I've read recently, and I think it is true, that a mind-set definitely developed in Athens, if nowhere else, where the wariness men felt for women turned into an active resentment that women were even necessary for the process of procreation. Jokes along the lines of "I wish we could just bud" or "wouldn't it be great if we didn't have to have them around?" Everything you are saying about why Greek men kept a lid on their women makes perfect sense . . . but I sense that there was an IRRATIONAL response as well as a rational one. As Kallistos did in that wonderful article on Sparta, the freedom allowed to Spartan women was simply the freedom to keep the heifers healthy so they could breed strong progeny for the polis. My general impression - particularly in view of the fact that many Athenian men focused their emotional needs, not on their womenfolk, but on their male friends, is that this misogyny was omnipresent.

On another point entirely, I wonder if one could not argue that, just like we're far more "tender" with babies now because they may LIVE, that the last two centuries in the west has channeled a man's emotional needs entirely onto his wife or lover, and has concurrently made it extremely problematic to have a close, intense relationship with another man? Perhaps that, too, is new in the grand scheme of things? (and maybe that channeling fails so often because men and women were NOT meant to be all-and-all to each other, lol)

That puts the cat among the pigeons!