A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice (13 page)

For they who rub their skin with medicaments, stain their cheeks with rouge, make their eyes prominent with antimony, sin against Him. To them, I suppose the plastic skill of God is displeasing. In their persons, I suppose, they convict, they censure, the Artificer of all things! For censure they do when they amend, when they add to, His work; taking these their additions, of course, from the adversary artificer. That adversary artificer is the devil. For who would show the way to change the body, but he who by wickedness transfigured man’s spirit.
⁹²

The misogynists of Greece and Rome similarly censured women for beautifying themselves. To a Cato or a Juvenal, however, a woman’s love of decoration was merely a sign of human vanity. Though it was an admittedly powerful distraction for those high-minded men who strove towards the virtues of self-control and discipline, it was also an opportunity to show how foolish women were for aspiring to possess such a transient bauble as beauty. But with Tertullian we are in a
different world, one where the border between the natural and the supernatural has been blurred, where God and Satan now struggle for dominance on the battlefield of the human body, and where sexual desire has been deployed on the side of the forces of darkness as one of their most potent weapons. The Divine has intervened on the side of those who strive to suppress human sexuality, which means first and foremost suppressing women’s sexuality. To avoid becoming the devil’s ally, women, writes Tertullian, should ‘go about in humble garb . . . and affect meanness of appearance, walking about as Eve mourning and repentant, in order that by every garb of penitence she might the more fully expiate that which she derives from Eve – the ignominy, I mean, of the first sin, and the odium attaching to her as the cause of human perdition.’

To the suggestion of allowing an unveiled girl into church, Tertullian responds with an example of how moralists can enjoy masturbatory fantasies in the guise of condemning them: ‘There she is patted all over by the roving eyes of total strangers, is tickled by the fingers of those who point her out, and the darling of us all, she warms to it amid assiduous hugs and kisses.’
⁹³

In a passage that has become notorious since Simone de Beauvoir’s citation of it in
The Second Sex,
Tertullian proclaims the link between women and the devil.

The sentence of God on this sex of yours lives in this age: the guilt must of necessity live too. You are the devil’s gateway: you are the unsealer of that forbidden tree: you are the first deserter of the divine law: you are she who persuaded him whom the devil was not valiant enough to attack. You destroyed so easily God’s image, man. On account of your desert – that is, death – even the Son of God had to die. And do you think about adorning yourself over and above your tunics of skins?
⁹⁴

Tertullian thunders at women in the manner of the God of the Old Testament who once threatened to make their hair fall out. But his tone and his words are altogether more menacing. Not only are women held responsible for the Fall of Man, but it is they – not the Jews, not the Roman authorities – who are blamed for the suffering and death of Jesus, man’s Redeemer. It is through their flesh that the devil comes into the world. Indeed, apparently oblivious to Jesus’ own attitudes to women, Clement of Alexandria asserted that Jesus’ mission had been specifically ‘to undo the works of women’, by which he meant sexual desire, birth and death. His words echoed those of Ecclesiastes (3:19): ‘And marriage followed the woman, and reproduction followed marriage, and death followed reproduction.’

With Christianity there was a new concept in the world – the concept of salvation. Increasingly, as their faith struggled to define itself, Christians believed that salvation could only be achieved by rejecting sex. This feeling intensified to unheard of levels during the third century. It was accompanied by a radical misogyny of a ferocity never before seen.

The background to these developments was a crisis that struck about 200 years after the death of Jesus, when Western civilization was almost extinguished. Its impact on the way people thought and felt about themselves and the world was even more unsettling than the impact the Peloponnesian War had on the Athenians of the fifth century (see
Chapter 1
). A series of wars of succession weakened Rome internally: twenty emperors took power between
AD
235 and 284
⁹⁵
and uncontrolled inflation threatened the empire with economic collapse. Barbarian hordes burst across the borders and thrust deep inside the empire’s hitherto tranquil provinces. For the first time in 700 years, Rome had to be ringed with massive walls.
⁹⁶
A Roman emperor bowed the knee to a Persian king.
⁹⁷
Two
major epidemics of what is now thought to have been the first outbreaks of smallpox and measles struck the major cities and their rural hinterlands, carrying off between a quarter and a third of the people and deepening an already profound population crisis.
⁹⁸
Rarely had the world seemed more mutable and transient. And it was during these decades of disaster and despair that Christianity enjoyed the period of its most rapid growth; by the end of it there were over 6,000,000 members of the faith, making it a force to be reckoned with.”
⁹⁹

Since St Paul, there always had been a powerful feeling of ambivalence about sexuality within Christianity. But the early Christians experienced the joy of believing that the return of Jesus was imminent, when all such problems would be resolved. The mood changed as time passed. Origen (
AD
185–254), the first real philosopher of the early Church, decided not to wait for the Kingdom of Heaven and resolved the conflict between body and soul by having himself castrated.
¹⁰⁰
During the third and fourth centuries, the desire to avoid the temptations of the flesh became radicalized into an outright rejection of the body. Edward Gibbon observed in his
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
that Christians felt a ‘contempt for their present existence’, which they believed was a merely passing phase that had to be endured. Some declared ‘a boycott of the womb’. A young wife turned Christian rejects her husband when he comes to her bed with these words: ‘There is no place for thee beside me because my Lord Jesus with whom I am united is better than thee.’
¹⁰¹
Another young woman signals her rebellion against marriage and reproduction by informing her parents she is refusing to wash. St Jerome (
AD
342–420) would later sing the praises of Paula ‘squalid with dirt’ as the ideal of Christian womanhood.
¹⁰²
According to Brown: ‘To break the spell of the bed was to break the spell of the world’.
¹⁰³
The effect of this and similar
sentiments was to make early Christianity – with its hostility to sex, disparagement of the married state and obsession with virginity – one of the most profoundly anti-family movements ever to come into existence.

In the eastern half of the empire this anti-family sentiment expressed itself most radically in the rise of militant asceticism. It is not surprising that the eastern Mediterranean, which was the original cradle of misogyny, also gave birth to its most profound and disturbing manifestation. John the Baptist had set a Biblical precedent by living in the desert, surviving on locusts and wild honey. Jesus himself had spent forty days and forty nights in the wilderness. During the third and fourth centuries, thousands of monks known collectively as ‘the desert fathers’ took refuge from the world in the deserts of Syria and Egypt, living in caves or primitive huts, even on top of pillars, sometimes alone, sometimes in small communities. Running from society was a lot easier than running from the body – it has a habit of coming along with you with its bundle of desires and needs, especially those related to women.

‘Torture your senses, for without torture there is no martyrdom,’ advised an old monk to a neophyte.
¹⁰⁴
The spell of the bed was transfigured into a nightmare of self-loathing, as misogynistic tendencies intensified to psychopathic levels, creating scenes like those from a grade-B horror movie. One ascetic monk, driven crazy with lust, dug up the rotting corpse of a woman, dipped his cloak in her putrefying flesh, smelled it and then buried his face in it. He hoped – undoubtedly with some justification – that this would turn him off women for life.
¹⁰⁵

In the West, meanwhile, Christianity was undergoing other profound transformations that would affect the history of misogyny. As a religion and a cultural force, Christianity had become so powerful that the authorities were compelled
to recognize it. In
AD
313 the emperor Constantine (306–337) issued the Edict of Milan, proclaiming religious tolerance. In the form of Catholicism, the universal Church, dominated by the bishop of Rome, Christianity began to assume the mantle of the established religion, run by a clerical class determined more than ever to restrict the role of women. A few years earlier, the Church Council of Elvira had passed a series of rulings that imposed strict controls on women both sexually and socially. Clerics could remain married but were forbidden to have sex with their wives. Christians were forbidden to have sex with Jews. Of the eighty-one rulings enacted, thirty-four were codes applying greater restrictions on marriage and women’s behaviour, especially in relation to their role in the Church. It is as if the Council clerics forbade themselves sex and then took out their anger on women.
¹⁰⁶

Seven years after the Edict of Milan, Constantine, as the first Christian emperor, revealed the stern hand of the new, increasingly absolutist morality. He passed a law that meted out the death sentence to any virgin and her suitor for the crime of eloping together. The penalty for any female slave held to have collaborated in the enterprise (and they were always suspected of such collaboration) was death by having molten lead poured down her throat. The young woman’s consent to the elopement was ruled irrelevant ‘by reason of the invalidity associated with the flightiness and inconsequentiality of the female sex’.
¹⁰⁷
We find here echoes of the old misogyny of Solon and Cato, but enforced with a horrifying brutality.

The increasing intolerance manifested itself in other ways. During the reign of the pious Catholic emperor Theodosius 1 (
AD
379–395), Christian mobs ran amok, knocking the heads off the statues of Vestal Virgins in the Roman Forum (where the results of their vandalism can be seen to this day), attacking pagan temples, and burning down a synagogue.
¹⁰⁸
The revolution
against the body brought the Olympic games to an end in
AD
393, because the athletes competed naked. As a subject for art, the body disappears from view in the West for about 1,000 years. Another hint of what lay in the future as the Church strengthened its grip on sexual behaviour came in
AD
390 when raids were conducted on homosexual brothels (which had thrived in Rome for centuries). Prostitutes found there were publicly burned alive. They had been condemned for playing the woman’s role in sexual acts, a crime against the new orthodoxy which ruled that the differences between the sexes were irrevocably ordained by God and thus everlasting. Earlier Christianity had tolerated a more fluid notion of male and female. But fluidity, or flexibility, in thought and behaviour was coming to an end. Catholic orthodoxy began defining all the fixed spheres – social, moral, religious, intellectual and sexual – in which men and women were destined to be set forever as fixed as the spheres of the starry heavens above.

However, if Christianity’s profound dualities between soul and body, man and God, man and woman, the world of the spirit and the world of the senses were to be given a philosophical dimension, there was intellectual work still to be completed.

Early Christianity was as innocent of philosophy as modern American Protestantism. Its evangelism bypassed rational thought in favour of faith-based revelation. Tertullian dismissed with contempt any suggestion that ‘the Greeks’ (as he called philosophers) could be of any use to Christians. The one important exception was the fourth gospel of St John, with its pronounced strain of Platonic thought: ‘In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God’ (1:1). The Word is identified with Plato’s Perfect Form, existing in a state of timeless perfection beyond the realm of
the senses, the Absolute Reality that the Christians equated with the one true God: ‘And the Word was made flesh, and dwelt among us, (and we beheld his glory, the glory as of the only begotten of the Father) full of grace and truth’ (1:14).

In this way, John declares that the perfection of the everlasting divine presence entered the stage of history in the person of Jesus. Plato’s Perfect Form had become human, the ideal merged with the real, declaring an end to dualism. So it is one of the profound ironies of Christianity that when it began to systematically absorb Platonism (to become Catholicism), it was as a philosophical justification for the set of dualities on which Christian thinking about the world rested.

There are two reasons why Catholicism took so readily to Platonism. Plato’s appeal was made on both intellectual and social grounds. His Theory of Forms fitted in very well with a religion that stressed the importance of the next world and expressed contempt for this one. His theory of society, as recounted in
The Republic,
appealed directly to a Church developing an increasingly elaborate hierarchical structure, with a ruling cast of clerics who, like Plato’s guardians, have comprehended the Absolute Truth and are there to interpret it for the faithful and protect it from heretics. According to Bertrand Russell, Origen was the first to begin the synthesis of Platonic thought and the Jewish scriptures. But it was left to St Augustine (
AD
354–430), the greatest thinker since Plato, to establish the philosophical edifice that intellectually propped up the Christian view of the world, including its misogynistic vision.