Reply #16: It is a persistent myth, isn't it? Christianity, Islam, Rome, Greece, all [View All]

[jobycom]

have versions of the same archetype. Think Media, Salome. Though in each of those cases, there are also examples of manipulative women who fail because men are either too smart or too just. Pharoah's wife cannot defeat Joseph, for example, in the Christian or Islamic versions. Moses likewise cannot be tricked by Pharoah's wife.

I think the big constant in this myth is the manipulative woman. She fails when a man is just, she succeeds when a man is greedy or lustful and is willing to compromise himself. Thus, the woman is a temptress, and the man's success or failure is based on his morality, not his intelligence.

This fits with woman's role in literature through most of our history, and in much of today's literature (including movies). The woman is not a character, she is a device to motivate the man, either through love, lust, greed, goodness, badness, whatever. The woman may be pure and innocent, childlike and flighty, sexy and manipulative, or whatever, but her primary goal is to move the male characters towards good or evil, or to satisfy the male character in some way.

I would say this archetype comes from two factors: One, women being kept out of power through much of history, and two, men being the ones who write all this literature and all these myths. Women's main access to power has often been through men, and thus men would see them as either silent, or manipulative to get something the man doesn't want to give them.

Since men are the ones writing the stories, and since often in history men and women have lived in separate realms that only intersected through romance, sex, or household duties, men's knowledge of them would be limited to these realms. Therefore, women were there to fall in love, have sex, clean house. When they wanted more, they often had to manipulate men to get it. Thus, men create these stories portraying women these ways.

Of course, the whole temptress thing is a way of excusing men for their lusts and condemning women for theirs. Men either give in to the woman because of weakness, or resist women because of strength. Thus, women are abstract temptations.

Hollywood still does this. Film Noir and basic Femme Fatale films (except, interestingly, the movie called Femme Fatale) are written mostly through the man's perspective. The woman is mysterious, unknowable--just as she always has been in literature. Fortunately, even Hollywood is moving beyond those genres now. Somewhat.

That's a quick but overly-wordy summary of my ideas. I could go on, but everyone else stopped reading long ago, so I'll stop now.