of her time, money, and energy on binding, plucking,
painting, and deodorizing herself. It is commonly and
wrongly said that male transvestites through the use of
makeup and costuming caricature the women they
would become, but any real knowledge of the romantic
ethos makes clear that these men have penetrated to the
core experience of being a woman, a romanticized construct.
The technology of beauty, and the message it carries, is handed down from mother to daughter. Mother teaches daughter to apply lipstick, to shave under her
arms, to bind her breasts, to wear a girdle and high-
heeled shoes. Mother teaches daughter concomitantly
her role, her appropriate behavior, her place. Mother
teaches daughter, necessarily, the psychology which
defines womanhood: a woman must be beautiful, in
order to please the amorphous and amorous Him. What
we have called the romantic ethos operates as vividly
in 20th-century Amerika and Europe as it did in 10th-
century China.
This cultural transfer o f technology, role, and psychology virtually affects the emotive relationship between mother and daughter. It contributes substantially to the ambivalent love-hate dynamic o f that relationship.
What must the Chinese daughter/child have felt toward
the mother who bound her feet? What does any daughter/child feel toward the mother who forces her to do
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115
painful things to her own body? T h e mother takes on
the role o f enforcer: she uses seduction, command, all
manner o f force to coerce the daughter to conform to
the demands o f the culture. It is because this role becomes her dominant role in the mother-daughter relationship that tensions and difficulties between mothers and daughters are so often unresolvable. T h e daughter
who rejects the cultural norms enforced by the mother
is forced to a basic rejection o f her own mother, a recognition o f the hatred and resentment she felt toward that mother, an alienation from mother and society
so extreme that her own womanhood is denied by both.
T h e daughter who internalizes those values and endorses those same processes is bound to repeat the teaching she was taught —her anger and resentment remain subterranean, channeled against her own female offspring as well as her mother.
Pain is an essential part o f the grooming process,
and that is not accidental. Plucking the eyebrows,
shaving under the arms, wearing a girdle, learning to
walk in high-heeled shoes, having one’s nose fixed,
straightening or curling one’s hair —these things hurt.
The pain, o f course, teaches an important lesson: no
price is too great, no process too repulsive, no operation
too painful for the woman who would be beautiful.
The tolerance of pain and the romanticization of that tolerance begins here, in preadolescence, in socialization, and serves to prepare women for lives o f childbearing, self-abnegation, and husband-pleasing. The adolescent
experience o f the “pain o f being a woman” casts the
feminine psyche into a masochistic mold and forces
the adolescent to conform to a self-image which bases
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itself on mutilation of the body, pain happily suffered,
and restricted physical mobility. It creates the masochistic personalities generally found in adult women: subservient, materialistic (since all value is placed on the
body and its ornamentation), intellectually restricted,
creatively impoverished. It forces women to be a sex of
lesser accomplishment, weaker, as underdeveloped as
any backward nation. Indeed, the effects o f that prescribed relationship between women and their bodies are so extreme, so deep, so extensive, that scarcely any
area of human possibility is left untouched by it.
Men, of course, like a woman who “takes care of
herself. ” The male response to the woman who is made-
up and bound is a learned fetish, societal in its dimensions. One need only refer to the male idealization of the bound foot and say that the same dynamic is operating here. Romance based on role differentiation, superiority based on a culturally determined and rigidly enforced inferiority, shame and guilt and fear of women and sex itself: all necessitate the perpetuation of these
oppressive grooming imperatives.
The meaning of this analysis of the romantic ethos
surely is clear. A first step in the process of liberation
(women from their oppression, men from the unfreedom of their fetishism) is the radical redefining of the relationship between women and their bodies. The
body must be freed, liberated, quite literally: from paint
and girdles and all varieties of crap. Women must stop
mutilating their bodies and start living in them. Perhaps the notion of beauty which will then organically emerge will be truly democratic and demonstrate a
respect for human life in its infinite, and most honorable, variety.
BEAUTY HURTS
C H A P T E R 7
Gynocide: The Witches
It has never yet been known that an innocent person has been punished on suspicion
of witchcraft, and there is no doubt that
God will never permit such a thing to
happen.
Malleus Maleficarum
It would be hard to give an idea of how dark the Dark
Ages actually were. “Dark” barely serves to describe the
social and intellectual gloom of those centuries. The
learning of the classical world was in a state of eclipse.
The wealth of that same world fell into the hands of the
Catholic Church and assorted monarchs, and the only
democracy the landless masses of serfs knew was a
democratic distribution of poverty. Disease was an even
crueler exacter than the Lord of the Manor. The medieval Church did not believe that cleanliness was next to godliness. On the contrary, between the temptations
of the flesh and the Kingdom o f Heaven, a layer o f dirt,
lice, and vermin was supposed to afford protection and
to ensure virtue. Since the flesh was by definition sinful,
it was not to be uncovered, washed, or treated for those
diseases which were God’s punishment in the first place
— hence the Church’s hostility to the practice of medicine and to the search for medical knowledge. Abetted by this medieval predilection for filth and shame, successive epidemics o f leprosy, epileptic convulsions, 118
Gynoclde: The Witches
119
and plague decimated the population o f Europe regularly. T he Black Death is thought to have killed 25
percent o f the entire population o f Europe; two-thirds
to one-half o f the population o f France died; in some
towns every living person died; in London it is estimated that one person in ten survived: On Sundays, after Mass, the sick came in scores,
crying for help and words were all they got: You have
sinned, and God is afflicting you. Thank Him: you will
suffer so much the less torment in the life to come.
Endure, suffer, die. Has not the Church its prayers
for the dead. 1
H unger and misery, the serf’s constant companions,
may well have induced the kinds o f hallucinations and
hysteria which profound ignorance translated as demonic possession. Disease, social chaos, peasant insurrections, outbreaks o f dancing mania (tarantism) with its accompanying mass flagellation
— the Church
had to explain these obvious evils. What kind o f Shepherd was this whose flock was so cruelly and regularly set upon? Surely the hell-fires and eternal damnation
which were vivid in the Christian imagination were
modeled on daily experience, on real earth-lived life.
T he Christian notion o f the nature o f the Devil
underwent as many transformations as the snake has
skins. In this evolution, natural selection played a determining role as the Church bred into its conception those deities best suited to its particular brand o f dualistic
theology. It is a cultural constant that the gods o f one
religion become the devils o f the next, and the Church,
intolerant o f deviation in this as in all other areas,
Woman Hating
vilified the gods of those pagan religions which threatened Catholic supremacy in Europe until at least the 15th century. The pagan religions were not monotheistic and their pantheons were scarcely conservative in number. The Church had a slew of deities to dispatch and would have done so speedily had not the
old gods their faithful adherents who clung to the old
practices, who had local power, who had to be pacified.
Accordingly, the Church did a kind of roulette and sent
some gods to heaven (canonizing them) and others to
hell (damning them). Especially in southern Europe the
local deities, formerly housed on Olympus, were allowed
to continue their traditional vocations of healing the
sick and protecting the traveler. The Church often
transformed the names of the gods —so as not to be
embarrassed, no doubt. Apollo, for instance, became
St. Apollinaris; Cupid became St. Valentine. The pagan
gods were also allowed to retain their favorite haunts —
shrines, trees, wells, burial grounds, now newly decorated with a cross.
But in northern Europe the old gods did not fare
as well. The peoples o f northern Europe were temperamentally and culturally quite different from the Latin Christians, and their religions centered around animal
totemism and fertility rites. The “heathens” adhered
to a primitive animism. They worshiped nature (archenemy o f the Church), which was manifest in spirits who inhabited stones, rivers, and trees. In the paleolithic hunting stage, they were concerned with magical control o f animals. In the later neolithic agricultural
stage, fertility practices to ensure the food supply
predominated.
Gynocide: The Witches
121
Anthropologists now believe that man’s first representation o f any anthropomorphic deity is that o f a horned figure who wears a stag’s head and is apparently
dancing. That figure is to be found in a cavern in Ar-
riege. Early religions actively worshiped animals, and
in particular animals which symbolized male fertility—the bull, goat, or stag. Ecstatic dancing, feasts, sacrifice o f the god or his representative (human or animal) were parts o f the rites. T h e magician-priest-shaman became the earthly incarnation o f the god-animal and
apparently dressed in the skins o f the sacred animal
(even the Pharaoh o f Egypt had an animal tail attached
to his girdle). T here he stood, replete with horns and
hooves—the primitive deity, attributes o f him echoing
in the later deities Osiris, Isis, Hathor, Pan, and Janus.
His worship was assimilated into the phallic worship o f
the northern sky-thunder-warrior gods (the influence
o f which can be seen in Druidic practices). These pagan
rites and deities maintained their divinity in the mass
psyche despite all o f the Church’s attempts to blacklist
them. Some kings o f England were converted by the
missionaries, only to revert to the old faith when the
missionaries left. Others maintained two altars, one
devoted to Christ, one to the horned god. The peasants
never played politics—they clung to the fertility-magic
beliefs. Until the 10th century, the Church protested
this willful “devil worship” but could do nothing but
issue proclamations, impose penances and fasts, and, o f
course, carry on the unending struggle against nature
and the flesh.
This was a serious business, for the end o f the world
was believed to be imminent. For good Christians, prep
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arations to depart this earthly abode included renunciation of all hedonistic activities (eating, dancing, fucking, etc. ). St. Simon Stylites, in his attempt to avoid the crime of being human, fled to the desert where he
erected a pillar on which he mortified his flesh for most
of his 72 years. He was tempted throughout by visions
of lascivious women. Indeed, it required starvation,
incessant prayer, and flagellation to be visited by lascivious women in those days and still lead the perfect Christian life.
The extremeness of the Church's ascetic imperatives
invited a reciprocal debauchery. The nobility, when
not out butchering, enforced that most curious of
customs, the jus primae noctis, which legitimated the rape
of newly wed peasant women. The Crusaders brought
back spices and syphilis from the East —that summing
up their knowledge of Arab culture. The clergy was
so openly corrupt and sensual that successive popes
were forced to acknowledge it. “By 1102 a church council had to state specifically that priests should be degraded for sodomy and anathematized for 'obstinate sodomy. ' ” 2 Bishops and cardinals were also known to
fuck around: “A typical example is that Bishop o f Toul
. . . whose favorite concubine was his own daughter
by a nun o f Epinal. " 3 The monasteries and cloisters
were rampant with homosexuality, but nuns and monks
did occasionally get together for heterosexual fucking.
kinds of relationship to the Church. There were the
ascetics who fled the cities to roam like beasts in the
wilderness and emulated St. Simon, who made a pig-sty
his home when not on the pillar. The ascetics mortified
Gynocide: The Witches
123
the flesh while awaiting cataclysmic destruction and
eternal resurrection. There were the nobility, the
clergy, and the soldiers, who delighted in carnal excesses o f every sort, and the serfs who went on breeding because it was their only outlet and because the nobles
encouraged increases in the number o f tenants. T h e
last group, crucial to this period, were the heretics.
In the 12th century various groups, viewing the abominations o f Christianity with increasing horror, began to voice openly and even loudly their skepticism. These
sects played a prominent role in shaping the Church’s
idea o f the Devil.
T h e Waldenses, Manicheans, and Cathari were the
principal heretical sects. It is said that “the Waldenses
were burnt for the practices for which the Franciscans
were later canonized. ” 4 T heir crime was to expose and
to mock the clergy as frauds. For their piety they
suffered the fate o f all heretics, which was burning.
More influential and more dangerous were the Manicheans, who traced their origins to the Persian Mani who had been crucified in a . d. 276. T h e Manicheans
worshiped one God, who incorporated both good and
&nbs
p; evil, the ancient Zoroastrian idea. T h e Cathari, who
were equally maligned by the Christians, also worshiped
the dual principle:
. . . the chief outstanding quality of the Cathari was
their piety and charity. They were divided into two
sections: the ordinary lay believers and the Perfecti,
who believed in complete abstinence and even the
logical end of all asceticism — the Endura —a passionate
disavowal of physical humanity which led them to
starvation and even apparently to mass suicide. They
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Woman Haling
adopted most of the Christian teaching and dogma of
the New Testament, mixed with Gnostic ritual, using
asceticism as an end to visions and other-consciousness.
They were so loyal to their beliefs that a John of Toulouse was able to plead before his judges in 1230 ...
“Lords: hear me. I am no heretic; for I have a wife and
lie with her, and have children; and I eat flesh and lie
and swear, and am a faithful Christian. ” Many of them
seem, indeed, to have lived with the barren piety of
the saints. They were accordingly accused of sexual
orgies and sacrilege, and burned, and scourged, and
harried. Nevertheless the heresy flourished, and
Cathari were able to hold conferences on equal terms
with orthodox bishops. 5
The Holy Inquisition, in its infancy, exterminated the
Cathari, tried to exterminate the Jews, and then went
on to exterminate the Knights Templars, the Christian
organization of knighthood and conquest which had
become too powerful and wealthy. It had become independent of clergy and kings, and had thereby incurred the wrath of both. With these experiences under its expanding belt, the Inquisition in the 15th century
turned to the persecution o f those most heinous o f all
heretics, the witches, that is, to all of those who still clung
to the old cult beliefs of pagan Europe.
The Manicheans and Cathari had, in order to account for the existence of good and evil (the thorniest of theological problems), worshiped good and evil both.