Contempt For Women Research Articles

The Commandment | Psalm to Asherah | Prayer for the Woman Scorned

The Commandment | Psalm to Asherah | Prayer for the Woman Scorned

Emotions and Psychological Survival in the Red Army, 1941–42

Emotions and Psychological Survival in the Red Army, 1941–42 Matthew E. Lenoe (bio) In the predawn hours of 22 June 1941, the border zone separating the Red Army from Axis forces to the west flared to life. German artillery pounded Soviet bivouacs, entrenchments, and fortifications, while Luftwaffe bombers swooped down on Soviet airfields. North of the Pripet Marshes, the Wehrmacht took only one week to encircle the Soviet Western Front (army group), ultimately killing or capturing more than half of the front's initial complement of 625,000 troops. By 10 July, German mechanized spearheads were 600 kilometers into Soviet territory, approaching the strategic Dnieper and Dvina river barriers. This was not the end of disasters for the Red Army. Between June and December 1941, Axis invaders inflicted one of the greatest military defeats in history on the Soviet Union. Total Soviet dead, captured, and missing in action that year numbered about four million, more than ten times those of the invaders.1 Soldiers in the Red Army were borne down by the defeat and the near certainty of their own deaths. In a 15 August 1941 letter that passed (or eluded) the military censor, Private Aleksandr Tykin wrote to his wife, "there is no hope of my return, so you must rearrange your life and build it independently."2 Other letters reported by the censor (and probably confiscated) expressed even greater pessimism. A soldier with a communications [End Page 313] company described an October 1941 German attack in stark terms: "on the second of the month the enemy attacked in our sector … he bombed us for two days and then surprised us with his tanks, smashed up all of our vehicles, and surrounded us on three sides. We fled for three days, hungry and sleepless. I am living through severe hardships … and I do not know whether I will remain alive." North of Moscow in December 1941, another Red Army man wrote, "The German routed us like a flock of sheep, and we ran in panic."3 At the Battle of Moscow (December 1941–January 1942), the Red Army counterattacked, inflicting on the Wehrmacht its first operational defeat of the war. The Soviet capital was saved, and morale, as indicated by letters and diaries, rebounded. However, the following summer saw further disasters, and millions more Soviet casualties, as Axis forces drove east to the Volga River and south into the Caucasus. During this period, deep discouragement and even despair about the war's outcome resurfaced. On 13 August 1942, the diarist Boris Suris, a translator of German stationed near the front, wrote simply: "The Germans have broken through to the oil; they're cutting off the North Caucasus. It's the end [Eto grob]."4 Yet the Red Army ultimately prevailed. Much of the Western scholarship on the Soviet war effort has attributed this to material factors and the Soviet state's ability to coerce its soldiers. In this story, the vast spaces and human reserves of the Soviet Union, the infamous Russian winter, and the commissars' pistols ultimately defeated Hitler. Alternatively, Soviet and Russian historians, as well as some contemporary Western scholars, have insisted that it was the courage, patriotism, and selflessness of the troops that won the war. Some of these scholars, such as Jochen Hellbeck, emphasize the troops' commitment to communism. Others focus on Russian nationalism. Overall, this line of argument emphasizes Soviet voluntarism over coercion and impersonal material factors.5 [End Page 314] Other authors are harder to place on a "coercion vs. voluntarism" axis, arguing in different ways for a mix of motivations within the Red Army. Roger Reese sees thirst for vengeance, social pressure, and even desire for rations as key; Catherine Merridale portrays "Ivan" as complex—sometimes loyal to the regime, sometimes disillusioned by war, sometimes driven by desire for revenge to rape and murder civilians; Mark Edele argues that Soviet victory depended heavily on a minority of committed Communists who "bullied, cajoled, threatened, inspired or talked around" the majority of soldiers who sought above all to survive. Stephen Jug limns the ways in which male Soviet soldiers constructed their own masculinity, based on contempt for women and "the rats in...

Fear of Commitment

What does it mean to commit? And why are men stereotypically afraid to do it? At some point in the last, say, sixty years, commitment-phobia displaced sexual neurosis as the acceptable euphemism through which men could talk about (or at least be talked about as though they talked about) the obsessive fear of castration that, from Ovid to Freud, took as its sign the phallophagic vagina. Thus, in one of the key contemporary representations of male commitment-phobia, the relationship between Chandler and Janice on Friends, our sympathetic horror derives not from Chandler's having been encompassed by Janice's body but by her postcoital laugh. To surrender, by surrendering to the feminizing procedure of commitment, one's contempt for women; to put oneself in the position where one had no choice but to put up with such a laugh—worse, perhaps, to feel compelled to excuse such a laugh among one's friends: such would be the anxious hypothesis of a heterosexual body magnetized toward feminization, but just as strongly defended from it.

Mary Wollstonecraft’s Female Imbeciles

ABSTRACTMary Wollstonecraft’s invectives against women in A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, ostensibly an argument for improved female education, have long troubled readers. Why does Wollstonecraft rely on rhetoric that shows contempt for women’s “imbecility” to convince her readers of women’s capacity for intelligence? By placing Wollstonecraft’s use of the term in the context of both her model of mind and the late-eighteenth-century discourse on cognitive disability, I show how Wollstonecraft’s indictment of female “imbecility” functions as part of her larger rhetorical project to link the problem of unequal female education to the inequities of the monarchical state.

Unkosher Sex: Vulnerable Narcissism and Ultra-Orthodox Jewish Men

ABSTRACTNarcissistic men that engage in out-of-control extra-marital sex can be challenging to treat when their cultural background reinforces their misogyny and sense of entitlement, as it does among ultra-Orthodox Jewish men. A case study illustrates the challenges for a female clinician helping an unfaithful, married, narcissistic ultra-Orthodox Jewish male refrain from seeing prostitutes. He devalued the approach of his female therapist and the client had to learn that he was not entitled to women's love and respect, but that he needed to earn it by transcending his egocentrism and demonstrating empathy rather than contempt for women.

Are men's misogynistic attitudes associated with poor mental health and substance use behaviors? An exploratory study of men in Tijuana, Mexico.

Men's misogynistic attitudes (i.e., dislike or contempt for women) have been shown to be associated with men's perpetration of physical/sexual violence against women and poor health outcomes for women. However, these attitudes have rarely been examined for their influence on men's own health. This paper examines the socio-demographic, substance use, and mental health correlates of misogynistic attitudes among a binational sample of men (n=400) in Tijuana, Mexico with high-risk substance use and sexual behaviors. We used a 6-item scale to measure misogynistic attitudes (α = .72), which was developed specifically for this context. We used descriptive statistics to describe our sample population and the extent to which they hold misogynistic attitudes. Then, using misogynistic attitudes as our dependent variable, we conducted bivariate linear regression and multivariable linear regression to examine the relationship between these attitudes and socio-demographic characteristics, substance use behaviors (i.e., use of alcohol, marijuana, heroin, methamphetamines, cocaine), and mental health (i.e., depression, self-esteem). In the multivariable model, we found significant relationships between misogynistic attitudes and education level (t = -4.34, p < 0.01), heroin use in the past 4 months (t = 2.50, p = 0.01), and depressive symptoms (t = 3.37, p < 0.01). These findings suggest that misogynistic attitudes are linked to poor health outcomes for men and future research needs to further explore the temporality of these relationships and identify strategies for reducing men's misogynistic attitudes with the ultimate aim of improving the health and well-being of both women and men.

Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England by Sarah E. Johnson (review)

Reviewed by: Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern Englandby Sarah E. Johnson Ariane M. Balizet Sarah E. Johnson. Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England. Women and Gender in the Early Modern World. Farnham, Surrey: Ashgate, 2014. Pp. xi + 185. $104.95. In Staging Women and the Soul-Body Dynamic in Early Modern England, Sarah E. Johnson interrogates early modern dramatic tropes of gender inequality to illustrate the multiple and surprising ways in which representations of women being manipulated or mistreated onstage can in fact reveal transgressive and empowering portrayals of women and the feminine. Chief among these dramatic tropes is the dynamic of soul and body, which was not only gendered (men were aligned with the rational, divine soul; women with the capricious, earthly body) but also hierarchized, in that the soul was placed above and thus governed the body in all things. By reframing the “soul-body hierarchy” as the “soul-body dynamic,” Johnson makes the persuasive case that many metaphors typically associated with gendered control can ultimately generate, on the stage, “empowering ideas of women” (5). That is, once we consider alternate power dynamics between soul and body, we can view afresh other relationships that appear hierarchized in the same manner. Over the course of four chapters and a brief conclusion, Johnson examines two tragedies, two comedies, several masques, and a religious treatise from the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries in England. Her reading of the dramatic works in terms of the soul-body dynamic and its analogues unsettles and productively challenges scholarly thinking on the seemingly trenchant binaries that organized representations of men and women on the early modern stage. For Johnson, the perception of a power struggle between soul and body animates familiar tropes of gendered conflict in early modern drama, and thus each chapter focuses on a particular relationship manifest in one or more plays: puppeteer/puppet, tamer/tamed, ghost/haunted, and observer/spectacle. For each relationship, the author explores how hierarchized thinking about who is controlling whom gives way, on stage, to more complex representations of power and social critique. The puppet, for example, might be seen as a soulless, empty “body” brought to life only by the hand, voice, and will of the puppeteer. [End Page 369]In gendered terms, the staging of a man using a woman like a puppet reinforces the analogue between soul over body and masculine control of women. In performance, however, the puppet almost always takes on a “life” of its own, commenting upon and even critiquing the will of the puppeteer. Early modern puppetry, the author notes, often capitalized on the uncanny ability of the puppet to subtly (or uproariously) undermine the labors of its “master.” While, metaphorically, puppets represent (feminized) subordination, onstage they have a “disruptive feminizing power” that “holds positive implications for the representation of women more broadly” (27). In chapter 1, which focuses on this relationship between puppeteer and puppet, Johnson notes multiple early modern dramatic examples of men turning women into puppets. The most famous example is to be found in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, in which Katharina specifically scolds her husband for attempting to make her into a puppet. Her final speech, for Johnson, reveals both a puppet-like performance (throwing her cap on the floor, placing her hand beneath Petruchio’s boot) as well as the “disruptive” power of this puppetry (since her commendation of husbands’ duties may be read as parody). Many examples feature men displaying and animating women’s corpses; these macabre displays have been much discussed in terms of the volatile signifying power of the stage property. By analyzing Gloriana’s skull in Middleton’s The Revenger’s Tragedyas a puppet—not a prop—Johnson affirms the more active role Gloriana plays in the tragedy: “As Vindice unloads his contempt for women onto Gloriana’s skull and celebrates his ingenuity in suiting her up for the Duke, her perpetual, gruesome grin could very easily produce the effect of seeming to silently mock Vindice himself. Such mockery is in keeping with the daring vulgarity and rebelliousness that came to be expected from a puppet” (48...

What’s Love Got to Do with It? A Qualitative Grounded Theory Content Analysis of Romance Narratives in the PG Era of World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) Programming

Although numerous studies have examined cultural representations of love and romance in myriad media sources, scarce attention has been paid to such representations in the genre of sports entertainment. As the most popular brand within this genre, World Wrestling Entertainment (WWE) is an important conduit of cultural knowledge in which to investigate narratives about modern romance. Using qualitative grounded theory content analysis methods, the current study examined representations of romance narratives in WWE’s two highest rated programs (Monday Night Raw and Friday Night Smackdown!) over a 6 month period. Fifty-two episodes comprising 105 h of televised programming were analyzed. Data analysis revealed evidence of six central romance narratives (Prince Charming, Dark Romance, Femme Fatale, Gold Digger, Cougar, and Woman Scorned). The meanings of these narratives were frequently contradictory in nature, revealing complex ideas about the nature of heterosexual romance. Many of the romantic relationships presented contained elements of multiple narratives, suggesting conflicting presentations of heterosexual gender relations not just across but also within individual relationships. Implications of these findings through the lens of social learning and schema theories are provided.

Barriers to the Effective Use of Medico-Legal Findings in Sexual Assault Cases Worldwide

Despite the increasing implementation of standardized rape kits across jurisdictions, the medico-legal findings generated by these tools are often not related to positive criminal justice outcomes. Given that there has been no global investigation of the factors that might impede their successful use in cases of sexual assault, we conducted a review of relevant scholarly and "grey" literature from industrialized and less-developed regions. One key theme to emerge from the analysis concerned certain problematic practices and behaviors of professional groups involved in the various stages of the post-sexual assault process. We found that a lack of competence in handling sexual assault cases, contempt for women who have been victimized, and corruption among some forensic examiners, police, scientists, and legal personnel often have shaped the collection, processing, analysis, and use of medico-legal evidence. We discuss recent initiatives and future directions for research that might serve to address these issues.

Carol Anne Bond v the United States of America: How a Woman Scorned Threatened the Chemical Weapons Convention

The case of Carol Anne Bond v the United States of America stemmed from a domestic dispute when Ms. Bond attempted to retaliate against her best friend by attacking her with chemical agents. What has emerged is a much greater issue--a test of standing on whether a private citizen can challenge the Tenth Amendment. Instead of being prosecuted in state court for assault, Ms. Bond was charged and tried in district court under a federal criminal statute passed as part of implementation of the Chemical Weapons Convention (CWC). Ms. Bond's argument rests on the claim that the statute exceeded the federal government's enumerated powers in criminalizing her behavior and violated the Constitution, while the government contends legislation implementing treaty obligations is well within its purview. This question remains unanswered because there is dispute among the lower courts as to whether Ms. Bond, as a citizen, even has the right to challenge an amendment guaranteeing states rights when a state is not a party to the action. The Supreme Court heard the case on February 22, 2011, and, if it decides to grant Ms. Bond standing to challenge her conviction, the case will be returned to the lower courts. Should the court decide Ms. Bond has the standing to challenge her conviction and further questions the constitutionality of the law, it would be a significant blow to implementation of the CWC in the U.S. and the effort of the federal government to ensure we are meeting our international obligations.

(Un)reasonable Doubt: A "Narrative Immunity" for Footballers against Sexual Assault Allegations

(Un)reasonable Doubt: A "Narrative Immunity" for Footballers against Sexual Assault Allegations

Venezia Passatista?: Luigi De Giudici and a Broader Futurism

This article explores the artistic trajectory of a lesser‐known Italian painter and supporter of Futurism, Luigi De Giudici (1887–1955), also known as Gigi De Giudici. Building on a narrative written by Gigi’s son Angelo, who through meticulous research brought his father’s figure into the public eye, our article reveals Italian Futurism to be a more complex and less homogenous movement than has been widely accepted by critics. Access to visual materials from the private archive of Angelo De Giudici (letters, postcards, unpublished sketches, notes and drawings on pages torn from books or exhibition catalogs, inscriptions, and photographs) allows re‐examination in a new cultural context of such crucial issues for Italian Futurism as war, contempt for women, and an image of passéist Venice, largely propagated by F. T. Marinetti’s manifestoes. Our insistence on a broader understanding of Futurism establishes connections between mainstream Futurism and its numerous offshoots, highlighting their contribution to the creation of artistic communities in various geographical spaces and their embrace of diverse artworks and styles.

"Clockwork" Language Reconsidered: Iconicity and Narrative in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange

"Clockwork" Language Reconsidered: Iconicity and Narrative in Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange Robbie B. H. GoA Anthony Burgess's A Clockwork Orange is a novel structured around repetitive patterns, the most obvious being its three-part division, each beginning with an identical question ("What's it going to be then, eh?"). Philip Ray sees this tripartite structure as an imitation of the ABA pattern of the eighteenth-century Italian "da capo aria," suggesting that Alex's movement towards law-abiding adulthood takes on the characteristics of a formal, predictable return within a set-piece (137). Burgess himself speaks of the "arithmology" of the original 21-chapter novel ("21 being the symbol of human maturity"), suggesting that the narrative's form mimes the organic and social development of the protagonist Alex, although this organic arithmology does not totally escape the suggestion that Alex's maturity is a kind of depersonalising and inorganic assimilation into the norm or social standard (Play with Music, vi). Indeed, this is precisely the objection made by the first American publisher of the novel, W. W. Norton, which argued that the final chapter should be omitted in order to minimise the sense of a reassuring and expected moral conformity at the end of Alex's career.1 Structural repetition reinforces Burgess's vision of the constraints of social structures, which create merely a "clockwork" morality through JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory 30.2 (Summer 2000): 263-280. Copyright © 2000 by JNT: Journal of Narrative Theory. 264 INT Skinnerian conditioning and other less obvious, more insidious means— and language itself, as a socializing system, is not exempt from this indictment . M. Keith Booker argues that the teen language, "Nadsat," spoken by the narrator Alex, represents various forms of entrapment and conditioning : it may reflect the subtle influence of "Russian propaganda," as well as having an "alienating" effect on its teen speakers, since it cannot be understood by mainstream society. Furthermore, its "lust for violence" and "contempt for women" also play some role in determining Alex's repetitive crimes (95-97). Esther Petix goes so far as to find in Nadsat "the Platonic form of mechanism: the cadence of a metronome and the tickingtocking ramifications of humanity without its essence" (126). Other scholars who are less concerned with the formal repetitions in the narrative structure of his novel, nevertheless also emphasize Burgess's "structuralist " foregrounding of the "ideal patterns" of language rules and rhetorical elements.2 Burgess's use of language in this novel makes a statement about the individual 's struggle (with varying degrees of sincerity and effectiveness) for authenticity under dystopian conditions of social control. Interwoven into the larger repetitive structures of the novel are moments of startling linguistic variation and experimentation, stemming on the one hand from Alex's neologistic playfulness and inventiveness, and on the other from his mimicry of the linguistic performances of others around him. Theo D'Haen, who argues the minority view that Alex represents the artistic impulse , the "creative, imaginative, liberating uses of language," bases bis argument in part on Alex's superior linguistic flexibility, since he can use a "gentleman's goloss" as well as his teen argot Nadsat (46). It is worth noting from the beginning that Alex's narrative is thus curiously hybrid and heteroglossic, rebelliously inventive at one moment, and perfectly imitative and conformist (despite his often satirical or deceptive intent) the next. In this light, it does seem too optimistic to argue (as D'Haen does) that at the end, there is a "preservation of the protagonist's linguistic creativity and imagination, and of his individuality" (49). The dominance of the larger repetitive structures in the novel seems clear; what is less clear is the scope for individual freedom and inventiveness within such larger structures. The novel's vision of social control is thus encoded in the different kinds of linguistic performances on the part of Alex, the Everyman of this "Clockwork" Language Reconsidered 265 dystopian world. Alex's "infantile" experiments with language—with small morphemic units and the possibilities of transplanting them to create new words, with sounds and their iconic and phonemic qualities—constitutes a sort of micro-politics of the individual (125...

A Woman Scorned: Acquaintance Rape on Trial

This study of American sexual culture and the politics of acquaintance rape identifies the sexual stereotypes that continue to obstruct justice and diminish women. Beginning with an account of the St. John's rape case, the author refers to other British and American landmark rape cases to explain how, with the exception of earliest Colonial times, rape has been a crime notable for placing the woman on trial.

Women's ‘Conservatism’ and the Politics of Gender in Late Colonial Lesotho

The triumph of the ‘conservative’ BNP over the ‘radical’ BCP in Lesotho's pre-independence elections has long been a source of contention among analysts. While many factors are seen to have contributed to the BCP defeat, one which consistently appears in passing or in footnotes is the ‘conservative’ inclination of Basotho women who, in 1965 comprised two-thirds of the electorate. Women's ‘conservatism’ is commonly accepted as a given, stemming from their purportedly natural domesticity, religiosity or love of tradition. This article examines the actual history of Basotho women in politics in the late colonial era (1920s–1965) and finds no empirical grounds for these assumptions. On the contrary, even the most ostensibly ‘conservative’ women often adopted non-traditional, self-emancipatory behaviour. In the context of a ‘modern’ colonial state with retrograde, often punitive policies towards women, such ‘conservatism’ was in fact rather progressive. On the other hand, Lesotho's self-proclaimed ‘radicals’ exhibited strong elements of male chauvinism, ignorance and contempt for women's needs. The implication for African nationalist or other radical politicians and sympathic academics is that failure to take serious account of women and gender can undermine political integrity and effectiveness.

Fulvia Giuliani: Portrait of a Futurist Actress

Despite the importance of Italian Futurism to the modernist movement in Europe during the early inter-war period, it has suffered a bad press – initially because of its association with the emergent fascist movement, and more recently because of the feminist concern with apparently misogynistic elements in the writing of the acknowledged leader of the movement, F. T. Marinetti. However, Günter Berghaus argues that this is to ignore not only the roots of Marinetti's own anti-feminism – in contempt for the very aspects of subservient womanhood now condemned by feminists themselves – but also the support that Futurism enjoyed from a number of women artists in Italy at the time. Certainly, the early career of the actress Fulvia Giuliani affirms both her strong endorsement for and participation in the movement, and her contempt for women who passively accepted the roles assigned to them by the patriarchy. Günter Berghaus, who teaches in the Drama Department of the University of Bristol, here outlines Giuliani's role in the Futurist movement and documents it from previously unpublished sources.

A Code of Her Own: Attitudes Toward Women in Willa Cather's Short Fiction

Efforts by feminist scholars to recover Willa Cather’s literary reputation and to ensure her place in a male-dominated canon have caused some feminist critics to dismiss aspects of her personality too complex to fit into established categories of feminist literary criticism. In particular, feminist critics have not admitted the extent of Willa Cather’s misogyny, even though it informs the male code of behavior that is the controlling consciousness of all her fiction. In her 1987 biography of Cather, Sharon O’Brien explores Cather’s difficulty in reconciling her gender with the male-dominated literary tradition she hoped to join. But O’Brien does not acknowledge the depth or significance of Cather’s hostility toward women. She admits that Cather had misogynistic views: “her early college journalism . . . frequently expressed . . . contempt for women in tones ranging from amused dismissal to bitter condemnation” (122). However, O’Brien argues that Cather’s misogyny disappeared as she matured and asserts that Cather experienced what Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar term “the woman writer’s anxiety of authorship” (83), that even though she denounced women writers, “Somewhere in her consciousness she knew that women could be strong and vibrant and creative storytellers” (125). As Cather matured, she eventually abandoned the male values she once associated with art, thereby reconciling the opposing roles of woman and artist. Thus, O’Brien insists, Cather was able to write novels that speak from a woman’s experience. However, O’Brien’s effort to make Cather “fit” into a female literary tradition not only distorts the central themes of her fiction but also diminishes Cather’s complex and conflicted literary imagination. For whatever reason, during her adolescence Willa Cather admired male behavior and even adopted male dress; her apparent identifica-

Hippolyte, the Woman Scorned: Corneille's Unconscious Debt to Lope De Vega

Hippolyte, the Woman Scorned: Corneille's Unconscious Debt to Lope De Vega