’s social and political status was accompanied by the increasing denial of their sexuality. This reached a point in mid-Victorian times when medical experts could confidently declare that women had no sexual desires at all. No doubt this would have seemed preposterous to a Hindu, just as a Victorian gentleman would have deemed the idea of copulating one’s way to salvation as the very height of impropriety.
In Europe and North America, the Enlightenment and the revolutions of the eighteenth century had completely transformed political and social relations. Yet, neither the new republic of the United States nor the National Assembly set up by the revolution in France extended the rights of man to women, who were still denied the suffrage that in the following century was increasingly extended to males regardless of their economic status. But woman could not be forever regarded as the eternal exception to the granting of political and social rights. Thomas Paine (1737–1809), whose Common Sense pamphlet did so much to galvanize the struggle of the colonists against Britain, had pleaded for women’s rights. In 1775, the year before he wrote Common Sense, he lamented:
Even in countries where they may be esteemed the most happy [women are] constrained in their desires in the disposal of their goods; robbed of freedom and will by the laws; slaves of opinion which rules over them with absolute sway and construes the slightest appearances into guilt; surrounded on all sides by judges who are at once tyrants and their seducers . . . for even with the changes in attitudes and laws, deeply en-grained and oppressing social prejudices remain which confront women minute by minute, day by day.248
In Paris, in 1792, in the National Assembly, of which Paine was a member, he argued for a woman’s right to vote, without success. That same year, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–97) published A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, a book that some have hailed as ‘the feminist declaration of independence’ and ‘the first sustained argument for female emancipation based on a cogent ethical system’.249 When A Vindication was published, its author was described as a ‘hyena in petticoats’ and her support of the French Revolution – Wollstonecraft moved to Paris temporarily in 1792 – was looked on in England with either great suspicion or outright hostility. She was called one of ‘the impious amazons of Republican France’250 Her basic argument was simple: the rights of man imply the rights of woman. Other women in England, such as Mary Astell had, a hundred years earlier, argued for women’s emancipation inspired by Enlightenment philosophical thought (see Chapter 5). But the French Revolution took abstract principles of freedom and tried to give them concrete political expression, inspiring many in Wollstonecraft’s generation with the hope that their notions of equality and universal brotherhood might now in fact be realized.
Wollstonecraft was one of six children, the daughter of a sometimes tyrannical father who was a farmer, and a mother whom she described as ‘vague and weak’, who doted exceedingly on her oldest son. After working unhappily as a governess, she published a treatise Thoughts on the Education of Daughters (1787), and then a novel, Mary, A Fiction (1788), moved to London to pursue a career as a writer, and mixed in radical circles where she met Thomas Paine, the poet William Blake, the political philosopher William Godwin and the chemist Joseph Priestly. Her experience as a governess had made her fiercely hostile to the life-style of upper-class women, who spent their days preening themselves, and in what she regarded as other utterly frivolous pursuits. She took the opposite course and became, in fact, the archetypal bohemian feminist, not caring for her appearance, wearing her hair unkempt and dressing in black worsted stockings, which disgusted one of her friends who called her a ‘
philosophical sloven’.251
Wollstonecraft’s hostility to women who spent what she believed was too much time before the mirror is a major theme of A Vindication. It set the tone for a lot of later feminist writing. Indeed, her contempt for what she saw as female frivolousness, especially women’s devotion to beautification, is as thoroughgoing as anything ever written by a male misogynist. ‘Pleasure,’ she writes, ‘is the business of women’s life, according to the present modification of society; and while it continues to be, little can be expected from such weak beings.’ She paraphrases Hamlet’s diatribe again women, with approval. Her complaints about women echo those found in the works of traditional misogynists and she is so vitriolic that a recent authority upon her work has had to defend her from being misconstrued ‘as unsympathetic to women’.252 Wollstonecraft, in fact, accepts the dualistic notion that devotion to the body is a sign of mental and moral inferiority. She asserts that as long as women are guilty of this, they will be perceived as inferior – and, according to Wollstonecraft, deservedly so. She warns ‘if then, women do not resign the arbitrary power of beauty – they will prove that they have less mind than man.’253 The old mind/body dualism had taken on a new philosophical force thanks to the work of Rene Descartes (1596–1650), in which the very the proof of existence was contingent upon thinking, as he stated cogently in his renowned maxim: ‘I think therefore I am.’ Wollstonecraft took this to mean that body is non-rational and therefore inferior to mind – a dichotomy familiar since Plato and a favourite among misogynists who identify women as body. It followed that women who fuss too much over their make-up and dress must be inferior to those who spend their hours reading philosophical works.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 18