Living in a world not of our own making

If I know only one truth about men it’s that they love to tell lies about women. Writing in the 4th century BC, Aristotle argued that reproduction centered around the concept of “heat.” According to him, embryos that developed without a sufficient amount of heat turned up female. Furthering this notion of inferiority (or “lack” as Freud would later term it) Aristotle hypothesized that the male parent provided the "form," or soul of the embryo and the female contributed “unorganized matter.” From his vantage, women were “misbegotten men” or delicately put, a “monstrosity.” Moving right along, classical scholars, doctors, and writers (all male) ran with the notion that women were physically, morally, and emotionally weaker than men. The consequences of these attitudes ranged from witch burnings to female genital mutilation (still practiced today) along with legal classifications securing second-class status. Fictional accounts of women didn’t help either. Chaucer’s wicked Wife of Bath recklessly married and divorced five husbands in pursuit of money and pleasure while the Ida’s of Norman Mailer’s (un)imagination behave like a “bitch in heat” at only the slightest provocation. A look at literature, art, or even philosophy would suggest that men are obsessed with telling sordid tales about the weaker sex. When men write, we behave as inappropriately as they demand. As Virginia Woolf says, “imaginatively [woman] is of the highest importance; practically she is completely insignificant.” Women in fiction can be strong, weak, ornamental, interesting, paranoid, recluse, or tragically beautiful -- as long as men are authoring, we become whatever they want us to be. The challenge remains convincing women that what men say about them isn't true.