BELOVED OSHO, I AM VERY ANGRY WITH WOMEN. I DON'T LIKE WOMAN. WHY IS WOMAN SELFISH? WHY HAS WOMAN NO INTELLIGENCE? WHY IS A WOMAN LIKE A CAT? OSHO, WHY DO YOU PUT WOMAN ON THE WAY OF TAO?

Woman is what man has made of her.
It is a vicious circle.
Man has deprived woman of education and other social institutions, of economic freedom. And then you ask why women are unintelligent? You are the cause. Women have as much intelligence as any man -- because intelligence has no concern with sexual hormones.

Do you think if you changed Albert Einstein into a woman with plastic surgery, he would lose his intelligence? He would still remain Albert Einstein, but in a woman's body. The difference is only of bodies; the difference is not of consciousness, not of intelligence.

But unfortunately man decided to repress woman. For centuries it has not been clear to historians why it had to happen in such a way. But the latest psychological research makes it very clear why it happened: it happened because man feels a deep inferiority complex in comparison to woman. And the basic root of that feeling comes from the woman's capacity to become a mother. She is the source of life, she creates life.

Man is incapable of it.

This became the reason to cut the wings of all women -- of freedom, of education -- and confine her to a prison-like home and reduce her to just a factory of reproduction so that he can forget that he is inferior. The woman had to be made inferior so that man could feel at ease, so that his ego could feel that now there is no competition with women at all.

The woman is not the cause of all her bitchiness.

You have been torturing her for thousands of years.
No society in the world has accepted her as equal to man.
No culture of the past has given the woman the same respect as it gives to the man. On the contrary, they have all tried to force her into a subhuman existence. And the reason why the woman did not revolt against such things is simple: again, the same motherhood. For nine months when she is pregnant, she becomes absolutely dependent -- particularly in a society which lived by hunting. And by the way, I would like you to remember that the society in which you are living now -- where houses exist, cities exist -- is a contribution of women, not of men.

The house is the woman's contribution.
Man was hunting.
The woman was confined to a small space; naturally she started decorating it, cleaning it, making it beautiful, liveable -- and she became attached. In a hunting society, the nomads had to go on changing... because when hunting was not giving them enough food, they had to move to where the animals were. They could not have permanent cities; they could have only tents, not houses. And you can see it: when a man lives alone, his house is almost like a tent, it is not like a house. Without a woman, it remains a tent, a temporary place -- just a shelter with nothing sacred about it.

As the woman enters, the tent starts transforming into a house and finally into a home. In hunting societies, the woman's function was nothing but reproduction. She was continuously pregnant. This became her failure: she could not fight, she could not rebel, she had to submit, she had to surrender -- of course unwillingly.

Nobody becomes a slave willingly. When somebody becomes a slave willingly, there is no problem. But millions of women have been forced to become slaves unwillingly. Naturally they try to take revenge in indirect ways. All those ways combined make them cats, their behavior becomes bitchy. But remember: a woman can be bitchy only with a dog, and a woman can be a cat only with a mouse -- and that's why you are angry.

Seeing a woman, you are reminded that you are a dog, you are a mouse.
Your male chauvinist attitude hurts.
It is simply an unconscious reaction, and you have to be watchful of the reaction so that it can disappear.
It is undignified of you.
It shows something about you -- not about the woman.
It is your anger, it is your hate.

If you will look at the history.... In many villages, the women cannot enter the temples. In some religions she can enter, but she has a separate section -- not the same as the men. In all religions, the woman is not accepted as a candidate for the ultimate growth of consciousness. She is unworthy, not for any other reason -- just because she is a woman; her crime is that she is a woman. And she can evolve but she will have to fulfill a condition: first she will have to be born as a man. So in religions like Jainism, there are methods, rituals, religious disciplines for women, specifically intended for them to enter a man's body in their next life. Now the whole Jaina attitude and philosophy can be disturbed because with plastic surgery a woman can become a man with no difficulty. There is no need for all those disciplines and rituals and arduous hostilities. Just a very small amount of plastic surgery and you are capable of entering the ultimate state of consciousness.
Strange, that plastic surgery is needed for spiritual growth! But this has been one way to condemn the woman.

Another reason why man has condemned the woman is the power of the woman over the man. You can never forgive someone who has so much power over you. The woman is beautiful, attractive... her beauty, her body, her attraction and you become just a beggar -- and you are going to take revenge for that too. But everything is going on in an unconscious state. You are not aware of what you are doing and why.
Man is almost magnetically pulled by the woman.
He can see that he is just a puppet.
How can he forgive the woman who has forced him to be just a puppet? -- whatever he can do, he tries to do.

Women everywhere are not allowed to read the holy scriptures. In many countries the woman is not even allowed to show her face in the society. It used to be so in India; it is still so in all the Mohammedan countries.

I have heard, when Mulla Nasruddin got married according to the tradition, his wife asked him, "To whom am I allowed to show my face?" Mulla Nasruddin said, "First let me have a look, only then can I say anything." So he looked at her face, closed his eyes and said, "Enough! Except for me, you are allowed to show your face to everybody."

These are subtle ways of humiliation, of cutting women off from the world of power, from the world where everything is happening.
The woman is not part of it.
She is not part of your wars, she is not part of your businesses, she is not part of your religions.

And there are countries like China -- not a small country.... A woman was reading in the newspaper that of every four men, one is Chinese. She came very much worried and concerned. She said to her husband, "This paper says that every fourth person is Chinese. Now you have to be careful; we already have three boys, and I don't want any Chinese in this house."

In this vast one-fourth of humanity, for ten thousand years it was believed that the woman had no soul, she was as soulless as your furniture. Hence, if a husband killed his wife, there was no crime, he had simply destroyed his property. It was nobody else's concern to come into it. Thousands of women were killed by their husbands, but the court, the law, did not accept it as killing, because how can you kill somebody who has no soul?

In India millions of women have been burned alive simply because of the male ego: "My wife is beautiful, young. If I am dead, she may get married again." This jealousy was the reason for deciding that every woman should jump into the burning funeral pyre with her husband. The husband is dead; the living woman has to jump into the fire. And we have practiced this for ten thousand years. It still happens once in a while, although now there is a law against it. One feels as if we don't give any attention to our social mores, our behavior mores. In the whole of Indian literature I have not come across a single statement saying that if women are required to die with their husbands to show their faith, their love, then why are men not required to do the same? What kind of game is this in which the rule applies only to the woman, not the man?

The society is made by men. Women are living in a society which is not made for them, not made by them; it has not considered them at all.

Your anger towards women is worth understanding.
Perhaps it is really your anger against yourself, your anger against men -- what men have done to women.
Women have been victims.
You cannot be angry at them.
In the home, the husband is the victim; and it can be said without any doubt that every husband is henpecked.
In fact, every intelligent husband has to be -- only some idiot may not be.
But this is the price that every man has to pay for what mankind has been doing to womankind for thousands of years.

If you want to get free from your anger against women, you will have to go through a very deep inner spring cleaning and see that the woman is the victim. And because she is the victim and has no positive way to resist, to fight, she finds indirect ways: of nagging, of screaming, of throwing tantrums.
These are simply hopeless efforts.
And naturally her rage against the whole of humanity becomes focused on one man, the husband.

The freedom of women is going to be the freedom of men too.
The day the woman is accepted as equal, given equal opportunity to grow, man will find himself suddenly free from the bitchiness that he used to feel from the women. And he will be surprised that neither is she a cat nor is he a dog -- both are human beings.

It is time.
Man has come to a certain maturity.

We can create a world together, with men and women sharing their insight, their visions, their dreams. Because they are different, their dreams are different, their contributions to the society will be different. And if a society can be created in which men and women have participated equally, that will be for the first time the richest society in the world -- and without all this bitchiness and nagging and fighting.

This is a strange and stupid way of living.
But just because your father used to live this way it is accepted almost as if it is something religious. Your forefathers did it, you have to do it, your children will learn it from you. Every generation goes on giving its diseases to the coming generation.


My people have to be aware and alert not to pass on any sickness which they may have received from the past generation.
Let this be the dead end.
Don't pass it to the new generation.
Let the new people grow -- the new earth, the new man.
The old has failed so badly that there is no point in renovating it.
It is all ruins.
It simply needs to be written in the history books, pieces of it preserved in the museums -- but from life it has to disappear.

OshO

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