A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (6 page)

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.

Dear Spartan girl with a delightful face,
Washed with the rosy spring, how fresh you look,
In the easy stride of your sleek slenderness.
Why, you could strangle a bull.
³⁸

Much to the outrage of Aristotle and other conventional moralists, Spartan women even wore short, revealing tunics. They were able to inherit their husband’s property and manage it. By the fourth century
BC
they possessed two-fifths of all Spartan land. The result was a seeming paradox – a militaristic society where women enjoyed greater freedoms and higher status than in Athens, the home of democracy.

Sparta faded into oblivion, its treatment of women cited only as an unnatural folly. Plato and Aristotle, on the other hand, survived to become the twin pillars of philosophic and scientific thinking in the Western world, supporting the massive edifice of Christianity. Plato’s Theory of Forms, with its inherent contempt for the physical world, and Aristotle’s biological dualism, in which females were seen as failed males, provided the intellectual apparatus for the centuries of misogyny that were to follow.

Roman women were the Greek male nightmare come true. They defied the misogynistic dictate (attributed to the Athenian statesman Pericles) that a good woman is one who is not talked about, even in praise. Obeying this had consigned the good women of fifth-century
BC
Athens to complete oblivion; today, not a single one is known by name. But the women of Rome made themselves known; a few have been talked about ever since. Messalina, whose name became synonymous with sexual excess; Agrippina, the woman of ruthless, ‘unnatural’ ambition who murdered her way to the top; Sempronia, the intellectual who abandoned the female sphere to enter the dangerous male world of conspiracy and revolution; Cleopatra, the brilliant seductress who plotted to rule the Empire and plunged it into civil war; and Julia, the emperor’s rebellious daughter who defied her father’s plans and threw the state into crisis. They
emerge from the pages of Rome’s historians and poets as flesh-and-blood examples of how men viewed women. Much of what is said about them is far from flattering. But men’s vitriol proves as powerful a historical preservative for women as does their desire. These recorded sentiments are an indication of the impact women made and the obstacles they overcame, including some of the most fearsome misogynistic laws ever codified.

The Romans were not original thinkers. They did not produce a new theory or philosophy to justify the oppression and dehumanization of women. The stereotypes that evolved in Greek culture were good enough for them (as they have been for many succeeding cultures, including our own). But Roman writers allow us to see behind them. In the literary and historical portraits of the handful of extraordinary women who helped shape one of the greatest civilizations the world has ever seen, we get a glimpse of their struggle to assert themselves.

A difference quickly emerges between the misogyny of the Greeks and that found in Rome. Greek misogyny is based on fears of what women might do if they were free to do it. However, as far as is known, if women challenged men, these actions were confined to their private world and only made public through the realm of the Greek imagination. But from the start, Roman women openly challenged the prevailing misogyny and made public their feelings and demands. Roman women protested their fate and took to the streets. In Rome, the veil of their anonymity was lifted. Women entered the public sphere, and made history. They intervened in wars and stopped them; they took to the streets in protest at government policy and changed it; they murdered their husbands; a few trained and fought as gladiators in the arena (evoking worrying images of Amazons); they subverted the authority of their fathers; they even sought personal satisfaction in their relationships, and rejected their role as breeders of rulers; and, perhaps most
disturbingly of all, they came tantalizingly close to political power. They provoked a backlash which mustered some of the biggest guns that literature and history have ever aimed at them.