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Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76.2 (2002) 406-407



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Book Review

Misogyny:
The Male Malady


David Gilmore. Misogyny: The Male Malady. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2001. ix + 248 pp. $26.50; £19.00 (0-8122-3608-4).

"Misogyny" is for David Gilmore the label for all of the fears, anxieties, stereotypes, and stigmatizing behavior that characterize men's image of women. His is a cross-cultural study, ranging from Melanesia to ancient Greece and back. It is a font of information about how various cultures imagine women—mostly negatively, but also ideally (gynophilia). Given this goal, Gilmore is very successful in presenting an argument that all societies have stereotypes of the female that focus the anxieties of the male. And, in principle, I agree with him that this is the case. I have argued elsewhere that the relationship between images of the woman and masculine identity is the most fraught of the binaries that we have in our vocabulary of stereotypes. But it is also the case that all women can only rarely be perceived as completely destructive and negative. Society rests for its perpetuation on the ability of men and women (with or without test tubes) to reproduce. And, no matter how complex your system of images is, there has to be some small window that enables you to image your partner in reproduction as at least acceptable—or, as Gilmore in his chapter on gynophilia and Philip Roth in his most recent novel The Dying Beast show, as perfection itself. Thus the simple binary of men versus women always postulates exceptions, which makes this set of images very much unlike other sets of stereotypes.

There are two major problems that Gilmore will, I hope, address in his future work. First, the "male" image of the "female" is not limited to men: it is a culture in general that imagines women as different, including the women in that culture. Now one can argue, and Gilmore has done so, that patriarchal societies create images of the female that women too must internalize. But it seems that all societies, including polyandrous societies, share these images. What is quite possible is that the images of the female are regularly linked to broader fields of images, including taboos about blood, reproduction, and incest that focus on the woman. It is probably better to speak of misogyny as a cultural malady, rather than as solely a male one.

Second, Gilmore assumes that there is a unitary "male" perspective in any given culture that defines the image of the woman. Yet often the complexity of the image of the woman exists because there are competing concepts of masculinity in any given society. The complex idea of what a "real" man is can be negated in any attempt to define a clear polarity between the "male" and the "female." Competing notions of the masculine vanish (or are at least subsumed) in cultures that focus on the binaries. This is doubly the case when questions of sexual orientation are introduced as a set of variables. Are the "women" that appear in the images that Gilmore catalogs imaginable without their role in reproduction? The corollary is that the men, too, are defined by this role.

Gilmore's study provides a great deal of thought and insight into the images of the woman across culture and history. It is the beginning of a search for our [End Page 406] stigmatization of the female, but also for a more complex understanding of how and why we imagine man.

 



Sander L. Gilman
University of Illinois/Chicago

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