‘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.’
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.
Some misogynists project onto women their own neuroses about sex. ‘In our sexual natures,’ wrote George Bernard Shaw, ‘we are torn by an irresistible attraction and an overwhelming repugnance and disgust.’ However, today’s misogyny has less to do with the neuroses of men like Shaw and Schopenhauer than that of articulate women writing in the 20th century. ‘Women are “clinging”, a dead weight,’ wrote Simone de Beauvoir in The Second Sex. ‘Their situation is like that of a parasite sucking out the living strength of another organism.’ ‘We can no longer ignore that voice within women,’ wrote Betty Friedan, ‘that says: “I want something more than my husband and my children and my home”.’ ‘The intimacy between mother and child,’ wrote Germaine Greer in The Female Eunuch, ‘is not sustaining and healthy’ and ‘the average family has not proved to be a very good breeding ground for children’.
The presumption among these feminist pioneers was that, with the liberation of women, relations between the sexes would change for the better. ‘Let women be provided with living strength of their own,’ wrote de Beauvoir, ‘let them have the means to attack the world and wrest from it their own subsistence, and their dependence will be abolished — that of man also.’ Has this happened? Undoubtedly, gender equality is now unquestioned in the developed world, and misogyny, like racism and homophobia, is one of today’s Seven Deadly Sins. A woman can now survive quite well without a man and a man without a woman. Changes in the means of production mean that women’s quick brains and nimble fingers are as productive as the aggressive instincts and muscle-bound arms of men. Even the aboriginal bond that was once necessary for the continuance of the species has been broken: women can bear children without having to have sex with a man and, if there is no man to provide for her children, the state steps in.
Is there a downside for women? Yes, it lets men off the leash. By all means liberate women, says today’s Casanova! Free them to work. Let them pay their own way and have sex at will. The male of the species who until now has had to pay for sex — either in cash to a prostitute or with a joint account to a wife — can now enjoy sex without strings. No longer need he deploy the subterfuge of a Vicomte de Valmont to seduce today’s Cécile. Her virginity is an embarrassment. She seduces him.
Rather than eradicate misogyny, as the feminists predicted, the liberation of women has given it a new lease of life. Men may take advantage of the freedoms won by the sexual revolution but, as Melanie Phillips writes in her book The Sex-Change Society, they ‘regard with contempt those girls who are sexually available, calling them slags and slappers’. Men quietly ridicule the inconsistency of supposedly liberated women. They still expect a measure of gallantry — flowers on Valentine’s Day, candle-lit dinners on their birthdays — and insist on placing a man between two women at middle-class dinner parties. They are prepared to compete with male novelists for the Booker Prize, but the Orange Prize is open only to women. Women now have the right to serve as front-line soldiers in the British army, but it seems to be the young men who get killed. Girls win more places at our universities and snap up the best jobs, but as often as not they are just on fishing-trips for a man who will appear at the altar for an ego-trip wedding, then buckle down to a conjugal life.
Yet for a man, marriage is now something of a gamble. Half of marriages end in divorce and the majority of divorces are instigated by women. The rate of breakdown in partnerships is higher still. Men father children, grow to love them, and lose them when their wives kick them out. This has grave consequences, particularly for their sons who, according to Melanie Phillips, come to ‘treat their own mothers with contempt for having a different boyfriend every month, and often blame the mother for driving the father out...’ The absence of a father makes the mother the default disciplinarian: the son, who would accept chastisement from his father, feels emasculated when it is meted out by his mother. A misogynist is born.
Freud’s colleague, the Hungarian psychoanalyst Sandor Ferenczi, wrote that a woman can only be cured of neurosis when she accepts ‘without trace of resentment the implications of her female role’. What is true for an individual applies to a society as a whole. The archetypal female role, throughout human history, has been first and foremost that of a wife and mother — gentle, nurturing, faithful. Now, thanks to feminism, femininity itself is denigrated as slavish and outmoded. Misogyny is on the rise but not just among men: women have come to despise themselves.