Hating Women

Rabbi Shmuley Boteach

• Publisher: HarperCollins e-books
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780061744945
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Culture populaire

From the author of the internationally bestselling Kosher Sex. A wake-up call about the growing trend of misogyny in our culture-as evidenced by the flood of reality TV shows, ads, and lyrics that portray women as brainless bimbos, or worse

Shmuley Boteach, the social commentator and outspoken relationship guru, shares his grave concerns about our society's growing contempt for women. Turn on the television: Reality TV shows such as The Bachelor, For Love or Money, and Average Joe boost their ratings by showing attractive women in competition for one man, one man's money, or both. On a "quest for true love, " these women quickly devolve into a pit of vipers-and millions of Americans tune in each week for more. During commercial breaks, women are objectified to sell beer, cars, and every other product under the sun. Flip on the radio: Women are bitches, hos, and gold diggers, at least if you listen to the rap lyrics pumping out into our mass consciousness. And female pop stars like Britney and Madonna, says Boteach, have pushed the envelope past provocative and into the downright pornographic. 'Tween girls across the country follow their lead, and standards for how women should be treated plummet.

Perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of this trend, he says, is women's complicity in their own degradation. Either they've become resigned to base stereotypes, or worse, they've bought into these mass market values (hence the deluge of shows like The Swan and Extreme Makeover, on which female contestants insist they need a new nose, teeth, or boobs to feel a positive sense of self-esteem). "There are strong consequences, " writes Boteach, "in a world where men have no respect for women and women have no respect for themselves."

Greedy gold diggers, brainless bimbos, publicity prostitutes, and backstabbing bitches-are these the stereotypes we want our sons and daughters bombarded by as they grow up? Hating Women offers a vision of how we can correct this downward spiral-along with a strong argument for why we absolutely must.

PART
ONE

THE SHOCKING
ASSAULT ON THE
AMERICAN WOMAN

1

FALL OF THE FEMINIST DREAM

As I watched President Bush deliver the 2005 State of the Union address, I experienced a redemptive sense of vindication. For years I had been hammering away, on radio, television, and in print, at the crisis of American manhood, manifested specifically in the growing male tendency to disrespect women. I was shocked at how the principal portrayal of women as empty, shallow, and sleazy vessels who just want men’s cash, and who do anything for fame and publicity, including sleeping with complete strangers and taking their clothes off for celebrity, gradually became mainstream. I was likewise astonished at how no one seemed to care how this brutal portrayal was adversely affecting the respect men had for women. Then, smack in the middle of the most important political speech of the year, along with such pressing international priorities as holding Iran accountable for its desire to build nuclear weapons, President Bush suddenly announced that he had appointed his wife, Laura, to head a national effort to raise a new generation of American men who know how to respect women.

Now, with the country beginning to recognize the depth of the women-hating crisis among men, I want to welcome you to my world. I am the father of five young daughters, and I am deeply troubled by the world they are growing up to inhabit as women. It is a world that values a woman’s bust over her brains, her body over her moral fiber, and her sexual nature over her soul and spirit. It is a world that increasingly diminishes a woman into the sum total of her bodily parts. It is a world where men routinely use the word bitch, and where women are portrayed as complacent playthings to lecherous men.

I have been stunned to see the growing misogyny in our culture, and I am even more shocked to see how little women seem to care about their degradation. Indeed, it is difficult to gauge what is more shocking: the rampant exploitation of women or the near complete silence and lack of protest about this alarming trend. And it is all happening so fast. Before one degrading TV show about women like Joe Millionaire or For Love or Money has run its course, ten even more degrading shows have sprung up to take its place.

This devolution in the portrayal of women in our culture is happening at warp speed, and there is no telling where it will end. As a young boy growing up in a religious home, I was raised to revere and respect women. I was taught that they were the fairer sex, more naturally dignified and gentler than men. Indeed, it took a woman to domesticate and ennoble a man, and in the thought of my Jewish tradition, this was why a wife was such a blessing to her husband. In the yeshivas where I studied to be a rabbi, I was taught that a woman is a reflection of the divine countenance, a more authentic reflection of the divine image than men. Part of my religious instruction was to recite King Solomon’s “Ode to a Woman of Valor,” the final chapter in Proverbs, which is sung to one’s wife on the Sabbath, the holiest of days.

Even in the mainstream culture, women used to be portrayed as models of dignity and refinement, deserving of men’s respect and veneration. The great movie actresses of Hollywood’s Golden Age included such memorable ladies of the silver screen as Grace Kelly, Lauren Bacall, and Katharine Hepburn. The image of a woman was one of refinement and grace, intelligence and elegance, spirituality and strength. But all that is gone today, replaced by vulgar icons of bad taste and crude morals such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton, arguably the two most famous female cultural icons in contemporary America.

As a father of five daughters, shocked and appalled by the sweeping change in female role models and our treatment of women in this culture, I have had a personal stake in understanding how and why this evolution has occurred. In truth, it does not take a rocket scientist or philosopher to see the influences that have helped create these mores that malign women. Instead of cultivating the image of woman as nurturer, helpmate, role model, and intellectual equal, we as a society have stooped to looking at women as objects to be used and abused. Women are depicted as pieces of meat to be devoured by the hungry eyes of licentious men. This is the essential picture of woman in the popular culture, and it is having a grave effect on how women are treated by men.

In fact, the bulk of reality TV shows depict women as creatures whose highest calling is to fulfill the erotic and sexual needs of men. From television to the Internet, women are portrayed as stupid, shallow, parasitical bimbos who will do anything for money and fame—anything, from dating men solely for their money, to having sex with horses, to lifting up their shirts and flashing their breasts in exchange for a T-shirt in the Girls Gone Wild videos.

In a song from his 1975 album, Shaved Fish, John Lennon famously said, “Woman is the nigger of the world.” Little did he realize that his words were prophetic. Did Lennon somehow foresee that two decades after his death the principal depiction of women in the popular culture would be as mindless nymphomaniacs, money-grubbing gold diggers, promiscuous prostitutes prepared to do anything to get on TV—catty witches who fight one another for a boyfriend? Women today have become the fashionable group to subject to relentless and horrendous defamation.

Where and how this defamation will end, nobody actually knows. What we do know is that, historically, the unremitting degradation and scorn of any group of people is often the prelude to their oppression. Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s famous pronouncement, “Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains,” would seem far more aptly applied to women than to men. Here we are, forty years after the women’s liberation movement; women think they are freer than ever, when in reality the past few decades have produced a monolithic and degrading depiction of women as the carnal manifestations of male fantasy. How free are women when, even as they become doctors, lawyers, and diplomats, they continue to be judged first and mostly by their appearance? How free are women when in their place of work they are subjected to continual sexual harassment, brought about by the incessant male exposure to women as sexual rather than thinking creatures? How free are women in a culture dominated by a $15 billion-a-year porn industry that is available at the touch of a button to every man in almost every office and home in the United States? And how free are women when, even as they go to colleges to receive an education, they are surrounded by young men who are encouraged to have sex with as many of them as possible to squeeze the fullest sexual experimentation out of their college years? Indeed, how free are women when men, tragically conditioned to view women as the walking gratification of their sexual needs, are coercing more and more of them into sex? A report by the Alan Guttmacher Institute maintains that 70 percent of all sexually active fourteen-year-old girls have had sexual intercourse against their wills, while the FBI estimates that one out of three American women will be raped in their lifetime.

Moreover, we must ask ourselves what this onslaught of disrespect toward women says about the very fabric of our society, its cultural mores, and most important, how it affects men’s treatment of women.

It is often said that one of the most accurate measures of a society’s moral state is how it treats its most vulnerable members—its women and children. Do they oppress and exploit them, or do they cherish and honor them? There are many means of female degradation in the world, ranging from oppression in the East to deprecation in the West. Time magazine captured this well in an article (November 10, 2003) about Vida Samadzai, the first Miss Afghanistan to appear in a beauty pageant in thirty-one years. As part of the competition, she appeared in a bikini and was promptly condemned to Hell by the Afghan Supreme Court, who called her behavior “totally un-Islamic.” The Time piece concluded, “Ah, if only all Afghan women enjoyed the dignity Western women are afforded: to be judged not by the hem of their burkas but by the size of their breasts.”

Oppression in the East,
Degradation in the West

Although Western society, compared with the full-scale abuse of women’s rights in Islamic society, might seem far less guilty, it is nonetheless necessary to look with a more critical eye at the harm our society is inflicting.

Western society is at the forefront of creating an increasingly misogynistic civilization in which the deprecation of women is not only acceptable, but serves as the primary engine for many cultural and commercial outlets, from television to film, and from the Internet to advertising. Naked women are no longer found only in the pages of Playboy and Penthouse. Rather, they are absolutely everywhere, from roadside billboards to the Super Bowl. No sooner did the Enron scandal break than Playboy magazine featured a cover story called “Women of Enron,” with female employees of the company posing naked. A great many people question whether the sexual depiction of women is even degrading. A lot of women even claim that it is liberating, as if the primary depiction of women capable of giving a man an erection is a flattering portrayal of the full panoply of female potential.

But imagine for a moment that there was a television show that took thirty Jews to a castle in France, and told them that they had the opportunity of befriending a megamillionaire. The twist in the program is that the millionaire is really a New Jersey construction worker. The objective of the show is to see if the Jews, who everyone assumes love money above all else, will terminate the friendship on discovering that their new buddy is broke. And imagine also that this show is so wildly successful that fully 50 million people watch its finale, and that a new international version is quickly readied for release during the fall ratings sweep. You would be justified in thinking that the show’s creator is Joseph Goebbels and that the intended audience is Nazi Germany.

But that is essentially the theme of the trendsetting show, Joe Millionaire (produced a few years ago by the Fox Television Network), which spawned so many even worse imitations. The only difference is that the Jews are now a group of leggy women, and they meet and compete for a suitor who is supposedly a multi-millionaire. The suspense builds as the audience waits to see if the winning contestant will dump him when she discovers that he is, in fact, penniless. Incredible! A whole TV show perpetuating the stereotype of women as greedy gold diggers for whom love and romance are worthless compared with credit cards and cash. And even though the last contestant ends up staying with her pauper of a prince, the point is still abundantly clear: With rare exceptions, women are prepared to prostitute themselves for cash and marry for money.

And yet, the show’s revolting premise wasn’t met with angry protests by the viewers. No feminist organization made a significant stink about it. Nope, there was no feminist picket line outside Fox studios. Instead, women watched the show by the millions and loved it.

ABC’s short-lived reality TV show Are You Hot? literally put women on the block to have each feature of their bodies evaluated, as if they were sex slaves about to be sold on the market. As I watched this particularly nefarious piece of trash, I expected the sleazy male judges to walk over to each woman to check her teeth and gums, the way purchasers used to examine slaves. This was not harmless fun. The premise of this show literally defined women as if they were sexual objects. They were paraded on stage as pieces of meat to be carved up by men. “Next up we have Susan,” the announcer would say, “Is Susan hot?” And then the judges would launch in with things along the lines of, “Well, her legs are nice and long, but her breasts are too small. And they’re too pear shaped. They should be rounder. Susan, smile for us now, I want to see your teeth.” Amazingly, Susan would comply with the indignity, smiling throughout her public humiliation. How far we have come—or fallen—when women happily giggle as they are reduced to a couple of “inadequate” body parts?

The portrayal of woman as prostitute is so pervasive in American culture that there is no escaping it. Even after CBS and the National Football League (NFL) were fined and rebuked for Janet Jackson’s portrayal of her breast as a football that needed to be thrown out onto the gridiron in front of millions of American kids, ABC came back less than a year later with their disgusting intro to Monday Night Football, in which Desperate Housewives’ Nicolette Sheridan dropped her towel and begged Terrell Owens for casual sex. And this is a football game, for goodness sake. But then, is this radically different from having women jump up and down, in what looks like their underwear, at professional football games every time a man scores a touchdown? I never did figure out the point behind cheerleading, always believing it was an anachronism that feminism would eventually kill. And yet it, along with the breasts of the cheerleaders, is bigger than ever.

Sixty years after the advent of feminism, women must now ask themselves a sobering question: Is this what they fought for? For women to devolve into men’s sex slaves? And if not, why are they silent when this has become the most rampant stereotype in American popular culture?

To be sure, some will say that Are You Hot? degraded both men and women, since both genders appeared as contestants. And while that may be true, men are not as naturally vulnerable as women, and thus cannot be sexually exploited in the same way. Men are not rendered powerless when they are ogled by women. Since men lack the natural refinement and dignity of women (indeed, they mostly learn it from women), when they appear in a show like Are You Hot? they treat it as nothing more than a fraternity prank, to be laughed off over a couple of beers. Their essential dignity is not compromised when they are judged by their biceps. Not to mention, the very inclusion of men on a show like Are You Hot? was essentially a farcical stab at equality. The dissection of the female form was the very point of the show. If the women had not been on, the ratings would have looked very different.

Encountering negative propaganda against women often makes me want to shout, “How can women allow this? Does no one see just how offensive this is? Where are the protests?” Many of the women I ask are puzzled by the question. “Where are what protests?” they ask me. “Why would we protest? This stuff is not that offensive. It’s just harmless fun.”

But this trend is neither harmless nor fun. Amazingly, almost every reality television show is premised on the image of women as brainless bimbos. Many women say that it is just innocuous entertainment, but do they really believe that these depictions don’t have enormous influence over how men view women, and how women view themselves?

Contrast this laid-back attitude for a moment with a story in the Wall Street Journal about the NFL. In August 2003, ESPN, the sports television network, released a new drama series called Playmakers. Among the many negative stereotypes about professional football players, it showed a football player at a crack house, a team doctor giving a shot to a player who clearly should not be going back on the field, and two players who, when pulled over by police, quickly hide cocaine in the glove compartment. In other episodes, a drug-addicted running back steals morphine from a sick child he visits in the hospital, and a football player is arrested for assaulting his wife.

What was the reaction to this single TV series with its negative depiction of football players? Harmless fun? The NFL sure didn’t see it that way. Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner, called Michael Eisner, chairman of the Disney Corporation, which owns ESPN, to complain about the “negative impact the show could have on the league.” Tagliabue and the league would not take no for an answer. ESPN decided to stop running promotions for Playmakers during NFL games. And although they said they made the decision on their own, the fact is that they were in the sixth year of an eight-year, $4.8 billion deal to air NFL games and nobody wanted to rock the boat. Pat Bowlen, owner of the Denver Broncos and head of the committee that negotiates NFL television contracts, called the show “horrible” and said he could not understand why ESPN, which has profited from its relationship with pro football, would “go out and crap all over the product.” Jeff Lurie, owner of the Philadelphia Eagles, called a press conference to voice his outrage with ESPN, saying he wondered how Disney would like it if “Minnie Mouse were portrayed as Pablo Escobar and the Magic Kingdom as a drug cartel.”

To be sure, the NFL did not have a complete victory insofar as the series was not dropped completely (until the ratings eventually killed off the sorry drivel). But the protest was instrumental in hastening the show’s decline. And all this resulted from a single TV show depicting NFL players as unsavory wife-beaters. This is a tiny exposure compared with the daily trampling women receive through scores of television shows, advertisements, websites, and other media—all depicting women as sleazy airheads with boobs and genitalia and no...