Posts Tagged ‘misogyny’
on male advantage and how it continues…
The late Frans de Waal, in his book Different: what apes can teach us about gender, observes some interesting traits that humans consider to be associated with leadership, and which probably date back to our primate ancestors. The most obvious one is physical. We’ve all heard that being short (as I am) is a serious disadvantage for those vying for the Prime Ministership or the Presidency, to say nothing of military leadership.
But what about Napoleon? Actually of average height for his time, as was Hitler. Mao was a little above average, and Stalin somewhat below, but of course none of these men were elected into power. The average height of US Presidents is well above the average US citizen, and much more so if you include women, from the time that women were eligible for that office (1920).
Another physical attribute we associate with power is loudness and vocal tone. A scientific paper published in 2016 entitled ‘Sexual selection on male vocal fundamental frequency in humans and other anthropoids’, began with this interesting statement:
In many primates, including humans, the vocalizations of males and females differ dramatically, with male vocalizations and vocal anatomy often seeming to exaggerate apparent body size.
and then it continues:
Here we show across anthropoids that sexual dimorphism in fundamental frequency (F0) increased during evolutionary transitions towards polygyny, and decreased during transitions towards monogamy. Surprisingly, humans exhibit greater F0 sexual dimorphism than any other ape. We also show that low-F0 vocalizations predict perceptions of men’s dominance and attractiveness, and predict hormone profiles (low cortisol and high testosterone) related to immune function. These results suggest that low male F0 signals condition to competitors and mates, and evolved in male anthropoids in response to the intensity of mating competition.
This is quite an issue, as our vocalisations are vast and complex, and better known as speech. As de Waal puts it:
We are a verbal species, and the voice is hugely important to us. And here I don’t mean the content of what we say, but how we say it, how loudly, and with what vocal timbre.
The adult male larynx is 60% longer than that of the female, a particular sexual dimorphism that is much greater than the general sexual dimorphism of humans. One has to wonder why this evolution has occurred, because the effect has been to reinforce male dominance. The principal argument, as alluded to above, is that it suggests male vitality to other males, and females, in the mating game – but are we more competitive than other primates in that arena? Of course, in the WEIRD world, male dominance is being increasingly challenged, but how can a few decades of social evolution compete with millions of years of the physico-genetic variety? Or, as de Waal put it: ‘How does it serve sound decision-making if decisions are prioritised by the timbre of the voice that expresses them?’ This is the dilemma – we know, sort of, that we shouldn’t fall for a deep voice – or a tall stature – as a sign of greater authority, but we fall for it nevertheless.
I always feel inclined to eliminate men with high testosterone levels, perhaps by boiling them in their own sewerage (sorry, a macho moment), but every website tells me, in emergency tones, that low testosterone is a health hazard. So what is the antidote, the quick fix, to these male power advantages? One suggestion of course, is the bonobo way – not just safety in numbers but power in numbers, even to the point of bullying. A patrolling, policing bonobo sisterhood. And certainly women with ‘the knowledge’ are fighting back. And I too, have been campaigning on this front, for example by advocating less adversarial systems in politics, the law and industrial relations. I note that the political dramas currently occurring in South Korea have much to do with their having adopted, no doubt under ‘benign’ pressure, the fundamentally flawed US political system after the Korean war. However, even the more party-based Westminster parliamentary system could do with a shake-up, to effect a more inclusive, egalitarian approach to decision-making.
Ah, but wait up. Hierarchies are everywhere, de Waal and others tell us. It’s alpha males mostly, and alpha females among bonobos and some other species. And there are generally hierarchies within each gender, or sex. But these are more complex hierarchies than we might think. Whether male or female, they’re not always based on physical strength. What we would call emotional intelligence or EQ plays a big part, especially in female leadership. So, as human society, especially in the WEIRD world, becomes less patriarchal, this different kind of leadership, a kind of leadership against leadership, or a co-operation-promoting, networking leadership, will hopefully emerge. Such collaborations can help in the battle against patriarchy, of course. de Waal again, referencing the American anthropologist Barbara Smuts, writes this:
[One way] for women to reduce the risk of male sexual harassment is to rely on each other. Their support network may be kin-based (if women stay in their natal communities after marriage), but it could also, like the bonobo sisterhood, consist of unrelated women.
And, of course, sympathetic men. Some of whom, like the Dutch historian and sociologist Rutger Bregman, have tackled claims about the ‘natural’ violence of men head on. In stark contrast to de Waal, Bregman has this to say:
Basically, our ancestors were allergic to inequality. Decisions were group affairs requiring long deliberation in which everybody got to have their say.
So ‘allergic to inequality’ or ‘hierarchies everywhere’? Both of these things are not like the other. And yet both authors have written admiringly of each others’ work. I think the answer lies in complexity. I’ve lived in share houses, which formed hierarchies of a sort, hierarchies that shifted as tenants came and went. Others would describe the group as essentially egalitarian, though with a certain seniority for more long-standing tenants. And obviously a nuclear family is a hierarchy, with parents of different rank depending on personality, and age-ranked siblings. Workplaces are generally hierarchical, whether formally or informally, depending on seniority and competence. Again, in the world that I’ve grown up in, these hierarchies have become less patriarchal – in fact, my mother was the principal breadwinner in our family, and the principal decision-maker.
So is there much in the way of male advantage in today’s WEIRD world? Of course there is. How many women are in the top ten richest individuals (sorry to bring up filthy lucre)? Zero of course. How many female US Presidents? Zero of course. How many elected Canadian Prime Ministers? Zero. How many French Presidents? Zero. How many Italian Prime Ministers? Congratulations, their current PM Giorgia Meloni is the first to hold that office. How many Spanish Prime Ministers? None. And so on. Of course there has been Thatcher and Merkel, and other one-offs in progressive countries vis-a-vis gender, but there has been nothing like parity, and there won’t be for a long long time into the future. And then there’s the rest of the world, where patriarchy and misogyny run riot.
I’m getting old and tired.
References
Frans de Waal, Different: what apes can teach us about gender, 2021
Rutger Bregman, Human kind: a hopeful history, 2020
the ultra ultra ultra male god we’re still dealing with
Can’t kill me, nya nya
A few years back I was trying to be more sociable by attending meet-ups, using the meet-up app, but it didn’t seem to work for me, given me. One perhaps promising meet-up was organised by an elderly intellectual, on philosophical topics. He would choose the topic, then send us a screed of viewpoints and questions related to it, which I found more or less apropos. So I went to a couple of these meet-ups, which were interesting enough, except that, as often in these situations, a minority hogged the limelight, and I’ve never been much of a limelight-hogger – though actually I found that one of my great pleasures of becoming a teacher, somewhat late in my working life, was that it was more or less set up for the teacher as limelight-hogger, which I have to say I found most satisfying. I’d had very little experience before then of actually being listened to, and I found it quite a treat.
Anyway, getting back to the elderly intellectual, he was generally good at sharing that wonderful limelight thing, and encouraging diversity of opinion, so it struck me as interesting that at one point he became firm, and, apropos of nothing, said that he wouldn’t tolerate criticism of religion. It had become clear to me that he wasn’t a religious person, and I later learned that he had a PhD in physics, which wasn’t at all surprising given the tendency of his conversation. So why this remark? The new atheism movement, with its ‘four horsemen’, Dawkins, Dennett, Harris and Hitchens, had run its course by this time, not without having an influence on myself. I had never been religious, but the movement reawakened me to the baleful influence of one religion, Christianity, upon Europe and its global empires – the ‘civilised world’ that Darwin had in mind when he wrote his Voyage of the Beagle.
But more recently, the Abrahamic religions, as they’re called, have bugged me mostly because of their patriarchy, because of its clear conviction that the One God, never seen, never manifest, but ever-present, must be male. Which of course emerged from an ultra-patriarchal society, and helps to maintain that patriarchy to this day. I’ve gone on about the Catholic Church, known simply as The Church, which more or less controlled the whole of Europe for 1300 years, with its six-tiered hierarchy of maleness:
- the Father-Son godly duo
- the Papas, or Popes
- The Cardinals
- the Archbishops
- the Bishops
- the Priests
And even beyond them, the various all-male Catholic orders, the Franciscans, the Dominicans, the Jesuits and no doubt others I happily know nothing about. Of course there were Nuns, and some feisty ones, for better or worse, but they were generally imbued with the pride of their own celibacy and would often be more furiously puritanical than their cock-bothered brethren, as history has shown.
It seems to me that this patriarchal nature of Judaism and Christianity and Islam, all of a piece, is a weak spot that the four horsemen of new atheism didn’t exploit sufficiently. Where were the horsewomen? Where are they now?
I’d argue that the maleness of the so-called Abrahamic god should be the real target. To me, it’s painfully obvious why this ever-invisible, omniscient, omnipotent god was as male as male can be. It’s because he was constructed some 2600 years ago from two male gods then popular in the region of ancient Canaan (Yahweh and El/Elohim) – I’ve written about this in a two-part blog piece referenced below – by a society as ultra-patriarchal as it’s possible to be, IMHO. A society which sold females into marriage, in exchange for a dowry – from the age of ten, and even younger, without their having any say-so whatsoever. And once that deal was sealed, and the youngster handed over to her often much older husband, she was titled a ‘woman’, which adds extra horror to the story in John 7:53 – 8:11 (apparently a later interpellation, but that’s irrelevant) of the ‘woman taken in adultery’. Jesus supposedly saved her from being stoned to death, but how many others suffered that fate? And how many innocent girls, more or less raped by their unchosen husbands, suffered or died in childbirth?
The number of insults to women presented par inadvertence in the Bible is impossible to enumerate. It starts, of course, with the creation of the first woman as the male’s help-mate out of a supernumerary rib, a woman who promptly becomes the reason for the poor innocent man’s fall from the Macho God’s grace. But I won’t go on with the many proofs of the god’s maleness – because what is more interesting, and disturbing about the belief in ‘our Father, who art in heaven’, is how oblivious many believers seem to be about this fact.
Example – in glancing back at my two blog pieces on the origin of the god called God, I reread a very long comment to Part 1, by ‘Anonymous’, the only comment I received. It was a generally reasonable comment about not taking the Bible literally, that it was full of stories that one might reflect on and learn from and so forth. Fine. As ‘Anonymous’ says, you can take what you want from it and leave the rest. Fine. And ‘Anonymous’ inserts one brief line, which perhaps I overlooked at the time:
If you see G-d as very male that’s what you see.
I respectfully disagree. I see this god as very male because the Bible uses the male pronoun to refer to him almost 7000 times, and never once refers to him using the female pronoun. And of course because I know that the stories about him were written by people who lived within an ultra-patriarchal framework. And these things matter, and they have consequences to this day, as we know from anti-feminist remarks still being made by Bible Belt Old Testament literalists and Young-Earth Creationists and the like.
‘Anonymous’ doesn’t refer to his or her own gender, but I think I can guess.
I’ve added to my references a hilarious-horrific essay on Godly masculinity, just for fun.
References
On the origin of the god called God, part one – on the Judean need for a warrior god
on the origin of the god called God, part 2: the first writings, the curse on women, the jealous god
The Masculinity of Christ in the Face of Effeminate Christianity
Dorian Gray – random notes 2
Great art? Pig’s arse, my dear Basil
Continuing with the preface:
It is the spectator, and not life, that art really mirrors. Diversity of opinion about a work of art shows that the art is new, complex and vital. When critics disagree, the artist is in accord with himself.
Listening to this on audiobook (in an upper-class American accent for Christsake! – but more of that anon) makes me think of some ancient upper-crust fin-de-siècle roué bombastically holding forth in front of a bunch of sniggering teenagers in some mock-Etonian art class. First what he’s pompously saying is that an art viewer reveals herself in her opinion of the work. Bien entendu! As to what diversity of opinion shows, it seems to me it shows that people are diverse, art or no art. And the sentence that follows is equally meaningless. But perhaps one shouldn’t scrutinise things that don’t stand up to scrutiny.
We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. All art is quite useless.
So ends the preface. This month marks the 30th anniversary of the launch of a very useful thing, more useful even than the printing press, and arguably as useful as the invention of writing. Tim Berners-Lee and his accomplices sent out their World Wide Web to entangle the globe and transform human communications like nothing before it. Can we forgive Berners-Lee? I should note that Berners-Lee has serious misgivings about the social media world the internet has given rise to, and is looking to solutions, which of course is a good thing, though I’m not too optimistic, crooked timber and all. As to the supposed uselessness of art, that’s an old issue. It may be of no practical use, but advancing beyond the purely practical is what distinguishes us, our ancestors and our Neanderthal relatives etc from the rest of the mammalian world. Or maybe not. Many other animals do seemingly useless things which appear to contribute to their wellbeing. Wilde bypasses the complexity, as usual.
Chapter 1
The aesthetics of the parasitic upper-class: roses, lilac, pink-flowering thorn, Persian saddle-bags, honey sweet and honey coloured laburnum, tussore silk curtains and birds – Japanese effect, elaborations on the effects of Japanese art, straggling woodbine.
The ‘dim roar of London’ is mentioned. Late 19th century London was the centre of investment capital. Investments in the midlands factories of the industrial revolution (dark satanic mills) and the north, but above all from the colonies, with their slave and semi-slave labour. See James Hawes’ The shortest history of England for analysis of the north-south (rich-poor) divide, which goes back to pre-Roman days.
Lord Henry described as ‘languid’, of course. Indolence does that to you. The ‘opium-tainted cigarettes’ wouldn’t help.
In-talk comparing ‘the Grosvenor’ with ‘the Academy’
witticisms (Lord Henry) Oxford (Basil Hallward)
‘… only one thing in the world worse than being talked about…’ seemed very amusing and true to me, when young. Wanted to be talked about, and probably still do.
‘if old men are capable of any emotion…’ (Wilde wrote this in his mid thirties)
Obsession with male beauty – his descriptions of men in the way heterosexual men dwell on physical descriptions of women. Mixed with Greek classicism – Adonis. ‘ivory and rose leaves’, etc.
Narcissus – ‘Beauty, real beauty, ends where an intellectual expression begins. Intellect is in itself a mode of exaggeration, and destroys the harmony of any face’. Thinking makes you look ugly (Henry), and all learned men are hideous. No such thing, then, as A Beautiful Mind…
In the Church, they don’t think. Same at 80 as at 18. Keeps them attractive. (Yes, mostly true!)
Dorian must be a ‘brainless, beautiful creature’ (Henry).
Fatality about people of distinction (Basil) – better not to be different. Ugly and stupid have the best of it. (Basil – but this is puerile)
I’ll limit myself mostly to this first chapter, as there are so many other things to focus on. Many first chapters can be used to summarise the whole, as major themes tend to be outlined.
Plenty of cynicism, especially from Lord Henry, whom we’re told in passing is a young man, so his world-weariness is an affectation. Whether Wilde portrays him as a figure of fun or his own mouthpiece is hard to say. Perhaps both.
All of the beauty mentioned, apart from that of Japanese art, and certain flowers, is male beauty. Women get a mention, for their ugliness and poor taste and false view of themselves (their ridiculousness). Intellectual talk disguises while revealing the fact that Wilde’s men are attracted to youthful beauty – in both women and men. An unspoken truth. Women, not so much – but then Wilde clearly has no interest in the thoughts of women, his world is entirely male.
Al this makes me long for Simone de Beauvoir, whom I’m intently reading. Her mind and writing make me fall in love with her. So utterly the opposite of Wilde. In The second sex, she treats of five male writers and their treatment of women, from Henri de Montherlant (the most misogynist) to Stendhal (feminist avant la lettre – and a huge favourite of mine). I wish now she had chosen Wilde as one of those writers, I would’ve loved her analysis, I’m sure of it. And it may well have been sympathetic, given his quite extreme homosexuality, if that makes sense. She was always tolerant of, and even drawn to, extremes.
But thinking of Wilde’s attraction for pretty young men, it’s not unreasonable to see the novel as his masturbatory fantasy. He has clearly a horror of ageing, which he disguises as mockery.
Basil’s rapturous speech about Dorian is essentially a confession of love/lust, wrapped of course in twaddle about the Ancient Greek sense of form, and ye olde ‘muse’ concept, the beautiful being whose very proximity makes you see with brightened eyes (tho’ there might be something in that). A ‘romance of art’.
Basil and Harry seem to represent two opposed positions, the Idealist and the Cynic, neither of which seem tenable or convincing. There’s a closedness, a perfunctory element in both.
‘It is only the intellectually lost who ever argue’ (Henry). There goes philosophy.
“It is a sad thing to think of, but there is no doubt that genius lasts longer than beauty. That accounts for the fact that we all take such pains to over-educate ourselves. In the wild struggle for existence we want to have something that endures, and so we fill our minds with rubbish and facts in the silly hope of keeping our place. The thoroughly well-informed man, that is the modern ideal. And the mind of the thoroughly well-informed mind is a dreadful thing, It is like a bric-a-brac shop, all monsters and dust, with everything priced above its proper value.” Oh dear, no more op-shops and second-hand bookshops for me then.
Henry mocks and despises class talk about the ‘value of thrift’ (from the rich) and the ‘dignity of labour’ (from the idle). Being both rich and idle he values his lack of hypocrisy. He has to value something, after all.
Additional notes
On Sybil Vane, an important figure. Very likely given this name because ‘Vanity, thy name is woman’ (a regular misquote from Hamlet). Sybil, the first name, can of course contain many allusions, but it was also a popular name at the time. Vane is young, beautiful and poor, but also a very talented actress, playing complex Shakespearean heroines – Juliet, Desdemona, Cordelia, Portia, Rosalind, Beatrice and Imogen (from Cymbeline), and apparently doing a brilliant job – thus highly intelligent. On meeting the magnetically attractive Dorian Gray, who declares his love for her, she falls for him so hard that she instantly loses her actorly skills and performs so badly that she’s more or less booed from the stage (frailty, thy name is woman?) Some have analysed Sybil as a sort of corollary to Basil, the artist who, having painted Dorian’s portrait, and been intimately touched by the man himself, has nothing left to give, but I’m not entirely convinced. Sybil, the person rather than the artist, is presented as a shining light in an impoverished world – and Wilde really despises that world, as if poverty indicates stupidity. The description in Chapter 4 of the theatre in which Sybil performs, and of the people performing, is truly stomach-churning in its mockery. Since I’m limiting myself to chapter 1 I’m spared from analysing it. But here’s a revealing quote from Lord Henry on being told by Dorian of this ‘genius’ actress:
“My dear boy, no woman is a genius. Women are a decorative sex. They never have anything to say, but they say it charmingly. Women represent the triumph of matter over mind, just as men represent the triumph of mind over morals….. I am analysing women at present, so I ought to know. The subject is not so abstruse as I thought it was. I find that, ultimately, there are only two kinds of women, the plain and the coloured. The plain women are very useful. If you want to gain a reputation for respectability, you have merely to take them down to supper. The other women are very charming. They commit one mistake, however. They paint in order to try and look young. Our grandmothers painted in order to try and talk brilliantly. Rouge and esprit used to go together. That is all over now. As long as a woman can look ten years younger than her own daughter, she is perfectly satisfied. ”
This is presumably meant to be amusing. The Picture of Dorian Gray was published in 1891. Two years later women were first given the vote, in New Zealand. Ten years after that, and three years after Wilde’s premature death, the suffragette movement, braving much outrage, contempt and abusive treatment, was launched in Britain.
But returning to Dorian, he went out one night and found himself heading ‘eastward’, to the poorer part of the city. I won’t provide Wilde’s contemptuous and contemptible account, but here’s a description of the area at the time:
In the last decade of the nineteenth century London’s population expanded to four million, which spurred a high demand for cheap housing in areas that became known as slums. These were very similar to the rookeries of the previous century. The East End of London was one of these areas. They became notorious for overcrowding, unsanitary and squalid living conditions.
References
James Hawes, The shortest history of England, 2020
The Grosvenor Gallery- Final Project