Content/trigger warning: Discussion of sexism, misogyny, and sexual violence (including mentions of rape)
I’m currently reading Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 for the first time, and the other day I put it down in the middle of a chapter to try to find out if anyone else has been as bothered by its sexism as I have. 20 minutes on Google turned up multiple blog posts that tack on a mention of the novel’s misogyny at the end, finishing with, “otherwise it’s a great book”, and even one post defending the book against accusations of misogyny. Only one result, this review, came close to expressing my feelings. This is an aspect of this book that needs to be acknowledged, so that’s what this post is going to do.
Catch-22 enters the points of view of many of its cast of characters—but never the female ones. [Edit after reading more: We actually do eventually get a female character’s point of view, but only after 350 pages, and only to tell how much she likes being with and receiving attention from men.] While there are multiple women in the book, their significance is only in relation to the men around them. As the review I found says, “[N]one of them whatsoever has any real independent life or thoughts of her own. They are only perceived through the male gaze.” Men miss them, pine for them, ogle them, lust after them, sexually harass them, sleep with them, and (I’ve heard but haven’t read this part yet) rape and murder them. Their bodies are often described in (sexual) detail, and if they’re characterized at all it’s very briefly, and often has to do with their sexuality—whether they’re sexually voracious, sexually indiscriminating, or sexually withholding. The review also points out the problematic willingness of many of the women to be reduced to sexual objects—it’s explicitly stated that several will sleep with any man who wants.
One woman, “Nately’s whore,” never gets any dialogue, and while it’s made clear that she doesn’t like Nately, his supposed love for her keeps him following her around and paying to get into her bed—even though according to him she “says that if [he] really liked her [he’d] send her away” and sleep with a different prostitute (chapter 23). But apparently he loves her too much to honor her wishes. And from an ace viewpoint, the equation of love with desiring sex is troubling, and it’s something that’s done throughout the novel—it’s often said that the main character is in love with this woman or that woman, and what it really means is that he wants her body.
Bad as all this is, the part that disturbed me the most so far and led to this whole thing is when one male character discusses participating in a gang rape with complete nonchalance. He doesn’t use the word “rape” and just mentions the women involved “complaining”, as if it wasn’t a big deal to them (and the reason he’s telling this story is to defend the idea of threatening and robbing women in the present) (chapter 23). So beyond Heller not portraying women as actual people, and the male characters not treating them as such, the men actively abuse women and have no sense that there’s anything wrong with that (I could give more examples but I feel like that one is enough…). The only thing I found online that went into that aspect, as opposed to focusing on the flatness of the female characters or just mentioning the novel’s misogyny in passing, is a blog post on homosociality in Catch-22, and there the mistreatment of women is only discussed to illustrate the male characters’ “homosocial impulses”.
I want to spell it out very clearly: this novel is sexist. This novel is misogynistic. And this is not excusable. I’ve been enjoying the parts of the book that aren’t like this and will finish it, but this is kind of ruining it for me. Women are basically only mentioned in the context of being objects of sexual desire or gratification for men, and a lot of them eagerly embrace that role. They don’t have many other traits (except sometimes stupidity, or being annoying in some way). The male characters treat them as sex objects only and have no concept that that—or outright rape—is problematic in any way. Many of the female characters are prostitutes, but as the review I found points out, there’s no attempt to portray the hardship of that life.
I could pull out so many more examples and quotes, but I won’t because writing this has been upsetting enough—but flipping through the book again has reminded me that it’s even worse than what I’ve conveyed here. I wish more people would talk about this. I don’t want to just hear that Catch-22 is a funny, brilliant, insightful classic. I want to also hear that Catch-22 is sexist; Catch-22 is misogynistic. Don’t read it if that’s going to upset you, and if you do read it, do so critically.
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I agree with you completely, but could not finish the book. I didn’t really find it engaging, I had already watched and loved the movie EXCEPT for the way women were portrayed and treated. It was truly horrifying. I initially attributed it to perhaps the director and it having been made so long ago-but as I tried to read the book I discovered that IT WAS the source of the mysogeny.
I mainly liked the film due to Alan Arkin’s performance and the reactions of a sane man to an insane world-he gives off a sense of intelligence, decency, and is very likeable. Also, few can compare when it comes to portraying an ordinary person dealing with insane circumstances. I doubt I would have liked the movie so much without his prescence. The movie depicts the insanity of war and of the ultimate poisonous nature of corporate greed, another insanity, and I appreciated those aspects. Strangely, it is not some kind of evil horrific man who ends up destroying everything-it is the man in charge of the food who creates his own business, in which the welfare of the troops and of human beings is swept behind in his ‘my getting rich is good for the country’ etc. philosophy.
I loved the some of the scenes with General “Dweeble”, the name in itself is great! Orson Wells gave some of his lines a very world wearing tone. Acting was good from many involved including a very young Bob Newheart, Anthony Perkins, Richard Benggimen and more. But Paula Prentiss was treated as a sex object, it was very disgusting, the nurses uniforms in one scene objectified them, and there was one scene in which the ‘men’ are literally moaning and drooling over the General’s ‘girlfriend.’ The director was just as guilty as the writer of the book, using the camera in an extremely offensive manner.
So I did a search to see if anyone else felt like I did. Glad I found this site.
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I haven’t seen the movie; now I kind of want to, but also kind of don’t, knowing it’s as bad as the book in this way… They could have changed this aspect, and it’s really a shame that they didn’t.
I did find the book a bit hard to get into at first, but enjoyed it when it wasn’t horribly sexist. The narrative style was intriguing, and also a little confusing at first, but actually ended up working really well and was quite clever.
But anyway, I’m glad I’m not the only one who was disturbed by this. I was so surprised when I Googled and didn’t really see it being talked about, so I’m glad you found this post, because that’s the exact reason why I made it.
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All of you need to get a grip and quit lamenting the past. Catch 22 is a great piece of American literature and it accurately portrays things the way they were during WWII. Be lucky you live in a better time for women and stop complaining over spilt milk.
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I love most of Catch 22, in fact it’s one of my favourite books, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t critique the ridiculous degree misogyny in its writing. The book was published in the 60s, so has very little excuse for basically obliterating the sentience of half the human race.
The only bits in Catch 22 I don’t enjoy ARE the parts of misogyny. Saying that it accurately represents WWII times suggests that you don’t think women had internal lives then. Could have easily kept the book almost the same, with the same sexist culture, but actually explored the women as people and how they found it
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Heller started writing the book in 1953, so THAT is the context for the author. The context for the story was 1941-1945. At that time, “misogyny” was a word that was unknown to all but a few psychologists.
Of course women had “internal lives” back then. They were also better able to cope with events that shock and outrage women today. The species is getting weaker.
Consider the fact that the rights and respect women enjoy today never existed at all in the entire history of the species until just a few years ago. One could argue that today’s situation is nothing but an anthropological aberration. Do the relationships between genders in other species ever change as they have with humans? No.
I get the solid impression that people today actually seem to enjoy being victims, often vicariously.
There was nothing ridiculous about this issue in Heller’s book. It was normalcy. What you say he should have done would have turned the book into a “romance novel”!
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A lot of feminist progress may have been achieved in the last decades, but that does not mean it was absent in the past centuries. Social mores eb and flow. Way back in the ancient Greek days there were multiple philosophic writers in even some of the more misogynistic cultures who spoke in favor of abolishing slavery and gender equality. If it were a mere more of the past. We wouldn’t have so many historic accounts defending sexism and misogyny if it were a self-evident norm we aberrated from
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I’m just re-reading Catch-22 after a few years and was troubled by a lot of sexism and misogyny as well.
Some of it is intentional, with the purpose of upsetting the reader. The character you reference in chapter 23 is probably one of the most awful characters in the book, who actually rapes and murders someone later in the book with the logic that it doesn’t matter because she was poor and he was wealthy. I think it is safe to say this is not a reflection of the author’s beliefs, anymore than the rampant authoritarianism or racism that are all throughout the book are.
But there is a lot of other terrible stuff in the book that, as far as I can tell, serves no purpose. Women are objectified constantly. At one point Yossarian and Dunbar sexually assault a nurse in the hospital. I don’t know if this is all drawn from what the author actually saw when he served overseas, or if he made it up.
Anyways, I guess I’m just trying to say that there is a lot of stuff we should be troubled by in the book that, sadly, is a product of the time it was written and seemed to go largely unnoticed then, and unaddressed now. But there is also a lot of stuff in the book that is upsetting because the author meant it to be upsetting. When we read chapter 23 and are disgusted, we should be disgusted not that someone wrote about that stuff in a book, but that it is an actual thing that happens in the world, and that, like in the book, it goes largely unpunished. I think that was the author’s intention.
I was really glad to find your post, because I couldn’t find any feminist criticism of the book. All the reviews in the back of the 50th anniversary addition I’m reading are by men, and yours was the only thing I found via google search. Yes the book is clever and insightful, but it is also deeply flawed. So thank you!
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Hey! I haven’t been checking my blog notifications for a long time, so I only just saw your comment. But I appreciate you stopping by and taking the time to comment! That is a good point about some of it being intentional; I guess as I was reading I just didn’t get any sense of condemnation of those actions from the narrative itself. Some of the other issues were treated in such a way that they were obviously wrong/ridiculous, but Yossarian himself participates in objectification/harassment of women (as you mentioned), so it didn’t always feel like those things were being presented as actually bad.
Anyway, again, thanks for commenting! I’m glad other people have some of the same problems with this book as I do, because like you said, hardly anyone is talking about that aspect, which is troubling…
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I think this books commentary on the awfulness of objectification, and violence against women goes hand in hand with it’s commentary on the awfulnessand pointlessness of war and rampant capitalism. I don’t see why this books should be called sexist or mysoginistic any more than it should be called millitaristic.
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Citizens of countries (those with a democracy,) are not directly able to begin or end a war nor are they directly responsible for the economic locomotive that exist. If a citizenry continues to vote for warmongers and purveyors of economic systems that are failing them, then, yes, by defacto they are responsible for these ill-advised social conventions. Whether or not you are for or against war, is irrelevant. War is committed against the populace at large, while rape is a solitary crime that is felt by the individual before anyone else is alerted, and often times without any forewarning.
With that said, citizens in countries that do not engage in the buying and selling of females (and sometimes males) into marriage, etc., the rebuke of rape is echoed the world over, and victims do not gleefully consent to rape. Ever! Rather it is an outright attack or coercion, it is still rape when one party does not want the act to occur. There can never exist a legal premise from which to sanction rape in conscionable societies.
Capitalism and military ills are not problems for the rape victim to bear. We have a plethora of social ills, but I think you would agree that you would not want the rape of your vagina or anus or mouth held liable for them. The fact is this book has no real value to society. Parading around the sexual deviances of a couple of “soldiers” is no different than parading around the sexual deviances of a couple of “soldiers” who are pedophiles. In each instance, the victims do not get a choice!
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I got you mate.
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Catch-22 is an absolute must-read. Heller’s masterpiece is undeniably one of the best fiction novels of the 20th century. While your immediate reaction to the sexism and misogyny strewn throughout the book is (understandably) very negative, it’s important to read these books with a sense of context. This book was written throughout the 1950’s, about the 1940’s. Women were treated much differently than they are today. While the way Yossarian and the others treat and view women is very unacceptable today and should obviously not be emulated, reading with a cultural lens is a must. Though use of the n-word in today’s society is very taboo, we still are able to read and appreciate literary classics like Huckleberry Finn by viewing the work in the context in which it was written. Don’t give up on a defining piece of American literature due to ethnocentrism without giving it another chance.
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What a strange argument for why women shouldn’t be concerned about the trivializing of a problem that impacts them on a regular basis and goes largely ignored and even celebrated in some circles of society.
If the book were truly well written, it would have condemned these issues with artfulness and included female characters written as human beings.
This is also the first i’ve heard of the 1950s being a different ethnicity ;)
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Well, it was a different time and women were represented differently then… And at its time, its irreverent treatment of war was refreshingly honest in contrast to other heavy going, contempraneous books like Mailer’s Naked and the Dead. It is very much a guy’s book, I admit, but attacking it because it doesn’t conform to acceptable modern standards of female representation is a bit harsh, if not limiting. If that’s your attitude to literature, then I would suggest avoiding reading anything pre-1970, such as Shakespeare, Dickens, D H Lawrence, etc. They’re probably just rubbish chauvinists anyway.
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Yours is a fresh breeze of intellect blowing through the intellectual vacuum that encompasses most of the rest of these comments that belie no understanding of the changing norms.
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I agree with you. I forced my way through it, but it’s not a funny book, and I’m confused how anyone thinks it is. The way woman are desribed throughout the book is awful. The men commit assualt after assualt and it’s just like “tra la la…” I honestly wondered if the author had ever spent any time around women in his life. Terrible book. Barf.
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You are obviously quite young.
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It just seems also that you are overlooking Heller’s intentions – The male characters who mistreat women are not presented as role models but rather quite unpleasant men, Heller uses their treatment of women to show this rather than use it as a vehicle for his own misogynistic views. The book has sexism and misogyny in it, that doesn’t make it a sexist/misogynist book.
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I completely agree with you. I’m reading it as part of a book club reading classic novels but I feel this one doesn’t even count as a classic novel should stand the test of time whereas this one is repulsive. Such a shame as it ruins what could have been a great novel
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I think it’s important to look at this book as a whole piece full of unsavoury representations and questionable events, but also to observe that the purpose of these representations and events is to show in huge exaggeration the issues that heller saw around him. When Aarfy rapes and then murders the prostitute it is not Heller insinuating that these women are worthless but in fact highlighting the attitude he disparaged in men, that he had to kill her because he raped her. While this is an extremely violent act and of clear horror to Yossarian who hears this, the fact that there are no consequences for Aarfy shows exactly what Heller is getting at with the rest of the book, how wartime allowed these awful acts to occur but with no consequence to those who could prove it was done in the outlines of the law, a catch-22. I would also point anyone who is questioning how much of this is Heller’s own beliefs to an interview he did with Paul Krassner in 1962. in this interview, Heller discusses how he did not want Yossarian to be a hero, but to show he was deeply flawed and expressed this through his attitude to women, Heller says, speaking as if almost detached from the position of writer, and the character has become his own entity: “it’s not nice– it’s not really gracious on his part– never to think of this girl by her name, but always as Nately’s whore”. I think this clearly demonstrates Heller’s awareness of the misogyny and sexism in the book, but demonstrates that it is for the purpose of characterisation rather than designed to be ideal or reflective of his own views.
I do agree, however, with the assertion that the book consistently reduces women to their level of desire for sex, but I believe through m reading I have found this always to be coming from the voice of a character, Yossarian talking of Nurse Cramer for example, rather than through the external narrative voice. I also do believe it is important, as mentioned above, to also look at the book in context of both production and of reception now and when it was first released. the reason you will hear that the book is ‘must-read’ or ‘life-changing’ is because of the challenges it posed when it was first published and the boundaries it pushed not only socially and politically but in the literary domain. it is a masterfully constructed book that should not be stripped of this title due to how some audiences may perceive aspects of the book to be non-compliant with today’s standards. You will find what could be deemed ‘problematic’ representations of women all throughout history, in books written by men, books written by women, books written by men or women that are in support of women’s rights. you could take ‘The Handmaids Tale’ and pull out certain moments where today you could take issue with Atwood’s view of women, yet we instead focus on what it does represent well. In turn, we must, and should, focus on what Catch-22 does brilliantly and subversively despite its questionable characters, which is reflect the utter hopelessness and helplessness of those engaged in warfare against their will, a monumental narrative that sits just in between the end of the second world war and the beginnings of the Vietnam war, and has no doubt resonated with many, many people around the globe. You may wish to view this book as sexist and misogynistic and you may wish it to be brought down in the esteem it has gathered since its publication, but it is impossible to deny that this book is important, and exists as much more than a few questionable representations.
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I also believe that the sexism is planted for effect (mostly based on the fact that this behaviour is moralised towards the end of the book), maybe not 100% of it but very nearly. And on the other hand, and this is important, the men are hardly portrayed as intelligent either. Can you name a single male character in the book who seems like someone to look up to, or is someone whom you are meant to like? Yossarian is certainly no hero, nor is he very likeable. Why would Heller treat the women in his book any differently? In the same way as the women are seen as objects, the men are seen as sex crazed, incapable of real emotion, impulsive and violent. Is that not just as sexist? I get that men aren’t oppressed in the same way that women are but the sexism towards men, portraying them as these sexual beings that can’t feel is also damaging in that it makes men think that that’s what it is to be a man. I think Heller is being unfair toward both sexes in this book, and that makes sense because it’s an exaggerated version of reality where it makes sense that people have flies in their eyes and crab apples in their cheeks.
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Thank you so much for writing this. I was so disturbed by the sexism and violence against women in this book yet it is widely lauded. So disgusting.
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Your comments are so much on point:
This is my second time reading of this book. The first time was years ago. Back then, I was struck by its irreverence and occasional witticism. I am a Vietnam veteran, having served as a medical officer in the Army in 1970. Back then, I was amused by Doc Daneeka’s rules for “sick call”–perhaps because they satirized some arbitrary rules . I also chuckled at “Major Major”–only because I had met a pre-med officer named “Lieutenant General”.
Over the years, this book has risen to a place in the “Pantheon”, probably on account of its rise in popularity during the Vietnam War. (I heard it touted as one of four twentieth century novels that made an “impact” during the 20th Century. This at an excellent lecture at One Day University by Professor Luzzi of Bard College. The others being To the Lighthouse, Invisible Man, and The Great Gatsby.) In my opinion, “22” may have primacy, but “MASH” is more readable, more relevant and better written.
Presently, I am re-reading the book for a book club. And I have become truly annoyed by both content and style. “Miscogeny” is too gentle a word for the portrayal of child prostitutes in a “humorous” way. I do not dispute that Heller’s description of the treatment of women and attitudes toward them are not an accurate portrayal of the author’s personal experience. But, the levity is out of line. “The twelve year old girl looked to Nately like a plucked chicken”. (Ironic that the 14 year old “prostitutes” of Jeffrey Epstein are now in the news.)
As for style, Heller would make Hemingway roll over in his grave. (Please pardon that trope!)
Although Papa may not be the all-time arbiter of style, her certainly knew how to use terseness and get a lot of bang out of the unsaid. Heller–at least in this book (and I have no intention of reading the others)–abuses adverbs left and right. And, when he uses an adjective, he frequently adds one or two others. AND he may be found to repeat them in variations: e.g. in the chapter “Nately’s Old Man” the old man is “debauched ugly” then, a few pages later “This sordid, vulturous, diabolical old man”, then “loathsome old man”. On the last page of the chapter, the old man is “lecherous and depraved” and the “corrupt, immoral old man”. Talk about beating us over the head!
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Thank you for your post! I am starting to read some of the books my kids left behind, now that they are in college. Reading the 50th edition of the ‘Catch-22’ and found myself so ignorant to not having read such an important novel! But I found myself puzzled by the apparent ‘problems’ as you described in this post. I googled using different words to describe it, but the comments are very few on the internet. I am so grateful that I found your post. I haven’t finished the book yet and I am not going to see the movie because it is a hard read. I will share your post with the world.
– from a woman
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