Men’s Fears of Women in History and Myth

Source: Falco/Pixabay

First oral myths, and then written history, have been primarily told and written by men. As long as men have been telling the story, they have been talking about their fears of women.

In pre-agrarian, hunter-gatherer times, the individual household was the primary unit, and women by virtue of their reproductive and childrearing roles dominated the household. People naturally worshipped goddesses. With the domestication of animals and farming, populations became more stationary. Men no longer needed to be absent to hunt for such long periods of time. People built cities with higher levels of organization than the individual family, and the best interests of the tribe or community superseded the best interests of any individual family. Organized societies from the beginning were societies of men, with male gods.

Joseph Campbell calls this period “the great reversal,” during which there was a shift from admiration of women to fear and disdain for women, their bodies, and nature as the symbolic mother (Campbell, 1968). Women begin to be depicted as dangerous to men, often by seducing them. The first book of the Bible tells the story of a woman, Eve, betraying her partner and causing them to be exiled from the utopian garden and forced to fend for themselves. The Greek version is Pandora, who was created by Zeus to punish humans for stealing fire, and who then unleashes for all eternity evil, sickness, and death on humankind. The Greek story of Odysseus is the story of a man who spent 10 years overcoming a series of unimaginably difficult obstacles in female form, only to return home, from the Sirens who used their sexuality to try and lure Odysseus to his ruin on the rocks, to Circe the enchantress who similarly used her beauty and threatened to “unman” him (Glick, 1996). The most dangerous characters in fairy tales are most often either a woman as a seductress or as a mother or stepmother. Lederer reviewed 200 of Grimm’s fairy tales and found 52 dangerous female characters and only six dangerous male characters (Lederer, 1968).

Another important development in the evolution of men’s fears of women was the large 19th-century shift in how manhood was defined and achieved in America (Ducat, 2005). Men felt threatened by the potential loss of their privileged positions in various areas, leading to the escalation of femiphobia nationally. Early industrialization took fathers away from work in the home to work in factories and offices. Male self-employment fell from 67% in 1870 to 37% in 1910 (Bederman, 1995). Many fathers became less present in their children’s lives.

At the same time, women began to enter the workforce in increasing numbers and there was a general sense that gender roles were changing in a way that devalued roles that had traditionally belonged to men, leading to an increase in men’s anxiety about the security of their positions as men.

The current, and one of the most disturbing current manifestations of men’s fears of women, is the advent of the new men’s movement. While the original men’s movement of the 1960s framed itself as feminist and allies of women, this men’s movement is shockingly hostile toward women or anything related to the feminine. Any man in this movement who identifies as a feminist is attacked as a traitor, a “feminazi.” There is a large online group called Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), which advocates for men learning to live their lives without needing women in any way. Their paranoid vision is of a world that is “gynocentric,” with men as victims of a system that favors women and persecutes men. Some of their claims include that there is no such thing as a wage gap, that marriage is a form of slavery for men, that men are arrested in domestic violence disputes even when the woman has clearly been the aggressor, and that men have been forced to pay child support for children proven by DNA evidence not to be their biological children.

One man wrote:

Men do not have a disproportionate share of power in the world, that's feminist theory, and not supported by observable reality . . . Women on aggregate do tend to be judgmental and overly critical of men. . . Typically it's the female partner who loses interest in sex, or starts rationing it to control your behavior, it's one of many forms of manipulation. Basically, the default model of relationship(s) in the West is that of man as a supplicant trying to appease a petty tyrant of a partner who will have it HER WAY, or no way, with little if any effort on her part to reciprocate, once she has you locked in.

While it is tempting to overlook the largely baseless claims of groups like these, we ignore them at our own peril. The pain of the emotional suppression, disconnection, and loneliness these groups are expressing is real, and if we don’t find a way of acknowledging and responding compassionately to that pain, it will continue to be acted out in these angry, destructive ways.

Excerpted in part from Hidden in Plain Sight: How Men's Fears of Women Shape Their Intimate Relationships. (Weiss, 2021).