Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble quoted some passages from Elizabeth V. Spelman’s essay “Woman as Body: Ancient and Contemporary Views” that captured my interest enough that I found a copy and read it this morning. Here’s one of the finest zingers in the piece:
Plato had what I have described elsewhere as a case of psychophilic somatophobia. As a psychophile who sometimes spoke as if the souls of women were not in any important way different from the souls of men, he had some remarkably nonsexist things to say about women. As a somatophobe who often referred to women as exemplifying states of being and forms of living most removed from the philosophical ideal, he left the dialogues awash with misogynistic remarks. Of course, one can be a dualist without being a misogynist, and one can be a misogynist without being a dualist. However, Plato was both a dualist and a misogynist, and his negative views about women were connected to his negative views about the body, insofar as he depicted women’s lives as quintessentially body-directed.”
In this essay she mentions another unpublished piece I’d like to read, ‘Metaphysics and Misogyny’. The connection between religious faith, traditional metaphysical conceptions, preference for hierarchical power structures, aversion to matter and the senses, xenophobia, readiness to use violence and subjugation of women are becoming clearer to me.