A recent article by Doug Mortimer tells a story of a young man who went to a small town high school in the Texas Panhandle:
An avid tennis player, he went to the powers that be at his school and asked if he could form a tennis club. Sure, go ahead. Why not?
At first, things went well. Membership in the tennis club grew steadily. Then things went too well. Football players were dropping out in favor of the tennis club. So the powers that be changed their minds, and the tennis club was deep-sixed.
It is a curious paradox. In academic environments, where toxic masculinity is routinely excoriated, why is football, the ultimate contact sport – and arguably the most “toxic” sport – sacrosanct?
Musing on the story Mortimer goes on to conclude that what makes football different from other team sports, in least in terms of popular culture, is the belief that “it will make a man out of you”:
In days of old, one could come right out and say that; today it’s sub rosa. Other team sports, such as soccer, basketball, or baseball, are OK, but no one asserts they will make a man out of you. After all, even girls play soccer, basketball, and baseball (well, softball). But girls don’t play football!
Athletic competition goes back at least as far as the ancient Greeks, but organized sports leagues are a relatively new phenomenon in civilization. The sociobiological take on them is they provide an arena for a ritualized form of aggression. Think of tribal warfare without spears.
So how did boys become men before football was invented? Playing games was a leisure activity at best. You could go your entire life without ever playing any kind of sport and no one would question your manhood.
This story and Mortimer’s comments illustrate a fundamental contradiction at the heart of male-shaming, ie. the very things society shames men and boys for – in this case bone jarring football – are the very things that same society encourages. The double message for men and boys is never really resolved and they carry it like a lead weight.
Mortimer makes an important point here, that men in classical times didn’t behave in the same way. Which begs the question of where, when and especially why did this ritualized form of competition come about? Historian Johan Huizinga provides an interesting answer to these questions:
“The warlike sports of the Middle Ages differ from Greek athletics by being far less simple and natural. Pride, honour, love and art give additional stimulus to the competition itself. Overloaded with pomp and decoration, full of heroic fancy, they serve to express romantic needs too strong for mere literature to satisfy. The realities of court life or a military career offered too little opportunity for the fine make-belief of heroism and love, which rilled the soul. So they had to be acted. The staging of the tournament, therefore, had to be that of romance ; that is to say, the imaginary world of Arthur, where the fancy of a fairy-tale was enhanced by the sentimentality of courtly love.” [ https://gynocentrism.com/2014/12/10/the-dream-of-heroism-and-love-by-johan-huizinga/ ]
Based on Huizinga’s account it seems the modern sporting tournament was born first in France and referred to the joust, sword fighting and other chivalric games, all of which seem to have their origin in impressing women (who sat attentively in the stadiums) and for the gaining of women’s romantic attentions. Same thing today – beautiful women lining up to fuck sports heroes, and sportsmen/teams/clubs doing special deeds for the ladies, from wearing pink jerseys to raise money for breast cancer or raising awareness about domestic violence, and generally sucking up.
And of course we have feminists assisting sporting clubs in the drafting of ‘respecting women’ charters that result in a more general feminist ownership of club culture.
Just compare today’s woman-impressing sports with descriptions of same in the Middle Ages:
Above: Female audience attending a medieval tournament
‘Many knights, says our Armoric fabler, famous for feats of chivalry, were present, with apparel and arms of the same colour and fashion. They formed a species of diversion, in imitation of a fight on horseback, and the ladies being placed on the walls of the castles, darted amorous glances on the combatants. None of these ladies esteemed any knight worthy of her love unless he had given proof of his gallantry in three fevered encounters. Thus the valour of the men encouraged chastity in the women, and the attention of the women proved an incentive to the soldier’s bravery’ [ https://gynocentrism.com/2013/09/14/chivalry-for-love-1774/ ]
Or this one written in 1818:
The looks, the words, the sign of a lady, were accounted to- make knights at time of need perform double their usual deeds of strength and valour. At tournaments and in combats, the voices of the ladies were heard like those of the German females in former battles, calling on the knights to remember their fame, and exert themselves to the uttermost. “Think, gentle knights,” was their cry, “upon the wool of your breasts, the nerve of your arms, the love you cherish in your hearts, and do valiantly for ladies behold you.” The corresponding shouts of the combatants were, “Love of ladies! Death of warriors! On, valiant knights, for you fight under fair eyes? Where the honour or love of a lady was at stake, the fairest prize was held out to the victorious knight, and champion from every quarter were sure to hasten to combat in a cause so popular. [ https://gynocentrism.com/2013/09/17/the-spirit-of-chivalry-1818/ ]
You get the picture…
The sporting tournament (from french word – tourney) arose at precisely the same time as romantic chivalry and courtly love, a theme that continues today in the ubiquitous sporting tournament everywhere. With this in mind it becomes the task of today’s sports-minded men to decide just who they are playing the game for; for upper class women like in France? or for simple, natural fun like the Greeks? some other reason?….. the answer is your call.
I recently came across a few mentions of Gynosympathy on the internet and decided to look into its origins and meaning. The term, translating roughly as special sympathy for women and girls, is a corollary to biological and cultural gynocentrism, and a helpful addition to the lexicon.
ORIGINS
The term does not appear in any dictionaries. The earliest mention I could locate was a blog post of 22nd September 2013 which is given below in full:
Gynosympathy is the well-documented, yet poorly examined, tendency in human being to sympathize with females more than males, leading to the preferential protection and appeasement of women. As a scientific reality, gynosympathy is so well demonstrated that it is virtually irrefutable.1 As a social concept, however, it is virtually unknown.
The reasons for this discrepancy are many, not least of which is that gynosympathy is such a deeply rooted phenomenon that human beings have a very difficult time recognizing it.
It likely has both evolutionary and cultural aspects. For example, Bateman’s Principle would lead us to suspect that men would exhibit gynosympathy more often in the context of sexual relations (or their implied or imagined potential) which has been born out in a study by Rudman and Goodwin entitled Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: why do women like women more than men like men? that found “that for sexually experienced men, the more positive their attitude was toward sex, the more they implicitly favored women.2
Another excellent demonstration of gynosympathy can be found in a study by Plant, Hyde, Keltner, and Devine entitled “The Gender Stereotyping of Emotions3 wherein a variety of facial expressions were posed by professional face models, photographed, and selected for their precise muscular sameness. Participants shown photos of men and women with the exact same expressions judged the women to be more sad (eliciting sympathy) and the men to be more angry (eliciting a threat response). “Even unambiguous anger poses by women were rated as a mixture of anger and sadness.” This is a clear bias of sympathy in favor of women.
Of course, researchers often focus on conclusions other than gynosympathy; the authors of the PWQ study, for example, lamented that women were not allowed to be angry. Ironically, by sympathizing preferentially with women (why not lament that men were not allowed to be sad?) the researchers were exhibiting the very bias they thought they were addressing.
A human gynosympathetic bias is clear. It absolutely saturates gender politics, leading to exaggerations of the plight of women like the “rule of thumb” myth, the “wage gap” myth, and the widespread belief that before the 20th century no woman could own property. It leads political activists to glamorize the history of voting rights and ignore conscription, to demonize men for fighting (and dying) in war while glossing over the well-documented role of women in urging, and even shaming, men to trek off to battle while they remained home in peace and safety.
Gynosympathy distorts legislation, leading to brazenly discriminatory laws that explicitly name women as a class of victims who need special protection, even against problems (like violence) where men suffer comparable or even higher rates of victimhood. It skews medical research, leading to preferential funding for women’s health issues out of proportion to their incidence and fatality rates compared to similar men’s health issues. And, in US courts, the influence of gynosympathy drives a sexist bias in prosecution, sentencing, and execution that dwarfs the racial biases in the justice system.
It is time to recognize this cognitive bias for the systemic and dangerously discriminatory influence that it is; to seek out its discriminatory influence in ourselves, our culture, and our institutions; and to push for a more rational, scientific, ethical, equitable, humane, and universally sympathetic approach to gender issues.
Notes:
[1] Of course, valid science being defined by falsifiable theories, nothing scientific is technically “irrefutable.”
[2] Rudman and Goodwin, Gender differences in automatic in-group bias: why do women like women more than men like men?, Journal of Personal and Social Psychology, 2004 Oct;87(4):494-509.
Incidentally, the same study “confirmed that women’s automatic in-group bias is remarkably stronger than men’s” and “men lack a mechanism that bolsters automatic own group preference,” making ideological theories of a “patriarchal” conspiracy to boost men at the expense of women a scientific absurdity.
[3] Plant, Hyde, Keltner, and Devine, “The Gender Stereotyping of Emotions, Psychology of Women Quarterly, 28 JUL 2006 [DOI: 10.1111/j.1471-6402.2000.tb01024.x]
Since this apparent coining, others across the internet have used it though usually as a brief descriptor rather than an in-depth commentary on its meaning. The following, slightly shorter elaboration from Freethinker’s corner blog dated June 2014 provides a few examples of gynosympathy in action:
Gynosympathy
Society has always shown extraordinary sympathy towards women. A woman can commit the same heinous illegal act, from child abuse, to rape, and a judge, either male or female, will grant the most lenient sentence, if any sentence is applied at all.
The recent incident in Nigeria, the Boko Haram, butchered boys (some reports vary on the number), hacking them to death and burning them alive, then kidnapped girls (reports vary on number), but what do we hear of on the news? The kidnapping of the girls, without so much as a mention of the slaughter of the boys. Western media went so far as to attempt to make the kidnapping into a feminist, women’s rights issue.
There are many examples of the double standard that is applied between males and females. In TV, movies, and in print the double standard is easily seen.
If a woman commits a sexual act with a minor male, he is often depicted as being “lucky”. She usually receives a very lenient sentence, if any at all. A man commits a sexual act with a minor female, no matter how willing, and it’s rape. His name is publicized, his reputation immediately ruined, even if the incident was only something conjured up in the girl’s mind. If found guilty his sentence is noticeably more harsh than a woman’s.
The public accepts this gynocentricity without reaction. Recently Hillary Clinton said that when men are killed in war the main people who suffer are the wife and children. What about the man that was killed, Hillary?
One night I was watching an episode of the old Adam-12 series. A woman had just shot her husband to death and then rushed out of her residence firing her gun at will. If a man had killed his wife and done that he would have been full of lead before the echo from his first shot had died out. Instead, the police, treated the woman with delicacy. They hid behind their police car ducking round after round while another officer surreptitiously worked his way around behind her, and disarmed her. They seemed to have great sympathy for the woman. The man? Well, he’s dead, who cares.
Undoubtedly, thousands more examples of gynosympathy could be, or rather have been noted by observant human rights advocates, examples where women’s voices, needs and concerns were offered quick and compassionate response in comparison to the poverty of response toward males in similar situations. While our current gynocentric culture complex remains strong, gynosympathy will likely also remain the dominant use of available human sympathy.
FORERUNNERS AND SYNONYMS
A notable forerunner to gynosympathy is sentimental feminism, coined over 100 years ago by Ernest B. Bax, who used the phrase to cover much the same territory as gynosympathy. For more on Baxs’ conception of sentimental feminism see here: https://ernestbelfortbax.com/2014/01/27/bax-on-sentimental-feminism-and-political-feminism/
Finally, following Bax, I would like to offer as synonyms: gynosentiment or gynosentimentality, as well as another – gynobias – to coincide with the much studied Women-Are-Wonderful Effect which conceives of women as having pure and positive motives, and thus are more deserving of sympathy.
As men, we are born into the storybook world of brave knights saving damsels, stoic acts in the face of pain and suffering, and glorious deeds of male heroics. All these things constitute the psychological diet on which boys are raised.
Whether Sir Lancelot, Superman, a great athlete or firefighter, these archetypes silently shape our identity and direct our behaviors, often for the better and often at great cost. They are the living templates men use to map their world, to construct their sense of self, and to direct their behaviors in relationships with others.
Therapy with men, then, must involve a significant and compassionate understanding of the narratives that guide them, and must work within those narratives to carve out a path toward meaningful change.
To that end we will tentatively title a male-friendly approach to working with men, a Narrative Therapy With Men.
Before we get into the nuts and bolts of narrative therapy, we need first to examine the place where therapy, coaching and counseling happens, which is more often than not an environment tailored to suit female sensibilities.
The Therapeutic Setting
Many therapy rooms have pretty decor, flowers, artwork, an essential-oil diffuser, and of course face-to-face seating positioned to honor the typical female preference for eye to eye contact and sharing.
You will find tissues placed conveniently on a side table in a decorative box, conveying the silent expectation of tears, shared feelings, and emotional catharsis.
In a way the therapy office mimics an hour at the cafe sipping lattes, for which women might prepare by thinking about what clothing to wear and what juicy bits of personal drama they might like to share. Then to round it off with all the sincerity of here’s your bill and have-a-nice-day.
So much for the male friendly therapy environment.
Imagine instead a therapy office in the boiler room of a ship, in a workshop, a park, a building site, mechanics shed or a sports locker room, with seating arrangements that allowed men to sit at 45 degree angles or side by side — engaged in some kind of task if they wished.
Imagine too if we were to engage in some kind of typical male play or industry – not just Jungian sandplay or water-color art therapies as suits the more effeminate sensibilities of women, but hands on therapy – while driving a truck, fixing the engine of a car or building a piece of furniture.
Or, if you prefer, something recreational. Standing on a peer fishing, hiking up the side of a hill or sitting beside a campfire.
When it comes to communication, men like a medium, something through which to channel their energy.
“The image just doesn’t compute, does it?” she half-asks, half-declares. Then she adds with obligatory condescension, “The Marlboro man wouldn’t admit to needing help.”
We can agree with Winerman that it is impractical to expect the Marlboro Man to sit in a feminized office, with a feminist-trained female counselor and gush his emotions on demand. But perhaps he would be more open to discussing his issues while riding a horse, stacking bales of hay or enjoying a beer?
As with boys, who are more engaged when kinetic learning is applied to the school curriculum, men too are generally more inclined to thrive outside of the prettified and sedentary counselor’s office — in the world where real life takes place.
For most men the average counseling office is not only in poor taste, it is at once anesthetizing and pressurized. It is an environment where the senses are dulled and urges male participants to do something that is already likely a problem in their lives – the expectation to perform for the benefit of a woman.
This is a critical point to make. As we examine the narratives of men, as we look at their stories, what we find with great redundancy is the expectation for them to perform for women. From the mandate to please mothers, to protection and provision for women, to heroic sacrifice and even down to the basic assumed responsibility for the female orgasm, we see men in a role to satisfy through performance.
What then can possibly be happening in the minds of men sitting in female dominated space, box of tissue at their side, with a woman saying “tell me how you feel” about this or that? Even worse, asking such probing questions with the implication that he is an empty emotional vessel in need of her redemption.
There is little there for most men. Indeed, if we honestly and compassionately examine the narrative of men’s lives, we have to agree with Ms. Whinerman again. There is no reason to imagine why the Marlboro man, or any other man, would have much to say to her at all, and the ones who do are likely just caving to the pressure to perform.
Without some kind of activity or medium to engage in other than naked personal drama and emoting, men tend to disengage. Feminist inspired therapy would have us believe that this is because men are emotionally stunted and ill-equipped to articulate feelings.
In reality, the only thing men are ill-equipped at is being women, which is why standard talk-therapy is such a poor option for most of them.
Like boys, men are more likely to connect with the therapist and be willing to table his issues (vs share his feelings) when they are engaged in something meaningful.
Rather than shaming men as recalcitrant therapy clients, we must take a different approach and offer them a greater variety of places in which to speak to their issues. Therapy can still take place in the traditional face to face manner in an office, but it can also take place in any of the environments mentioned before, providing the therapist is willing to step out of his or her chair and begin walking, literally, while the therapy takes place.
Alternatively, if the logistics of getting together with the therapist are restrictive, digital mediums like Skype can provide the platform, again with special consideration to siting postures: men might prefer to sit at an angle to the camera and have the therapist do the same, or he might prefer the vision switched to off altogether. For the tech-savvy therapist male-friendly backgrounds for his digital office might be employed on request – a bar, a mechanics shed, a kitchen… you name it.
And yes, unless a client has issues with alcohol, a beer during the session may not be out of the question.
That proposition will seem scandalous to some practitioners. However, we estimate the knee-jerk hostility to such ideas is rooted firmly in an academically acquired ignorance of men and their needs. It is consistent with trying to put them into the female emotional mold.
Finally, the language of the therapeutic session might need to undergo a similar revolution, depending on the client’s imagination, with less emphasis on unquantifiable metaphors like personal growth and empowerment, or on feelings, and more on metaphors of manual-activity to describe emotional processes; men speak in terms of wrestling with challenges, hammering problems out, trying to understand the mechanics of depression, and when considering objectives, they might hope to score a goal: to nail it, as it were.
To summarize, a new therapy for men might consider utilizing new settings for conducting consultations, including the use of a wider range of manual activities – occupations and crafts – as therapeutic mediums.
Having briefly sketched out the ‘where’ of therapy, we can now move onto the ‘what’ of the therapy.
The Practice of Therapy
Narrative Therapy with Men assumes the following principles as axiomatic:
Rejects misguided concepts like patriarchy theory and toxic masculinity.
By definition it is tailored exclusively to men’s experiences, men’s ways of thinking and behaving.
Sees learned detachment as essential to problem solving
Recognizes the unique emotional and psychological acumen of men
Sees the therapist as more of a coach or mentor than an emotional conduit.
Seeks to use men’s kinetic inclination as an asset, rather than treat it as an impediment to progress
Narratives, the building-blocks of our worldview become the focal point around which the therapy hinges, and include the following objectives:
Identifying the current narrative
The way we tell our story is the way we form our therapy,1 so the first task for each man is to narrate his story about himself and his world. These initial narratives form the primary datum which sets the future direction of the therapy, a direction completely unknown until the stories are verbalized.
As stories are shared, likenesses between them and popular cultural stories can be discussed – such as classical myths, fairy tales, biographies of the famous or from movies, to bring the material alive. The comparison stories act as bass chords that animate the material under discussion, and to help depersonalize the content so that it no longer seems unique and isolating – ie. such stories belong to our collective cultural history and are thus very far from personal.
Externalizing the narrative
Carl Jung was famed for saying “We don’t have complexes, the complexes have us.” The same can be said of narratives, including our personal ones. The stories and archetypes that drive our lives underscore the importance of gaining cognitive and emotional distance from them if we no longer wish to be held under their spell.
This is a radical departure from where most therapies in the modern mold take men. In standard practice the agenda of the therapist is usually to drive the client toward reliving trauma or loss and articulating the feelings that surround those things.
While practitioners with men need to have the skills to comfortably handle emotional upheaval when it happens, the objective is to help the client gain more distance from the inner turmoil, affording them an opportunity for practical, rational solutions.
How else, for instance, can a man stop acting sacrificially with women, until he rejects the sacrificial role? And to reject that role, he must be able to see it from a more objective distance, in practical terms. Men rarely need assistance to realize they are in emotional hell with a woman. They often stay silently immersed in it, entangled hopelessly in trying to find solutions that are not forthcoming.
While an exploration of childhood trauma, abusive parenting and unresolved grief may provide more insight into current life troubles, it will not provide what the client needs most. A path out.
Externalizing a narrative, depersonalizing it, helps us to see it as separate from our own self-image, perhaps for the first time. By abstracting the story and dissociating from it we can more easily edit its details and gain mastery: the narrative no longer has us – we have it.
None of the aforementioned, however, have actively applied the technique to the stories men live by – a shameful oversight for therapies claiming to plumb the depths of human experience.
The life of men has heretofore been shrouded in a cloud of repression, amnesia and denial, ironically aided and abetted by the very psychologists called to lift the lid on that repression.
While some have claimed to help men raise consciousness, what in most instances has happened is therapists adding yet more layers of faulty text to an already burdensome set of male narratives. Narrative Therapy with Men aims to reverse the tradition of neglect.
Problematizing the narrative
A core tenet of Narrative Therapy with Men is that Men are not the problem, the narrative is the problem.
We view this approach to be corrective on its face. Men are universally saddled with the artifacts of a faulty narrative. Whether that is driven by a failure to be heroic or successful enough to fulfill historic male expectations, or whether it is the more modernized narrative of toxic masculinity, or both, men typically see themselves as the source of the problem.
Continually failing to fix themselves, which their narrative does not allow them to do, aggravates the situation all the more.
Portions of a given narrative may be destructive and other parts may not, which a joint, detached exploration can discover. It can lead to a discarding of the dysfunctional parts and a retention of those parts retaining value and importance to individual men.
It is as simple as keeping what works and tossing out what doesn’t, which is easier said than done. We view the main obstacle to that, though, as a lack of detachment.
For instance, shame can be a huge impediment. A man can see a problem, but without detachment, his experience of shame can drive him to deny, minimize and avoid the problem. Until, of course, the problem rears its head, causes pain, and the cycle starts all over again.
The only way, we argue, to interrupt that, is through healthy detachment.
An Ear for Men has detailed numerous examples of destructive narratives for men, such as the belief that men are inherently flawed, that they belong to and benefit from Patriarchy, that they must ignore their health to be worthy of relationships, or that their role in life is to serve women in one capacity or another while denying their own needs and value.
To these the new therapy for men applies the razor, surgically removing criticisms of men and replacing them with narratives of self-worth. And, importantly, it allows men the use of their logic and reason to guide the surgery, not their emotional reaction to the problem.
Exploring potential new narratives
Life does not tolerate a void. That is why isolating problem narratives and the work of deleting them runs concurrent with a process of re-narration. In this a therapist and client can be imagined as co-authors working on a novel, where therapist co-writes or ghost-writes a new narrative, running a red pen though all the toxic text.
The new text can be literally anything the client dreams up. The practitioner consults with the client, offers observations, but otherwise gets out of the way and allows the client to have the lead role in the creative aspects of the process.
Narratives men adopt to break free from limiting expectations need not be reduced to reactions against the original problem-riddled narrative, which places the response into a narrow formula of thesis and antithesis. An example of that approach is seen in the tendency of some men to replace misandric narratives with misogynistic narratives. Or, perhaps, men who have been sexually rejected who seek to correct with sexual conquests.
An example of narratives structured along the lines of antithetical reactions vs. more liberating and proactive possibilities was elaborated in an earlier article at An Ear for Men, titled Values-based approach to gynocentrism for men. There we are given the example of three narratives:
-1. A gynocentric narrative in need of deletion -2. An anti-gynocentric reactive narrative, and -3. A proactive narrative which transcends the for-and-against-gynocentrism binary
.
Nailing down a narrative
The goal of the new narrative is to serve as a values-centered approach to dealing with self and world.
This part can be somewhat tricky. Values, or what we consider good and bad, right and wrong, purposeful or meaningless, are by necessity a product of our narrative. And they can be as destructive as the narrative itself.
For instance, you can ask a man to tell you about his values. He might tell you that among them are honesty and integrity. So far, so good. But he may also follow that up by saying his values drive him to sacrifice for the benefit of a woman, that a real man takes care of women and shields them from hardship.
The problem with that, as may be apparent, is that millions of men have led themselves to misery, ruin, and even to death, with precisely these values. It is not that their intent is flawed but that they have allowed values for which they have no conscious etiology to put them behind the wheel with a blindfold on, mindless of any values that might have addressed their self-preservation.
Again, a detached review of values, and how they stem from personal narrative is a necessity.
A values-centered ideology is established and articulated by the client at some time during the process of consultations. He may already have his core values clarified and will want to proceed with a narrative that honors them. Alternatively, he may feel his values have been implanted from without or inherited without consent, foreign objects that have brought harm to his health and wellbeing and so seeks to construct a new set of values and an accompanying life script that will do them justice. This can all be done with a practitioner, or simply on a man’s own volition, or with a trusted friend.
______________
That, then is a brief outline of Narrative Therapy with Men. It is not intended to be complete, and is indeed still a nascent approach to working with men. The psychological disciplines, as mentioned earlier, have hinted at this approach, have skirted the ideas contained here but without breaching the sacred wall of feminized psychology.
Now we set about the work of expanding on these ideas and calling on others to do the same.
References:
[1] “The way we tell our story is the way we form our therapy” is a quote from Patricia Berry’s essay ‘An Approach To The Dream,’ Spring Journal of Archetype and Culture (1974).
The following article is the second of a two-part series. Part one looked at the roots of damseling, chivalry and courtly love in the gynocentric tradition. In part two we look at damseling, chivalry and courtly love as it appears in the feminist tradition. – PW
_________________
FEMINISM
Before being given the name feminism, the obsession with women’s status was referred to as the Querelle des Femmes or quarrel about women. The querelle consisted of a perpetual social movement that used damseling to call for more chivalry and more courtly love, which ultimately afforded women more power.
The three elements of gynocentrism first born in medieval Europe – damseling, chivalry and courtly love – continue to act as the basis of modern feminism. Indeed feminism today is little more, and little less, than a perpetuation of this medieval triad, giving feminism its internal drive even as feminists disavow these essentials with rhetorical obfuscations.
With this charge in mind let’s revisit the holy trinity above with a focus on behaviors central to modern feminism.
Damseling as “victim feminism”
Most observers today, including feminist observers like Christina Hoff-Sommers, Camille Paglia, Rene Denfeld, Katie Roiphe and others agree that feminism comes close, if not all the way, to being a cult of victimhood.
The phenomenon has variously been referred to as grievance feminism, victim feminism, safe space feminism, and even fainting-couch feminism – with Christina Hoff-Sommers portraying its mythos as “a battle between fragile maidens and evil predators.” 1
Feminist icon Naomi Wolf tells that victim feminism evolved out of “old habits of ladylike behavior that were cloaked in the guise of radicalism,” 2 and laments that a substantial segment of modern feminism is devoted to its cause.
Denfeld writes that current feminists “promote a new status for women: that of the victim,” and adds:
“This is victim mythology. From rape redefinitions to feminist theory on the “patriarchy,” victimization has become the subtext of the movement, the moral to be found in every feminist story. Together these stories form a feminist mythology in which a singular female subject is created: woman as a helpless, violated, and oppressed victim. Victim mythology says that men will always be predators and women will always be their prey. It is a small place to live, a place that tells women that there is really no way out.
“Like other mythologies, victim mythology reduces the complexity of human interaction to grossly oversimplified mythical tales, a one-note song, where the message of the story becomes so important that fiction not only triumphs over fact but the realities of women’s experiences are dismissed and derided when they conflict with the accepted female image.3
While Denfeld does a good job of describing feminism’s victim mentality, she labors under a myth of her own by characterizing it as a “new” fetish among feminists. Anyone reading through the history of feminist literature can see it appealed to by literally every feminist writer. Even a century ago Ernest Belfort Bax was able to say that feminists “do their best to bluff their dupes by posing as the victims of a non-existent male oppression.”4
Feminists well know that the most grotesquely far-fetched cry about the injustice of man to woman will meet with a ready ear. They well know that they get here fond and foolish man on his soft side. Looking at the matter impartially, it is quite evident that man’s treatment of woman is the least vulnerable point in his moral record. Woman, as such, he has always treated with comparative generosity. But it is, of course, to the interests of the abettors of female domination to pretend the contrary. Accordingly everything has been done to excite prejudice in favour of woman as the innocent and guileless victim of man’s tyranny, and the maudlin Feminist sentiment of the “brute” man has been carefully exploited to this end.5
In all of these accounts the behavior being described is damseling, a practice feminists have been at the forefront of preserving from the medieval canon. Evoked in conjunction with claims of male brutality, rapiness, depravity and insensitivity, the ultimate purpose of damseling is to draw chivalric responses from men, a routine Wolf makes clear in her remark that “victim feminism casts women as sexually pure and mystically nurturing, and stresses the evil done to these ‘good’ women as a way to petition for their rights.” 6
A famous example of feminist damseling, both literal and figurative, is Anita Sarkeesian. Sarkeesian is known for raising concerns that video-games are misogynistic – like most everything else found in the feminist worldview. Her primary concern was that female game characters are often portrayed as damsels-in-distress saved by male heroes, which promotes, she says, sexual objectification and a range of other problems. To address that issue in video games she moved to launch a study project to raise awareness.
Sarkeesian established a fundraiser for $6,000.00 for her project, but after receiving some initial trolling by trolls on social media she damseled herself to potential donors by saying she was under grave threat, swooning with such finesse that she was showered with 158K in donations from fellow feminists and white knights. Over a thousand people donated after hearing of her “plight.”
With that financial success, Sarkeesian subsequently replayed the scenario over and again particularly in the context of further fundraising efforts and public speaking; swooning about online attacks directed against her or over female gamers enduring abject sexism, female video-game characters being cast in degrading and/or humiliating roles, and about young impressionable girls being robbed of agency after being subjected to the damsel trope in games.
Sarkeesian’s case is particularly poignant because, from the many subjects she could have highlighted to damsel herself for attention, she chose to damsel herself over the very existence of damsels. This demonstrates that even when disavowing the medieval pageant of damsels in distress, feminists continue to enact it even while obfuscating their complicity in the tradition.
Feminism would have died out long ago if it were not for the power of this ancient ruse, and while damseling continues to draw rewards from a public primed to cater to it, the planet will increasingly come to resemble a tower full of imprisoned, vulnerable Disney Princesses.
Chivalry – from husband Sam to Uncle Sam
Equity feminist Christina Hoff-Sommers states that men need to be civilized with chivalric manners, a belief outlined in an interview with Emily Esfahani Smith, where she said, “Chivalry is grounded in a fundamental reality that defines the relationship between the sexes,” and adding a warning, “If women give up on chivalry, it will be gone.” 7
While feminists like Hoff-Sommers admit their reliance on a sexist version of chivalry, others are less candid about it, going even so far as pretending they don’t need chivalry despite their demonstrable appeal to it in most of their activism. Many observers however can see through the anti-chivalry posturing.
Feminism draws its power from chivalric support, but instead of soliciting it from men in the traditional, interpersonal manner it has learned how to get it solely from the government – holding the government to ransom ever since the suffragettes damsaled the vote for women. Since that time politicians have only been too willing to furnish demands by feminists in exchange for voting the candidate into power and allowing him to retain office – and conversely politicians who fail to uphold the chivalric contract are promptly voted out.
The results of this compact are obvious to anyone who looks at political decisions with impartiality.
Instead of men giving up seats in buses, government now provides seats in legislative assemblies and boardrooms via quotas. Instead of men opening car doors for women, government opens doors into universities and workforces via affirmative action. Instead of men being the sole protectors of women from violence, government now protects them with an army of police specially trained to service women’s accusations (over and above more serious crimes). Instead of men providing living expenses, governments now provide it as social welfare and compensation for the wage-gap. Government as substitute husband.
The appeal to chivalry is not confined to government institutions alone. The appeal also goes out to sporting clubs, business owners, CEOs and private institutions who respond to the damsel’s call with women-only busses, women-only safe spaces, pink car parking spaces with extra lighting and security with male escorts and chaperones, or with feminist adverts at sports venues, sportsmen wearing pink to raise money for all manner of feminist projects, and that on top of monies already heaped at their feet by politicians eager to please.
This is not a recent development; it can be witnessed in mirror image as far back as a century ago. Back then, Bax was able to tie feminism so definitively with the act of chivalry-seeking that he actually labeled the women’s liberation movement “chivalry feminism.” Moreover, Bax saw through the superficial disavowals;
“The justification for the whole movement of Modern Feminism in one of its main practical aspects – namely, the placing of the female sex in the position of privilege, advantage and immunity – is concentrated in the current conception of “chivalry.”
It is plain then that chivalry as understood in the present day really spells sex privilege and sex favouritism pure and simple, and that any attempts to define the term on a larger basis, or to give it a colourable rationality founded on fact, are simply subterfuges, conscious or unconscious, on the part of those who put them forward…
Such is “chivalry” as understood to-day – the deprivation, the robbery from men of the most elementary personal rights in order to endow women with privileges at the expense of men.8
Chivalry feminism today, same as it ever was, relying on men’s generosity to perpetuate its creed of power.
Courtly love as ‘Respectful Relationships’
The phrase ‘Respectful Relationships’ is shorthand for a range of conventions promoted by feminists to govern interactions between men and women, particularly in the context of romantic interactions. The conventions detail acceptable speech and actions in the contexts of socializing, friendship, flirting and sex, emphasizing a man’s duty to respect women’s emotional comfort, self-esteem, and dignity.
Portrayed overtly as a method of reducing men’s abusiveness, the program maintains that even men and boys who do not display abusive behaviors should be enculturated in its protocols as a prophylactic, and concomitantly to afford dignity and self-esteem to women. This is where the respectful relationships program moves past the overt goal of reducing violence and into the covert goal of maintaining and increasing the power of women.
As we begin to look at the detail of Respectful Relationship we could almost mistake it for Andreas Capellanus’ work The Art of Courtly Love where the medieval rules of romance were codified in meticulous prescriptions for male deference, homage, and courtesy toward women. Considering this parallel, the feminist movement appears to have provided a new language for a very old set of sexual customs, essentially reiterating that which has been with us all along.
As mentioned in Part one, central to the art of courtly love was the expectation that men practice love service toward women based on a model of vassals or serfs in relation to a feudal lord. That relationship model of serf-to-Lord was adopted wholesale to regulate love relationships whereby women were literally approached as the lord (midons) in each male-female encounter. As Medievalist Sandra Alfonsi explains;
Scholars soon saw striking parallels between feudalistic practices and certain tenets of Courtly Love. The comparisons lie in certain resemblances shared by vassalage and the courtly “love service.” Fundamental to both was the concept of obedience. As a vassal, the liegeman swore obedience to his lord. As a courtly lover, the poet chose a lady to whom he was required to swear obedience. Humility and obedience were two concepts familiar to medieval man, active components of his Weltanschauung…
The entire concept of love-service was patterned after the vassal’s oath to serve his lord with loyalty, tenacity, and courage. These same virtues were demanded of the poet. Like the liegeman vis-a-vis his sovereign, the poet approached his lady with fear and respect. Submitted to her, obedient to her will, he awaited a fief or honor as did the vassal. His compensation took many forms: the pleasure of his lady’s company in her chamber or in the garden; an avowal of her love; a secret meeting; a kiss or even le surplus, complete unity. Like the lord, the woman who was venerated and served was expected to reward her faithful and humble servant.9
The idea behind love service was that men should demonstrate the quality of their commitment to women; was it merely lust or obedient and sacrificial love? If the woman decided it was “love” then she might decide to engage more intimately with him, as Joseph Campbell explains:
“The woman is looking for authenticity in a relationship, so she delays merci until she is guaranteed that this man who is proposing himself to her is one of a gentle heart… And, the women were in control, that’s all there is to it. The man is the one who is advancing, the one performing the acts of guarding bridges, or whatever bit of foolishness she puts on him, but, she’s in control. And her problem is to live in a relationship that is authentic of love, and the only way she can do it is by testing the one who offers himself. She isn’t offering herself, he’s offering himself. But, she’s in control of what happens then with step two.10
“The technical term for a woman’s granting of herself was merci; the woman grants her merci. Now, that might consist in her permission for the man to kiss her on the back of the neck once every Whitsuntide, you know, something like that – or it may be a full giving in love. That would depend upon her estimation of the character of the candidate. The essential idea was to test this man to make sure that he would suffer things for love, and that this was not just lust.
The tests that were given then by women involved, for example, sending a chap out to guard a bridge. The traffic in the Middle Ages was somewhat encumbered by these youths guarding bridges. But also the tests included going into battle. A woman who was too ruthless in asking her lover to risk a real death before she would acquiesce in anything was considered sauvage or “savage”. Also, the woman who gave herself without the testing was “savage”. There was a very nice psychological estimation game going on here.11
Today that psychological estimation game (as Campbell puts it) might involve asking consent to sit with a woman, appealing politely for a date, waiting patiently for her to call or sweep right, keeping his knees together to avoid manspreading, or asking for permission to speak in order to prove he is not talking over her or mansplaining. Such demonstrations show the feminist woman that he has a gentle heart, and that he is willing to suffer things for love.
That psychological testing also encompasses public activities which demonstrate a man’s commitment to serving womankind as a whole. Examples would be a man walking a mile in her shoes, or joining White Ribbon Campaigns that require men, as was required of the medieval knights, to pledge oaths to “Never to condone, or remain silent about violence towards women and girls” and especially to intervene when learning of any male behaving offensively toward a woman.
Today’s White Ribbon “oath” bears a striking resemblance to the 14th century enterprise of the Green Shield with the White Lady (Emprise de l’Escu vert à la Dame Blanche) in which men committed themselves for the duration of five years to serving women. Inspired by the ideal of courtly love, the stated purpose of the order was to guard and defend the honor, estate, goods, reputation, fame and praise of all ladies. It was an undertaking that earned the praise of protofeminist Christine de Pizan. The continuity of chivalry and courtly love from the medieval knightly oath to the modern feminist-inspired oath is remarkable in its consistency.
In line with most women who expect men to follow medieval rules of love concerning male courtesy, the feminist movement is geared toward enforcing the same goal. Feminism however postures itself as disavowing that goal even while they are at the forefront of institutionalizing it in our families, our schools, our political structures and laws.
Each of the psychological tests mentioned above are evidence of a love service called for by feminist activists. Or worded differently, they are sanctified methods by which men are called to demonstrate obedience and a ‘gentle heart’ in contrast to the brutality, rapiness and exploitativeness of the savage heart; the default feminist conception of men.
I will close here with the words of an academic feminist, one not so coy about identifying courtly love with the project of feminism. Elizabeth Reid Boyd of the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University, and Director of the Centre for Research for Women in Western Australia with more than a decade as a feminist researcher and teacher of women’s studies tells:
In this article I muse upon arguments that romance is a form of feminism. Going back to its history in the Middle Ages and its invention by noblewomen who created the notion of courtly love, examining its contemporary popular explosion and the concurrent rise of popular romance studies in the academy that has emerged in the wake of women’s studies, and positing an empowering female future for the genre, I propose that reading and writing romantic fiction is not only personal escapism, but also political activism.
Romance has a feminist past that belies its ostensible frivolity. Romance, as most true romantics know, began in medieval times. The word originally referred to the language romanz, linked to the French, Italian and Spanish languages in which love stories, songs and ballads were written. Stories, poems and songs written in this language were called romances to separate them from more serious literature – a distinction we still have today. Romances were popular and fashionable. Love songs and stories, like those of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, were soon on the lips of troubadours and minstrels all over Europe. Romance spread rapidly. It has been called the first form of feminism (Putnam 1970).12
Reid Boyd finishes her paper by waxing poetic about the many joys of romantic love, and of its increasing popularity in academe.
Same as it ever was, the project of modern feminism can be summarized as championing victimhood (damseling), soliciting favors from men and governments (chivalry), and promoting “respectful” relationships by men-toward-women (courtly love).
References:
[1] Christina Hoff-Sommers, How fainting couch feminism threatens freedom, American Enterprise Institute 2015
[2] Naomi Wolf, Fire With Fire: New Female Power, 1993
[3] Rene Denfeld, The New Victorians: A Young Woman’s Challenge to the Old Feminist Order, 1995
[4] Ernest B. Bax, Feminism and Female Suffrage, 1910
[5] Ernest B. Bax, Mr. Belfort Bax Replies to his Feminist Critics, 1908
[6] Naomi Wolf, Fire With Fire: New Female Power, 1993
[7] Emily Esfahani Smith, Let’s Give Chivalry Another Chance, The Atlantic, Dec 10 2012
[8] Ernest B. Bax, Chapter-5 ‘The Chivalry Fake’ in The Fraud of Feminism, 1913
[9] Sandra Alfonsi, Masculine Submission in Troubadour Lyric, 1986
[10] Joseph Campbell, Parzival, the Graal, and Grail Legends, talk at the Ojai Foundation, 1987
[11] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, interview with Bill Moyers, 1988
[12] Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Romancing Feminism: From Women’s Studies to Women’s Fiction, 2014
This article is the first of a two-part series looking at the roots of damseling, chivalry and courtly love as fundamentals in the gynocentric tradition. Part two will look at damseling, chivalry and courtly love as it appears in contemporary feminism. – PW
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GYNOCENTRISM
The dominant features of gender relations today come from old Europe in the forms of damseling, chivalry and courtly-love. Together they form the customs, in fact the essence, of modern gynocentric culture.
This holy trinity was crafted into a system of deportment by 12th century French and German aristocrats, setting a trend that spread to all the aristocratic courts of Europe. From those lofty parlors it filtered into popular culture, being transported eventually to the new world on the wings of colonial expansion.
The principle modes of transmission were expositions from upper class men and women; troubadour performances; plays; and notably a new genre of literature referred to as romance literature in which knights were celebrated for saving damsels in distress, and male lovers endured tortuous and trial-ridden tests in an attempt to secure a love bond with a beloved lady.
Nine hundred years later and romance novels remain the largest selling literature genre in the world, and we equally see the obsession with damseling and chivalry which dominate our politics, our societies, and our conversations over the dinner table.
In what follows, each of these gynocentric pillars and their historical roots will be summarized, along with references to the biological imperatives that give them their internal drive. Lastly (in part 2) an argument will be made that feminism today is nothing more, and nothing less, than a perpetuation of this medieval triad.
Let’s take a closer look at these three elements.
Damseling
Damseling is a popular shorthand for women’s projection of themselves as damsels in distress, regardless of whether the distress and the reasons for it are real or manufactured.
An excellent overview of damseling and its history was posted on Reddit in 2014 by author LemonMcAlister:
We hear a lot about the “Damsel in Distress” trope and how it is both uncreative and damaging to women as a whole. The idea that a woman needs to be rescued by a valiant hero is held up as a sexist concept created by men who view women merely as a prize to be won.
Would you be surprised if I told you this trope actually has a heavily feminist origin?
In order to explain this, we’ll need to go back in time about 1,000 years. In Medieval Europe, this was a time of rampant violence and wars with no other goal than material gain. Even long before the First Crusade, popular fiction took the form of heroic songs and epic poems much like Beowulf. They were sung in great halls and appealed mainly to a very masculine audience.
One thing many people are surprised to hear is that early legends and stories of King Arthur are exceedingly violent, gory, and action packed. Knights routinely have their head split to the shoulders, warriors are killed on almost every page, and there is even a giant who has his testicles sliced off in a fight.
The common understanding of Arthurian legend, however, is one of chivalry and courtly love. Knights fight for their ladies and for God. Love and romance is considered by most people to be a major part of the Arthurian stories.
The truth, however, is that this emphasis on love and romance, the idea that knights would fight to rescue a lady from a villain, is a later addition and was promoted by someone who can undeniably be called a feminist.
Eleanor of Aquitaine, born somewhere around 1123, was, as Wikipedia calls her, “one of the wealthiest and most powerful women in western Europe during the High Middle Ages”. She is well known for doing many “unlady-like” things such as taking up the cross for the second crusade, recruiting women from her court to accompany her, and personally leading her own army as a feudal lord.
What’s important here is that she is also responsible for the major and dramatic shift in the themes of popular fiction. Chrétien de Troyes, a poet of the late 12th century, is probably the most well-known writer dealing with this new type of Arthurian story. Some of these stories, in fact, were written for Eleanor’s daughter, Marie de Champagne.
Emphasis was no longer placed on Arthur nor did these stories focus on a thoroughly manly knight’s ability to split skulls. Arthur himself is used as a bit of a background decoration and is essentially a kindly old king that rules over his kingdom but doesn’t take much of an active part in the stories.
The focus of the stories was on love, romance, and the concept that chivalry should emphasize a knight’s utter devotion to his lady. Women also became more powerful. Far from being a prize to be won, they often helped their knights in one very important way or another.
In these stories, which are vastly different from earlier popular fiction, the love of a lady was the highest prize a knight could win, short of divine favor.
As society continued to change and we emerged from the dark ages, the stories remained immensely popular. There was no longer a need for savage and brutal warriors who could slaughter legions of people. Society’s focus was on cultural ideals such as courtly love, romance, and the chivalric service of ladies.
My point here is that the original Arthurian stories, and essentially all popular fiction of the time, treated women as nothing more than a means to social, economic, and political advancement. The stories hardly ever included women and those that were present never played a significant role in the narrative.
It wasn’t until Eleanor’s reign, and the influence she had on popular fiction, that we see the development of the “Damsel in Distress” trope. This trope, however, was created because it appealed to women. It was an effort to include women in the enjoyment of popular fiction and marked a major change in society’s values.
No longer were women merely an object, they were the entire motivation. No longer were they seen as merely a means to an end, they were the very focus of the story itself.
The “Damsel in Distress” trope is far from a misogynistic effort to treat women as prizes and is actually a result of the increased power and influence women were gaining during Eleanor’s reign. It has continued to remain a popular story telling device because it appeals to both sexes by presenting an idealized view, both of society and what a hero’s motivation should be.
The hero rescues the woman, placing himself in mortal danger, for love and love alone. Had we remained with the male dominated form of story-telling, the hero would rescue the damsel because marrying her would allow him to muster a larger army with which he could violently murder his chosen enemies. The woman’s desire to be married to the hero would not factor into the equation at all.
Damsels are in distress because there is an extremely high value placed on them and they are, in many ways, the entire motivation for the hero and the story itself. The hero rescues the damsel because he is motivated by love, not by a desire to possess a prize.
The trials he goes through are tests not of his strength and masculinity but of his overpowering love for the damsel.
The damsel is, in other words, far more important than the hero.
As indicated in that summary, the chief goal of damseling is to evoke chivalric behaviors in men. The biological drive underpinning it is our urge to protect and provide for children, behavior which is triggered by juvenile characteristics such as a rounded forehead, large eyes, and most importantly helplessness.
As elaborated in a previous article, women have been taught from generation to generation to mimic juvenile characteristics via the use of makeup and vocal tonations, along with a feigning of distress typical of children — which collectively works to extract utility from men. While women are capable of solving most of their own problems and providing for their own needs and wants, many have cultivated a posture of helplessness, damseling their way out of doing the dirty, dangerous or stressful work required to achieve those goals.
Why exert yourself when men can be manipulated to do it for you?
Chivalry
Different definitions have been attached to the word chivalry throughout history. To make matters more confusing, encyclopedic overviews tend to blend those different meanings into an ungainly synthesis, making the job of teasing out distinctive meanings more difficult.
While there are differing definitions, the most common use of the term today is the one we need to describe. That job is made easy by modern dictionaries in which chivalry is given two separate and radically different definitions – a contemporary definition and an archaic, largely obsolete one:
? 1. very polite, honorable, and generous behaviour, especially by men towards women
? 2. the system of behaviour followed by knights in the medieval period of history, that put a high value on honour, knightly skill, and martial valor.1
The first is the definition we are concerned with here. To be sure, chivalry has been a woman-centered enterprise for close to a millennium, and early accounts such as that by Walter Scott in the year 1818 render the meaning clear:
“The main ingredient in the spirit of Chivalry, second in force only to the religious zeal of its professors, and frequently predominating over it, was a devotion to the female sex, and particularly to her whom each knight selected as the chief object of his affection, of a nature so extravagant and unbounded as to approach to a sort of idolatry.
“Amid the various duties of knighthood, that of protecting the female sex, respecting their persons, and redressing their wrongs, becoming the champion of their cause, and the chastiser of those by whom they were injured, was represented as one of the principal objects of the institution. Their oath bound the new-made knights to defend the cause of all women without exception ; and the most pressing way of conjuring them to grant a boon was to implore it in the name of God and the ladies. The cause of a distressed lady was, in many instances, preferable to that even of the country to which the knight belonged.
“The defence of the female sex in general, the regard due to their honour, the subservience paid to their commands, the reverent awe and courtesy, which, in their presence, forbear all unseemly words and actions, were so blended with the institution of Chivalry as to form its very essence. But it was not enough that the “very perfect, gentle knight,” should reverence the fair sex in general. It was essential to his character that he should select, as his proper choice, “a lady and a love,” to be the polar star of his thoughts, the mistress of his affections, and the directress of his actions. In her service, he was to observe the duties of loyalty, faith, secrecy, and reverence. Without such an empress of his heart, a knight, in the phrase of the times, was a ship without a rudder, a horse without a bridle, a sword without a hilt ; a being, in short, devoid of that ruling guidance and intelligence, which ought to inspire his bravery, and direct his actions.
Note the references to protecting the female sex and of redressing their wrongs as hallmarks of chivalry, with men going even so far as to believe the cause of a distressed lady is preferable to that of the nation to which he belonged.
But that protection, provision and adoration is only one half the story — the other half being fulfilled by the damsel in distress. The damsel represents the vulnerable and needy child who pulls on parental heartstrings, behavior provoking the parental brain state referred to by neurobiologists. Chivalry is shorthand for the parental brain state by which men are moved to protect, provide for and adore an adult disguised as a child.
Courtly love
Courtly love, which was later called romantic love, is the program of cultivating deference of men toward women. It was born as a twofold movement beginning with a social shaming of men for bad behaviors, followed by a proposal that men could atone for bad behavior by worship of women through a new code of love.
The idea was launched by powerful women of the medieval aristocracy who cited the worst behaviors of the most unruly males and extrapolated those behaviors to the entire gender. Knights were particularly singled out – much like today’s sporting heroes who display some kind of faux pas – and used as examples of distasteful male behavior requiring the remedy of sweeping cultural reform.
During that time of (supposedly) unruly males, uneducated squires were said to ride mangy horses into mess halls, and rude young men diverted eyes from psalters in the very midst of mass. Among the knights and in the atmosphere of tournaments occasional brawls with grisly incidents occurred – a cracked skull, a gouged eye – as the betting progressed and the dice flew. Male attention to clothing and fashion was said to be appalling, with men happy to go about in sheep and fox skins instead of clothes fashioned of rich and precious stuffs, in colours to better suit them in the company of ladies. And perhaps worst of all were their lack of refinement and manners toward women which was considered reprehensible.
The solutions to the ‘male problem’ was posed by the French Countess Marie, daughter of Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine. Historian Amy Kelly tells;
“Marie organized the rabble of soldiers, fighting-cocks, jousters, springers, riding masters, troubadours, Poitevin nobles and debutantes, young chatelaines, adolescent princes, and infant princesses in the great hall of Poitiers. Of this pandemonium the countess fashioned a seemly and elegant society, the fame of which spread to the world. Here was a woman’s assize to draw men from the excitements of the tilt and the hunt, from dice and games, to feminine society, an assize to outlaw boorishness and compel the tribute of adulation to female majesty.”2
Marie was among the first of a long line of reformers to usher in a gynocentrism whose aim was to convince men of their shared flaws and to prescribe romantic love and concomitant worship of females as the remedy. The remedy was referred to as love service.
Love service involved the positioning of women as men’s superiors along with a series of prescribed behaviors for demonstrating the sexual hierarchy in male-female interactions. The meta-rules for those interactions can be found in troubadour poetry and in the book The Art of Courtly Love by Andreas Capellanus, who wrote it under direction from Marie in 1188 AD.
The love service at the core of courtly love replicates feudal relations between vassals or serfs and their overlords. The feudal template was transferred wholesale into love relationships whereby each women came to be approached as a quasi ‘lord’ in each male-female relationship.
The troubadours lived and functioned within a society based on feudalism. Certain ones were themselves feudal lords; others were liegemen dependent on such lords for their sustinence. The troubadours who were members of the clergy were also actively involved in this feudal society. It is only natural that their literature reflect some traits of the age in which it was created. Scholars soon saw striking parallels between feudalistic practices and certain tenets of Courtly Love. The comparisons lie in certain resemblances shared by vassalage and the courtly “love service.” Fundamental to both was the concept of obedience. As a vassal, the liegeman swore obedience to his lord. As a courtly lover, the poet chose a lady to whom he was required to swear obedience. Humility and obedience were two concepts familiar to medieval man, active components of his Weltanschauung. Critics, such as Erich Kohler, have found them exhibited in both the life and literature of that time.
The entire concept of love-service was patterned after the vassal’s oath to serve his lord with loyalty, tenacity, and courage. These same virtues were demanded of the poet. Like the liegeman vis-a-vis his sovereign, the poet approached his lady with fear and respect. Submitted to her, obedient to her will, he awaited a fief or honor as did the vassal. His compensation took many forms: the pleasure of his lady’s company in her chamber or in the garden; an avowal of her love; a secret meeting; a kiss or even le surplus, complete unity. Like the lord, the woman who was venerated and served was expected to reward her faithful and humble servant.
The similarities between courtly service and vassalage are indeed striking. Although of a more refined character than an ordinary vassal, the poet-lover is portrayed as his lady’s liegeman, involved in the ceremony of homage and pictured at the moment of the immixtio manuum. His reward for faithful service will doubtlessly include the osculum.
The influence of feudalism upon courtly love was, in my opinion, twofold: it provided the poets with a well-organized system of service after which they might pattern their own; it furnished them with a highly developed vocabulary centered around the service owed by a vassal to a lord. Feudalistic vocabulary was comprised of certain basic terminology indicative of the ties which legally bound a man to his lord in times of peace and war.3
Evolutionary Psychologist Don A. Monson paints a similar picture
This configuration of unequal power is the central feature of the poet-lover’s positioning of himself with regard to the love object. Drawing on the stratification and class-consciousness of medieval society, the canso describes primarily in terms of social hierarchy the woman’s psycho-sexual power to determine the outcome of the relationship. Thus the troubadour’s lady is regularly portrayed in terms denoting aristocracy, such as ‘‘noble’’ rica, franca or ‘‘high born’’ de bon aire, de aut paratge, whereas the poet stresses his own subordination, describing himself as ‘‘humble’’ umil, umelian, ‘‘submissive’’ aclin, and ‘‘obedient’’ obedien. The culmination of this tendency is one of the most pervasive images of troubadour poetry, the ‘‘feudal metaphor,’’ which compares the relationship of the lover and his lady to that which obtains between a vassal and his lord.
The poet-lover presents himself to his lady in an attitude of feudal homage omenatge, ‘‘kneeling’’ a/degenolhos with ‘‘hands clasped’’ mans jonchas. He declares himself to be his lady’s ‘‘man’’ ome or ‘‘liege man’’ ome lige and refers to the lady as his ‘‘lord’’ senhor, midons. He asks her to ‘‘retain’’ retener him as her ‘‘servant’’ ser, servidor or to take him into her ‘‘service’’ servizi. According to a military variant of the feudal metaphor, the lover ‘‘surrenders’’ se rendre to the lady, declaring himself ‘‘vanquished’’ vencut or ‘‘conquered’’ conques, and asks for her ‘‘mercy’’ merce.4
As described by Alfonsi and Monson, the demands of courtly love bespeak unbalanced power relationships, ones that engender vulnerability in the male supplicant along with an experience of a fragile pair-bonding that hovers in the realm of tantalizing.
In terms of our biological drives, courtly love captures the imperative for a strong, reliable pair-bonding experience, albeit one that remains maddeningly difficult to gain and maintain in the face of the convoluted conventions of courtly love.
The biological and cultural complexity covered above can be summarised in a few short lines;
Damseling is the cultural codification of neoteny.
Chivalry a cultural codification of the parental brain.
Courtly love is the codification of tantalizing pairbonds.
Part two of this series will look at how this holy trinity reappears in feminist ideology and activism.
References:
[1] Combination of Cambridge and Miriam-Webster dictionary definitions.
[2] Amy Kelly, Eleanor of Aquitaine and Her Courts of Love, Source: Speculum, Vol. 12, No. 1
[3] Sandra Alfonsi, Masculine Submission in Troubadour Lyric, 1986
[4] Don A. Monson, Why is la Belle Dame sans Merci?, Neophilologus 2011; 95: 523.
The Greek goddess Hera was the patroness of marriage, status, and social power, and as I hope to demonstrate here, a goddess appropriate to feminism too. By analyzing the character of a goddess we follow the late psychologist James Hillman’s suggestion that “Mythology is psychology in ancient dress,” – ie. it gives us insight into human nature, and more specifically into the nature of feminism.
No other goddess in the Greek pantheon comes close to capturing the activities we associate with feminism – not the warlike independence of the Amazons, not the esteemed motherhood of Demeter, and not the allure of Aphrodite. These are merely peripheral topics taken up by a feminism that is concerned with securing multiple varieties of power, and Hera is the goddess I’m going to finger for that role.
Marriage
Hera was first and foremost a goddess of marriage, or rather the goddess of marriage. Under her sign marriage tamed men to great advantage of the Greek State, and the State in turn extended honors to her cult. In parts of Greece men could not be recognized as citizens until the day of their marriage, thus enticing men to marry and providing a means for Greek cities to continue reproducing the citizen-estate, not to mention securing a ready supply of laborers, taxes and military personnel to boot. James Hillman writes,
Marriage belongs to the state; it belongs to society, to the community. Zeus and Hera are social stability; they are the state in a way, so we can be married by a Justice of the Peace at City Hall, because marriage is also secular. We recognize that by having both church weddings and legal weddings. Our tax code, our inheritance laws acknowledge that a fundamental structure of the organization of society is marriage. Therefore some can claim it has nothing in particular to do with the persons who are engaged; it hasn’t anything to do with God; it hasn’t anything to do with symbolic representations. It is a fundamental structure of society belonging to the polis or the city or the community.1
While the marriage of Hera and Zeus is mythological, life in this instance had a way of imitating art. In the marriage month (Gamelion ) the mythical marriage of Hera and Zeus was reenacted and celebrated with public festivities, a time when many couples would get married in imitation of the divine couple. On these occasions prayers and offerings were given to Hera, and the bride would pledge fidelity to extending Hera’s dominion on earth. One can only surmise that the riches, status, and influence of the divine couple became a model to which each couple would hope to aspire.
Another facet of Hera’s cult was the focus on buildings, and her temples were usually the biggest and most lavish in all Greece. Women would carve small houses, or make them out of clay and give as offerings to the Goddess. Remarking on this practice, Hillman states that our modern obsession with houses and real estate, one of the bedrocks of our economy, may also arise from a Hera-like sentiment;
If you think back to all the times you play house as a child, or had a dollhouse, or made little houses out of cartons and boxes, this is an archetypal move going on. We forget that the house is not just something made by an architect and sold you by a developer… What one does for the house, to the house, with the house, is taking care of Hera. Housekeeping is a Hera activity. Our culture recognizes this. Think of the enormous quantity of house magazines: House and Garden, House Beautiful, Home Decorating, Architectural Digest, World of Interiors, the home section of newspapers, home improvement on TV, supposedly a best-selling TV show or one of the most watched, “This Old House.”
“I know a woman who decorates people’s houses. You pick out the furniture and the fabrics – then she’ll lay out the paintings you should have, what repros you should have on the wall, and the bric-a-brac and what colors the walls should be and so on. She told me that in every one of the cases that she works with (of married couples), the woman picks out everything in the house and the entire house belongs to her except for the husband’s desk and his playroom and maybe the garage. He has his little area and the rest of the house is hers. He makes no decisions about what color the upholstery should be or the kinds of window shades.
“Often when you go to people’s houses the wife shows off the house while the husbands talk shop. “Come, let me show you my house; I want to show you the house.” She’s showing a part of her Hera nature.
“There are these old sayings (whether you go with the gender of them or not): a woman likes a man who can do things around the house, and she hates it that she always has to pick up after him and he leaves things in a mess. By desecrating the house that way, he insults Hera. And a man likes a woman who’s a good housekeeper. These are Hera statements. Another one: She loves the house more than me. And the jokes: A man is making love to a whore and she says, “You’re the greatest;” and when he’s making love to his mistress, she says, “I love you so much.” But when he’s making love to his wife, she says: “I wonder what color we should paint the ceiling.” Now, that is a nasty gender joke, but it isn’t! She really loves the house. That’s crucial and shouldn’t be treated as just a kind of obsession. Her obsession with the house equals his obsession with sex.1
In a telling newspaper cartoon some years ago, two women were conversing. The first said she was getting a divorce, to which her friend replied it must be an awful thing to go through. “Not really” the woman replied, “it’s actually a dream come true; I get the house, the furniture, the artworks and the kids. I’ve been planning this divorce since I was a little girl!” In this cruel cartoon we get a sense that the husband was merely a backdrop to securing the larger vision of a house, renovations, furnishings and the children. But especially the house.
Taming Men
Hera was nicknamed ‘The Tamer.’ She tamed horses, men and heroes and in some places was recognized as the tamer of the seasons, of nature, and even the universe itself.
Her goal was to limit wildness and freedom by placing all creatures in her service. Her tools-for-taming were the entrapment of men and women in marriage, the use of her own sexuality as an enticement for conformity; shaming, and aggressive punishment of any rebellious behaviours. Even her lordly husband Zeus did not escape her control: “Hera’s cruel rage tamed him.”2
Hera was worshipped as ‘Goddess of the yoke,’ an enslaving device symbolizing her desire to create utilities of beasts and men. She yoked obedient men to wives, and yoked heroes to an inevitable death through their performance of labours that bring betterment to women and society.
In the Iliad Hera is said to tame heroes through death, not marriage. Death through service to others was considered -and is still considered- something appropriate for males and for their own good. In The Myth of Male Power Warren Farrell recounts a Greek story which illustrates the fact:
The Hero As Slave:
Once upon a time, a mother who wanted to see the beautiful statue of Hera had no oxes or horses to carry her there. But she did have two sons. And the sons wanted more than anything to make their mother’s wish come true. They volunteered to yoke themselves to a cart and take her over the mountains in the scorching heat to the faraway village of Argos, the home of the statue of Hera (the wife of Zeus). Upon their arrival in Argos, the sons were cheered and statues (that can be found to this day) were built in their honor. Their mother prayed that Hera give her sons the best gift in her power. Hera did that. The boys died. The traditional interpretation? The best thing that can happen to a man is to die at the height of his glory and power. Yet had this been a myth of two daughters who had substituted themselves for oxen to carry their father somewhere, would we have interpreted the daughters’ deaths as proof that the best thing that can happen to a woman is to die at the height of her glory and power? The statues and cheers can be seen as bribes for the sons to value their lives less than their mother’s request to view a statue. The fact that the statue was of Hera, the queen of the Olympian gods and protector of married women is symbolic. The sons’ sacrifice symbolized the mandate for men to become strong enough to serve the needs of mothers and marriage, and to be willing to call it glory if they died in the process. Which is why the name Hercules means “for the glory of Hera”.3
Sexual manipulation was another of Hera’s strategems to gain what she wanted. In one popular tale, for instance, she asked if she could borrow Aphrodite’s magic girdle to help her woo the King of the gods. By borrowing Aphrodite’s natural charms (the girdle) Hera imitated the goddess of love and sex and thereby seduced Zeus. As we read in Homer’s Iliad, the magical girdle of Aphrodite had the power to create subservience in the target;
Hera was divided in purpose as to how she could beguile the brain in Zeus of the aigis. And to her mind this thing appeared to be the best counsel, to array herself in loveliness, and go down to Ida, and perhaps he might be taken with desire to lie in love with her next her skin, and she might be able to drift an innocent warm sleep across his eyelids, and seal his crafty perceptions…
Now, when she had clothed her body in all this loveliness, she went out from the chamber, and called aside Aphrodite to come away from the rest of the gods, and spoke a word to her: ‘Would you do something for me, dear child… Give me loveliness and desirability, graces with which you overwhelm mortal men, and all the immortals…
Then in turn Aphrodite the laughing (philomeides) answered her: ‘I cannot, and I must not deny this thing that you ask for, you, who lies in the arms of Zeus, since he is our greatest.’ She spoke, and from her breasts unbound the elaborate, pattern-pierced zone (himas), and on it are figured all beguilement (philotes), and loveliness is figured upon it, and passion of sex (himeros) is there, and the whispered endearment (oaristos) that steals the heart away even from the thoughtful. She put this in Hera’s hands, and called her by name and spoke to her: ‘Take this zone, and hide it away in the fold of your bosom. It is elaborate, all things are figured therein. And I think whatever is your heart’s desire shall not go unaccomplished.’ So she spoke, and the ox-eyed lady Hera smiled on her and smiling hid the zone away in the fold of her bosom.4
Hera employed sexual manipulativeness as an artifice to purchase the power and influence she so desperately craved. Today we would call this behavior “Love bombing,” which has the ability to tame a man to schemes he might otherwise have never dreamed of following.
Binding Hera’s rage
When Hera didn’t get her desired measure of power, when her status didn’t reach high enough, or worse, when she lost status or power, things went very badly for the world around her. Epithets of spitefulness, jealousy, vengefulness, vindictiveness, cruelty and rage belong to the scorned goddess, and from a reading of the myths it seems she felt scorned much of the time.
We turn for example to the priestess Medea who murdered her children as revenge against her husband’s transgressions. Her husband, Jason of Argonauts fame, decided to leave her after the marriage went stale. He found a new bride and Medea devised to make them suffer for their happiness. Much like the goddess Hera to whom Medea was priestess, she carried out a scorched-earth policy in the face of frustrated power urges, saying;
Sorry, kids, but your dad’s a douche
I will send them with gifts in their hands, carrying them unto the bride a robe of finest woof and a chaplet of gold. And if these ornaments she take and put them on, miserably shall she die, and likewise everyone who touches her; with such fell poisons will I smear my gifts. And here I quit this theme; but I shudder at the deed I must do next; for I will slay the children I have borne… and when I have utterly confounded Jason’s house I will leave the land, escaping punishment for my dear children’s murder, after my most unholy deed… so help me God, Never shall he see again alive the children I bore to him, nor from his new bride shall he beget issue, for she must die a hideous death, slain by my drugs. Let no one deem me a poor weak woman who sits with folded hands, but of another mould, dangerous to foes and well-disposed to friends.5
After killing Jason’s bride with a poison-smeared robe, murdering her own children, and then setting fire to the palace, Medea fled to Athens where she married the mighty King Aegeus, thereby securing a place of notoriety in the mythological scheme of Greece.
Mythologist Karl Kerenyi asks, “What should we make of it that Medea, a barbaric representative of the Hera world, and her gloomy cult, found acceptance in the sacred precinct of Zeus’ spouse?”6 Kerenyi was struck by the fact that Hera remained associated with Medea’s barbarism and surrounded her with the sanctity of her own world. Our thoughts on this question might extend to a similar comparison of moderate feminism and how it remains associated with radical feminism’s relational and cultural terrorism.
The Greeks understood better than we moderns, however, that impulses of the psychopathic mind needed to be restrained by a civil society.
To that end the Greeks developed a religious ritual that involved winding a rope tightly around a statue or effigy of the Goddess Hera, particularly during what they imagined to be her ‘unfulfilled’ moments. That hog-tying symbolized containment of destructive energies resulting from loss of status or power. Participants understood the binding was of the proverbial ‘woman scorned,’ a ritual teaching how to deal with such behavior in the lives of mortals.
In contrast to her fulfilled behavior within marriage, when the Queen of Heaven lost her marital station and status, she would tear the social fabric into black confetti. Hera then became monstrous or in some stories started giving birth to monstrous creatures who did her bidding. Jungian psychologist Murray Stein talks to this monstrous side of the goddess;
This compounding of evil upon evil is an image of Hera in her Iuno inferna aspect and energized by a full-blown animus rage and destruction, running amuck through the world, devouring whomever she can lay her hands on. Hera is in this development a veritable epidemic of pathology.
The ancient cults of Hera showed great foresight and wisdom in “binding” her image during the dangerous periods of her cycle. This was prophylactic against the potentiation of the she-dragon. But what could they have done to prevent this potentiation in the face of the Typhaonian spirit energizing it? Hera’s reaction to her experience with Zeus bursts all fetters, for without a full experience of the Teleia [fulfillment] aspect of the cycle the bindings on the infernal aspect of it cannot possibly hold. Thus we find in the Homeric and classical image of her a Hera Unbound, whose boundlessness knows no limit to destruction. The rhythm inherent in the archetype has been disturbed, and we get a sort of symphony whose rhythm is one long downbeat. The restoration of Hera Teleia is an individual and cultural historical project that is still being worked on in our time.7
Feminism
The comparisons of Hera and Medea with feminism are unmistakable. The male shaming, intimidation, manipulation, and power-seeking are all there – as are the destructiveness and scorched-earth policy accompanying frustrated goals.
Along with Hera, Medea is universally recognized as a feminist heroine. As an example of feminist websites promoting her we read, “There is, however, one other role that we twenty-first-century audiences are able to recognize in Medea: that of the feminist pioneer. And the fact that this precursor of the suffragettes is a mythic character dramatized nearly 2,500 years ago by a man is quite astonishing.”8
The Wikipedia entry for Medea reads, “Medea is widely read as a proto-feminist text to the extent that it sympathetically explores the disadvantages of being a woman in a patriarchal society,” – to which characterization is implied (by feminists) that we dare not read her as anything but a hapless victim, as one Jungian analyst Cheryl Fuller was to discover.
Fuller, a feminist, gives a revealing account of what happened when she attempted to shine a light on the dark side of Medea, and by extension of women. She writes;
Eight years ago as I searched for a dissertation advisor, I ran into a wall with the feminist scholars on the faculty of my university. As soon as I explained that I wanted to write about Medea came the assumption: of course, they said, you will be looking at the patriarchy as the issue in her behavior. And when I replied that indeed I was not going to be looking in that direction, but rather at Medea herself and at the meaning intrinsic to her acts and her story, interest in my work evaporated and they declined to serve on my committee. Though long a feminist myself, I had been absent from developments in academic feminism. It had escaped my attention that there were “right” ways and “wrong” ways to study women, both real and mythological, and clearly considering Medea as anything other than a victim of the patriarchy was the “wrong” way.
I persisted, found an advisor who could accept my apparently heretical viewpoint and happily explored the character of Medea and developed a description of a Medea complex. But the resistance to considering that Medea could be anything other than a hapless victim of the patriarchy continued to intrigue me and set me to wondering about the meaning of excluding this dark and troubling aspect of her, and by extension all of us, from our understanding of what it is to be human and more specifically a woman. It is this wondering which is the subject of my paper.9
In summary, the traditional binding of Hera has failed and her destructive energies are loosed upon the world – to devastating effect. Her bindings began to unravel in the Middle Ages with the advent of an indiscriminate chivalry that saw men worshiping women as pure and infallable vessels, while failing to recognize and bind their destructive potentials with reasonable forms of social constraint.
While we continue on our current path the scorched earth policy too will continue… compliments of a vengeful, and power-craving Hera.
References:
[1] James Hillman, ‘Hera, Goddess of Marriage’ in Mythic Figures (2007)
[2] Joan O’Brien, ‘The Tamer of Heroes and Horses,’ Chapter 6E in The Transformation of Hera, (1993)
[3] Warren Farrell, The Myth of Male Power, Simon and Schuster, (1993)
[4] Richard Lattimore, Trans. The Iliad of Homer (1951)
[5] Medea By Euripides (431 B.C.E), Translated by E. P. Coleridge (1891)
[6] Karl Kerenyi, Goddesses of Sun and Moon (1979)
[7] Murray Stein, Hera: Bound and Unbound, in Spring: an annual of Archetypal Psychology (1977)
[8] Medea: Everywoman, Many Women (website)
[9] Cheryl Fuller, Medea, Feminism and the Shadow (2009)
Author’s note: Part of the Taming section was previously published in the article How to tame men.
The following is a three-part extract from Dr. Frank Tallis’ excellent book Love Sick. The book surveys the concept of romantic love, or more accurately the sickness of it, with Dr. Tallis’ extensive clinical experience confirming just how sick-making these practices can be. Obsessive thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and persistent images and impulses, superstitious or ritualistic compulsions, delusion, the inability to concentrate—exhibiting just five or six of these symptoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of a major depressive episode. Yet we all subconsciously welcome these symptoms when we allow ourselves to fall in love.
In Love Sick, Dr. Frank Tallis, a leading authority on obsessive disorders, considers our experiences and expressions of love, and why the combinations of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, rapture and grief have come to characterize what we mean when we speak of falling in love. Tallis examines why the agony associated with romantic love continues to be such a popular subject for poets, philosophers, songwriters, and scientists, and questions just how healthy our attitudes are and whether there may in fact be more sane, less tortured ways to love.
A highly informative exploration of how, throughout time, principally in the West, the symptoms of mental illness have been used to describe the state of being in love, this book offers an eloquent, thought-provoking, and endlessly illuminating look at one of the most important aspects of human behavior.
On which side should the men’s movement focus its activism — on the similarities or differences between the sexes?
The thinkers among us will stay abreast of both sides of the argument, however in the realm of activism most will take up a position one way or the other.
Arguments for sameness or difference rest on a more fundamental dyad, the biological and cultural – topics that have been tackled extensively in manosphere discussion circles, though I’m not sure we have gained good mileage from them in the fight against gynocentrism.
So just for a moment, let’s partition-out the hard scientific discussions of biology vs. culture, and pay more attention to the rhetorical leverage points of sexual politics – to those emotive generalizations about sameness/difference. All feminist reasoning, all female privilege, and all misandry start from there.
Departing from the usual MRA emphasis on differences, real and significant biological ones, this article will make a case for focusing on the similarities, on the things men and women have in common as the most effective basis for tackling gynocentrism. Emphasizing only differences between the sexes, as old-school MRAs and new MGTOW like to do, will not reach the goal of defeating feminist propaganda and the anti-male culture created by same. Let’s look at some rationale for this move.
Difference Feminism as the order of the day
I am here going to chart three changes within socialist feminism over the last fifteen years. It has, I argue, moved in large part from androgyny to gender difference, and from Marxism or revolutionary socialism towards an accommodation with, if reform of, the political and social system we know now. [Socialist Feminism: From Androgyny to Gynocentrism, Equality to Difference – 1995]
In this quote, feminist Judith Evans makes an observation many are familiar with; that today’s feminism is more concerned with promoting sexual differences than androgyny. While obvious to astute observers, I will argue that feminist ideology and feminist activism has not traveled in a linear fashion from androgyny to gynocentrism as Evans suggests, but more accurately has always enjoyed it both ways.
Ernest B. Bax observed this fact well over a century ago:
Modern Feminism would fain achieve the feat of eating its cake and having it too. When political and economic rights are in question, such as involve gain and social standing, the assumption of inferiority magically disappears before the strident assertion of the dogma of the equality of woman with man – her mental and moral equality certainly! When, however, the question is of a different character – for example, for the relieving of some vile female criminal of the penalty of her misdeeds-then Sentimental Feminism comes into play, then the whole plaidoyer is based on the chivalric sentiment of deference and consideration for poor, weak woman.” [Chapter V: The “Chivalry” Fake, in The Fraud of Feminism 1913]
Feminists only claim equality with men in so far as it has agreeable consequences for women. And this applies all along the line… I would advise woman’s-righters to choose the one side or the other. If they stick to the weakness of woman physically as ground for woman’s privileges and immunities, let them give up prating of equality otherwise. If they contend for equality let it at least be an even equality all round. [‘Female Suffrage’ – in Social Democrat, Vol.8, no.9, pp.533-545 1904].
The bulk of the advocates of woman’s rights are simply working, not for equality, but for female ascendency. It is all very well to say they repudiate chivalry. They are ready enough to invoke it politically when they want to get a law passed in their favour – while socially, to my certain knowledge, many of them claim it as a right every whit as much as ordinary women. [‘No Misogyny But True Equality’ – in To-day, pp.115-121 1887]
Reading through Bax’s articles it’s clear that feminists argued in both directions, especially enjoying the difference narrative, proving that sentimental appeals to sex-difference were the approach that gained women the most. Why?
Because differences, especially those implying weakness and vulnerability, evoke chivalry.
And chivalry brings goodies!
Meme juxtaposes equalist vs difference arguments: indicates difference is the stronger social power
MRAs need to catch up with this fact and realize that whenever we promote difference, be it biological or cultural in origin, we play into feminist word-games and provide them with the basis for arguing chivalric treatment for women.
Commentaries on men and women’s different natures and the corollary of why men and women should be treated differently (read special treatments for women) appear throughout history. The claims are that men and women are different due to cultural training (e.g. men are trained in patriarchy and violence; women in softness and subservience), or they are biologically different (e.g. men are testosterone poisoned, and women give birth and need special help), thus, we must discriminate to better serve those differences, say feminists.
Whenever old school MRAs thrash their swords around yelling “WE ARE BIOLOGICALLY DIFFERENT!!” they play right into the rhetoric and remedies of feminists. In fact, many of the more prominent stars in the MRM specialize in promoting difference, arguing for biological differences over culturally implanted ones, and not realizing that they end up with a conclusion of difference that gets exploited equally by feminists – it matters not whether the difference is of cultural or biological origin.
Conversely, when we discuss that men and women have a massive overlapping area of shared humanity – the discussion changes to one of equal value, concern and empathy for men.
Males and females, for example, are both among the homeless, both are among the mentally ill, both can be poor or disabled. Men and women equally experience all emotions- jealousy, pride, elation, fear, anxiety, depression, or joy, and they equally suffer heart attacks, diabetes, strokes, broken bones, malaria or the common cold. Both suffer the impact of environmental degradation and pollution, and so on.
Despite that massive area of overlap, you can already read the “difference” argument being exploited by protofeminist Modesta Pozzo in the year 1590;
Don’t we see that men’s rightful task is to go out to work and wear themselves out trying to accumulate wealth, as though they were our factors or stewards, so that we can remain at home like the lady of the house directing their work and enjoying the profit of their labors? That, if you like, is the reason why men are naturally stronger and more robust than us — they need to be, so they can put up with the hard labor they must endure in our service.” [The Worth of Women: their Nobility and Superiority to Men – 1590]
And it doesn’t stop with Pozzo. The same language can be seen by virtually all feminist writers from her day to the present, including revered feminist philosophers like Julia Kristeva or Iris M. Young, through to the “difference feminists” of today. The historical lineup, all milking difference, is unbroken.
Take for instance the language of popular “equity” feminist Christina Hoff-Sommers who, while helpfully deconstructing many feminist myths, is happy to promote sex-differences as a basis for seeking chivalry for women.
Sommers demonstrates the sex-differences perspective in an interview with Emily Esfahani Smith. “Chivalry is grounded in a fundamental reality that defines the relationship between the sexes,” explains Sommers, “and given that most men are physically stronger than most women, men can overpower women at any time to get what they want.” “If women give up on chivalry, it will be gone,” says Sommers, and “If boys can get away with being boorish, they will, happily. Women will pay the price.”1
The historical benefit to women of the difference argument has far outweighed the sameness argument because difference enlists the traditions of damselling, white knighting, and romantic chivalry. The sameness argument fails to tap into those medieval powers and thus affords far less reach for gynocentric tentacles.
* * *
Feminists are among the most rigid enforcers of gender stereotypes on the planet – all while championing “varieties of masculinities/femininities” which “don’t fit the binary.” However, those varieties are something they tend to spout for window dressing, in passing, before going on to enforce strict gender stereotypes in most everything they say.
Some MRAs miss the fact that most feminists today are difference feminists or cultural feminists – feminists who believe first and foremost in reinforcing real or perceived differences between men and women. Many of us labor under the assumption that feminists promote a polymorphous perverse (androgynous) identity — which they never did with any consistency.
And for feminists it doesn’t matter if the differences are of biological origin (many feminists subscribe to Evolutionary psychology) or the result of cultural conditioning – selling any differences of sexed behavior allows them to argue for special treatments for women and harsh treatment for men, regardless of whether the differences are congenital or cultural.
As men’s rights activists, we would do well to emphasize the biological/behavioral overlap between the sexes – that we all feel emotions, all think, fall in love, catch a common cold, and seek intimate human bonds – and with that we can defeat calls for preferential treatments of women arising from differences. Let’s move on from the task of defeating ‘feminist androgyny,’ which appears to be an activism dead-end.
This article contends that some MRAs place the focus on differences between men and women and that that approach is an activism cul-de-sac. But before adopting the alternative strategy of highlighting male and female behavioral similarities, we need first to observe how feminists have used the difference narrative to their advantage; only then will we see the urgency.
So next time you see an argument for difference or sameness, stop and ask yourself who stands the greatest chance of benefiting from it. And if you are advocating for difference, ask yourself if you are helping to promote men’s human rights or instead promoting a return to the good-ol-days of strictly demarcated gender roles.
The following short article, entitled Women’s and Men’s Rights, appeared in the 1875 volume Historic and literary miscellany, by G.M.D. Bloss. – PW
* * *
THERE have recently been Women’s Rights conventions in New York and Boston. The general drift of the proceedings was to show the wrongs of woman under the laws of society at present constituted. There were plenty of facts to show that in many instances women, at the present time, were ill-fed, ill-clothed, and ill-sheltered; that their employment was not remunerative in many cases, and that under their afflictions they were driven often to live a life of vice and crime.
All this will be freely admitted and universally regretted. But, and the question may be asked with emphasis, are these wrongs peculiar to women? Do they alone suffer them? Is there a discrimination against the sex? We unhesitatingly answer in the negative. Would man–yea, would man, who is endowed with that wonderful right of suffrage, which in the eyes of these reformers is the great cure for all the grievances of the sex, not be enabled to find as serious cause of complaint as those made by his female associate?
How many men of ability and intelligence, willing to work, are trodden down in the battle of life? How many are scantily fed, miserably clad, and barely sheltered, who labor with assiduity from the rising to the setting sun? To the ill requital of man’s labor, in hundreds and thousands of instances, may be attributed woman’s calamities.
For one woman who is driven by destitution to sin and shame, there are probably ten men. If one sex more than the other has the right to be restive under society as it is now constituted, it is the male. He makes the laws, it is true, but who derive the greatest benefit from them? In cases at law and equity, where the two sexes are antagonistic, who is generally the loser? Women are seldom convicted of criminal offenses, where men would be certain to suffer the penalty. They always, or nearly always, succeed before a jury of men, in civil cases.
In most of the States they can hold property in their own name, and while in the position of a fem-covert– their property is exempt from execution, even upon their own contracts. They are exempt from all military and jury duty, and from many other labors of serious import, which fall upon the males alone. They receive all the courtesies of society. They are the first at the feasts, and all the reserved seats everywhere are for them.
The state in which we live is very far from being perfection; men and women are joint sufferers by a false and ill-regulated condition of society. There is no antagonism between them, and they are enemies of both man and woman who desire to create the impression that either sex is enjoying rights at the other’s expense, or suffer infliction for the other’s benefit. They are our partners in the great trials and misfortunes which an All-wise Creator has imposed upon all the sons and daughters of Adam, and from which there is no escape by either this side of the grave.
Whatever improvements and reforms of modern society are demanded, should be in the name of both, and for both, instead of one. “A Men’s Rights Convention,” to redress the wrongs of the men alone, leaving the females alone where they are, would be selfish and ungrateful. Scarcely less so are those of the strong-minded woman, who has no eye and no compassion for the sufferings of any but her own sex.
Feature image by Michael Coghlan
