A week has gone by since the Isla Vista shooting and thankfully misogyny is still a topic of conversations. I say thankfully not because we still have to address misogyny in 2014, but because it is being discussed and maybe change will come of it. The trending Twitter hashtag #YesAllWomen responded to a misogynist shooter by pointing out women's struggles and fears. Often women are accused of being the problem instead of how men handle their desires. When these shootings happen, have we been missing a point? That these shooters are hurting, because they feel entitled to gain something from the world whether that is the ideal woman, power, or attention.
In the beautiful words of Maya Angelou, who we lost this week:
"I’ve always had the feeling that life loves the liver of it. You must live and life will be good to you, give you experiences. They may not all be that pleasant, but nobody promised you a rose garden. But more than likely if you do dare, what you get are the marvelous returns."
We are not entitled to anything, but the tradition of misogyny teaches some men they are.
Misogyny is nothing new. History is full to the brim of misogynist stories, events, and societies. It existed before the middle ages, but women lost a lot of ground with the advent of Christianity. The very beginning of Christianity blames one woman for all the suffering and work in the world because Eve ate the apple. One woman's mistake led to all women being inferior to men. Of course, other factors contributed to misogyny like medical beliefs, established traditions, and biological circumstances of caring for children.
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| Temptation of Eve |
Misogyny in the middle ages existed in the usual formats of rants against women. One very famous poem The Romance of the Rose by Guillame de Lorris and Jean de Meun exhibits several instances of misogyny. The storyline of the Rose involves a dreamer transported into a garden where he meets numerous allegorical figures and falls in love with a rose. The personification Jealousy hears of the Lover's desire and imprisons the Rose in a castle. The Lover wanders around receiving advice from various characters until the God of Love appears to help him. They storm the castle and the Lover experienced one erotic night with his Rose before he wakes up.
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| Opening page of Ms 25526 The Romance of the Rose, from the National Library in Paris. |
During the Lover's wandering, he meets Friend who tells the story of a Jealous Husband. This character embarks on a rant about the failings of women. The husband goes so far as to call the wife a
“lady slut…riotous, filthy, vile, stinking bitch.”
The shooter called women sluts, but his source of pain was his inability to have sex or be loved by them. Stating women freely give out sex and then complaining about how hard it is to have sex is contradictory. This insult is also found in medieval writings. Where the man complains about how lustful women are, but he also teaches all these tips for deception in order to have sex with women. If women are so lustful, why do men have such problems with having sex? It is time to stop slut shaming and confront the real problem of a misogynist culture.
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| Woman Pulling Man by Rope Attached to His Penis from the margins of Ms 25526 in the National Library, Paris |
The Jealous Husband further takes insults toward his wife and extends lustful characteristics to all women:
"All you women are, will be, and have been whores in fact or in desire,
for, whoever could eliminate the deed, no man can constrain desire.
All women have the advantage of being mistresses of their desires."
Friend uses the Jealous Husband as an example of bad conduct and as a warning women will treat men badly if men are cruel to them. Friend states that men serve and please women in order to marry them, but once they are married, they expect the women to serve them. This change in treatment causes the misogyny in men and the naughty behavior in women. Friend’s ultimate advice to seduce women is to complement their beauty, no matter how ugly. This counsel assumes that women are shallow and easily fooled by compliments. He also states that men should avoid correcting women because
“they have minds so constructed that it seems to them that they do not need to be taught their trade.”
This statement posits that women have differently built minds than men and are born with this stubbornness. Even though Friend advocates good treatment of women, he does so in a misogynistic and condescending way.
Misogyny further appears in the Rose during the author's apology to justify his misogyny. Meun abruptly stops the third person narrative and changes to the first person for his explanation:
“any words that seem critical and abusive of feminine ways, then please do not blame me for them nor abuse my writing, which is all for our instruction.”
This shows that Meun knew and worried about his abuse of women. Even though he apologizes or defends himself, he is condescending to woman because he believes his negative comments about women will teach them to not act that way. He further excuses himself by saying that he merely cited previous authors showing the large scale misogyny in the middle ages.
Despite the trending topic, discussions on misogyny are sadly always relevant. Among other things, history shows us the mistakes of the past. Here we are 800 years later still dealing with the same problems. There was misogyny in the middle ages and there is misogyny now. Have we progressed and learned as a society? Yes, but we still have miles to go.
Couple this with the "Oppressed Majority" parody that chronicles a switch in the gender roles:
