Plato to Rousseau on the Harlot

The sinful response to God’s pursuit of us being embodied by a seductive female is familiar to our western culture because the defining writing on women for the last millennium has often depicted women this way. A twisted understanding of the Genesis account was used to endorse the view that all women were temptresses. Many cultures have legends of a tempting seductress who brought evil upon the world at its beginning. Paul’s commands to women, when not rightly contextualized by the culture and the heart of the new covenant also were used to demean women. Though Plato argued for an inclusion of women as equals in The Republic, his student Aristotle rejected these views by the 300’s BC, and argued that a woman is a mutilated and incomplete man. Aristotle believed women to have a lesser and ‘colder’ soul, making them inferior in intelligence, morality, and stature. There are traces of these ideas in Augustine’s The City of God (published in 413 AD) in which he wrote that a woman could be a either a temptress as a part of earthly cities, or a mother and wife in the divine city of God.

By the time Thomas Aquinas wrote his Summa Theologica in the 1200’s, the church had already established a low view of women. Aquinas, who was influenced by Aristotle, solidified the idea that women were base and inferior; his demeaning views on the nature and function of women were foundational in the western church’s opinions. The tradition of women being unfortunately necessary to procreation, and a hindrance to the genius of men continued with Francis Bacon’s 1612 article “Of Marriage and Single Life,” and Rousseau’s A Discourse on Political Economy. Because of these writers, the archetypes of the harlot/seductress were widely applied to the feminine species. So it is commonly understood that the warnings of Scripture against harlotry are literally for women.