Off with Her Head: Three Thousand Years of Demonizing Women in Power

by Eleanor Herman

The purpose of slut-shaming is to silence women and usually has nothing to do with their actual sexual behavior.

As the award-winning historian Ronald Schechter wrote in 1998, “Once a fact becomes ‘common knowledge’ the historian is released from the obligation to cite a source, and only a determined effort to falsify it can dislodge it from the bricolage of generally accepted facts that constitute the historical canon.”

In the sixteenth century, Mary I of England burned some three hundred Protestants as heretics during her five-year reign, earning herself the sobriquet “Bloody Mary.” Yet her father Henry VIII executed some seventy thousand people during his thirty-eight-year reign for a variety of offenses, mostly treason and heresy.

Through her third marriage, Lucrezia finally escaped her interfering family (her father had annulled her first marriage, and her brother had murdered her second husband) by ending up in the city-state of Ferrara as wife of Alfonso d’Este, who would become the ruling duke. The d’Este family had not wanted the marriage, fearful of her reputation as a sex fiend and a poisoner, but they had finally caved in to the intimidation and generous financial offers of the pope. But once installed as duchess, Lucrezia made herself universally popular, serving as patron to artists and poets, and reigning graciously over a colorful Renaissance court. She devoted herself to pious works and helping the poor, and capably administered the realm when her husband was away, doing much to reverse her sinister reputation.

Man she sounds Heckin cool!

The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself. —Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own, 1882–1941

Mispronouncing an individual’s name intentionally and repetitively signals the person is not worthy of one of life’s most basic courtesies. And for people of foreign or non-white cultures, it can indicate they are un-American, different, difficult—they don’t even have normal names, for God’s sake—and they should probably go back to the shithole countries from whence they came where everyone can revel in their odd and ungainly appellations.

White people suuuuuuck

Boldrini pointed out to BuzzFeed News in 2018, “Language is not only a semantic issue, it is a concept, a cultural issue. . . . When you are opposed to saying la ministra or la presidente, it means that culturally you are not admitting that women can reach top positions. Everything must remain masculine.”

“Calling a female politician by her first name and her male counterpart by his full name amounts to everyday sexism,” she said. “It’s a bad habit that male politicians need to shake off.”

According to a 2007 book called Rethinking Madam President by professors Lori Cox Han and Caroline Heldman, “Gendered language of this sort is not consciously disrespectful, perhaps, but gender difference is not random and has the ‘real world’ consequence of delegitimizing knowledge, experience, and ultimately, leadership.” Using only a woman’s first name makes her seem like a child.

As Gloria Steinem said, “Whoever has power takes over the noun—and the norm—while the less powerful get an adjective.”

This vicious diminishing of Black women is called “misogynoir” (noir meaning “black” in French,) a term coined by Moya Bailey, an African American feminist scholar, for what happens at the intersection of sexism and racism.

While anger at injustice has fueled great social and political movements—the American Revolution, for instance, the Civil Rights Movement, and #MeToo—many Black women accused of anger are not angry in that moment at all; they are simply speaking. And when Black women point out the injustice of being labeled “angry,” they just appear angrier to those who call them such. The easiest choice is to remain silent, which, though understandable on the personal level, just lets misogynoirists win, as silencing Black women is the very purpose of the creation of the angry Black woman trope.

“When you look at the Squad in Congress, the women who receive the most vitriol, they are the same women who inspire and motivate the most people in the country,” she said in an interview for this book. “Their time in Congress has been relatively short, and yet their national standing is so high. Any time I ask younger women whom their favorite elected officials are, they say AOC is one of their heroes. It is important not to underestimate the power these women have, which can be scary to white men.”

Men are afraid that women will laugh at them. Women are afraid that men will kill them. —Margaret Atwood

According to mythologist Joseph Campbell, the story of Medusa’s murder—and, it is fair to say, that of Python—was created by invading men to justify their aggression. “Wherever the Greeks came,” he wrote, “in every valley, every isle, and every cove, there was a local manifestation of the goddess-mother.” To obtain power for themselves, they needed to cut off her head. Apollo slew Python. Perseus beheaded Medusa. The baby Hercules strangled two snakes the jealous goddess Hera sent to kill her husband’s illegitimate son. The writers of the biblical Book of Genesis ensured that snakes were seen as deceitful, manipulative, and evil for all time, which is why Saint Patrick drove them out of Ireland to eternal acclaim. These tales tell of the emphatic rejection of divine feminine power, replaced by a man dressed in battle armor swinging a mace.

In 1872, Victoria Woodhull was the first women ever to run for US president.

Yeah, I never knew this? Three guesses as to why

Social media is a weapon of the Patriarchy, a potent new tool in the Misogynist’s Handbook to threaten, abuse, and belittle powerful women. It took decades for the first whispers to come out about Isabeau of Bavaria, centuries for them to cement themselves in the public consciousness. No longer do libellistes manually print scandalous pamphlets in a foreign country, smuggle them into a capital city in a nobleman’s baggage, and sell them surreptitiously in darkened bookstores, as they did to take down Marie Antoinette. Nor do misogynists sit down, write a letter, stuff it into an envelope, address it, put a stamp on it, and walk it to the mailbox. These days, with just the push of a button . . . whoosh! It’s gone around the world, viral in hours, viciously punishing a woman for stepping outside of patriarchal bounds.

Social media companies started as a small thing, and nobody thought that there was any reason to regulate them. But now we know they have had an impact on democracy, on mental health, on the riots on the Capitol, so actually somebody needs to regulate them.

Hard agree

Christina Cauterucci wrote in Slate in November 2019, “The only thing that will inoculate the public to the jarring novelty of women in positions of power is more women in positions of power. The waning of sexism in politics won’t be marked by people starting to like women in leadership but by the decline of likability as a political criterion—by people not liking female candidates, the same way they don’t like male candidates, and voting for them anyway.”

We live in an age of increasing questioning of the status quo. Of #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, and the removal from positions of prominence of statues of Confederate traitors who shed American blood to keep human beings enslaved.