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| ISBN-13: | 9781911383031 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Free Association Books Limited |
| Publication date: | 04/30/2016 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Sales rank: | 821,354 |
| File size: | 481 KB |
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Why Men Hate Women
By Adam Jukes
Free Association Books
Copyright © 1993 Adam JukesAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-911383-03-1
CHAPTER 1
The Hatred of Women
INTRODUCTION: MISOGYNY – INNATE OR SOCIALLY CONSTRUCTED
Do all men hate women? My central contention is that they do. Of course this statement will be qualified and expanded, but in its essentials it will remain unchanged. My aim is to examine – and perhaps to qualify – the nature and origins of this hatred and the means by which men express it, whether explicitly or otherwise.
I hope to be able to show that misogyny is universal, and that it has profound effects on men's and women's capacity for creative and healthy living. The universality of misogyny consists in the fact that it is not only a facet of the male character but also an aspect – albeit a less debilitating one – of the female character. The origins of misogyny in both sexes will be examined, but its male manifestations are my central concern. The vicissitudes of misogyny in the female will be alluded to and, to some extent, traced in the context of the female contribution to the oppression of women. There is no great novelty in the idea that women collude in their own oppression. There are, however, serious questions about the origins of this collusion – whether, in essence, it is natured or nurtured by men, and whether it is even valid to describe women's apparent passivity in this way; these questions are not so very different from those concerning the origins of misogyny in men. I use 'apparent' in describing women's passivity in order to make explicit my belief that it is possible to be subordinated without being passive, and that this subordination is then rationalized by the oppressor as the victim's passivity.
My assertion that misogyny is universal presupposes the existence of the unconscious. The idea of an unconscious mind is an ancient one. Fables which show an exact understanding of the defence mechanisms which we humans use to prevent the emergence of uncomfortable feelings and thoughts have been extant for centuries. For example, the fable of the fox who decided that the grapes were sour after he had tried, in vain, to reach them on the vine illustrates one way of rationalizing failure. Hartmann (1869) and others had written about the unconscious long before Freud first made use of the term (Freud and Breuer, 1893, p. 76) and expanded on and universalized it. It was a shocking notion in its day, but mainly, one suspects, because of the qualities with which Freud endowed it; and it still cannot claim consensual status.
Freud's ideas, however, are now widely disseminated, and most people are familiar with the idea that our conscious self is not necessarily in control of our behaviour, feelings or thoughts. None the less, there are still many unresolved logical and semantic difficulties with the idea of the unconscious, even though it is generally accepted as a daily demonstrable fact of life. Still, it will be very difficult for any reader who rejects the idea of an unconscious self to feel any sympathy with my theme. Not that such a reader will be alone with his or her discomfort. As I said in the Introduction, this is intended to be a shocking book. I do not believe it is possible to examine the basis of male-female relations critically without causing anxiety. Nor is it possible, without considerable defensiveness, to remain utterly detached when one is made aware of the plight of women. This was certainly true for me as I wrote, and even now it is not clear how far I have succeeded in standing aside from my own infantile perceptions and expectations of intimate sexual relationships, as well as from any biases introduced by my masculinity.
Rather than take up the philosophical and semantic difficulties of the concept of the unconscious, I will briefly describe unconscious functioning and its consequences for our everyday lives.
It is important to distinguish between different sorts of unconscious material. We would all agree that there is a great deal of knowledge and information which we know, and know that we know, and which can be called up when needed. It is as if we have in our minds a sort of databank which we can access as necessary. This databank has the primary quality of unconsciousness: it is out of awareness. There is another sort of unconscious material, however, which cannot be accessed at will. This material is actually being kept unconscious. It is material which we do not want to know. Psychotherapists call this not wanting to know resistance.
There are major differences in the way these two types of information are processed in the mind. The readily available databank obeys all the usual rules of thinking. It is logical, it is reality-tested, it is linear in time and causality, it is not internally contradictory – we do not think that A, which is opposite to B, is true when we also believe B to be true. These rules, which are essential for everyday living, are known as the rules of 'secondary process'. We all learn them with our acquisition of language and they are employed, for most of the time, by the conscious 'self'.
The second type of unconscious material – which we resist knowing, and actively 'unknow' – obeys quite a different set of rules: the rules of 'primary process'. This part of the mind is almost a separate person inside all of us – a structurally separate part. It has a life of its own in which people and information are treated without regard for secondary-process rules. Contradictions abound. Mutually exclusive truths coexist. Time is at a standstill. Causality is not linear. Information is not reality-tested; internal reality rules. Something is true because we believe it to be true (Brenner, 1974, pp. 1–15). I believe that these processes are equally true of society and culture. Although at times I present what seems to be a monolithic picture of men and women – and indeed of history – I am well aware that no form of hegemony – whether in Hitler's Germany or in a 'man's world' – can mean the total control or end of alternatives in theory or practice. Even the winner's definitions of reality are an achievement – they are never complete, and they are always contested. So it is with gender relations.
These distinctions, and the existence of these two parts of the self, are not always so clear in our minds. At one extreme is mental illness, in which the conscious is overwhelmed by unconscious material. To an external observer this can be quite bewildering, particularly if one is talking to a floridly psychotic person in whom delusions and hallucinations alternate with moments of lucidity. Less extremely – and far more common – even most ordinary people will have experienced similar processes at times in their lives. In states of jealousy, for example, we are all capable of thinking the most appalling thoughts and having frightening impulses about someone we love. This temporary insanity seems bizarre when we later recover our equilibrium. Perhaps even more common are states of grief or mourning which can seem, to the sufferer, so similar to states of pathological depression. Normally optimistic and robust dispositions can be overcome by feelings of loss and despair which border on the suicidal.
One of the most common signs of the danger of a breach of the boundary between our unconscious and conscious selves is anxiety – we all experience anxiety. It does not always imply the danger of an incursion of the unconscious into the conscious self – clearly, there are many realistic sources of anxiety. These, however, can be employed by the unconscious and cause an excessively anxious response to quite ordinary sources of worry. This happens when an everyday event evokes in the unconscious mind echoes of situations which seem similar. All events are processed by the unconscious. The barrier works, in the main, in one direction only: from the unconscious to the conscious. The unconscious mind is primitive, infantile and dominated by passions. If it were to overwhelm the conscious self, normal functioning would be impossible. Anxiety is a signal that this might occur, and that the conscious self had better take avoiding action. Everything contains the potential for evoking primitive responses from us. Clearly, however, some of us are better defended than others against this possibility. What makes this so is an important question in so far as it is probably a major determinant of the extremity and intensity of expression of each individual man's misogyny, whether violent or silently contemptuous.
This – admittedly simple – description of the unconscious mind will be amplified below. Accepting the existence of the unconscious will simplify my task considerably. It enables me to introduce a qualification to the original statement about the universality of misogyny. If there is an unconscious mind, it is tenable to assume that it is quite possible for a man to hate women without being even remotely, consciously, aware of it. In fact we can go further towards those who might accept the unconscious but find universal misogyny a little more difficult to swallow by adding that this hatred may vary in intensity from mild to extreme. I realize that statements like these go right to the heart of a major methodological problem with the concept of the unconscious. If it is asserted that there is something about you which is unconscious, and which you deny, it could be said, with conviction, that you are bound to deny it because it is unconscious. This is a double bind. You could equally well reply that if it is unconscious, it is impossible for either of us to perceive it. This is a major dilemma for dynamic psychotherapists, but I hope to achieve some resolution of it.
If I can demonstrate that misogyny is universal, I hope then to examine its consequences – not only for you and me as individual men and women, but for society as a whole. In my opinion, men's struggles with their misogyny and its emotional consequences are responsible for most acts of male creativity, from the most sublime to the most destructive, in that this struggle involves extremes of emotion, from intense hatred to passionate idealization. It is difficult to think of an aspect of the male psyche which does not in some way, however obscurely, reflect these extremes of feeling in relation to women.
Collins English Dictionary defines misogyny as 'hatred of women', and it should be stressed that it is 'hatred' of women, not simply anger with them, which is my concern here. Although there may not commonly be many differences between the observable behaviour of an angry person and a person who is in a state of hatred, there are fundamental differences between hatred and anger. Our own integrity is not particularly discomfited when we are angry with another person. Subjectively, therefore, the experience of hatred is that it is a threat to the physical and psychological well-being of the subject, ourselves, and the object. Most people, on the other hand, experience anger as a threat to the object only. It seems to me that when I work with hatred in my patients – or, indeed, struggle with my own – that it has a quality of endurance, and it is often difficult to analyse because it has a thought-stopping effect. It involves the inability to see any good or redeeming features in its object. Anger, on the other hand, is usually easily identified as having been caused by particular circumstances. It has a more immediate reactive quality, and does not involve the kind of splitting of good and bad, with the subsequent denial of good, which we see in hatred. Hatred is essentially a state of enmity for an object, with its attendant wishes to dominate and control it. In most cases these impulses are reinforced by a – not always unconscious – desire to exterminate – that is, kill – the object if one fails to dominate it.
It is true to describe men's relations with women as being founded in hatred and a state of enmity. Naturally, this calls for major qualification. In all fields of human relations one finds that enmity and fear are handmaidens. Nobody would dispute that relations of enmity are based on fears of the other's intentions. The history of superpower relations, until the recent apparent end of the Cold War, is a good demonstration of this. Equally, it would be difficult to deny that these fears are paranoid – projections on to the 'enemy' of one's own hostile impulses towards them. There is an old American joke which was invented after a well-known Civil War general said that he had 'seen the enemy and it was ours'. A wag coined the immortal phrase: 'I have seen the enemy and it is us!'
There is a direct parallel here with the origins of male misogyny. In the final analysis it is difficult to judge the exact contributions made by, on the one hand, paranoid projection and, on the other, reality in one's final perceptions because of the necessity of determining the enemy's intentions in the absence of unambiguous information. Often the only information available is one's own fantasies, and in conditions of uncertainty one's worst fantasies prevail.
It is the hatred and fear of woman which lies behind the male need, and its praxis: to dominate and control her. That men actually dominate and control women is amply demonstrated, I believe, by the statistics in the Preface. In many instances – but, tragically, not always – this need stops short of the woman's death or serious injury. The need to dominate and control none the less allows expression of the hatred behind that desire, as well as preserving some vestiges of relationship within which to express love, in however limited a way. Sadly, for a great many men, the only means left for this expression is a distorted sexuality which might be described as exclusively male. It tends to be of a highly circumscribed and limited nature which allows for very little intimacy and closeness. It regards every woman as a sexual object, not a whole person. She becomes 'fair game' for a male predatory sexuality which is driven by a need aggressively to penetrate and possess. The subject, woman, becomes object. Aspects of the male self which yearn for intimacy and mutuality are split off and discounted. It was thought that the anxiety about AIDS had induced many heterosexuals to change their sexual behaviour, and this may indeed be true in the long term. Surprisingly – to me – however, it seems that massive publicity campaigns are having little effect, and the spread of HIV amongst heterosexuals now seems to be causing greater alarm than did its earlier appearance in homosexuals and drug users. I will return to this issue when I discuss the politics of homosexuality.
I can now restate my central thesis. Men exist in a state of perpetual enmity towards women which they express overtly and covertly, by controlling and dominating them. Whether by attrition or violence, women are ultimately controlled or destroyed by men. This destruction is usually carried out on women's psyches and their self-esteem, although as we see with each passing day, and as the evidence in the Preface shows, it all too often involves physical damage in addition. Of course, this damage varies: not all women are destroyed spiritually. However, as Rowan (1990) states, the introjection, by women, of what he calls the 'patripsych' is inevitable.
I believe that there is conclusive proof of the damage men inflict on women. This damage is visible and measurable. There is also damage of a sort which is not so evident: the spiritual damage to women – the destruction of their unique individuality and strength, self-esteem and freedom from fear, which comes from the limitations imposed on their development by men's use of their physical superiority.
Why do women put up with it? Can it, after all, be simply a consequence of men's physical superiority that they are, and seem always to have been, in the dominant position? The literature is not crammed with tales of big women battering small men. Although this is not entirely unheard of (see Straus et al., 1980) it is stretching the bounds of credibility to use such examples as there are to assert that violence is interactive or relational, not gender based. Surprisingly, there are still respectable researchers and clinicians (for a good example of this in clinical practice see Bowlby, 1988, p. 77ff.) who maintain this position despite the fact that society markedly discriminates against women who are violent towards their husbands. Often this discrimination takes the form of the most extreme applications of medical technology or the law (take the case of Sara Thornton in the UK in 1990. She was given a draconian sentence for killing her husband after suffering years of physical and emotional abuse. Fortunately, there is evidence that the battering defence is beginning to gain credence in such cases.) In comparison, society's response to men battering women is at best mildly disapproving and at worst explicitly collusive and outrageously encouraging. In 1989, out of 100,000 calls to the London Metropolitan Police from women who were victims of male violence in the home, fewer than 5,000 men were put on report. An even smaller proportion were prosecuted, although the figures are not centrally collated and precise numbers are impossible to come by – in itself a telling state of affairs. It is a well-documented fact that the police are less likely to act if an assault occurs in the home between intimates (Stanko, 1985). The evidence for society's differential response to female violence is overwhelming. Susan Edwards (1984) documents differential responses to women who 'maltreat' men.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Why Men Hate Women by Adam Jukes. Copyright © 1993 Adam Jukes. Excerpted by permission of Free Association Books.
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Table of Contents
Contents
Acknowledgements,John,
Preface,
Introduction,
1 The Hatred of Women,
2 Child Development,
3 Falling in Love,
4 The Development of Gender Identity: The Fear and Hatred of the Feminine,
5 The Don Juan Complex,
6 Pornography, Rape and Masturbation,
7 Female Masochism,
8 Men Who Batter,
Conclusions,
Postscript: John,
Bibliography,
Index,