tittle@ics.UCI.EDU (Cindy Tittle Moore) (05/01/91)
Review by Cindy Tittle Moore
April 30, 1991
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Copyright (C) 1991 by Cindy Tittle Moore
The Gospel According to Woman:
Christianty's Creation of the Sex War in the West
by Karen Armstrong
Anchor Books, Doubleday
ISBN 0-385-24079-1 (trade paperback)
Library of Congress: HQ1394.A75
All page numbers given are from the paperback version.
Karen Armstrong has written a powerful, provocative, and persuasive
book about the effects of Christianity on the West in the areas of
sexuality and relationships between men and women. She does this
through exploring what she terms the main neurosis of Christianity:
sex. Only in Christianity is sex regarded as evil: Jews assign
importance to sex as the means of propogating the Chosen Race; Muslims
consider sex to be one of the main joys in life; and Hindus outline a
path to holiness through sexuality. Armstrong charts the course of
women in Christianity since its inception. Christianity, for the
purposes of this book, is *not* the teachings of Jesus or official
Christian doctrine but the influences of theologians and scholars on
the Western world.
First Christian attitudes toward sex, from Jesus' time to the present
are outlined. The result of this is the view of women as inextricably
linked to sex; as women provoke sexual desire in men, they are seen as
insatiable temptresses leading men to their doom. For many centuries,
women were considered to be such oversexed, dangerous creatures that
they were isolated, segregated, kept in their homes and covered up
lest they tempt otherwise good men into passion. This forms the
cornerstone of the myth of Eve. Armstrong shows how this view
inevitably led to the witch hunts of the sixteenth and seventeenth
centuries and furthermore shows how these witch hunts affect us to
this day.
There were several ways to escape the stigma of being a woman in the
Christian world, and Armstrong explores each of these separately and
then jointly. She details the reasons for being a Virgin, a Martyr,
or a Mystic, and showed how being any one of these usually encompassed
the others. Women who achieved any of these statuses were accorded
full equality with men, at the expense of shedding her femaleness.
Armstrong makes interesting observations about connections between
anorexia nervosa and religious neurosis. Interestingly enough,
Christianity made possible the idea of an autonomous woman, so alien
in other religions and cultures, in its very condemnation of sex.
Early Christianity abounded with examples of women taking equal places
alongside with men.
Part of this discussion includes an extensive discussion of the
damaging effects of sadomasochistic behavior on the part of many of
these saints. She does not make the distinction clear in her book,
but she is talking about the sort of self-destructive and
self-humiliating behavior that has nothing to do with modern-day S&M
sexual practices. Because of her vagueness on that point, it would be
easy to read into this portion of the book an anti-S&M tirade, which I
do not believe to be the intention. Other reader's mileage may vary.
Armstrong then discusses more recent developments, such as the
sanctification of marriage (which interestingly enough does not seem
to have occurred until about the eighteenth century; until then it was
viewed as strictly a secular arrangement) that the Protestant
Reformers introduced. She shows how this bound the woman even more to
her husband as he was now the spiritual head of the family and she
even more dependent on him. She examines the peculiarly destructive
Victorian views of women as being virgin-wives: not expected to enjoy
sex at all, the myth of the sexually voracious woman was transmuted
into the sexually helpless "good" woman.
I enjoyed this book quite a bit, and for several reasons. One was the
unexpected but thoroughly logical drawing together of what one would
think as completely disjoint: the similarities between the medieval
Virgins and modern-day feminists, for example. Another was her
refreshing lack of vindictiveness: as much of Christian neurosis as
she exposes, she also shows how Jesus' and St. Paul's views were
grossly warped by later Church Fathers. She discusses the oppression
of women by men and also discusses the tendency of women today to
completely villify men and points out the destructiveness of both
behaviors. A few quotes:
"Throughout Christian history we have seen that it is separation
which has been the dominant motif, not togetherness. Men have
pushed women away from then, and women have withdrawn. Women have
erected protective defences around themselves to make them
invulnerable to male attack. Men and women have wounded and
castrated one another. Mutilation has been the motif far more
than the loving embrace." p 336.
"Some women today are continuing this tradition of Christian
hatred. They are creating Man, the stereotyped enemy, in as
blinkered and prejudiced a way that the old Christian stereotypes
-- Jew, Moslem, Witch, Heretic -- were built up... Many women seem
to need to hate men in order to gain a new appreciation of woman,
just as Christians have traditionally defined themselves in terms
of aggression and hatred...In their turn, men are beginning to
create a stereotype of the Feminist as the Enemy." p 344.
Armstrong is careful to limit her conclusions to the Western,
Christian world; however, she shows how the secular has been
influenced by the religious. Considering other popular stereotypes
such as teh Jewish American Princess, of which it is joked that you
can tell she had an orgasm because she dropped her nail-file, it seems
possible to me that non-Christian religions that have been in the
Western world have been affected by these neurosis, too. Be that as
it may, I think that this book will be of interest to anyone who must
deal with the Western world, whether or not they are Christian.
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