A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice

by Holland, Jack

  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.

  FURTHER READING

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  Eller, Cynthia, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an invented past won’t give women a future, Beacon Press, Boston, 2000.

  Etcoff, Nancy, The Survival of the Prettiest: The science of beauty, Doubleday, New York, 1999.

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  NOTES

  1. See the statistical evidence in The Blank Slate: The modern denial of human nature, by Steven Pinker, Viking, 2002.

  2. Hesiod: Theogony/Works and Days[elip], translated by Dorothea Wender, Penguin Classics, 1973.

  3. Ibid.

  4. Helen: Myth, legend and the culture of misogyny, by Robert Meacher, Continuum, 1995.

  5. Wender, op. cit.

  6. Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, by Sarah Pomeroy, Schocken Books, 1975.

  7. The Epic of Gilgamesh, translated by N. K. Sanders, Penguin Classics, 1960.

  8. Women in Greece, by Sue Blundell, Harvard University Press, 1995.

  9. The seventh-century poet Semonides wrote, ‘For Zeus designed this as the greatest of all evils: Woman/And bound us to it in unbreakable fetters.’

  10. The Tragical History of Dr Faustus, by Christopher Marlowe.

  11. The Iliad, translated by Richmond Lattimore, as quoted by Robert Meacher, op. cit.

  12. The Trojan Women, translated by Gilbert Murray and George Allen, Unwin Ltd., 1905.

  13. Civilization and Its Discontents, by Sigmund Freud, Dover Publications, 1994.

  14. From the introduction to the Larousse Encyclopaedia of Mythology, Hamlyn, 1968.

  15. Menander, quoted in The Reign of the Phallus, by Eva Keuls, University of California, 1985.

  16. ‘A Husband’s Defense, Athens circa 400 B.C.’, quoted in Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A source book in translation, edited by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, John Hopkins University, 1982.

  17. Pomeroy, op. cit.

  18. Ibid.

  19. Courtesans and Fishcakes: The consuming passions of Classical Athens, by James Davidson, Harper Perennial, 1999.

  20. Keuls, op. cit.

  21. ‘Though wounded, battered, defeated and overcome by the javelins of the Classical heroes, by the moral indignation of the Fathers of the Church and numberless Christian defenders, by the fantastic spells and powers of Renaissance heroes, and by the boldness and greed of the early modern conquistadors, Amazons lived on to emerge again and again in Western culture,’ writes Abby Kleinbaum, commenting upon the extraordinary persistence of this myth, in The War against the Amazons, New Press, 1983.

  22. Blundell, op cit.

  23. The comedies of Aristophanes, also written during the fifth century, often play upon similar themes, with women defying the prevailing moral, social and political order. His work without question reflects the concerns, obsessions and preoccupations of the contemporary world. Since both tragedies and comedies share similar themes, we can assume the contemporary relevance of both.

  24. Antigone, translated by E. F. Watling, Penguin Classics, 1947.

  25. Ibid.

  26. Hippolyta, translated by Judith Peller Hallet, Oxford Classical Texts, 1902–13.

  27. Plato’s dualism was not new. In the sixth century BC, the philosophical school of Pythagoras drew up a Table of Opposites. The list comprised of ten pairs which Pythagoreans believed governed the Universe, such as good and evil, right and left, light and darkness, limited and unlimited, and male and female. The four elements into which the Ancients reduced all nature were also pairs of opposites: fire and air, earth and water. A habit of thinking viewed the differences between men and women as eternal and immutable opposites, and the source of an unending conflict.

  28. As quoted in An Introduction to Western Philosophy: Ideas and arguments from Plato to Popper, Anthony Flew, Thames and Hudson, 1989. Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies is a critique of the political and social thinking of Plato and Marx.

  29. The History of Western Philosophy, by Bertrand Russell, George Allen and Unwin, 1946.

  30. The Republic, translated by H. D. P. Lee, Penguin Classics, 1955. All quotes are from this edition.

  31. In the parable of the prisoners in the cave he conveys his vision of the falseness of the world as perceived by the senses. Imagine that the prisoners have been there since childhood, chained together. Near the opening, a fire is blazing and people pass on a raised road between the fire and the prisoners. As the world goes by outside, the prisoners see nothing of it but its shadows flickering on the cave wall. Because they know no better, they mistake this for reality. In the same way as the prisoners are deluded by shadows of a reality they have never directly perceived, we who know the world only through the senses know nothing of the World of Perfect Forms, absolute and eternal, of which the world of the eyes and ears, of taste and of touch, is merely a shadow. The philosopher is equated with a prisoner who has escaped the cave and seen the world beyond it.

  32. Russell, op. cit.

  33. Keuls, op. cit.

  34. ‘On the Generation of Animals’, quoted in Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition, A Reader, edited by Beverley Clack, Routledge, 1999.

  35. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: a source book in translation, by Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, John Hopkins University Press, 1982.

  36. Pomeroy op. cit.

  37. Too Many Women?: The sex ratio question, by Marcia Guttentag and Paul Secord, Sage Publications, 1983.

  38. From Lysistrata, in The Complete Plays of Aristophanes, edited by Moses Hales, Bantam Books, 1962.

  39. Lefkowitz and Fant, op. cit.

  40. Ibid.

  41. Ibid.

  42. Ibid.

  43. The City of God, translated by Gerald G. Walsh et al, Image Books, 1958.

  44. Roman Women: Their history and habits, by J. P.V. D. Balsdon, Harper and Row, 1962.

  45. Livy, The Early History of Rome, translated by Aubrey de Sélin-court, Penguin Classics, 2002.

  46. Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud, Dover, 1994. The flame survived until AD 39
4, when the Christians, now rulers of Rome, ordered it to be extinguished. It took sixteen years for the ancient prophecy to come true. In AD 410 Rome fell to an invading army of Visigoths.

  47. Jugurthine War, and Conspiracy of Catiline, Sallust, translated by S. A. Handford, Penguin Classics, 1963.

  48. Ibid.

  49. Ibid.

  50. Egyptian women, like those of Mesopotamia, were known for their elaborate make-up. Make-up is first mentioned in a Mesopotamian text dated to 3000 BC.

  51. Roman Women, Balsdon, ibid.

  52. Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act 2, Scene 2.

  53. Lefkowitz and Fant, op. cit.

  54. Ibid.

  55. Women and Politics in Ancient Rome, by Richard A. Bauman, Routledge, 1992.

  56. Livy, op. cit.

  57. Pomeroy, op. cit.

  58. Bauman, op. cit.

  59. Macrobius, quoted by Bauman, ibid.

  60. The psychiatrist Frank Caprio, quoted in Nymphomania: A History, by Carol Groneman, W. W. Norton, 2000.

  61. Groneman, ibid.

  62. Ibid.

  63. Translated by Rolfe Humphries, Indiana University Press, 1958.

  64. Ibid.

  65. Tacitus, The Annals, translated by Michael Grant, Penguin Classics, 1956. Outrageous marriages were far from unknown in Ancient Rome. In the reign of Nero, one aristocrat who had already shocked public opinion by fighting as a gladiator, married his boyfriend. Nero himself put on a bride’s veil and married one of his male lovers.