Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

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“she is a liar by nature, ” “her gait, posture, and habit

. . . is vanity o f vanities. ” 18

Women are most vividly described as being “more

bitter than death” :

And I have found a woman more bitter than death,

who is the hunter’s snare, and her heart is a net, and

her hands are bands. He that pleaseth God shall escape from her; but he that is a sinner shall be caught by her. More bitter than death, that is, than the

devil.. . .

More bitter than death, again, because that is

natural and destroys only the body; but the sin which

arose from woman destroys the soul by depriving it

of grace, and delivers the body up to the punishment

for sin.

More bitter than death, again, because bodily death

is an open and terrible enemy, but woman is a wheedling

and secret enemy. 19

and also:

And that she is more perilous than a snare does not

speak of the snare of hunters, but of devils. For men

are caught not only through their carnal desires, when

they see and hear women: for S. Bernard says: Their

face is a burning wind, and their voice the hissing of

serpents.. . . And when it is said that her heart is a

net, it speaks of the inscrutable malice which reigns

in their hearts.. . .

To conclude: All witchcraft comes from carnal lust,

which is in women insatiable. See Proverbs xxx: there

are three things that are never satisfied, yea, a fourth

thing which says not, it is enough; that is, the mouth

of the womb. 20

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Woman Hating

Here the definition of woman, in common with the

pornographic definition, is her carnality; the essence

of her character, in common with the fairy-tale definition, is her malice and avarice. The words flow almost too easily in our psychoanalytic age: we are dealing

with an existential terror of women, of the “mouth of

the womb, ” stemming from a primal anxiety about male

potency, tied to a desire for self (phallic) control; men

have deep-rooted castration fears which are expressed

as a horror of the womb. These terrors form the substrata of a myth of feminine evil which in turn justified several centuries of gynocide.

The evidence, provided by the Malleus and the executions which blackened those centuries, is almost without limit. One particular concern was that devils

stole semen (vitality) from innocent, sleeping men —

seductive witches visited men in their sleep, and did the

evil stealing. As Ernest Jones wrote:

The explanation for these fantasies is surely not hard.