Misogyny is the gateway to all bigotry — and loving women is the cure

By Janet Marugg | FāVS News Columnist

The views expressed in this opinion column are those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect the views of FāVS News. 

The best things I learned from men are things they learned from their mothers. Or maybe a female teacher who filled a boy’s ear when it mattered — when the window of language opens a mind and starts to set the meanings of things. 

From his mother, Marcus Aurelius learned, “You do what’s right, not because there are consequences for doing wrong, but because it’s inconceivable to you to be the kind of person who would try to get away with something.” 

I recognize her immediately — a mother trying to get some peace and quiet.

From Gandhi’s mother figure, I learn what it’s like to yearn for justice and equality. From Buddha’s mother, I see the strength of letting go so her child could attain enlightenment. 

From the Dalai Lama’s mother and older sister, my heart aspires to inner peace and simple living. Muhammad’s mother gave me sacred soul words, and Mary, the mother of Jesus, taught me to love women. All the leading men of yesterday learned it from women.

You cannot hide them. Women are humanity’s blood supply. The veins of history are filled with women, the heart of the future already set to her beat. Like great men of the past, the hearts and minds of future men are bettered for what they learn from women. 

A person can make the case that being of value to the community comes through maternal lines. The doing of hard things, risking, caring for others without drama or making it weird, but just because it needs to be done, is the real story that bleeds women between the lines of history. 

Women are not a fairy tale caricature. They possess keen executive skills in creating and caring for others. All the women I know manage the moving parts of family, career, friends, social gatherings, church communities, etc. They’re in the know, about who is where, doing what. 

She knows where to find and when to administer the dosage of medicine, when a friend needs comfort or a laugh, and transforms the grocery shopping of the day into future meals. I think we’d be fine if women took over things. 

Roles are fine for playing, but I don’t subscribe to hard-line roles. Life is nuanced and never truly binary, and morality and character have little to do with body parts. But when I’m seeking solutions or putting someone in charge of all the moving parts of an increasingly complex world, I’m open to elevating women. Every woman I know is a server, a survivor, a success.

Misogyny: The original sin

Here’s the twist: This was supposed to be a personal essay about xenophobia and bigotry. I’m supposed to be writing about which is best: ignorance or knowledge, fear or understanding, hate or love? Evolve or devolve? 

I’m supposed to be presenting the idea that misogyny is the original sin and that even just a smidge of misogyny is a gateway to hate. In my informal study, every xenophobe, misandrist, racist, bigot and sectarian I know is misogynistic. 

A demonizer of women surely hates themselves for the one thing they cannot change — that they are alive because they gestated and are part of a woman. We are all part woman. To hate women is to hate yourself. And everybody else. 

It’s alarming the way we let people go around hating everybody. And dangerous. Hate crimes and extremism grow out of bigotry. People able to dehumanize others are anti-lifers. Bigotry is anti-life. 

The cure for bigotry

What does it take to make better humans? It takes loving women. All women. If we can’t love women, we can’t love anyone who comes from women, or anyone influenced by women. Developing the ability to love women and the diversity they bear can cure the predatory bigotry that is less tolerable every day for its threat to the survival of our species.

Life is not a sole-survival scenario for us. Evolutionarily, humans selected as a cooperative and communal species. They once lived in cave-sized populations and small tribes. 

Those small tribes evolved into one large human tribe as the world shrunk through technology. Humans of the future will self-select as well-adapted to a diversely populated single tribe with a serious social contract. 

The good news is that misogyny (and all the bigotries that follow) can be cured with an individual and collective will to do it. We can give the gift of a future through our support of women. As leaders. 

There is no moral system that hates, dehumanizes and demonizes women and those who come from women, and we should not be asked to tolerate one that is. The misogynists amongst us are the cannibals — the dangerous ones.

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