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)
– The Men’s Rights Movement: Changing The Cultural Narrative (Peter Wright)

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)

 

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)

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.

WORKS CITED

• 10. Dir. Blake Edwards. Orion Pictures, 1979. Film.
• Aberth, John. (2003). A Knight at the Movies: Medieval History on Film. New York: Routledge.
• As Good As It Gets. Dir. James L. Brooks. Gracie Films, 1997. Film.
• At First Sight. Dir. Irwin Winkler. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer (MGM), 1999. Film.
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• Battais, Lise. “La Courtoisie de François d’Assise: Influence de la littérature épique et courtoise sur la premi?re génération franciscaine.” Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome—Moyen-Age, Temps modernes 109 (1997): 131-160.
• Beauty and The Beast (“La belle et la b?te”). Dir. Jean Cocteau. DisCina, 1946. Film.
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• Bogin, Magda. (1980). The Women Troubadours. New York and London: W. W. Norton.
• Burns, E. Jane. “Courtly Love: Who Needs It? Recent Feminist Work in the Medieval French Tradition.” Signs, 27 (2001): 23-57.
• Casablanca. Dir. Michael Curtiz. Warner Brothers Pictures, 1942. Film.
• Deleyto, Celestino. “Between Friends: Love and Friendship in Contemporary Hollywood Romantic Comedy.” Screen 44, 2 (2003): 167-182.
• Driver, Martha W., and Sid Ray. (2004). The Medieval Hero on Screen: Representations from Beowulf to Buffy. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.
• Duby, Georges. ”Le modèle courtois,” in Histoire des femmes en Occident, ed. G. Duby and M. Perrot (v. 2, Le Moyen Âge, ed. Ch. Klapisch-Zuber). Paris: Perrin, 1991.
• Elliott, Andrew B. R. (2003). Remaking the Middle Ages: The Methods of Cinema and History in Portraying the Medieval World. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland.
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• Galician, Mary-Lou. (2002). Sex, Love, and Romance in the Mass Media Analysis and Criticism of Unrealistic Portrayals and Their Influence. Routledge Communication Series. New York and Oxford: Routledge.
• Genz, Stephanie. “Singled Out: Postfeminism’s ‘New Woman’ and the Dilemma of Having It All.” The Journal of Popular Culture 43 (2010): 97–119.
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• Kantor, Jodi. “Elite Women Put a New Spin on an Old Debate.” New York Times June 22, 2012. Consulted online: <http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/22/us/elite-women-put-a-new-spin-on-work-life-debate.html?_r=1>.
• Kelly, Douglas. “Courtly Love in Perspective: The Hierarchy of Love in Andreas Capellanus.” Traditio 24 (1968): 119-148.
• Kim, Ji-hyun Philippa (2012). “Pour une littérature médiévale moderne: Gaston Paris, l’”amour courtois” et les enjeux de la modernité.” Coll. Essais sur le Moyen Age, n° 55. Paris: Honoré Champion.
• Leithart, Peter J. Zizek and Courtly Love. 4.29.15. http://www.firstthings.com/blogs/leithart/2015/04/zizek-and-courtly-love. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
• Lewis, C. S. (1936)The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition. Oxford: Oxford UP.
• Marcabru. “L’autrier jost’una sebissa.” In The Medieval Pastourelle, vol. 1, edited and translated by William D. Paden, 36-41. New York: Garland, 1987.
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• Novak, Michael. The Myth of Romantic Love. 2.14.11. http://www.firstthings.com/web-exclusives/2011/02/the-myth-of-romantic-love. Retrieved 12 July 2015.
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• Pretty Woman. Dir. Garry Marshall. Touchstone Pictures and Silver Screen Partners IV, 1990. Film.
• Pugh, Tison, and Susan Aronstein, Eds. 2004. The Disney Middle Ages: A Fairy-Tale and Fantasy Past (New Middle Ages). New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Raw, Laurence. “Imaginative History and Medieval Film.” Adaptation 5, 2 (2012): 262-267.
• Reddy, William M. (2012) The Making of Romantic Love: Longing and Sexuality in Europe, South Asia, and Japan, 900-1200 CE (Chicago Studies in Practices of Meaning). Chicago: U Chicago P.
• Robertson, D. W. (1968) “The Concept of Courtly Love as an Impediment to the Understanding of Medieval Texts.” in The Meaning of Courtly Love, ed. F. X. Newman. Albany, NY: State University of New York, 1-18.
• Roxanne. Dir. Fred Schepisi. Columbia Pictures Industries, IndieProd Company Productions, L.A. Films, 1987. Film.
• Saturday Night Fever. Dir. John Badham. Producer: Robert Stigwood Organization (RSO). Distributed by Paramount Pictures. 1977. Film.
• Scaglione, Aldo. “Petrarchan Love and the Pleasures of Frustration.” Journal of the History of Ideas 58 (1997): 557-572.
• Scala, Elizabeth. “Pretty Women: The Romance of the Fair Unknown, Feminism, and Contemporary Romantic Comedy.” Film & History 29 (1999): 34-45.
• Schultz, James A. (2006) Courtly Love, the Love of Courtliness, and the History of Sexuality. Chicago: U Chicago P.
• Slumdog Millionaire. Dir. Danny Boyle. Fox Searchlight Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, 2008. Film.
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• The Matrix. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Village Roadshow Pictures, Silver Pictures, Groucho II Film Partnership; distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, 1999. Film.
• The Matrix Reloaded. Dir. Andy Wachowski and Larry Wachowski. Village Roadshow Pictures, Silver Pictures; distributed by Warner Bros. Pictures, 2003. Film.
• The Princess Bride. Dir. Rob Reiner. Act III Communications, Buttercup Films Ltd., The Princess Bride Ltd., 1987. Film.
• The Wild One. Dir. Laslo Benedek. Columbia Pictures, 1953. Film.
• Walsh, P. G., ed. and trans. (1982) Andreas Capellanus on Love. London: Duckworth.
• Witt, Ronald G. (2012) The Two Latin Cultures and the Foundation of Renaissance Humanism in Medieval Italy. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
• Zipes, Jack. (2011) The Enchanted Screen: The Unknown History of Fair-Tale Films. New York: Routledge.

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.

*The following is a Q & A interview by Jewel Eldora – PW

 

Peter Wright is an Australian researcher and writer who has published research and analysis on the history of Gynocentrism since 2007.  Wright has written books, interviews, and academic research articles on chivalry, gynocentrism, human attachment, and cultural mythologies. In addition to being the unofficial historian of the Men’s Rights and MGTOW movements, he’s also a contributor and editor of A Voice For Men.   

In 2017, Mr. Wright agreed to publish my first series of 5 articles entitled, “There’s a Flaw in All Men, We’re Doomed and Only Women Can Save the Day”, in their entirety and unedited.  The criticism and feedback from that community has been invaluable to my writing ever since.

OUR INTERVIEW

JE: How many years have you been writing about Gynocentrism?

PW: Around 15 years. 

JE: How many books and articles have you written, edited, published?

PW: 150 or so articles and ten books. 

JE: What was it that gave you the motivation to start writing this work?

PW: Like most men I’ve experienced various forms of anti-male bias. However my interest in gynocentrism resulted more from observations of a cultural over-valuing of all things female, and the devaluing of all things male, which raised the question of which social tropes might be contributing to this mindset. 

While feminist derogation of men was an obvious provocateur, the roots of the problem seemed to go much deeper and prior to feminism. After a survey of European history it became apparent that a quixotic version of male chivalry was responsible for the evolving fetishization of women, and not the usually-cited bogeymen such as Marxism or feminism, which only compounded the trend. Having discovered cultural roots for this tendency I thought it might be helpful to document a history of sexual relations starting from the period of romantic chivalry, providing a kind of road-map for how we got here and, in theory, a road-map for how we might walk back some of the more malignant outcomes.

JE: In the nearly 5 years since my first article, you and I have had some lively, private debates. I think we agree that men have been devalued to the point where it’s beginning to hurt women. I think that we also agree we’re witnessing an incredible mass hysteria. We have some different points of view on how we got here and what might be done about it. I’d like to see if I can state my argument and steelman your argument.  Correct me where I’m wrong.

My General Argument (80% Nature | 20% Nurture):

I’ve posited that 50 years of propaganda, ideological class war and social movements, exploiting biases and human group and valuation has a tendency to increase stress. That stress is exploiting evolutionary biases and rendering the humanity of men invisible behind the enforcement of cross-cultural taboos.  This has been made possible by effective Class War propaganda, State force, and benefits replacing men within the family, combined with increasing stress from social media/technology.

PW: I have found most of your arguments compelling, arguments that you previously published as a series to a large readership who were both bemused by their novelty and genuinely intrigued by their potential explanatory power. With a plethora of one-dimensional explanations on offer for the deteriorating relations between men and women, many people hunger for something more substantial – and your series provided precisely that; depth. 

You took findings from evolutionary psychology and biology and repackaged them for a mainstream consumption, and gave them your own twist. For example your work on female ingroup preference, parasite stress, and associated disgust mechanisms has helped to highlight how biological reflexes are exploited by nefarious actors who aim to stir up social panics – of which the final result is, too often, a form of male outgroup derogation.  As you mentioned a moment ago, all of this ends up hurting women too as they find their own lives and intimate interactions with men become paranoid, stifled, and essentially poisoned.  

JE: Me Steelmanning Your General Argument (80% Nurture | 20% Nature);

Beginning in roughly the Middle Ages, the concepts of Chivalry and Courtly Love began to shape the moral and legal landscape to advantage women and to disadvantage men. Through a man made process, incremental changes in the cultural, media and legal systems have led us to where we are now. 

As evidence you present different cultures that still value masculinity and appreciate men for their inherent strengths, complexity management and boundary maintenance attributes and skills.  Obviously, you have an enormous body of research and work that doesn’t fit comfortably in a paragraph. Where am I Wrong? And What Am I Missing? 

PW: That’s a fair synopsis of my position, with the only quibble being with your characterization of ‘80% Nurture | 20% Nature.’ I appreciate that your percentages here refer to a relative influence I’m ascribing to cultural signifiers (nurture), vs. the influence of unmodulated biological reflexes (nature) in the formation of our moral views about men and women today – a.k.a. the skewed gynocentric worldview of the Anglosphere.

In that scenario the 80/20 description reflects the fact that biological imperatives, as expressed by an individual, will always be subject to customs of the body politic along with being subject to punishments for transgressing social norms – even to the point where an individual can be put to death for taboo expressions of sexuality, hypergamy, unacceptable expressions of disgust and the like. In such cases we see a win for cultural conventions, and a loss for the selfish gene impulse expressed by a given individual.

More broadly speaking, I prefer to characterize my position as 100% nature and 100% nurture – you’ll never see a human environment without biology, and you’ll never see biology without a facilitating environment, even if it’s hard to know where the center of gravity lies between the two forces. 

JE: What was the most unexpected discovery or set of discoveries you’ve made in your research?

PW: Being somewhat of a reductive biological-determinist in my former outlook, I was surprised to learn just how wildly human cultures and associated human behaviors changed from era to era, and from place to place. In one culture you can see sexual license, in another sexual repression; or in one culture you can witness a parasitic-disgust response toward men’s beards, and in another you witness the exact opposite disgust for the smooth-skinned faces of men who don’t sport beards – beards which are seen as pure and divine features gifted by God. Such flexibility of human behavior forced me to make big adjustments in my thinking.

JE: What is the most disturbing discovery or set of discoveries you’ve made in your research?

PW: I’m in awe of how human societies display a kind of organic flow, possessing inbuilt homeostatic mechanisms that steer us in the correct direction when societies go a bit wacky.

The disturbing thing I’ve noticed is that owners of mass media such as newspapers, radio, television, and now internet tech, can censor the organic voices calling for homeostasis. That action takes us into a mechanistic and anti-human direction that I think is soul destroying, both for the individual and for the culture. I think some of your work touches on examples of this in action, particularly in the State of Minnesota. 

JE: My target audience are lawyers, Intellectual Dark Web types, and Unwoke Minnesotans.  What message would you like to send to them?

PW: I would encourage Minnesotans to read your work and follow you to get up to speed on the tendency of Minnesota to be a generator of global panics. The choice you offer between being woke and awake is critical. 

JE: What message would you send to your fellow Australians?

PW: Count your blessings that you live on a massive island with no border crises to suffer. 

JE: What gives you hope?

PW: What gives me hope is to remember that culture always changes.

__________________________________________________________

*Interview first published on the Jewel Eldora blog here:  

By Paul Elam & Peter Wright

Hey guys. From time to time I have the pleasure of collaborating on a piece with Peter Wright of Gynocentrism.com. Though it is written in first person, this is one of those pieces. My sincere thanks to Peter.

* * *

“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.”

Or so said Robert Briffault, an English surgeon, anthropologist, and novelist back in the day. And sure enough, if you listen to all corners of the manosphere, there’s no shortage of agreeance with this so-called, “Briffault’s Law.”

“Them there’s the rules,” you’ll hear, with absolute conviction and certitude, “and their ain’t nothin’ you can do about it.”

That outlook is roughly confirmed in a small poll taken by Peter Wright, offering four different interpretations of what Briffault’s Law actually means. One, that it is 100% true as written. Two, that it applies to only nonhuman animals. Three, that the law is accurate, but that it applies equally if the sexes are reversed. And four, you don’t much care about Briffault or his law to begin with.

The results were pretty clear. As you can see, 61, or 91% of those who responded see Briffault’s law, down to the last dotted i and crossed t, as 100% accurate about the female of the human species. By any measure that is an impressive amount of unanimity.

And we certainly see backup for this mentality from the more prominent MGTOW voices out there on the interwebz.

Stardusk titles a remarkably unremarkable talk, linked below, with, “Briffault’s Law – The Most Important Thing You Can Know as a Man”

Sandman opines in more personal fashion in one of his talks, linked, with the following. “I know from my own personal experience that I have two modes of operation with regards to my life,” he says, “Either I’m waiting for a woman to choose me to have a relationship, or I typically don’t care for them – like I do now.”

Finally, we have Colttaine, who expands the definition of Briffault’s Law with the same practiced acumen a feminist employs to expand the definition of rape, linked below “From where I’m sitting,” he asserts,  “the problem with Briffault’s Law is that Robert Briffault didn’t go far enough with his definition. Women don’t just determine all the conditions of the animal family, they determine ‘all the conditions’ –  period!”

Setting aside my desire to shame these public displays of learned helplessness, well, ok, partially setting aside that desire, I still want to focus on what these guys are saying and why I think it’s a learning opportunity for red pill men.

I know the online red pill community pretty well by now. And one thing is for sure, that community is above average in intelligence. Way above, in my opinion, which makes the 91% who subscribe to an obvious fiction with such religious fervour all the more perplexing.

At this point, some qualifying is necessary, though I wish it weren’t. Saying I disagree with a single prevalent MGTOW belief isn’t the same thing as disagreeing with the idea or practice of men going their own way, which I do support wholeheartedly. If you’re too obtuse to see that and appreciate the difference, this is my piss off in advance. Feel free to leave your butthurt in the comments.

That said, let’s start the conversation with a little common sense. I know, they grow ‘em big and dumb in Texas, but we do learn the difference between shit and Shinola early on in life. That predisposition, that stubborn Texas insistence to get 4 when adding 2 and 2 leads me to one inescapable conclusion about the idea of perception of benefit, a perception on which Briffault’s Law is totally reliant.

I don’t blow my nose, or even scratch it for that matter, without a perceived benefit. I don’t take a leak, put on socks, or do, literally anything you can think of, without perceived benefit. That’s true for the smallest, least significant things I do, or that I can even imagine doing. As human beings, acting on perceived benefit is pretty much all we do. By the time we’re talking about intersexual selection and pair bonding, there’s wheelbarrows full of perceived benefit on both sides. Anyone who can’t see it could perceive some benefit from eyeglasses.

And I know what some of you may be thinking. That we are socially conditioned to see the perceived benefit of the woman as what really matters. And that the weight of that social conditioning means that Briffault was right, “The female, not the male, determines all the conditions of the animal family.”

And to be fair, just pointing to the obvious fact that human behaviour, generally speaking, is driven by perceived benefit, isn’t a thorough enough rebuttal to Briffault’s widespread acceptance across the manosphere.

Before we dig into precisely the meaning of Briffault’s claims, let’s take a moment to consider Briffault the man. What do we know about him? Well, we know that he was raised by a strict, fundamentalist mother from the age of eleven after his father’s untimely death.

In short, Briffault was the product of an abusive, single-mother home. From accounts of biographers, we know that Briffault resented his mother’s controlling nature, but nevertheless went on to write about mothers at enormous length and extolling their superior status in the human scheme.

That alone is undoubtedly prima facie evidence of learned simpery, but let’s go on.

In his most famous book The Mothers, Briffault argues for the importance of mothers over and against fathers. The editor of the same book introduces him as a man without a loving bond with his mother, but with loving and fond memories of his deceased father. About Briffault from the intro, we read:

“It is not unreasonable, when a man has devoted seven years of strenuous work to arguing the importance of mothers as against fathers, to ask whether he betrayed any marked attitudes towards his own parents. Mrs Herma Briffault informs me that he had little apparent attachment to his mother, but often spoke of his father. (He seems, nevertheless, to have had a picture of his mother in his room in the last decade of his life). His mother was evidently a reserved, ‘canny’ Scots-woman, of strict views, whose capacity for personal warmth seems to have been limited, and perhaps he felt, as an infant, denied the acceptance he desired. He certainly rejected violently his mother’s strong religious beliefs and teaching. Clearly there was strong ambivalence here, and the attacks — which suggest narcoleptic stupors — which assailed him at the time of his mother’s last illness seem consistent with the idea of a powerful love-hate relationship.”

The biographer then goes on to conclude;

“It is not difficult to see how natural such attitudes were to one whose outlook had been conditioned by the experiences just described. I have observed elsewhere that, when a child has one parent who is easy-going and affectionate and another who is severe and apparently unloving, it identifies itself with the former and is preoccupied throughout life with its relationship with the latter… when it is the mother who is unloving, this leads the male child to a preoccupation with women and with incest. This was certainly the case in Briffault’s great contemporary, Havelock Ellis, for instance. It seems to have been equally true of Briffault.”

If we take this as true, the influences that led Briffault to his gynocentric conclusions, as well as his personal weakness with women, come into clear focus. Inadequate, abusive mothers and absent fathers. The results of that toxic combination are now sprawled across the cultural landscape in form of legions of young men who become obsequious lapdogs whenever in the presence of women.

It’s that instilled powerlessness that leads many, even if indirectly, to seek solutions in PUA, MGTOW and other red pill venues. And I argue that we still see the remnants of that same learned victimhood in the widespread acceptance of Briffault’s Law.

Moreover, it appears that many have taken hold of Briffault’s Law and applied it exclusively to human relationships in a way that Briffault didn’t even intend. Briffault applied his Law toward non-human animals, and the chapter in which he announces his Law is titled ‘The Herd and the Family Amongst Animals’ under this subheading ‘The Female in the Animal Group.’

The chapter is five pages long. In it he mentions tigers, elks, lions, zebras, gazelles, buffaloes, deer, monkeys, beavers, lions, birds and other animals, and only references humans briefly in order to contrast human behavioural patterns from those of animals.

Although Briffault appears to have intended his Law for animals, he also presented human sexual relations with the same exaggerated gynocentric framing, demonstrated throughout his book ‘The Mothers The Matriarchal Theory Of Social Origins’ which is chock full of cringeworthy claims of female superiority and male inferiority.

Whatever the merits of his observations, it is only fair to say that he was writing a century ago and his speculations were a product of the thinking of his day, and perhaps the personal pathology of his life. His work is replete with the flattery of and deference toward, women. It’s possible his thinking was even shaped by ideology of first wave feminism, which was running rampant in the culture during the time of Briffault’s writing.

Fast forward to contemporary research and we have a wealth of information to test, and quite frankly dismiss, Briffault’s hypotheses.

Steve Stewart-Williams, PhD in psychology and philosophy, wrote a now famous paper distilling the literature of evolutionary psychology on questions of intersexual human dynamics. Notably, he reiterates findings from the field of Evolutionary Psychology that males are also very choosy in selecting mates, which debunks the view that Briffault’s assumption concludes that only females choose. Williams states, and I quote;

“According to a common understanding of sexual selection theory, females in most species invest more than males in their offspring, and as a result, males compete for as many mates as possible, whereas females choose from among the competing males. The males-compete/females-choose model applies to many species but is misleading when applied to human beings. This is because males in our species commonly contribute to the rearing of the young, which reduces the sex difference in parental investment. Consequently, sex differences in our species are relatively modest. Rather than males competing and females choosing, humans have a system of mutual courtship: Both sexes are choosy about long-term mates, and both sexes compete for desirable mates. We call this the mutual mate choice (MMC) model.” ¹

Stewart-Williams goes on to conclude that men, throughout our evolutionary history, have crafted women into the creatures we want – Pygmalion style. In other words, modern woman, in all her inglorious splendour, is, like it or not, the Stepford Wife that men actually chose to build. How’s that for patriarchal choosiness?

He states, for example, that “human males have a number of well-documented, species-typical mate preferences. These include preferences for physical traits such as a low waist-to-hip ratio, facial and bodily symmetry, neoteny, and youthfulness. They also include preferences for psychological traits such as intelligence, emotional stability, and sexual fidelity.” ¹

Imagine that – males throughout evolutionary history having a preference for intelligence and emotional stability. It’s almost as though he’s saying that men are exercising a personal choice, not only about whether to pair bond, but also about the type of woman they choose.

Not only does this bitch slap common manospherian ideas of Briffault as human gospel, it also destroys the cliché that ‘all men want is sex’ and will take anything that moves – providing the female “selects” them. It’s also worth noting that male mate preferences have left their mark on female physical morphology – again quoting Stewart-Williams:

“In some domains, women are more sexually selected than men; one… example can be found in the domain of physical attractiveness. Women are typically rated as better looking than men, by both men and women (Darwin, 1871; Feingold & Mazzella, 1998; Ford & Beach, 1951). The difference is plausibly a consequence of the fact that, although both sexes care about good looks in a mate, on average, men care somewhat more (Buss, 1989; Lippa, 2007).

This means that, since this sex difference first evolved, there has been a somewhat stronger selection pressure on women than men for physical attractiveness—the opposite of what we find in peacocks. To take a more specific example, the fact that adult human females have permanently enlarged breasts is plausibly a consequence of male choice. Contrary to popular opinion, enlarged mammary glands appear not to be necessary for milk delivery. The vast majority of mammals deliver milk without them, and there is little correlation between the size of a woman’s breasts and her capacity to produce milk (Miller, 2000). What, then, are breasts for? A rather obvious clue can be found in the fact that most men find youthful-looking breasts sexually attractive. This has led to the suggestion that the primary evolutionary function of breasts relates to mate choice (Dixson, Grimshaw, Linklater, & Dixson, 2011).

The most widely accepted suggestion is that they are honest signals of good genes, youthfulness, and nutritional status (Jasienska, Ziomkiewicz, Ellison, Lipson, & Thune, 2004; Marlowe, 1998; Singh, 1995; for an alternative hypothesis, see Low, Alexander, & Noonan, 1987). If so, women’s breasts tell us something important about ourselves, namely, that we are not the kind of species in which males only ever pursue sex indiscriminately and females alone exert mate choice. Breasts are evidence of male mate choice operating over many thousands of generations (Cant, 1981). The same is true of other secondary sexual features found in human females, including facial neoteny (e.g., large eyes, small noses and chins); gluteofemoral fat deposits and the hourglass figure; and lighter, smoother, less hairy skin.” ¹

“Of course,” Stewart-Williams concludes, “no one is surprised that men have mate preferences; it is such a familiar fact of life that we take it for granted. From a comparative perspective, though, we should be surprised. The existence of these preferences makes our species atypical among mammals and is inconsistent with the idea that we are an MCFC species.” ¹

Considering these widely available scientific facts, we must wonder if men upholding Briffault’s Law are simply brainwashed by the prevailing gynocentric narratives, or whether they too suffer from “male mother need” as Briffault himself did? When, for example, Turd-Flinging Monkey dismisses all women as THOTS but then goes on to talk for a decade about said thots stealing men’s authority, is that not akin to Briffault’s obsession with female self-interest?

Who knows? Perhaps an examination of TFMs relationship with his mother would be revealing.

For me, the red pill is, in its purist form, a dedication to living in the truth. It’s red pill 101 that women should not be viewed as an omnipotent power in the lives of men. That, dear listeners, is one of the very first liberating truths of men’s red pill existence. That women largely have only the power we give them, and that we have the power to keep them in check. In the earlier days of red pill, we called it veto power, the ultimate trump card for men. And we still have that power in spades unless we insist on immersing ourselves in the victim narrative.

So how then, do we have red pill commentators proclaiming aloud, and I quote again, “Either I’m waiting for a woman to choose me to have a relationship, or I typically don’t care for them – like I do now”?

Word for word, that could have been uttered by any defeated blue pill simp you’ve ever met in your life. Get mad if you want to, you know it’s true.

And to be clear, I am not saying a thing in contempt of men who look at all the facts and choose to avoid women based on the risk, effort, expense and unfairness that often comes with the so-called fairer sex.

Indeed, I think it’s important to point out that we’re talking largely about two distinct groups of men. There are those who have stared reality directly in the face, weighed all the facts and dispassionately concluded that women are not worth the effort; that the juice isn’t worth the squeeze, as it were, and veto power is at the core of their very identity. If you’re in that group, this talk is for you, but it isn’t really

The other group are men who have looked at the challenges of attracting and pair bonding with women and decided that they are just not up to the job. These are generally men whose spine has never survived contact with a woman. Their frame cracks, splits and ultimately shatters at the hint of female influence. You can hear it in their endless droning about how a man can never win, how women make all the rules and that the rules are unfair. They make sweeping declarations of personal powerlessness. To wit, “Women don’t just determine all the conditions of the animal family, they determine ‘all the conditions’ – period!”

Men like this appear incapable governing their own lives if women are involved. They can’t choose mates, not because women have unbridled personal power, but because those men don’t have the personal strength, values and integrity to remain in control of their lives.

They are just men who can’t hold on to their interests, their friends, their values, or self-respect because women make all the rules and they have no choice but to follow them. Because that’s the way things are, and Briffault’s Law is the so-called truth they wallow in to prove it.

If that’s your idea of red pill, you might want to skip the refills.

Whatever the motivations, I can safely say that a blind belief in Briffault’s Law is relegating many men’s personal progress to the dumpster, because if men have no choice about the conditions of their life, what possible agency can they have?

What form of personal autonomy is it that you can’t practice in the presence of a female? What kind of poorly constructed frame won’t bear the weight of a woman’s whims? Ya know, if you have to hide from anyone to assert your, uh hum, agency in life, you might hear Inigo Montoya, whispering in your ear, “You keep using that word. I don’t think it means what you think it means.”

Personally, I’d rather try to pull an AR15 out of Kyle Rittenhouse’s hands than surrender to this weak bullshit.

Finally, I’d like to propose a different set of axioms for red pilled men: First, as a human male you are the most magnificent living entity ever known to exist. Men built civilization and conquered all manner of frontiers. If I were to try to list all the accomplishments of men, you’d grow old before I got finished.

Whatever your decisions about allowing women into your life, seeing yourself as a loser who can’t win is a self-fulfilling prophesy, with all the lameness that implies. If you want sex, companionship or even a relationship based on red pill principles, don’t let some youtuber’s mommy issues hold you back. Don’t lock yourself into the black pill prison of learned helplessness and nihilistic defeatism. Well, unless that is what you want to do. If that’s the case, just make sure that when you’re staring into that black, optionless void, you know it’s just a mirror of your own making.

Meanwhile, red pill men will enjoy the byproduct of personal agency, accountability and practiced wisdom; a solid frame that doesn’t crumble when a woman enters the room. A frame that doesn’t crumble for anyone.

References:

Stardusk
Briffault’s Law: The Most Important Thing You Can Know As A Man https://youtu.be/9W6wvHSMmzY

Sandman (2:32)
Briffault’s Law: Women choose men. Men can’t choose women.
https://youtu.be/n0gjEDzx2vk

Colttaine (17:51)
Briffault’s Law doesn’t go far enough.
https://www.bitchute.com/video/Pqz5tB4hnOln/

Robert Briffault
The Mothers: the Matriarchal Theory of Social Origins. https://tinyurl.com/4a5fyj9s

Steve Stewart-Williams
1. The Ape That Thought It Was a Peacock https://tinyurl.com/yjefu9jf
2. The Ape That Kicked The Hornet’s Nest https://tinyurl.com/mcr4w8m4
3. Are Humans Peacocks Or Robins? https://tinyurl.com/5awybxrf

* * *

Addendum: A small point that some commentators missed, is that Briffault aimed his law strictly at animals. Just before he gives his law he states, quote; “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.” So while its perfectly ok to mis-apply Briffault’s law as he intended it (a biological law operating among non-human animals), its important to note that many have repurposed his law for describing the current gynocentric culture operating among humans…. which of course a lot of MRAs could agree with regarding the gendered issues operating in the cultural and legal spheres. Again, this was not the intended meaning of what Briffault wrote – he was describing biology, not the shapeshifting dating and culture trends of recent decades, and its that misplaced biological determinism among humans, wrongly attributed to Briffault, that is under question. He was, notwithstanding, very much a gynocentrist aside from the wide misapplication of his law by modern commenters.

Painting by artist William de Leftwich Dodge (1910) showing Guinevere looking into Narcissus’ Mirror, with Lancelot sniffing at her hand in recognition of her femdom. This image illustrates the taproot of feminism’s concern with maintaining or increasing the power of women, a process facilitated by men’s adherence to medieval chivalry and deference to women.

The following is from the introduction of Sarah K. Balstrup’s thesis To ‘Believe’ in Love – The Religious Significance of the Romantic Love Myth in Western Modernity. In it she explores romantic love as the dominant religious belief system in the Western world today. – PW.

THE STUDY OF LOVE

In 2011, Simon May made the bold claim that “love has increasingly filled the vacuum left by the retreat of Christianity…so that it is now the West’s undeclared religion – and perhaps its only generally accepted religion.”⁴ Although May’s research engages with philosophical debates rather than the more sociological concerns of the scholar of religion, his observations provide an excellent starting point for deeper analysis into this seemingly new religious phenomenon.

What is the significance, for instance, of the fact that May refers to love as ‘the’ religion of the West, and the simultaneous claim that such a widespread belief system can remain unrecognised by its adherents? Moreover, what is meant by ‘love’? This thesis seeks to answer such questions and, in doing so, provide a comprehensive analysis of the socio-cultural changes that have occurred between the mid-nineteenth century and the present day that have fundamentally altered both the significance of love, and the nature of religion itself. As the subject of study, love is defined as a particular social mythology that has achieved religious status due to important epistemological shifts associated with secularisation.⁵

Through the consideration of a number of case studies, including Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1856), the HBO series Sex and the City (1998-2004), and romantic comedy films, the religious function of love will be investigated. As a social mythology that effectively replaces the Christian symbolic, love will be appraised as a religious position, on the basis that it acts as an ultimate concern for Western individuals.⁶ Most importantly this will involve an analysis of the religious epistemological mode in order to demonstrate why the ‘love religion’ does not involve self-identification.

Typically understood as an emotional state, love has become an important topic of philosophical, religious and psychological investigation throughout Western history. While far from exhaustive, such a history might include examples from the Biblical Scriptures, Plato’s Symposium, Dante’s Commedia, the tradition of courtly love that emerged in eleventh century Europe, along with a host of examples from the Romantic poets,⁷ and humanist philosophers.⁸

As love has acquired a rich symbolic resonance through the influence of such discourse, it has variously been understood to be an aspect of the Christian symbolic system, a state of being associated with truth, sacredness and beauty,⁹ or as an ethical force that is human in origin. To consider the implications of each of these examples within their cultural context is an unwieldy task, yet one that has been tackled by numerous academics in the past thirty years, as well as in earlier studies such as C. S. Lewis’s Allegories of Love (1936)¹⁰ and Denis de Rougemont’s Passion and Society (1956).¹¹ More recent studies of import include Stephen Kern’s The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (1992)¹² and Simon May’s Love: A History (2011),¹³ as well as a host of philosophical¹⁴ and socio-cultural studies.¹⁵

While these texts will inform this thesis, in general, their aim has been to extrapolate the culturally specific nature of the Western understanding of love, where ‘religion,’ in its Judeo-Christian form, is understood to be one of many influences upon the myth. In light of Wittgenstein’s assertion that “the meaning of a word is its use in language,”¹⁶ it becomes apparent that the survival of ‘religious themes’ does not necessarily prove the continuation of religious significance. Rather, in this thesis, the love myth is deemed to be a coherent symbolic system that functions as a type of secular religion, regardless of the origin of ideas that comprise its current form, which may or may not have been religious in their original cultural context.

Despite the depth and breadth of studies on love, and the frequent claim that love is of sacred or religious significance,¹⁷ the definition of love remains vague and the dynamics of this supposed religious connection have yet to be fully explored. Those who have made the strongest claims regarding love’s spiritual significance have done so with disapproval, in the case of de Rougemont,¹⁸ May¹⁹ and others; or an air of tragedy, as can be found in the reflections of Flaubert,²⁰ Michel de Certeau and Roland Barthes.²¹ The former find fault with the love myth, claiming that it puts unrealistic expectations upon human relationships,²² that it is an inferior and adulterated version of a purer religious sentiment,²³ that it is a corrupting influence in society which involves the human attempt to become God,²⁴ or is otherwise responsible for human cruelty.²⁵

In each case, love and relationships are viewed to be separate from the culturally contingent love myth that is being subjected to critique. As a Religious Studies approach does not involve the evaluation of belief systems based on their putative merit, these arguments will not be explored; however, it is important to note the contested nature of the religiosity of love. As a ‘growing trend,’ the sacralisation of love is then identified as an undesirable development that must be studied in order to create a level of reflexivity necessary to stem the flow of its influence.

Although the majority of scholars mentioned thus far simply use the term ‘love,’ and may mention culturally specific sub-categories such as agape, eros, or parental love, the contemporary form of love that is increasingly idealised can be more accurately defined as ‘romantic love.’ As a cultural construct, romantic love has a history that can be most clearly traced to eleventh century Provence, when the love poetry of the troubadours began to depict a noble and divine love between man and woman that stood in contrast to the dry practicalities of arranged marriage.²⁶

Medieval scholars have problematised this reductive claim, and have revealed aspects of the courtly tradition that do not serve to convey the more modern notion of romance, yet, the concept of the birth of romance has remained a useful periodisation tool nonetheless.²⁷ As courtly love was an adulterous, albeit unconsummated love that stood in contrast to the institution of marriage, romantic love is based upon passionate feelings towards an idealised other, involving a self-sacrificing attitude of devotional awe. Tristan and Isolde provides the most iconic example of courtly love, and due to the tragic culmination of this lovers’ tale, there has remained a strong link between romantic sentiment and the concept of being reunited with the beloved through death.

While not always mentioned regarding the origins of romantic love, there is a very close relationship between courtly love poetry and the writings of medieval mystics like Bernard of Clairvaux and Hadewijch of Antwerp.²⁸ Incorporating Biblical material such as the erotically charged “Song of Songs,” Christian mystics have developed strong associations between devotion for the beloved (as lover), and the Beloved (as Christ or the Deity himself).²⁹ This form of romantic worship drew strongly on Platonic philosophy, wherein erotic desire for the beauty that resides within the beloved can lead the lover to purer states of love, and, ultimately, to the contemplation of the Divine. As influential strains of Christian mysticism appropriated this model of sacred relation,³⁰ the concept of ascent via beauty intermingled with Christian concepts of the Divine, and this association has remained salient in Western cultural mythology.

The poetry of the courtly tradition and the writings of Christian mystics are historical antecedents of the idea of romantic love, however, in mid-eighteenth century England, romantic love came to be understood in terms of human relationships. Related to the rise of the middleclass, the birth of the modern novel, and other factors associated with modernisation, romantic love became a driving force of social change as it became increasingly acceptable to marry for love.³¹

Previously constrained by the class system and the social obligation to enter into practical marriages, in the mid-eighteenth century, the law of love became more deeply associated with virtue than the ability to conform to the dictates of the social institution. In this early period the ideal of true love was applied to the dissolution of class-based distinctions, and this deregulatory function has become characteristic of the love myth, so that in the contemporary context, romantic love is employed in the rejection of all forms of social barriers. In the realm of popular culture, the romantic comedy has offered a running commentary on the love myth since the establishment of the genre in Hollywood’s classical era.³²

Depicting strong female leads in the 1930s and ambitious career women in the 1980s, the romantic comedy genre has a history of correlating the overthrow of patriarchal dominance with the negotiation of ‘true’ love.³³ Films from the 1990s onward have extended the use of the romantic love myth to dismantle social barriers relating to race, gender, sexuality, age, and cultural extraction. As such, the love myth has been consistently identified as a force of justice that enables the individual to oppose social sanctions.

As the history of the love myth does not in itself define the specific types of beliefs involved in its contemporary form, examples will be provided of what romantic love is considered to be within the bounds of this thesis. First and foremost it is believed that true love can be found between two people, and that the connection that they share involves the total person; physical, spiritual, mental. These two individuals are destined to be together and are led into contact with one another through divine aid or coincidence, so that all life events can be understood in relation to the formation of a relationship that was always ‘meant to be.’³⁴

Romantic love requires one to surrender disbelief,³⁵ and have faith in the power of love in order to experience this sacred relationship, and the individual expects to undergo trials of virtue in order to be worthy of such love.³⁶ Super-empirical elements implicit in the romantic myth include a belief in destiny,³⁷ and the ability to connect with the beloved by means of extra-sensory-perception, and a belief in postmortem reunion in the afterlife,³⁸ or in subsequent lives.³⁹ The universe is believed to contain knowledge of the fated union between the individual and their ‘soul mate,’⁴⁰ and one can read ‘signs’ in daily life that may lead them to this person, or reveal their identity. The identity of one’s soul mate is as unique as the individual, so that uniqueness is prized over stereotypical conventions of beauty or personality.⁴¹

One may come up against innumerable practical obstacles; identifying subsequent mates as ‘the One,’ or failing to establish a connection with a person that one believes is their ‘soul mate,’⁴² yet the romantic myth can be manipulated successfully to absorb even the most direct contradictions. This is possible due to a belief in layers of meaning, and an ultimate underlying ‘truth’ related to the concept of the ‘true self.’ This truth can only be verified by emotional cues and personal intuition, so that if these initial feelings of confirmation are seriously tested, the individual can concede that they were fooled by the appearance of truth, and so remain unshaken in their belief that their true love is still out there.

Drawing upon the value of self-determination embedded in the ideal of freely choosing one’s partner, out of love rather than social obligation, love is heralded as a revolutionary force that can usurp institutionalised authority.⁴³ Ultimately, true love removes the scales from one’s eyes, revealing the goodness inherent in all things, and enables one to experience Heaven on earth.⁴⁴ As the mode of relation between the individual and God has been so often expressed in the Judeo-Christian tradition in romantic terms, popular culture reveals that God and the beloved have now become almost interchangeable concepts.⁴⁵

____________________

REFERENCES:

4 May, Love: A History, p. 1.
5 Terms such as ‘myth,’ ‘mythology,’ ‘imaginative,’ and ‘imagination’ are not used in the pejorative sense in this thesis. While Christian polemicists have used these terms to imply a type of belief that is ‘untrue’ and based upon delusory thinking, here they are used to refer to their function. Mythology can be understood analogously to ‘social narrative,’ while imagination involves a type of active mental engagement requiring the suspension of reality.
6 Paul Tillich, ‘Dynamics of Faith,’ in Robert P. Scharlemann (ed.) Paul Tillich: Main Works, Writings on Religion (Walter de Gruyter, 1988) pp. 231–232.
7 John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley and others.
8 For instance, Petrarch and Auguste Comte.
9 Dante Aligheiri, The Paradiso (J. M. Dent and Sons: London, 1941); Charles Williams, Religion and Love in Dante: The Theology of Romantic Love (Kessinger Publishing, 2010); Flaubert, Madame Bovary.
10 C.S. Lewis, The Allegory of Love: A Study in Medieval Tradition (Oxford University Press, 1938).
11 Denis de Rougemont, Passion and Society (Faber and Faber, 1956).
12 Stephen Kern, The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns (Harvard University Press, 1992).
13 May, Love: A History.
14 For example Vincent Brümmer, The Model of Love: A Study in Philosophical Theology (Cambridge University Press: Cambridge, 1993); Albert James Smith, The Metaphysics of Love: Studies in Renaissance Love Poetry from Dante to Milton (Cambridge University Press, 1985); Richard John White, Love’s Philosophy (Rowman & Littlefield, 2001); Irving Singer, The Pursuit of Love (John Hopkins University Press, 1994).
15 For example Kern, The Culture of Love; May, Love: A History; Ann Swidler, Talk of Love: How Culture Matters (University of Chicago Press, 2001); Aaron Ben-Ze’ev and Ruhama Goussinsky, In the Name of Love: Romantic Ideology and its Victims (Oxford University Press, 2008).
16 Simon Malpas, Jean-François Lyotard (Routledge, 2003) pp. 21–22.
17 All love theorists mentioned in this thesis recognise the classic examples of sacred love enshrined in Biblical, Platonic, mystic, courtly, and Romantic sources. The centrality of love in Western culture is likewise recognised, yet each theorist articulates the ‘sacred’ or ‘religious’ role of love in a different way. Due to limitations of space, May’s claim is singled out for its directness and clarity.

18 de Rougemont, Passion and Society.
19 May, Love: A History.
20 As will be discussed in further detail in the second chapter of this thesis, Flaubert’s views of love are tragic, idealistic, cynical and ironic. Evidence of this can be found in all of his written works, particularly Madame Bovary (1856) and A Sentimental Education (1869) yet also in his extensive collected correspondence. See John Charles Tarver, Gustave Flaubert as seen in his Works and Correspondence (Kessinger Publishing, 2005).
21 Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: Volume One: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (University of Chicago Press, 1995); Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. As this thesis merely cites de Certeau and Barthes in order to engage with their personal representations of the love myth, their broader theoretical oeuvres will not be considered. Recognising that French theory has contributed much to the study of love, thinkers like Lacan, Kristeva, De Beauvoir and Foucault have been purposely omitted from this thesis in order to distinguish my methodological position from theirs, and avoid an unintended association with the strong political subtext of their writings.
22 Swidler, Talk of Love; May, Love: A History; Kern, The Culture of Love; Ben-Ze’ev and Goussinsky, In the Name of Love.
23 de Rougemont, Passion and Society.
24 May, Love: A History.
25 Ben-Ze’ev and Goussinsky view the “romantic ideology” of love to be responsible for “wife murders” and violence perpetrated against women in the name of love. Ben-Ze’ev and Goussinsky, In the Name of Love.
26 Swidler, Talk of Love, pp. 112–135.
27 Stephen C. Jaeger, Ennobling Love: In Search of a Lost Sensibility (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999); Lewis, The Allegory of Love.
28 Gordon Rudy, Mystical Language of Sensation in the Later Middle Ages (Routledge, 2002) pp. 68–72.
29 Louise Nelstrop, Kevin Magill, and Bradley B. Onishi, Christian Mysticism: An Introduction to Contemporary Theological Approaches (Ashgate, 2009) pp. 89–90.
30 Nelstrop, Magill, and Onishi, Christian Mysticism, pp. 23–27, 85–91.
31 Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (Blackwell, 1989) p. 27.
32 Claire Mortimer, Romantic Comedy (Taylor & Francis, 2010) p. 10.
33 Chantal Cornut-Gentille, ‘Working Girl: A Case Study of Achievement by Women? New Opportunities, Old Realities’ in Peter William Evans and Celestino Deleyto (eds) Terms of Endearment: Hollywood Romantic Comedy of the 1980s and 1990s (Edinburgh University Press, 1998) pp. 111–128.

34 Before Sunrise (1995) tells the story of Jesse and Celine who meet by chance on a train in Europe. They spend one night together, yet their entire lives are rewritten in relation to this event. Failing to reunite in Vienna the following year, in Before Sunset (2004) the couple eventually meet in Paris to find that the nine years that they had spent apart were filled with dissatisfaction and that their chance at happiness depends upon their being together.
35 In romantic comedies, the initial cynicism of the romantic couple is replaced by absolute faith in the reality of love by the film’s conclusion. For example, When Harry Met Sally (1989), The Proposal (2009), Friends with Benefits (2011).
36 In the romantic comedy Joe Versus the Volcano (1990) this test takes the form of a ‘leap of faith’ where the romantic couple express their commitment to each other and to love by jumping into a volcano. Rather than dying together, this act is rewarded by unseen forces as the volcano spits them out and they survive unscathed. In the ‘real life’ context of the reality television show The Bachelor (16:7) Ben takes Kacie, Nicki and Rachel shark-swimming on their group date. Rachel has a shark phobia, yet Ben convinces her that the shark dive is a suitable metaphor for their (potential) future relationship. Despite the danger that Rachel finds herself in, she is able to utilise the psychological skills learnt from romantic narratives in order to act against her natural instinct of fear. Knowing that when one demonstrates their faith in love, they will be rewarded, Rachel puts her life in danger as she wills herself to believe that Ben’s presence will magically protect her from harm.
37 Serendipity (2001).
38 Chris and Annie reunite in What Dreams May Come (1998), while in Ghost (1990) Sam communicates with his partner Molly after his untimely death. When his spirit is about to ascend to Heaven, the couple say goodbye in the temporary sense by saying “see ya,” implying that they will meet again.
39 The Fountain. Similarly, many romantic films involve lovers meeting while one partner is in a different body, yet the true spiritual bond that they share eventually enables the recognition of the disguised beloved. In Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997-2003) this trope is played out in a range of bodyswapping scenarios, and in the dual nature of Angel/Angelus. Similarly, in Doctor Who (2005-2009) the Doctor’s ‘true self’ is maintained through subsequent ‘regenerations.’
40 In its popular usage, this term refers to a person’s destined true love, yet is derived from Plato’s story of the original humans who were male and female; two joined together with four arms and four legs, until they were separated by Zeus. In popular culture, the term soul mate is employed to emphasise that love between two individuals is so great that no physical or metaphysical force could destroy it. In fictive form, soul mate partnerships are often depicted overcoming space, time, death, the body, or psychic barriers such as spells or Alzheimer’s disease. For example, in The Notebook (2004), The Fountain (2006), and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004).
41 “For me the other is neither he nor she; the other has only a name of his own, and her own name. The third-person pronoun is a wicked pronoun: it is the pronoun of the non-person, it absents, it annuls. When I realise that common discourse takes possession of my other and restores that other to me in the bloodless form of a universal substitute, applied to all the things which are not here, it is as if I saw my other dead, reduced, shelved in an urn upon the wall of the great mausoleum of language. For me, the other cannot be a referent: you are never anything but you, I do not want the Other to speak of you.” Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse, p. 185.
42 Sliding Doors (1998).
43 In The Adjustment Bureau (2011) the authority to be overcome is that of God himself. In the film, it is revealed that angels monitor human behavior to ensure that all act according to their destiny. David and Elise state their case to the Deity and convince Him that they should be allowed to write their own destinies because they are most truly in love.
44 “In this world we’re just beginning to understand the miracle of living…Ooh, baby, do you know what that’s worth? Ooh, heaven is a place on earth. They say in heaven love comes first. We’ll make heaven a place on earth.” Belinda Carlisle, “Heaven is a Place on Earth.”
45 For example, songs that are generally understood to be about romantic love can also be read as songs about God, for instance, Florence and the Machine (“When food is gone you are my daily need. When friends are gone I know my Saviour’s love is real…You got the love I need to see me through.”) “You Got the Love,” Markita “Love, Thy Will be Done.” Similarly, in Sister Act (1992) a choir of nuns use the love songs “I Will Follow Him” and “My Guy” to refer to the Christian Deity.

 

Excerpt source: To Believe in Love – The Religious Significance of the Romantic Love Myth in Western Modernity, by Sarah K. Balstrup

 

In the following study How Venus Got Her Furs: Courtly Romance as Sadomasochistic Erotica, sadomasochism is shown to characterize the European sexual relations contract in the form of masochistic-chivalry and romantic love. It can also be observed that the same sadomasochistic culture has spawned the rise of gynocentrism, feminism, and the essentially male-led servicing of these same traditions.

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