Jan 22
The Deep History of Insecure Men’s Quest to Control Women’s Bodies
Abortion and Authoritarianism
{NOTE: On this, the fiftieth anniversary of the Roe decision, I offer some of the deep history that lies beneath the perceived need of men who are insecure to control women’s bodies. Versions of this essay were previously published on Salon and Substack.
I’ll explore this topic in much more depth in my next book, tentatively titled “Diving Beneath the Wreck: Deep History, Masculine Insecurity, Sexism, Obscene Language, and Neofascism.”}
Man got his woman to take his seed
He got the power, oh
She got the need
– Alice Cooper & Dick Wagner, “Only Women Bleed” (1975)
Will America’s future be one of democracy and women’s control over their own bodies or one of authoritarianism and forced pregnancy? The two issues that most motivated Americans to vote for Democrats in the recent midterm elections are far more intertwined than is generally recognized.
A time when rightwing extremists are hellbent on making American states — or, many of them intend, the whole nation — into Gilead, it is appropriate to turn to Margaret Atwood. “Tyrants and dictators like Adolph Hitler and Nicolae Ceausescu have often dictated the terms of fertility and criminalized those who did not comply,” she pointed out in 2017. “It’s no accident that Napoleon banned abortion. He said exactly why he wanted offspring for — cannon fodder. Lovely!” “What it comes down to is that they assert their right to control reproduction, and they assert their right over people’s bodies,” Atwood said of authoritarian regimes in 2020. “All totalitarianisms, no matter what they say their aims are, no matter what’s on the flag, they all have in common the rollback of women’s rights.”[*] Historian Ruth Ben-Ghiat, who has done a transnational and transhistorical study of authoritarian regimes, makes the same point. “Control over female bodies,” she writes in her 2020 book, Strongmen, is invariably among the goals of the insecure males who call themselves by that name to seize power and become authoritarian rulers.[†]
To understand — and try to overcome — both the treatment of women as property and the basis of authoritarianism, it is necessary to dive into the deep history of humanity. When we do so, we find that those two evils emanate from the same source.
It is more than mere coincidence that the desperate, redoubled quest to outlaw abortion gained traction during an era in which women have been achieving a greater degree of autonomy in other areas. The underlying question is not whether a fetus is a person. Rather, it is this:
Is a woman a person?
Are women property or people? That oldest and most consequential question in human history is the deep font of the struggle to control women’s bodies and why it is so crucial to the self-doubting men who turn toward authoritarians.
The Original Sin of Humanity
It is often and correctly said that enslavement is the original sin of America. Less recognized is another foundational condition shaping much of recorded history and our lives today: Sexism is the original sin of humanity.
Misogyny is the gateway drug to all other hatreds, all other dominance/ subordination relationships. The belief that men are superior to women is the model on which all other vertical divisions — race, class, nationality, master/slave, religious hierarchies, and so on — have been constructed. The subordinate position in these relationships is always depicted as corresponding to women.
The 1975 Alice Cooper song “Only Women Bleed” hints at the origin of what is at stake in the struggle over a woman’s right to control her own body. The foundation of the conviction that has been held for thousands of years that “he got the power” and “she got the need” is the erroneous idea that men have the “seed” and women’s purpose and need is to “take” that seed.
The Seedtime of Sexism
A very deep history lies beneath this subject. To understand it, we need to go back to what can accurately be termed the seedtime of sexism.
Creative power had presumably been seen as female in most societies over the vast eons in which our distant ancestors lived as hunter/gatherers, dependent on plant and animal food produced by nature. Such terminology as Mother Nature and Mother Earth are remnants of that belief. Men appeared to have little or no role in reproduction. Here’s a striking example of that way of thinking: Nearly a century ago, anthropologist Phyllis Kaberry tried to explain the role that men have in creating babies to a group of indigenous women in Australia. One of them responded that she had proof that men have nothing to do with making new life: Her husband had died many months before she gave birth. Another woman summed it up succinctly, “Him nothing!”[‡]
In addition to being seen as the possessors of the power to create life, women in most hunter/gatherer societies were also co-providers through the collection of plant food. Those roles appear to have resulted in women having a rough level of equality with men in many of those societies. The development of agriculture, in all likelihood by women, more than 10,000 years ago began a mega-revolution that radically altered human life.
Agriculture led to both animals and women being domesticated. Increased food supply made population growth possible. Women spent more of their lives bearing and raising children. When the plow was introduced — in some areas roughly 6,000 years ago — and men began planting seeds in the rutted ground, a seeming correspondence was noticed. The furrowed soil resembled the vulva of a woman. It would occur to some men that planting seeds in a groove in Mother Earth seems analogous to a man “planting” what came to be called semen (Latin for seed) in the groove between the labia of a woman.
This correlation came to be taken as an operational equivalence, and it overturned the understanding of which sex has creative power as readily as a plow overturns soft, moist soil. “Who will plow my vulva? / Who will plow my high field? / Who will plow my wet ground?” asks Inanna in The Courtship of Inanna and Dumuzi, a Mesopotamian poem from around 1750 BCE. Men were elevated to the all-powerful creators — authors — of new life and so those with authority. Women were reduced from being thought to possess sole power to create new life to the counterpart of dirt — a place for men to plant their seeds. The common reference that continues to this day to women who do not conceive as “barren” is a reflection of the belief that they are soil.
Both human gametes are microscopic, and the sperm is even smaller than the egg. Semen, though, is visible and it is obviously the case that a woman becomes pregnant only after it is “planted” in her. Yet, for those who thought much about the view that semen is the seed of a new life there were a few difficulties that needed to be explained away. One is that women also produce a visible fluid, and its discharge ceases during pregnancy. Wouldn’t that indicate that menstrual fluid also contains something necessary to the creation of new life? The other is that offspring sometimes resemble their mother. How can that be if the woman provides nothing to the new life except a place, analogous to soil, where the generation can occur?
In his fourth century BCE explication on female inferiority in Generation of Animals, Aristotle sought to answer those questions. In a convoluted argument, he achieved his objective of propping up the belief that men are the sole authors of life. Hippocrates had previously hypothesized that each sex provides life-giving material. Aristotle simply rejected that idea by taking it as axiomatic that “it is impossible that any creature should produce two seminal secretions at once.” So, it “follows that the female does not contribute any semen [seed] to generation.” Menstrual fluid, he said, is a weak, powerless concoction that cannot be life-giving, but it provides the lifeless material to which semen gives life. A woman, Aristotle declared, is “an infertile male” because she “lacks the power to concoct [seed].” The female, he concluded, “is as it were a deformed male” and menstrual fluid is an impure form of semen lacking “one constituent … the principle of Soul.” This argument seemingly solved the problems Aristotle had set out to address. A woman does not produce new life, but if she provides the matter that will become a new human when it is given life by a man, then of course it could resemble her, and if the material given life by a man is necessary, that seems to explain why menstrual discharge ceases during pregnancy.
The reversal of reproductive power based on the Seed Metaphor (it has been so central in human history that it merits capitalization) can be found in numerous ancient texts. A few examples:
■ In the thirteenth chapter of Genesis, God tells Abram, “I will make your seed like the dust of the earth.”
■ “The mother is no parent of that which is called her child, but only nurse of the new-planted seed that grows,” Aeschylus has Apollo proclaim in The Eumenides (458 BCE). “The parent is he who mounts.”
■ In Sophocles’ Antigone (442 BCE), when an astonished Ismene says to Creon, “What? You’d kill your own son’s bride?” the king calmly responds, “Absolutely: There are other fields for him to plow.”
■ “Your wives are a place of sowing of seed for you,” verse 223 of the second surah of the Qur’an instructs men, “so come to your place of cultivation however you wish.”
The evil aftereffects of taking this metaphor literally have been monumental on a scale similar to those that flowed from accepting the story in the second and third chapters of Genesis as literally true. In both cases, those consequences centered on seeing women as inherently inferior.
Considering women as the functional equivalent of tilth — prepared soil ready to be seeded — reclassified them as property: real estate in which men grow their crops of children. Property owners have rights; property (implying that which is properly — rightfully — owned) does not.
Viewed in the light of the Seed Metaphor, planter was an especially appropriate term for American enslavers. Many of them were planters of their “seeds” in enslaved women, using them as fields in which to grow a cash crop: more enslaved human beings. “I consider a woman who brings a child every two years as more profitable than the best man of the farm,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1820 of the value of enslaved women. “What she produces is an addition to the capital, while his labors disappear in mere consumption.”
The Long and Pernicious Afterlife of the Conception Misconception
The improvement of the microscope in the seventeenth century and beyond made possible the identification of two components in sexual reproduction, but the functions of sperm and egg were still unclear. The ovum was seen through a microscope in 1827. But the fact that the woman produced ova did not necessarily mean she was a source of life. The egg could readily be seen as the container of the matter to which Aristotle had contended the man’s seed gives life and soul. Indeed, after sperm had been seen under microscopes, the already existing idea of preformism, which held that organisms grow from preexisting tiny versions of themselves, crystalized into the concept that the homunculus — the “little man” — was inside the sperm.
It was not until the 1870s that it began to become clear that a new life resulted from the combination of life-giving material from both parents. It is, then, impossible that the traditional Christian argument can be that life begins at conception, because through the first nearly two millennia of the Christian Era, people had no idea when conception took place.
Although educated people have known for well over a century that it is wrong, the Seed Metaphor goes on like a zombie, eating the brains of people across modern cultures much as it did in the past, insidiously germinating the poisonous misconception that women are and ought to be property for the use of men. A few modern illustrations, in addition to the one already cited in “Only Women Bleed”:
■ In his 1933 novella, Miss Lonelyhearts, Nathaneal West describes an obelisk as “red and swollen … as though it were about to spout a load of granite seed.” West also has one of his characters say to another, “You tread the seed down into the female earth.”
■ The Nicholas Cage character in the 1987 film Raising Arizona says of his wife: a “doctor explained that her insides were a rocky place where my seed could find no purchase.”
■ From the Urban Dictionary: he “planted his seed in his wife. She accepted all of his seed. His seed is growing.” (2003)
■ From the first season of the television series Outlander in 2014: “He must have to get himself swine drunk every night before he can stand to plow your field.”
■ When she discovers that her husband’s mistress is pregnant, a wife in the 2016 Irish mini-series Rebellion says that the other woman must have had sex with someone else because she and her husband were unable to have children and a physician “found that the fault lies with the seed, not the soil.” The mistress responds that she has had sex with no one else and “the seed is fine in fertile earth.”
■ A 2019 front-page story in the New York Times reported that Jeffrey Epstein sought to “seed the human race with his DNA by impregnating women at his vast New Mexico ranch.”
■ “Women are for seeding, not reading,” Peter says to Catherine in the “occasionally true” 2020 Hulu series, The Great. “Let’s hope that my seed has found purchase,” he declares after they have had sex.
The message to women is unmistakable:
Your only purpose is to carry his seed.
That is the extraordinarily (though it has been totally ordinary) dominating, degrading, and debilitating — authoritative — lesson that has been taught to women for thousands of years. And it is the cracking foundation beneath the authority Catholic bishops and other insecure men fear is being “usurped.”
Authoritarianism is an extreme manifestation of the power relationship based on the never-to-be-questioned inequality ♂ > ♀. That is the motive force in the rise of authoritarian rulers and would-be rulers around the world, from Russia to Hungary to Turkey to Brazil to the Philippines to the United States. A man claiming unlimited power over others is asserting that he is in the position of a god, the Author to whom all others are subordinate. Authoritarians are males terrified that they aren’t “real men.”
Ironically, the weak men who are so attracted to these “strongmen,” apparently thinking that some of the authoritarian’s virility will be infused in them if they submit — offer themselves — to him, are unconsciously putting themselves in what they classify as the woman’s place: subordinate, powerless, submissive, obedient, serving, groveling before “The Man.” They act like Ilsa in Casablanca when she says to Rick, “Oh, I don’t know what’s right any longer. You’ll have to think for both of us, for all of us.” Please, Dear Leader, tell me what I must think and do. Picture Mike Pence and other members of Donald Trump’s entourage telling him that serving him is the greatest honor they could imagine. They were presenting themselves for “The Man” to plant his putative manhood in them.
Authoritarianism, Forced Pregnancy, and the “Great Replacement”
This deep history explains why the issue in the Dobbs v Jackson Women’s Health Organization is seen by many anxious males as monumental. If male dominance is to be maintained, women’s reproductive freedom must be severely curtailed. It isn’t really about choice; it’s about denying women the right to make the choice. Ancient Romans, for example, were “pro-choice,” but the choice was solely that of the man. His supposed creations were his, not hers. Farmland has no say in whether crops planted in it will be allowed to grow or be pulled out or plowed under. The patria potestas, the authority of the father, was absolute.
Thou shalt not pull up what man has planted. That sentence sums up the position of many churches — and, alas, the radical rightwing Opus Dei-influenced majority on the Supreme Court — today.
In the decades since women began moving towards equality, male supremacists have intensified their efforts to put them back “in their place,” accurately described by Atwood in The Handmaid’s Tale as “two-legged wombs, that’s all: sacred vessels, ambulatory chalices.” Or, as George Carlin put it in a brilliant 1996 routine, “Pro-Life Is Anti-Woman,” opponents of women having control over their own bodies “believe a woman’s primary role is to function as a brood mare for the state.”
A postmortem on the startling August landslide rejection by Kansas voters of removing abortion protection from the state constitution painted the positions of the forced pregnancy advocates in Seed Metaphor terminology. They want “to treat a woman’s body like it’s a high-yielding 160 acres of Kansas farmland,” Priti Gulati Cox wrote. And, presumably without being aware that she was doing so, she pointed out that those seeking to deny women’s ownership of their bodies are applying to all women Jefferson’s 1820 argument on the value of enslaved women: “The higher the yield, the higher their value.”
The tie between authoritarian regimes and the use of women as fields in which to grow new members of the favored race is undeniable. “Cradles are empty and cemeteries are expanding,” Benito Mussolini warned in 1927 in words that are echoed by the American extreme right today. “The entire white race, the Western race, could be submerged by other races of color that multiply with a rhythm unknown to our own.” One of Mussolini’s programs was called the “Battle for Babies.” It presented awards to prolific women for (of course without putting it in these terms) being such rich, productive soil, and banned abortion and contraception.[§] If that sounds familiar to Americans in 2022, it is for good — or, rather, bad — reason. On July 21, 96 percent of Republicans voting in the House of Representatives opposed legislation to protect access to birth control.
American rightwing extremists have chosen racist and misogynist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán as their model. He and others on the radical right in Europe and the United States have taken up fear mongering about the “Great Replacement” of white Christians by Them. In July, Orbán gave a speech in which he declared, “we mix within Europe, but we don’t want to be a mixed race.” One of his own top aides characterized it as “a purely Nazi diatribe worthy of Joseph Goebbels.” Yet the American radical right’s admiration for Orbán remains undiminished. The Conservative Political Action Committee (CPAC) still welcomed him to speak at their gathering in Texas in early August.
It is easily overlooked, but essential to realize that a significant part of the replacement fear authoritarians fire up among insecure men is not only that they are being replaced by people of other skin color, culture, or religion, but also that they are being replaced by the original “other” or Them: women.
CPAC had previously chosen to hold its 2022 convention in Hungary. There, on May 19, Matt Schlapp, the CPAC head, indicated that one of the ways to reduce what white nationalists claim is the “replacement” of white people in the United States with non-whites is to grow our own population by outlawing abortion. This is an interesting twist on the use of enslaved black women as soil in which to grow more people who would be classified as black and owned by the seed planters. Now white supremacists want to use white women to grow crops of “free” white children. The color of the “soil” in which white men plant seeds has changed, but the treatment of women as owned real estate remains a constant.
Forced pregnancy fits into the Great Replacement hysteria not only with the hope that it will increase the white population, but also in that again classifying women primarily as soil in which to produce children might remove more of them as competitors with and potential replacers of men in the workforce. On the day the Dobbs decree was announced, a Republican candidate for lieutenant governor of Minnesota made explicit the argument that abortion leads to women having careers. “Our culture,” Matt Birk pronounced, “loudly but also stealthily, promotes abortion. Telling women they should look a certain way, have careers, all these things.” Forced pregnancy can help to put women back in their “proper place”: barefoot, pregnant, at home — serving and servicing men — not replacing them: Kinder, Küche, Kirche (children, kitchen, church) as the Nazis defined women’s roles. And, of course, opening their furrows for men to plant the seeds that will produce more and more white babies.
“Question Authority”
The Sixties slogan “Question Authority” is key to the attainment of equality by women, and nothing questions male authority as much as women having the power to control their own bodies. Preventing women from deciding whether to continue a pregnancy is the sine qua non of the regime of male dominance and female subordination. Acceptance of that right recognizes that women and men are the coauthors of new life and so have equal “authority.” Equality of the sexes is the foundation of an equal society. As long as women are seen as inferior, authoritarianism remains a danger.
The war on women’s choice is Armageddon for insecure men because women having control over their own bodies means that they are their own bodies — that they are equal human beings, not property owned by men.
That way lies the unraveling of male dominance and so it is on the issue they call “Pro Life” (in truth, Forced Pregnancy) that self-doubting men who are terrified of equality with women have dug in for their last stand. And, because the concept of man > woman is the foundation for all other claims that one classification of people is superior to another, to question the authority of men over women is to endanger the whole edifice of inequality that has been raised upon it.
Deuteronomy 22:29 declares that a woman must marry her rapist. Italian law had this requirement — matrimonio Riparatore, “rehabilitating marriage,” to restore a raped woman’s reputation — well into the second half of the twentieth century. Now the Supreme Court’s outrageous decree means that in many states a woman — or even a ten-year-old girl — will be required to carry and deliver the child of her rapist. The message to women in the abortion laws passed in several states over the past few years is essentially the same as that in Deuteronomy: When you’re fucked, you’re fucked. Anxious, fragile men are determined to keep it that way.
It’s all about subordinating women — and other categories of humans that have been classified in an inferior position similar to that to which women have been consigned for thousands of years.
No member of our species is wholly or partly property. We are all fully human. The title of a 1960 Good Housekeeping article by Betty Friedan that contained some of the argument she would publish in book form as The Feminine Mystique three years later provides an appropriate retort to the Court’s despicable classification of women as property: “I Say: Women are People Too!”
Women and secure men must rededicate ourselves to establishing, once and for all, that women are not real estate, but equal human beings. The place to start is by massively mobilizing to ensure that those who are unequivocal in their affirmation that women are free human beings (their group label is Democrat) take firm control of both houses of Congress so that they can pass a federal law protecting women’s bodies from government control.
Women being slaves of the state is what authoritarianism looks like. It must not be tolerated.
Him + Her = Authority
The Seed Metaphor that has misshapen human history for millennia is 100 percent wrong. Neither sex produces the equivalent of a seed from which a new organism grows. No human, male or female, has creative power; each has potential half-creative power that is useless without the other. Each sperm and each egg contains half of the genetic material needed for reproduction. They must combine to create a zygote, which has the potential to become a new life.
Neither sex is the author of new life. Neither has authority. The power to author new life is formed only through the coming together of man and woman. They only possess authority together, as equals.
Let us put it in the terminology used by the indigenous woman in Australia. In the creation of new life:
Him nothing. Her nothing. Together, Them something extraordinarily powerful.
{Historian Robert S. McElvaine teaches at Millsaps College. He is the author of Eve’s Seed: Biology, the Sexes, and the Course of History. His latest book, The Times They Were a-Changin’ — 1964: The Year the Sixties Arrived and the Battle Lines of Today Were Drawn, was recently published by Arcade.}
