Women as Morally Superior According to Girard

Rene Girard’s theory inverts our ideas of superiority to show that women, in truth, show moral superiority over their male counterparts by largely not participating in the cycles of mimetic contagion which have led to violence, murder and wars over the ages:

I find it strange that women so badly want participation in the male power of archaic societies, for it is precisely their real superiority that women don’t appear, for the most part, as the primary agents of violence. If they want now to join the power games of the males, and that is understandable, are they not losing their real moral superiority?

As important as the apostles are in the Gospels, the women around Jesus are just as important but in a different way: they are that part of humanity which has nothing to do with scapegoating him. They are the ones who stick with him through the crucifixion…

If anything my hypothesis is pro-woman. It is peculiar how people moved by new ideologies want to be part of the power structure even retrospectively, and to be seen as responsible for some of the horrors that have left their mark on us. This greed to participate in violence of men is incomprehensible to me.

Rene Girard, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with Rene Girard’, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 275-276.

Girard’s Three Great Moments

Rene Girard summarising his three greatest moments in writing:

I would say that there have been three great moments in the process of my thinking and writing.

First was mimetic desire and rivalry, when I realised that it accounted for so much. The second was the discovery of the scapegoat mechanism. This basically completed the mimetic theory…The third great moment of discovery for me was when I began to see the uniqueness of the Bible, especially the Christian text, from the standpoint of the scapegoat theory…In the Gospels we have the revelation of the mechanism that dominates cultures unconsciously.

Rene Girard, ‘The Anthropology of the Cross: A Conversation with Rene Girard’, in James G. Williams (ed.), The Girard Reader, (New York: Crossroad Publishing Company, 1996), 262.