Misogyny is not just for men

‘Was it Vauvenargues or Chamfort,’ asks Pierre Costals in Henri de Montherlant’s novel Pity for Women, ‘who said that one must choose between loving women and understanding them?’ Most men would rather love women than understand them, and most women would rather be loved than understood. Women particularly resent men taking a scalpel to dissect, let alone disparage, the feminine psyche, which makes it difficult for a man to write about misogyny; yet there are signs that it is on the rise and, since good relations between the sexes is so fundamental to human happiness, it is perhaps pertinent to ask why.

Misogyny is found in pagan antiquity but today is frequently blamed on the Christian tradition which denigrated the daughters of Eve as a source of temptation: they lured men to have sex and, since almost all sex was sinful, jeopardised the salvation of their souls. However, Christianity also venerated a woman as the mother of God and empowered women by insisting upon a life-long, monogamous marriage; and much of the most vociferous misogyny appears after the Enlightenment, particularly in the 19th century. ‘When you go to a woman,’ said Nietzsche’s Zarathustra, ‘don’t forget your whip.’

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Schopenhauer, an influence on Nietzsche, was vitriolic about women: nature had endowed them with deceit as a means of protection, just as it had given claws to a lion and horns to a bull. They had no conscience when it came to sexual morality because ‘in the darkest recesses of their heart, they are aware that in committing a breach of their duty towards the individual, they have all the better fulfilled their duty towards the species which is infinitely greater’. He rubbished the Christian esteem for women and used pseudo-scientific language to prove their inherent inferiority, just as his French contemporary Ernst Renan did of the Jews.