David Cameron’s rather childish treatment of Tory backbencher Nadine Dorries last week has largely been blamed on the upper-class attitudes he learned at Eton. There may well be some truth to this but the roots of this still too common attitude towards women are actually deeply embedded in neoplatonism.

'I know she's frustrated'
Let me begin by reviewing what happened during Prime Minister’s Questions last week. Dorries, in the middle of an attempt to ensure more counselling for women who seek abortion, was discouraged by what she perceived to be undue power exercised by Nick Clegg upon government policy on the issue. In order to highlight her thinking she asked Cameron a question in PMQs and in his response the prime minister said that he knew that she was ‘frustrated’. Several MPs – including the PM – began to giggle and Cameron failed to finish his answer. As well as the (probably unintended) sexual innuendo the implication was that Dorries as a woman, was failing to keep control of her feelings and allowing this to overspill into an unwise intervention, thus embarrassing the prime minister.

Underlying the whole thing was the widely held view that while men are able to be dispassionate in their thinking, women lack control over their feelings and allow those feelings to cloud their judgement. Thus women are inferior to men.

Body and soul - corrupt and pure
Behind this long-held conviction is the neoplatonic belief that the human person is divided into two quite different parts. On the one hand we have a spirit or soul and on the other we have a body. In neoplatonism, while the soul/spirit is good and pure, the body is corrupt and evil and while it journeys on earth the soul is believed to be trapped in the body and must eventually escape to be with God, leaving the body to be destroyed. In this system our reason is connected to the soul or spirit – and therefore is good and pure – but our emotions are connected to the physical body – and are conversely corrupt and evil. It is dispassionate reason, therefore, that is to be valued over the feelings and emotions of the body.

In ancient times it was believed that men had the ability to be dispassionate while women did not. It was men who, therefore, had the ability to think clearly and have their thinking unencumbered by their emotions and they were expected to work hard to avoid any emotion spilling out of their lives. Because women were thought not to have this ability to control themselves they were obviously seen as being inferior.

'God saw it was very good'
Women are still suffering from this Greek philosophical nonsense and, of course, big boys still don’t cry. Would it not be better, therefore, for us to begin to disentangle neoplatonism from our culture and replace it with something else? Hebrew thinking definitely has something to offer, with its emphasis on the whole person – body and soul, mind and emotions – being ‘very good’.

Any response?


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