Tama Starr. The "Natural Inferiority" of Women (1991)

     Tama Starr. The "Natural Inferiority" of Women (1991) "Outrageous Pronouncements by Misguided Males". Starr has assembled an astonishing collection of quotations illustrating the patriarchal theory that men are superior and women are inferior. Occasionally, they are witty, especially those put in the mouths of fictional characters, but mostly they are absurd, and occasionally bizarre. Reading so many misogynistic pronouncements all in one place confirms the suspicion that misogyny at one extreme is self-serving deliberate ignorance, and at the other is a mental illness. Technically, I think it’s a type of hysteria, which is ironic, considering the origin of that term.

     The collection also shows that religious leaders have a lot to answer for. In the soi-disant Christian West, Augustine of Hippo’s self-absorption had a very damaging effect on the early church. He believed, as narcissists have always done, that his experience is universal. When he got religion, he projected his disgust over his past life of debauchery onto his new-found ideology, and distorted the lessons of the Bible. Not that he was unique: religionists from all faith traditions have done exactly the same.
      I don’t know what impulse leads some men into fear and loathing of their women. Freud’s theories suggest an answer, but Freud himself would have resisted it: these men (including Freud himself) suffer from fear. There’s something about women that terrifies these men, and their only defence (per Freud) is to transform the object of fear into an object of loathed inferiority. By imagining superiority, such men prop up their faltering ego, which threatens to dissolve into abject terror. I suspect the fear is prompted in large part by the recognition that we are animals, a fact that humans tend to deny more or less indignantly. For some people, the animal in the human is a disgusting stain on what they believe is  a spiritual nature; so Woman, who reminds us of our animal nature by giving birth to us as all other mammals do, becomes the focus of that fear. That mothers wield practically absolute power over small children no doubt injects the note of impotent hate.
     Starr has arranged the quotations in something resembling an argument, which is (as she notes) circular. Women arouse men’s baser instincts, so women must be evil. Because women are evil, they arouse men’s baser instincts. That men may be responsible for allowing their baser instincts to be aroused seems to be an idea considerably beyond the intellectual capacity of all those clever theologians and philosophers who prove their superiority by producing elaborations on this fallacy.
     Starr compiled a companion volume, Eve's Revenge, which I haven't seen.
     Recommended. ***