Editing Gulliver's Travels (section)

=== Misogyny ===
Although Swift is often accused of [[misogyny]] in this work, many scholars believe Gulliver's blatant misogyny to be intentional, and that Swift uses satire to openly mock misogyny throughout the book. One of the most cited examples of this comes from Gulliver's description of a Brobdingnagian woman:

{{blockquote|I must confess no Object ever disgusted me so much as the Sight of her monstrous Breast, which I cannot tell what to compare with, so as to give the curious Reader an Idea of its Bulk, Shape, and Colour.... This made me reflect upon the fair Skins of our ''English'' Ladies, who appear so beautiful to us, only because they are of our own Size, and their Defects not to be seen but through a magnifying glass....
}}

This open critique towards aspects of the female body is something that Swift often brings up in other works of his, particularly in poems such as ''The Lady's Dressing Room'' and ''A Beautiful Young Nymph Going To Bed''.<ref>{{Cite journal|last=Rogers|first=Katharine M.|date=1959|title='My Female Friends': The Misogyny of Jonathan Swift|jstor=40753638|journal=Texas Studies in Literature and Language|volume=1|issue=3|pages=366–79}}</ref>

A criticism of Swift's use of misogyny by [[Felicity A. Nussbaum]] proposes the idea that "Gulliver himself is a gendered object of satire, and his antifeminist sentiments may be among those mocked". Gulliver’s own masculinity is often mocked, seen in how he is made to be a coward among the Brobdingnag people, repressed by the people of Lilliput, and viewed as an inferior Yahoo among the Houyhnhnms.<ref name="1667-1745">{{Cite book|title=Gulliver's travels : complete, authoritative text with biographical and historical contexts, critical history, and essays from five contemporary critical perspectives|last=Swift|first=Jonathan|others=Fox, Christopher|isbn=978-0312066659|location=Boston|oclc=31794911|date = 1994}}</ref>

Nussbaum goes on to say in her analysis of the misogyny of the stories that in the adventures, particularly in the first story, the satire is not singularly focused on satirizing women, but to satirize Gulliver himself as a politically naive and inept giant whose masculine authority comically seems to be in jeopardy.<ref>{{Cite book|title=Gulliver's travels : complete, authoritative text with biographical and historical contexts, critical history, and essays from five contemporary critical perspectives|last=Swift, Jonathan|others=Fox, Christopher|isbn=0-312-10284-4|location=Boston|oclc=31794911|year = 1995}}</ref>

Another criticism of Swift's use of misogyny delves into Gulliver's repeated use of the word 'nauseous', and the way that Gulliver is fighting his emasculation by commenting on how he thinks the women of Brobdingnag are disgusting.

{{blockquote|Swift has Gulliver frequently invoke the sensory (as opposed to reflective) word "nauseous" to describe this and other magnified images in Brobdingnag not only to reveal the neurotic depths of Gulliver's misogyny, but also to show how male nausea can be used as a pathetic countermeasure against the perceived threat of female consumption. Swift has Gulliver associate these magnified acts of female consumption with the act of "throwing-up"—the opposite of and antidote to the act of gastronomic consumption.<ref>{{Cite journal |last=Armintor |first=Deborah Needleman |date=2007 |title=The Sexual Politics of Microscopy in Brobdingnag |journal=SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500–1900 |volume=47 |issue=3 |pages=619–40 |jstor=4625129|doi=10.1353/sel.2007.0022 |s2cid=154298114 }}</ref>
}}

This commentary of Deborah Needleman Armintor relies upon the way that the giant women do with Gulliver as they please, in much the same way as one might play with a toy, and get it to do everything one can think of.  Armintor's comparison focuses on the pocket microscopes that were popular in Swift's time.  She talks about how this instrument of science was transitioned to something toy-like and accessible, so it shifted into something that women favored, and thus men lost interest.  This is similar to the progression of Gulliver's time in Brobdingnag, from man of science to women's plaything.