ABSTRACT
The reality behind what men have written about women is an ambivalence of feeling, which includes deep antagonism. Since men enjoy the advantages of physical strength, intellectual energy, political power and wealth, and until recently also those of legal status and education, it seems unnecessary as well as unchivalrous for them to have written as much satire on women as they have. Satire on women is a comic recording of deviations from the ideal set up by the encomium, and traditionally it has been centred on the cardinals of docility, chastity and modesty. A major development in Christian mythology and iconography also affected all subsequent satire on women. This was the dramatisation of man's ambivalent feelings about women around the polar antitheses of Eve and the Virgin Mary. The more devotion was paid to the sinless Mother of God, the more execration was heaped on Eve, who became the symbol of everything that was wrong with women.
