Book description
"Yes, women are the greatest evil Zeus has made, and men are
bound to them hand and foot with impossible knots by
God."-Semonides, seventh century B. C.
Men put women on a pedestal to worship them from afar-and to
take better aim at them for the purpose of derision. Why is this
paradoxical response to women so widespread, so far-reaching, so
all-pervasive? Misogyny, David D. Gilmore suggests, is best described
as a male malady, as it has always been a characteristic shared by
human societies throughout the world.
Misogyny: The Male Malady is a comprehensive historical and
anthropological survey of woman-hating that casts new light on this
age-old bias. The turmoil of masculinity and the ugliness of misogyny
have been well documented in different cultures, but Gilmore's
synoptic approach identifies misogyny in a variety of human
experiences outside of sex and marriage and makes a fresh and
enlightening contribution toward understanding this phenomenon.
Gilmore maintains that misogyny is so widespread and so pervasive
among men that it must be at least partly psychogenic in origin, a
result of identical experiences in the male developmental cycle,
rather than caused by the environment alone.
Presenting a wealth of compelling examples-from the jungles of
New Guinea to the boardrooms of corporate America-Gilmore shows that
misogynistic practices occur in hauntingly identical forms. He asserts
that these deep and abiding male anxieties stem from unresolved
conflicts between men's intense need for and dependence upon women and
their equally intense fear of that dependence. However, misogyny,
according to Gilmore, is also often supported and intensified by
certain cultural realities, such as patrilineal social organization;
kinship ideologies that favor fraternal solidarity over conjugal
unity; chronic warfare, feuding, or other forms of intergroup
violence; and religious orthodoxy or asceticism. Gilmore is in the end
able to offer steps toward the discovery of antidotes to this
irrational but global prejudice, providing an opportunity for a
lasting cure to misogyny and its manifestations.
"Readers will be intrigued by the enormous range of material
covered."-Literary Research / Recherche Litteraire
David D. Gilmore is Professor of Anthropology at the State University
of New York, Stony Brook. He is the author of several books, including
Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary
Terrors, also available from the University of Pennsylvania Press.
