Male anxiety about women boundary-crossers manifests itself most powerfully and memorably in Greek tragedy. All the tragedies that have survived were written by Athenian playwrights during one relatively brief period of the fifth century. Only one of them, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, has no woman character. The titles of over half of all the tragedies include either a woman’s name or some other female reference.22 Women were centre-stage and in a state of ferocious rebellion.
The tragedies nearly always take their characters and much of their plotting from the epics of Homer and his Bronze Age heroes, heroines and villains. It is as if modern novelists followed a convention which obliged them to base all their characters and plots on the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Questions have therefore been raised about how much these dramas can tell us about the lives and problems of real women. However, the question is not how accurately they reflect the behaviour of real women but how truly they express society’s anxieties about relationships between men and women. No one has doubted that they do.23
In Euripides’ Medea, the eponymous heroine slaughters her children to take revenge on her husband, the Greek mythological hero Jason, when he abandons her to marry another woman. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon, Clytemnestra takes a lover when her husband sails for Troy; she assumes state power and murders him when he returns. In Sophocles’ Electra, Agamemnon’s daughter goads her hesitating brother Orestes into revenging their father’s death by murdering their mother Clytemnestra. Antigone is the story of a woman who defies her uncle Creon, the king, to bury her brother, when he has forbidden it on pain of death. She pays for her rebellion by being walled up alive. Euripides’ The Bacchae tells how the women worshippers of the orgiastic wine-god Dionysus are transformed into Amazons. They rampage around the countryside, sack villages for plunder, defeat a contingent of soldiers in battle, and in ecstatic frenzy, tear King Pentheus limb from limb, when he tries to spy on their activities.
The tragedy in each case results when women defy the patriarchal order, breaking temporarily free from the confinement that it imposes upon them. The women do so while asserting the claims of ‘nature’. Their rebellion is often in the name of the family, which predates, and supersedes, the demands of the state. ‘We’ll have no woman’s law here while I live,’ Creon asserts when Antigone declares that her love for her brother obliges her to bury him decently, in defiance of the law.24
In rebellion, the tragic heroines cross the boundary between what is acceptable female behaviour and what is not, thereby becoming masculine, even Amazon-like. As Antigone challenges the law, Ismene warns her defiant sister: ‘We were born women . . . we were not meant to fight with men.’25
The message is mixed, if not contradictory. While the playwrights often convey sympathy with women for the suffering and the oppression that goads them into rebellion, the resulting violence and savagery reinforces the underlying anxiety that women are wild and irrational creatures, eruptions of nature who are a threat to the civilized order created by men. This expresses itself in one of the most powerful pieces of misogyny ever penned: In Euripides’ Hippolyta, Hippolytus declaims:
Go to hell! I’ll never have my fill of hating
Women, not if I’m said to talk without ceasing,
For women are also unceasingly wicked.
Either someone should teach them to be sensible,
Or let me trample them underfoot.26
While the injustices that women suffer are recognized, so is the necessity for maintaining the patriarchal order that perpetrates them.
The sense of woman as ‘the Other’, the antithesis of man, emerges powerfully from the dramas. This sexual dualism has been a characteristic of Western civilization ever since, partly thanks to Plato and Aristotle, who gave it philosophical and scientific expression.
Plato (429–347 BC) has been called the most influential of all philosophers – ancient, medieval, or modern. His ideas about the nature of the world have spread wherever Western civilization and its most crusading catalyst, Christianity, have taken root, shaping the intellectual and spiritual development of continents and nations that were undiscovered or unexplored at the time those ideas were formulated. Plato’s contribution to the history of misogyny is a by-product of this extraordinary impact but it is, in some ways, a paradoxical one.
Some have hailed Plato as the first feminist because in The Republic, his vision of Utopia, he advocated that women receive the same education as men. At the same time, however, his dualistic vision of the world represents a turning away from the realm of ordinary, mutable existence. This existence he held was an illusion and a distraction to be scorned by the wise man. It included marriage and procreation, lowly pursuits with which he identifies women.27 He himself never married, and exalted the ‘pure’ love of men for men higher than the love of men for women, which he placed closer to animal lust. His is a familiar enough dualism – identifying man with spirituality and woman with carnal appetites. But Plato gave it a kind of philosophic fire-power never seen before.
No philosopher’s speculations take place in a vacuum; however abstract or obtuse the thought, there are circumstances, real enough, to help explain it. ‘Plato was the child of a time that is still our own,’ wrote Karl Popper.28 His search for a higher, more perfect world beyond that of the senses took place against the background of years of starvation, plague, repression, censorship, and civil bloodshed. The events that shook the Greek world when Plato was a young man profoundly shaped him. Born into a wealthy Athenian family, he grew up during the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta that lasted almost continuously from 431 BC to 404 BC. Few wars have had such long-term consequences. The impact of the Peloponnesian War on Greece can be compared with that of the First World War on Europe. It led to the ruin of Athens and its empire. It brought about the end of one of the most extraordinary periods of intellectual and artistic achievement that civilization has ever enjoyed. It exhausted Greece, paving the way for conquest first by the Macedonians, and then by Rome. In the turmoil and confusion that followed defeat, a vengeful democratic regime forced Plato’s beloved mentor Socrates (469–399 BC) to commit suicide. The Peloponnesian War profoundly influenced Plato’s view of the world – this alone makes it a turning point in history. It bred in him a profound distrust, and indeed contempt, for democracy.
When Plato envisioned the first Utopia, it was as a totalitarian state, rigidly ruled by a permanent elite, the Guardians, with an underclass whose only role was to maintain society’s economic and agricultural basis. In the world of The Republic, frivolous pleasures such as love poetry and dancing are forbidden. The Guardians are allowed no wealth, and no form of personal adornment such as make-up. Plato, who viewed the body as essentially evil, often voices contempt for the mutable world of the senses.29 In the Symposium he calls personal beauty a ‘trifle’, and speaks of ‘the pollution of mortality’. ‘So when the current of a man’s desires flows towards knowledge and the like,’ he asserts in The Republic, ‘his pleasure will be entirely in things of the mind, and physical pleasures will pass him by – that is, if he is a genuine philosopher and not a sham.’ Nothing must be allowed that will distract the elite from contemplating Absolute Beauty and Absolute Goodness – surely a recipe, if ever there was one, for Absolute Dullness.
All of Plato’s work takes the form of dialogues between Socrates and his pupils. In The Republic, Socrates advocates the integration of selected women into the ruling elite (the Guardians) with responsibilities equal to those of men, based on his claim that women and men differ only in their biological roles and physical strength. They will be trained and educated alongside their male compatriots. Men and women Guardians ‘will live and feed together, and have no private home or property’.30 Mutual attraction between men and women Guardians is inevitable but ‘it would be a sin either for mating or for anything else in our ideal society to take place without regulation. The Rulers would not allow it.’ The aim is ‘to have a real p
edigree herd’ so the best must breed with the best. The offspring of their unions will be taken away from their mothers immediately upon birth and reared in a communal nursery. The mothers will be spared the time-consuming and exhausting business of breast-feeding their babies. State nurses will do that for them. ‘No parent should know his child, or child his parent.’ By eliminating private property there will be no need for the father to know his son, since there will be nothing to inherit.
In Plato’s work, equality for women has been achieved by the denial of the full range of their sexuality. They have become, in effect, honorary men. The only biological distinction acknowledged for them is that of reproduction. (Several thousand years later, some radical feminists would make the same claim – that men and women differed solely in their genitalia, and that all else was learned behaviour.) The female Guardians are permitted merely to breed and not to bond. Their offspring will be ‘mothered’ by the state. The control of sexuality is the key to the state’s domination of its citizens. It becomes an instrument of state policy. By breaking the bonds of the family, especially the relationship between mother and child, Plato’s Utopia attacks the notion of individuality itself. All totalitarian ideologies seek to erase individualism in order to ensure that the needs of the state are paramount.
The disparaging of mundane pleasures is among the aspects of Plato’s Utopia that can be found in the totalitarian states of the twentieth century. Seeing sex merely in terms of the task of reproducing the ‘pedigree herd’ foreshadows Nazi Germany’s obsession with the breeding of a master race. The sexless status of female Guardians would be duplicated by attempts in Maoist China to make men and women indistinguishable in their boiler suits. Most forms of poetry and music were actually banned during the fanatical censorship of the Taliban in Afghanistan, in their efforts to create a pure Islamic republic. During their rule, it was even a seditious act to open a hairdresser’s salon. From Plato onwards, it has been the goal of every totalitarian regime to stop women from putting on make-up.
The Republic also makes it clear that ‘the Other’ can take different forms, in this case racial. Socrates advocates that the ‘natural enemies’ of the Greeks are the barbarians, just as women are ‘natural enemies’ of men. The division of the world into warring principles makes it easy to develop exclusive categories of persons. It is no accident that misogyny and racism are often found in the same social environment.
Plato’s dualism takes on its most powerful philosophical expression in his Theory of Forms. The Guardians are expected to grasp it as their guiding wisdom and the most essential part of their education. Without understanding it, they will not know how to distinguish true Reality from false. For Plato, the true Reality is grasped only by the mind.
In The Republic he writes regarding the Theory of Forms:
We distinguish between the many particular things which we call beautiful or good, and absolute beauty and goodness. Similarly, with all other collections of things, we say there is corresponding to each set a single, unique Form, which we call an absolute reality.31
Plato also equates this higher ‘Reality’ with the Good, which is timeless in its perfection. In a discussion about the nature of God, he defines God as the supreme realization of this perfection, scorning the Homeric pantheon in which the gods change themselves into different beings like magicians. ‘Any change must be for the worse, for God is perfect Goodness.’
Plato’s Theory of Forms is the philosophical basis for the Christian doctrine of Original Sin, in which the very act of conception is viewed as a falling away from the perfection of God into the abysmal world of appearances, of suffering and of death. It provided the allegory of Pandora and the Fall of Man with a powerful philosophical basis. Before this Fall, autonomous man lived in a state of harmony with God. A falling away from God is, inevitably, with the intervention of woman, a falling away from the highest good. This dualistic vision of reality denigrated the world of the senses, placing it in an eternal struggle with the achievement of the highest form of knowledge: the knowledge of God. This vision profoundly influenced Christian thinkers in their view of women, who literally as well as figuratively, embodied what is scorned as transient, mutable and contemptible.
If Plato’s Theory of Forms made misogyny philosophically respectable, Aristotle (384–322 BC), Plato’s pupil, made it scientifically respectable. Because much of Aristotle’s science appears to the modern mind as ludicrous, it is easy to forget that his doctrines dominated Western thinking about the world for close to 2,000 years. It was not until the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century that his ideas were overthrown. ‘Ever since the beginning of the seventeenth century, almost every serious intellectual advance has had to begin with an attack on some Aristotelian doctrine,’ observed Bertrand Russell.32
Aristotle has been described as one of the most ferocious misogynists of all time. His views on women take two forms: scientific and social. Although at times Aristotle was a precise observer of the natural world – his descriptions of various species impressed Charles Darwin – his observations of women were decidedly warped. As a sign of women’s inferiority, he referenced the fact that they did not grow bald – ‘proof of their more childlike nature. He also claimed that women had fewer teeth than men, about which Bertrand Russell is said to have commented: ‘Aristotle would never have made this mistake if he had allowed his wife to open her mouth once in a while.’33
Aristotle introduced the concept of purpose as fundamental to science. The purpose of things, including all living things, is to become what they are. In the absence of any knowledge of genetics, or of evolution, Aristotle saw purpose as the realization of each thing’s potential to be itself. In a sense, this is a materialistic version of Plato’s Theory of Forms: there is an Ideal Fish of which all the actual fishes are different realizations. The ideal is their purpose.
When applied to human beings, notably to women, this has unfortunate but predictable results; it becomes a justification of inequality rather than an explanation for it. The most pernicious example is seen in Aristotle’s theory of generation. This assumes different purposes for men and women: ‘the male is by nature superior and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; the principle of necessity extends to all mankind.’ Therefore, according to Aristotle, the male semen must carry the soul or spirit, and all the potential for the person to be fully human. The female, the recipient of the male seed, provides merely the matter, the nutritive environment. The male is the active principle, the mover, the female the passive, the moved. The full potential of the child is reached only if it is born male; if the ‘cold constitution’ of the female predominates, through an excess of menstrual fluid in the womb, then the child will fail to reach its full human potential and the result is female. ‘For the female is, as it were, a mutilated male,’ Aristotle concludes.34
Much of Aristotle’s discussion of women takes place in the context of his treatment of slaves. Slaves, like women, are purposed by nature to be the way they are. Aristotle argues, however, that slaves lack the ‘deliberative faculty’, whereas this is granted to women. Nonetheless, this faculty is ‘without authority’. Obedience is seen as a woman’s natural state, in which she achieves her purpose. And women and slaves are similar in one important respect: their inferiority to their ruler – a master in the slave’s case, and a husband in the woman’s – is permanent and unchanging.
The consequences of seeing females as mutilated males could be heard at night, in the world of Classical Antiquity, when newborns’ cries disrupted the silence. ‘If – good luck to you! – you bear offspring, if it is a male, let it live; if it is female, expose it,’ wrote Hilarion to his wife Alis, in 1 BC, testifying to a custom that lasted until Christianity became the dominant religion of the Roman Empire.35 Unwanted infants were abandoned on rubbish dumps. The majority of those exposed were deformed or sickly males or ‘mutilated males’ (baby girls). It was such a common practice that the cries
of the abandoned babies are unlikely to have disturbed the citizens’ repose. Archaeologists studying burial remains in Athens of the seventh century BC made the startling discovery that there were twice as many men as women interred in the plots. By 18 BC, the historian Dio Cassius was lamenting that there were not enough women for upper class men to marry. Females, one scholar wrote, were ‘selectively eliminated’. When combined with high mortality rates during childbirth and abortion, this practice ensured that men always outnumbered women, in significant ratios.36 But not all the exposed daughters died. Because abandoned infants were automatically reduced to slave status, brothel owners frequented dumps, searching for baby girls to raise as prostitutes. We will never know how many millions of Pandora’s daughters ended up on the rubbish dumps of Greece and Rome – some dying of hunger and cold; others, more ‘fortunate’, destined for a life of prostitution.
A population imbalance in favour of men has been associated with lower social status for women. Today, we find this in parts of India and China, where the selective abortion of female foetuses has meant fewer women than men, and women’s status suffers accordingly. Women become ‘scarce goods’ and are confined to the narrow roles of marriage and child-rearing.
Where females outnumber males, on the other hand, they enjoy a corresponding rise in status.37 Sparta has been cited as proof of this phenomenon. The victor of the Peloponnesian War, and the model for Plato’s Republic, Sparta was something of an anomaly: It practised infanticide, but did not discriminate between males and females, only between healthy and sickly babies. All healthy babies were raised and, since males tend to be sicklier than females at birth and have more complications, fewer females were exposed than males. The fact that Sparta was a militaristic state and frequently at war further drastically increased the male mortality rate. Moreover, Spartan women married at an older age than was typical at that time, so they had a better chance of surviving pregnancy. Because women were expected to be strong in order to be fit mothers of Spartan warriors, their health was of concern to the state. To the horror, and no doubt fascination, of the rest of Greece, they exercised naked, took part in athletic games, and generally tended to be stronger and fitter.
A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Page 4
