Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

of the loup-garou, and De L’Ancre at Labout burned

two hundred. 11

It is estimated that at least 1, 000 were executed in

England, and the Scottish, Welsh, and Irish were even

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Woman Haling

fiercer in their purges. It is hard to arrive at a figure

for the whole of the Continent and the British Isles,

but the most responsible estimate would seem to be

9 million. It may well, some authorities contend, have

been more. Nine million seems almost moderate when

one realizes that The Blessed Reichhelm of Schongan at

the end of the 13th century computed the number of

the Devil-driven to be 1,758,064,176. A conservative,

Jean Weir, physician to the Duke of Cleves, estimated

the number to be only 7,409,127. The ratio o f women to

men executed has been variously estimated at 20 to 1

and 100 to 1. Witchcraft was a woman's crime.

Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from

becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime:

since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” 12 Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the

Devil themselves. Without the personal intercession of

Christ, women remained what they had always been in

Judeo-Christian culture:

Now the wickedness of women is spoken of in

Ecclesiasticus xxv: There is no head above the head

of a serpent: and there is no wrath above the wrath of

Gynocide: The Witches

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a woman. I had rather dwell with a lion and a dragon

than to keep house with a wicked woman. And among

much which in that place precedes and follows about a

wicked woman, he concludes: All wickedness is but

little to the wickedness of a woman. Wherefore S. John

Chrysostom says on the text. It is not good to marry

(S. Matthew xix): What else is woman but a foe to

friendship, an unescapable punishment, a necessary

evil, a natural temptation, a desirable calamity, a domestic danger, a delectable detriment, an evil nature, painted with fair colours!. . . Cicero in his second

book of The Rhetorics says: The many lusts of men lead

them into one sin, but the one lust of women leads

them into all sins; for the root of all woman’s vices is

avarice.. . . When a woman thinks alone, she thinks

evil. 13