Cultural Narratives

– Mythologies of the men’s rights & feminist movements (Peter Wright)
– Men Who Sit At The Screens (Peter Wright)
– One True Masculinity (Peter Wright)
– Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts (Elizabeth Hobson & Peter Wright)
– Where Do Stories Come From? (Richard Kearney)
– Stories and The Christian Faith – Part 1 (Paul Elam)
– Stories and The Christian Faith – Part 2 (Paul Elam)

Personal Narratives for Men

– Men Authoring Their Own Lives (Paul Elam & Peter Wright)
– Narrative Therapy With Men (Paul Elam & Peter Wright)

 

• The Dogma Of Gender (by Patricia Berry)
• Gendered Archetypes: Masculine and Feminine (Peter Wright)
• The Psyche Often Ignores Gender (James Hillman)
• Masculinity & Femininity Are Plural (Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig)
• Beyond The ‘Feminine’ Principle (Andrew Samuels)
• Gender And Individuality (James Hillman)
• “The One True Masculinity” (Peter Wright)
• Revisioning Anima & Animus (James Hillman)
• Nothing Envy and the Fascration Complex (David L. Miller)
• A Mythopoetic View Of Men & Masculinity (Shepherd Bliss)
• Frau Minne and her Gender Roles (Peter Wright)
• Hera, Ancient Greek Goddess of Feminism (Peter Wright)
• Male Archetypes: Servant, Slave and Scapegoat (Paul Elam)
• Male Utility & Disability: The Hephaestus Archetype (Peter Wright)
• Dimorphism & Monomorphism: A Basis For Imagining Gender (Greta Aurora)
• Attitudes Towards the Puer: From Jody Miller to Tomi Lahren (Vernon Meigs)
• Heracles: A Slave To Guilt And Shame (Peter Wright)

 

Below is an amended excerpt from an interview with Greta Aurora which touches on archetypes of masculinity and femininity appearing in traditional mythologies.

 

Greta Aurora: You previously mentioned you don’t agree with looking at masculinity and femininity as the order-chaos duality. Is there another archetypal/symbolic representation of male and female nature, which you feel is more accurate?

Peter Wright: Some archetypal portrayals in mythology are distinctly male and female, such as male muscle strength and the various tests of it (think of the Labours of Hercules), or pregnancy and childbirth for females (think Demeter, Gaia etc.). Aside from these universal physiology-celebrating archetypes, many portrayals of male or female roles in traditional stories can be viewed instead as stereotypes rather than archetypes in the sense that they are not universally portrayed across different mythological traditions (as would be required of a strictly archetypal criteria in which images must be universally held across cultures).

For example you have a Mother Sky and a Father Earth in classical Egyptian mythology, which is a reverse of popular stereotypes, and males are often portrayed as nurturers. This indicates that material nurture is not the sole archetypal province of a feminine archetype. Also, many archetypal themes are portrayed interchangeably among the sexes – think of the Greek Aphrodite or Adonis both as archetypal representations of beauty, or Apollo and Cassandra as representatives of intellect, or of the warlikeness to Ares or Athene.

To my knowledge the primordial Chaos described in Hesiod’s Theogony had no apparent gender, and when gender was assigned to Chaos by later writers it was often portrayed as male. There is no reason why we can’t assign genders to chaos and order to illustrate some point, but we need to be clear that this rendition is not uniformly backed by archetypal portrayals in myths – and myths are the primary datum of archetypal images. So broadly speaking the only danger would be if we insist that chaos must always be female, and order must always be male as if that formula were an incontrovertible dogma.

There’s also a rich history of psychological writings which look at chaos as a state not only of the universe, or of societies, but as a potential in the psyche or behavior of all human beings regardless of gender; e.g. this factor elaborated for example in the writings of psychiatrists R.D. Laing and by W.D. Winnicott .

See also:

• The Greek Titans: Images of Chaos
• Titanism: chaos against order

ARTICLES DESCRIBING THE NATURE OF ‘DAMSELING‘

 

• What is Damseling? Chat GPT Definition
• Damseling, chivalry and courtly love (Peter Wright)
• Women of color feminists vs. white feminist tears (Peter Wright)
• Alison Phipps: White Men’s Ship Floats on White Women’s Tears (Peter Wright)
• Damseling and ‘Chivalry’ in International Negotiations (Study)
• The Damsel In Distress Trope (Wikipedia)
• The Near-Irresistible Lure of Damseling (Janice Fiamengo)
• The Origins And Structure Of Damseling (Peter Wright)
• The Biological Origins of Damseling (Peter Wright)
• Two Modes of Damseling (Peter Wright)
• The Power of Feminine Weakness (Greta Aurora)
• The Victim Industrial Complex (Warren Farrell)
• Damseling in International Negotiations: A Survey Experiment in the Council of the European Union

ARTICLES ON WOMEN’S ATTRACTION TO THE CHILD ARCHETYPE

 

• Time To Throw The Baby Out With The Bathwater (P. Wright & P. Elam)
• With This Ring I Thee Adopt (Esther Vilar)
• The Child Archetype As Responsible for Woke Dystopia (Peter Wright)
• Fascinating Womanhood: How To Use Childlikeness to Manipulate Men (video)
• Fascinating Womanhood: Women’s Introduction To Cultivating Childlikeness (pdf text)
• Peter Pan Wives: A Menace To Marriage (1938)

By Peter Wright & Paul Elam (2017)

 

A wise man once suggested that when it comes to marital discord couples fight more over one issue: who is going to play the child in the relationship and who is going to play the responsible parent.

His comment rings true on its face, with men historically being the ones who take on the parental role in marriage. It’s witnessed in the centuries of men taking responsibility for the financial and other security concerns of wives, and also hinted at in the relationship age gap. Males marry younger females — not to control their sexuality (as we are frequently misled to believe) – but because women seek an older male to place in the responsible, paternal role, to enhance the child theme they intend to play out in the relationship.

Women collectively spend billions annually to neotenize their appearance, enhancing their efforts to assume the infantilized role.

We see the same theme appear in our language when men are shamed for being ‘Peter Pans’ or ‘man babies’ along with the injunction to ‘man-up’ — which has no counterpart for women; they are phrases intended to jolt men out of any inclination to regress to a childlike state of dependency. Never do we hear women being chastised as immature Wendys, woman babies, nor do we hit them with the demand to ‘woman-up.’

To be fair we may see the occasional man playing a full-time child to his female partner, and we can say that all men experience occasional moments of regression to boyishness in their relationships. However, society frowns upon men indulging too much of the child within. And such indulgence is roundly met with sexual rejection by women. The child role is reserved exclusively for women within the relationship context.

The stresses that this dynamic places on relationships and especially on men cannot be overstated; the catering to a child within an adult’s body is exhausting and ultimately demeaning to both the infantilized woman and the parentified man. Standardizing childishness in one partner and hyperagency in the other prohibits any sort of relationship between adult peers. Instead, it breeds contempt and conflict.

The structure of this type of arrangement ultimately results in an assured relationship killer. Hostile dependency. It is impossible for the infantilized partner to maintain respect for, or a healthy emotional connection to, her chief enabler. And it is impossible for the chief enabler to maintain respect or a healthy emotional connection to what amounts to a financial, emotional and familial parasite. Self-respect in both parties is also a casualty of this arrangement.

Before getting more into the dynamics posed by this dysfunctional relationship, we’d like to elaborate a bit more on the concept of the adult child which is something quite different from the literal child we look after when they are small. The ‘child’ is also one of the fundaments of the human psyche, operating equally in biologically mature adults and in children, thus the popular qualifier of ‘the inner child.’

The great 20th century psychologist Carl Jung wrote a paper on the inner child, or what he preferred to call the child archetype,¹ where he outlined its main psychological features which include 1. growth toward independence, 2. vulnerability, and 3. a state of innocence.

1. Growth toward independence (but never reached)

This aspect of the child archetype is concerned with futurity, and is captured in the phrase ‘what I want to be when I grow up.’ It reflects the ongoing state of becoming without ever arriving at the destination – it remains an eternal child. In this respect the child archetype differs from the archetype of individuation, a more heroic path that does eventually culminate in mature autonomy and self-reliance.

The ambition for perpetuated childhood, as we commonly see in modern women (and enabled by men), is the inevitable outcome of the child archetype. As men and women collude to remove the destination of adult autonomy from the life-map, they effectively kill the archetype of mature individuation – the path of true potential for growth. And instead they give birth to the child of static permanency. Individuals dominated by the child archetype will always position themselves as eternally incapable of personal agency, even relying on the chief enabler to help fabricate a web of denial about their true nature.

This is reflected in the spiritual, financial, or relationship ‘growth’ workshops attended largely by women, who appear to pursue adult goals but who are in reality only participating in a charade. The true goal is more dependency and more childhood. These pursuits are often funded through the hard labor of the hopelessly paternalized male.

We also see this acted out in the psychodrama of the modern housewife, “taking charge” of such matters of household finances and other matters of home and hearth, without any responsibility for creating wealth, taking the risks that come with those efforts, or any other matter of real consequence. The perpetuated child chooses the colors but cannot buy the paint or climb the scaffold with brush in hand.

2. Vulnerability

Vulnerability is one of the main guises of the child, and so the woman dominated by this archetype is constantly signalling threats to herself from the surrounding environment. She is in danger of getting lost, hurt, abandoned and frightened, and just like the child of fairy tales she projects herself as lost in the woods with snarling bears and wolves, or afloat on the river Nile in a flimsy basket where she is in danger of getting lost or going under.

She is “at risk” at all times, including the risk of exposure to her chief enabler’s frustrations or his wishes for her to realize adulthood.

The vulnerable, permanent child, communicates with the wider world through these threat narratives² which most everyone is familiar with through the archetypal damsel in distress — tied to the railway tracks, the locomotive of adult agency barreling down on her, or being held prisoner by a dragon from which she must be freed by your parental, sacrificial rescue.

3. Innocence

The child’s way of defending its perpetual dependency is to project its innocence: “I don’t know”, “I didn’t realize”, “I didn’t mean anything”, “It just happened”, “I got carried away by my feelings.” Yes, her own emotions can be the villain in her threat narrative. And the understanding of a hyper-responsible male is required to save her from it. Because she claims ignorance she divests herself of all responsibility for what happens, leaving others to pick up the tab – most likely her male partner if she has one.

We see this even in women’s general predisposition to gravitate toward victim politics, supporting male candidates who offer enabling paternalism from the state, and the vision of woman as perpetually in distress.

Moving on from Jung, perhaps the best conceptualization of the child archetype comes from Eric Berne, whose transactional analysis shows three possible relationship dynamics:

1. A child relating to a parent
2. A parent relating to a child
3. An adult relating to another adult.

The first of these – child to parent – encompasses all that we’ve said so far about the child archetype and its exploitative style of relating with others. The second – parent to child – represents the parental relationship to a child. And the last one – adult to adult – represents a healthier mode of conducting relationships based on steering a middle path between the more extreme demands of both parent and child. This latter is where we might hope to be along with anyone we might choose for pair bonding.

The perpetual child, however, demands that the default relationship setting be parent to child, an emotionally incestuous arrangement that affords some comfort to the irresponsible child, but that does so at the expense of a healthy adult connection.

Eventually, and we think invariably, this results in the parentified male viewing the infantilized female as inept, incapable and deserving of pity over respect. It can also breed a lot of anger that goes both ways, from the frustrated, overburdened male, and the dependent, irresponsible female whose life is a constant reminder of her lack of meaning.

The parental brain

Juvenile characteristics have long been known to evoke in caretakers a neurological state known as the ‘parental brain.’ Children’s faces and various other child gestures provoke hormonal changes that prime parents to be more sensitive towards infant cues and needs, resulting in nurturance, caretaking and protectiveness.

Adult women who learn to mimic child features through cosmetics, and the feigning of childlike behaviors of innocence and vulnerability, evoke in their male partners a very similar parental response. Like parents of literal infants men can be seen to respond with care-taking and protection, and if women are skilled at peppering the routine with threat-narratives she gains the ability to prompt him like a philharmonic concert conductor. Such is the obedient, reflexive state of readiness to rescue that defines the lives of so many men.

Listeners are probably familiar with this charade being played out between men and women, one which was not lost on Esther Vilar when she gave a sardonic description of it in her 1971 book The Manipulated Man. There she writes:

Woman’s greatest ideal is a life without work or responsibility – yet who leads such a life but a child? A child with appealing eyes, a funny little body with dimples and sweet layers of baby fat and clear, taut skin – that darling minature of an adult. It is a child that woman imitates – its easy laugh, its helplessness, its need for protection. A child must be cared for; it cannot look after itself. And what species does not, by natural instinct, look after its offspring? It must – or the species will die out.

With the aid of skillfully applied cosmetics, designed to preserve that precious baby look; with the aid of helpless exclamations such as ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ah’ to denote astonishment, surprise, and admiration; with inane little bursts of conversation, women have preserved this ‘baby look’ for as long as possible so as to make the world continue to believe in the darling, sweet little girl she once was, and she relies on the protective instinct in man to make him take care of her.”³

Vilar hits the nail right on the head; that many women have been taught they will be protected while having every whim catered for by simply playing the child.

This parent~child dynamic, perhaps more than any other theme, captures the dilemma most men are wrestling with – a theme more central than sexual attraction, more central than pair bonding, and more than romantic love and all the other social mandates. The biological urge to care for children is king, and it’s also an Achillies’ Heel for those who abide by it unconsciously.

The good news is that our vulnerability to abuse is corrected in one move: by men refusing to play parent, whether indulging or trying to correct women who are perpetual children. Instead we have to insist that female partners woman-up right alongside men, showing reciprocal responsibility between two adults. Or be prepared to show them the door once it’s apparent that the task is too much for them to take on.

Esther Vilar’s comment that a woman’s greatest ideal is ‘a life without work or responsibility’ requires someone to facilitate it, and that someone is almost always a man. But men need not play the role of parent and they do have the option to seek a relationship between adult peers: two responsible adults supporting each other in the walk through life. Such a woman may be a unicorn but unicorns do exist. And success, if you are lucky enough to get it, will be more likely tied to the women men reject than the woman they seek.

References:

[1] C.G. Jung, ‘The Psychology of the Child Archetype’ in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Princeton University Press (1969)
[2] Alison Tieman, Threat Narrative series
[3] Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man (1971)

Courtly Love (Amour Courtois) refers to an innovative literary genre of poetry of the High Middle Ages (1000-1300 CE) which elevated the position of women in society and established the motifs of the romance genre recognizable in the present day. Courtly love poetry featured a lady, usually married but always in some way inaccessible, who became the object of a noble knight’s devotion, service, and self-sacrifice. Prior to the development of this genre, women appear in medieval literature as secondary characters and their husbands’ or fathers’ possessions; afterward, women feature prominently in literary works as clearly defined individuals in the works of authors such as Chretien de Troyes, Marie de France, John Gower, Geoffrey Chaucer, Christine de Pizan, Dante Alighieri, Giovanni Boccaccio, and Thomas Malory.

Scholars continue to debate whether the literature reflected actual romantic relationships of the upper class of the time or was only a literary conceit. Some scholars have also suggested that the poetry was religious allegory relating to the heresy of the Catharism, which, persecuted by the Church, spread its beliefs through popular poetry while others claim it represents superficial games of the medieval French courts. No consensus has been reached on which of these theories is correct, but scholars do agree that this kind of poetry was unprecedented in medieval Europe and coincided with an idealization of women. The poetry was quite popular in its time, contributed to the development of the Arthurian Legend, and standardized the central concepts of the western ideal of romantic love.

Origin & Name

Courtly love poetry emerged in southern France in the 12th century CE through the work of the troubadours, poet-minstrels who were either retained by a royal court or traveled from town to town. The most famous of the early troubadours (and, according to some scholars, the first) was William IX, Duke of Aquitaine (l. 1071-1127 CE), grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine (l. c. 1122-1204 CE). William IX wrote a new kind of poetry, highly sensual, in praise of women and romantic love. William IX and the troubadours who followed him never referred to their work as courtly love poetry or Provencal love poetry – it was simply poetry – but it was unlike any literature produced in Western Europe previously. Scholar Leigh Smith discusses the origin of the name:

The term itself dates back only to 1883 CE when Gaston Paris coined the phrase Amour Courtois to describe Lancelot‘s love for Guinevere in the romance Lancelot (c. 1177 CE) by Chretien de Troyes. Medieval literature employs a variety of terms for this kind of love. In Provencal the word is cortezia (courtliness), French texts use fin amour (refined love), in Latin the term is amor honestus (honorable, reputable love). (Lindahl et. al., 80)

This love praised by the troubadours had nothing to do with marriage as recognized and sanctified by the Church but was extramarital or premarital, freely chosen – as opposed to a marriage which was arranged by one’s social superiors – and passionately pursued. An upper-class medieval marriage was a social contract in which a woman was given to a man to further some agenda of the couple’s parents and involved the conveyance of land. Land equaled power, political prestige, and wealth. The woman, therefore, was little more than a bargaining chip in financial and political transactions.

In the world of courtly love, on the other hand, women were free to choose their own partner and exercised complete control over him. Whether this world reflected a social reality or was simply a romantic literary construct continues to be debated in the present day and central to that question is the figure of Eleanor of Aquitaine.

The Queen of Courtly Love

As with many aspects of the discussion of courtly love, Eleanor’s role in developing the concept remains controversial. Eleanor of Aquitaine was one of the most powerful women of the Middle Ages, wife of Louis VII of France (r. 1137-1180 CE) and Henry II of England (r. 1154-1189 CE), and mother of Marie de Champagne (l. 1145-1198 CE) from her marriage to Louis and Richard I (r. 1189-1199 CE) and King John (r. 1199-1216 CE) from her marriage to Henry. She had eight children in total with Henry II, most of whom would follow her example in patronizing the arts.

Throughout her marriage to Louis VII (1137-1152 CE), Eleanor filled her court with poets and artists. When their marriage was annulled in 1152 CE, Eleanor did the same at her own court in Normandy, where she was especially entertained by the young troubadour Bernard de Ventadour (12th century CE), one of the greatest medieval poets, who would follow her to the court of Henry II in 1152 CE and remain with her there three years, probably as her lover.

Louis VII, after Eleanor’s departure, drove the troubadours from his court as bad influences, and Henry II seems to have had an equally low opinion of the poets. Eleanor admired them, however, and when she separated from Henry II in c. 1170 CE and set up her own court at Poitiers, she again surrounded herself with artists. There is no doubt that she inspired the works of Bernard de Ventadour, but it is likely she did the same for many others and, through her daughter Marie, inspired the greatest and most influential works of courtly love literature.

Chretien de Troyes & Andreas Capellanus

Eleanor’s court at Poitier, c. 1170-1174 CE, is a subject of some controversy among modern-day scholars in that no consensus has been reached as to what went on there. According to some scholars, Marie de Champagne was present while others argue she was not. Some scholars claim that actual courts of love were held there with Eleanor, Marie, and other high-born women presiding over cases in which plaintiffs and defendants would present evidence relating to their romantic relationships; others claim no such courts existed and that any literature suggesting they did is satire.

THE BEST-KNOWN EXAMPLE OF COURTLY LOVE IS LANCELOT’S LOVE FOR GUINEVERE, THE WIFE OF HIS BEST FRIEND & KING, ARTHUR OF BRITAIN.

Whatever happened at Poitiers, Eleanor seems to have established the ground rules for a literary genre – and possibly a social game of sorts – which was then developed by her daughter who was the patroness of the poet Chretien de Troyes (l. c. 1130-1190 CE) and author Andreas Capellanus (12th century CE). Andreas is the author of De Amore (usually translated as The Art of Love) which describes the courts of love presided over by Marie and the others while also serving as a kind of manual in the art of seduction.

The work draws on the earlier satirical Art of Love (Ars Amatoria) of Ovid, published c. 2nd century CE, which presented itself as a serious guide to romantic relationships while actually mocking them and anyone who takes such things seriously. Since Andreas’ work so closely mirrors Ovid’s, some scholars claim that it was written for the same purpose – as satire – while others accept it as a serious guide to navigating the world of courtly love. Andreas set down the four rules of courtly love as, allegedly, derived from Eleanor and Marie’s courts:

• Marriage is no excuse for not loving
• One who is not jealous, cannot love
• No one can be bound by a double love
• Love is always increasing or decreasing

According to these rules, just because one was married did not mean one could not find love outside of that contract; love was expressed most clearly through jealousy which proved one’s devotion; there was only one true love for every individual and no one could honestly claim to love two people the same way; true love was never static but always dynamic, unpredictable, and ultimately unknowable even by those experiencing it because it was initiated and directed by a God of Love (Cupid), not by the lovers themselves. These concepts in Andreas’ prose work were mirrored in Chretien’s poetry.

Chretien de Troyes is the poet responsible for some of the best-known aspects of the Arthurian Legend including Lancelot’s affair with Guinevere and the Grail Quest. His works include Erec and Enide, Cliges, Lancelot or the Knight of the Cart, Yvain or the Knight of the Lion, and Percival or the Story of the Grail, all written between c. 1160-1190 CE. Chretien established the central motifs of the genre of courtly love poetry which include:

• A beautiful woman who is inaccessible (either because she is married or imprisoned)
• A noble knight who has sworn to serve her
• A forbidden, passionate love shared by both
• The impossibility or danger of consummating that love

The best-known example of this is Lancelot’s love for Guinevere, the wife of his best friend and king, Arthur of Britain. Lancelot cannot deny his feelings but cannot act on them without betraying Arthur and exposing Guinevere as the unfaithful wife of a noble king. In Malory’s version of the legend, their affair’s exposure is pivotal in destroying the Knights of the Round Table. Another example is the famous story of Tristan and Iseult by Thomas of Britain (c. 1173 CE) in which young Tristan is asked by his uncle Mark to escort Mark’s fiancé Iseult to his castle. Tristan and Iseult fall in love (in some versions because of a love potion accidentally taken) and their betrayal of Mark is the plot point that drives the rest of the story.

Although scholars continue to debate Eleanor of Aquitaine’s role in developing these kinds of stories, even a cursory knowledge of the woman’s life strongly suggests that courtly love poetry was inspired by her. Like the lady character in the poems, Eleanor was never defined by either of her marriages, she always did precisely as she pleased except for the period in which Henry II had her imprisoned, and she inspired devotion in others. Eleanor’s role seems even more prominent if one entertains the theory that courtly love poetry was actually religious allegory depicting the beliefs of the heretical sect of the Cathars.

The Cathars & Courtly Love

The Cathars (from the Greek for “pure ones”) were a religious sect which flourished in southern France – precisely in the regions of the courts of Eleanor and Marie – in the 12th century CE. The sect evolved from the earlier Bogomils of Bulgaria and adherents were popularly known as Albigensians because the town of Albi was their greatest religious center. The Cathars rejected the teachings of the Catholic Church on the grounds they were immoral and the clergy corrupt and hypocritical.

Catharism was dualist – meaning they saw the world as divided between good (the spirit) and evil (the flesh) – and the Church was decidedly on the side of evil as the clergy was more devoted to earthly pleasures than spiritual pursuits, and the dogma emphasized the weight of sin over the hope of redemption. Cathars renounced the world, lived simply, and devoted themselves to helping others. The Cathar clergy were known as perfecti while adherents were called credentes. A third set of people were the sympathizers – those who remained nominally Catholic but supported Cathar communities and protected them from the Church.

The Church suspected both Eleanor and Marie as sympathizers, and this suspicion was strengthened by the actions of Raymond VI, Count of Toulouse (r. 1194-1222 CE), Eleanor’s son-in-law, who was not only a Cathar sympathizer but secretly the Cathar bishop of his region. Raymond was the most ardent defender of the Cathars when the Church finally launched the Albigensian Crusade against Southern France in 1209 CE.

The correlation between Catharism, Eleanor, and courtly love poetry is that this genre seems to appear out of nowhere at the same time Catharism is flourishing and Eleanor is holding her courts. This theory (advanced, primarily, by the scholar Denis de Rougemont in his Love in the Western World), highlights how one of the main tenets of Catharism was recognition of the female principle in the divine which they recognized as the goddess Sophia (wisdom) and how the core of the belief was dualist. The theory then claims that courtly love poetry was an allegory in which the damsel-in-distress was Sophia, held captive by the Catholic Church, and the brave knight was the Cathar whose duty was to liberate her.

The lady symbolized good as spirit – and so the knight could never consummate his love for her – while the marriage she was trapped in, sanctified by the Church, symbolized the evil of the world. This theory is by no means universally accepted but it should be noted that there seems to be a direct correlation between the activities of the troubadours of southern France and the spread of Catharism in the 12th century CE.

A Social Game

Another theory (advanced by scholar Georges Duby, among others), is that courtly love was a medieval social game played by the upper-class in their courts. Duby writes:

Courtly love was a game, an educational game. It was the exact counterpart of the tournament. As at the tournament, whose great popularity coincided with the flourishing of courtly eroticism, in this game the man of noble birth was risking his life and endangering his body in the hope of improving himself, of enhancing his worth, his price, and also of taking his pleasure, capturing his adversary after breaking down her defenses, unseating her, knocking her down and toppling her. Courtly love was a joust. (57-58)

According to this theory, the lady in the tales serves “to stimulate the ardour of young men and to assess the qualities of each wisely and judiciously. The best man was the man who had served her best” (Duby, 62). This theory accounts for the misogynistic elements of courtly love poetry in that the woman is an object to be conquered sexually, not an individual, or is an arbiter of a man’s worth based solely on her status as noble and, again, not because of who she is as a person.

This aspect of the genre, however, may not be so much misogynistic as idealistic. If courtly love was a game invented by women, then woman-as-prize and woman-as-judge would have served the same purpose of elevating their status. Other scholars have pointed out that there were court games played by the upper class well into the Renaissance which would amount to role-playing and that the courts of love Andreas Capellanus describes were not actual courts but simply games the noble ladies created to amuse themselves; the works of Andreas and Chretien and others just added to the enjoyment or provided ground rules. Leigh Smith writes:

As with any game that depends upon the creation of an alternate reality, the fun depends upon all the participants treating that reality with utmost seriousness. Therefore, Andreas’ treatise may be understandable as a guide to being a successful courtier in such a Court of Love. (Lindahl et. al., 82)

The winner in this game would be the knight who exemplified the virtues of chivalry and courtesy in service to his lady. It is possible these games were played over the course of months – and perhaps that is what was happening at Eleanor’s court at Poitiers c. 1170-1174 CE – but the game theory does not explain the passion of the works themselves, the devotion the knight has to the lady, or their enduring popularity. Most importantly, the game theory does not fully explain why, even if women invented the game, they should suddenly be so elevated in this genre in a way no earlier European literature had done.

Conclusion

The genre was considered completely original by scholars of the 19th and 20th centuries CE who, while recognizing the central motif of the elevation of the lady present in some Roman works and the biblical Song of Songs, had little or no knowledge of the literature of ancient Mesopotamia and Egypt. As noted, ‘courtly love’ was coined by French writer Gaston Paris only in 1883 CE, and the concept was not fully developed until 1936 CE by C. S. Lewis in his Allegory of Love.

These authors were both writing at a time when the understanding of Egyptian hieroglyphics (in Paris’ case) and Mesopotamian cuneiform (for Lewis) was in relative infancy. Many works, from both ancient cultures, had yet to be translated – most famously, The Love Song for Shu-Sin (c. 2000 BCE) from Sumer, considered the world’s oldest love poem, which was not translated until 1951 CE by Samuel Noah Kramer. Works from both cultures that had been translated were not often widely publicized outside of anthropological circles.

Accordingly, writers like Paris and Lewis interpreted the literature of courtly love as something unprecedented in world literature when, actually, it was not; it was simply new to medieval Europe. The Egyptian and Mesopotamian cultures both regarded women highly, and their literature bears witness to that. Somehow, whether as religious allegory or role-playing or simply through the efforts of one woman, the poets of Southern France – with no knowledge of the passionate poems of Mesopotamia or Egypt – produced the same sort of literature in a culture which did not support that vision. Women were consistently devalued and denigrated throughout most of the Middle Ages but, in the poetry of courtly love, they reigned supreme.

Bibliography

• Barber, M. The Cathars: Dualist Heretics in Languedoc in the High Middle Ages. Routledge, 2000.
• Cantor, N. F. The Civilization of the Middle Ages. Harper Perennial, 1994.
• De Rougemont, D. Love in the Western World. Princeton University Press, 1983.
• Duby, G. Love and Marriage in the Middle Ages. University of Chicago Press, 1996.
• Gies, F. & J. Women in the Middle Ages. Harper Perennial, 2018.
• Hollister, C. W. Medieval Europe: A Short History. John Wiley and Sons, 1964.
• Kelly, A. Eleanor of Aquitaine and the Four Kings. Harvard University Press, 1991.
• Kramer,S. N. History Begins at Sumer. University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988.
• Lacy, N. J. The Arthurian Encyclopedia. Peter Bedrick Books, 1987.
• Lewis, C.S. The Allegory of Love. Cambridge University Press, 2013.
• Lindahl, C. et. al. Medieval Folklore: A Guide to Myths, Legends, Tales, Beliefs, and Customs. Oxford University Press, 2002.
• Parry, J. J. Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus. W. W. Norton & Company, 2014.
• Power, E. Medieval Women. Cambridge University Press (1997-10-13), 2019.
• Staines, D. The Complete Romances of Chretien de Troyes. Indiana University Press – Indiana University Press, 1991.

About the Author

Joshua J. Mark (published 2019)

A freelance writer and former part-time Professor of Philosophy at Marist College, New York, Joshua J. Mark has lived in Greece and Germany and traveled through Egypt. He has taught history, writing, literature, and philosophy at the college level.

Creative Commons reprint.

 

By Raymond J. Cormier

While the influence of powerful troubadour motifs is undeniable, let us cite here one brief northern French text as a kind of shorthand, for emphasis. It is a brief narrative or lai that illustrates certain courtly values. Lanval, Marie de France’s eponymous hero, is a sad, forlorn Arthurian knight, abandoned, lonely, and helpless. An otherworldly sequence brings to him a wealthy and supremely stunning noblewoman (a fairy princess) with whom he becomes “well lodged.”

His liberation from the bonds of solitary abandonment lead to liberality (he now gives freely to all comers), the medieval ideal of generosity, “the queen of virtues.”⁹ Kindness and love rescue him, as they do several male characters in modern film.¹⁰ Northern French poets emphasized too the “chivalry topos,” that is, that love motivates the knight in love and he becomes a better person through his adventures, thus meriting his beloved all the more. Noble love ennobles; in this better world too (for Auerbach), the apolitical “feudal ethos” encompasses “self-realization” (116-117).

Courtly thinking existed in the Middle Ages and is manifested in the modern era.¹¹ Each of the films we analyze here will of course not yield up every feature of the courtly mode, but still I sense that there is enough medieval residue and resonance in each to justify the argument, that, as some might put it succinctly, “courtly themes continue to generate artistic creation.” Along these lines, one wonders if the strong continuity of the Troubadour ethos—in particular that longing for a “far-away love”—is what underlies the resonances and residues. Love stories, requited or not, remain viable even in today’s hip-hop world.

It has been reasoned that the two principal and most admired modes of courtly behavior were generosity and joy. Aristocratic courtly culture held that “the lady” was lord, and the lover’s role was to serve her, to sing about her merits and qualities, and carry out all imaginable actions to remain or become worthy of her, in a word, to deserve her.¹² 

The function of love in this context was as dictated by the De amore of Andreas Capellanus (ca. 1185): “Love easily attained is of little value; difficulty in obtaining it makes it precious” and “Everything a lover does ends in the thought of the beloved.”¹³ 

For Auerbach, the synthetic term corteisie embodied values like the “refinement of the laws of combat, courteous social intercourse, service of women” (117). In what is dubbed the long European twelfth century (1050-1250), French humanism predominated, a phenomenon already analyzed historiographically at length.

As Italianist Ronald Witt recently put it (2012: 317): “The term ‘humanism’ aptly describes French culture in the period […].” In this context, interior monologue and dialogue arose from a new awareness of the interior life (the unique individual is now consciously separate from the court), which was further linked to the chivalric adventure/quest whereby audiences yearned for the unusual and the marvelous—now stimulated especially by wondrous stories brought back from the East by returning Crusaders (in particular the First-ca. 1100, and Second-ca. 1150). In discussing this particular type of medieval love, Aldo Scaglione has written (559):

The radical interiorization of the love experience carried with it the impossibility of communicating with the love object (topos of ineffability). Not only did poets profess themselves incapable of communicating to the beloved the depth of their passion, but the very lack of communication was for them both a sign of its depth and a consequence of it, to the point of entailing the complete physical absence of the lady.

Transformation through kindness and love, the frequent quest motif, the rescue of the hero/heroine—such are the narrative innovations associated with these elements (even the ineffable moment can be noted in at least one film, Roxane). Allied terms include honesty and humility—for perfection of the knight depended on his courtly worth, manifested through continuous bravery and feats of arms, humbly accomplished so to enhance and vouchsafe his honor and his nobility.

Such aims for flawlessness were mirrored by the lady’s perfection, inspired too by her knight/liege. Of course, adultery occurs as co-incidental in this context, as does a “religion of love,” whereby mutual suffering and adoration are obligatory¹⁴. Let us see how all this plays out in the series of films selected for analysis.

As Good As It Gets

The romantic comedy As Good As It Gets, the Jack Nicholson and Helen Hunt masterpiece (with Greg Kinnear), has provided the main title of this essay. The iconic line, “You Make Me Want to Be A Better Man,” is spoken by the misanthropic Melvin Udall (Jack Nicholson), whose obsessive-compulsive behavior and pathological germophobia strangle all of his human interactions. In the penultimate sequence, after he affronts and insults Carol (played by Hunt), his apology, necessary to get back into her good wishes, is a confession that he wants to merit her and deserve her respect (enough so that he can have their relationship return to its prior arrangement).

One can say that all his motivations are selfish (arranging to care for Carol’s asthmatic son, putting up with his gay artist neighbor and then the neighbor’s dog), yet he is redeemed in the end, having moderated somewhat his odd manners.¹⁵ If not mere empathy, a kind of love is born in Melvin’s heart—even for his gay neighbor, for the dog, even for his neighbor’s African-American agent, and especially for Carol. For in the end, he is “a better man.”

Pretty Woman

Perhaps no genuinely touching and dreamlike modern film has captioned courtly features as much as Pretty Woman (1990), in which the Richard Gere character (Edward) undergoes a major personality shift, from ruthless business tycoon to generous shipbuilder, as a result of his experience of love for/with (an apparently) blonde streetwalker named Vivian (played by Julia Roberts).¹⁶ The wig disguises, as it were, her true personality. Over and above the film’s obvious Cinderella theme, it has been argued in fact, in a reversal of traditional gender roles, that it is she, Vivian, who, as the “Fair Unknown” (Scala 35), is transformed from “veiled” Hollywood Boulevard prostitute into a truly “noble character,” a change attributable to soul-sharing (with Edward—neither “wimp nor wild man”¹⁷), catalyzed by the experience of a San Francisco opera performance focused on the heroine Violetta (La Traviatta).

Vivian’s real character is revealed too in an early scene when she drives, like a NASCAR expert, Edward’s sports car, then again in the bathtub scene, where she sexually enfolds him in her extra-long legs. But, after their goodbyes, when Edward unexpectedly returns (in a white stretch limo) to Vivian’s apartment at the very end of the film, he scales the fire escape (in spite of his fear of heights) to “rescue the princess in the tower.” He has undergone a total conversion, from emotionless corporate raider to brave, forgiving and loving human.

Tellingly, he asks the now red-haired (and post-feminist) Vivian what happens after the knight rescues the princess, she replies that she saves the hero “right back,” another revelation of a “reversal of gender roles” (Scala 38).¹⁸ And, as Genz recently put the question of the “post-feminist woman” (PFW). The PFW wants to “have it all” as she refuses to dichotomize and choose between her public and private, feminist, and feminine identities. She rearticulates and blurs the binary distinctions between feminism and femininity, between professionalism and domesticity, refuting monolithic and homogeneous definitions of postfeminist subjectivity.¹⁹ 

Reddy, in his analysis of this film posits it as a mirror of the sexual revolution of the 1960s and 1970s (380-381), whereby prostitution is permissible and sexual desire is destygmatized, but still stands in opposition to love, since both characters, now mutually devoted to each other, give up their life of “mere appetites.”²⁰ Edward is thus a better man, Vivian a better woman.

Casablanca

Going back now to the World War II era, we will glance briefly at the great 1942 classic, Casablanca, in which, again surprisingly and ironically, the bitter and cynical refugee hero Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart) is transformed not by passionate love, but in this case through a self-effacing compassion. He just wants his beloved Ilsa (the woman between two men story), played famously by Ingrid Bergman) to be happy, for, as he remarks to her—“We’ll always have Paris.”

In the final sequence, Rick, his tough-guy veneer now gone, surrenders two objects, one tangible, the other human—i.e., the vital letters of transit for transport out of Morocco, along with his chance for love with Ilsa. In a meeting with her and her husband Lazlo (the Resistance-fighter) at the Casablanca airport, the now-noble Rick swallows his resentment toward her and yields himself to a new emotion, empathy mixed with admiration for both Ilsa’s devotion and Lazlo’s political cause. And he opines: “It doesn’t take much to see that the problems of three little people don’t amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world.” In a dramatic gesture of magnanimity, Rick turns Ilsa over to the freedom fighter. Generosity and self-sacrifice redeem the hero as it will the other protagonists, even in different ways.

Beauty and the Beast

At this point, we will turn to three animated films (one of which is inspired by a live-action archetypal film produced just a few years after Casablanca). I refer to Beauty and the Beast, known today mainly through the 1991 Disney version. The lesser-known account that inspired the modern and magical remake is the Jean Cocteau classic, a contemporary parable based on a seventeenth-century French tale.

The flawless Belle—to pay for her father’s transgression and obliged to dwell within the Beast’s castle—finds the beast repulsive, but, eventually, love is the potion that will transform both her and the Beast within; he is saved through Belle’s own generous change of heart as she responds to his kindness and favors. Similarly, Belle’s pity, patience, growing admiration and slowly-receding fear of the Beast, brings her to lower her guard and embrace the creature.

Once she does love him (as foretold), the enchantment magically evaporates, the Beast is tamed and everything is joyfully transformed—by their love and new-found respect for each other.²¹

Hercules

Redemption of a different sort rescues the mythological hero Hercules from the depths of weakened loss and despair. In this 1997 Disney film, the once-powerful and immortal youth attempts to save the life of Megara, his beloved (to provoke the hero, she was slain by Hercules’ nemesis Hades). His awesome powers had been taken from him by the villain but Hercules miraculously regains his strength through mutual love, and is on his way to become a “true hero”— just as (Samson-like) he lifts a huge column that had fallen on Meg. He is wholly and joyfully restored—by love—as a proper and divine hero, and elevated to Mt. Olympus.

Tangled

In Disney’s 2010 Tangled, the heroine Rapunzel undergoes a major personality shift as a result of her encounter with the hero Eugene. It is in fact he who is responsible for getting her out of the imprisoning tower (using a ruse along with the appeal of the mysterious tiara—it’s hers, it is discovered, and she’s the princess!).

In an interesting twist and role-reversal, Eugene tells Rapunzel that she was his new dream and Rapunzel says he was hers. Eugene dies in Rapunzel’s arms. In despair, Rapunzel sings the “Healing Incantation,” and begins to cry. Moved by her love and kindness, the last remnants of a magical flower’s enchantments condense in her tear, which heals Eugene. Later, the two return to the castle to meet her parents and eventually marry, living happily ever after. Rapunzel is redeemed through reciprocal love.

Excalibur

One must expect courtly themes in a medieval film like Excalibur (1981), set presumably in the late fourteenth or fifteenth century, bearing “mythical truth, not historical,” according to its director John Boorman.²² When the charismatic character of Lancelot first appears, he battles with Arthur’s knights, then with Arthur himself. Summoning such superhuman power that the sword Excalibur is cracked in half, Arthur overcomes Lancelot, though the new champion enigmatically but with great nobility bows to the king and offers him fealty.

With the twelve-year peace across Britain established, along with the Round Table and its famed fellowship, Arthur proclaims he will marry. The relationship between Lancelot and Guinevere at first encapsulates what Scaglione named (see above) the “impossibility of communicating with the love object (topos of ineffability).” But then, while escorting the bride Guinevere to the wedding (each, now love struck, having already undergone a coup de foudre), Lancelot is asked by her if he will find a soul mate to love and marry. His reply goes like this: I have found someone. It is you, Guinevere. I will love no other while you live. “I will love you always as queen and wife of my best friend.”

Several scenes later, the queen is charged with adultery and Lancelot (now aware of her unhappy marriage) is at once named her champion—to defend her honor. Such a scenario is familiar to scholars, but surely the millions of non-specialists who have seen the film must relate somehow to this courtly episode.

As if enacting a Occitan love lyric, each has been mightily unfaithful: Guinevere in her longing glances, Lancelot in his fixed staring. But finally they must surrender to their passion. Their shameful infidelity, a deep wound, paralleled by Arthur’s own (unwilling) incestuous coupling with his half-sister Morgana, brings on a terre gaste, a horrid, morbid and gross wasting of both Arthur’s body and the land. The courtly and anti-courtly elements here predominate: the lovers’ religion of love easily nullifies any idea of a stylized game of flirtation. No one is improved this time.

Roxanne

In the romantic comedy, Roxanne (1987), brilliantly adapted by Steve Martin from Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac, the astronomer heroine (Daryl Hannah) argues with the genuinely courtly hero (C. D. Bates, Martin’s tennis-playing fireman). In the final sequence (to this woman between two men story) the hero reveals himself as the epitome of generosity by interceding for another man and wooing the heroine on his behalf. Bates says in the end that all Roxanne wanted was the perfect man who was both physically beautiful, emotionally mature and verbally adept.

Finally, Bates (who loved her from the beginning, but direct communication with her was not possible—once more, the ineffable!) and Roxanne forgive one another as she confesses her love for him, in spite of his extraordinarily characteristic nose: it gives him uniqueness, she thinks, observing that flat-nosed people are boring and featureless. Feelings of compassion, admiration, tenderness and understanding change her point of view. The joyful humor and big-heartedness of the film charm the viewer.

The Matrix

We turn next to a blockbuster, the mysterious 1999 science fiction “cyberpunk-cyber thriller,” The Matrix. Amidst all the computer-generated graphics, amazing action scenes and visual effects, futuristic costumes, the enigmatic significance of The Matrix itself, and the secretive feelings Trinity (Carrie Ann Moss) experiences for the hero, Neo (Keanu Reeves), the story really embodies a simple and beautiful fairy-tale component. Trinity’s destiny was to fall in love with “the One” (prophesied as a savior-healer and super manipulator of The Matrix).

The romantic relationship of the two is not revealed until the very end of the film, but Trinity’s act of kissing Neo powerfully resuscitates him within the sentient world (his interfaced physical body) and within The Matrix as well, where his avatar has been active. It is a phenomenal moment when the obscure meaning of The Matrix, Trinity’s love (from afar!) for Neo and Neo’s resurrection and fate are revealed all at once. Trinity does not have to quest for Neo: his sentient body remained right there with her in the laboratory. One can argue that Neo’s life is saved (literally) through the efforts and love of a beloved: Trinity has loved Neo all along. One can also posit that Neo’s acceptance of his destiny as “the One” is augmented by his awareness of Trinity’s love for him.

At the very opening of the film’s sequel, The Matrix Reloaded, the two have now become lovers, and, in one of the film’s final sequences, Neo has a choice: save mankind from extinction (it would happen through a “system reboot”), resulting in the survival of the destructive machines (but not humanity), or choosing to save Trinity’s life: in a face-to-face battle with an Agent (humanoid robot of The Matrix), she crashes out of a window and a bullet pierces her heart. In his abbreviated and breathtaking quest, Neo catches her in mid-air, but she dies. Loath to allow Trinity’s death, Neo uses his superhuman abilities to remove the bullet and revive her. The balance of the two scenes is perfect: in The Matrix it is Trinity who rescues Neo, while in the sequel Neo the hero saves his beloved through love. These films do not illustrate every aspect of courtliness or court culture, but the revealing moment does transport the viewer to a realm of heightened emotion. As in Hercules, love reigns supreme.²³

Slumdog Millionaire

Our final film is Slumdog Millionaire, billed as a kind of bildungsroman, a straightforward story about Jamal Malik, an eighteen-year old orphan from the slums of Mumbai. But the film has multiple strata, and underlying the story is Jamal’s search for his “far-away love”—a theme made legendary by twelfth-century Occitan poet Jaufre Rudel’s amor de lonh.²⁴ As the film’s narrative revolves around “Kaun Banega Crorepati,” the Indian TV version of Who Wants To Be A Millionaire? each chapter of Jamal’s increasingly layered story reveals where he learned the responses to the show’s seemingly impossible questions.

To witness the unfolding of Jamal’s life journey—surviving as a street urchin/career thief, his many colorful adventures, gang encounters, his job serving tea in a call center—helps to explain several mysteries, like how and why he ended up as a featured contestant, but most especially how he knows the answers. His life story—in reality a quest—includes being orphaned at an early age; growing up with an older brother, who was both his guardian/protector and antagonist (a kind of rival and dark “other”); and having a relationship since childhood with another orphaned child, a girl named Latika.

A parallel plot line deals with the law—in the present-time episodes, the police grill him to determine how Jamal can be doing so well on the show when others who are brighter, more educated and wealthier fail. Is he cheating? Is it purely luck? But the fact is, the complex and interwoven story is simply a tale of love: every action of Jamal is motivated by his search for his lost childhood love, Latika.

The resplendent joy manifested in the final sequences—an emblem, we recall, of courtly life (Battais 135)—unlocks all the puzzles and enigmas of the film.²⁵ With great generosity of character, Jamal, enduring and shaking off all sorts of suffering and pain, was searching endlessly for Latika: that is why he found a way to get himself recruited to be a contestant for the game show, for he knew she would be watching and that they would be able to meet together, finally, at a designated locale, and no doubt live “happily ever after” and in joy.²⁶

Conclusion

As we have seen, in these selected films (and in many other contemporary ones) transformation through kindness and love frequently manifests itself as a part of the finale. The quest motif very often subsumes the conversion—not necessarily as dramatic as an Augustinian one—yet nevertheless resulting in the rescue of the hero/heroine, where rescue is a generic term including redemption, resuscitation and/or vindication. Melvin Udall, Edward and Vivian, Lancelot, Neo and even Rick Blaine—all are made over or made better by love. Beauty and the Beast, Hercules, Rapunzel and Eugene—these are characters transformed from within; Jamal Malik’s life quest, motivated by a far-away love, ends in a glorious epiphany. An explanatory rationale for the preceeding essay might suggest how faintly aware of these themes our readers might be, but the need remains to inform them of their exact correspondence with courtly love themes. However much it has been transplanted, the courtly legacy sustains. And “the better man” (or woman) survives today.

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NOTES

¹ William A. Reddy, The Making of Romantic Love, 14-16; on “desire as sexual appetite,” see 105-107, 220, 351-352; on romantic love and anthropology, 16-21. See as well James Schultz, Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness…, xvi, xxi, 91-94 (on the courtly paragon)—another recent publication, more specifically on courtly love itself, that posits an eroticization of noble power arising from paradigmatic roles of refinement and social distinction.
Also topically of interest is Galician’s work, Sex, Love and Romance, more negatively-oriented self-help guide than scholarly analysis, deals with “rescue fantasies” (26), courtly love, 28-29, as well as more than a few films, including Coming to America (156), Ever After and Far and Away (169), Legally Blonde (199), Jerry Maguire (206) and What Women Want (138). ?

² Reddy’s focus unfortunately occludes the influences on twelfth-century European verse and romance of, among others, antecedent Arabic poetry as well as Marian devotional lyrics. ?

³ Magda Bogin, The Women Troubadours, p. 56. ?

⁴ Celestino Deleyto, “Between Friends,” 169. ?

⁵ Selection was nowhere near as systematic as that found in the modern media study by Johnson and Holmes; their “RomCom” films all had implications for adolescents, containing in fact (they concluded) contradictory messages (366) with both desirable and undesirable outcomes to romantic relationships; only four of the forty films studied seemed familiar to me (You’ve Got Mail, Runaway Bride, What Women Want, and Sabrina—all still non-courtly it would seem). ?

⁶ This essay is dedicated to a colleague and friend of over forty years, Deborah Nelson-Campbell of Rice University.
Regarding other films I might have selected for study here, or recent scholarship that I might have “engaged” with, lack of space obliges me to disregard a spate of references to medieval legacies in cinema: medieval scholar Kathryn Hume deals mainly with fantasy, not courtly matters; extreme and heavily theoretical works like Bernau and Bildhauer’s Filming the Middle Ages or Pugh and Aronstein’s The Disney Middle Ages (major recipe discovery: traditional gender roles are reinforced in Disney movies, and Tangled is labeled “racist, speciesist…”—204 ). In theme-based studies like A Knight at the Movies, Aberth is oriented more to epic than romance and to films like Camelot, El Cid, Robin Hood, Seventh Seal, The Navigator, or to Joan of Arc films, and he does not mention any potential aspects of courtly values; while comprehensive and definitive Finke and Shichtman’s Cinematic Illuminations focuses on historicism and film conventions and does not deal with courtly subjects, nor does Elliott’s more recent Remaking the Middle Ages whileoffering innovative semiotic and historiographical analyses. Driver and Ray’s The Medieval Hero glosses over chivalry and knighthood (12-13, 44-45, esp. 73-87) but does not confront courtly issues directly. Laurence Raw reviews several other recent books in this category. ?

⁷ See C. Stephen Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility. For D. W. Robertson, the medieval phenomenon never existed: “I have never been convinced that there was any such thing as what is usually called courtly love during the Middle Ages” (1). ?

⁸ On fin’amors see Reddy, 164-167; also, Burns, Kelly and Monson provide full details and background on the subject; see Kim for the term “amour courtois.” ?

⁹ On this work, Burns writes with urgency (47): “As courtly heroines resist, recast, and manipulate paradigms of femininity, the standard scenarios available for male lovers shift as well. The anomalous and highly courtly fairy heroine in Marie de France’s twelfth-century Lai de Lanval, for example, openly displays the stunning beauty and refined behavior of the classic, commodified courtly lady while riding heroically to defend her seemingly helpless lover in a legal suit. The effect of this woman’s uncharacteristic participation in the legal system at King Arthur’s court is to disrupt it substantially and to defy simultaneously our preconceived notions of gendered options in the courtly world […]. While this heroine plays both parts of lovely lady and heroic knight, her lover Lanval is cast as stunningly ‘beautiful’ but not effeminate. He is a courtly suitor propositioned atypically by the lady’s expression of desire and a lover not required to prove his chivalric mettle in deeds of prowess”—obviously a view of the text quite different from mine. ?

¹⁰ My methodology will not include reference to courtliness or to the pragmatics of politeness/impoliteness (see e.g., Grice, Studies in the Way of Words); nor will I deal with obsessive-compulsive, erotic and neurotic Tristan & Iseut-type passionate love, as demonstrated in the movie 10 (George fanatically pursues Jenny) and/or Fatal Attraction (psychopathic Alex hounds Dan endlessly). As Genz observes (119), “[t]he film’s villain, Alex Forrest (Glenn Close), is forcefully prevented from ‘having it all’ as her joint desires to succeed in her career and have a child with her lover are represented as equivalent to madness and ultimately resulting in death. Thus, the backlash reinforces the division between professional and domestic world […], maintaining that women have to opt between a typical existence as a woman and independence.” On the other hand, At First Sight features a generous female (another “gender-bending” role reversal) who attempts to “save” the blind hero (i.e., find a way to bring him sightedness) but complications thwart her success. ?

¹¹ Contemporary relevance is found as well in the writings of theorist Slavoj Zizek who saw courtly love as masochistic; one reviewer wrote that Zizek “sees courtly love everywhere still. It’s not a medieval phenomenon only, but a contemporary one. The femme fatale is an heiress of the cruel lady of courtly love […].” (Leithart, “Zizek and Courtly Love”—a account of The Metastases of Enjoyment: On Women and Causalityby Zizek.) ?

¹² Battais, 133-135. Cf. G. Duby, ”Le modèle courtois,” in Histoire des femmes en Occident, 261-276. Reddy, 108-109, 219-220, describes what he calls a “longing for association” in the context of romantic love. ?

¹³ De amore, ed. Walsh, 1.6.371 (146), 377 (148), 399 (156); 2.8.44 (282). ?

¹⁴ See C. S. Lewis, Allegory of Love. On “love service” to/for the Lady, see Grossel’s essay. ?

¹⁵ Surprisingly, the final scene of Saturday Night Fever in which Tony and Stephanie conclude the story, reveals a similar sentiment: Stephanie—“There were other reasons why I was hanging around you. / Tony—What do you mean? / St—You made me feel better. You gave me admiration, you know? Respect. Support. / T—Stephanie, maybe now, when I’m going to be in town, maybe we could see each other. I don’t mean like that. I know you’re thinking I’m promoting your pussy. I mean like friends. Like you said: we could help each other. / St—You want to be friends? / T—I’d like to be friends with you. / St—Do you think you know how? Do you think you could be friends with a girl? Could you stand that? / T—The truth? I don’t know. I could try. That’s all I can say. / St—OK.” < http://www.script-o-rama.com/movie_scripts/s/saturday-night-fever-script-transcript.html>. Accessed 12 Oct. 2015. ?

¹⁶ For Deleyto (170), this film curiously reveals a “postmodern aesthetic of ironic vampirization of traditional rituals.” ?

¹⁷ See Peberdy’s article. For Pretty Woman, Reddy, 176-179, 180, sees parallels with the Lancelot romance by Chrétien de Troyes ; for Lancelot and adultery, parallels with Casablanca. ?

¹⁸ Perhaps a stretch, but I see a parallel here with the famous pastorela of innovative Occitan troubadour Marcabru: the rhythm and tone of the dialogue, its frankness (the shepherdess, in the chilly wind, has admirable nipples; the knight wants to see her beneath him to do together the “sweet thing” (per far la cauza dousanna), etc.) remind me of the banter between Edward and Vivian, particularly during the first half of the film. ?

¹⁹ Genz, 98. The term today is the “higher-harder-faster school of female achievement” and, in the oracular proclamation of Ms. Sandberg (CEO of Facebook): “require your partner to do half the work at home, don’t underestimate your own abilities, and don’t cut back on ambition out of fear that you won’t be able to balance work and children.” (Kantor NYT) ?

²⁰ In this regard, see Jeffers-McDonald on the sub-genre “radical romantic comedy” of the sixties (59-84), that interrogates romance’s ideology itself, a result of the profound social changes of the era; she perceives in such films a conspicuous self-reflexivity, self-consciousness and self-absorption—what one called narcissism back in the day. ?

²¹ Fairy-tale specialist Jack Zipes has this to say about the numerous Beauty and the Beast films: they are “self help films [that] basically [offer] variations on the same theme: how to help attractive, seemingly strong women realize that appearances are deceiving and that happiness in wedlock is within their grasp if they understand the goodness of good-hearted men” (239). ?

²² As for relevance and continuity of appeal, one may note the film’s total domestic gross: $35 million—a testament to its success with audiences. ?

²³ Chaos, death and mayhem reign in yet another film worthy of mention in this context: The Wild One (1953): the motorcycle hooliganism cannot overshadow the eight-minute romantic and quiet interlude (the hero safely escorts the girl away from violence), during which a desperate Kathy (Mary Murphy) expresses to the brooding Johnny (Marlon Brando) her yearning for salvation by “someone” who will rescue her from small-town mediocrity. ?

²⁴ See, for example, Jaufre Rudel, “Quan lo rius de la fontana…” (amors de terra lonhdana) and “Lanquan li jorn son lonc en may…” (l’amor de lonh) in Poètes et romanciers du Moyen Age, ed. Pauphilet, 780-784. ?

²⁵ Channeling St. Francis of Assisi, Battais observes (136) that pain delights the courtly lover since it can no doubt lead to ultimate happiness. ?

²⁶ Michael Novak observes, on the very subject of that “rarefied spiritual passion” in a “higher sphere” known only to romantic lovers:. “Romantic love is a transfiguring force, something beyond delight and pain, an ardent beatitude, purer, more spiritual, more uplifting than physical “hooking up.” It is not a sated appetite, but in fact quite the opposite. It loves the feeling of never being satisfied, of being always caught up in the longing, of dwelling in the sweetness of desire […]. This is why romantic love desperately needs obstacles […].” On this, Zizek would say that such impediments elevate the value of the beloved (see note 10). ?

*First published in 2015 in the Americana Journal. Creative Commons.

This is a response to a video¹ by Colttaine regarding Briffault’s law. I would encourage people to watch Paul Elam and Peter Wright’s video² on this subject and then watch the response video from Colttaine. People can also read my previous articles here³ and here⁴ on Briffault’s law as well. I don’t have an issue with Colttaine personally, what I have an issue with is ideological dogma posing as science and the arrogant narrow-minded thinking behind it. With my past scientific background, I cannot just sit back and say nothing on this subject and surrender to the groupthink surrounding Briffault’s law.

Absolutism And Categorical Thinking

This is how Briffault’s law is written when it is discussed in the manosphere:

“The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family. Where the female can derive no benefit from association with the male, no such association takes place.” ^5,6

Firstly it is not a logical fallacy to argue that Briffault’s law is inconsistent with genuine red pill philosophy and men going their own way. Briffault’s law is written in absolute terms. Females we are told^5,6, control all the conditions of the animal family. Not some of the conditions, not in general and not on average. As if this absolute meaning was not clear enough, Colttaine has said Briffault did not go far enough and that “women control all the conditions period”⁷. People can watch his entire video where he said that, it was not taken by Paul and Peter out of context. His commentary on Briffault’s law is about as absolute as you can get.

Briffault’s law is routinely presented from pockets of the manosphere that promote it as an absolute law of nature. It is not written or conveyed with any exceptions or limitations, just with extensions describing female opportunism. Female omnipotence is written into the very basis of this so-called law of nature and it is reasonable from how the law is written and presented, for someone to form the view that this law is to be taken as an absolute rule.

It has taken Paul and Peter Wright’s video for Colttaine to make a response video and explicitly state that Briffault’s law should not be taken as an absolute law of nature. If we all agree on that, then the law itself needs to be either dismissed, reworded or elaborated on because it is written in absolute terms without any further clarification. More importantly it should have never been conveyed to men in such absolute terms in the first place and the people questioning the absolute nature of the wording of the law should not be derided for it.

Briffault’s “law” was, in any case, aimed explicitly at non-human animals as confirmed by Briffault in the same passage, saying  “There is, in fact, no analogy between the animal family and the patriarchal human family. The former is entirely the product of the female’s instincts, and she, not the male, is the head.” -citation, The Mothers⁶. How about we consider the context of what Briffault was actually saying, instead of spinning it to mean something else.

Even the generalisation Briffault assigns exclusively to animals is highly questionable, given the numerous examples in the animal kingdom of male social dominance and its influence on animal behaviour and evolution. We should also consider monogamous species where both sexes invest in offspring like humans do and other species where the sex roles are reversed and it is the males primarily investing in offspring and selecting mates while the females put in the bulk of mating effort. Life is extremely diverse and applying generalisations about animal behaviour can have limited application.

The reality is that you cannot on the one hand argue that men can go their own way and rise above our gynocentric culture and on the other hand argue women control all the conditions of society. By definition women would control the very psychological condition of all males absolutely, if Briffault’s law was operating as it is written and conveyed. Briffault’s law leaves no room for male choice or for men to exercise any power over their own lives. The only logical fallacy here is the delusion Briffault’s law is red pill knowledge and not just an overly simplistic and outdated statement referring to animals from a book saturated with gynocentric bias and written almost a century ago when biology and psychology were still in their infancy as scientific disciplines!

Colttaine at least has the intelligence to concede that Briffault’s law is not an actual scientific law of nature. Excellent! Then we should stop calling it a law. It is absolutely ridiculous to compare the universal acknowledgment of the law of gravity with the acceptance of Briffault’s law. We have centuries of scientific theory and empirical evidence for gravity.

Briffault’s law is not even close to the standard of proof we have for gravity. Gravity is also the weakest of the fundamental forces and our basic equations for gravity recognise that it is not an absolute force and it has a quantifiable strength. In contrast, Briffault’s law acknowledges no limitation to the degree of female influence in society and its adherents instead double down and tell us the law does not go far enough in conveying the degree of female social omnipotence.

Just as the force of gravity at the center of a black hole does not resemble the force of gravity across the entire universe, neither does the claim of women controlling all the conditions of society accurately reflect reality. Anyone with a functioning brain that is not infected with ideology and dogma, can conclude that we live in a complex world where neither sex alone really has complete control over all or even most of the conditions of society.

Not even as a general rule is it the case that women or men on average control the conditions of society. As gynocentric as our culture is, society is not some monolithic matriarchy where women call all of the shots. When we consider history and the third world, the lack of female omnipotence is even more stark and more apparent.

Feminist patriarchy theory makes exactly the same mistakes as Briffault’s law when making broad generalisations of civilisation and history. These sorts of simplistic descriptions of society tend to breakdown when you look at society and history in detail. Just as patriarchy theory is presented like it is an actual testable scientific theory (which it is not), Briffault’s law has a false cloak of legitimacy embedded in its name with the use of the word “law”. Both ideas frame society in fairly black and white categorical terms. This is what Prof. Sapolsky called in his first lecture on behavioural biology, “categorical thinking”⁸.

Adherents of both sets of ideas suffer from serious confirmation bias and selectively rely upon facts and evidence they think support their perspectives and omit inconvenient facts and evidence that do not. They make bold leaps and interpretations of the evidence and facts they present and then confuse their interpretations as the actual evidence itself. Their twisted interpretation of science is not evidence, it is sophistry warping legitimate research to convey nonsense.

Contrary to Colttaine’s opinion, we can’t just simply ignore the gynocentric bias of Briffault and his upbringing, because this bias may have impacted what sort of research and arguments he put forward and what he omitted. Sapolsky went through numerous examples in his first lecture on how the ideological leanings and biases of certain prominent scientists, led to the propagation of half-baked theories throughout the early 20^th century in Briffault’s time. Many of these theories have subsequently been disproven and had terrible outcomes.

Colttaine has argued⁹ men are mentally and physically superior to women. Perhaps he should read anthropologist Ashley Montagu’s book, The Natural Superiority Of Women¹⁰  and the one-sided reporting of the scientific research Montagu cites, if as per his video Colttaine truly thinks we should just focus on the validity of the arguments, facts and evidence people present and not give any consideration to the biases or prejudices of a scientist and consequently not be alerted to look for the research and evidence they may omit in their work.

I don’t think we should just ignore the clear gynocentric bias evident in Briffault’s work or his mother issues. The lives and upbringing of people affect how they think, how they conduct research and report information and the conclusions they draw about the world. That includes scientists and especially applies to scientists like Briffault from the early 20^th century that were working in disciplines still in their infancy!

There is a reason there are often conflict of interest statements in scientific papers. Unfortunately the evidence in studies and the conclusions that are derived from the evidence collected, can be distorted by bias and prejudice. Evidence or studies can be omitted from papers and literature reviews, or even rigged or fabricated. There have been plenty of examples of that in science throughout history and also in the present day. Even entire fields can ignore legitimate science because of deeply engrained biases in that area of research.

For the record neither sex is in an overall sense superior, both sexes have their own sets of evolved strengths and weaknesses. That reality has not stopped people with a strong prejudice doing selective reviews of the scientific literature and arguing otherwise though. Female supremacists will argue women are superior citing women’s greater immune system, lower susceptibility to X-linked chromosomal diseases and higher academic achievement and ignore or dismiss everything else. Male supremacists will cite men’s greater physical strength, aerobic fitness and the IQ literature reporting a higher average male IQ and ignore or dismiss everything else.

Neither group dispassionately reviews the whole picture, which clearly shows a mixture of the two extremes with neither sex really being superior in an overall sense to the other. Claims of one sex being superior to the other, are classical examples of what categorical thinking leads to. Science is only as scientific as the level of impartiality of scientists will permit. Sometimes unfortunately what we get as a result of bias and prejudice from researchers, is junk science rather than actual science.

You have to really sit back and wonder about the mindset of someone arguing men are mentally and physically superior to women in one video and then arguing in other videos how something as gynocentric and female supremacist as Briffault’s law is generally valid and a useful explanation for male and female behaviour!

I had planned to cite a plethora of research debunking this ridiculous notion that we should regard females in our society as omnipotent. Whilst I have cited some of the research I had originally planned to discuss in this article which I will get to later, I gave it further thought and realised the futility of spending weeks writing a much larger article and going through all of the research I actually have.

I cannot convince people that have made up their mind and subscribed to dogma. I cannot convince people who religiously believe those with a pussy make all of the rules that this is not the case, any more than I can convince someone who believes in flat Earth that the Earth is indeed round. All I can do is appeal to the basic reason and commonsense of those people that still have an open mind on the subject.

The reality is that men set the boundaries they will accept and if men start with the belief that women essentially control all the conditions of society, then the logical result of that absolute belief is learned helplessness. That is not an opinion, it is just basic logic and what would be expected to occur in a social environment where Briffault’s law is perceived to operate. What other eventual conclusion could men reach with such an absolute statement?

Unfortunately some men do, to a degree, develop a form of learned helplessness from such beliefs, just as many feminists develop a mentality of perpetual victimhood from patriarchy theory. Could it be perhaps that the truth might be somewhere in the middle between Briffault’s law and patriarchy theory? No that is heresy to the ideologues!

Not adhering to Briffault’s law does not mean you deny gynocentrism exists. Gynocentrism is indeed a powerful force, but it is not absolute and it is not unassailable. I have been quite emphatic about that fact in my writing (again see links here³ and here⁴). Other forces in our society can and do influence the direction of society and the actions of governments, corporations and the behaviour of the public. Gynocentrism often has very little relevance to decision making in a number of domains and there are numerous examples of this.

It is hardly the case that women control all of the conditions of our society, or men as a group for that matter! It is also the case that gynocentrism itself is often used for purposes other than women’s interests. Corporations have enjoyed enormous financial gain from funding feminism and ensuring both sexes are working like rats on a treadmill and consuming. Was that funding all because corporations were genuinely concerned for women, or was it because they wanted to drive female consumer spending and virtue signal ultimately for financial interests? Let us get real here.

Some societies in different places of the world and at different times in history are very gynocentric and some have relatively little or no gynocentrism. Even in very gynocentric societies, there are often pockets of such societies which are devoid of gynocentrism. Gynocentrism can also be overridden by more powerful forces, and there are plenty of examples of that also. One example out of the many I could cite, has been the recent feminist and traditionalist temper tantrums over the establishment endorsements of transwomen participating in women’s sports, and the crackdown on gynocentric transphobia.

Despite these gynocentric protests, the advance of transwomen into women’s spaces, along with the deplatforming and silencing of transphobic feminists holding a gynocentric agenda continues. Gynocentrism is a powerful force in society, but let us not emulate the feminist fantasy that the social influence of the opposite sex is the sole or primary determinant for the current state of our society!

Not even as some generalisation or average is Briffault’s law even remotely correct of human societies. The state of society and the conditions within society, are far more complicated than a simplistic concept like Briffault’s law or patriarchy theory can accurately predict. At the end of this article, I will propose an alternative principle to Briffault’s law which I think is far more accurate and useful for men.

Male Mate Choice Is Not Trivial

Not a single scientist cites Briffault’s law as a valid theory or a law of nature. That also includes the prominent scientists Colttaine refers to with pictures of them in his video. It is widely recognized¹¹ in the scientific community that male mate choice exists and plays a substantial role in human behaviour. Contrary to what Colttaine suggests, male mate choice is not just exercised primarily by a handful of the top men in a tribe. Most hunter-gatherer societies as I will discuss later, are only mildly polygynous and most of the women in these societies are actually in monogamous relationships with men. Most men in general exercise some substantive level of male mate choice and place some significant level of sexual selection pressure on women.

Whilst we can argue about the relative degree of choosiness of mates by men and women, the reality is that male mate choice does impact the social dynamics between the sexes. Female intrasexual competition in our species exists, so does female jealousy with respect to mates and so does the sexual selection of females by males. We can measure the effects of male mate choice on social behaviour and observe the signs of its influence on female biology and psychology. Often we underestimate rather than overestimate these effects because they are different from what we see in males. The more covert form of relational aggression between women vs the more overt physical aggression between men is one example of this.

The influence of male mate choice is not trivial or something that is dwarfed by female mate choice. The evidence of its impact is of high significance to explaining female behaviour and biology. It is certainly the case that when we look at short-term mating females are more choosey than males, although that difference is quite small relative to the sex difference in height. However, male mate choice increases dramatically when we start talking about long-term mating dynamics and relationships, where males become a lot more choosey than they are with casual sex.

The papers by Prof. Steve Stewart-Williams (linked here¹², here¹³ and here¹⁴)  which Colttaine flippantly dismisses, are hardly obscure articles. They have been cited many times and the papers themselves cite numerous studies from the fields of evolutionary psychology, anthropology and the wider life sciences. The papers are not referring to a single study or to a single set of evidence, and that is clear if you actually read them. The author has more than adequately addressed criticism of his original paper in his follow up article¹³.

Essentially as Stewart-Williams successfully argues, there is no actual disagreement with his original paper and the wider literature on the significance of sex differences (which is what most of the criticism was directed at). Just because the psychological sex differences in humans are relatively small compared to our physical sex differences and the sexual dimorphism of other animals, does not then mean they have no importance and Stewart-Williams never argued otherwise.

Aside from that, the popularity of a paper or an area of research does not make it any less accurate. There was a time not long ago, when most people in the scientific community did not believe in plate tectonics or even the theory of evolution. Our scientific understanding is constantly evolving and our present understanding of biology should not be taken as unquestioned dogma. I would have thought this would have been learnt from the pandemic and how off the mark some of our early modelling was.

Hyper Female Hypergamy And Hookup Culture

Online dating websites and the skew we see in finding a match on some of those sites between males vs females, is not just purely a function of female hypergamy. Modernity and the access we now have thanks to social media, has had the effect of amplifying many underlying psychological drives. That would also include the pattern of hypergamy we see in women. What we are observing to a degree, is a form of hyper female hypergamy.

On top of that, we have an education system and a work environment that discriminates against men and boys and preferences women and girls. The logical end result of that is fewer men meeting the same levels of income and employment relative to women than they did decades ago. Women want men to earn more money than them and then at the same time demand we close the gender wage gap and implement quotas in the workplace for women. The point I am making, is that the mate choice mismatch we are observing is not exactly entirely a result of innate female hypergamy.

Our modern environment is behind a lot of it. Just consider the effect of birth control alone on female sexual behaviour and the long run effect that has on female mate choice and dating. We are way beyond talking about just natural levels of female hypergamy being able to explain the disparity between men and women on dating sites where it concerns the level of choosiness of mates.

One has to also point out the reality as well that quite a few of these dating websites are just used by people to garner attention and have casual sex, rather than make serious attempts to find an actual person for a relationship. We know the relative choosiness of the sexes is considerably more similar where it concerns long-term mate selection for relationships.

Many men looking for relationships and that have actual standards, are not using the websites Colttaine refers to in his video. The pool of men using those sites and arguably the pool of women also, are not necessarily representative of the wider population. Many men are not even looking anymore for a relationship and have pulled out of dating entirely because what is on offer from women is simply not good enough.

That leaves a skewed pool of men with lower standards still looking on these sites, many of whom are not attractive to women for the same reasons their standards for women are so low. Often the men are just looking for a casual fling on these sites, not an actual relationship and so are less choosey.

In contrast many of the women using these sites are doing so primarily for attention and often overvalue themselves without ever realising that is why they are single and on these sites in the first place. I would exercise some caution in just automatically assuming we can generalise data from these dating websites onto the general population.

Many young men are actually single now by choice. They want to be single when they look at what is on offer and many of them do not even know MGTOW exists. Men are figuring it all out without even knowing about MGTOW. For every incel there are 10 men opting out of dating and enjoying the bachelor lifestyle. Then women complain in the media about where all the good men went.

All the modern hookup culture and hyper female hypergamy does in the long run, is concentrate the power in the dating market into the hands of alpha male Chads. Women chase these men and expect them to enter into a relationship with them and eventually marry them. The alpha Chads have no interest in this and have their casual fling with them and then go onto the next woman.

Sure, it can certainly backfire for these alpha Chads and I certainly would not recommend having a rotating buffet of female partners with all of the risks involved. However for women chasing these men, they waste all of their time chasing them in their twenties, then want to settle down with them in their thirties and get to their forties and then wonder why they are still single. Meanwhile the alpha Chads are out with their younger female counterparts! See how that works? They reap what they sow. Tom Leykis laughs and talks about this pattern all of the time.

Our Ancestral Heritage

As for the genetic research Colttaine cites allegedly claiming twice as many women passed on their genes compared to men in our prehistoric past and the implied assertion that this automatically means female mate choice was fierce, male competition for mates was high and on average only 1 man reproduced for every 2 women (or at times 17 women for every 1 man), modelling can be wrong. We have seen how wrong modelling can be during the pandemic and from past research claiming the Y chromosome was going to eventually disappear. Much to the ire of radical feminists, the claim that the Y chromosome was disappearing was later shown to be wrong^15,16, and I would encourage people to do their own research on the claims about how lethal COVID was at the start of the pandemic and what it actually turned out to be.

This sort of analysis that Colttaine cites of our prehistoric past is tentative at best and needs to be regarded with at least some level of caution. Modelling our ancestral past from 10,000s of years ago with genetic data is difficult and fraught with issues. We cannot go back in a time machine and verify the results of the modelling. What we can directly observe though is modern hunter-gather communities, specifically the marriage practices in those cultures and also in societies around the world both in the present day and throughout history, and our relative levels of sexual dimorphism. We can also consider other genetic research which has been done which appears to be more consistent with actual field observations.

I notice Colttaine had a picture of Sapolsky in his video. I would suggest people watch Sapolsky’s second lecture¹⁷ on behavioural evolution from 1:19:00-1:36.14. He clearly states our current knowledge on where humans fall on the spectrum of sexual dimorphism and mating when it comes to monogamy and pair bonding vs polygamy and tournament mating- “We’re right in the middle”.

As Sapolsky explains, even in polygynous cultures there is only mild polygamy going on and the majority of people are in monogamous relationships. In modern monogamous societies many of us usually have more than one partner over the course of our lives and lifelong monogamy where a person has only one sexual partner is fairly rare. However we normally only have one partner at a time in such societies. Yes of course there is some level of cheating, but it is generally not something most men or women will socially accept, and neither will many cultures accept such behaviour without exacting punishments, often leading all the way to death.

As Sapolsky clearly explains in the lecture, whilst we are not purely a monogamous species, we are not a tournament species like Baboons either where only a handful of males mate with the majority of females. That is a good thing too, civilisation would not have formed with that level of male intrasexual aggression.

Other genetic analysis (the research is linked here¹⁸ and here³³)of our prehistoric ancestors, suggests that the numbers of ancestral females to males breeding was indeed somewhat skewed in favour of females, but generally at the lower end of estimates from other research. It was found that the breeding ratios of ancestral females to males from different regions of the world, were still within the range of monogamous societies and do overlap with polygynous societies as well to an extent¹⁸. Humans are a bit of a mixture, but we are not strongly polygynous.

As the scientist’s papers discuss, based on all of the available evidence and the body of scientific literature, humans are quote, “mildly polygynous or monogamous with polygynous tendencies”^{18, 33}. The findings from the researcher’s genetic analysis, was in agreement with the wider literature that humans are indeed mildly polygynous. The authors go on to explain a range of demographic factors that can affect estimates of the breeding ratio of females to males other than just the levels of polygyny, such as sex biased migration, sex differences in generation time and also population bottlenecks¹⁸.

Less than 20% of males in 87% of 190 surveyed hunter-gatherer societies existing in the present day, have been reported to be married polygynously^19,20. Similar observations have been recorded from previous anthropological studies, with less than 5% of men in half of societies identified as polygynous having more than one spouse^21,22. Even in polygynous societies the reproductive variance of males and females can be very similar and this is in part due to the reality that most marriages in polygynous societies are actually monogamous^21,22.

One detailed analysis²³of 36 hunter-gather communities, reported a mean average across all 36 societies of 20% of married women being in polygynous marriages with 12% of the married men, approximately 80% of marriages being monogamous and 11% of men being single. The median figures for polygyny from the communities observed in the study was even less than these mean averages and there was also considerable variation in the levels of polygyny observed.

The bottom line is that based on direct observation of present day hunter-gatherer communities that most likely resemble our prehistoric ancestors, the claim that only 1 man reproduced for every 2 women is not what we observe on average in such communities and furthermore such generalisations ignore the considerable variation we see in the levels of polygyny.

If we compare the relatively low levels of sexual dimorphism in humans to the sexual dimorphism of primates that are tournament species, where only a handful of males reproduce with the majority of females, the difference in sexual dimorphism is quite stark. Humans do not show the typical level of sexual dimorphism we see in primates that exhibit a tournament form of mating.

The high levels of sexual dimorphism observed in such species are not just restricted to specific traits like muscle mass or levels of body fat, they are found in broad overall differences in overall physical form like body weight. The body size sexual dimorphism in humans by body weight just to cite one example is only 1.15 (human males are 15% heavier than females on average), compared to 2 or more for our far more polygynous Gorilla counterparts²⁴. The sexual dimorphism of humans in body size is closer to monogamous Gibbons whom are at 1.07 in body size sexual dimorphism²⁴.

The conclusion that only a handful of men reproduced with the majority of women over our evolutionary history, is at odds with the hard physical evidence of our relatively modest levels of sexual dimorphism, other genetic analysis and our direct observations of hunter-gatherer communities and traditional societies in the present day.

It is certainly still possible though, that the model allegedly supporting the claim we are descended from twice as many women as men is correct. Even if that is the case, overall each sex as a group has contributed exactly the same share of DNA to our present genome. The female share may come from more ancestral females, but the males had a higher contribution to our current genome per individual ancestral male than any ancestral female did individually.

It could be that there are other explanations other than the implied assertion males were socially excluded from mating by choosey women. An assertion that the research Colttaine cites does not entirely make, if at all. As alluded to earlier, demographic factors such as war and disease, sex differences in lifespan and speed of sexual maturity, the migration of primarily men into new environments, or conversely the movement of primarily women, could even at modest levels over long time spans of tens of thousands of years, result in a large skew in the numbers of female vs male ancestors passing on their genes to the present day. Just think of how even modest levels of compound interest can result in a large increase in debt after a sufficient period of time.

There could be genetic factors at play as well that explain the relatively lower numbers of male ancestors. The genes on the Y chromosome are highly conserved because even a minor mutation can result in infertility. It might be that over tens of thousands of years only a handful of Y chromosome lineages made it to the present without incurring a mutation resulting in infertility. It could also be the case that Y chromosomes facilitating more fertile sperm production, began to dominate the gene pool and displace other less fertile Y chromosome lineages over such a long evolutionary timescale.

What I have just suggested has in fact been put forward²⁵ as one key explanation for why relatively less ancestral male DNA has made it to the present and why the Y chromosome has reduced genetic diversity. Deleterious mutations that make some males infertile, leading to high levels of purifying selection on the Y chromosome and beneficial mutations that increase fertility in other males, may explain the pattern we observe. Over long evolutionary timescales of tens of thousands of years, high levels of selection on the Y chromosome combined with demographic forces, may result in a handful of male ancestors dominating the future gene pool. Rather than simply more females mating than males due mate choosiness, genetic and demographic forces may be at work.

Unfortunately because such explanations proposed by the scientific community do not generate the same level of gynocentric hype of claims that 1 man reproduced for every 17 women at some point thousands of years ago, they do not get as much media attention. Consequently they do not pop up on the radar of people like Colttaine. People read from such research what they want to think, even when the research does not support what they are thinking it supports. Research that generates headlines gets reported and more plausible explanations get ignored. That pattern is especially the case if the research validates the gynocentric bias of our mainstream media.

I could keep going with more alternative explanations that may explain why we have more female ancestors, but the reality is the conclusions we form about our prehistoric past are mostly conjecture. We just don’t know with any real certainty and we can’t go back in a time machine and find out. Even if only one male was reproducing for every two females, that does not automatically mean that women were calling the shots and female mate choice was the dominant force in prehistoric communities. Generally in a tournament species the alpha male is socially dominant over the harem of females he mates with, as are the males competing with each other for the alpha male’s position relative to the females in the group.

We have numerous observations of male social dominance in our primate counterparts that have a tournament mating pattern. Female mate choice is not the exclusive force driving mate selection in such instances. Male competition, itself independent of female influence, has a considerable sway in deciding which male reproduces. The males compete to become the alpha male and the alpha male then mates when and with whomever he wants. That is a generalisation of course, but an accurate description of what tournament mating in our primate counterparts looks like.

We see this in humans too where polygyny is practiced and male social dominance is often quite apparent. Polygyny is not exactly by default a predictor of gynocentrism. Extremely patriarchal societies can practice polygyny and the harems of women in such cultures are treated not far above being chattel. The feminist fiction of course is that such a dynamic then represents all of human civilisation in general throughout history and in the present day and that all men have known is privilege and not their own extreme hardships and injustices.

Arranged marriage was common place for most of human history in many cultures and still is prevalent in many traditional cultures today. Arranged marriage has been observed to be the dominant form of marriage in hunter-gather communities. A comprehensive anthropological survey, found that arranged marriage was the dominant form of marriage in approximately 85% of a sample of 190 hunter-gatherer societies around the world and only mild levels of polygyny were observed in most of those cultures^19,20. The high frequency of arranged marriage in the majority of hunter-gather communities in the present day, in past societies over thousands of years of history and in present day traditional cultures, has prompted scientists to undertake genetic analysis of our ancestors to reconstruct marital systems.

Based on phylogenetic analysis¹⁹ using data from present day hunter-gatherers and mitochondrial DNA, it was concluded that arranged marriage has had a substantive prevalence and impact in these communities since the migration of humans out of Africa at least 50,000 years ago. The analysis also found that low levels of polygyny was most likely the state of ancestral marriage in past hunter-gatherer communities. It has been shown²⁰ as well with arranged marriage, that parental control on selecting a partner for marriage is particularly strong for parents of daughters and that fathers have a greater influence than mothers in choosing a suitable partner.

This same paper which again looked at 190 hunter-gatherer communities, also stated that we may be overestimating female mate choice on sexual selection and underestimating the influence of parental mate choice on human evolution during our prehistory²⁰. The study reports that whilst parents consult with their offspring, consent from their sons and daughters is usually not required and they usually comply with their parent’s choice^20,26. Furthermore, virtually all reproduction in these communities was found to occur whilst a woman is married²⁰.

We can see numerous examples of patriarchal influence by fathers in arranged marriage practices across many cultures throughout history. It is not just limited to modern hunter-gatherer communities. Another study²⁷ examining arranged marriage across 543 different ethnographies around the world, found that parents and their offspring in all areas of the world were very frequently in vast disagreement on the choice of partner and on the relevant traits of the right partner. The parental choice of mate often strongly disagreed with the offspring’s choice of mate. The authors note that sometimes extreme methods were used to enforce the choice of mate.

These realities are part of the truths behind the half-truth of feminist patriarchy theory. Female mate choice has not been some dominant force exclusively dictating the social structure of society. The jokes about fathers with their baseball bats sizing up their daughters’ partners, comes from a long history of parents and particularly fathers regulating who their daughters mate with.

Of course it would be correct to point out that male mate choice has also been curtailed to a somewhat lesser degree by the same system of arranged marriage. Before the advent of modernity and the luxury of modern technology, what was good for the prospects of families has often been regarded as more important than the wishes of the bride and groom. Marriage was used to form alliances and this no doubt had a direct benefit on social cohesion, resource sharing and ultimately the propagation of genes for familial lineages over multiple generations and for multiple kin.

Briffault’s Warning

I could keep going debunking the dogmatic rubbish of Briffault’s law, but what I have written in this article and in previous articles (see this link³ and this link⁴) should be sufficient for people to at least question Briffault’s law and whether the arguments put forward allegedly supporting it have any merit. There is so much research I could have kept going through.

Human behaviour is incredibly complex and anyone that puts the actual effort in to review the scientific literature, can see the obvious fallacy in prescribing a universal absolute law of behaviour like Briffault’s law to human beings. Even applying basic commonsense and everyday observation of the world exposes the falsity of Briffault’s law. There is an arrogance to the type of dogmatic thinking supporting Briffault’s law and a lack of humility in acknowledging the obvious limitations in making such a bold statement about human behaviour.

Here is an alternative principle for Colttaine and like-minded individuals to consider:

Briffault’s warning-

“In a gynocentric social dynamic, the female not the male primarily influences the conditions governing the social interactions between the sexes. Where the female can derive no benefit from associating with the male, no such association exists.”^5,6

That to me whilst a bit wordier than Briffault’s law, seems far more accurate than suggesting females universally control all of the conditions of humans and animals on average or absolutely. As Paul has pointed out, men have the power to set personal boundaries with women and avoid such a gynocentric social environment. Men can and are removing themselves from gynocentric social environments and institutions like modern marriage. Men are filtering out women who want a one-sided gynocentric relationship where they are pedestalised. Men are in a substantial number of instances deciding to opt out of dating entirely because of our gynocentric culture. The activities of numerous bachelor movements over centuries and millennia are a testament to men setting boundaries and asserting their preferences^{28,29,30,31,32}.

Briffault’s warning is not a universal law of human behaviour. It is a warning to men that if you are prepared to accept a gynocentric social dynamic in your interactions with the opposite sex, then these are the consequences. Men and society are in this position because they made concessions on their personal boundaries and the principles that made our society thrive, and chose instead to pedestalise women. Now we are paying the price for that.

Beliefs like Briffault’s law serve only to push men in a direction away from taking responsibility for enforcing personal boundaries with women. It is time to wake up and throw out the trash. Notions of female omnipotence have no place in a red pill environment. Women are flawed creatures just like men and men pedestalise women at their peril.

Now I could keep going on ad infinitum back and forth in response to Colttaine after this article, but I am not going to do that. It would be a waste of my time to respond to any further Gish gallop from Colttaine. At a certain point you just have to accept that you can lead a horse to water, but you can make them drink it. The research I have gone through in this article is just the tip of the iceberg on what I can cite to support the arguments I have put forward. Reductive categorical thinking has its value to a degree, but it also stops people from seeing the forest for the trees!

References

1. https://www.bitchute.com/video/AKpEPgIgk1kj/
2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMJYYlbHld0
3. https://avoiceformen.com/featured/briffaults-law-a-classic-example-of-reductionist-categorical-thinking/
4. https://gynocentrism.com/2020/01/31/gynocentrism-sex-differences-and-the-manipulation-of-men-part-one/
5. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9W6wvHSMmzY&t=0s
6. https://tinyurl.com/4a5fyj9s
7. https://www.bitchute.com/video/Pqz5tB4hnOln/
8. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NNnIGh9g6fA&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D
9. https://www.bitchute.com/video/PRKlf8Tu1KYF/
10. https://www.amazon.com.au/Natural-Superiority-Women-Fifth/dp/076198982X/ref=sr_1_1?crid=2NQYLBH4Y0PJU&keywords=natural+superiority+of+women+ashley+montagu&qid=1642817924&sprefix=natural+superiority+of+%2Caps%2C221&sr=8-1
11. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/200008810_Male_Female_The_Evolution_of_Human_Sex_Differences
12. https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/publications/Stewart-Williams%20&%20Thomas,%202013.pdf
13. https://www.psychologytoday.com/files/attachments/33284/stewart-williams-thomas-2013bpi.pdf
14. https://www.stevestewartwilliams.com/publications/Stewart-Williams_2020_peacocks_or_robins.pdf
15. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3292678/
16. https://www.nature.com/articles/nature.2012.10082
17. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y0Oa4Lp5fLE&list=PL848F2368C90DDC3D&index=2
18. https://www.cell.com/ajhg/fulltext/S0002-9297(10)00261-2#back-bib1
19. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3083418/
20. Sexual selection under parental choice: the role of parents in the evolution of human mating – ScienceDirect
21. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3096780/
22. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3772751
23. https://www2.psy.uq.edu.au/~uqbziets/Marlowe2003%20The%20mating%20system%20of%20forages%20cross%20culturally.pdf
24. Frontiers | Are We Monogamous? A Review of the Evolution of Pair-Bonding in Humans and Its Contemporary Variation Cross-Culturally | Ecology and Evolution (frontiersin.org)
25. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3886894/
26. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/352710406_Parental_Influence_and_Sexual_Selection
27. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/355453550_Arranged_Marriage_Often_Subverts_Offspring_Mate_Choice_An_HRAF-Based_Study
28. Bachelorhood and the Querelle du Mariage (quarrel about marriage/bachelorhood in medieval European countries) –https://gynocentrism.com/2017/11/17/querelle-du-marriage-historical-taproot-of-mgtow-and-the-mens-human-rights-movement/
29. Gisela Bock and Margarete Zimmerman, The European Querelle des Femmes, in Medieval Forms of Argument: Disputation and Debate (p.134).-https://books.google.com.au/books/about/Medieval_Forms_of_Argument.html?id=HuUbAQAAIAAJ
30. The Bachelor Movement of 1898- https://gynocentrism.com/2013/12/20/mgtow-movement-of-1898/
31. The Age of the Bachelor: Creating an American Subculture-https://press.princeton.edu/books/paperback/9780691070551/the-age-of-the-bachelor
32. Citizen Bachelors: Manhood and the Creation of the United States-https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501746833/citizen-bachelors/#bookTabs=1
33. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2833377/