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Woman Hating
itself on mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered,
and restricted physical mobility. It creates the masochistic personalities generally found in adult women: subservient, materialistic (since all value is placed on the
body and its ornamentation), intellectually restricted,
creatively impoverished. It forces women to be a sex of
lesser accomplishment, weaker, as underdeveloped as
any backward nation. Indeed, the effects o f that prescribed relationship between women and their bodies are so extreme, so deep, so extensive, that scarcely any
area of human possibility is left untouched by it.
Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care of
herself. ” The male response to the woman who is made-
up and bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions. One need only refer to the male idealization of the bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operating here. Romance based on role differentiation, superiority based on a culturally determined and rigidly enforced inferiority, shame and guilt and fear of women and sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of these
oppressive grooming imperatives.
The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethos
surely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation
(women from their oppression, men from the unfreedom of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the relationship between women and their bodies. The
body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint
and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop
mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps the notion of beauty which will then organically emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a
respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable, variety.
BEAUTY HURTS
C H A P T E R 7
Gynocide: The Witches
It has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion
of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that
God will never permit such a thing to
happen.
Malleus Maleficarum
It would be hard to give an idea of how dark the Dark
Ages actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe the
social and intellectual gloom of those centuries. The
learning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse.
The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of the
Catholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the only
democracy the landless masses of serfs knew was a
democratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an even
crueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations
of the flesh and the Kingdom o f Heaven, a layer o f dirt,
lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and
to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful,
it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those
diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place
— hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics o f leprosy, epileptic convulsions, 118
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and plague decimated the population o f Europe regularly. T he Black Death is thought to have killed 25
percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirds
to one-half o f the population o f France died; in some
towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived: On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores,
crying for help and words were all they got: You have
sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you will
suffer so much the less torment in the life to come.
Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers
for the dead. 1
H unger and misery, the serf’s constant companions,
may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations and
hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation — the Church
had to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation
which were vivid in the Christian imagination were
modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.
T he Christian notion o f the nature o f the Devil
underwent as many transformations as the snake has
skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining role as the Church bred into its conception those deities best suited to its particular brand o f dualistic
theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods o f one
religion become the devils o f the next, and the Church,
intolerant o f deviation in this as in all other areas,
Woman Hating
vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the 15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic and their pantheons were scarcely conservative in number. The Church had a slew of deities to dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the
old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old
practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified.
Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent
some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to
hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the
local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed
to continue their traditional vocations of healing the
sick and protecting the traveler. The Church often
transformed the names of the gods —so as not to be
embarrassed, no doubt. Apollo, for instance, became
St. Apollinaris; Cupid became St. Valentine. The pagan
gods were also allowed to retain their favorite haunts —
shrines, trees, wells, burial grounds, now newly decorated with a cross.
But in northern Europe the old gods did not fare
as well. The peoples o f northern Europe were temperamentally and culturally quite different from the Latin Christians, and their religions centered around animal
totemism and fertility rites. The “heathens” adhered
to a primitive animism. They worshiped nature (archenemy o f the Church), which was manifest in spirits who inhabited stones, rivers, and trees. In the paleolithic hunting stage, they were concerned with magical control o f animals. In the later neolithic agricultural
stage, fertility practices to ensure the food supply
predominated.
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Anthropologists now believe that man’s first representation o f any anthropomorphic deity is that o f a horned figure who wears a stag’s head and is apparently