The Diminishing of Women: From Religious Gaslighting to Modern Objectification

Let’s start with a thought experiment. Imagine you want to control a group that makes up half the population of every society on earth. You can’t imprison all of them. You can’t simply declare them inferior — at least not without some persuasive backstory. What you need is a system. Something durable, self-reinforcing, and ideally something the controlled group eventually helps to maintain themselves.

Congratulations. You’ve just stumbled onto one of history’s most successful projects. The systematic diminishing of women is not a story confined to one culture, one religion, one era, or one hemisphere. It is a remarkably consistent pattern across civilization — different costumes, same play. And one of the most effective features of this project is that it rarely presents itself as oppression. It presents itself as theology, or science, or protection, or aesthetics, or love.

This is what makes it worth examining carefully. Not with the goal of assigning blame, but with the goal of recognition. Because you can’t dismantle something you haven’t named.

In the Beginning — The Theological Foundation

The oldest and most resilient tool in the diminishment toolkit is the sacred story. Religious narratives have an enormous advantage over other forms of propaganda: they arrive pre-packaged with divine authority. You can challenge a law. You can debate a politician. But challenging a story that claims to come directly from God is a much riskier proposition — spiritually, socially, and historically, physically.

The story of Eve in the Abrahamic tradition is probably the most consequential piece of narrative propaganda in human history. Think about what it actually says, read plainly: a woman, created as an afterthought from a man’s rib, is the vector through which suffering enters the world. She is disobedient, easily seduced by evil, and catastrophically irresponsible with the one rule she was given. Every human who has ever lived or died or suffered does so, according to this foundational story, because of what she did. That is an extraordinary amount of moral weight to place on one character — and it was placed there at the very beginning, before women had any institutional means to contest it.

What’s fascinating — and telling — is that this pattern is not unique to one tradition. Hindu mythology contains figures like Putana, the demoness, alongside powerful goddesses, yes, but the powerful goddesses are also frequently domesticated and subordinated to male counterparts in practical religious culture. Ancient Greek mythology is essentially a catalog of women being punished, transformed, or destroyed by male gods for reasons ranging from being raped to being too beautiful. Pandora, like Eve, opens something she shouldn’t and unleashes chaos. The template is strikingly consistent: woman as beautiful danger.

The Institutionalization of Inferiority

Religious stories are powerful, but they needed institutional support to become truly operational. This is where theology met law, medicine, and philosophy to create something remarkably durable.

Aristotle — whose influence on Western thought is difficult to overstate — described women as “defective males,” arguing that female biology was essentially an incomplete version of male biology. This wasn’t a fringe opinion; it was considered rigorous natural philosophy and remained influential for nearly two thousand years. When medieval Christian scholars like Thomas Aquinas synthesized Aristotelian philosophy with Christian theology, they produced a framework in which women’s intellectual, moral, and spiritual inferiority was not just a cultural assumption but a reasoned, theologically endorsed conclusion.

Women could not hold religious office. Women could not own property in most jurisdictions. Women could not testify in court. Women could not receive the same education as men. These weren’t random cruelties; they were the logical downstream consequences of a worldview that had been carefully built, layer by layer, from myth to philosophy to law to daily practice.

Witch Hunts — When Diminishment Becomes Elimination

If you want to understand how fear and misogyny can be institutionalized into mass murder, the European witch trials of the fifteenth through eighteenth centuries are your case study. Between approximately 1450 and 1750, somewhere between forty thousand and sixty thousand people were executed for witchcraft across Europe and colonial America, with estimates of accusations running into the hundreds of thousands. Somewhere between seventy and eighty percent of those executed were women.

The Malleus Maleficarum, published in 1487 by Heinrich Kramer, is the document that makes the logic explicit. It is simultaneously a theological argument, a legal manual, and a psychological study — and it is staggeringly misogynistic even by the standards of its time. Women, Kramer argues, are more susceptible to demonic temptation because of their weaker intellect, their insatiable carnal desire, and their fundamental defectiveness as human beings. The book was printed in fourteen editions and used by both Catholic and Protestant inquisitors for centuries.

What the witch trials represent — beyond the individual horror of tens of thousands of agonizing deaths — is the use of state violence, theological justification, and community participation to eliminate women who deviated from prescribed roles. The accused were disproportionately widows, healers, women with property, women without men to protect them, and women whose knowledge and independence made them threatening. The witch hunt was not an aberration; it was a mechanism.

The Enlightenment That Forgot Half of Humanity

The Scientific Revolution and the Enlightenment are typically narrated as a great liberation of the human mind from superstition and dogma. And in many ways they were. But they also produced new, science-flavored justifications for the same old conclusions about women.

Nineteenth-century science was prolific in its production of studies proving female inferiority. Phrenologists measured skull shapes and concluded that women’s brains were less developed. Physicians diagnosed women who expressed intellectual ambition, sexual desire, or political opinion with ‘hysteria’ — a catch-all condition conveniently derived from the Greek word for uterus, as if the problem were literally located in their reproductive organs. The ‘treatment’ for hysteria frequently involved removing women from intellectual and public life entirely.

Charles Darwin’s work, whatever its actual claims, was quickly appropriated to argue that women were evolutionarily less developed than men — closer to children in their mental capacities. Herbert Spencer’s Social Darwinism applied these ideas to social structure, arguing that women’s exclusion from education and public life was not injustice but natural selection in action. The costume had changed from theology to science, but the argument was structurally identical.

This Is Not Just the East — A Note on Western Hypocrisy

There is a deeply entrenched habit in Western discourse of treating the diminishment of women as primarily an Eastern or Islamic problem. This framing is not only historically illiterate; it is itself a form of deflection that allows the West to avoid examining its own record.

The United States did not extend full voting rights to women until 1920. Switzerland — which likes to think of itself as a model of democratic governance — did not grant women the right to vote in federal elections until 1971. Women in the United Kingdom could not open a bank account without a male cosignatory until 1975. American women could not legally obtain a credit card in their own name without a husband’s signature until the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974. American women could not legally be protected from marital rape in all fifty states until 1993.

France, the birthplace of liberté, égalité, fraternité, did not allow women to vote until 1944. Germany, by 1900 one of the most scientifically advanced nations on earth, was producing the academic literature on female inferiority. The United Kingdom, which saw itself as a beacon of civilization, was force-feeding suffragettes in prison in the early twentieth century.

The point is not that every culture is equally progressive or equally problematic in its treatment of women today. It is that the project of diminishing women is genuinely global and genuinely recent in its partial resolution — and that treating it as someone else’s pathology is a convenient lie that lets everyone avoid the harder reckoning.

The Mask of Modernity

Here is where it gets particularly interesting, because the modern forms of this project are precisely the ones we’re least equipped to recognize.

The beauty and diet industries are the most financially successful vehicles in human history for transmitting the message that women’s natural bodies are inadequate and require continuous, expensive modification. The global beauty industry is valued at over five hundred billion dollars annually. It survives entirely on the premise that women are not good enough as they are. This is not incidental to the industry; it is the business model. Create the insecurity, sell the remedy, repeat.

The media’s treatment of female politicians, executives, and public figures provides a running commentary on what happens to women who reach for power. The coverage of a woman’s clothing, weight, voice, and marital choices in political reporting is not the result of individual journalists being petty; it is a systemic pattern with a clear effect: it trivializes women in power and sends a constant message to women watching about the conditions under which female authority is acceptable.

The gender pay gap — which persists in every single country on earth, including the Nordic nations that top every gender equality index — is not simply the result of women choosing different careers. It reflects the fact that professions become less well-paid as they become more female-dominated, and better paid as men enter them. This is not invisible; it is documented, replicated, and largely unaddressed.

Gaslighting as a Structural Tool

Perhaps the most sophisticated evolution in this project is the deployment of gaslighting at a cultural scale. Gaslighting, in its clinical sense, refers to the manipulation of someone into questioning their own perception of reality. At a cultural scale, it involves denying the existence of a systemic pattern while that pattern continues operating.

When women raise concerns about harassment, discrimination, or unequal treatment and are met with ‘you’re being too sensitive,’ ‘you’re imagining it,’ ‘that’s just the way things are,’ ‘men have problems too,’ or ‘but you have so many rights now’ — these are not simply dismissive comments. They are structurally functional responses that redirect attention from the systemic to the individual and from the present pattern to the irrelevant comparison.

The gaslighting is particularly effective because it contains grains of truth. Women do have more legal rights now than at any point in history. Men do face serious issues that deserve attention. Sensitivity exists and can be miscalibrated. These true statements are used as weapons against the recognition of a much larger and well-documented pattern.

Understanding the history — from Eve to the witch trials to the hysteria diagnosis to the modern beauty industry — is not about manufacturing grievance. It’s about acquiring the historical literacy to recognize a pattern that has been very, very good at disguising itself as something else. That recognition is the beginning of anything better.

LET’S GET CRITICAL

The article you just read makes a compelling case. The historical through-line from religious myth to modern gaslighting is real and well-documented. But staying with any argument too long without stress-testing it is intellectually lazy, and this topic deserves better than that. So let’s make it uncomfortable.

The first thing worth questioning is the framing of a coherent, intentional ‘project’ of diminishing women. The article, by necessity, presents a narrative arc — from Eve to the witch trials to the beauty industry — that can imply a level of coordination and intentionality that probably didn’t exist across most of history. Most of the men who subscribed to Aristotle’s view of women as defective males were not conspiring; they genuinely believed it. Most of the neighbors who accused women of witchcraft were acting from fear, social pressure, and genuine superstition, not a coordinated patriarchal agenda.

Why does this matter? Because if we understand the diminishment of women primarily as intentional oppression, we misdiagnose the problem. Much of what perpetuates gender inequality today is not malicious intent; it is unconscious bias, institutional inertia, and the internalization of norms by both men and women. You can’t solve unconscious bias with the same tools you’d use to fight deliberate discrimination. Conflating the two — and the article occasionally risks doing this — can actually make the problem harder to address.

Second, the article’s treatment of religion deserves more nuance than it received. The presentation of Eve as straightforwardly misogynist propaganda is not wrong, but it is incomplete. Many feminist theologians and scholars — including women deeply committed to Abrahamic faiths — have argued for readings of these same texts that are far more egalitarian than the dominant interpretations. The history of religion includes not just the subordination of women but also the first female saints, scholars, mystics, and teachers; the Islamic Golden Age included female hadith scholars with enormous religious authority; Christian monastic tradition gave women spaces of intellectual and spiritual autonomy unavailable to them in secular life.

This doesn’t undo the misogyny baked into much of institutional religion. But it does complicate the picture, and that complication matters — particularly because dismissing religion as simply a tool of oppression alienates billions of women who find meaning, community, and genuine empowerment in their faith. An analysis that doesn’t make room for that reality isn’t just incomplete; it risks being condescending in its own way.

Third, the article’s critique of the West’s tendency to project misogyny onto Eastern cultures is valid and important — but it’s worth making sure the corrective doesn’t swing too far. Saying ‘the West is also guilty’ is not the same as saying ‘all practices are equally problematic.’ Forced marriage, female genital mutilation, honor killings, and the legal treatment of women as property in some current legal systems are practices that exist on a different scale of severity than, say, a gender pay gap or a beauty industry. Both are real. Both deserve attention. But treating them as morally equivalent in the name of avoiding Western hypocrisy is itself a failure of moral seriousness.

Fourth — and this is the one that tends to make people most uncomfortable — the article doesn’t fully engage with the role women have played in perpetuating patriarchal systems. Women have been among the most effective enforcers of beauty standards, marriage norms, gender-conforming behavior, and social punishment of women who deviate from expected roles. This is not a reason to blame women for their own oppression; it is a consequence of the way internalized norms work. But analyzing these systems without acknowledging women’s complicated role within them — as both subjects and agents — produces an incomplete picture of how these systems actually function and how durable they actually are.

The most honest version of this conversation is one that holds the documented reality of systematic gender inequality alongside the genuine complexity of how that inequality works, who maintains it, and what it would actually take to change it. That requires more than an arc from mythology to modernity. It requires looking, without flinching, at all the ways the project continues — including the ways those of us who think of ourselves as progressive contribute to it more than we’d like to admit.

FANTASTIC GUEST: JOHN STUART MILL

John Stuart Mill (1806-1873) was one of the most influential philosophers of the nineteenth century, a utilitarian thinker, political economist, and the author of The Subjection of Women (1869), one of the earliest and most rigorous philosophical arguments for gender equality. He was also, famously, shaped by his intellectual partnership with Harriet Taylor, the philosopher and activist he eventually married, whom he credited as a co-thinker on much of his most important work.

Danny: Mr. Mill, welcome. I want to say right off the bat that inviting a Victorian man to discuss the diminishment of women is either the best or worst decision I’ve made for this article. I’m not sure which yet.

Mill: It is probably both simultaneously, which is itself a kind of philosophical position. I should warn you that I am going to say several things that will irritate you, and a few that will surprise you, and I make no apology for either.

Danny: That’s exactly what I wanted. Let’s start here — you wrote The Subjection of Women in 1869, and it cost you enormously in terms of social standing. Your argument was essentially that the entire subordination of women to men rested on custom and force, not nature or reason. How did you arrive at that position in a world that was uniformly convinced of the opposite?

Mill: I arrived at it the same way I arrived at most of my positions — by noticing that the strongest arguments for a widely held belief are, upon examination, circular. People said women are by nature suited only to domesticity, and they proved it by raising women in environments that allowed for nothing else, and then pointing to those women as proof of the theory. I found this logically indistinguishable from raising a plant in the dark and then concluding that plants have no capacity for growth.

Danny: That’s a devastatingly clean analogy. But the article we’ve just published traces the history much further back — to religious myth, to Aristotle, to the witch trials. Were you aware, writing in 1869, of the full depth of this historical project?

Mill: I was aware that the subjection of women was ancient and tenacious. What I found most remarkable was not its antiquity but its universality. Every society, every civilization, every era — all had found different reasons to arrive at the same conclusion: that women should be under the authority of men. When that many different thinkers in that many different contexts reach the same conclusion, one of two things is true. Either the conclusion is so obviously correct that any reasoning mind will reach it — or the reasoning is being shaped by an interest that precedes the reasoning. I found no evidence for the former and considerable evidence for the latter.

Danny: The article raises something you’d probably call “gaslighting” — the cultural mechanism by which women who identify systemic problems are told they’re imagining them or being too sensitive. You didn’t use that word, but did you see the same mechanism in your time?

Mill: I called it something more cumbersome but equivalent: the disqualification of the testimony of those most affected by a system from any evaluation of that system. It was considered self-evident in my day that women’s complaints about their condition were unreliable precisely because they were affected by it. Men, being disinterested parties — or so the argument went — were better placed to assess whether women were actually suffering. You will notice the magnificent convenience of this arrangement. The only people whose testimony is deemed trustworthy are the people with every incentive to conclude that everything is fine.

Danny: That is still happening. Verbatim. The article points to the West’s habit of treating gender inequality as primarily someone else’s problem — pointing to the Middle East or Asia while maintaining its own glass ceilings and pay gaps. Did you see that same deflection in Victorian Britain?

Mill: Enthusiastically. Britain in my time was extremely proud of its relative progressiveness — having abolished slavery, developed parliamentary democracy, and positioned itself as the pinnacle of civilization. This pride was not entirely unjustified. It was also used, with remarkable consistency, to avoid looking at the considerable injustices that remained. I observed that a man who has solved one moral problem sometimes believes himself to have solved all of them, which is a kind of moral myopia that prosperity tends to encourage.

Danny: I have to ask about Harriet Taylor, because the article touches on how women’s intellectual contributions have been erased or minimized. You credited her enormously. But critics then and since have questioned whether you overstated her influence — some have suggested you were essentially performing a kind of idealization. How do you respond to that?

Mill: With interest rather than offense, because it is exactly the kind of question the article you’ve published is about. Consider the logic: I credit a woman as a genuine intellectual partner and co-thinker. The response from many contemporaries — and subsequent scholars — is not to engage with whether the credit is merited but to assume it cannot be, because the crediting seems implausible. A man of my intellect, they reasoned, could not seriously regard a woman as his equal. She must be a muse, or an obsession, or a flattery. The assumption that the credit is implausible is not based on any evidence about Harriet. It is based on a prior conclusion about women in general. Which was, I thought, rather illustrative of my point.

Danny: That is a beautiful trap you’ve just sprung. I want to push back on something from the critical thinking section of our article. It argues that the framing of a coherent patriarchal ‘project’ overstates intentionality — that most of the men who subscribed to these ideas genuinely believed them. Does that affect the moral analysis?

Mill: It affects the causal analysis, not the moral one. If a man genuinely believes a harmful falsehood and acts on it, his sincerity does not mitigate the harm. It does, however, change what is required to address it. Malicious intent requires confrontation. Sincere error requires education. Much of what I wrote in The Subjection of Women was addressed not to the cynically powerful but to the sincerely mistaken — which are, in some ways, the more difficult audience, because they feel no guilt and see no reason to change.

Danny: The article also asks whether modern progress — voting rights, legal equality, professional access — represents genuine change or just a more sophisticated version of the same system. Where do you land on that?

Mill: I land where the evidence leads me, which is: both. The formal legal equality that has been achieved since my time is real, and it represents the partial success of arguments I and others made. But formal equality is not substantive equality, any more than removing the bars from a cage is the same as teaching the bird to fly. If you have spent generations preventing a group from developing the habits, resources, networks, and self-conception needed to exercise freedom, removing the legal prohibition is a necessary but not sufficient condition for genuine equality. The cage can be invisible and still be a cage.

Danny: Last question. The article ends on a note of historical literacy as the beginning of change. You were a philosopher and a parliamentarian. Which was more useful — the argument or the power?

Mill: Neither is sufficient without the other, and both are insufficient without the third ingredient, which is organized human will. Arguments change the frame. Power changes the law. But only sustained collective action by the people most affected changes the culture. I wrote arguments. I voted in Parliament. But the women who marched, who organized, who went to prison, who refused to comply — they were the ones who actually moved the needle. I was, at best, useful to them. They were not, as some preferred to imagine, recipients of my magnanimity.

Danny: Mr. Mill, that was better than I expected, which given who you are is saying something.

Mill: I’m gratified. I have been dead long enough to have no remaining vanity. Almost.