Rabbi Shmuley Boteach - Hating Women: Americas Hostile Campaign Against the Fairer Sex

THE SHOCKING ASSAULT ON
THE AMERICAN WOMAN

THE NOBILITY ACCORDED
WOMEN IN AGES PAST

FORTY YEARS OF FEMINISM
ERASED IN A SINGLE DECADE

A s 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 mens 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 womans 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 Solomons Ode to a Woman of Valor, the final chapter in Proverbs, which is sung to ones 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 mens respect and veneration. The great movie actresses of Hollywoods 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 TVcatty 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 Rousseaus 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 womens 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.