As well as burdening Pandora with responsibility for the mortal lot of man, the Greeks created a vision of woman as ‘the Other’, the antithesis to the male thesis, who needed boundaries to contain her. Most crucially, Greece laid the philosophical-scientific foundations for a dualistic view of reality in which women were forever doomed to embody this mutable, and essentially contemptible world. Any history of the attempt to dehumanize half the human race is confronted by this paradox, that some of the values we cherish most were forged in a society that devalued, denigrated and despised women. ‘Sex roles that will be familiar to the modern reader were firmly established in the Dark Ages in Athens,’ wrote the historian Sarah Pomeroy.6 That is, along with Plato and the Parthenon, Greece gave us some of the cheapest sexual dichotomies of all, including that of ‘good girl versus bad girl’.
Hesiod was writing some five centuries after tribes who would become the Greeks had swept into the eastern Mediterranean as conquerors, establishing themselves not only on the Greek mainland but also in the islands around it and on the shores of Asia Minor (modern Turkey). By the sixth century BC, the Greeks had spread as far west as Sicily, the coasts of southern Italy, and the southeast coast of Gaul (now France). They brought with them their pantheon of warrior gods of whom the most powerful was Zeus, the Thunderer. Having violent warrior divinities, however, is not necessarily an indication of a misogynistic culture. In the older civilizations the Greeks encountered, such as those of Egypt and Babylon, there was an abundance of war gods, but no equivalent of the Fall of Man myth. In Mesopotamia, the Sumerian poem ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’, which dates back to the third millennium BC, has a hero who like Prometheus aspires to rival the gods. Gilgamesh does so by seeking to share in their immortality; but women are not made the instrument of revenge by some vindictive deity seeking to punish man for challenging his mortal lot. Nor does Gilgamesh castigate women for being to blame for ‘the lot of man’; the gods are to blame for our mortality. The goddess who rules Paradise tells him:
Gilgamesh, where are you hurrying to? You will never find that life for which you are looking. When the gods created man they allotted him death but life they retained in their own keeping. As for you, Gilgamesh, fill up your belly with good things, day and night, night and day, dance and be merry, feast and rejoice; let your clothes be fresh, bathe yourself in water, cherish the little child that holds your hand, and make your wife happy in your embrace; for this too, is the lot of man.7
In the later culture of the nomadic Celts, which dominated northwestern Europe, myths of paradise found and lost abound, but there is no myth of the Fall of Man. The Celtic version of paradise is, like that of the Sumerians and Jews, a fruitful garden where beautiful women rule and lure men to a life of bliss. But the only conflict is between the men’s nostalgia for home and their desire for the women of the garden. Desire exists, but the evil consequences do not. There is no Celtic equivalent of Pandora or Eve.
The gods of the Athenian pantheon – traditionally located on Mount Olympus – became the national gods of Greece, with several prominent characteristics. Four of the five major goddesses are either virginal or asexual. The most important of them, Athena, is as androgynous as the Statue of Liberty in New York harbour. She is usually shown holding a shield and spear, clad in helmet and long thick robes that conceal her body. The fifth goddess, Aphrodite, the goddess of love, behaves at times like a celestial airhead. The sexlessness of most of the female deities is in startling contrast to the violent, predatory nature of the males. Most significantly, the Athenian pantheon established a serial rapist, the sky-god Zeus, as the father of them all. Zeus’ numerous offspring are nearly all the product of the rape of mortal women. The two exceptions are Athena and Dionysus, to whom Zeus gives birth himself. Athena springs from his head, fully armed, carrying her spear and shield; and Dionysus emerges from his thigh.
All religions ask us to believe the impossible. The fantasy of male autonomy, in which men are seen as somehow free from dependence on women, expresses itself in the creation myth of Pandora, where males can come into existence without females. In the Athenian pantheon, this impossibility expresses itself in the claim that males can make females redundant in the very sphere where they are indispensable – that of reproduction. Ludicrous as it might seem, the myth of the father of the gods becoming the mother of the gods was given force by the science of Aristotle, in which the role of the mother in pregnancy was determined to be merely nutritive. She was the passive receptacle of the male seed, which contained everything needed (except the environment) for the development of the foetus. Whatever the female can do, it seems, the male can do better – though there is no evidence of any Greek males rushing to experiment with impregnation and giving birth.
The rise of misogyny in the eighth century BC Greece occurred just as the influence of family-based dynasties was on the decline; instead power was invested in the body politic of the city-state. One historian has suggested that:
Where political power was rooted in the royal household, the boundary between the domestic and the political, between the private and the public, is not nearly so rigid. The roles of men and women overlap, and it is for this reason that a woman can come close – in the absence of her husband – to the exercise of political power.8
Alliances between noble families were of vital importance and women’s role in forging such bonds was essential. This is reflected in the work of Homer, Hesiod’s more gifted contemporary. In The Iliad, the story of the siege of Troy Menelaus, the king of Sparta and Helen’s husband, owes his throne to his wife. For Menelaus it is essential to get his wife back after she has eloped with Paris to Troy not just for her unrivalled beauty, but because his kingship depends on it.
Homer based both The Iliad and The Odyssey (the latter recounting the long journey home of Odysseus, one of the Greek kings) on material which dates back to the earlier dynastic period. In these works, women are generally portrayed sympathetically; they are complex and powerful, and among the most memorable characters in all literature. The end of this era was accompanied by a move from a pastoral to a labourintensive agricultural economy, one concerned about the conservation of property. But the expressions of hostility to women, not only in Hesiod but in other extant eighth-century writings, cannot be entirely explained by changing political and social structures: no deep-seated hatred can. They provided, however, the context in which men felt comfortable in expressing misogyny.9 And the woman against whom they felt most comfortable expressing it was an eighth-century creation: Helen of Troy, Greek misogyny’s centre-fold, the face ‘that launched a thousand ships/ And burned the topless towers of Ilium’.10
Helen’s mother Leda was one of Zeus’ rape victims, whom he violated when he was in the form of a swan. But Helen, in her remarkable career as a complex icon inciting both desire and loathing, is more truly a daughter of Pandora. Like Pandora’s, her beauty is a trick. It arouses extraordinary desire in men. But to desire her is to uncork the evils of bloodshed and destruction. In The Iliad, Helen expresses self-loathing, describing herself as a ‘nasty bitch, evil-intriguing’.11 She echoes the description of Pandora. At the peak of Athens’ most creative period, when self-loathing becomes a generalized feeling among the female characters of some of the great dramas, Helen is the focal point of misogyny. She is the man-slaughterer, man’s curse, bitch, vampire, destroyer of cities, the poisoned chalice, devourer of men – almost every misogynistic epithet imaginable is thrown at her. In Euripides’ The Trojan Women, Hecuba the widow of Priam, the slaughtered king of Troy, cries out to Menelaus the victorious Spartan King:
I bless thee, Menelaus, I bless thee,
If thou wilt slay her! Only fear to see
Her visage, lest she snare thee and thou fall!
She snareth strong men’s eyes; she snareth tall
Cities; and fire from out her eateth up
Houses. Such magic hath she, as a cup
Of death!12
Hecuba’s
pleas are in vain. Menelaus both needs and desires Helen too much to punish her. He carries her back to Sparta where they resume their married life, while the other women, reduced to the status of the victors’ slaves, are left to lament their lost husbands, fathers, and sons.
Like that of Pandora, the story of Helen is an allegory that inextricably links desire with death. In the Pandora story, her loss of virginity – the uncorking of the jar – lets death into the world, just as Paris’ desire for Helen brings war and all its horrors. Such allegories are expressions of what Sigmund Freud called ‘the eternal struggle between Eros and the destructive or death instinct’ – Thanatos.13 In the culture of contempt, women are made to feel overwhelming guilt because their beauty causes desire, starting the cycle of life and death.
Other mythologies and cultures have mediated this complex dance of Eros and Thanatos but primarily as an inescapable act of life. In the mythology of the Celts, goddesses are typically identified with the principles of both life and death. These dual roles are not, however, seen dualistically; that is, as two principles of life and death, forever at war. The Celts portray their goddesses as unselfconsciously reconciling the forces of life and death in the way every mother does in reality: by bringing life into the world, she also brings death. This life/death reconciliation is, to them, simply in the nature of things, not a cause for blame or condemnation. But to the Greek dualistic mentality, nature embodies man’s limitations and weaknesses, and woman embodies nature. Woman serves as a constant and resented reminder of those limitations. This is the sin of Pandora and her daughters, for which misogyny, from its fairy tales to its philosophies, seeks to punish all women.
‘One constant rule of mythology,’ wrote the poet Robert Graves, ‘is that whatever happens among the gods above, reflects events on earth.’14 Relationships and attitudes which are given mythological sanction are usually reflected in laws and customs. During the sixth century BC, this became evident with the growth of democracy and city states such as Athens, which quickly developed restrictive codes to regulate women’s behaviour.
To modern minds, the notion that the rise of democracy should lead to a diminishing of women’s status might seem to be something of a contradiction. But the notion of universal suffrage or even of equality, as it is understood now, did not inspire the democracies of Greece and Rome. They were slave-owning states where democratic rights were severely restricted to adult male citizens. In a slave-owning economy, the idea that all people are born equal would have contradicted a blatant reality, one that was as self-serving as it was universal. Slavery was the ‘natural’ outcome of inherent inequalities. In a society where one form of gross inequality is institutionalized, it is easier for other forms of inequality to flourish as well.
Laws regulating women’s behaviour and opportunities give the most graphic and pertinent examples of how Hesiod’s allegory of misogyny became a social fact. Legally speaking, Athenian women remained children, always under the guardianship of a male. A woman could not leave the house unless accompanied by a chaperone. She seldom was invited to dinner with her husband and lived in a segregated area of the house. She received no formal education: ‘Let a woman not develop her reason, for that would be a terrible thing,’ said the philosopher Democritus. Women were married when they reached puberty, often to men twice their age. Such a difference in age and maturity, as well as in education, would have enhanced the notion of women’s inferiority. The husband was warned: ‘He who teaches letters to his wife is ill advised: he’s giving additional poison to a snake.’15
A husband’s adultery was not considered grounds for divorce. (This view prevailed in England up until 1923, a reflection of how deeply the classics permeated upper-class English culture.) But if a woman committed adultery or was raped, her husband was obliged to divorce her or lose his citizenship. With these threats, women in the world’s first democracy were worse off than in the autocracy of ancient Babylon. There, under the laws of King Hammurabi compiled in 1750 BC, the husband of a woman convicted of adultery at least had the power to pardon her.
Having consensual sex with another man’s wife in ancient Greece was regarded as a more serious offence than raping her. During the trial of a husband accused of murdering his wife’s lover, the clerk of the court reads from the laws of Solon (the great Athenian lawgiver of the sixth century BC) regarding rape:
Thus, members of the jury, the lawgiver considered violators deserving of a lesser penalty than seducers: for the latter he provided the death penalty; for the former, the doubled fine. His idea was that those who use force are loathed by the persons violated, whereas those who have got their way by persuasion corrupt women’s minds, in such a way as to make other men’s wives more attached to themselves than to their husbands, so that the whole house is in their power, and it is uncertain who is the children’s father, the husband or the lover.16
The defence of the husband was that he had the right to kill his wife’s lover because he had caught them in flagrante. A raped woman suffered the same penalties as one accused of adultery, and was forbidden to take part in public ceremonies or to wear jewellery. As in many conservative Moslem societies today, the rape victim was regarded as responsible for her own violation. She became a social outcast, a terrible fate in the small, close-knit community of the city state.17
Solon imposed further restrictions on women: he circumscribed their appearance at funerals (where traditionally they had provided contingents of paid mourners) and at feasts, as well as limiting their public displays of wealth. In addition, they were banned from buying or selling land. Solon also enacted a law forcing a woman without brothers, on the death of her father, to marry his nearest male relative. The sons born of that marriage would inherit any land. In this way, woman became ‘the vehicle through which the property was kept within the family’.18 Even after her marriage, an Athenian woman remained under the control of her father, who retained the power to divorce her from her husband and wed another if he decided that it was advantageous. Another law attributed to Solon forbade any Athenian citizen from enslaving another Athenian citizen (the enslavement of non-citizens was allowed) with one notable exception: a father or head of the household had the right to sell his unmarried daughter into slavery if she lost her virginity before marriage.
Having ensured that the ‘good’ girls were safe from any taint of sexual indiscretion, it was necessary to supply the ‘bad’ girls to cater for men’s sexual appetites. Solon legalized state brothels, staffed by slaves and aliens. While the good girls composed a single category (wives cum mothers), the bad girls were graded from the high-maintenance hetaera – the equivalent of the mistress – to the low-end street walker, who could be picked up for a few dollars near the city dumps where people went to defecate. The whore’s sexuality was a public convenience; she was viewed in terms of a sewer that drained off men’s lust.19
‘We have hetaerae for our pleasure, concubines for our daily needs, and wives to give us legitimate children and look after the housekeeping,’ Demosthenes, the greatest of the Athenian orators, is reported to have said. This demarcation associating female virtue with sexlessness has been used to dehumanize women to this day.
It is not surprising, given the number of boundaries circumscribing women, that men developed something of an obsession with women as boundary-crossers. This fascination is graphically illustrated by the Greek interest in the Amazons, the legendary tribe of warrior women who invaded the most male of sanctuaries, organized warfare. The Amazons are a recurring presence in Greek history; this theme has persisted down to modern times. First mentioned by the fifth-century historian Herodotus (the ‘father’ of history), they were depicted as dwelling on the borderlands of civilization, devoted solely to warfare; they sought men only when they needed to mate, and exposed all their male babies, rearing only the females. They are the mirror image of patriarchal Athens. With the Amazons, the fantasy of the autonomous male meets its nightmare opposite, the autonomous female
.
Men’s fascination with warrior women has a long history, from Classical Athens to today’s comic book heroine Wonder Woman and professional women wrestlers. The Amazons are like these wrestlers in that their combat is fantasy. But for men the fascination, edged with anxiety, is real. Among the Athenians, it reached obsessive proportions. Representations of battles between men and Amazons are among the most popular depictions of women in Antiquity. Over 800 examples survive, the bulk of them Athenian in origin.20 They decorate everything from temples to vases and drinking bowls. Wherever a citizen looked, his eye would inevitably fall on a scene showing a man, sword or spear raised, hauling a woman by her hair off a horse; or stabbing and clubbing her to death, a javelin pointed at her nipple, as invariably her tunic slips to reveal a breast, and her short skirt rolls up to reveal her thighs. The greatest temple in Athens, the Parthenon, was erected in 437 BC to honour Athena, the city’s ruling deity, and to celebrate the Greek victory over Persian invaders. But the battle scene chosen to decorate the shield of Athena was not based on any historical event. It was a depiction of the legendary victory of the hero Theseus, the mythological founder of the city, over an invading army of Amazons. The popularity of this scene cannot be explained merely by the fact that it was the only theme that allowed the artist to portray women naked or partially naked. (Convention in fifth-century Athens permitted only men to be depicted nude.) The scene reoccurs with the repetitiousness of pornography. But like pornography, the repetition cannot assuage the urge and the anxiety that lies behind it.21
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 3
