Inferiority of Women Theme Analysis

The symposium, or ritual banquet, at Agathon’s house is a very intentionally male space. Symposia would often include flute-girls (courtesans who provided entertainment and often flirted with guests), but after the men settle the question of how much the guests should drink that night, Eryximachus proposes that they should “send away the flute-girl who’s just come in, and let her play for herself, or for the women in their part of the house, if she prefers, and that we should spend the evening in conversation.” This statement underscores the fact that even the men and women within a given household were strictly segregated, it makes clear two key features of the symposium: first, it will be intellectually oriented (that is, not a space for women, who were thought irrational) and second, whatever eroticism occurs there will be male-oriented. The rest of Plato’s dialogue bears out the view that women are inferior to men. Even though Socrates’s speech modifies aspects of previous speakers’ views, like those of Pausanias and Aristophanes, Plato still argues through Socrates and the other guests that women are neither fit objects for men’s love, nor—because of their inherent irrationality—are they themselves capable of loving.

Pausanias, one of the symposium guests, argues that love for women is inherently “common” and inferior to love for boys or other men. This so-called common love is undiscriminating, felt only by “inferior” people. Such people “are attracted to women as much as boys, and to bodies rather than minds. They are attracted to partners with the least possible intelligence, because their sole aim is to get what they want.” In other words, women lack sufficient intelligence to be worthy objects of love; they exist purely so that men can satisfy their baser desires. “Heavenly” love, by contrast, is felt toward boys who are beginning to be capable of some intelligence (“around the time that they happen to grow a beard”). Because it’s founded on intelligence and virtue, this type of love is oriented toward “a fully shared life,” something that isn’t possible with women. According to Pausanias, “This [love]…is a source of great value to the city and to individuals, because it forces the lover to pay attention to his own virtue and the boyfriend to do the same. All other forms of love derive from the other Love, the Common one.” In other words, then, “common” love toward women is not only a waste of a man’s time, it’s also useless to society at large.

Aristophanes, through his myth-making, creates a space for the desire of women, but he ultimately argues that love of women is inferior to love of men, echoing Pausanias’s argument. After explaining how humans and their attractions came about through Zeus’s splitting in half of the double-humans who originally existed, he claims that men who love other men are “the best of their generation” and “naturally the bravest” because of their desire for what is “bold, brave and masculine.” They desire to return to the wholeness they once possessed, so they are attracted to those qualities they already have. He further argues that men with these superior desires will only settle for marriage and fatherhood out of the pressures of convention; since a lover “wants to find a loved one who naturally fits [his] character,” such men possess a primeval superiority.

Socrates’s presentation of the prophetess Diotima, and of her teaching rejecting aspects of previous speakers’ arguments, suggests that Plato has a somewhat more elevated view of women than was common in classical Greece, but this view ultimately doesn’t value women in and of themselves. The very fact that Diotima isn’t an ordinary human being, but rather a prophetess with access to wisdom that mortal humans can’t easily attain, underscores the fact that women weren’t viewed as equal to men in Plato’s society. Instead of overturning the widely held idea that women were irrational and inferior to men, Diotima’s status was intended by Plato to be shockingly unconventional.

Diotima’s teaching also presents a radical rethinking of reproduction that ultimately downplays physical childbearing as an inferior pursuit. Intercourse and reproduction, she explains, are one way that mortal human beings can get to close permanence and immortality. Men with merely “bodily” desires for children are drawn toward intercourse and childbearing with women, and that is praiseworthy; however, Diotima argues that there’s a still more superior path. There are men who “are even more pregnant in their minds than in their bodies, and are pregnant with what it is suitable for a mind to bear and bring to birth”—in other words, wisdom and virtue. Men with such intellectual desires are drawn toward other men, in order to form the kinds of friendships that can bear immortal children—things that are founded on virtue and will stand the test of time, like poetry, laws, and philosophical discourse. Such people “have a much closer partnership with each other and a stronger bond of friendship” than men and women can have with each other or parents can have with their biological children. Diotima takes for granted that “everyone would prefer to have children like [Homer’s or Hesiod’s] rather than human ones”—so even in Diotima’s view, natural childbearing is inferior to “mental” childbearing, the latter being something that only men can attain.

While Plato’s argument through Socrates doesn’t claim that marriage and conventional parenthood are worthless, it does prize intangible, philosophical beauty as an incomparably higher goal. “If someone could see beauty itself…not cluttered up with human flesh and colors and a great mass of mortal rubbish,” then that person couldn’t help but realize the superiority of beauty’s eternal form to anything found on earth. Only someone “who’s given birth to true virtue and brought it up”—something that only happens through men’s wisdom-seeking relationships with one another—"has the chance of becoming loved by the gods, and immortal.” Even with the example of Diotima as prophetess and educator of Socrates himself, there’s no place within Diotima’s scheme for a mortal woman who’s capable of pursuing true virtue or giving birth to immortal beauty.