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What’s the matter Beavis?
Why would the physically stronger sex treat women as the greatest threat? The question spans every culture and age. This lecture from Academy of Ideas draws on David Gilmour’s Misogyny to find the answer deep in the male psyche. Every boy begins fused to the mother, then must violently separate to become a man — and the longing he repudiates gets projected outward as fear and hatred of women. From New Guinea taboos to Pandora, sirens, and Eve, the same pattern repeats. The cure, it argues, is not domination but self-knowledge: men who hate women are truly hating the feminine within themselves.
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Given that man is the physically stronger sex, it may seem preposterous to claim that many men fear women more than women fear men.
Yet across cultures and throughout history, women have often been portrayed as the greatest threat to man.
In Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things, the American linguist and philosopher George Lakoff shows how in many languages there is a deep metaphorical connection between the words woman and danger.
In this video, drawing from the anthropologist David Gilmour’s book Misogyny, the Male Malady, we examine the anthropological and cultural evidence showing that man’s fear of woman is a cross-cultural phenomenon, and we explore how the early developmental process of boys contributes to this fear.
Misogyny is commonly defined as contempt, hatred, or prejudice towards women.
But a more complete definition of this phenomenon should include fear as well.
For much of the hate of the misogynist is a mask for his fear of the female sex.
In Antony and Cleopatra, William Shakespeare famously wrote,
In time, we hate that which we often fear.
And as David Gilmour writes,
By misogyny, I mean an unreasonable fear or hatred of women that takes on some palpable form in any given society.
Some men are not misogynists. These men have successfully resolved their inner conflicts
over women, but most men have not been so successful. Misogyny is not a Western invention,
nor is it confined to modern capitalist societies as many feminists and Marxists have argued for
many years. Misogyny shows no correlation with any particular form of society. It occurs everywhere.
Misogyny is indeed close to being universal, as our data will amply demonstrate.
It is not an exaggeration to state that man’s preoccupation with woman’s body is the greatest
obsession in history, yet this obsession is shadowed by an equally powerful fear.
For man not only desires the female body, he also experiences it as something foreign,
mysterious, and potentially dangerous.
Among hunter-gatherer cultures, this fear of the female body takes the form of a full-blown
phobia.
The aboriginal tribes of the highlands of Melanesia, or New Guinea, remained undiscovered
and untouched by outside influence until the mid to late 20th century.
When anthropologists first encountered these tribes, they observed that the aboriginal
men harbored a deep and intense fear of the female body.
In summarizing these anthropological studies, David Gilmour writes,
“…literally all publications start off by noting a curious degree of sex antagonism
as a salient feature, if not the standout feature, of most highland societies.
There is probably no place on earth where men have such a pervasive fear and loathing
of women.
Nowhere else in the world does fear of the female body reach such a terrible, staggering
pitch.
According to the Aboriginal men of New Guinea, prolonged contact with a woman’s body can
cause serious illness that causes the skin to wither and the organs to waste away.
The anthropologist John Langness observed the male elders of one tribe warn the adolescent
boys that if they spend too much time in close physical proximity with women, their skins
will be no good, their work will go wrong, and they will die young.
The aboriginal fear of the female body reaches its most intense expression and anxiety surrounding
her reproductive functions and sexual organ.
Menstrual blood is regarded as one of the most dangerous substances a man can encounter.
Contact with a mere drip of it is thought to be able to kill a young and strong man.
While the female genitalia are not only considered potentially poisonous, but also the conduit
through which malevolent forces enter the world.
The very biology that gave birth to man, paradoxically, is seen as antithetical to man’s well-being
and existence.
So, through her sexual organs a woman, even if unintentionally, is believed to act as
a constant magnet to the evil powers that populate the world’s subterranean realm.
Explains Gilmore,
“…women attract these evil powers without even being aware of it, and thus seriously
endanger both nature and society.
mother, wife, sister, no matter. Woman’s body is the harbinger of all human evil.
Like all men, Aboriginal men desire sex, but they also believe too much of it weakens them
and can even kill them. The anthropologist Raymond Kelly noted that among the Otoro tribe,
the men ritually abstain from sexual contact with women for about two-thirds of the year.
For the New Guinea Aboriginal man, sex drains him of his vital essence,
while at the same time enhancing the strength and vitality of women.
Throughout the entire Highland region, men conclude that women pursue sex precisely in order to capture semen, to enhance well-being, to deplete the male victim, and to strengthen themselves in the process, explains Gilmore.
These fears of the female body are not only found in the male-dominated aboriginal tribes of New Guinea.
Among the matrilineal crow, where women control significant property and hold relatively high status, as well as the semi-people of the Malay Peninsula, a non-violent people described by Gilmore as the least sexist group of people on the face of the earth, the same fear of the feminine body exists.
As Gilmore notes,
Semenides wrote, yes, women are the greatest evil Zeus has made and men are bound to them
hand and foot with impossible knots by God. Subsequent Greek and Roman poets echoed this
idea by claiming that women are the original source of khaki or evil in this world and that
they were created by the gods to torment men. Roman poets like Ovid, Hesiod, and Juvenal wrote
long treatises heaping scorn and abuse upon women and everything pertaining to them and urging men
to avoid sex and marriage completely.
Western mythology is also rife with fears of the female.
In a myth that echoes the aboriginal belief
that the female genitalia are a gateway
from malevolent forces,
it is Pandora who opens a box
that releases evil into the world.
Ancient Greek mythology is filled with female figures,
sirens, nymphs, lamias, and furies
who lure, ensnare, and ultimately destroy men.
Many of these mythological females live in water
and attract men with their beauty
only to drag them underwater.
This motif persists throughout western history
In Icelandic myths, for example, women are portrayed as rivers of poison
into which men, like flies drawn to honey, taste sweetness for a brief moment, only to drown
The philosopher Dorothy Dinnerstein finds the image of the siren or mermaid
the female sea creature who rises from the dark sea depths to drag men down
to be virtually universal in folklore
In his book on monsters and demons, David Williams calls this siren figure
the most widely represented monster throughout history, putting a female face on the horrific
and the grotesque for all times. The siren is a mythological representation of the femme fatale,
the seductive yet deadly woman, which is a common symbol across the centuries.
In the 18th century, the English poet John Gay wrote,
The fly that sips treacle is lost in the sweets, so he that tastes woman, ruin meets.
In the operas of Richard Wagner, the goddess Venus ensnares men in realms of sensual pleasure,
thus diverting them from their higher heroic pursuits.
In capturing the widespread belief that every woman embodies something of the femme fatale,
Gilmore writes,
Women are evil because of their sexual allure,
which, by disguising all this teeming malevolence with a pretty exterior,
puts men in physical and moral danger of immorality.
This physical attractiveness is, in fact, the strategy for their treachery and duplicity,
for it is their appeal to men’s senses that cheats, betrays, deceives.
And so women are among the most dangerous things on earth.
Western philosophy and literature are likewise filled with men expressing the view that women are inherently dangerous.
The German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer argued that because women are constitutionally weaker than men,
they have become master deceivers in order to survive and achieve their reproductive ends.
They are driven to rely not on force but on cunning, hence their instinctive subtlety and their tendency to tell lies, wrote Schopenhauer.
Friedrich Nietzsche echoed this idea by arguing that women are constitutionally incapable of
telling the truth. What is truth to a woman? From the beginning, nothing has been more alien,
repugnant, and hostile to women than truth. Her great art is her lie. While the writer D.H. Lawrence
did not hold back in expressing what he thought to be the colossal evil of the united spirit of
woman that is sending out waves of destructive malevolence which eat out the inner life of a man,
like a cancer. The foundational texts and teachings of all the world’s major religions
likewise provide evidence for man’s fear of the feminine. In most of the world’s messianic
religions, 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, explains Gilmore.
In the book of Genesis, it is Eve who succumbs to the serpent’s deceptions, eats the forbidden fruit,
and convinces Adam to disobey God which results in their expulsion from paradise and the fallen
state of humanity. As the 4th century theologian Saint Ambrose of Milan wrote,
The woman was first deceived, and it was she who deceived the man. Adam was not deceived,
but the woman was deceived and was in sin. In the biblical apocryphal texts, one finds
warnings about the ruinous power which women can exercise over men, as well as the claim that
all wickedness is but little compared to the wickedness of a woman.
While the medieval Bishop Marbot of Rennes went as far as to link woman with the devil.
Countless are the traps which the scheming enemy, the devil, has set throughout the world’s paths
and planes. 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. In the religion of Islam, the same fears can
be found. Upon his ascension to heaven, the prophet Muhammad is reported to have said
that, hell was populated above all by women, while on his deathbed he is said to have stated,
After my disappearance, there will be no other greater source of chaos and disorder for my
nation than women. In her study of Islam, the Moroccan sociologist
Fatima Mernissi goes as far as to argue that the entire Muslim social structure can be seen as an
attack on and a defense against the disruptive power of female sexuality. Even in Buddhism,
a spiritual tradition associated with peace and kindliness to all living creatures, women are
depicted as morally degraded enchantresses who, through deceptions and lies, lure men away from
the righteous spiritual path. As one Buddhist traditional verse puts it,
“‘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.”
Because man’s fear of woman appears in similar forms across cultures and religions throughout
history, it cannot be adequately explained by social structures, institutions, or belief systems.
its roots must lie in the psyche of man. It is because misogyny is so widespread and so
pervasive among men everywhere that it must be psychogenic in origin, a result of identical
experiences in the male developmental cycle rather than caused by the environment. The developmental
roots of man’s fear of women can be traced back to the earliest stages of life, when the mother
stands as the omnipresent figure in the child’s world. As the source of nourishment, comfort,
and that indispensable motherly love, she is the central figure of early experience.
Embedded in this maternal environment, both boys and girls unconsciously mirror the mother’s gender
identity and develop what the psychiatrist Robert Stahler called a proto-feminine identity.
A boy’s earliest experience of gender is really not neuter but female,
a mirroring of the gender of his mother, writes Eugene Monick. Or as Stahler writes,
If, as is suggested, there is a stage at the beginning of life in both males and females
when one feels as if part of mother, this will establish a feminine quality in one’s identity.
While helpful for the girl who is to become feminine, it can threaten the boy’s capacity
for masculinity. Because an infant boy initially forms a feminine-oriented identity, in order to
later develop a masculine identity, he must psychologically distance himself from the mother
and reject the proto-feminine identity that was unconsciously formed in the earliest stages of
life. As the Indian proverb puts it, men are born of women, nurtured and loved by women, protected
and dominated by women, yet they must become men. Or as David Gilmour continues, all boys feel this
irreducible core feminine identity as a threat to their masculine self, an inner softness or
weakness, a deficiency lurking within. It must be repudiated so that the boy can later develop a
manly identification consonant with cultural expectations. That is, the boy at some point
must disidentify with the mother to become a true male as defined by convention. The process
of disidentifying with mother includes an often violent rejection of everything feminine, so that
masculinity becomes defined as the opposite of, and a distancing from, femininity. But this process
of disidentifying with the mother and repudiating the feminine within is no easy task. In fact,
it is one of the most difficult a boy must face. For the mother is the source of comfort, security,
and unconditional love the earliest years of life before self-consciousness fully emerges
are marked by a state of ease and contentment in which the child is cared for without effort
or responsibility mother is warmth mother is food mother is the euphoric state of satisfaction and
security writes the psychologist eric from a boy does not relinquish his bond with the mother
willingly historically harsh rites of passage designed to forcibly separate the boy from the
maternal world and initiate him into manhood were practiced by almost all cultures. Underlying these
rites of passage was the recognition that within the male psyche there exists a regressive longing
to remain in, or return to, that paradisal and infantile state of dependence on the feminine.
Regressive wishes seem to be felt as a return to a primordial pre-masculine state,
to infancy, that is, to a condition associated with femininity, writes David Gilmour.
Especially as a boy matures into adolescence and then adulthood, these regressive wishes become
increasingly unacceptable, for to give in to them means the extinction of masculinity.
Within most men, therefore, there exists an innate conflict. On the one hand, they are drawn toward
what the anthropologist Thomas Gregor called the path back to fusion with the mother and the
pleasures of infancy, while at the same time they fear, resist, and despise these regressive impulses
that arise from within. The boy, more than the girl, has a powerfully ambivalent response to
this universal regressive wish. On the one hand, he feels it as a pleasurable symbiosis with the
mother, a recapturing of the carefree, prelapsarian world of infancy. But on the other hand, he senses
it as a dangerous backsliding that is as terrifying as it is pleasurable, for it means the extinction
of masculinity. In an attempt to deal with the anxiety this inner conflict evokes, many men
projected onto women so that what is, in reality, an internal struggle comes to be experienced as
an external threat. The result is a paranoid fear or phobia of women that in many men takes the form
of hatred or contempt. And in some cases, such as the Salem witch hunts, this fear of women expands
into full-blown psychoses. Or as Gilmore writes, phobias are projections, attributions to others
of one’s own repressed wishes. Phobias are either projections of the repressed wishes or they are
displacements by which inner conflicts find objectification and scapegoats.
Phobia formation is what psychoanalysts call the defense mechanism of externalization.
Misogyny has all the earmarks of a typical phobia, with fears focusing on woman,
who is demonized as the implacable, omnipotent foe.
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The fact that many men project their desire for, and fear of, their own regressive impulses onto
women helps explain why their feelings towards women are marked by such intense ambivalence.
For on the one hand, men fear women, but they also admire, desire, and idolize them. This
ambivalence has been expressed throughout history in religion, literature, and myth.
Hesiod described woman as a beautiful evil, while Catullus, writing of his mistress, confessed,
I love and I hate.
Mythological figures such as the Sphinx, half alluring woman, half monstrous beast,
embody this union of attraction and dread.
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.
It seems that wherever we find misogyny, we also find its diametric opposite in equal measure.
And this is the key to misogyny, explains Gilmore.
If this explanation is valid, then it follows that the more a man fears or hates women,
the more he simultaneously longs for and needs them.
In other words, men who appear most overtly misogynistic may, in fact,
be the ones most deeply driven by a powerful yet unacknowledged yearning for the very women they denounce.
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, explains Gilmore.
This tension-ridden state, not simple hatred or a wish to dominate,
accounts for men’s denigration of women.
It is not surprising that the men who most deplore and distrust women
are the same ones who most admire, want, and need them.
Although the regressive impulses that underlie man’s fear of women
originate in his early dependence on the mother,
David Gilmore notes that the father-son relationship plays a crucial role
in shaping a boy’s later attitudes toward women.
He draws on a comparative synthesis study by the anthropologist James Taggart, who discovered
that fathers who are more involved in a boy’s life help their sons separate from the mother
with less anger toward women.
This is a promising finding, but given that absent fathers are now the norm, with about
half of all boys growing up without a present father in the household, many are deprived
of the masculine guidance needed to develop a healthy relationship to women.
Like many deep-rooted social problems, the responsibility ultimately rests with individual
men to recognize that conflicting feelings toward women are, in reality, conflicts within
themselves.
This requires bringing regressive impulses into consciousness, and rather than indulging
in them, acknowledging, accepting, integrating, and mastering them.
It requires the awareness that when one hates or fears women, one is really hating and fearing
parts of oneself.
Men who hate women hate themselves even more.
What they really hate and fear is the femaleness within.
Only if more men undergo this evolution of consciousness can the deep division that exists
at the heart of our species, a millennia-old war between men and women, give way to a more
harmonious relationship between the sexes and an elevated form of human life.
Or as David Gilmour concludes, only self-knowledge can free men from fear of women and self-knowledge
in this case means the acceptance of the divided self within. And only through such an acceptance
can men appreciate the loveliness, gentleness, and beauty of women. Men and women thus united,
misogyny will wither away of its own accord. And on that ambiguous note, we end.
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Source: Academy of Ideas
The friction between the sexes is nothing new. It’s as old as sex itself.
Epidemic in today’s confused society, this tug of war between masculine and feminine was no less relevant in the 3 centuries both preceding and following Christ. For it was during that time – a period of about 600-700 years – when an all-masculine Monism swept across the Western world and overthrew the open, Feminine pluralism that proceeded it.
Before Monism took over, women were central to the practice of religious rites and rituals all across the Western world. They were the Oracles, the priestesses. In many cases, women were the literal source of communion. Many ancient religious rites literally could not have been practiced without a female heirophant – the one delivering the sacred entheogen.
But by the time the New Testament was being written, that pendulum was swinging hard the other way. Christianity enforced a new, male, deity – with a male savior, and male disciples. The role of women in religion was being erased, rewritten, even vilified. Paul spoke against women, against marriage. Sex was demonized entirely. And for the first time in history, celibacy was institutionalized from the very top of the religious heirarchy.
By the time we get to Revelation 17 – we’re told what this new Monism really thinks about any form of religion or belief outside of the accepted bounds. Any competing idea, belief was labeled blasphemy – blasphemy born from the mother of all whores.
This is the built-in misogyny that erased and vilified The Great Mother. This is why we can’t have nice things.
Until we end this male-centric Monism and establish balance and harmony between the sexes – our entire species and religio-political system will continue to suffer.