WOMEN, SEXISM & SOCIETY: From Sirens to Sluts, Angels to She-Devils...

“The emotional, sexual, and psychological stereotyping of females begins when the doctor says: "It's a girl.” -Shirley Chisholm

“SEX game gone wrong,” “sex game gone awry,” “sex-mad flatmate,” “sex-crazed killer.”

That’s from just the first three minutes of the ABC News special on Amanda Knox last week, a veritable drumbeat of sexual shaming that leaves no doubt about what elevated a college student accused of murder into an object of international fascination, titillation and scorn.

It wasn’t the crime itself. It was the supposed conspiracy of her libido, cast as proof that she was out of control, up to no good, lost, wicked, dangerous. A girl this intent on randy fun was a girl who couldn’t be trusted and got what was coming to her, even if it was prison and even if there was plenty of reason — as the eventual reversal of her initial conviction made clear — to believe that she might not belong there.

“Knox knew, it seemed, no boundaries, leaving a vibrator in a transparent washbag and enjoying one-night stands,” wrote Tobias Jones in a 2011 article in the British newspaper The Observer. One-night stands? How could she?!? Of course if a guy has one of those, it’s a triumph: all the pleasure, none of the commitment. And boys, after all, will be boys.

We’ll never know precisely what happened on the night in Perugia, Italy, in 2007 when Meredith Kercher, 21, was killed. Knox, her housemate, was found guilty, then acquitted and will soon, despite the profoundly flawed case against her, face another trial. The Italian judicial system works about as smoothly as the Italian government.

But we know this: the double standard concerning men’s versus women’s sexuality not only survives but thrives, manifest in the enduring notoriety of “Foxy Knoxy,” whose memoir was published on the same day last week that the ABC News special aired. Keep the rest of her story the same but make her a man in the midst of erotic escapades abroad. Are we still gawking? Is ABC trumpeting Diane Sawyer’s exclusive sit-down with the lascivious pilgrim?

Similar questions can be asked about Jodi Arias, 32, whose murder trial in Arizona was winding down last week. The Arias case hasn’t made quite the leap from the tabloids into the mainstream that Knox’s did. But HLN, the cable network on which Nancy Grace fulminates, has enjoyed a ratings bonanza with its saturation coverage of the courtroom proceedings.

Arias has admitted to stabbing, shooting and slashing the throat of a former lover: an act of self-defense, she unpersuasively claims. And while his death was certainly grisly enough to explain a baseline of media interest, the amount of attention it has received stems from the courtroom juxtaposition of the defendant, outfitted in nerdy eyeglasses and a frumpy hairstyle, and evidence of what a steamy, pliable playmate she was. It stems from pictures of her genitalia that she let her lover take, audiotapes of the phone sex that the two of them had — and that she recorded. It stems from the shock and censure of such potent female desire.

Knox and Arias aren’t just women accused of murder. They’re minxes accused of murder, sitting in their courtroom seats with scarlet letters emblazoned on their chests, no jury needed to pronounce them guilty of wantonness at the very least. For men, lust is a tripwire. For women, it’s a noose.

I’ve heard quite a bit lately about David Petraeus’s road to redemption. I’ve heard less about Paula Broadwell’s. Yes, he’s the more public figure, but the disparity also reflects the way their affair was often portrayed in the first place. He strayed; she preyed. He was weak; she was wily. He was the fly, she the spider.

Let’s bring a few other recent news stories into this. Let’s indulge in a few hypotheticals.

WHAT if it had been Antonia Weiner who took to Twitter and there had been a different architecture to the image she tweeted? Would she be able even to entertain the idea of a political comeback? And would the spouse standing dutifully by her be seen as a brave and magnanimous stalwart, the way Huma Abedin is viewed in some quarters, or dismissed by one and all as a pitiable pushover?

Had a Southern governor named Marcia Sanford been entangled with a Latin lover when reputedly hiking the Appalachian Trail, would she today be her party’s nominee for an open Congressional seat? We know the answer, and we know that Wilhelmina Clinton and Newtina Gingrich wouldn’t have rebounded from their infidelities as robustly as Bill and Newt did.

Men get passes, women get reputations, and real, lasting humiliation travels only one way. The size and scope of that mortification, despite many decades of happy talk about dawning gender equality, are suggested by recent news stories of one teenage girl in California and another in Nova Scotia who hanged themselves after tales or cellphone pictures of their sexual violation circulated among peers. It’s impossible not to wonder if shame drove them to suicide, and it’s impossible not to ask what sort of world allows the victims of such assaults to feel more irredeemably branded — more eternally damned — than their accused assailants by all appearances do.

I’ll tell you what sort: a world in which there’s a cornucopia of synonyms for whore and slut and no comparably pejorative vocabulary for promiscuous or sexually rapacious men. A world in which Knox’s vibrator and the lingerie she was said to have bought in a Perugia store were presented not just as newsworthy but as germane to the charge of murder against her: referendums on her character, glimmers of her depravity, clues to precisely how a good girl went bad. A world in which her erotic appetite made her a “man eater,” as the Italian press wrote and as the rest of the world more or less parroted. A world in which her tally, scribbled on a sheet of paper in her prison cell, of seven sexual partners in all of her life was seen as sensational. A similar count for a guy in his early 20s would provoke not derision but disagreement: swordsman or slacker?

When we chart and lament the persistence of sexism in society, we look to the United States Congress, where women are still woefully underrepresented. We look to corporate boardrooms, where the glass ceiling hasn’t really shattered. But we needn’t look any further than how perversely censorious of women’s sex lives we remain, and how short the path from siren to slut and from angel to she-devil can be.

-Frank Bruni (Sexism and the Single Murderess, NYT, 5.4.2013. Image: Ben Wiseman,2013).

Women: Vicious Emissaries Of Hell...Sold, Pawned & Prostituted...

"A twitch of a woman's lip causes the fall of a nation. On the one hand she is sickeningly, destructively powerful. One the other hand she is a chattel, a beast, a commodity, she and her sisters are "human incubators."

In the Assyrian empire, which flourished from 1300 BCE, she could be impaled for aborting the child she is carrying. For lesser offenses she could be beaten or disfigured behind closed doors, but if her master wanted to mutilate her permanently—cut off her ears or nose, or tear out her breasts—he had to do it in public; though whether for the sake of example or for the general enjoyment. She could be punished at various times and places for going veiled, or not going veiled. She could be sold, pawned, or prostituted.

In Aristotle's thought, women were "deformed" men. In feudal Japan they were barred from climbing Mount Fuji because they would pollute it, and "unhappily married women were expected to commit suicide." A Buddhist text describes woman as the "emissary of hell." Her oppression is universal, her story cyclical; construed less as a human being than as an animal or force of nature, her place is outside history.

Even when historical records begin, most women have no names. At best they are just "wife of" or "daughter of" some illustrious man. A few stand out—they are famous for being almost erased, like Sappho, or startlingly wicked, like Messalina, or they perpetrate shocking violence on a man, like Jael killing Sisera by putting a nail through his head; or like Ruth the Moabite, they offer a pattern of exemplary gentleness, approved by men. If somehow a woman does manage to impose herself on the culture, her achievements will be appropriated by men or dismissed as freakish, a problem expressed pithily in the seventeenth century by Anne Bradstreet, the New England Puritan poet:

If what I do prove well,
it won't advance,
They'l say its stoln,
or else it was by chance.

In the nineteenth century, women's skulls were measured and their brains were weighed, and found wanting. For the criminologists Lombroso and Ferrero, women were big, vicious children. Through much of recorded history they have been slaves, though in some eras "rhetoric granted them the status of angels." Arguing for women's moral superiority can be a way of keeping them in their place—a way of removing them from the civil space, where power corrupts, to the supposed purity of the private sphere.

The home, French observes, is seen as women's natural territory, but is also "the primary site of female prosecution," the place where she is most unsafe. Sometimes the only power a woman has is to kill herself. In east African traditional societies women committed "cooking pot suicide," poisoning themselves and taking their children with them. Sometimes a woman is more powerful dead than alive. In the China of the Han dynasty, if an unhappy wife killed herself wearing her red bridal dress, she would haunt the husband's family and they would have to move house.

Men who read it might be put off by the depiction of the collective male as brutal psychopath, or puzzled by French's idea that men should "take responsibility for what their sex has done." (How responsible can you be for Sumerian monarchs, Egyptian pharaohs, or Napoleon Bonaparte?)

"Control over a woman is the only form of dominance most men possess, for most men are merely subjects of more powerful men," but she also takes gender oppression to be the fundamental oppression, and "primary, whatever the agenda of a culture."

...Mothering was taken to be innate, an instinctive activity. In cases where mothers violate this instinct, they can be punished and their children taken away. Once the link between coitus and childbirth was understood, men began to regard children as their property. All patri-lineal societies stand condemned: "Naming children for fathers is intrinsically an act of force: it reverses natural mother-right." Sometime before the development of writing, the shift took place from matrilineal to patri-lineal societies, then to patriarchy. The war against women began, the long battle to control their sexuality, which necessitates control of their bodies and minds.

...The European appropriation of North America, highlighting Jesuit testimony to the gentle and egalitarian societies of Native Americans: "Indians never imagined rape until they saw Europeans perform it." If true, this challenges the assumptions to which the rest of her project leads us—assumptions not just about men and women, but about how the strong exert power over the weak. Was Abigail Adams wrong when she said: "Remember all men would be tyrants if they could.... That your sex is naturally tyrannical is a truth so thoroughly established as to admit of no dispute"? It was the chosen task of the Church to suppress egalitarianism in Native American society and to teach men to be brutal to their women. The Catholic Church is one of the most effective misogyny machines ever devised.

The 19th Century was "the lowest point in women's history" but also "the most cheering period in female history, the moment the tide began to turn." In the rapidly industrializing West, women's capacities are proclaimed to be exactly what economic need requires them to be at any particular time. Oppression puts on a mask of concern. "The rhetoric of achieved revolution" conceals vast sexual and racial inequalities. Woman is no longer cast as diabolically sexy; now she is asexual, and responsible for regulating men's desire. In her, desire is abnormal; uterine function dominates mental function; too much thinking is bad for reproductive health; and "all exclusively female physical functions were considered inherently pathological."

Feminism is often misunderstood; people think it is about putting women where men are now, but "the ultimate goal of feminism is to change society." The design is to create a cooperative world, a task that will not be achieved in a few generations; to do it we will have to free ourselves from the grip of history, from the assumptions of the societies in which we have grown up. The task is to convince the world that "sexism brings men...emotional and biological loss. Quoting a Buddhist text: Her face resembles that of a saint; her heart is like that of a demon...A woman has no home in the three worlds." She does not exist in the past, present, or future. Her battle is just to become visible; to be accorded full humanity, not to be regarded as some transient natural phenomenon, or an animal created for male use.

-Hilary Mantel (Excerpt: "The War Against Women," The New York Review of Books, 4.30.2009. Image: "The Killers", Starring Ronald Reagan & Angie Dickinson, directed by Donald Siegel, 1964).

King Henry VIII: Love Is A Many Splendored Thing...

In 1509 King Henry VIII of England married his dead brother's wife Catherine of Aragon, whose seven pregnancies failed to produce for him a male heir. In 1533 he annulled the marriage and married Boleyn, dissolving ties with the papacy and becoming the head of the Church of England one year later.

Love letter to Anne Boleyn:

"In debating with myself the contents of your letters I have been put to a great agony, not knowing how to understand them, whether to my disadvantage as shown in some places, or to my advantage as in others. I beseech you now with all my heart definitely to let me know your whole mind as to the love between us. For necessity compels me to plague you for a reply, having been for more than a year now struck by the dart of love, and being uncertain either of failure or of finding a place in your heart and affection, which point has certainly kept me for some time from naming you my mistress, since if you only love me with an ordinary love the name is not appropriate to you, seeing that it stands for an uncommon position very remote from the ordinary. But if it pleases you to do the duty of a true, loyal mistress and friend, and to give yourself body and heart to me, who have been, and will be, your very loyal servant (if your rigour does not forbid me), I promise you that not only the name will be due to you, but also to take you as my sole mistress, casting off all others than yourself out of mind and affection, and to serve you only, begging you to make me a complete reply to this my rude letter as to how far and in what I can trust—and if it does not please you to reply in writing, to let me know of some place where I can have it by word of mouth, the which place I will seek out with all my heart. No more for fear of wearying you.

Written by the hand of him who would willingly remain your HR."

Boleyn did not bear a male heir either. King Henry charged her with adultery, incest and treason. She was beheaded in 1536. According to prominent British historian Eric W. Ives, her Executioner was so taken and shaken by Anne, he found it difficult to proceed. In order to distract her, he shouted, "Where is my sword?" just before killing her. Anne could die thinking she had a few more seconds to live. Ten days after the execution, Henry VIII married Jane Seymour.

And...Anne Boleyn's daughter? Queen Elizabeth I: When she died at Richmond Palace on the 24th March 1603, England was one of the most powerful and prosperous countries in the world.

-King Henry VIII of England (Love Letter To Anne Boleyn, 1528. Image: -Circle of John Bettes the Elder.Temple Newsam House, "Portrait Of Queen Elizabeth I," 1592).