Woman’s at best a contradiction still.

—Alexander pope, Moral Essays, Epistle 2

11. Ambivalences

What the previous material shows is that men’s feelings toward women are contradictory, labile, bifurcated, and ambivalent—to put it mildly. Ambivalence occurs when one experiences diametrically opposed emotions at the same time: the affected person is drawn in opposite directions, torn by incompatible emotions. He feels anxiety because he cannot reconcile the clashing feelings.

The word “ambivalent” (ambi-valent, having two “valences” or directional charges, as in electrical current) was apparently coined by Freud’s contemporary Eugon Bleuler in an article written in German in 1910 (Weigert 1991:20). By coming up with ambivalenz, Bleuler was attempting linguistically to capture what he saw as the divided emotional state from which so many of his neurotic patients suffered. By the time of Freud’s later career, the concept had already become a basic tenet of the psychological understanding of how the mind works. A powerful heuristic tool, the concept of ambi- or bivalence underlies most other psychological notions such as repression, psychic conflict, and anxiety. When ambivalent affect occurs, the mind often responds by driving the struggle into the unconscious, thereby protecting the ego against paralysis and breakdown. In the prevailing psychoanalytic view, ambivalence is a “stressful condition from which the sufferer seeks escape,” often by means of seizing upon an ideology of absolute certainty, that is, by choosing some rigid belief system or delusion, or other mental resolution that provides superficial relief (Weigert 1991:23). The outward signs of this inner struggle are neurotic symptoms, fears, and obsessions (Brenner 1974:100–1).

As the reader will have surmised, it is the basic argument of this book that a series of multilayered ambivalences (the term is intentionally plural) in men lies at the heart of the misogyny affliction. At least judging from the material presented in the preceding chapter, and taking Melanesia and Amazonia as prime examples of the extremes to which antifemale prejudice can go, it seems abundantly clear that many, if not most, of men’s feelings about women are a hodgepodge of strongly contrasting impulses, starkly contradictory affects and fantasies. Unlike some who have studied misogyny, I believe this tension-ridden state, not simple hatred or a wish to dominate, accounts for men’s denigration of women.

This effort stems from the fact that the object of ambivalent feelings produces a fixation unlike any other psychic condition because each side of the affective equation stimulates and exacerbates the other unceasingly, sparking an endless and dynamic tension; as a result, the object looms excessively large in psychic importance. In misogyny the engines of conflicted emotions involved are the peremptory male desire and need for the female and the unconscious discomfort that such feelings prompt on the behalf of the superego, leading to powerful, constant, but ineffective repression. Ambivalence is a supercharged tie because of the ego’s desperate attempts to deal with the dynamic tension created between the extremes of feelings and the intolerable sensations such tension produces. This struggle creates the obsessive aspect, the unending fascination and the aggressive response.

The central tension often achieves social expression in a simultaneous series of ritualized manifestations of both disavowal and imitation. We have seen ample evidence of this thesis in Melanesia and Amazonia. In these two hotbeds of misogyny, the otherwise fierce and brave warriors, who are afraid of no man, literally quake in terror before woman. Yet these very same warriors enact lurid rituals of female impersonation in which they go to extreme (albeit gruesome and masochistic) lengths to emulate the female body and its functions. These same men also passionately crave most lecherously the same female bodies, the same vaginas, the same sexual fluids that they outwardly despise as dirty and polluting. It seems that wherever we find misogyny, we also find its diametric opposite in equal measure: and this is the key to misogyny.

One must also point out the tendency toward masochism in misogyny, the pain men inflict upon themselves. Rather than only hurting women, misogyny also rebounds bitterly upon its perpetrators, a common enough psychological outcome when a powerful ambivalence leads to self-doubt and self-hatred. One is tempted to conclude, perhaps too glibly, that men who hate women hate themselves even more. What they really hate (and fear) is the “femaleness” within. So, like many self-destructive neurotics, misogynists cut themselves, draw blood from their veins, inflict painful rituals on their bodies, including mutilation, thereby realizing their own worst fears and fantasies of what women supposedly conspire to do to them. Even the most sophisticated men, who would scoff at the self-inflicted wounds of primitive peoples, often deny themselves a pleasurable sexual life by spurning women. Or else they constrict their own lives with phobias, delusions, and debilitating ritual practices. No man was more hobbled by this paradox than the otherwise brilliantly successful Johannes Brahms.

This said by way of introduction, it is now time to expand our double-edged perspective on misogyny to include a second look at the other societies and social categories we have described above. In each case we shall see, instead of a single-sided negative emotion, an amalgam of extremes: hate and love, side by side at every level, revulsion coexisting with attraction. I interpret misogyny as stemming from man’s basic discomfort about his passionate desire for woman in all her guises: not just as a sexual object, but also as the fantasized generous, loving mother, the brimming breast, the selfless comforter, the indispensable omnipotent goddess who nurtures boy and man. The result of men’s irreconcilable inner conflict is the proliferation of misogynistic institutions, beliefs, and practices as well as their opposite, gynophiliac practices such as cross-dressing and male menstruation. The latter are less common than the antiwoman manifestations, and are often more disguised because they contradict the admired masculine pose.

Western Ambivalences: Ancient

Even in the ancient Western world, sexual ambivalence was an insistent theme. Although the earliest Greek poets like Semonides called woman kakon, the worst of evils, they also called her kalon, the most beautiful thing—sometimes in the same breath. An example is Hesiod’s comment in the Theogony about woman as being the “beautiful evil” (kakon kalon). What this rather typical mixed usage shows, according to classical scholar Meagher, is that the Greek view of woman was never pure or one-sided, but essentially dualistic, a “living contradiction” (1995:51). This contrariness is true throughout the Greek corpus involving women: all men would willingly fight for Helen, as the poet says, as well as denounce her or kill her. And the Helen of myth stands for all women, for Woman: she is as desirable as she is dangerous, “fascinating and redoubtable” as well as sexually provocative, the apotheosis of perilous pulchritude (Lloyd-Jones 1975:26). Helen is at the same time object of both adoration and loathing, but she is loathed because she is so adored (Meagher 1995:67). The simultaneous but incompatible feelings she arouses are coterminous and inextricably linked.

In her study of misogyny in Western literature, Katherine Rogers (1966: 53–54) finds this same inconsistency in the Roman tradition, and in fact in all men’s writing about women, through the Renaissance up to the present day. She summarizes by saying that men’s fear, dislike, and contempt for women in the literary canon have always been accompanied by an equally intense “love and respect” for women, bordering on the fanatical. The enduring and chronic nature of this bitter inner conflict and the lack of a viable resolution are due to the eternal power of the extremes, for the more intense the relationship, the more it is likely to engender ambivalence. And the ambivalences so engendered are, in turn, infinite.

Rogers regards the Latin attitude about women a prime example of this paradox. The remark by Catullus, odi et amo (“I love and I hate”), in relation to one of his mistresses, accurately sums up this attitude among Roman men of letters (46). Latin love poetry, for example, rhapsodizes ecstatically about the charms and beauty of women, their lifegiving qualities, as well as their moral flaws, sometimes within the same work.

Early three-dimensional art, even before the Greeks, also expresses the theme of sexual dualism to a surprising degree. Dijkstra finds the theme already well developed in Egyptian statuary imagery, as in the paradoxical conglomeration of female features found in the hybrid figure of the Sphinx. “The Sphinx, soft-breasted mother and steel-taloned destroyer conjoined, was only one of the many Chimeras of womanhood expressive of the . . . extreme dualistic mentality” that characterizes man’s response to woman (1986:333). The mythical female figures that so terrified the ancients, the lamias, nymphs, hamadryads, and serpentine sea-creatures, were usually hybrids, both alluring and foul, voluptuous and odious.

Western Ambivalences: Medieval and Renaissance

The ancient “oxymoron” (Dijkstra’s term) of masculine attitudes toward women continued unabated throughout the Middle Ages. If anything, male attitudes became even more oxymoronic, because revealed religion further inflamed the moral struggle. Although the patristic churchmen reviled femininity as the devil’s trap, and in some ways even went beyond the Greek and Roman antipathy toward women by adding a brimstone element drawn from the parable of the Fall, these same clerics rescued women from some of the worst misogynistic abuses. For example, St. Augustine, despite his railings against sin and his unresolved conflicts about sex, also respected and revered women, painting them as purer and more pious than men at their best. In fact, according to philosopher Jean Elshtain, St. Augustine went further toward rehabilitating women than other men of his day and was indeed “one of the great undoers of Greek misogyny” (1981:73). What might seem a minority opinion is seconded by Coole (1993:47), in her review of politics and woman-hating in Western culture. As we have noted, this partial rehabilitation of woman in Christianity, especially in Latin Catholicism, stems in part from the growing attachment to the figure of the Virgin Mary in the high Middle Ages, which reaches its apotheosis in the worship of the madonna, the perfect mother, of the Renaissance.

Although the medieval and early-modern periods in Western history were perhaps the most misogynist of all, as Bloch (1991), Muir (1997), and Solomon (1997) have pointed out, the same time-frame also saw a cultural development in which women were exalted to the greatest extent in Western history, both abstractly and specifically. One has only to look at the theme of romantic courtly love to appreciate medieval and Renaissance gender ambivalence.

Bloch, for example, takes this gender contradiction as the central motivating phenomenon of medieval misogyny, which he calls a “both-at-once” and “bivalent” attitude (1991:67). Reviewing the mass of continental literature of the period, Bloch can only wonder at finding so many positive depictions of women alongside the innumerable negative portrayals (ibid.). He refers specifically to the institution of chivalrous love, which found its highest expression at this same time. In this courtly tradition, balladeers and troubadours, as well as monks and holy men, sang the praises of women extravagantly, devoting their lives to their service and exaltation. Woman represented an ideal of tender purity, fertility, and innocence, through whose worship a man might attain the highest spiritual plane. Men were worshipping woman even as they were casting her into the jaws of hell.

There can be no better manifestation of Christianity’s double attitude toward women than this paradox of romantic idealization coexisting with abject degradation. It is no coincidence, then, that the peevish Tertullian, author of many scurrilous antiwoman diatribes, blithely refers to women in the same breath as “The Brides of Christ,” simultaneously the devil’s agent in human form and the purest instrument of God’s grace. Supremely contradictory, symbol of both God and devil, woman was reified as man’s damnation but also as his salvation. While her body was an infernal trap, in her passive and sacrificial maternal goodness woman nevertheless represented a model of spiritual perfection. Rather than corrupt and destructive, she could also be purifying, uplifting, and life-giving.

Later in the Renaissance, the romanticized view of woman as pure and innocent finds further expression. One example is Edmund Spenser’s Faerie Queene, with its exaltation of Queen Elizabeth, whose sagacious rule further enhanced the reputation of women in England (Rogers 1966:135). Throughout the late medieval period and into the Renaissance, European knights swore fealty to a good woman, “mistress,” an unconsummated relationship continuing until death; it was a kind of secular holy quest, rather like Dante’s platonic admiration of Beatrice. The good woman became the avatar of the incorruptible, the holy.

A well-known example of this moral dualism is drawn from European folklore: “The Beauty and the Beast.” In the original French fable, which has come down to us in so many variants, an honest woman turns a horrid beast (actually an enchanted prince) back into a handsome man, reversing the usual order of the woman-induced zoological metamorphosis (Lederer 1968:164). No longer the “cruel beast” who brings out the animal in men, no longer the witch Circe who turns men into swine, woman has become the embodiment of the positively transformative forces of civilization, raising men up from animality rather than casting them down into it.

Nordic Ambivalences

One encounters the same splitting tendency in much Nordic literature, for example, in old Scandinavian folklore. We have seen examples of Icelandic mythology in which woman is the icy or poisonous river into which men fall and drown. On the other hand, as Linke points out, in the same body of oral literature the figure of woman is split into the “venomous river of ice” and a “milk-producing cow,” a bovine source of warmth and nourishment (Linke 1996:141–42). Mothers and motherhood are portrayed in starkly dichotomous terms in northern European lore as elsewhere; in Old Norse myths woman is either a “devouring” destructive monster or else the “all-good” nurturer. Both the sexual and the nurturing aspect of women are split and bifurcated to an astonishing degree.

Speaking of northern European folklore, one might mention the ancient legends that Richard Wagner used in his music dramas, all having strong moral messages. Although he uses females to symbolize vice (Venus, for example, in Tannhäuser, who entraps the knight-minstrel in her sybaritic paradise, or the temptresses in Parsifal), Wagner also uses them as symbols of purity paving the way to man’s redemption. The virtuous maidens Elsa and Elisabeth in Lohengrin and Tannhäuser respectively both “save” a conflicted man from spiritual ruin through selfless love. Both heroines are paragons not only of virtue but also of self-negation, nonsexual qualities that men of the time regarded as saintly (although Elsa’s curiosity about Lohengrin’s origins proves fatal in the end). The virtuous Eva Pogner in Die Meistersinger plays virtually the same redemptive role, rescuing the conflicted Walther from himself, symbolized by the laurel wreath she places on his head at the end of the opera.

Even more striking in this regard is Senta in The Flying Dutchman. In this tale of sin and redemption, the ghostly Dutchman has been condemned by the devil to wander endlessly from port to port. His torment can only be ended by the selfless love of a woman who will prove faithful “until death.” In a typical metaphor of spiritual transfiguration, the Dutchman is finally rescued from his cruel fate by the loving Senta, who leaps to her death in the final act shouting, “true to thee unto death.” Through her sacrifice, the curse is lifted, the Dutchman redeemed. His satanic ship finally sinks, and he and Senta are seen, transfigured, triumphantly rising toward heaven. In Wagner’s dualistic vision, as in most late Victorian literature and art, woman represents both death and eternal life for man, sin and salvation, carnality and purity, debasement and divinity. Her moral “weather” is as two-sided as the North Sea over which the restless Dutchman roams.

Western Ambivalences: Victorian

Throughout the nineteenth century, woman gets royal treatment as well as misogynistic abuse in literature and art. Often compared to angels and goddesses in English poetry, she is praised as “the nobler half of humanity” in the work of the early Victorian poet Charles Kingsley. In his poem “Yeast” (1848), Kingsley suggests that only woman can save man in a moral sense and speaks of the “Triumph of Woman” as leading to the redemption of all humanity (Rogers 1966:189). Rather than dragging man down, angelic woman raises him to lofty heights (the sexual double entendre of the “raising up” or “lifting up” conveys the sexual-moral ambivalence so redolent in sex-drenched Victorian poetry).

For other Victorian poets and artists, woman is “the priceless pearl” who sheds the light of God upon man. In the work of many idolaters, woman is the “finer” and “more noble” sex, more spiritual and more refined than man. For worshipful Victorians, woman is not only the duplicitous temptress who sullies man’s fragile ideals, but also the “jewel,” the “flower,” the possessor of a superior moral power nourishing the weaker and less noble male soul (Dijkstra 1986:8). Tennyson, in a typical prowoman elegy, The Princess, praises women in general, especially their purity of spirit, and extols their virtuous example. Tennyson’s contemporary Owen Meredith goes so far as to rehabilitate the original Eve and hold her forth as the ideal of mankind rather than the false betrayer depicted in morose medieval theology.

The art critic John Ruskin, who warned in Munera Pulveris against women’s power to bewitch, also lavished overwrought praise upon the fair sex in the same work. For Ruskin, a good woman turns the family into a sacred place, a vestal temple, and he constantly compares women to fragrant flowers: they are as pure, innocent, guileless, and life enhancing.

The British Victorian novelists incorporated both sides of woman in their work in an even more developed and stereotyped way, furthering the fragmented moral vision. We are all familiar with Dickens’s portrayals of such paragons of virtue as Dora (David Copperfield), Amy Dorrit (Little Dorrit), Little Nell (The Old Curiosity Shop), Lizzie Hexam (Our Mutual Friend) and so on, all of whom counterbalance his criminal and duplicitous female characters like the heartless Estella and the vindictive Miss Haversham in Great Expectations. As in Dickens, the nineteenth-century novelists’ image of woman is thus as rudely split as medieval and Renaissance representations, a classic case of the projective power of the inner contradictions within the masculine fear-hate/love-worship complex. Sometimes, as in Dickens’s portrayal of the complex Nancy in Oliver Twist, the two sides of woman appear within the same individual. Nancy starts out as a willing accomplice of archcriminals Bill Sikes and Fagin and helps them kidnap Oliver. But halfway through the book, she has a characteristically feminine change of heart and sacrifices her life to rescue the abused child. Woman in Dickens, as in much Victorian literature, often has an exalted function as a sort of natural, self-sacrificing priestess, closer to God than man, and a source for him of spiritual strength and encouragement (Slater 1983:307).

One finds this dualistic strain very powerfully in the transcendentalist novels of John Cowper Powys, especially in Wolf Solent (1926) and A Glaston-bury Romance (1932). In these dreamlike narratives, Powys portrays his female characters in almost pantheistic terms as mirroring both the fertile beauty and the wanton destructiveness of nature itself. He constantly compares them to lush saplings, trees, flowers, and other growing things, but also to ugly mushrooms, vegetative rot, windstorms, floods, and fire. Like so many other English novelists of the time (1850–1950), Powys uses “Woman” to symbolize both the best and the worst in nature and in humanity. She is worshipped for the sexual pleasure she gives man and feared for the same reason.

Unlike the Melanesian and Amazonian gynophobias, which emphasize bodily pollution and magical emanations, the Western strain of misogyny often takes on a rather moralistic and intellectual tone (“Swiftian” physical disgust being comparatively rare and confined to certain poets). Rather than being seen as polluting, woman is regarded from an ethical, rather than sexual standpoint, as wicked and destructive or as irrational and frivolous. The danger is moral rather than magical or biological. Western religions, the established Christian church in particular, confirms all this cynicism and disillusionment, at least throughout its formative and medieval periods. It is therefore not surprising that in the West the inevitable converse of misogyny, gynophilia, should also reflect moralistic pietism and should elevate woman to the position of salvation’s handmaiden, a kind of sexless “priestess” for man: a complete reversal of the woman-as-devil viewpoint.

Oddly, this Victorian idealization of a fragmented female imago has also had its detractors. So pervasive was the moral exaltation of women in the late-Victorian, early twentieth-century period that many, like D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, thought it went too far and so, in a curious kind of dialectic, reacted against it with a counterbalancing antifeminism. In English and American literature this reaction often included a defensive idolization of phallic masculinity. For example, Pound castigates woman as no more than a biological “process,” and D. H. Lawrence, in Aaron’s Rod, implicitly explains some of his fictional character’s misogyny (and by extension his own) as a defense against the great, smothering gynophilia of the day. He violently denounces “this great and ignominious dogma of the sacred priority of women”—the belief “that all that is productive, all that is fine and sensitive and most essentially noble, is woman” (1930:186–87).

Ambivalences in the Hindu Tradition: My Mother/My Cow

Let us turn elsewhere for further evidence, to India. To fully appreciate the many dualisms in Hinduistic views of woman, we must return to the earliest proto-Indo-Aryan deities of Asiatic prehistory. In the first stages of the Indus civilization, the archaeological evidence reveals a notable paradox: she appears simultaneously as fertility goddess and destroyer. To sum up, around the Eastern fertility goddess, whom many consider a prototype of Pandora, there is a bundle of associations. On the one hand this goddess is regarded as life-enhancing and all-giving, but on the other hand she is made responsible for the demonic seduction of men, for their death and damnation, as well as being associated with dirt, decay, and the chasm of the underworld. Thus the fundamental ambivalence of life-death, which we have been tracing all along, is once more repeated, as are those of lover-betrayor and nurturer-withholder.

It is noteworthy, from this perspective, that the dreadful castrating goddess Kali, one of the many forms assumed by the protean goddess Devi, has another gentler side as well, a side that connotes not only fertility but blessedness. There is, in fact, no other deity in the Hindu pantheon, male or female, who has such a divided, contradictory persona. On the one hand, the goddess-mother Devi is the bloodthirsty scourge, but another incarnation is nurturing Uma Parvati, the loyal wife of Siva. The terrible side of the Devi is represented by the bloodthirsty virgin warrior Durga and her hosts, who include not only Kali, but also the goddesses Camunda, Mahisamardini, Yogi Nidra, and Ambika—all killers. The gentle side of the goddess is perhaps best represented by Uma Parvati, devoted wife and mother. We might characterize this gentle aspect of the Devi as the pure, faithful wife and the gentle mother of Hindu lore.

The paradoxes of Hindu womanhood intensify at every turn. As Bennett concludes, the fact of her contradictory nature is what makes Devi-Kali so powerful as a symbol of woman as a platonic category and of man’s ambivalence toward her. Even the contradictions contain contradictions. The gentle Uma Parvati, although devoted and faithful to her husband, is so erotically stimulating that she is somewhat suspect in the Hindu canon. Even the ruthless killer Kali is closely linked with purity and asceticism, because an ideal of godly perfection drives her homicidal fury. Typical of the protean Hindu deities, they are not what they seem.

Clearly, in the Hindu pantheon, just as in the Christian, woman plays an ambiguous moral role. On one hand, sexual woman is persecutor, seducer, and corrupter of man; on the other, as mother, she is nurturer, comforter, and ennobling influence, both “dangerous” and “sacred” at the same time (Bennett 1983:316). This glaring paradox is best summarized by Sanskrit scholar Wendy O’Flaherty Doniger, who says that woman may be the cause of all evil in Hindu mythology, but “it is she who takes the burden of it away from man” (1976:141). She gives and she takes; she creates and she destroys. The nature of woman (to man) is a dualism, a paradox, a contradiction at every turn.

Turning to the Nepalese variant of Hinduism, we see how the “Hindu ambivalence about the female sex” (Bennett 1983:316) works itself out in a specific empirical case: matriolotry versus uxorophobia in Himalayan culture. We have already seen the negative side of this equation: hatred and fear of wives. The other side is the worshipful attitude toward sisters and, even more so, toward mothers. Just as Hindu misogyny often focuses upon the female’s bodily effluvia, especially menstrual blood, Nepalese matriolotry takes the same bodily focus in a curious and typical inversion: the veneration of mother’s milk.

Most female bodily functions in the village of Narikot, Nepal, have a negative connotation for the men. The striking exception is mother’s milk, which is literally worshipped as a gift from the gods and said to be pure, lifegiving, and holy. Like menstrual blood, breast milk is undeniably linked to sexuality and reproduction, however not with polluting or destroying powers, but, on the contrary, with its equally powerful creative, beneficial, and life-giving side. So deep is the respect for mother’s milk that it overcomes the negative aspects of female sexuality and purifies “female sexuality through motherhood” (Bennett 1983:252). Much of this transformation has to do with the religious linkage among three primary symbols in Hinduism: milk, cows, and women.

In Hinduism generally, milk and cows are sacred, and woman’s association with them provides her with a counterbalancing aura of holiness that actually neutralizes many of the negative connotations of female sexuality. In a paper on female purity in Hinduism, anthropologist Nur Yalman explains the threefold convergence:

And again it is most appropriate that the “cow,” the supreme symbol of the Hindu mother, should also be the most potent symbol (as well as main source) of purity. The cow is sacred . . . the giver of all things. . . . The association between cow and women (especially the mother) is, of course freely made. . . . The cow is sacred because it is like the mother . . . it provides milk. (1963:43)

Thus the stark nature of the misogynistic-gynophiliac split in the Hindu vision: the mother is associated with purity, milk, constancy, devotion, and selfless love; the wife with pollution, “rampant and debilitating sexual demands, menstrual blood and potential unfaithfulness” (Bennett 1983:255).

The veneration for mothers in the Hindu tradition, like the female river in Nordic mythology, tends to overflow its bounds and to touch all women by association. The reason for this excess is that all women are potentially mothers and can change from object of man’s erotic desire into paragon of selfless maternal devotion. Through metamorphosis, woman can turn man’s carnality into spirituality and can lead all men down the road to salvation. Indeed, the Hindu man can see the very face of God in a woman. Such a revelation is enunciated in the writ of many Hindu holy men, such as Swami Nikhilananda, a famous modern devotee of Ramakrishna:

By seeing God in a woman [man] gradually sublimates his carnal desires. Carnality, which seeks fulfillment through the physical union with a member of the opposite sex, is one of the deadly enemies with which spiritual seekers . . . have to wrestle. A woman can easily conquer it by regarding a man as her child. She is, in essence, the mother of all men, no matter what other relationships society may sanction or speak of. A man, too, easily subdues his lust by seeing in a woman the symbol of motherhood. (1962:82)

Buddhism, Yin and Yang

Taking the Japanese variant of Buddhism as an example, we have already seen that a menstruating woman not only might escape polluted status in the Buddhist canon, but can be valued as the opposite and be given a “sacred status” (Smyers 1983:10). In addition, in early Japanese Buddhism, before the condemnatory Tokugawa edicts, women were sometimes seen as exerting a purifying power. Not only were women not seen as inherently polluted beings; they may even have “the power to remove pollution.” It is a curious fact that in the Obaraekotoba, the ritual prayer for the very solemn semiannual purification of the Japanese nation, “the four kami [spirits] who are invoked are all female”(M. Harding 1971:125).

Furthermore, in classic early Buddhism, woman is granted a positive soteriological role. Buddhism in its origins was above all a pragmatic soteriology, that is, a theory of human salvation that sought to free humanity from suffering and to lead mankind to the exalted state of perfect wisdom. Curiously, rather than a bar to, or diversion from, wisdom, as is often the case in the misogynistic Buddhist texts that condemn woman as diverting men from holiness, in some holy Sanskrit teachings woman is paradoxically given a central and facilitating role in this search for perfection. The concept of wisdom, always a prime Buddhist virtue in the quest for man’s liberation from worldliness, has been primarily expressed with a grammatically feminine noun (prajna/panna). Implicitly, there is an assertion that there can be no truly liberating wisdom that was not at the same time compassionate. In Sanskrit both of these terms, wisdom and compassion, are represented as feminine.

In the early Mahayana literature, however, the grammatically feminine gender begins to take on firmer psychological grounds when we find the ultimate virtue of perfect wisdom personified in feminine form as “the mother of all Buddhas”:

The Buddhas in the world-systems in the ten directions
Bring to mind this perfection of wisdom as their mother.
The Saviours of the world who were in the past . . .
Have issued from her, and so will the future ones be.
She is the one who shows this world [as it is], she is
the genetrix, the mother of the Jinas [= Buddhas]. (Sponberg 1992:26)

As Sponberg points out, the femininity of this prerequisite in the search for liberation is no longer coincidental, and not surprisingly it is readily incarnated in the form of the Himalayan goddess Prajnaparamita, an onomastic hybrid, which translates both as “perfect wisdom” and “the mother of all Buddhas” (Sponberg 1992:26). So, once again, a holy woman figures prominently as a moral model in man’s salvation, much as does the Virgin Mary in Latin Catholicism, the Prophet’s daughter and heir, Fatima, in some branches of Islam, and the sacred mother-cow in Hinduism. In a typical reversal, common in so many religions, women become the path to God instead of the devil’s gateway.

There is a parallel in medieval Chinese Buddhism as well. During the assimilation of the Buddha’s teachings into Chinese culture, the male bodhisattva (enlightened being) from India, Avalokitesvara, became transformed in local lore into a beautiful white-robed Chinese woman (the reasons for this are not clear). In addition to the sex change involved in this religious diffusion, the accompanying female symbolism of the bodhisattva was enlarged to include female yin symbols, for instance, moon, water, and vase, from the yin-yang polarity of traditional Chinese philosophy (Reed 1992:159). This lovely female deity (Reed 1992:174, fig. 20), often depicted in Chinese painting and statuary art, became the very feminine figure Kuan-yin, who is known today not only to alleviate women’s sufferings, but also to have special powers of healing and purifying. In fact she is viewed by some as a “Buddhist savior,” with Christlike overtones. Furthermore, she serves both Chinese men and women alike as “a model of piety” and right action (Reed 1992:176).

Islam, or The Prophet’s Dilemma

We have presented ample evident of the misogynistic thread in Muslim cultures and in Middle Eastern gender philosophies: woman is compared to chaos, blamed for sin and lust, likened to the devil’s traps, and so on. Yet, despite all this antiwoman excitement, which seems more narrowly sexual than elsewhere, there is another, calmer thread running through both the Quran and Muslim society in general in all its rich variety. Certainly one may agree with Arabist Daniel Varisco when he stresses that a single-sided, or monolithic Islam “does not exist” (1995:22). Other scholars have provided good evidence that the picture is indeed complicated. As Barbara Stowasser says, the Quran has a “richness and subtlety” (1994:56) in its treatment of women, allowing for many varied interpretations, one of which, of course, is that the Quran is a highly ambivalent text when it comes to women. This means that its author, Mohammed, cannot make up his mind, and that as the Quran represents it, God’s will in this respect is essentially and dynamically dualistic. For Mohammed, “Bivalence is the will of God” (Bouhdiba 1985:7).

First, there is the question of woman’s status as a mirror of her supposed inner qualities. We start with the Quran’s “ethical egalitarianism,” which is a building block for most legal and political judgments in Islamic thought. In many of its suras, or verses, the Muslim holy book extends this strongly egalitarian position to women, placing them on equal terms with men; then, as though thinking better of such ideas, the Quran contradicts itself in subsequent suras, so that a pattern of contradiction or oscillation emerges. From an ethical point of view, some Muslim scholars argue that the Quranic vision of gender is actually at odds with some of the legalistic and pragmatic recipes, which reflect the supposed inherent deficiency of women. “There appear, therefore, to be two distinct voices within Islam, and two competing understandings of gender, one expressed in the pragmatic regulations for society . . . the other in the articulation of an ethical vision” (Ahmed 1992:65–66).

Thus in some passages in the Quran (and post-Quranic texts) woman is said to be of a “single soul” with man and therefore equal (sura 4:1). At another point, despite all the previous caveats about woman’s amorality, they are said to be also equal to men in piety (Haeri 1989:67). The Islamic perception of women, as Haeri finally confesses, is essentially indeterminate, oscillating, “ambivalent at best.”

Indeed, some scholars even argue that “a feminist breath sometimes blows through the most sacred texts [of Islam]” and even, in what may perhaps be an overstatement, that “Islamic civilization is essentially feminist” (Bouhdiba 1985:19–20). For example, Bouhdiba points to the exalted status given to such females as Fatima, the Prophet’s daughter and to Khadija, the first lady of Islam, whose status is also saintly (20). Bouhdiba says that a man “cannot be a misogynist” if he follows the sacred texts to the letter, for these usually demand respect for women and generous treatment for women at all times (116). Paramount here is the respect offered to chaste wives and especially to mothers. Indeed, the mother once again overcomes misogynistic prejudice and becomes sanctified as the moral model for humanity. Bouhdiba speaks of the “cult of the mother” in Islam (214), which, as one might expect, resembles nothing so much as Marian worship in southern Europe; and he refers to the Middle East as “the kingdom of the mothers” (225), an epithet that would ring true for Spain and Italy as well.

Furthermore, there is some historical and archaeological evidence that Islam’s impact on gender has had more than a few positive benefits for Middle Eastern women, despite what many Western feminists may say. This argument is made by such feminist writers as Haeri (1989), Ahmed (1992), and Stowasser (1994). Comparing Islam to pre-Islamic (tribal and pagan) conventions, they point out that Islam banned infanticide (females were the customary victims), limited polygyny, accorded women an ample share in their parent’s inheritance (which was denied them previously), and gave them the right to enter into many contracts and to dispose of their possessions according to their own will—all rights restricted or denied under pre-Islamic tribal laws (Haeri 1989:24).

Even the view of female sexuality in Islam takes on a starkly dualistic vision. Woman’s sexual allure is bad and chaotic when invoked outside of legitimate marriage, but it is God’s will when used for procreation. This subtle prosex message is certainly more audible than in Christianity. In Islam, sex is “highly commendable” and even a “sacred function” when used for procreation: that is, to increase the community of the faithful (Bouhdiba 1985:13–14). Consequently, female sexual attractiveness outside of wedlock may be explosive like gunpowder and as dangerous as the devil’s trap, but legitimized by propriety is a holy thing because it leads men to procreate.

Interestingly, some of the ambiguity about sexuality expressed in the Quran may be due largely to the strongly virile nature of its author, the Prophet himself. According to contemporary accounts and to what we know of his life, Mohammed was a highly sexed man (and a practical one; he married a rich widow), having many wives and mistresses. He was in fact known to be irresistibly attracted to pretty women and often struggled to resist their spell. For example, there was his beloved Coptic concubine, Maria, who held him “in thrall” with her sex appeal (Mernissi 1987:56). The Prophet never denied or hid his own powerful desire for women, but he did feel his sexual needs as dangerous to his soul. It was a feeling with which he was neither entirely comfortable nor reconciled, as the following vignette reveals.

One day the middle-aged Mohammed went to the house of his adopted son Zaid to pay a social call. At the doorway he was greeted by his son’s young and voluptuous wife, Zainab, who was engaged in her toilette and was only half-dressed at the time. Covering her dishabille modestly, she politely invited her stepfather-in-law inside to wait. Feeling a surge of uncontrollable lust for her, the Prophet instead turned and fled in confusion, mumbling prayers. Learning of the episode, Zaid offered to divorce Zainab so that his stepfather might marry her. After some soul searching Mohammed accepted his adopted son’s offer and married Zainab. This union led to a special passage in the Quran, which was designed to quell the scandalized clamor that erupted among the Prophet’s contemporaries about the hasty match, seen by some as too close to incestuous. Verse four of the thirty-third sura denies that adoption creates legal and relational ties between individuals (Mernissi 1987:57).

It is clear from the historical evidence that Mohammed as a man was vulnerable to sexual temptation and fully recognized this weakness as a moral problem. Accordingly, he spent much time wrestling with his own desire, thereby producing a monumental inner struggle that accounts, at least in part, for his ambivalence about women as reflected in the Quran’s emphasis on the control of lust as a primary duty of the Muslim. As Mernissi puts it: “Fear of succumbing to the temptation represented by women’s sexual attraction—a fear experienced by the Prophet himself—accounts for many of the defensive reactions to women by Muslim society” (54).

Once again woman is held to blame for man’s inner turmoil, and woman scapegoated for what she is not so much the cause as the object. Seen in this light, Muslim misogyny is really not so much an attack on women as it is a flight from woman “as the source of uncontrollable desires in the male self” (Bouhdiba 1985:116). Islamic misogyny, like all others, is a flight from inner conflict over women; misogyny is the psychic consequence to male ambivalence and turmoil. The reification of this struggle that occurs in Islam is similar perhaps to what occurs in Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, except perhaps for the added biographical ingredient of the Prophet’s apotheosis of sexual anxiety into liturgy. One may say that St. Paul and St. Augustine played similar roles in forming Christian theology.

Parallels Elsewhere

This many-faceted male ambivalence about women finds expression in all the cultures we have examined and is usually consciously, if not unconsciously expressed, in various public institutions, such as proverbs and folklore, and not always in a purely sexual sense. For example, in those agnatic societies where men denigrate in-marrying women as disruptive and traitorous, the same men speak approvingly of these same women’s contributions to the patriline. The men especially appreciate and revere woman’s reproductive capacity, which is the key to genetic survival and genealogical continuity. Prime misogynists, the Sarakatsani reflect this dual attitude when they say that women both make and break the kindred: a local proverb has it that “Women make the house and they destroy it” (Campbell 1964:71). Throughout Orthodox Greece, as in other parts of the Mediterranean, the men worship a specifically female deity, the Virgin Mary, hold up the maternal woman as the human ideal and revere (female) virgins as holy.

Taking a tribal example, even the Tukanoan Indians of Brazil, who deplore women as treacherous, dirty, and perversely antinatal, also praise them as creating life and thus renewing the patriline, if only by default. “In brief, Tukanoan women are seen as both destructive and creative with respect to the patrilineal clan” (Jackson 1996:96).

Analyzed comparatively and in context, misogyny therefore seems more and more a response to man’s limitless responses to his own mixed feelings about woman as lover, wife, and mother rather than a simple negative reaction to the sexual “other” or an attempt to politically dominate women. Misogyny, like most prejudices, is, in the end, a symptom of a wide-ranging inner struggle, an effort to relieve massive self-doubt through scapegoating. Does this mean that a malady as complex as misogyny can be cured or at least ameliorated? We take up this and other issues in the following chapter.