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

by Holland, Jack

  Shortly after the occupation of Kabul, in September 1996, the Taliban debated whether or not the peepholes in the chadri were too big. The veil had turned a woman’s face into a sexual organ, and it has to be negated, denied, and repressed at all costs. Not only woman herself, but anything to do with her is infused with her sexuality, especially her clothes, which the Taliban will not touch. A man, his wife and daughter were fleeing the country. He avoided having his suitcases searched simply by telling the Taliban guards: ‘This is my wife’s suitcase, and these belong to my daughters,’ and the guard steps back.410 Rarely has the horror and fear of the female body expressed itself so eloquently, or manifested itself so explicitly.

  Some have sought explanations for this misogyny in the nature of Islam itself. It is easy to dig out quotations from various mullahs condemning women’s beauty as evil and the work of the devil. But in this the Islamic tradition is in fact little different from that of Christianity and Judaism. It shares with them a common inheritance rich in misogyny (though in works such as The Perfumed Garden it incorporated the erotic influence of the East in a way the Christian tradition never has). The historical traditions to which Islam is heir were no doubt influential, but an explanation for such unrelenting misogyny as the Taliban embodied must be sought elsewhere.

  The Taliban have been compared to an all-male brotherhood of holy warriors like that of the Medieval Crusaders.411 A more recent parallel might be drawn with the origins of the Nazi party, whose policy towards women was aimed at driving them out of the public sphere into a domestic prison where they were expected to perform their only true function: reproduction.

  Both the Taliban and the Nazis were products of war, disillusionment, and frustration. The Taliban emerged from the Pakistani refugee camps, where millions of Afghanis had fled during the war against the Soviets, and the all-male world of the religious schools that wealthy Saudis set up and funded in Pakistan to teach a reactionary form of Islam deeply hostile to the West. Many who flocked to these schools were orphans, with little or no contact with women. In the Taliban, this all-male world would consolidate into one that was profoundly antagonistic to women, and not a little afraid of them.

  Both movements attracted men brutalized by years of death and destruction, men whom humiliation had embittered. For the Germans who joined the National Socialists, Germany’s defeat in the First World War was the catalyst of their anger; for those who joined the Taliban, it was the humiliation of their country and its traditions at the hands of lawless brigands funded by America, and more broadly, the humiliation of Islam, as the influence of the West spread throughout the Middle East. The Nazis had the beer halls, an all-male domain like that of the trenches, the veterans and paramilitary associations that they created after the war. For the Taliban, the Koranic schools exercised a comparative function, where their anger and frustration could coalesce into an ideology whose misogyny is so extreme that it does not pasts the test of sanity. Had an individual expounded such doctrines, he would have been regarded (quite rightly) as insane. But, as has been noted before, once religion sanctions a belief, our ordinary notions of what distinguishes the insane from the sane are thrown out the window.

  As in the all-male milieu of the Nazis, it is not surprising to find also a strong homoerotic element among the Taliban. Shortly after the fall of the Taliban in late 2001, an American journalist visiting their stronghold of Kandahar was surprised to find a photography shop with photographic portraits of Taliban fighters, some of whom were wearing eyeliner. He learned that it was not uncommon for these fundamentalists to do what was utterly forbidden to women: paint their finger and toe nails with henna. Some even wore high-heeled sandals, which gave them a mincing, feminine gait. These ‘Talibanettes’ were tolerated in the capital of a state that brutalized and mutilated women for putting on make-up and where the official punishment for homosexuals was to use bulldozers to crush and bury them alive.412

  Hypocrisy is inevitable when moral restrictions defy human nature.

  Unfortunately, hypocrisy also remains a fundamental part of the West’s relationship to the Moslem world. Until after 9/11 the governments of the West largely ignored the Taliban’s violations of human rights and the many atrocities that they were responsible for that were specifically aimed at women. In February 1997, the French government invited the Taliban Minister for Health, Mullah Mohammed Abbas, to Paris where on the very day that two women were executed in Kabul for committing adultery he was received by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the President of the National Assembly. ‘A “Minister for Health”,’ commented one Afghan woman, ‘who bars women from hospitals,’ who forced women doctors and nurses out of work, and closed day-care centres. Abbas was an ‘uneducated mullah’ who was not even a doctor. The invitation caused some Afghan women to despair that ‘if France is welcoming a talib, that means the Taliban propaganda has worked.’413 In May 2001, just four months before the attacks on the United States, President George W. Bush congratulated the Taliban because they had cracked down on opium production and compensated them for the loss of revenues with a check for $43,000,000.414 All this time, the Taliban were providing facilities for training the men, followers of Osama bin Laden, who would attack the United States and its allies.

  There was some satisfaction in knowing that in the American air strikes against Taliban targets that began in October 2001, at least one of the pilots involved was a woman. But it is, in the end, small compensation for the decades of misguided policies the West has pursued that helped create the Taliban in the first place.

  In the years since the fall of the Taliban, the United States and its allies have been funding health and education schemes for women in an attempt to repair the havoc the years of war and fundamentalism have wrought on the medical and school systems. ‘Maternal mortality in Afghanistan is at catastrophic levels,’ a UNICEF official reported a year after the Taliban had fled. In one province, between 1998 and 2002, 64 per cent of women of reproductive age who died did so from complications associated with pregnancy.415 The efforts to educate girls has seen improvised schools opening in remote rural areas, as well as a resurgence of schools in the big cities. However, Afghanistan remains unsettled and the fundamentalist threat still thrives. In late 2002, four girls’ schools were attacked in villages south of Kabul. Near one a message was left which warned: ‘We call on all our countrymen to save their clean sisters and daughters from this infidel net. Stop carrying out the plans of the Americans or you will face further deadly attacks.’ Local police said the attackers were either Taliban supporters, or those still loyal to Hekmatyar.416

  One of the lessons of Afghanistan, and of the Middle East in general, is that the treatment of women is not a foreign policy issue for the United States unless, as under George W. Bush, there is the prospect of aid money going to family planning clinics that offer abortion services. Misogyny, unlike racism, is never an issue when Washington’s foreign policy hawks survey the global balance and pick their allies and their enemies. Women’s rights continued to be denied systematically in states such as Saudi Arabia and Pakistan that are close allies to the United States. Yet, unlike racism, misogyny is regarded as a quaint if sometimes upsetting cultural trait, with which outsiders do not interfere. It is like the days, not too long ago, when wife beating was a domestic dispute that was nobody’s business.

  Our recent history should have made one thing clear. Women’s rights are human rights. Any foreign policy that fails to recognize this effectively dehumanizes half the human race.

  IN CONCLUSION:

  MAKING SENSE OF MISOGYNY

  When I told people I was writing a history of misogyny I got two distinct responses and they were divided along gender lines. From women, came an expression of eager curiosity about what I had found. But from those men who knew what the word ‘misogyny’ meant, there came a nod and a wink in an unspoken assumption that I was engaged in justifying it. If I had said I was writing a history of racism, I do not think
anyone would have concluded automatically that I was a racist. It suggests that unlike racism, misogyny is not seen by many men as a prejudice but as something almost inevitable.

  For much of human history, misogyny has been part of what the holocaust historian Daniel Goldhagen has called (in reference to anti-Semitism) ‘the common sense of society’.417 It was a prejudice that was too obvious to be noticed. In different civilizations, at different times, the historical record is clear: it was regarded as perfectly normal for men to condemn women or express outright disgust at them simply because they were women. All the world’s major religions, and the world’s most renowned philosophers, have regarded women with contempt and a suspicion that sometimes amounted to paranoia. In Classical times, when Athenian women were forced to stay in doors for most of their lives, or when during the end of the Middle Ages, women were being burned alive as witches, it was not seen as the result of a prejudice against women, in spite of the fact that both societies had a long history of denigrating and demonizing them.

  A prejudice can exist a long time before it has a name.

  Today, in many parts of the world, practices such as veiling, seclusion and clitoridectomy are still accepted as part of society’s ‘common sense’. According to the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, women still own less than 1 per cent of the world’s property. UNICEF reports that 120,000,000 children do not go to school, 80 per cent of them in sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, the vast majority of them girls. In early 1993, it was reported that a clinic in Bombay, India aborted 8,000 foetuses, 7,999 of them female.418 As George Orwell has said, ‘To see what is in front of one’s nose needs a constant struggle.’419

  Misogyny still flourishes in some corners of Western culture. Where males feel humiliated and angry, women still provide the universal scapegoat. A 1990 rap song by the group called Geto Boys declared, ‘She’s naked, and I’m a peeping Tom/Her body’s beautiful so I’m thinking rape/Shouldn’t have had her curtains open, so that’s her fate.’ In the verbal currency of rap, women are ‘bitches’ and ‘hoes’ (whores). Rappers are not the only proponents of misogyny in popular culture, and far from the first. Even during the 1960s and 1970s, a period remembered by many for its celebration of love and sexual freedom, pop groups such as the Rolling Stones had hits with songs like ‘Under My Thumb’ and ‘Stupid Girl’. In 1976 the Stones released an album called ‘Black and Blue’ which was advertised with a picture of a beaten woman tied to a chair. However, hostility to women seems to be at the very core of rap culture. A young black man from a ghetto in Chicago, speaking about the rapper Ice Cube who was notorious for his hostility to gays as well as women, commented that he liked his music because it is ‘talking the truth, that’s the way it is in my neighborhood. There’s a lot of tension between women and men in the neighbourhood, a lot of guys who act like pimps and a lot of women who act like bitches and whores.’420 Even though rap’s blatant contempt for women has come under attack, both from black women and others, it is clearly the product of a culture of alienation and frustration where misogyny still remains part of the society’s ‘common sense’. It is yet another reminder of the power of contempt for women to replicate itself in different cultures like an almost indestructible virus.

  What history teaches us about misogyny can be summed up in four words: pervasive, persistent, pernicious and protean. Long before men invented the wheel, they invented misogyny, and today, as our wheels roll over the plains of Mars, that earlier invention still blights lives. No other prejudice has proved so durable, or shares those other characteristics to anything like the same extent. No race has suffered such prejudicial treatment over so long a period of time; no group of individuals, however they might be characterized, has been discriminated against on such a global scale. Nor has any prejudice manifested itself under so many different guises, appearing sometimes with the sanction of society at the level of social and political discrimination, and at other times emerging in the tormented mind of a psychopath with no sanction other than that of his own hate-filled fantasies. And very few have been as destructive. Yet, these very features that should have made misogyny stand out have rendered it in a strange way inconspicuous. In the case of misogyny, we have too often relinquished the struggle to see what is in front of our noses.

  In November of 2003, the latest in a long line of American serial killers, Gary Ridgeway, stood in a Seattle court and repeated ‘guilty’ over and over again to charges of strangling forty-eight young women, mostly prostitutes, during a period of two decades.421 Had the victims of his murderous rampage been Jews or African Americans, there would have been a national alarm sounded, and acres of print covered with soul-searching questions about the state of race relations in the United States as we enter a new millennium. But the actions of a Ridgeway, or a Jack the Ripper, are usually left to a psychiatrist to explain. Their urge to kill women is seen as an aberration when in truth it is simply an intensification of a commonplace prejudice. The spectrum of misogyny, which runs from the contempt of ‘cunt’ scrawled as a curse word on bathroom walls to the murderous rage of a serial killer, seems too wide, too extreme, to lend itself to any one easy explanation, though that has not stopped people from trying. Indeed, surely one of the main justifications for writing a history of any hatred or prejudice is to uncover its source in order that we may find a way of ending it. It must be more than just a collection of acts and words that display men’s contempt for women.

  As I have already suggested, the history of misogyny shows that this is an especially difficult task. The reason is obvious. It lies in the complexity of the relationship between women and men. It is biological, sexual, psychological, social, economic and political. It is a Gordian knot of interwoven dependencies, involving our very existence both as individuals and as a species. If we cut through that knot, where among the tangled skeins will we find the source of men’s contempt for women?

  Every level from the biological to the political at which women and men relate to each other has generated a theory of misogyny. All of them assume that at the core of this contempt is men’s fear of women stemming from the recognition that women are different from men in potentially threatening ways. The history of misogyny certainly confirms men’s obsessions with how women differ from them in a manner real or merely perceived as real. For men, women are the original ‘Other’ – the ‘not you’. People have an alarming tendency to convert any category of persons designated as such into scapegoats. And before there were different races, religions or classes, there were women and men. But woman presents a more complex problem for those who designated her as ‘the Other’. She is ‘the Other’ that cannot be excluded. Racists can avoid interaction with the despised group. But intercourse with women is in the end unavoidable, even for misogynists. Tribesmen in the highlands of New Guinea and aborigines in the Amazon basin may bar her from their sleeping quarters, Athenian gentlemen may lock her in the remotest part of the home, Catholic theologians seclude her behind convent doors, and Moslem fanatics hide her behind the head-to-toe veil, but intimacy with her is as unavoidable as it is essential. The very maintenance of human life and society depends upon it.

  Dependency, fear . . . contempt. The theories that attempt to explain this bundle of conflicting feelings generally suffer from one of two failings: they are either overly ambitious or not comprehensive enough. In the first category, that of overly ambitious theories, are the biological, sexual, psychological and psychoanalytical explanations. The biological theory declares that ‘essentially, the female is the primordial or basic form of the foetus’ that undergoes transformation into a male foetus with the release of the androgen testosterone from the sixth week to the third month of pregnancy.422 Maleness is seen as a superimposition upon primordial femaleness back into which men fear they will return. That is, ontogeny repeats phylogeny – the development of the individual duplicates that of the species to which he or she belongs. Misogynistic characterizations of women as swamps, bogs, mia
smas, pits and so forth, are common enough, and are said to be an expression of this dread of engulfment. Sexual theories of men’s fear of the vagina as an engulfing and/or castrating organ also reflect this notion of engulfment. Equally ambitious are the psychological and psychoanalytical hypotheses, Freudian and otherwise. These blame early dependency of the male infant upon his mother, or his unrequited love for her, as the culprit. In later life, this supposedly creates anger and resentment towards all women. Freud’s theory that misogyny is based on the boy’s contempt for the girl’s ‘puny’ clitoris also fits into the category of ambitious explanations that seek a universal scope (see Chapter 7).

  That is precisely their weakness. Since all males arise from female foetuses, and all boys are dependent on a mother during their most impressionable and formative years, and all men who have sex with women experience ‘engulfment’, these theories predict that all men must be misogynists. But the fact is that not all men are misogynists. Misogyny is only a part of the history of woman’s relationship to man. If it were the entire story, then the progress that women have made towards equality in Western or Western-style democracies over the last two centuries, which has been achieved with the advocacy and support of men, would hardly have been possible. Nor would books such as this get written. It suggests that the fear of the primordial female within, or the desire for revenge on the pre-Oedipal all-powerful mother, are not universal determinants of how men relate to women.