March is Women’s History Month and it’s gotten off to a bad start. .
On a TV talk show March 2, a male Egyptian scholar told a female Lebanese university professor to shut up, saying, “It’s beneath me to be interviewed by you. You are a woman…”
Then on March 9, the UN Secretary General told the General Assembly that violence against women and girls worldwide “persists at alarmingly high levels.”
Violence against women ranges from the gang rape of a woman on a New Delhi bus and assaults on women in the South Sudan, to jihadists enslaving women for sex, as well as rapes in the U.S. military and the mounting sexual assaults on American college campuses.
What’s going on? How did all the women-hating start in the first place?
Women may have been perceived as the enemy from day one when Eve tempted Adam and lost the world its place in Shangri-La. Fear and frustration seems to have been mounting ever since.
How else to account for why an 11th century French monk said of women: “If her bowels and flesh were cut open, you would see what filth is covered by her white skin.”
Then there’s the world first oil painting said to be the most influential painting ever made, Jan van Eyck’s 15th century altarpiece, which portrays Eve as a harlot with a gloomy face and stringy hair, holding the apple in one hand and her sex in the other.
Such convulsive misogyny seems never to have un-convulsed. As if to squash women, art history abounds with paintings of Saint Agatha, whose breasts were cut off when she defied males. “The Martyrdom of Saint Agatha” by 16th century artist Sebastiano del Piombo is but one example.
Women-bashing continued into the 20th century when Emile Nolde painted “Woman and Animal, which describes a nude female lying with a lion, inferring that the female is an animal as dangerous as the king of the jungle. To push the point Nolde even rendered the woman’s her hair like a bonfire of flames, as if to make her appear all the more deadly.
Another latter-day women-hating image is that of Joan Miro’s all-teeth image “Head of a Woman,” which tells the same terrifying story: women are monsters not unlike the black widow spider that bites the head off the male after mating.
Three years ago, when Hillary Clinton was Secretary of State and addressed the Women of the World Summit, she said that the zeal to control women, even to controlling their decisions about their own bodies, mystified her.
The dead giveaway is found in art history and even explains why former Senator Rick Santorum in a bid to be president in 2012 fretted about women who, he said, demand a “licenses to things in the sexual realm that is [sic] counter to how things are supposed to be.”
Eve is still taking the fall.
I also wonder if that TV commercial about Viagra, hawked by a reclining female with a sultry voice pressuring men about sexual performance, isn’t making men mad, too.