A Brief History of Misogyny: The World's Oldest Prejudice Read Online Free PDF Page B

dehumanize women to this day.
    It is not surprising, given the number of boundaries circumscribing women, that men developed something of an obsession with women as boundary-crossers. This fascination is graphically illustrated by the Greek interest in the Amazons, the legendary tribe of warrior women who invaded the most male of sanctuaries, organized warfare. The Amazons are a recurring presence in Greek history; this theme has persisted down to modern times. First mentioned by the fifth-century historian Herodotus (the ‘father’ of history), they were depictedas dwelling on the borderlands of civilization, devoted solely to warfare; they sought men only when they needed to mate, and exposed all their male babies, rearing only the females. They are the mirror image of patriarchal Athens. With the Amazons, the fantasy of the autonomous male meets its nightmare opposite, the autonomous female.
    Men’s fascination with warrior women has a long history, from Classical Athens to today’s comic book heroine Wonder Woman and professional women wrestlers. The Amazons are like these wrestlers in that their combat is fantasy. But for men the fascination, edged with anxiety, is real. Among the Athenians, it reached obsessive proportions. Representations of battles between men and Amazons are among the most popular depictions of women in Antiquity. Over 800 examples survive, the bulk of them Athenian in origin. 20 They decorate everything from temples to vases and drinking bowls. Wherever a citizen looked, his eye would inevitably fall on a scene showing a man, sword or spear raised, hauling a woman by her hair off a horse; or stabbing and clubbing her to death, a javelin pointed at her nipple, as invariably her tunic slips to reveal a breast, and her short skirt rolls up to reveal her thighs. The greatest temple in Athens, the Parthenon, was erected in 437 BC to honour Athena, the city’s ruling deity, and to celebrate the Greek victory over Persian invaders. But the battle scene chosen to decorate the shield of Athena was not based on any historical event. It was a depiction of the legendary victory of the hero Theseus, the mythological founder of the city, over an invading army of Amazons. The popularity of this scene cannot be explained merely by the fact that it was the only theme that allowed the artist to portray women naked or partially naked. (Convention in fifth-century Athens permitted only men to be depicted nude.) The scene reoccurs with the repetitiousness of pornography.But like pornography, the repetition cannot assuage the urge and the anxiety that lies behind it. 21
    Male anxiety about women boundary-crossers manifests itself most powerfully and memorably in Greek tragedy. All the tragedies that have survived were written by Athenian playwrights during one relatively brief period of the fifth century. Only one of them, Sophocles’
Philoctetes
, has no woman character. The titles of over half of all the tragedies include either a woman’s name or some other female reference. 22 Women were centre-stage and in a state of ferocious rebellion.
    The tragedies nearly always take their characters and much of their plotting from the epics of Homer and his Bronze Age heroes, heroines and villains. It is as if modern novelists followed a convention which obliged them to base all their characters and plots on the legend of King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table. Questions have therefore been raised about how much these dramas can tell us about the lives and problems of real women. However, the question is not how accurately they reflect the behaviour of real women but how truly they express society’s anxieties about relationships between men and women. No one has doubted that they do. 23
    In Euripides’
Medea
, the eponymous heroine slaughters her children to take revenge on her husband, the Greek mythological hero Jason, when he abandons her to marry another woman. In Aeschylus’
Agamemnon
, Clytemnestra takes