E9: Wrath - The Demonisation of Women’s Rage & Sexuality Part 1 - The Sanctuary of Sin Podcast

Episode Transcript
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SPEAKER_00 (00:00):
On today's episode, we're covering our next deadly
sin, which is wrath, which Ithought would be good to kind of
cover the demonisation ofwomen's rage and sexuality
throughout history.

SPEAKER_01 (00:13):
From nagging wives, hysterical virgins, sex obsessed
nymphos, to the devil'sconcubines...
Outspoken, empowered women havehistorically been ostracised
from society.
Whether it be theological,physiological, spiritual or
legal, there is a long historyof women being punished or cured

(00:35):
for their rage and sexuality.

SPEAKER_00 (00:37):
First off, let's take a look at the long and
complicated history of hysteria.
And it's surprising links toendometriosis.
This is one that I hadn't heardof before.
Like, I've never seen thatcomparison drawn.
Like, I feel like when we thinkof hysteria, it always gets
written off as just, like,historically a misogynistic way.

(00:59):
It can be keeping women down andit being about, like, oh,
they're too emotional, they'rethis or that.
And it definitely ended up thatway, which we'll kind of cover a
bit later on, but...
In the beginning and what it waskind of based off of, there does
seem to be like a strong linkbetween it and endometriosis.

SPEAKER_01 (01:20):
Yeah.
For me, the term kind ofconjures up images of like 1950s
American housewives and likealongside things like vibrators
and lobotomies.

SPEAKER_02 (01:30):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 (01:30):
That's kind of the general vibe I get from that
term.

SPEAKER_00 (01:35):
It's interesting how it's kind of morphed into that
over time.
But the term actually first cameup from about 2,500 years ago.
So it's been the kind ofsolution to a problem that has
been about for a long time.
Because of the direction thatdoctors and science and medicine

(01:57):
took hysteria, it becamediscredited as an idea.

SPEAKER_02 (02:01):
Right.

SPEAKER_00 (02:03):
But the roots of it and what it was based off of.
Though the reasonings they cameup with surrounding it are wild,
it still points to it being avery real thing that was
happening to women that was justbeing taken and ran away in a
wild way.

(02:24):
Mostly because they didn'tbelieve them.
They didn't believe the pain.
They didn't believe the...
They thought they were justbeing hysterical women.

UNKNOWN (02:34):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (02:35):
Which is why it's almost been a bit of a
self-fulfilling prophecy, I'dsay.
Aye, because it

SPEAKER_01 (02:41):
kind of painted women a certain way for such a
long time that it was kind ofdifficult for them to escape
that sort of labelling.

SPEAKER_00 (02:52):
Aye, that to be the kind of destination it was
headed towards, basically.
Because women don't tell thetruth about their own bodies and
experiences.

UNKNOWN (03:01):
No.

SPEAKER_00 (03:02):
They're just complaining for the sake of it.
So medicine has historicallyfallen on either side of either
magic, demonological orscientific views.
And things have took a bit of aweird journey.
I was kind of expecting it to gofrom one to the other but

(03:23):
there's been a bit of back andforth over the last 2,500 years.
You'd sort

SPEAKER_01 (03:28):
of expect it to go from magic and demons To
science.
And there'd be a fairly straightline from one to the other.

SPEAKER_00 (03:37):
Yeah, but no.
That has not been the case.
Through all of this though,there has always been evidence
that women are the weaker of thetwo sexes.
That has just been, even now,that's still taken as biological
fact.
So whether it be from a weakdisposition...

(04:00):
vulnerability to mentaldisorders or that they're more
easily influenced bysupernatural forces and more
likely to commit sinful actsthere's always been a kind of a
reason why women have been notonly the weaker of the two sexes
but the more kind of corruptibleand therefore the more corrupt

(04:22):
ah yes

SPEAKER_01 (04:23):
prisons famously full of women

SPEAKER_00 (04:25):
yeah yeah

SPEAKER_01 (04:27):
Famously, mostly women that do crime.

SPEAKER_00 (04:32):
It's a woman you don't want to meet on a dark
alley.

SPEAKER_01 (04:34):
Oh, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (04:35):
So, as I was saying, the first reference to this type
of disease was in the EberPapyrus in Egypt in 1600 BC.
It was the first medicaldocument to have references to
depressive maladies.
where kind of traditionalsymptoms of hysteria have been

(04:58):
noted within, in which theydescribed seizures as well as a
kind of like sense ofsuffocation and death, which to
me sounds a bit like anxiety,like a

SPEAKER_01 (05:08):
kind of panic attack.
It sounds like sort of anxiety,depression, like just a sort of
when your emotional feelingssort of take on like a physical
aspect.

SPEAKER_00 (05:21):
Yeah.
which, I mean, it makes sense.
I feel like anxiety, as much aspeople talk about it like it's a
new thing, it would haveaffected people, especially back
in the day when, like, meretraumatic stuff was happening
semi-regularly.
Like, people were dying and, doyou know, like, the way that
people died was, like, obviouslypeople would have been a lot
more used to it back then, butit's not as if it would have had

SPEAKER_01 (05:44):
effects on them.
I certainly find anxiety to bequite, like, a physical
sensation heavy sort of thing.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (05:52):
And without the kind of words to describe that, you
know, like, if you're in such apanic state that you're, like,
shaking and stuff like that,maybe we could have been taken
as a seizure back then.

SPEAKER_01 (06:02):
Yeah, yeah, I mean, I could see quite easily how,
like, a panic attack could bemistaken as a seizure.

SPEAKER_00 (06:08):
Especially if someone's went, like, non-verbal
and stuff like that, and, like,kind of non-responsive, like,
why it could be seen as such.

SPEAKER_01 (06:16):
I think that kind of comes down to, like...
the confines of language andhaving built that language
around...
We're at a point where we've hadthousands of years now come up
with the surrounding languagefor things like that to express
that quite clearly anddistinguish it from other

(06:39):
things.
I don't know if that's a newconcept at this time.
They're not going to have thewords to describe...
this new different thing when tolook at it looks close to
something i've alreadyencountered

SPEAKER_00 (06:54):
and got language for yeah so within this as well
there was the firstdocumentation of i don't exactly
know what words they used todescribe it but it was later
kind of termed the wanderinguterus by hippocrates we'll
cover in a wee bit but it waskind of understood at the time

(07:16):
that the uterus wandered aboutthe body kind of freely of its
own will which again kind ofcomes back to this like if
somebody is in such cripplingpain especially if they're
getting pain in different partsof their kind of torso and
abdomen why they would kind oflink that to it being the organ

(07:37):
like physically like movingaround the body because when you
get like period cramps like itcan feel like in all different
places yeah it's not just kindof in the one area, like it can
feel like it's kind of movingabout your body and if that's
the way that they've describedit it makes sense that this is
the kind of the theory thatthey've came up with

SPEAKER_01 (08:01):
Ah, you can kind of see the thinking going on there
and I'm sure there is some kindof thing where like organs can
kind of move and be in the wrongplace and it causes some issues.
So I think there is almost likethis wee grain of sort of maybe

(08:25):
science that could inform thatline of thinking.

SPEAKER_00 (08:30):
Yeah.
To an extent.

SPEAKER_01 (08:35):
I'm absolutely not saying they were right.
I'm just...
You can just about see...
why they might think a thinglike that.

SPEAKER_00 (08:45):
So the cure for this at the time was they kind of
seen the uterus as like a kindof another animal, like an alive
thing that had the samemotivations as well as of course
a sense of smell.
So the treatment for this was touse sweet smelling substances or

(09:14):
perfumes or anything nice thatwas a nice smell.
Either at the mouth and nose orat the vagina to lure the uterus
back into position.
Depending on whether it was toofar up or too far down.
Depending on where you wereputting the nice smelling trap,

(09:36):
I guess.
I don't know.
while at the same time using akind of acrid or bad,
foul-smelling substance at theopposite end to kind of scare it
away.
So it was a kind ofdual-approach, double-ended...

SPEAKER_01 (09:50):
Well, I mean, that would certainly work on me.
I would be likely to gravitatetowards the nicer smelling away
from the horrible one.
I

SPEAKER_00 (10:01):
feel like this was literally the line of thinking
that went into coming up withthis.

SPEAKER_01 (10:05):
yeah like it would work on me but like I absolutely
would never dream of using it tomove an organ

SPEAKER_00 (10:13):
yeah yeah so the Egyptians kind of were the first
people to start or at least thefirst documented people to kind
of use this I don't know what tocall it like I feel like I could
coin a really like funny namebut I cannae think of anything
now Like, oh, I can think he'sdual action.

SPEAKER_01 (10:34):
Dual action uterus seduction.

SPEAKER_00 (10:40):
Yeah.
But it was later used by theGreeks as well.
So in about the 5th century BC,so was that like 1100 years
later?
Hysteria as a term was firstcoined by Hippocrates, who was
the father of modern medicine.
You'll maybe recognise the namefor the Hippocratic oaths and...

(11:00):
He was an influential guy.

SPEAKER_01 (11:03):
Having heard some of his thinking, it very much felt
like a fling everything at thewall and see what sticks sort of
approach.

SPEAKER_00 (11:14):
I mean, I think that's what science was in the
beginning.
They kind of had to take thatapproach because there was no
frame of reference, there was nonothing to work from.
It was just, other thanobviously...
Like, the stuff that they wereworking from wasn't necessarily
all that scientific in nature.

SPEAKER_01 (11:33):
Ah, it very much kind of has the vibes of more
of, like, a philosophy than,like...

SPEAKER_00 (11:39):
Yeah.
Well, all the physicians backthen, like, in the ancient
Greece, a lot of them, they're,like, a philosopher and a
physician.
Like, this seemed to be quite acommon kind of crossover, which
is what, like, is mad to thinkabout now.

SPEAKER_01 (11:54):
Ah, it's why you're seeing sort of, like...
personality traits and, like,human behavioural traits being
ascribed to an organ.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (12:05):
They just thought, they overthought things,
basically.
Like, the ways that they thoughtabout things were, like, quite
big picture, but then we'reworking with the small picture
and the individual, and it just,they two things don't mesh well
together, in my experience.
Yeah.
So he described hysteria ascompulsive movements caused by a

(12:29):
restless and migratory uterus inthe body.
So again, very similar.
The kind of compulsive movementthing again kind of lends itself
to what I was saying aboutendometriosis and the kind of
cramps.
That happens anyway, but whenit's to the point where it's
causing people severe pain, itmakes sense that it's notable.

SPEAKER_01 (12:50):
And again...
You can kind of almost see thethinking of, like, this is
something acting of its ownaccord, you know, outwith the
person's control.
It must be, like, some kind ofsentient thing.
thing that is attacking themfrom the inside.

SPEAKER_00 (13:09):
I think this kind of goes in line with a lot of the
ways that they've seen erectionsand stuff like that as being out
of their control and the femalebeing the failed man.
It was like this being internaland therefore an issue.
You can kind of see the kind oflines of thinking that have led
them to where they were.
This is caused by poisonousstagnant humours.

SPEAKER_01 (13:32):
Oh, fantastic.
I love humour.

SPEAKER_00 (13:35):
So for people that haven't come across humours
before.
This was kind of like the OGmedicine and the way that we
know it today was based aroundthe concept of everything that
could be wrong with a person wasbecause of there being an issue
and an imbalance of the fourhumours within the body or

(13:57):
bodily fluids.

SPEAKER_01 (13:59):
So the humours being blood, phlegm, yellow bile and
black bile.

SPEAKER_00 (14:05):
Yeah.
And obviously we're not going togo too far into that, like if
you're interested, go and lookit up.
But these not only determinesomebody's health, but also
their temperament.
So an imbalance of these causednot only different health
problems, but different kind ofpersonality traits.
And I feel like this is againkind of showing for us where
this blend of philosophy andmedicine became...

(14:29):
a bit an issue.
Yeah,

SPEAKER_01 (14:31):
because it sort of managed to encompass people's
morality into their health andtheir health problems.
So, you know, there's certainthings that can sort of
morality-based behaviours thatcan imbalance your humours and
then cause you some kind ofailment.

SPEAKER_00 (14:51):
You can see how that was problematic.

SPEAKER_01 (14:54):
Ah, you can also see why that would be useful in
religious cultures and ways ofcontrolling people.
I

SPEAKER_00 (15:07):
have to say though, I can see where if you were
starting at a baseline ofknowledge people when they're
ill tend to be quite shorttempered.
I can see totally where they'vepulled this from.
When people are ill and sick itdoes tend to change the way that
they behave.
Because they're in pain.
And suffering.
And that's why.
But if you don't have theknowledge to think about things

(15:33):
like that, it makes sense whereyou would go.
Like, ah, there's a cause andthere's a solution.
Like a cause and effect.
So, hysteria.
Caused by poisonous, stagnanthumours which are trapped within
the body and require sex to bereleased.
So...
In the beginning, or at least atthis time period, the types of

(15:56):
people that were being diagnosedwith hysteria tended to be
unmarried women, widows, youngwomen virgins, and the answer to
this was for them to get marriedand have sex.
It very much tied into thesocial norms and values of the

(16:18):
time, which is where we can seeit for what it is, a method of
control.

SPEAKER_01 (16:22):
Yeah.
If you can reduce these people'sautonomy through this kind of
mystical quote-unquote science.

SPEAKER_00 (16:31):
It was very much used as like a ghost story for
people to kind of discouragethem from living outside regular
script to how they expectedpeople to behave there.
Which meant that women that weremore outspoken or lived their

(16:52):
lives in a way where weren'treally conforming were therefore
labeled hysterical and this waskind of the beginnings of this
even though they very muchunderstood it as a physical
ailment at the time rather thanlike a mental health one it very
much did begin as this physicalkind of thing within the body

(17:16):
Because of the humours and theway that they looked at health,
there was still this mentalcomponent to it, even though it
wasn't necessarily describedwithin the symptoms at that
point.
And a behavioural component.
So they believed that sexwidened their canals and
therefore allowed room for thebody to be cleansed.

(17:40):
So doctors were quiteliterally...
prescribing sex as a way ofcuring this at the time

SPEAKER_01 (17:48):
but it had to be married sex oh yeah you've got
to get that bit down first gotto be married

SPEAKER_00 (17:57):
aye so these toxic fumes would release themselves
from the vagina of those withhysteria and their uterus would
wander freely around their bodyand they would have all sorts of
disorders from anxiety tocompulsions and paralysis.
Convulsions and paralysis.

(18:19):
So alongside sex and marriage,they were also encouraged to
fumigate their face and genitalsto trick their uterus into
behaving in a very similarmanner to what the ancient
Egyptians were using.

SPEAKER_01 (18:32):
So

SPEAKER_00 (18:33):
there was this kind of hangover for that that was
still, even though it was over athousand years later, this was
still the kind of treatmentalongside sex and marriage.

SPEAKER_01 (18:42):
Also kind of worked as this sort of, oh you don't
want to end up like that, youbetter just go and get married
and perform your wifely dutiesso you don't end up becoming
hysterical.
Got that sort of preventativeelement to it as

SPEAKER_00 (19:00):
well.
Very much so.
And the thing is as well,another kind of link there with
endometriosis is that there'sstill this kind of ongoing myth
that pregnancy curesendometriosis.
But what it does is becauseyou're not having a period while
you're pregnant, it cantemporarily reduce the symptoms

(19:22):
of it while you're pregnant.
So in a sense, if hysteria wasindeed endometriosis, at least
at this time, getting marriedand having loads of sex would
have had some relief for people.
There would have been sometemporary relief for them while
they were pregnant, which kindof perpetuated this agenda.

(19:44):
It would have worked as much asthat shit.
So,

SPEAKER_01 (19:49):
you get a wee nine-month holiday from horrible
pain at the cost of a child.

UNKNOWN (19:59):
LAUGHTER

SPEAKER_01 (19:59):
So every time you want a wee break from your pen,
you then get lumped with theresponsibility of another child.

SPEAKER_00 (20:09):
And every time you have a kid, and the hysteria
comes back, and your husband orwhatever ships you back off to
the doctor, they're like, ah,you're not having enough sex.
Back you go.
And that would have been thesystem.
But it would have probably beenblamed on other things, do you
know what I mean?
It's just...

(20:29):
Rage inducing.

SPEAKER_01 (20:33):
That doesn't sound like much of a life.

SPEAKER_00 (20:36):
No.
24 hour baby machine indeed.

SPEAKER_01 (20:40):
Are you like human puppy

SPEAKER_00 (20:41):
mill?
24-7 baby machine indeed.
24 hour, oh my god, can youimagine?
So, Claudius Gallen in the 2ndcentury AD kind of continued
with Hippocrates' theories.
Quote, Ancient physicians andphilosophers have called this

(21:02):
disease hysteria from the nameof the uterus, that organ given
by nature to women so that theymight conceive.
I have examined many hystericalwomen, some stuporous, others
with anxiety attacks.
The disease manifests itselfwith different symptoms but
always refers to the uterus.
So I found this reallyinteresting in that, like, how

(21:25):
did they diagnose it then?
Because my understanding of whathe's saying here is that it has
any number of symptoms, butbecause it's a woman, it's
definitely the uterus that'scausing the issue here.

SPEAKER_01 (21:38):
It's the only difference.
The only difference between menand women.
Famously.

SPEAKER_00 (21:43):
And that's enough for it to just...

SPEAKER_01 (21:49):
I'm finding it interesting that we're seeing
more of this anxiety kind oflanguage where it sort of moved
away a wee bit from this.

SPEAKER_00 (21:59):
Moving closer to the mental health side as the
language is progressing.
Let's be honest, as society isbecoming more civilised, I
guess, people have more stressesin a way that they maybe didn't
before.
Do you know what I mean?
As society is evolving andchanging and people aren't

(22:22):
really built to be living incities and stuff.
that's just not natural for usso it makes sense that that kind
of movement was causing morekind of mental health disorders
in people and they were havingto therefore come up with new
terms and stuff for it so this,he became the kind of
Hippocrates started this line ofthinking and then Gallen kind of

(22:45):
became the kind of go-to guy forseveral centuries after his
point after his time as well ashis kind of treatments and stuff
which included stuff like purgesadministrations of various herbs
including belladonna extractwhich is nightshade

SPEAKER_01 (23:03):
deadly nightshade

SPEAKER_00 (23:05):
as well as getting married and also repressing
stimuli that could excite ayoung woman so I couldn't find
anything about like what thatkind of what things excited a
young woman back in 2 AD or 200AD sorry but as we'll kind of

(23:26):
cover a bit later on theVictorian had a very similar way
had a very similar theory to dowith hysteria it's mad that it
lasted all that time where youngwomen being excitable and being
excited by things could causehysteria and the list included
things like listening to musicdrawing horse riding as well as

(23:53):
doing too much exercise while ontheir period which is why I
think even now there's stillkind of hang ups to this where
like if you have your periodstay at home don't overexert
yourself like there was stillthis kind of ongoing kind of
vibe with that when we wereyounger

SPEAKER_01 (24:10):
That's kind of been a big sort of point in the
advertising of like periodproducts and things is like oh
regain freedom to leave yourhouse and

SPEAKER_00 (24:21):
actually exist as a person aye there's been this
kind of like answer to it butit's because there has been this
kind of this hang up that'sstill been about for like

SPEAKER_01 (24:30):
well we're

SPEAKER_00 (24:32):
saying the victorian times but from my understanding
of this yeah like wild

SPEAKER_01 (24:37):
it's another sort of like excitement being dangerous
is one of these kind of throughlines that you see popping up
time and time again and uh eventhe origin of Kellogg's cereal
is kind of based in some kind ofreligious opposition to
excitement.
That

SPEAKER_00 (24:58):
has heavy, heavy roots in racism as well.
It's like the spicy food is thedemon.
It needs to be bland.
That's an interesting one aswell.
Flavour will make

SPEAKER_01 (25:13):
people masturbate.

SPEAKER_00 (25:16):
I mean...
It is exciting.

SPEAKER_01 (25:23):
It certainly is.
I've clearly been led astray bymy excitement.
But aye, that's the kind ofthing we see popping up time and
time again.
Excitement being dangerous.
Kind of no surprises seeing ithere.

SPEAKER_00 (25:40):
At least at that point they were now being gender
specific.
That's what the one...
thing that i'll say for them inthat very small way everybody
was to blame so there wasn'treally any kind of contention of
this as a treatment um gettingmarried sex the addition of

(26:01):
herbs the fumigation um thesewere all kind of the accepted
treatments and there wasn'treally any contention of this
until a wee bit later on thatcentury um by soranus who was
another greek physician who'sactually considered the founder
of gynecology and obstetrics.

(26:22):
He wrote a treatise on women'shealth.
Actually wrote that it was thetoils of procreation were
actually the cause.
So it was women having sex andhaving children that was causing
a lot of these issues.
And instead for hysteria,prescribed sexual abstinence,
hot baths, relaxation, massagesand exercise.

SPEAKER_01 (26:44):
Well, this is starting to sound a little bit
more empathetic.
Yeah.
Certainly a great leap frompoison.
Literal

SPEAKER_00 (26:57):
poison.

SPEAKER_01 (26:58):
Yep.
And all these things could beactually beneficial to a person,
especially if they're dealingwith things like anxiety and,
you know.

SPEAKER_00 (27:08):
Yep.
And muscle cramps thatrelaxation and hot bath, like
the heat and things with it,like all of these things.
Definitely would have worked.

SPEAKER_01 (27:15):
This feels like sort of the first step in the right
direction.
Treating the patients as people.

SPEAKER_00 (27:24):
Yeah.
A bit more holistic, which isneeded, I find, for some of
these issues.
So he even had an explanation asto why the kind of fumigation...
I love that word, it's fuckinghilarious in this context.

UNKNOWN (27:40):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (27:41):
these two minutes, just need to fumigate my vagina
before I come

SPEAKER_01 (27:47):
out.
Uterus is a little bit hightoday.

SPEAKER_00 (27:51):
Feeling a bit low.
So he argued that the use ofthese kind of scent therapies
worked because they relaxed andconstricted the muscles.
And in that sense they probablywould have.

SPEAKER_01 (28:08):
Yeah, I'm...
This guy's thinking seems to bea little bit closer to something
I could get on board with.
Feels a little bit more based onthe reality that we know and
live in.

SPEAKER_00 (28:23):
Is somebody anxious?
Send them for a hot bath and amassage.
Like, that's something that wewould do and recommend today.
It's wild that this guy wasexisting at the same time period
where people were, like, puttingonions at people's vaginas and
shit.
Like...
wild.
But despite this, there werestill many followers of

(28:44):
Hippocrates, one of which beingthe physician Arateus of
Cappadocia, who went so far asto consider the womb an animal
within an animal, an organ thatmoved itself hither and thither
in the flanks, an animal hungryfor motherhood.

(29:04):
So this is where it startedgetting into the more the womb
is a living creature, it'shungry for dick, it's hungry for
a baby, it's bored, it'srestless, it's craving
motherhood.
And people that were going outwith it weren't placating it.

(29:27):
And that was what was causingall these issues, was that it
was just like going on arampage, basically.
Yeah.
A rampage only a baby couldstop.

SPEAKER_01 (29:38):
Yeah.
I feel like I find the way thatthis is worded to be utterly
repulsive.

SPEAKER_00 (29:46):
It's vile.
They just have this such deeprooted hatred of women.
So I've not looked up anythingspecifically about Aristotle for
this but He had so many theorieson women and how they were
inferior to men.
They were failed men.
That was how people viewedthings at the time.

(30:07):
Everybody's heard of Aristotle.
He's one of the most famousphilosophers of all time.
But he despised women.
He seen them as like...
He didn't think they hadanything to do with procreation
at all.
He thought even children werethe product of men.
They needed to be because womenweren't an equal partner in

(30:29):
procreation.
There was so much he wrote aboutand therefore influenced all
these people that we've justbeen talking about.

SPEAKER_01 (30:37):
He was essentially saying that women are empty
fields for men to sow theirseeds.
And

SPEAKER_00 (30:45):
seen them as nothing more than that.
They were the cause of theoriginal sin.
They were like...
toxic, they had, they were,like, they needed to be
fumigated.
Do you know, like, you can seewhere, like, yeah, and this guy
was the influence of a lot ofthe kind of, the way that people

(31:06):
viewed women, and thereforeviewed women's health, that at
the time, they weren't even seenas people, to the point that the
things that were wrong with themwere caused by an animal that
existed out with themselves.
Like, even that, they weren'tautonomous of.
Like,

SPEAKER_01 (31:23):
This is, again, the same kind of rhetoric that you
get with a group that the groupin power want to sort of exert
their power over.
There always seems to be thisstage of, well, they're actually
not the same as us.

(31:43):
They're a different thingentirely.
Mm-hmm.
You commonly see it with sort ofrace stuff, kind of much later
on than this, but it'sinteresting to see that that was
the sort of view, the view onwomen as well.
That's...

(32:04):
I don't know, there's only somany times I can say that it's
gross.

SPEAKER_00 (32:09):
It's really interesting to me though,
because Aristotle was the guythat...
I've seen a couple of people onTikTok talking about this and
it's not true.
It was one of these women'sstories, things that I was
telling you about that we'regoing to do a podcast episode
on.
With his wife being like hisdominatrix.

SPEAKER_01 (32:28):
Ah, right, yep.

SPEAKER_00 (32:29):
And the classic fucking philosopher is
hilarious.
She was, to him, totallyabhorrent.
He hated her.
He thought she was the worstperson that he had ever met.
Constantly said...
fucking horrible shit about herall the time and she just, she
beat him.

SPEAKER_01 (32:49):
Fair.

SPEAKER_00 (32:50):
Fair, yeah.
Um...
And he said that he married herbecause if he could put up with
her, he would see the best inthe rest of humanity.
Or something like that.
There was some kind of quotefilm that was along the lines of
that.
Well, that's vile.
But I find it mental.
Like, how has he got all theseviews of women when he's
getting, like, battered the fuckout of you by one, like, on the
regular?
And she's, like, constantly athim, like, really domineering,

(33:13):
really controlling.
Like, how can he see her asweak?
Like...
Was this him playing out hisfucking fantasies at his work
because he was going home andnot having that experience?
I don't know.
So Hippocrates' followersproceeded to write over 60
books, which are collectivelyknown as the Hippocratic Corpus.

(33:38):
They're still widely debated andread today.
They're really important.

SPEAKER_01 (33:43):
So these, like, sort of medical...

SPEAKER_00 (33:45):
Medical texts, yeah, yeah, yeah.
Him and his followers came to beknown as the Hippocratics
because he had a school ofknowledge and he had all these
followers and they kind

SPEAKER_01 (33:58):
of formalised a school of medicine

SPEAKER_00 (34:02):
that still survives today.
Obviously a lot of it has beenchanged and updated and stuff
but they formed the basis ofmodern medicine as we know it
today.
This is why doctors take theHippocratic oath.
Yeah.
This is where the philosophy bitcomes in, because it was all
about what it means to be adoctor.
Ah, some of the ethicalconsiderations.

(34:25):
The ethical side is a lot ofwhat's still used today, rather
than the actual medical, whichobviously is very outdated.
Well, you would think, butanyway.
Some of it has managed tosurvive, which is wild, but
yeah.
So, Hippocrates viewed thefollowing four factors as highly

(34:46):
predictive of gynecologicaldisease.
Menstrual dysfunction is thecause.
Pregnancy is the possible cure.
Pain and infertility arepotential outcomes if the woman
is left untreated.
As I've said, nearly two and ahalf thousand years later, they
still correspond nearlyseamlessly with the set of

(35:10):
symptoms identified today asemblems of endometriosis.
Yeah.
As mentioned, there's still thisongoing myth that endometriosis
is cured by pregnancy.
In fact, when I went and lookedit up, there's people on Reddit
for as soon as a year ago thatare still claiming that they've
been given this advice frommedical professionals.

SPEAKER_01 (35:31):
That's absolutely wild.
Especially, like, consideringlike the kind of modern day
implications of having a child

SPEAKER_00 (35:41):
yeah

SPEAKER_01 (35:42):
a couple of thousand years ago families were a lot
bigger there was a lot more sortof like community looking after
children and even going back youknow a hundred years yeah things
are a wee bit different butmodern day advising people to
get pregnant and have a childfor a nine month breaking

(36:04):
symptoms

SPEAKER_00 (36:06):
Well, this is the scary part because it's not that
they're advising this for anine-month breaking symptoms.
They're advising this as a cure,which is a myth.
A 2,500-year-old myth that isstill existing within the
fucking medical community today.

(36:27):
Nothing surprises me at thispoint, but that really shook me.
I

SPEAKER_01 (36:32):
mean...
The medical community has got aways to go to bring this
equality for women.
Even some of the things you'vetold me about the money and
resources and research that'sbeen done into certain things

(36:53):
for men versus for women.

SPEAKER_00 (36:56):
I like erectile dysfunction versus
endometriosis.
It's disgusting.
There was a point A couple yearsago, I think it was 2019 or
maybe 2018, where the onlyresearch study that had been
done on endometriosis was if itaffected women who were less
attractive more.

SPEAKER_01 (37:17):
Wow.
That's gross.

SPEAKER_00 (37:20):
That's very gross.
So one Hippocratic author warnedthat that if they have never
been pregnant, the derangedstate of menstruation is more
common and more dangerous thanwhen they have born children.
And that she will be releasedfrom the disease when she is
pregnant.
So again, this is just kind ofin line with what we were

(37:40):
saying.
That this was the advice of theday.
I love the term deranged stateof menstruation.
LAUGHTER

SPEAKER_01 (37:54):
Aye, that term could only have been created by a man.

SPEAKER_00 (37:58):
I love the implication as well, that if I'm
right, someone, or not someone,sorry, a woman being in pain is
equated to them being deranged.
Like, they couldn't possiblyjust be in pain.

SPEAKER_01 (38:12):
Aye, there's got to be some sort of moral failing.

SPEAKER_00 (38:16):
Like, they're literally insane.

SPEAKER_01 (38:17):
Not like when men are in pain.

SPEAKER_00 (38:19):
No.
So, moving forward a bit.
The early middle ages or thekind of dark ages were not a
time of science.
If you look at the kind ofsurrounding landscape of what
was going on at the time, do youknow like between 30 and 60% of
the population had died of theplague or were dying of the
plague during this time withinEurope.

(38:42):
There was wars, there wasfamine, there was empires
falling and new ones trying tocome up in their place.
It makes total sense why sciencejust totally got put on the back
burner at this point.
It was essentially like the fullEurope got a terminal illness.
Everybody turned to God,everybody turned to salvation

(39:03):
and that afterlife and moralityand...
From that stemmed witches anddemons and the devil and all
this stuff became the forefrontto answer what was going on.

SPEAKER_01 (39:16):
So this is where we see our sort of strange sidestep
from the progress of science,kind of, to demons and sort of
mythology and superstition.

SPEAKER_00 (39:31):
Yep.
Which is totally understandable.
It's

SPEAKER_01 (39:35):
understandable, but it is wild.

SPEAKER_00 (39:37):
It is wild.
Things were very quote-unquotecivilised.
Things very much did take a backstep during this time.
I don't know about you, but Idon't know a lot about the Dark
Ages.
I know bits and pieces.
I think that's kind of

SPEAKER_01 (39:55):
the point.

SPEAKER_00 (39:56):
The way that they're portrayed in media, rather than
how it was.
But I didn't realise it spannedsuch a long period of time.

SPEAKER_01 (40:07):
It's a surprisingly long period of time.

SPEAKER_00 (40:10):
Like, they reckon it was about 900 years, kind of
start to finish, and things juststood still.
Like, progress was just like,no.
We don't need it, we just needto survive.
Like, basically everybody wasjust in survival mode.
Art, culture, science, medicine,like...

(40:30):
It was mad that medicine duringa plague was like, nah, we don't
need that.
Fuck that.
We need fucking churches.
We need

SPEAKER_01 (40:37):
witch hunters.
We've had our own little glimpseinto that, do you know?
During Covid came this rise ofscience denialism.

SPEAKER_00 (40:45):
That is a very interesting point, actually.
I never thought of that.

SPEAKER_01 (40:49):
Do you know, the groundwork had already been laid
for it and has been for yearsand years, but...
there was this massive uptick inpeople not trusting science, not
trusting medicine.

SPEAKER_00 (41:03):
Yeah,

SPEAKER_01 (41:03):
because what they felt they were seeing at the
time didn't necessarily line upor do you know they were being
told about vaccines and vaccineeffectiveness and you know
because they didn't necessarilyunderstand the scientific
language or how it actuallyworked they were going well what

(41:28):
they've told me is wrong or ohthey've changed their mind from
what they were saying a fewweeks ago but they kind of have
always seen that science is thislike infallible fact

SPEAKER_00 (41:43):
and

SPEAKER_01 (41:44):
So for a scientist to come out a few weeks later
and say, oh, this thing that wesaid before, turns out that's
not actually how things are.
Things are more like this.
That sort of just eroded all thetrust and confidence in this.
Like, oh, science will save us.

(42:04):
So I can very much see how in amuch more severe outbreak...

SPEAKER_00 (42:11):
That happened at a much bigger rate.
Much bigger, yeah.
But just with what was availableat the time to get eternity,
rather than chlorine enemas andbleach enemas and shit.
It was fucking witch trials.
Far

SPEAKER_01 (42:25):
more exciting.

SPEAKER_00 (42:27):
Depends on who you were, I guess.
Depends on how many of yourfamily had died.
Right, so can I take a glimpseof where people's heads were at?
at the time.
I've got a quote from a reveredscholar, Lactantius, from the
4th AD.

(42:48):
He kind of questioned the needfor any further scientific
inquiry asking, So, this kind ofculture...
of thinking kind of led to quitelike a disturbing change in

(43:09):
views as we've been saying froma kind of scientific way of
looking at things to ascientific for the time to one
of kind of witchcraft anddemonic possession

SPEAKER_01 (43:21):
you can see why if everybody around about you is
dying and it feels like aninevitability that you are going
to die young yeah from thisdisease, that what is the point
in trying to fix that?

SPEAKER_00 (43:35):
The problems, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 (43:37):
Why not move your focus to your immortal soul?
Yeah.
That's going to be aboutforever.

SPEAKER_00 (43:44):
Like, people were terrified and there was plenty
of people that were willing tocapitalise on that fear.
You know, a lot of what kind ofled people to this way of
thinking was the preachers andtheir kind of focus on God was
punishing everybody and thereneeded to be...
It left room for people to getmass fucking influenced by the

(44:10):
church.

SPEAKER_01 (44:11):
Aye, because what they're offering is hope.

SPEAKER_00 (44:14):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 (44:15):
In this time when there is no possible hope for
you right now, they're offeringhope for your eternal soul and
that's...
I imagine that would have beensome comfort.

SPEAKER_00 (44:27):
Aye, that moved up the priority list when you could
die any second, basically.
So with this, hysteria movedfrom what was essentially a
physical ailment to one that wasa more psychological one, or a
morality one.
Yeah.
Which kind of went hand in handat the time because mental

(44:50):
illness was sin.
Yeah.
So when things moved to beingmore psychological at that point
became...
more blame based and more aboutyour behaviour and your faith.

SPEAKER_01 (45:02):
It feels like it's taken sort of mental health a
long time to begin recoveringfrom this point.

SPEAKER_00 (45:09):
Well this is why it's still taboo now.
Because mental health likepeople talk about these days
like oh mental health didn'texist.
It did.
It just was seen as like thedevil for like thousands of
years.
For over a thousand years peopleseen people that had mental
illness as people who werepossessed by demons.

SPEAKER_01 (45:33):
It was some sort of moral failing on their part.

SPEAKER_00 (45:35):
That had led them to be in that situation.
So you can understand why peoplethere's still this kind of left
over stuff like people notwanting to talk about mental
health because it's seen asbeing immoral.
Even if people don't know whythat is now.
That feeling's still there.
That knowledge is still there.

SPEAKER_01 (45:56):
We've seen that quite a few times with the
things we've talked about.
The why behind it.
Sort of getting lost over time.
But that idea of that thingbeing bad or whatever still
persists.
Yet nobody could really point towhat the actual reason for that

SPEAKER_00 (46:17):
is.
Well, this is the reason.
In this one particular case.
So it moved away from being thiskind of biological need for
procreation to the presence ofevil.
So around 600 AD, Greekphysician Paul of Aegina
suggested that suffocation ofthe womb was an illness that

(46:41):
usually afflicted lasciviouswomen or those who use drugs to
prevent conception.
So this was the first kind ofdocumented evidence quote that I
could find of somebody whostarted to point specifically to
behaviours as being the cause ofhysteria, as it was known then.

(47:06):
It moved from the wandering ofthe womb to them being like,
nah, it doesn't wander, it's anorgan.
They've got an understanding ofthat at this point, that it's
not just willy-nilly flappingabout in the body.

SPEAKER_01 (47:18):
It's moved on from being a creature.

SPEAKER_00 (47:21):
At this point, eh, I mean, it's still being
suffocated.
There's still this kind oflike...
I'm not saying that they stillthink it's a creature, but
they've still kind of likepersonified it in a sense, even
in the language that they'reusing surrounding it.
Because they're seeing it asbeing suffocated.

(47:42):
So suffocation of the womb.
Which, again, period cramps,constriction, I can see where
suffocation comes in.
Like at this point, this iswhat's like...
kind of starting to line up evenmore with this kind of theory.
So the suffocation of the wombis specifically at this point
getting the sluts and those whodidn't want kids.

SPEAKER_01 (48:05):
So the womb is being suffocated by God or by their
actions?
Or is it punishment for theiractions?

SPEAKER_00 (48:15):
I think it's the you know like God wants us to have
kids that's why he gave you awomb in the first place and if
you're overusing it and not forchildren or if you're
specifically not having kids bytaking medications then you're
going against God's will and youshall be punished.

(48:36):
It's my understanding of whatwas going on at that.
Kindly in line with that we'vegot our first female contributor
to the mess that is the historyof hysteria.
Hildegard of Bingen who wasalive between 1098 and 1179.

(48:56):
She was a German doctor who kindof resumed Hippocrates' work
around humoral theory, which isfucking like...
Wild.
Wild choice.
Because they were way past...
Well, I mean, they weren'treally, at the end of the day.
Do you know, this is the kind ofpoint that we were making
earlier, where we were severalhundred years past this, but...

SPEAKER_01 (49:18):
We'd had that period of stagnation where things kind
of ground to a halt.
So this is just...
Picking

SPEAKER_00 (49:23):
back up at the other side of this.
Even though it was so longlater, which, yeah.
So she attributed black bile tothe original sin.
So some of the early autopsiesthat they had done during the
early first centuries, obviouslythat was really fucking frowned

(49:47):
upon.
at that time, that was notstandard practice.
Doing an autopsy.
So there's no much written aboutthem because any that were done
were done in secret because itwas kind of against the kind of
morality what was acceptable atthe time.

SPEAKER_01 (50:03):
That always struck me as a sort of, that was quite
a big step away from the sort ofreligious and moral

SPEAKER_00 (50:11):
Yeah, messing with these bodies was pretty frowned
upon.
Especially cutting them up and,you know, they were sacred, they
were...
I

SPEAKER_01 (50:22):
mean, obviously, like, the Egyptians had a wee
dalliance with cutting intobodies, but that was...
But they weren't doingautopsies.
That was kind of...

SPEAKER_00 (50:31):
They were, but they weren't.
That wasn't the purpose, do youknow what I mean?

SPEAKER_01 (50:35):
But you'd think that there'd be kind of some...
some kind of medicalunderstandings and things would
have been picked up from there.
But that was kind ofspecifically a religious sort of
ritual thing going on.
But outside of religiouspractices, I find it wild that

(50:58):
they got to the point of cuttinginto bodies.

SPEAKER_00 (51:04):
So there are a ton of wee dalliance in that, but
secretively.
And when they had been lookinginto hysteria they had
discovered that there had beenin one patient there was like
cysts on the ovaries and whencut open black bile came out of
them so there had already beenthis kind of link between

(51:29):
hysteria and the kind of wombdiseases with black bile so this
is where she has picked thatback up and went black bile
Original sin mate.

SPEAKER_01 (51:41):
Definitely couldn't have been like clotted blood
or...

SPEAKER_00 (51:46):
No.
So she had seen melancholy,which was depression, sadness,
and very, very highly linkedwith hysteria.
Because who were the mostmelancholic people of the time?
Women.
Who were the most hystericalpeople of the time?
Women.
So they were both kind of, nointerchangeable as such, but

(52:08):
very interlinked and kind ofseen as one cause the other and
stuff.

SPEAKER_01 (52:13):
I think after seeing this sort of treatment that
women got as a result of showingemotion, you can really see why
it's so baked into our culturethat men shouldn't show emotion.
Yeah, they'll be seen as women.
God forbid they start gettingthis treatment, that would be

(52:34):
terrifying.

SPEAKER_00 (52:35):
Yeah.
Aye, so like, sad and depressed,melancholy.
Yeah.
Angry, irrational, anxious,hysteria.
That was the kind of, like, theemotions, any emotion, were
quite easily put into thesedifferent categories.
Yeah.
Where there were afflictions,either in the body or in the

(52:56):
mind.
Or in the moral soul, as our palHildegard seen.
So...
She's seen melancholy as adefect to the soul, rooted in
evil and therefore incurable.

SPEAKER_01 (53:12):
She's really found herself on the wrong team here.
Yeah.
I mean, props to her formanaging to become a doctor in
this time.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (53:21):
I feel like it was probably a name only.
In the sense that I highly doubtin 1098, I'm assuming that was
when she was born, so let's say1130.
that she was being accepted as adoctor I could be wrong maybe
Germany was further forward atthat time period than I would

(53:46):
imagine the rest of Europe soshe was also the first that I
found anyway who attributedmelancholy and hysteria to both
men and women because to herAdam and Eve shared dual
responsibility for the originalsin were seen as equals in the
eyes of gods and therefore wereboth victims of melancholy and

(54:11):
hysteria and sin, essentially.
That's a

SPEAKER_01 (54:14):
little bit more

SPEAKER_00 (54:15):
progressive.
A wee bit progressive.
So men were seen as ugly andperverse and women were slender,
unable to think freely andinfertile due to their weak and
fragile uteruses.
Always back to the uterus.
There's no like men were uglyand perverse because of their
dicks.
Or because they had

SPEAKER_01 (54:35):
weird balls.
Melancholy is stored

SPEAKER_00 (54:39):
in the balls.
Wandering balls.
That float freely around theirbody.
So the mainstream view at thetime was still very much that
women were intellectually,theologically and physically
inferior to men.
And we still see that today.

(54:59):
That's not something that hasentirely gone away.
Or indeed started at that time.
This has just been how society,since society has came into
being, has treated women.
Because it's been a necessityfor it to function.
But that is besides the point.
So this idea, as we've said, hasroots in Aristotelian concept to

(55:22):
the kind of male superiority,women inferiority.
And the idea of that the womanis a failed man.
Thomas Aquinas from 1225-1274wrote Summa Theologica which
confirmed Aristotle's theoriesand advanced on them.

(55:46):
He wrote that the inferiority ofwomen was rooted in sin, that
women were, some women, mostlyold women, specifically for some
fucking reason but yeah wereevil minded conferring with
demons who were able to enacttheir will through their eyes so

(56:09):
they could just look at you andlet the demons would get you
they gazed on children in apoisonous evil way jealous of
their youth I feel like this iswhere this old witch in the
woods eating children thingcomes from is fucking Thomas
Aquinas and the granddaddy ofhis ideas Aristotle.

(56:32):
Well this

SPEAKER_01 (56:33):
also, you know, with it being kind of mostly older
women and things, this kind ofto me immediately feels like
they're saying these are womenthat are no longer desirable to
me therefore they must be bad.
They serve no purpose.

SPEAKER_00 (56:51):
Exactly.
The types of women that werelabelled with these labels
tended to be the ones that weresexually undesirable.
Whether that be because ofsexual promiscuity, like their
anger, their general demeanour,them being argumentative, them

(57:11):
being scolds, or them beingwidowed too young or too old.
And these were the most by farpeople that were not only
diagnosed with hysteria but alsolabelled as witches which we
will come back to.

(57:32):
So the preachers at the timewere also disclosing the Old
Testament's condemnation ofwitchcraft and sorcery that was
kind of adding to this ongoingfear of just women in general.
Never mind women being witchesbut just women in general
because nobody was safe.
To the point that theecclesiastic societies actually
imposed celibacy and chastity ontheir clergy as a way of

(57:56):
protecting them from the evil,wicked ways of women that still
exist today.
That's still an ongoing thing ina lot of the churches.
Because the witches might getthem.
Because the poisonous old womenmight send demons out from their
eyes to smite them.
Or not smite, sorry, that'sGod's words.

(58:18):
Um...

SPEAKER_01 (58:19):
interfere with them.

SPEAKER_00 (58:22):
Yeah, we'll go with that.
So the church was kind ofstruggling at this point.
There were some new kind ofhumanist theories that were
coming out for the philosophers.
Things were starting to move awee bit further away from
religion in terms of themorality and the ways that
people were looking at the bestway to live a life, what it

(58:43):
means to be a good person.
Things were starting to kindof...
I don't want to call it science,but move away from the
traditional religious ways andmore into humanist theories, as
I've said.
So the church had to step itsgame up.
They were losing politicalcontrol, they were losing money.

(59:04):
Really, that was the big one.
They were losing influence, andthey were losing power, and they
were losing money.

SPEAKER_01 (59:09):
Their business was failing, so they had to find a
new gimmick.

SPEAKER_00 (59:14):
So, boom.
Heresy.
anybody who had anythingnegative to say about the church
became a victim of it.
We've kind of touched on this awee bit before with how the
church kind of labelledeverybody heretics, any kind of
opposing religions, any rivalbusinesses, any rival companies.

(59:38):
They were doing a hostiletakeover.
They were labelling themheretics.
They were killing everybody andthen they were getting all their
buildings, their lands, theirtitles.
Not their titles, but theirbuildings, their lands, their
wealth.
And once the church had kind ofran out of other businesses to
do this way, they kind of had tofocus in on the population.

(01:00:01):
They always

SPEAKER_01 (01:00:01):
need a good body.

SPEAKER_00 (01:00:04):
So they were attempting to unify Europe under
the one banner, which kind ofled to mental illness and
hysteria as being labelled aslinks with demons, the devil,
and people began to be exercisedas treatment for a lot of these
mental illnesses, includinghysteria.
The church became the doctors.

SPEAKER_01 (01:00:24):
Yep.

SPEAKER_00 (01:00:26):
So by about 1484, this instability of Catholicism
within Europe kind of led to theintensification of the
inquisitions by the churches.
They kind of tried to regainthis control that they were
slowly losing.
And the witch hunts in Europebegan.

SPEAKER_01 (01:00:42):
Oh, fantastic.

SPEAKER_00 (01:00:45):
So the German Dominicans, Heinrich and Sister
Kramer...
and Jacob Springer areaccredited with the publication
of the infamous Hammer ofWitches or the Malleus
Maleficarum in 1486.
Maleficarum being specificallywitches as opposed to the wizard

(01:01:07):
equivalent Maleficorum.
Further driving home the pointthat to be female is to be
without question evil.

SPEAKER_01 (01:01:16):
Yep.
You've got...
It's official now.
We've got official books anddocuments to say that it's the
women and not the men.

SPEAKER_00 (01:01:27):
I find it really interesting that this shift from
science to witches and wizardsand fucking necromancers and
demons and shit back to scienceagain.
In almost direct parallel,you've got hysteria and
melancholy moving to Witches andthen moving back to Hysteria

(01:01:50):
again.
Like it's all part of the samething.
It's just the same like it'sserving the same purpose under a
different name.
And I've never I've never heardof that link before but you can
literally watch it happen.

SPEAKER_01 (01:02:08):
Aye, like I've heard of these things all kind of
isolated on their own and goneyep, right, that's Sounds
horrible, but fine, whatever.
I didn't realise that it wasjust kind of one continuous
journey.
Yeah.
That it was all the one thing,the one kind of sustained attack

(01:02:34):
on women.
Yeah.
For all this time.
And it's pretty difficult tojust even sit and hear this.
Yeah.
Like...

SPEAKER_00 (01:02:47):
It's hard listening, it's hard reading.
This took it out of me becauseI'm just...
It's so difficult.
I think when you hear about thisstuff, sometimes it's easy to
hear it from a distance.
And you can imagine yourself inthat situation.
And I think this is why a lot ofthe time people do tend to think

(01:03:08):
people in the past is differentfrom people now.
because of the atrocities andthe things that have happened,
it creates this, like, oh, theydidn't know any better.
Like, it almost, like,infantilises the people of the
past and it's like, that wouldnever happen now.
In a sense.

SPEAKER_01 (01:03:23):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (01:03:24):
Like, it allows that kind of deniability.
I don't know, as you dive deeperinto these things and you start
looking at things and you startlooking at, like, people's
thought processes and realisingthat people are the exact same
as they've always been.

SPEAKER_02 (01:03:38):
Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_00 (01:03:40):
It hits so much closer to home reading about
stuff.
It makes it more difficult tokeep that distance there.

SPEAKER_01 (01:03:48):
The kind of main difference between then and now
feels like we've all just hadsort of collectively centuries
of experience where the kind ofthe side that is oppressing
women and oppressing any groupsthat don't

SPEAKER_00 (01:04:12):
meet the white man thing

SPEAKER_01 (01:04:16):
they have learned to get sneakier and more subtle
whilst the other side havelearned that they've got power
in numbers and can call it

SPEAKER_02 (01:04:26):
out

SPEAKER_01 (01:04:28):
but it just feels like this constant slight shift
of they get one step sneakierand the other side gets one step
bolder about calling things out

SPEAKER_00 (01:04:38):
yeah Aye.
I feel like this leans into aswell, like, this argument of, do
you know, what's natural?
Like, women's natural submissionto men.
And it's like, why the fuck havethey had to go to all this
trouble to uphold this if that'sthe case?
Why has there been

SPEAKER_01 (01:04:53):
a fight for thousands of years?
If it was natural, there wouldhave had to be no effort put in.

SPEAKER_00 (01:04:59):
And not just a fight, but a fight where they've
had to burn people.
Like, do you know what I mean?
It's not just been like...
a wee squabble.
They've actively had to put thefear of death in people to get
them to comply.

SPEAKER_01 (01:05:12):
And they still haven't.
That much work cannot possiblybe natural.
That's systematic control.
That's fighting against the tideof nature.
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (01:05:30):
So circle back to the Malleus Maleficarum.
The text itself is actuallyreally reminiscent of the
medical text from the day.
Exploring the link betweenphysical ailments and those who
work with demons and the devil.
So this is just furtherattributing physical illness and

(01:05:54):
physical and mental illness withsin and the devil and morality
it explains in three parts howinfertility pestilence and
famine are caused by the devilwith the help of his witches
showing evidence of theirexistence and how to find and

(01:06:15):
punish witchcraft it alsoexplains how if the reader
disbelieves any of the textsthat is the work of the devil
himself Meaning that anybody whoargued with them was also
labelled the witch.
Wrapped up in a neat little bow.

(01:06:39):
But the fucking mind games aswell, that's straight out the
cult manifesto.
At that point, that person, ifyou are reading that, you're
like, shit, the devil's got me.
Like, it just pulls you furtherinto the system.

SPEAKER_01 (01:06:53):
Yeah, and I think then when you get people in that
kind of state where they, youknow, if they've had that doubt
and then, oh, the devil's gotme, they're far more likely to
then try and pass that blame on,oh, well, it must be this wee
old woman for down the road.
She's using her devilish powersto make me think like that.

(01:07:20):
I couldn't possibly be

SPEAKER_00 (01:07:23):
to

SPEAKER_01 (01:07:23):
blame for that.

SPEAKER_00 (01:07:25):
Because of course, females are inferior to men.
If that's a man in thatposition, it couldn't possibly
be him.
It's his maid.
It's his wife.
It's his daughter.
It's that old woman down theroad.
You can see how this encourageda witch hunt.
Because it was setting people upto need somebody to blame.

SPEAKER_01 (01:07:49):
Yeah.
Incentivise them to shift theblame from themselves.

SPEAKER_00 (01:07:53):
Yeah.
To save their immortal soul.
It's quite a neat trick.
It's horrible, but you can seewhy it worked so well.
So this led to a worrying trend,where if a physician couldn't
discover the cause of anillness, then it must be the
workings of the devil.

(01:08:14):
And because...
they obviously knew so littleabout just generally things
anyway but like specificallywomen's illness because
everything it sounded likeanything that was wrong with a
woman was her uterus anythingthat was wrong with a woman
typically ended up beinghysteria so and because they
didn't understand what the chatwith that was and a lot of
people were saying that wasbecause of his sin anyway like

(01:08:37):
anybody who was labelled ashysteria was susceptible to then
being labelled as a witch And itdid happen.
A lot.
So, mental illness itself wascondemned as a sin as the devil
is more able to interfere withthose predisposed to hysteria

(01:08:58):
and melancholy.
Which, of course, again, iswomen.

SPEAKER_01 (01:09:01):
Weak-minded, weak-souled.

SPEAKER_00 (01:09:04):
Yeah.
All just weak.

SPEAKER_01 (01:09:06):
Yeah.

SPEAKER_00 (01:09:08):
But they're seen more as people now only in the
sense that

SPEAKER_01 (01:09:12):
they're

SPEAKER_00 (01:09:13):
conniving.
Yeah, they're sneaky.
They're in league with thedevil.
They have the autonomy to do thedevil's work.
But nothing else.
Their

SPEAKER_01 (01:09:22):
autonomy extends to making the bad choice.

SPEAKER_00 (01:09:25):
Yeah, to badness.
Even the Latin word for female,which is fomina, comes from fi
and minus, which means to haveless faith.
So even the language was set upto show that women...
were not as pious, were not asfaithful, and therefore were

(01:09:48):
more likely to be in tow withthe devil.
Over the next 300 years,thousands of women were
tortured, captured, and killedin the name of witchcraft.

SPEAKER_01 (01:09:59):
How depressing.
And on that bombshell...

SPEAKER_00 (01:10:05):
Wait, is that Top Gear?
I miss Top Gear.
And with that, We have coveredat least the historical side of
Hysteria and we'll be continuingthis on next week with The
Witches of Scotland.

SPEAKER_01 (01:10:21):
Yeah, quite a good wee transition there.

SPEAKER_00 (01:10:24):
Yeah, it's a shame it's not on one episode.

SPEAKER_01 (01:10:28):
I think there's just a bit too much to say on two and
a half thousand years worth ofhistory.

SPEAKER_00 (01:10:36):
Well, we're not even up to date yet.
Yeah.
Really, this was the first 1500years.

SPEAKER_01 (01:10:41):
Aye.

SPEAKER_00 (01:10:41):
But, yeah.
Come back next week, guys.

SPEAKER_01 (01:10:46):
Alright, see you next week.

SPEAKER_00 (01:10:48):
Bye!

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E9: Wrath - The Demonisation of Women’s Rage & Sexuality Part 1

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}E9: Wrath - The Demonisation of Women’s Rage & Sexuality Part 1