Excerpt: Hills of Paradise by Mineke Schipper
This extract debunks Freudian notions to suggest that the male envy of the female abilty to procreate is what lies at the root of violence directed at women
A lack of the characteristics of the other sex can be experienced as especially harrowing in societies where one sex is more valued or enjoys more privileges than the other. So jealousy of the dominant sex is more commonplace than jealousy of the less-valued sex. Undoubtedly girls are (or have been) envious of the self-evident privileges of boys who are allowed more freedoms and more opportunities: more education, being able to travel alone without being disgraced or losing their honour, and access to a number of domains deemed inaccessible to girls. The WomanStats Project world maps are crystal-clear testimonies of the global consequences of that age-old emphasis on sex differences.
In their morning prayer, orthodox Jewish men openly express their gratitude: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has not made me a woman.” A common Kurdish saying observes that “it is better to be a man for one day than a woman for 10 days.” A woman I interviewed from Bhutan agrees: “Being born a woman means a wasted life”, and “I won’t come back female” is an old Ashanti saying in southern Ghana, reflecting women’s hopes for a better position in a next life. Most oral traditions reflect a gender hierarchy in which it is self-evident who are to be the speakers and who are the silent ones, the keepers of knowledge and the ignorant, the travellers and those staying at home — as if this were the irreversible natural order of things.
It is quite understandable that most researchers have paid less attention to male envy of women and female bodily functions than the other way around. Until well into the last century most anthropologists were men, and it is likely that they had a blind spot for male envy of women. Yet that envy exists, and one of the most common devices to provide adolescents with a way of overriding it and to establish the required roles in society was to introduce initiation rites.
The circumcision of boys exists in so many cultures around the world, usually around puberty, that this custom seems to meet a deep-seated need. Initiation rites sometimes serve as “proof” that the men thereby give birth to their sons without any female interference: the initiated boy is “dying of his childhood” and is only now really born for the first time, thanks to his father. This form of wishful thinking puts medieval scholar Paolo Certaldo’s previously cited statement about the son who has to obey his father who gave birth to him, “even though his mother provided practical aid” — in a wider context. It remains surprising that such reasonings have rarely been interpreted as womb envy.
Male initiation is almost everywhere more extensive than female, and usually takes place during puberty, the period in which girls have their first monthly bleeding. It is not without significance that a little blood is released when the foreskin is cut away. In this process female “birthing behaviour” is sometimes literally imitated. Among the Iatmul in Papua New Guinea, boys even had a huge symbolic vulva thrown over their heads during their initiation. Emphasis on masculinity, (re-)birth as a “real man” or male birth-giving in circumcision rituals frequently go along with explicit negative feelings towards women.
In the Western world too, there has been a tendency to think that the birth of girls was due to a lack of virility — thanks in part to the lasting influence of reliable old sexist Aristotle. In his famous work on animals, written between 347 and 322 BC, the philosopher provided the world with powerful statements about the huge differences between men and women:
For females are weaker and colder in nature [than males], and we must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural deficiency. Accordingly, while it is within the mother it develops slowly because of its coldness (for development is concoction, and it is heat that concocts, and what is hotter is easily concocted); but after birth it quickly arrives at maturity and old age on account of its weakness, for all inferior things come sooner to their perfection or end, and as this is true of works of art so it is of what is formed by Nature.
Whether or not inspired by this or other Greek philosophers, Western physicians and other scholars continued to conduct empirical research, with perspectives often demonstrably clouded by their own bias. Thanks to traditionally cherished ideas, the female body was portrayed as a deviation from the “norm”, or as a less perfect or inferior variant of the male. It looks as if, subconsciously, male envy led to ever stronger belief in the male seed as the essential contribution to the life of a child. The contribution of women in pregnancy and birth-giving was considered less important or even negligible.
Studying myths and other commentaries on the female body transmitted around the world, one cannot ignore the legacies brought forth by womb envy. They make understandable why men invented and imposed rules excluding women from religious and other professional practices. The usual explanation was (and in some traditions still is) that only men had the brains needed for those roles, for the very reason that they were men. Authors such as Françoise Héritier in her important two-volume work Masculin/Féminin and Robert McElvaine in Eve’s Seed argue the very opposite: those patterns of thinking ensue from what men were physically unable to do — giving birth to and suckling society’s children.
The two sexes have been provided with different tools, but why can’t people be dissimilar and still treat each other as equals? Freud continued to emphasise sexual differences and reaffirmed centuries of influential reasoning that women are “inferior” to men. His emphasis on female penis envy and his claim that girls blame their mothers for having sent them ‘so pathetically incomplete’ into the world might well stem from his own subconscious womb envy.
In their practice, psychiatrists and psychotherapists come across men who are jealous of women. At children’s dressing-up parties, boys sometimes put pillows under their jerseys to imitate breasts or pregnant bellies. There are those who openly admit that they envy girls who will have children later: “They hate them for it, and dream of violence; cutting off breasts, pulling out vaginas.” They feel frustrated by women not responding to their advances or simply for not being allowed to touch those breasts.
There has undoubtedly been an irresistible need for the message that men are superior to women and that it makes sense for men to be in power.
A lack of the characteristics of the other sex can be experienced as especially harrowing in societies where one sex is more valued or enjoys more privileges than the other. So jealousy of the dominant sex is more commonplace than jealousy of the less-valued sex. Undoubtedly girls are (or have been) envious of the self-evident privileges of boys who are allowed more freedoms and more opportunities: more education, being able to travel alone without being disgraced or losing their honour, and access to a number of domains deemed inaccessible to girls. The WomanStats Project world maps are crystal-clear testimonies of the global consequences of that age-old emphasis on sex differences.
In their morning prayer, orthodox Jewish men openly express their gratitude: “Blessed are you, Lord our God, Ruler of the Universe, who has not made me a woman.” A common Kurdish saying observes that “it is better to be a man for one day than a woman for 10 days.” A woman I interviewed from Bhutan agrees: “Being born a woman means a wasted life”, and “I won’t come back female” is an old Ashanti saying in southern Ghana, reflecting women’s hopes for a better position in a next life. Most oral traditions reflect a gender hierarchy in which it is self-evident who are to be the speakers and who are the silent ones, the keepers of knowledge and the ignorant, the travellers and those staying at home — as if this were the irreversible natural order of things.
It is quite understandable that most researchers have paid less attention to male envy of women and female bodily functions than the other way around. Until well into the last century most anthropologists were men, and it is likely that they had a blind spot for male envy of women. Yet that envy exists, and one of the most common devices to provide adolescents with a way of overriding it and to establish the required roles in society was to introduce initiation rites.
{{/usCountry}}It is quite understandable that most researchers have paid less attention to male envy of women and female bodily functions than the other way around. Until well into the last century most anthropologists were men, and it is likely that they had a blind spot for male envy of women. Yet that envy exists, and one of the most common devices to provide adolescents with a way of overriding it and to establish the required roles in society was to introduce initiation rites.
{{/usCountry}}The circumcision of boys exists in so many cultures around the world, usually around puberty, that this custom seems to meet a deep-seated need. Initiation rites sometimes serve as “proof” that the men thereby give birth to their sons without any female interference: the initiated boy is “dying of his childhood” and is only now really born for the first time, thanks to his father. This form of wishful thinking puts medieval scholar Paolo Certaldo’s previously cited statement about the son who has to obey his father who gave birth to him, “even though his mother provided practical aid” — in a wider context. It remains surprising that such reasonings have rarely been interpreted as womb envy.
Male initiation is almost everywhere more extensive than female, and usually takes place during puberty, the period in which girls have their first monthly bleeding. It is not without significance that a little blood is released when the foreskin is cut away. In this process female “birthing behaviour” is sometimes literally imitated. Among the Iatmul in Papua New Guinea, boys even had a huge symbolic vulva thrown over their heads during their initiation. Emphasis on masculinity, (re-)birth as a “real man” or male birth-giving in circumcision rituals frequently go along with explicit negative feelings towards women.
In the Western world too, there has been a tendency to think that the birth of girls was due to a lack of virility — thanks in part to the lasting influence of reliable old sexist Aristotle. In his famous work on animals, written between 347 and 322 BC, the philosopher provided the world with powerful statements about the huge differences between men and women:
For females are weaker and colder in nature [than males], and we must look upon the female character as being a sort of natural deficiency. Accordingly, while it is within the mother it develops slowly because of its coldness (for development is concoction, and it is heat that concocts, and what is hotter is easily concocted); but after birth it quickly arrives at maturity and old age on account of its weakness, for all inferior things come sooner to their perfection or end, and as this is true of works of art so it is of what is formed by Nature.
Whether or not inspired by this or other Greek philosophers, Western physicians and other scholars continued to conduct empirical research, with perspectives often demonstrably clouded by their own bias. Thanks to traditionally cherished ideas, the female body was portrayed as a deviation from the “norm”, or as a less perfect or inferior variant of the male. It looks as if, subconsciously, male envy led to ever stronger belief in the male seed as the essential contribution to the life of a child. The contribution of women in pregnancy and birth-giving was considered less important or even negligible.
Studying myths and other commentaries on the female body transmitted around the world, one cannot ignore the legacies brought forth by womb envy. They make understandable why men invented and imposed rules excluding women from religious and other professional practices. The usual explanation was (and in some traditions still is) that only men had the brains needed for those roles, for the very reason that they were men. Authors such as Françoise Héritier in her important two-volume work Masculin/Féminin and Robert McElvaine in Eve’s Seed argue the very opposite: those patterns of thinking ensue from what men were physically unable to do — giving birth to and suckling society’s children.
The two sexes have been provided with different tools, but why can’t people be dissimilar and still treat each other as equals? Freud continued to emphasise sexual differences and reaffirmed centuries of influential reasoning that women are “inferior” to men. His emphasis on female penis envy and his claim that girls blame their mothers for having sent them ‘so pathetically incomplete’ into the world might well stem from his own subconscious womb envy.
In their practice, psychiatrists and psychotherapists come across men who are jealous of women. At children’s dressing-up parties, boys sometimes put pillows under their jerseys to imitate breasts or pregnant bellies. There are those who openly admit that they envy girls who will have children later: “They hate them for it, and dream of violence; cutting off breasts, pulling out vaginas.” They feel frustrated by women not responding to their advances or simply for not being allowed to touch those breasts.
There has undoubtedly been an irresistible need for the message that men are superior to women and that it makes sense for men to be in power.
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