In ancient Greece, women weren’t allowed to vote. This wasn’t mere bigoted, reasonless, irrational male sexism: It was based on actual biology. Participation in the public polis of Athens was forbidden for females, as they were said to suffer from a severe chronic condition called hysteria, consisting of mood swings, erratic behavior, and “incontinence” of the emotional, not bladder-based, variety. This was because hidden away inside their bodies like a Russian doll lurked an independent parasitic entity, the womb or uterus, or hysterika, as it was known in the language of the day.
Like the fetal xenomorphs in the Alien movies, this was conceived of as “an animal within an animal,” and when it got too dry due to lack of sex, it would wander around inside its feminine host body in search of spermy sustenance, causing extreme physiological, and thence mental, imbalance. Wombs having good noses, the only solution was for a woman to repel the itinerant beast from her upper body by imbibing cloves of foul-scented garlic and entice it back down into the correct abdominal niche by smearing her vagina with sweet, sweet honey, as if seducing Winnie-the-Pooh.
Because of such in-built genetic flaws, even such noted authorities of the day as Aristotle and Hippocrates argued that “persons with wombs,” as they were definitely not yet then called, should be kept as far away from primitive voting booths as was humanly possible.
How archaic, many modern readers may think. How retarded. And yet, in light of the recent immensely cheering election of Donald Trump to become the 47th new American Alcibiades, some contemporary political commentators have now suddenly decided the ancient Greeks may have been correct in their misogynistic prejudices after all—the difference being that, today, those who wish to deny women the vote somehow claim to be feminists.
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