Hell Hath No Fury Like a Man Devalued and Women Pay the Price

Wednesday, January 10, 2001

Hell Hath No Fury Like a Man Devalued--and Women Pay the Price

By ROBERT S. MCELVAINE

Although white rapper Eminem did not win an American Music Award on Monday, his two nominations in that competition combined with the four Grammy nominations he received last week serve to remind us how prevalent violent misogyny has become in contemporary popular culture.

Horror has been expressed about the effects of what seems almost universally to be seen as a disturbing new development that threatens to debase civilization. Like his black role models, Eminem shouts about abusing, raping and murdering women, including his mother and his wife. The chorus of one of his songs begins with the endearing declaration, "Bitch, I'ma kill you!"

Some people maintain that a culture overflowing with such repulsive messages has no effect on the thinking and actions of people who live in it. This is absurd.

Yet the alarm about what a departure the current trend in popular culture is, and how threatening it is to our traditions, also is mistaken. Apart from the vulgar language, there is nothing new about the rap on women. It is our tradition.

Misogyny, often coupled with violence, has long been a staple of popular culture. Three of the men often cited as the most important influences on modern music are instructive examples. "I'm gonna buy me a pistol, just as long as I'm tall/I'm gonna shoot poor Thelma, just to see her jump and fall," sang Jimmie Rodgers, the "father of country music," in his 1927 classic, "T for Texas." A decade later, Robert Johnson, often credited with being the grandfather of rock 'n' roll, affirmed: "I'm gonna beat my woman until I'm satisfied." In 1948, Muddy Waters sang: "Well, I feel like snappin' a pistol in your face, I'm gonna let some graveyard be her restin' place-- woman." And the main theme of the 1955 movie "Rebel Without a Cause" is that a woman wants a man who uses physical violence against her. "If he had guts to knock Mom cold once," the James Dean character says of his father, "then maybe she'd be happy."

But the sad truth is that the oft-repeated message in contemporary popular culture that women are evil and should be considered objects to be used, abused and discarded at the whim of males does not threaten to debase our civilization. How could misogyny debase a civilization that has been based--and debased--on misogyny throughout recorded history?

Mutilation of female genitalia has been a recurrent theme in some of the most objectionable products of recent years, such as some songs by 2 Live Crew. Horrifying as this is, it is anything but new. In the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, dating from the second millennium BC, the male god Marduk "shot the arrow that split the belly, that pierced the gut and cut the womb [of the goddess Tiamat]," thereby destroying her creative power and establishing his own. Perseus' severing of Medusa's head (which some classical scholars say symbolizes a powerful vagina) is a parallel Greek representation of the destruction of female power.

Similarly, Eminem's glorification of matricide is but a new improvisation on a very old tune. The argument of Aeschylus' play "The Eumenides," for instance, is precisely that killing one's mother is not a horrible crime because the mother is not a parent but merely the soil in which the true creator, the man, plants his "seed."

Then there is the Bible. The law in Deuteronomy punishes a man who rapes a virgin by requiring him to make a payment to her father and marry her. The woman is required to marry her rapist because she is considered mere property that has been ruined: You break it, you've bought it.

The concern over the effects of violent misogyny in contemporary popular culture is appropriate. But when we realize this evil has been central to cultures around the world for millennia, it becomes apparent that it would be more useful to examine this phenomenon as a symptom of a deep-seated malady.

The current outburst of woman-hating is only the latest manifestation of an underlying male sense of insecurity. A large number of men throughout history have suffered from the envy of female reproductive abilities. Added to this, since women invented agriculture about 10,000 years ago and thereby devalued the traditional male role of hunting, has been the fact that many men can find no satisfactory definition of manhood. Hell hath no fury like a man devalued.

The rap on women has been the anthem of history for 10,000 years. The current misogynistic music is but a different song with the same old meaning.

Robert S. McElvaine is a historian at Millsaps College in Jackson, Miss. His latest book Eve's Seed: Biology, the Sexes and the Course of History, has just been published by McGraw-Hill.