The woman was first deceived, and it was she who deceived the man.
Hence the apostle Paul told that women were subject to the stronger
vessel, obeying their husbands as their masters. And Paul says: “Adam was
not deceived, but the woman was deceived and was in sin.”
—St. Ambrose, De Paradiso
We have already seen religious teachings that condemn women. Virtually every faith, monotheistic, polytheistic, apostolic, or animist, has something hostile to say about menstrual blood and female reproductive functions. In addition, most religions blame woman, not man, for concupiscence, because it is supposedly her irresistible attractiveness that provokes male lust. Most religions contain an ascetic tradition and therefore a potentially misogynistic component.
In most of the world’s messianic religions—in which God’s revelations are set down in writing by prophets—sin is brought into the world by women. It is always First Woman, never First Man, who, because of innate character flaws, capitulates to the devil’s blandishments. As St. Ambrose (c. A.D. 339–397) writes, the First Woman, weak and sensual, is easily deceived and in turn deceives the man, thereby condemning all mankind. Eve is the guilty party in Christianity as well as in its sister faiths, Judaism and Islam, but Eve’s role as the devil’s gateway is played by female surrogates in practically all other origin myths, such as the Greeks’ Pandora. So in a sense, one can say that the malevolent-maiden motif finds expression in the guise of First Woman, the primum mobile of evil.
When we discussed Buddhism as practiced in Burma (Myanmar), we cited some examples of sacred writings, theological dramaturgy, and homiletic poetry that criticize woman for her grave flaws. More than other East Asian Buddhist traditions, the Burmese form of Buddhism takes umbrage at feminine treacherousness, and warns men repeatedly about letting down their guard against this ubiquitous menace. Spiro shows that Buddhism regards human biological drives, especially libido, as unhealthy and anarchic, interfering with the search for salvation. Buddhism emphasizes the moral defects of woman, the primary one being her supposedly exaggerated libido, unrestrained and surpassing the male’s. If Buddhist monks are believed to be morally pure because of an ability to control their sexual appetites, females are morally defective since their sexual ardor is said to be insatiable (Spiro 1997:21).
The result of this moral defect is that women are excluded from attaining the spiritual levels reached by men. The highest goal in life is to achieve perfect wisdom, or nirvana. The main obstacle to this goal is libido, which enfeebles self-control and impedes the spiritual quest. Not only does women’s insatiable sex drive make nirvana impossible for them, it also presents a danger to men who seek transcendence:
according to Buddhism . . . sex is a base drive and an insurmountable obstacle to ultimate salvation (nirvana) whose achievement requires, among other things, the extinction of sexual desire. The stronger one’s libido, then, the lower one’s position on the scale of spiritual progress—which is one reason that females, given their putatively powerful libido, are believed to be spiritually inferior to males. (Spiro 1997:154)
That women are sexual predators who lead men to perdition is enshrined in the traditional writings in the Burmese canon, in particular the Culla-Paduma Jataka, a traditional text that is the basis of a famous drama in Burmese classical theater (Spiro 1997:154). In this lengthy narrative, a virtuous and naive young man is seduced by a woman and dragged down to sexual debauchery. His fall is explained by a character in the play who says that a woman is to blame. According to Burmese Buddhist lore, the female libido is as wide as the ocean and as intense as a roaring fire. Note again the association of women with fire, sin, and other dangerous things. Enshrined in writ, this unity of women and fire takes on canonical authority.
Other Burmese religious authorities assure us that a woman’s sexual impulse is eight times stronger than a man’s. Her libido is also much less governable, less amenable to cultural constraint than a man’s (Spiro 1997:22). In the many texts cited by Spiro, man comes across thus as morally superior to woman, who is invariably depicted as morally defective and spiritually inferior (22–24). His anarchic sexuality is governable, hers not; she is more animal-like.
Such misogynist notions are enshrined in other sacred texts, such as the homiletic poem the Andabhuta Jataka, which holds, for example, that “All women work iniquity” upon the world (23). They do this by seducing men from the righteous path and debasing them with lustful thoughts:
’Tis nature’s law that rivers wind;
Trees grow of wood and kind;
And, given opportunity, All women work iniquity.
A sex composed of wickedness and guile,
Unknowable, uncertain as the path
Of fishes in the water—womankind
Hold truth for falsehood, falsehood for the truth! (23)
As well as charging women with falsity and sexual guile, the texts call them faithless and dishonest. Much the same accusation is made in Burmese secular folklore and ideology. Again, woman’s iniquity is a thickly layered, insidious danger requiring unflagging vigilance in both secular and spiritual realms. In the authoritative traditional play Paduma, the eponymous hero proclaims women’s infidelity in a celebrated diatribe known to every Burmese schoolboy: “They will even kill their rightful husbands the moment they want a new lover. Their lust blinds them. . . . They receive all, just as a roaring fire receives all rubbish. . . . One is more certain of one’s ability to drink up all the waters of the ocean, than of the faithfulness of one’s wife” (Htin Aung 1937:231). Another passage in the Andabhuta Jataka says: “You couldn’t be certain of woman, even if you had her inside you and always walked about with her. No woman is ever faithful to one man alone” (Spiro 1997:25). It is clear that woman is being blamed as a scapegoat for man’s sense of disillusionment at the faithlessness of life. Aside from all this emphasis on woman as sinner and corrupter of man through her carnality, Burmese Buddhism denounces her for intentional cruelty and perversity. Such categorical indictments can be found in a host of companion works of literature.
Rather than being unique to Burma, according to Spiro, these prejudices are found in the Thai and other versions of Buddhism. He summarizes all these Southeast Asian Buddhist misogynistic beliefs as follows: woman is intrinsically dangerous to man because she leads him astray through sexual enticement; she distracts man from his spiritual quest through her false promises of love and tenderness; rather than nurture him, she betrays him. In all versions of Southeast Asian Buddhism the cause of this wickedness is the same; woman is cursed with three defects: an immodest and powerful libido, a polluting vagina, and a powerful sexual allure. The dangerous female who burns men to ashes is an inherent aspect of the Burmese and Southeast Asian ascetic complex and cannot be separated from coexistent and everyday supernatural beliefs and practices.
Burma reflects a set of holy teachings stressing what might be summarized as an ascetic misogyny, placing the blame for temptation of all sorts on women. Such devotions are therefore necessarily aggressively hostile to women and to sex itself, with which of course women are linked (Sponberg 1992:18). Some of this sexual hostility may derive from prevailing East Asian social views regarding sexuality and gender predating Buddha, but it is consecrated by incorporation into the early texts of Buddha’s teachings, as Alan Sponberg (1992) argues in his syncretic study of Asian gender attitudes. But the antagonism goes beyond woman’s sexual allure, and woman is blamed for virtually all human flaws, and specifically for a perverse failure to nurture man as he wants and expects. An example of what he calls this particularly “virulent” brand of all-encompassing antifeminism in early Buddhism comes from a dramatic text, the Anguttara Nikaya, which tells the story of the wandering hero Ananda.
At one point in his adventures, Ananda comes across Buddha and asks, “Pray, Lord, what is the reason, what is the cause why womenfolk neither sit in a court [of justice], nor embark on business, nor reach the essence of [any] deed” (that is, why are women to be excluded from rational discourse?). The Buddha replies, “Womenfolk are uncontrolled, Ananda. Womenfolk are envious, Ananda. Womenfolk are greedy, Ananda. Womenfolk are weak in wisdom, Ananda. That is the reason, that is the cause why womenfolk do not sit in a court of justice, do not embark on business, do not reach the essence of the deed” (Sponberg 1992:18–19).
Sponberg also cites excerpts from an even more virulent antiwoman text, “The Tale of King Udayana of Vatsa,” which is a component sutra from the Maharatnakuta, an important sacred collection:
All desires are suffering, the vilest of evils
The impurity of pus, extremely despicable . . .
Like the overflow from a toilet or the corpse of a dog or a fox.
In the Sitavana cemetery pollution flows everywhere.
The evils of desire are contemptible like these.
Fools lust for women, like dogs in heat.
They do not know abstinence.
They are also like flies who see vomited food.
Like a herd of hogs, they greedily seek manure.
Women can ruin the precepts of purity.
They can also ignore honor and virtue . . .
As the filth and decay of a dead dog or dead snake are burned away,
So men should burn filth and detest evil.
The dead snake and dog are detestable,
But women are even more detestable than they are . . .
Women are like fishermen; their flattery is a net.
Men are like fish caught by the net. (Sponberg 1992:21)
Burma’s northern neighbor China also partakes of the Great Tradition of classical Buddhism, but with some differences. Unlike Burma, Tibet, or Thailand, which are largely monolithically Buddhist, China, a much larger and more diverse country, hosts numerous religious traditions, none of which can be said to be central. These overlapping traditions include various forms of Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, and remnants of ancestor worship, as well as the mystic teachings of sages such as Mencius. We have already seen that in traditional Chinese Buddhism and Taoism, women were not considered clean mainly because of menstrual blood and other bodily effluvia (Ahern 1978). Likewise, in Chinese traditional ancestor worship, which often coincides with Buddhist observance, the ancestral spirits are highly offended by the presence of menstruating or lactating women.
In a recent study of modern Chinese literature, the Chinese-American literary critic Tonglin Lu (1993) mines another rich vein of misogynistic thinking. She ascribes this attitude to ancient concepts stemming from sacred and philosophical texts in the Chinese literary tradition. For example, she places what she calls the “misogynist discourse” of popular writing within a venerable context: in China, she argues, the search for a marginalized and demeaned Other has essentially taken the form “of misogyny” (1995:4). With few ethnic divisions to inspire prejudice, the majority Han Chinese focus on the female sex as the denigrated other, the opposite, the negative mirror-image. Woman’s beguiling sexuality is part of the blanket condemnation, but not all of it.
Tonglin Lu supports this idea by noting that in the Confucian tradition women are seen as “inferior men” (xiaoren) who have none of the qualities of superior men. A famous Confucian saying reflects this notion: “Women and inferior men are difficult to deal with,” stressing woman’s perverse and way-ward nature (Lu 1993:13). Other Confucian proverbs stress woman’s animal-like impulses and passionate nature, her lack of emotional self-control, her evil tongue, and her susceptibility to disorder and sin. Lu shows that women are often portrayed as beastly or atavistic in contemporary fiction, just as they are in ancient texts in which femininity is often related to animality (1994:145). She notes that in Confucius’s writings, the sage usually refers to women as xiao, “little, mean, inferior” (1995:9).
Western feminists have often denounced official Christianity, especially Catholicism, because of the blame it places on Eve as well as for its all-male hierarchies and proscriptions against female “rights” such as sexual freedom and abortion. But the Christian Bible contains very little that could be called overtly misogynistic. However, a number of villainesses do appear in the Bible, women who tempt good men into sin or worse, and themselves scalp, behead, and castrate heroes with abandon. But these femmes fatales are no more prevalent and no more evil than the myriad male villains of Christian myth; a man, Judas Iscariot, for example, is the prime villain in the New Testament. The chief scourge of the Old Testament, Satan, is without any real sexual identity in the texts, but is nevertheless normally presented as male.
Yet the scribes of the Bible are not free of antiwoman pronouncements. In Proverbs we find the rhetorically misogynistic question: “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.” That evaluation certainly attests to a stereotypically negative attitude toward woman’s moral nature in the Judeo-Christian tradition in general terms, rather than toward individual female sinners for specific acts of sexual transgression. In her study of literary woman-hating, Katherine Rogers also points out that the story of Genesis, by inverting a normal birth and portraying Eve as emerging from Adam’s body rather than the other way around, provides evidence of antiwomen feelings, since it steals from woman the power of procreation and thus makes woman secondary, an afterthought (Rogers 1966:3). Feminist political scientist Linda Coole agrees, musing that the biblical reversal of birth implies that women are inferior (1988:44).
More tellingly, there are several lines from biblical apocrypha that might arouse feminist indignation. One warns against “the ruinous power, which women can exercise over men.” Another addresses the iniquity of womankind: “All wickedness is but little [compared] to the wickedness of a woman” (cited in Rogers 1966:13). But these sporadic critiques, after all, come from the apocrypha, the suppressed writings, which means that they were bowdlerized by a male interpreter, whereas the Bible, the official, edited testament of the Christian faith, cannot be labeled as misogynistic as the Buddhist texts we have examined above.
Still, if one takes a closer look at the uses made of Christ’s teachings especially among the theologians of the early Middle Ages—a time of great obsession with sin and the devil—one can see the validity of feminist assertions against the European Church and its pronouncements. Flesh-and-blood men twist lore and shape sacred revelations to suit their irrational antiwoman beliefs and feelings, reinventing holy writ for their own purposes.
Biblical scholar Elaine Pagels in Adam, Eve, and the Serpent (1988), as well as other students of early Christianity, have shown that ecclesiastical misogyny is a product of the formal association made by the founding clerics between sin and woman’s nature, their belief that carnality originates in the woman’s genitals, which are viewed as a trick or trap in which the devil ensnares the innocent male. This, of course, is only a crude form of what I have called Melanesian misogyny, in which sex is denounced as a trap or a pollution. “The guilt is hers, not theirs [the men’s]” (Blamires 1992:4). In medieval Christianity especially, as in Burmese Buddhism, woman was not seen simply as a passive object of man’s carnal appetites, but as “the incarnation of sin, the temptation of the flesh” (Bakhtin 1984:240).
As Bloch argues (1991:78), much of this emphasis on the sinfulness of female sexuality and woman’s shamefulness as sexual predator stems from St. Augustine’s defining struggles with his own lusts and his angry renunciation of the pleasures of the flesh. The patristic writers concluded that the idea of woman was virtually identical with the supervenient and the contingent, with the realm of the senses, that woman existed in the flesh in specific revealed contrast to the world of the spirit, which is both pure and male, “virtuous and godly” (65). The Manichaean division between man (spirit) and woman (flesh) is thus God’s intention: unquestionable and immutable.
So again we see male sexual guilt as the emotive inspiration for antiwoman feelings as a system of self-serving morality: an effort to exonerate the self by isolating and blaming the other. By claiming that the object of desire is the source of desire, one neatly sidesteps complicity. As Bloch astutely notes (1991:59), the Manichaean worldview of the early Christian puritans was one of ceaseless temptation in which flesh-and-blood women were not autonomous human beings with a soul, free will, and a chance of salvation, but were “snares” and “lures”—that is, the bait of the devil, the embodiment of sinfulness, objectified things rather than complex and feeling human beings. And of course the aspiring male saints and holy men were surrounded by such subhuman temptations living in the real world, so that the mundus mulieris (world of woman) was not a neutral place or environment, but a living assault on their senses, an insidious temptation to be renounced and denounced if salvation were to be achieved.
In a typical diatribe, Bishop Marbod of Rennes (c. 1035–1123) writes about the wickedness of women in his popular book La Femme fatale: “Countless are the traps which the scheming enemy [the devil] has set throughout the world’s paths and plains: but among them the greatest—and the one scarcely anybody can evade—is woman. Woman, the unhappy source, evil root, and corrupt offshoot, who brings to birth every sort of outrage throughout the world. . . . Woman subverts the world; woman the sweet evil, compound of honeycomb and poison” (Blamires 1992:100–101).
The message about “sweet evil” and poison originates not with Marbod in the twelfth century, nor with St. Augustine in the fifth, but rather with the apostle Paul in the first. Paul (or the writer of some of the material attributed to him) can be legitimately cast in the role of the first official Christian misogynist, as is indeed suggested in Ambrose’s attribution in the epigram that opens this chapter, credited with the epochal act of inextricably linking sensuality and woman with sin in the Western world. A recurrent theme in the great world religions, sexual sin in formative Christianity, takes on the additional feature of original sin, a “poison” (once again) in the human bloodstream; even in marriage it retains a certain detrimental connotation within the bounds of scripture.
First Corinthians expresses contempt for woman and stresses repeatedly that she must remain subservient to man, not just to preserve an orderly family life, but for moral reasons, as ordained by God. She represents not only raw sexuality but also childlike depravity, and only man can act responsibly: “Let wives be subject unto their husbands in everything,” urges Ephesians, with the underlying message that male dominance is necessary because woman is morally weaker and more susceptible to sensuality than man. Besides, women have the awesome power to lead men from the straight and narrow and to defile them with lascivious thoughts. Women are more dangerous to men than anything else on earth because of the seductive power of their bodies (Rogers 1966:11). In her treatise on Western political misogyny, Coole (1988:44) sees this theme as simply a carryover from the ancients or, as she puts it, a mental recycling of classic Greek misogyny. But there is of course an additional impetus in Christianity: women are not to be trusted because of their association, through Eve, with original sin; they carry the burden of the Fall (Coole 1988:43–44). Woman constantly betrays man; she disappoints and disillusions him like a bad, indifferent mother.
This antiwoman dogma inherent in the Christian liturgy continues throughout the early period of Roman Christianity and the dark and early middle ages. Saturninus, in the second century, declared that “marriage and procreation are of Satan,” and he called chastity the supreme Christian virtue, upon which every moral quality depended. Not long afterward, St. Athanasius proclaimed that virginity and chastity were the supreme revelations brought into the world through Christ’s teachings and declared concupiscence to be the primary obstacle to a state of grace. “Every woman,” said St. Clement of Alexandria, “ought to be filled with shame at the thought that she is a woman.” And St. Ambrose equated even conjugal relations with sin and shame: “Married people ought to blush at the state in which they are living, since it is equivalent to prostituting the members of Christ” (Lederer 1968:162–63).
Theological misogyny, which achieved a kind of formal legitimacy in the earliest thinkers, gathered steam throughout the high middle ages, culminating in the works of such clerics as Walter Map, Andreas Capellanus, and Jean Le Fèvre (author of the Lamentations of Maltheolus that so incensed Christine de Pizan). Included also are Tertullian (of “Devil’s Gateway” fame) and of course the martyrs and celibate mortifiers-of-the-flesh like St. Jerome the hermit and St. Anthony, who likewise took a detour from the way of all flesh by hiding out in the wilderness.
Saints Jerome and Anthony, perhaps, represent the archetype of virtuous men tempted by female softness, then depicted as soldiering against enticing but deadly sirens. Numerous Renaissance and early modern paintings of St. Jerome in the desert and St. Anthony in the wilderness portray the valiant struggle of these saints who turned their backs on lurid voluptuaries and retreated into Spartan sanctuaries. Prime examples are Hieronymus Bosch’s surreal St. Anthony Tempted by the Devil-Queen (ca. 1500), in which the seminude siren is depicted coyly concealing her private parts with a diaphanous curtain, and Francisco de Zurbarán’s Temptation of St. Jerome (1638–40), in which the maidens are depicted as pretty musicians, playing come-hither music as the virtuous saint fends them off. Thinking aloud in his work Adversus Jovinianum (393), Jerome reproaches woman as a human “atrocity,” the scourge of mankind, the principal cause of sin in the world.
While focusing on specific females as examples, Jerome’s condemnation is categorical and dogmatic. Like Juvenal in his Satires, Jerome maintains that women cause war, incite murder, and abet other atrocities (Coole 1988:53). Considering these categorical views, the celibacy of the Catholic priesthood is a foregone conclusion, as is the resultant strength of male resolve against the iniquitous enchantments of female flesh: as the Church struggled gradually to “shun the two-legged she-beast,” it is not surprising that there was a hardening of the inclination among those same clerics to see woman merely as a sexual snare employed by the devil.
Many of these ascetic fanatics were so suspicious of the “two-legged she-beast” and so consumed by sexual guilt and other frustrated longings for tender female ministrations that they either ran away from human society to become recluses, as in the case of desert-dwelling St. Jerome, or remained celibate and permanently avoided female contamination. Not even the sanctity of marriage was immune to the shame of sex; these anchorites fulminated not only against women in general but against marriage as an institution. This convergence of phobias, mixing misogyny with misogamy (fear and hatred of marriage), produced a curious sexual nihilism, almost exclusive to Christian Europe, that is purely male and that reverberates throughout Western history, to an extent rarely encountered elsewhere, except perhaps, as Spiro argues, in Burmese Buddhism.
Like misogyny, misogamy is firmly entrenched throughout Western literary history, as is shown in a book by Katherine Wilson and Elizabeth Makowski (1990). A classic example, in modern Western literature, is Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Kreutzer Sonata. In this misanthropic diatribe written apparently during a period of marital troubles, Tolstoy has his puritanical hero, Pozdnyshev, denounce all sex as sinful, even conjugal sex. Not unlike St. Jerome, Pozdnyshev advocates universal celibacy. This view, although extreme, reflects Tolstoy’s attitudes at the time and, in fact, Tolstoy himself spoke of this novella as reflecting precisely his emerging ascetic religious beliefs (Rancour-Laferriere 1998:65). As a specifically Christian thinker, concerned with questions of sin and redemption, Tolstoy is, it is sad to say, in good company. For example, both Ambrose and Tertullian declared that the extinction of the human race was preferable to its propagation by sexual intercourse (Lederer 1968:163). Deeply disturbed by visions of sensual, gratifying women, saints Jerome, Anthony, and Hilarion would probably have also agreed. But obviously, the extinction of the human race is only a second-best solution to the extermination of the female sex, or as Jukes (1994:315) calls it, “gynicide.”
The antiwoman, antisex hysteria reaches it apogee, perhaps, in the early Christian period with Quintus Septimus Florens Tertullian (c. 160–c. 225), a pagan from Carthage who converted to Christianity around 197, became a priest, and as we have seen, began a tradition that identified woman as the gateway to hell. Another example of misogynist rage appears in the works of Walter Map (c.1140–1209), a respected member of Henry II’s court who later became the influential archdeacon of Oxford. In his misogynistic screed, The Letter of Valerius to Ruffinus, Against Marriage (c. 1180), he reproaches women in the most scurrilous terms for sin and depravity, holding them accountable for causing the men who love them “bitterness of fear, anxiety, and frequent misfortune,” as well as for being demonically deceitful, lustful, and for harboring in their breasts the unending desire to do harm. Map envisions a world without women and is mightily pleased with the image.
Women, for Map as for so many other of these clearly disturbed male thinkers, are equivalent not only to carnality but to the failure of the human enterprise itself. Taken to its extreme, this prejudice comes close to advocating something akin to gendercide—the elimination of women—if not by actually murdering them (none of these writers went that far), then through the demographic device of attrition by celibacy and ultimate human extinction (for which male extinction would be an acceptable price to pay).
We have seen that except for the story of the Fall (Genesis), some snippets in the Apocrypha, and a few allusions to menstrual pollution (Leviticus), the Bible does not dwell specifically on the malevolence of womankind (as, one might argue, do the Qur
an and some Buddhist texts). Yet the Old Testament does in fact conjure up a stereotype of the destructive femme fatale in several hyperbolic mythical incarnations. One could refer to these ancient villainesses as biblical bad girls, because in their maliciousness and disastrous impact on men under their influence, they resemble the bad-girl model of today.
These biblical temptresses cut a wide swath: Jael kills Sisera the Canaanite after lulling him to sleep with soothing milk and a surfeit of maternal concern (Lassner 1993:24); cruel Delilah does a hatchet job on Samson’s glorious mane; the witch Jezebel manipulates men with her evil wiles; and demonic Lilith is an enigmatic and powerful force of nature whose corruption is exposed in Hebraic scriptural caveats.
Biblical scholar Jacob Lassner, in a lengthy book about the “demonization” of females in Christian lore as well as in Hebrew and Islamic texts, argues that this constantly reappearing portrait reveals “a terrifying fear” that grips men throughout the history of the Middle East—where all three religions originated—and that still lingers there and in the mind of Christian Europe. The fear is that woman, circumventing man’s domination through deceit and seduction, would make short shrift of civilization and reduce men to servitude, obliterating their chance at salvation; that is, left to their own devices, dangerous female creatures would change the nature of the world as we know it.
Destroying civilization is bad enough, but these inherently amoral females would also defile motherhood. By evading maternal responsibilities, they would unleash chaos in the nursery, and humanity would ultimately become extinct:
The implications of this course [rejecting motherhood] are self-evident. If the danger to the newly born and those [who] would be born is realized, humankind will not be able to sustain the species and in time will become extinct. Therefore, it is imperative that men, and the women of their household as well, do everything to maintain the separate roles that nature has designed for them at God’s behest. In any event, that is what texts ancient and medieval say they ought to do. (Lassner 1993:35)
This fear of wanton, amoral women who reject the duties of motherhood has deep roots in many cultures, Lassner concludes, and is as insistent as the fear of woman’s unleashed sexuality (33). It is in fact both curious and disturbing to see how woman as a human transgressor is magnified in male fantasies into a threatening and nonhuman force, super- and subhuman at the same time, allied with Satan and Chaos, endangering the universe. The contradictory messages reflect the extraordinary degree of male inner conflict and confusion: woman wants to overpopulate the world by enticing man into frenzied fornication, yet she also wants to extinguish the human race by abrogating her maternal role and renouncing sex.
This ambiguity along with the contradictory imagery of condemnation will become a major focus in later chapters, when we explore the psychological and cultural roots of many male distortions and inconsistencies. Nowhere is this gender ambivalence manifested so strikingly as in the cult of the Virgin Mary in southern Europe. Latin Christianity, unlike other world religions, places a woman, and a mother once again, at the heart of God’s grace. The Madonna is both a beacon of goodness, a goddess in her own right, and the mother of God—the essence of purity. Marian worship therefore presents a significant counterweight to misogyny in Christianity. Consequently, all is not so clear in the Christian vision of woman; we will look more closely at this basic contradiction in Chapter 10.
The Islamic scholar Abdelwahab Bouhdiba, in a book that can be seen partly as a defense of Islam against its feminist critics, admits that misogyny constantly recurs as a theme in Arab culture (1985:119). He acknowledges that the Qur
an and other Arab-Muslim holy texts swarm with resolutely antifeminist declarations (117), a leitmotif in historical and contemporary Islam (the topos once again). Many staunchly feminist anthropologists concur with this assessment, even though there has been much recent emphasis on reconciling feminism with Mohammed’s teachings (Ahmed 1992; Stowasser 1994; Varisco 1995).
The revisionists contend that the Quran is less misogynistic and more sexually “egalitarian” (Ahmed 1992:66) than some feminists allow. According to these observers, the feminist anthropologists have distorted the holy texts for their own realpolitik (Stowasser 1994:134) and are guilty of “orientalism.”
Bouhdiba even maintains at one point that Islamic civilization is essentially feminist (1985:116)—definitely a minority view, but one supported by Arabist scholar Daniel Varisco and a few other Arabist ethnographers. Furthermore, Middle Eastern and Mediterranean misogyny, they claim, certainly did not appear suddenly with Islam but rather predates both Mohammed and the Christian era by centuries. Lila Ahmed, for example, claims that whatever the cultural source or sources, a fierce misogyny was a distinct ingredient of Mediterranean and eventually Christian thought in the century immediately preceding the rise of Islam (the seventh century a.d.). One form it took, she notes, in the pre-Christian era was female infanticide: the practice of infanticide, predominantly of girls, predated both Christianity and Islam (1992:35).
However, even with the best intentions, this Islamic “antiorientalist” revisionism resembles the frequent effort of Marxists to revivify communism by pronouncing that all current socialist regimes are corruptions of the one true faith. Despite the ambiguity and even ambivalence in the Quranic view of women and her “nature,” for the most part, Islamic cosmology and morality, as adumbrated by Mohammed and his followers, indict woman: for her body, her incendiary sexuality, and her spiritual defects.
The Quran (4:34) says quite unequivocally that God made men superior to women, that men “have a status above women,” and that men have the right to command over “the inferior sex.” It also stipulates that a male should inherit twice as much as a female (4:11); in addition, the scripture gives men, but not women, the right to initiate a divorce (the aggrieved husband only has to call two honest men to witness), and to take more than one spouse (65:1). “Women are your fields,” says Mohammed in sura 2; “go, then into your fields whence you please,” thus making women chattel for men to own, use, and abuse as they wish. Many other elements supporting women’s inferiority have been identified in Muslim texts, including the following: men are permitted multiple wives, women may only have one husband; virginity is required for the bride but not the groom; in case of divorce, children belong to the husband, not the wife; women must observe a strict curfew from sunrise to sunset, while men may wander at will; husbands, not wives, are empowered to select the place of residence after marriage; women may not make eye contact or talk with a stranger, while men are at liberty to do so; women must be covered from head to toe, men not; women cannot work outside the home without the consent of their husbands; most marital property belongs to the man except for the woman’s personal jewelry; women are generally excluded from mosques, courtrooms, and all other places of power and privilege; for management of property belonging to her own children, a male relative must usually give consent, and so on ad infinitum.
Legally, the secondary sacred Islamic texts—not the Quran but the law books such as the Hadith and the Sharia, restrict women’s freedom, providing males exclusive authority not only in divorce but in most contractual, domestic, and religious matters. In what is essentially a feminist defense of Islam, the social historian Shala Haeri asserts that Middle Eastern women do have some defined rights in these scriptural texts but she admits that women’s rights are always inferior to those of men, and that woman is generally considered “half a man” (1989:27).
This diminishment holds true in both the orthodox Sunni and Shiite branches of Islam. Assumptions of female deficiency, presumably rooted in anatomy, saturate Shiite literature (Haeri 1989:68). In his typically understated way, Bouhdiba says, “Male supremacy is fundamental in Islam” (1985:19). He emphasizes the moral rather than political justification for masculine privilege; women are considered innately amoral, obdurate, frivolous, and therefore incapable of religious purity and moral gravity. And because of their passionate nature, women are not only lesser humans, innocent waifs needing masculine protection, but also dangerous and even demonic figures.
Picking up the common misogynistic thread uniting the world’s great religions, Islam makes a direct association of woman with satanic powers. The Muslim Book of Marriage equates woman with the devil: “She resembles Satan in his irresistible power over the individual” (cited in Mernissi 1987:42). Upon his nocturnal ascension to heaven, Mohammed declared (in an infernal vision vouchsafed by Allah) that “hell was populated above all by women” (Bouhdiba 1985:117), who were the devil’s agents in their power over men. The Prophet also warned that “No group prospers that appoints a woman to rule over them” (Lassner 1995:74). And in a verse attributed to Mohammed on his deathbed, the still-wary Prophet cautions against woman’s terrible destructive power: “After my disappearance,” he warned, “there will be no other greater source of chaos and disorder for my nation than women” (Varisco 1995:10).
Finding ammunition aplenty in such declarations, Mohammed’s misogynistic followers often advanced his radical view of woman as evil. The Imam Ali, an influential early theologian and political leader, said that “woman is wholly evil; and the worst thing about her is that she is a necessary evil” (i.e., for lawful procreation). The pious fourteenth-century Muslim poet Zayn Ibn al-Wardi wrote that “women constitute the basis of all fitna (revolt against God), since they are the principal element in Satan’s traps” (Bouhdiba 1985:118).
The allusion to fitna, or chaos, is the kernel of Islamic condemnation of woman. A polysemous word in Arabic, fitna means not only chaos, disorder, and social anarchy, but also, in a curious homology, a nubile, pretty woman (Stowasser 1994:55). Virtually all Islamic scholars agree that fitna signifies the importunate sexual attraction of women as well as moral collapse and general societal destruction (Varisco 1995). Indeed, according to the Moroccan feminist scholar Fatima Mernissi (1987:31), the fitna concept unites “chaos or disorder” and femme fatale, the beautiful woman who makes men lose self-control; thus the term suggests and encourages an unconscious identification of woman with illicit sex and sin. No matter what one’s views about woman in Islam, one is drawn to conclusion that woman’s “nature” is dangerous to the established moral order and that women are inherently defective in the eyes of Muslims. Barbara Stowasser (1994:13) points out further that the diatribes against female sexuality and women in general are immutable because Mohammed’s words represent literally God’s words and an unchangeable revelation to humankind.
The attack on woman as the source of sexual shame and sin is nowhere more antagonistic than in Muslim North Africa. Throughout this region women are unambiguously considered to be more impulsive, less self-controlled, and more sexually aggressive than men (Geertz 1979:332). The theme of fitna reaches a climax in the Maghreb, especially in Morocco, where woman is a “lascivious temptress” (Maher 1978:119), an evil seducer, corrupting and destroying men through her insatiable and peremptory lust (Dwyer 1978:151). In the eyes of many males in this part of the world, women are the major threat to male-created social institutions: women are a repository of powerfully destructive “id forces” (Rosen 1979). Even in non-Arab but Muslim Turkey, female sexuality is said to be explosive “like gunpowder” and equally destructive to social order (Fallers and Fallers 1976:258).
Mernissi supplies the reader with a multitude of Moroccan proverbs, verses, and holy writ that hammer home the misogynistic consensus and that harp on female defects both sexual and ethical. One of the best examples of the Muslim distrust of women is found in the still popular verses of the sixteenth-century poet Sidi Abderahman al-Majdoub. Throughout Morocco his sayings are household axioms:
Women are fleeting, wooden vessels
Whose passengers are doomed to destruction.
And:
Women’s intrigues are mighty.
To protect myself I run endlessly.
Women are belted with serpents And bejeweled with scorpions. (Mernissi 1987:43)
Poisons and serpents yet again.
Deeply appalled, Mernissi perhaps goes too far in her blanket statement: “The entire Muslim social structure can be seen as an attack on, and a defense against, the disruptive power of female sexuality” (45). In any case, one can easily see that the male fears constituting the essence of Islamic misogyny are yet again guilt-reducing projections of sexual desire onto women; the entire enterprise is a form of paranoid delusion in which women are scapegoats for all of man’s own failings. Islamic misogyny, Bouhdiba states, is really “a flight before women as the source of uncontrollable desires in the male self” (1985:116).
Varying little from Western monotheism in its basically negative view of the female sex, Hinduism also regards menstruation and other female bodily functions as defiling and unclean. Other similarities with the misogyny of the revealed religions abound. In Nepalese Hinduism, for example, there is the same striking emphasis on woman as chaos, social disruption, and moral disorder: woman represents all the unruly forces that work against purity, restraint, and reason in the world. The Nepalese Hindu man must constantly guard against the unruly and destructive forces of female degeneracy or face dissolution (Bennett 1983:218).
But Hindu misogyny also has a rare, peculiarly superheated quality stemming from the luxuriant imagery of deadly she-demons in its pantheon: diabolical figures that find few parallels in the Middle Eastern and Western canons. Throughout the Hindu texts, one encounters an upanishadic tendency toward misogyny and a “deep-seated” distrust of woman in all her guises (Doniger 1980:129, 133). This tendency, in accord with the rich iconography and pictorial mythology of classical Hinduism, assumes some highly idiosyncratic imagistic representations of the familiar malevolent maiden: mystical figures, deities, and exotic personifications. Doniger (133) refers to the Hindu women-blaming as yet another form of “ascetic misogyny,” related to the underlying fear of sexuality as “extremely dangerous” to man’s mental and spiritual health.
This view is endorsed by many other Hindu scholars. For example, Lynn Bennett, writing about Nepalese Hinduism, agrees with Doniger that the ascetic tradition, based as it is upon a profound misogyny, is quick to challenge the chastity of any woman, noble or not (1983:220), thus impugning the essential moral fiber of the entire sex. However, for Doniger, the question is not which comes first, asceticism or misogyny, but rather, how these themes interrelate and reinforce each another, especially in iconography and devotional practices.
Doniger seems to argue that the hatred for women is coterminous to, if not actually prior to, canonical anxiety over sex in Hinduism. She notes that the view that sex is evil is the natural consequence of the general misogyny of the Indian ascetic tradition and the upanishadic doctrine of the chain of rebirth: “reproduction traps men in the painful cycle of existence. Orthodox Hinduism, too, was prone to misogyny in its caste laws restricting the freedom of women” (Doniger 1976:27). In her opinion, the turning away from sex is only part of the problem, which is caused not only by liturgical injunctions against lust but also by a curious “gynecomorphic” preoccupation in the Hindu imagination that goes beyond sex, giving rise to a plethora of monstrous mothers and man-eating demons such as the famous death-goddess, Kali. Equipped with death-dealing weaponry and dripping blood, this ferocious she-creature turns desire into fright, intercourse into castration, motherhood into murder, love into death, dramatically embodying man’s most profound terrors of the deadly female. The lurid figure of Kali is familiar to Westerners as the bloodthirsty, multiarmed, sword-wielding fiend of Hindu mythology. She is the goddess of death, the taker of life, oppressive and frightening, the impersonation of terror.
But Kali is not the only protean she-demon in Indian lore, which is richly populated with gruesome female figures—among them the bloodthirsty virgin warrior Durga and her emanations, Camunda, Mahisamardini, Yogi Nidra, and Ambika. The goddess Durga is one of the many forms of Devi (Bennett 1983:261). Carstairs (1958:157) describes the goddess Mataji in equally terrifying terms: “everyone worships the Mataji, the Goddess, who is a protective mother to those who prostrate themselves before her in abject supplication, but who is depicted also as a sort of demon, with gnashing teeth, who stands on top of her male adversary, cuts off his head and drinks his blood.” This demon mother-goddess has the same appearance as a witch.
Deeply impressed by all this bloody imagery, part sexual part maternal, Lederer (1968:chap. 17) nevertheless regards Kali as simply one among a global multitude of fantasies about the diabolical female scourge dressed in religious garb along with witches and enchantresses: an iconography of feminized terror and a recurrent theme of embodiment or gyneco-anthropomorphism, the tendency to visualize and animate all manner of phobias in the shape of woman, often in the guise of monstrous mother. Lederer points out that Kali resembles the female figure of Chicomecoatl in pre-Aztec Mexico, the Terrible Mother who devours her husband and children. Kali also finds a parallel in the later Aztec Snake Woman, who appears in devotional imagery and drinks from a bowl of blood. Malekula, the man-devouring ogress of Polynesian lore, and various Celtic war-goddesses and Nordic woman-deities also mutilate, castrate, or kill their male adversaries. And of course, all these she-demons and murderous succubi bear uncanny resemblances to the sirens, lamias, naiads, sorceresses, evil stepmothers, and witches of Greek and Roman mythology: all female warriors and killers seducing men into moral amnesia if not murdering them and drinking their lifeblood with abandon. The sexual aspect is of course critical, but there is much more involved than sex; there is also the fear of the bad mother who gives death not life.
This kind of multitextured misogyny finds scriptural support everywhere. Whether or not religious antifeminism predates and stimulates its secular forms is a question often debated, especially by Islamic and Christian scholars, but essentially the question is a chicken-and-egg one. The causes of such complex feelings are deep and broad and resistant to any monocausal explanation, or one that relies only on sexual guilt and Oedipal elements. As we shall see in the next chapter, some other, purely secular causes of misogyny lie deeply embedded within the very structure and sinew of many societies.