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Woman Hating

Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years,

brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters for the

sake o f a secure marriage.

Millions of mothers, over a period of 1, 000 years,

brutally crippled and mutilated their daughters in the

name o f beauty.

But this thousand-year period is only the tip of

an awesome, fearful iceberg: an extreme and visible

expression of romantic attitudes, processes, and

values organically rooted in all cultures, then and

now. It demonstrates that man’s love for woman, his

sexual adoration of her, his human definition of her,

his delight and pleasure in her, require her negation:

physical crippling and psychological lobotomy. That is

the very nature of romantic love, which is the love based

on polar role definitions, manifest in herstory as well

as in fiction —he glories in her agony, he adores her

deformity, he annihilates her freedom, he will have her

as sex object, even if he must destroy the bones in her

feet to do it. Brutality, sadism, and oppression emerge

as the substantive core of the romantic ethos. That ethos

is the warp and woof of culture as we know it.

Women should be beautiful. All repositories of

cultural wisdom from King Solomon to King Hefner

agree: women should be beautiful. It is the reverence

for female beauty which informs the romantic ethos,

gives it its energy and justification. Beauty is transformed into that golden ideal, Beauty —rapturous and abstract. Women must be beautiful and Woman is

Beauty.

Notions o f beauty always incorporate the whole of a

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given societal structure, are crystallizations o f its values.

A society with a well-defined aristocracy will have aristocratic standards o f beauty. In Western “democracy”

notions o f beauty are “democratic” : even if a woman is

not born beautiful, she can make herself attractive.

T h e argument is not simply that some women are

not beautiful, therefore it is not fair to ju d ge women on

the basis o f physical beauty; or that men are not judged

on that basis, therefore women also should not be

judged on that basis; or that men should look for character in women; or that our standards o f beauty are too parochial in and o f themselves; or even that judgin g

women according to their conformity to a standard o f

beauty serves to make them into products, chattels,

differing from the farmer's favorite cow only in terms o f

literal form. The issue at stake is different, and crucial.