chownah wrote:seems that the Buddha resisted the creation of female monks at first....if this is correct then was the Buddha a misogynist?
chownah
But that isn't correct. Scholarly consensus considers it likely that it's a later forgery.
Consider that a nun recounts, in the Therigatha, that she ordained via the short, early phrase: "Come, Bhadda" (if I recall the name correctly). This cannot have happened if the traditional origin story is true. Also, the Jains had female renunciates at the time, so it wouldn't have been that remarkable. The scholarly evidence points to a misogynist streak beginning within the Theravadan tradition itself, one which simply continues to this day in various ways. It is this,
inter alia, which is being criticized by Gombrich.
chownah wrote:if a monk has a view that a legitimate lineage of female monks can not be constituted (not necessarily my opinion) then that is one thing....but it is not in and of itself misogynistic
It continues such attitudes via legalism, but this takes us off-topic.
As to the rest: I'm not calling this or that person a misogynist, and neither was Gombrich. People can be part of a misogynistic environment, of course - but so can a received textual tradition, or a cultural attitude, all of which involve people but which aren't people. Furthermore, misogyny isn't a black/white affair, as there are shades of manifestation in any particular case. Trying to reduce it to a list of names is overly simplistic and misrepresents the original criticism.