The re-election of Donald Trump has amplified the voices of America's misogynists who believe that 'women are property'. Rosemary Sorensen writes.
FEMINISM HAS MADE a difference to women’s lives in the past 50 years. Misogyny, nevertheless, is still very much embedded in masculinist belief systems, as the United States Presidential Election of a vulgar, sexist, abusive man shows. And while feminism cannot be destroyed, it’s now definitely on the defence, with misogyny on the rise.
In the final furious days before the American Election, Donald Trump made it clear that, despite polls suggesting he was on the nose with female voters, he knew he was on to a winner when he said he’d protect women whether they like it or not. A majority of men and women in the United States responded to this macho threat by making him their President.
Days after the result was declared, a couple of so-called Christian fundamentalists headed to the University of Texas campus with signs declaring ‘Women are property’ and ‘Homo sex is sin’. A decade ago, they’d have been laughed at. Now, in a fractious climate where women’s rights are being eroded by wave after wave of masculinist religious ideologies, their silly signs cause offence, anger and fear.
Weirdly, the idea that women are chattels is not expressed just by fringe lunatics but both by “trad wives” and their powerful husbands.
A decade ago, when religions were still opening to diversity and tolerance, to come out and say that demons are among us would also have been met with derision. Spinning heads and Devil worship were the stuff of horror movies, entertaining but not serious. Trump’s wicked accusations that there is “evil within” sowed a seed for the return of belief in demonic forces — and acolyte Tucker Carlson willingly watered that weed when he said that he’d been attacked by a demon that left claw marks on his body.
I kid you not. He claimed this, advertising a documentary about himself — a documentary about himself!
Even a month ago, the obvious reaction to both the “women are property” and “the devil is among us” nonsense would be to scoff. Now, as we watch Trump and his cronies head back to the White House (and here in Australia, a Senator felt confident enough to boast about using homophobic, racist and ableist terms), the laughter has stopped.
Presciently, Nobel-prize-winning Polish author Olga Tokarczuk has written a novel that reminds us about how misogyny is deeply embedded in masculinist societies. The Empusium is described as a ‘Health Resort Horror Story’, a feminist refiguring of Thomas Mann’s Alpine sanatorium novel, The Magic Mountain, and ‘a riveting, humorous tale of mystery that takes misogyny to task’.
It can also be called a revenge tale. The ghosts of abused women rise to carry out an annual murderous rite enacting the misogynist myth of empusae, female shape-shifters in Greek mythology who took the form of beautiful women to seduce, then kill and eat young men.
Sounds pretty silly, right? Tokarczuk pulls it off with powerful writing in a story that hints slowly at the supernatural, as it constructs a mystery around the main character, a young man who seems destined to be the empusae’s next victim. Her master-stroke is to put into the mouths of the sanitorium patients the kinds of misogynistic opinions that were accepted at the time the book is set – just before the First World War – and, shockingly, still accepted throughout the 20th Century, despite feminism.
The men say things like this, quoting Darwin:
‘Woman represents a bygone inferior stage of evolution. Woman is like... an evolutionary laggard.’
And:
‘Women... are incapable of creating a national organisation, or even a tribal one, because by their nature they submit to those who are stronger.’
And:
‘As far as brilliance in literature is concerned, dear gentlemen... the surest sign of an outstanding work is that women do not like it.’
To which one of the men adds:
‘What a pity we cannot test that — we have no women here.’
If this sounds ludicrous and amusing, the sting in the tail, the trump card, comes in an author’s note at the end of the book:
‘All the misogynistic views on the topic of women and their place in the world are paraphrased from texts by the following authors...’
The long list includes names from antiquity, such as Plato and Ovid, through to Augustine of Hippo and Thomas Aquinas, on to William Shakespeare, Arthur Schopenhauer, the aforementioned Darwin, Sigmund Freud (but of course), and on to Jack Kerouac, DH Lawrence, WB Yeats and Jean-Paul Sartre (partner of the magnificent Simone de Beauvoir, author of The Second Sex).
I once, 30 years ago, left the role of editor of Australian Book Review with what I wanted to be a memorable and light-hearted signoff: with primitive Photoshop tools, I pasted the heads of prominent Australian writers – such as Peter Carey, David Ireland, John Tranter and Rodney Hall – onto the buxom bodies of lingerie models. I added quotes from their writing, easily found, which patronised and stereotyped women.
My mistake was to send this little parting gift off to the printers as I left: the man who ran the printing press contacted the newly installed (woman) editor, outraged at this shocking lack of respect (I guess that’s how he saw it, I was never actually told) for Australia’s men of letters. Many distinguished literati, from booksellers to writers and academics, never forgave me.
Now, when I look back on that younger self, I recognise the frustration and contempt for the misogyny embedded in cultural norms. This was back when Bettina Arndt was still considered a feminist and men could say, without demur, that they were great supporters of women’s writing. (Thanks so much, lads.)
If feminism made a difference to how many women’s voices are now heard, the misogyny it identified still remains firmly embedded. If I say “God” and your mind’s eye flashes up an image of an old man with a flowing white beard, the cultural conditioning is still there, deep and unshakeable.
The poet Robert Graves, who, the Academy of American Poets tells us, was ‘greatly influenced by his mother’s puritanical beliefs and his father’s love of Celtic poetry and myth’, described the original Empusa as a beautiful demigoddess, who seduced young sleeping men (in their dreams, apparently), then killed and ate them.
Empusa makes the mistake of trying that on a man she finds asleep by the road, who turns out to be Zeus:
‘Zeus woke and visited his wrath on her and Empusa was killed.’
(The same Zeus who was saved from being eaten by his father by his mother, who fooled Cronos by handing him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes.)
There’s another twist in Tokarczuk’s tale: it’s the men who organise who is going to die each year. Taken up in a frenzy of fear about the impending empusae return, they carry a young man into the forest, where he is sacrificed to the hungry ghosts. It’s a metaphor for war and a reminder that men, like the writer Robert Graves, who went off to fight in the war that was supposed to end all wars were shockingly traumatised by the horrors they experienced and took part in.
All of this is, apparently, forgotten, by the rising misogynists, those who find in the elevation of Donald Trump the opportunity to come out of the closet and, like that Australian Senator, to announce themselves anti-woke, anti-feminist, anti-decency. That champion of this new world order, Elon Musk, has already shown implicit support for the resurrection of a theory of masculinity the sick men of The Empusium would endorse: that “alpha males” should run the world.
And here we are, then. Same lunacy, but not nearly as eloquently written as the misogyny of Plato, Shakespeare or DH Lawrence.
Grunts and slogans, like those held up by the silly men at the University of Texas, have replaced the flowing discourse of the literate and loquacious, although the alpha-male Twitter post re-posted by Musk as an ‘interesting observation’ has a go at sounding fancy:
People who can’t defend themselves physically (women and low T men) parse information through a consensus filter as a safety mechanism.
Only high T alpha males and aneurotypical people (hey autists!) are actually free to parse information with an objective “is this true?” filter. That is why a Republic of high status males is best for decision making. Democratic, but a democracy only for those who are free to think.
This is the stuff and nonsense now disseminated by the man who sits to the right of Emperor Trump’s throne. Frankly, the only hope is that the White House turns out to be an Empusium – writing metaphorically – because seductive, man-attacking demons are a myth, of course.
Rosemary Sorensen is an IA columnist, journalist and founder of the Bendigo Writers Festival. You can follow Rosemary on Twitter/X @sorensen_rose.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License
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