The following article was published in Justice, 1909. Note the reference to Lester F. Ward’s ‘Gynocentric theory’. In a subsequent edition of Justice, Barrister E. B. Bax replies in protest to this article, which is also printed below.
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Below is a reply by Ernest B. Bax in Justice – Saturday 18 September 1909:
The following excerpt is from the 1920 volume Taboo and genetics; a study of the biological, sociological and psychological foundation of the family. It details the popularity of what it calls “gynocentric theory” entailing a belief in the superiority of women over men, and describes how the idea had caught on widely not only in popular culture and in feminist thought, but in college reference libraries too.
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Scientific discovery, especially in biology, during the past two decades has made necessary an entire restatement of the sociological problem of sex. Ward’s so-called “gynæcocentric” theory, as sketched in Chapter 14 of his Pure Sociology, has been almost a bible on the sex problem to sociologists, in spite of the fact that modern laboratory experimentation has disproved it in almost every detail.
While a comparatively small number of people read this theory from the original source, it is still being scattered far and wide in the form of quotations, paraphrases, and interpretations by more popular writers. It is therefore necessary to gather together the biological data which are available from technical experimentation and medical research, in order that its social implications may be utilized to show the obsoleteness of this older and unscientific statement of the sex problem in society.
Lester F. Ward crystallized the arguments for [female superiority] in an article entitled “Our Better Halves” in The Forum, in 1888. This philosophy of sex, which he christened the “Gynæcocentric Theory,” is best known as expanded into the fourteenth chapter of his “Pure Sociology,“ published fifteen years later. Its publication at this late date gave it an unfortunate vitality long after its main tenets had been disproved in the biological laboratory.
Besides its faulty foundation as to facts, the old gynæcocentric theory involved a method of treatment by historical analogy which biologists have almost entirely discarded. Anyone interested in the relative value of different kinds of biological data for social problems would do well to read the opening chapter of Prof. Morgan’s “Critique of the Theory of Evolution,” for even a summary of which space is lacking here.
College reference shelves are still stocked with books on sex sociology which are totally oblivious of present-day biology. For example, Mrs. Gilman (Man-Made World), Mrs. Hartley (Truth About Woman) and the Nearings (Woman and Social Progress) adhere to Ward’s theory in substantially its primitive form, and not even sociologists like Professor Thomas (Sex and Society) have been able to entirely break away from it.
The following article, describing American culture as an epicenter of exaggerated gynocentric chivalry, was published in The London Sun, Wed 11th November, 1846.
I am convinced that a lady, no matter what her age and attractions might be, could journey through the whole extent of the union, not only without experiencing a single annoyance, but aided in every possible way with unobtrusive civility. Indeed a great number of Saphonisbas and Almiras do travel about, protected only by the chivalry of their countrymen and their own undoubted propriety.
To them the best seats, the best of everything, are always allotted. A friend of mine told me of a little affair at New York Theatre, the other night, illustrative of my assertion. A stiff-necked Englishman had engaged a front place, and of course the best corner: when the curtain rose, he was duly seated, opera-glass in hand, to enjoy the performance. A lady and a gentleman came into the box shortly afterwards; the cavalier in escort, seeing that the place where our friend sat was the best, calling his attention, saying “The lady, sir,” and motioned that the corner should be vacated. The possessor, partly because he disliked the imperative mood, and partly because it bored him to be disturbed, refused. Some words ensued, which attracted the attention of the sovereign people in the pit, who magisterially enquired what was the matter?
The American came to the front of the box and said, “There is an Englishman here who will not give up his place to a lady.” Immediately their majesties swarmed up by dozens over the barriers, seized the offender, very gently though, and carried him to the entrance; he kicked, cursed, and fought all in vain: he excited neither the pity nor the anger of his stern executioners; they placed him carefully on his feet again at the steps, one man handing him his hat, another his opera glass, and a third the price he had paid for his ticket of admission, then quickly shut the door upon him, and returned to their places. The shade of the departed Judge Lynch must have rejoiced at such an angelic administration of his law! – England in the New World.
The whole attitude of courtly love has been rightly described as ‘a feudalisation of love’. ~ C.S. Lewis
Both liberal-feminist and traditional conservative views on gender relations can be imagined as two heads growing from the same Hydra. What aim do these ideologies have in common? The answer to that question is beautifully captured by C.S. Lewis’ phrase “the feudalisation of love.”
According to Lewis, the feudalisation of love refers to the medieval event when the feudal contract employed between Lords & vassals was repurposed by noblewomen who believed the feudal contract could serve as a new model to govern relations between men and women. The idea was that a woman would assume the traditional role of Lord, and man her vassal symbolised in the iconic display of a man going down on one knee to offer service to her.
This effort in social engineering was wildly successful, and after a continuous process of cultural diffusion the formula now appears in most countries and governs most interactions between men and women, such has been its remarkable power to colonize. Today we refer to this model by the name of romantic love.
Lewis states that in comparison with the revolution generated by the feudalisation of love, the Renaissance amounts to a mere ripple on the surface of literature. It forms the internal rationale of post-industrial societies, along with the subsequent waves of feminism which embraced this concept with fervor, applying its principles more aggressively with each iteration of the movement.
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Lewis gives us a precise date on the rise of love feudalism, claiming it appeared quite suddenly at the end of the eleventh century in France. He describes it as an elitist fad spreading to all the courts of Europe while subsequently permeating down the vertical axis to capture the imagination of lower classes as well. The spread was so thorough that the feudalisation of love is now regarded as a “timeless” and “natural” human arrangement, and is imagined as as a sacrosanct pillar of gender relations by layperson and academic alike.
Feudalisation of love is based on the principle male service to women. It leads to poor treatment of males, serving as root cause of the malignant outcomes tackled by men’s advocates. Among the catalogue of negative outcomes is male suicide — and yet even family members, friends and academics who have lost male loved ones to suicides remain leery about naming this lack of value directly: as caused by both the gynocentrism and misandry inherent to the feudalisation of love.
The only place where female suicide is higher is in rural China where women have lower social value than men. China is also the place where the feudalisation of love never took root because it was explicitly outlawed there by Mao during the cultural revolution, as it was viewed as a disintegrative culture product.
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Outside certain parts of Asia most cultures are decidedly gynocentric, hyper-valuing women’s identity, needs and wants. While there’s many factors that can contribute to male suicide, if we were to address men’s devalued sense of self by removing the feudalisation of love, then the majority of these men wouldn’t suicide because they would be buoyed by that magic ingredient – value. This can only happen if we voice a full throated rejection of gynocentrism and a social revalorization of men and boys.
Those who adhere to the feudalisation of love script in their relationships, please don’t be surprised when it begins to hurt or when tragedy hits. In order to regain your sense of value you will need to divest yourself of it and, in the long run, find alternative models to live by.
The headline is likely to provoke an emotional reaction from both the woke and the virulently anti-woke, but I stride forth with my flack jacket on in order to make a salient point: that far from being a fringe group of misogynistic terrorists who refuse to court the ladies, MGTOW is perfectly aligned with the LGBTQIA category ‘Aromantic’ – a term indicating a profound disinterest in romantic love.
When it comes to romantic love they simply don’t want it.
I was surprised to learn that the ‘A’ in LGBTQIA can mean either asexual or aromantic, as described in the following LGBTQIA Wiki Fandom definition:
Aromantic, often shortened to aro, describes people who do not experience romantic attraction. One of the meanings of the A in LGBTQIA+ is Aromantic.[1] Aromanticism may involve forms of attraction that are not necessarily romantic, or interests in relationships that are intimate in other ways. There is no singular experience of aromanticism.[3]
The aromantic spectrum, also known as “aro-spec”, ranges from aromantic to alloromantic, the latter referring to people who regularly and consistently experience romantic attraction.[1] People within the aromantic spectrum are part of a community that has much in common. They may use the label aromantic as a close fit for their experiences or use other labels that further describe them.
Men Going Their Own Way are unmoved by the fantasy of romantic love, viewing its latent BDSM overtones as a theatre of female dominatrixes and male subs, a model that has grown from a kind of sexual feudalism instituted by affluent ladies of the medieval era. MGTOW typically reject this model because it requires men to go down on a literal and proverbial knee before a woman. This qualifies MGTOW as Aromantic because, as stated on the LGBTQIA Wiki Fandom page, aromantic individuals “may choose to opt out of anything coded as romantic or feel discomfort with the idea of romantic relations.”
I should add, for the slow of mind, that MGTOW orientation is concerned with a wider array of issues than this. However, the romance problem forms a molten core around which many of their concerns for male self-determination revolve.
The result of ‘Men going their aromantic way’ is in some ways striking. These men have inaugurated an enduring sex strike, putting quietly into practice what women routinely threaten if they don’t get their own way – as we recently saw from Joy Behar who called for ‘sex strike’ after Supreme Court abortion law leak. As usual it seems men have beaten women to the punch:
As this graph demonstrates, young men are driving a decline in sex. Perhaps more accurately they may be rejecting the pathological contamination of sexual intimacy with romantic love – aka, the idea that men need to demonstrate obeisance and servitude toward “romantic” partners before being “rewarded” with sex.
The sex slump is not sufficiently explained by labeling reluctant men as ‘involuntary celibates,’ because the yearly baseline for numbers of incels has blown out. A more plausible explanation is that men of the West are becoming increasingly aromantic – much as they did en masse in Japan with the rise of grass eaters. This is certainly true of the growing numbers of MGTOW, who may be interested in other kinds of sex and relationship (casual relationships, intimate friendships, non-romantic intimate partnerships, relationships of peers, etc) but who are no longer moved by the false fairy-tale of romance.
Far from being a fringe group that warrants deplatforming, men going their aromantic way deserve to be embraced as a speshul minority, deserving of special rights and protections afforded to every other vulnerable demographic. Is it not true that MGTOW are bullied, harassed and treated with extreme bigotry? That should qualify them for special protections and considerations under the law.
MGTOW probably won’t be entering a Pride float anytime soon, but in theory their cause is every bit as deserving under the umbrella of that one, powerful word – AROMANTIC.
Discussion about transgender identity is all the rage, with many people railing against what they view as a Frankenstein fad, and yet others who are encouraging the trend beyond what anyone would consider reasonable limits – e.g., gender-affirming surgery for children. A third approach is that of the social phenomenologist which accounts for people (including myself) who are more interested in making sense of the phenomenon before screaming blue murder to the sky.
Most people appear eager to discover what Aristotle called the “efficient cause” that might lead men to become transwomen — with the most popular ’causes’ being those of gender dysphoria, and autogynephilia which both end up falling short of sufficient explanations, for reasons I’ll discuss below.
Autogynephilia
Autogynephilia is defined as a male’s propensity to be sexually aroused by the thought of himself as a female. It’s a paraphilia that is theorized to underlie transvestism and some forms of male-to-female transsexualism,1 as showcased in the below tweet by a transwoman.
If ‘getting off’ by appearing as the opposite sex were the only motive we might reasonably assume that occasional cross-dressing and/or erotic roleplay would scratch the itch, but transgender individuals are clearly seeking a more permanent goal. Moreover, many transgender individuals experience a loss of sexual arousal after medically transitioning, indicating that the securing of permanent autogynephilic pleasure is not a sufficient explanation for making the change.2
Gender dysphoria
Gender dysphoria is the favorite go-to for advocates of traditional gender roles who pretentiously claim the body and psyche can only be exact Xerox copies of each other. As tidy as this formula sounds on its face, even people with a rudimentary understanding of human psychology will see its failings; failings demonstrated by the fact that everyone has an imaginative and psychological identity that is, at least in some ways, at odds with bodily reality:
A stunningly beautiful woman identifies as plain, or ugly.
A fat guy identifies as muscled and skinny.
An old man identifies himself healthy, as fit as a teenager.
A little girl identifies as a world-class singer.
A little boy identifies as the best violinist in the world.
A feminist identifies as more caring than others.
A person identifies as more intelligent than others.
A person born of privilege identifies as restricted.
An underprivileged person identifies as someone who can be and do anything. Etc.
The psyche tends to ramble off in fanciful ways that do not match seamlessly with physical reality, and it has done this since way back in our evolutionary history. Psychological identity is not, and never will be, a faithful replica of physical reality…. and yet human civilization has continued to thrive in spite of this propensity.
With that human capacity for imagination in mind we can set aside those who champion seamless sex-and-gender identities, and associated social roles. We can also find some fault with Matt Walsh’s recent insistence that there can be one, and only one definition of a woman.3 While Matt is 100% correct in stating that there is only one definition of a biological woman, he conveniently omits the possibility that there may be a definition of ‘woman’ applying to a person’s psychological identity, thus essentially giving us two definitions of woman corresponding to the soma/psyche split.
To reiterate, we all see the obvious XX woman of the body, and then there’s the woman of psychological/imaginal identity which can operate somewhat independently of the former (hence transgenders, intergenders, etc). To illustrate this, Matt Walsh could have a body that looks like Matt Walsh but, hypothetically speaking, in his imaginative and psychological identity he might be more like Napoleon Bonaparte; when it comes to the human psyche anything is possible.
While all this might sound like a recipe for confusion, it isn’t really. Dictionaries attest to the ability of the human mind to accept multiple definitions of a word. I can be stoned to death by literal rocks, and I can be stoned after smoking weed. I can suffer a physical pain, or alternatively I can be in psychological pain – and those ‘two pains’ might not be seamless pains going on at the same time; they might be completely unrelated.
When it comes to the public furor around this topic, the comical part is watching traditional conservatives argue there is only soma, and the progressives argue there’s only psyche. The stupidity of these two partial arguments – and the debate between them – make for the best Punch and Judy show on offer.
If I wanted to take a more strictly phenomenological approach to our topic, I might be forced to say transwomen were both male and female. For example being a woman in one’s imaginative identity will never mean that the chromosomal body has also changed, which indicates there are two identities running concurrently, one male and one female. That said, I appreciate that imagination can override the phenomenological approach to the point of absurdum.
What we can conclude from the more narrow arguments is that they are reductionist and kneejerk responses to a complex phenomenon, and so they provide insufficient explanations for the rise of transgender identity. They may be partially correct but it may help to consider more complex equations, not to mention the approaching of each trans person as possessing a unique biography that led them to become who they are. Following this line of thought I’d like to offer two more factors below that might help to complicate the picture.
Internalized misandry, and gyneolatry
I’ve observed in the rhetoric of many transwomen both an externalized and an internalized misandry. This appears in descriptions of the men they know, and in descriptions of themselves, and they also tend to rehearse feminist depictions of maleness that portray narrow and denigrating descriptions of masculinity. Conversely, transwomen tend to idealize women and femininity (i.e., gyneolatry),4 leading to a conclusion that the feminine grass is of a greener hue.
The sense of internalized misandry was reinforced by a 1991 study which found that mothers of young boys with gender dysphoria frequently suffered psychiatric disorders and that these boys exhibited chronic suffering that was often expressed directly by them as self-hate. One such boy at age three said:
“I hate myself. I don’t want to be me. I want to be somebody else. I want to be a girl.”5
When a man’s potential masculinity is felt as toxic due to the operation of internalized misandry, it’s only natural that such a person would have a dysphoric reaction to masculine selfhood. This might be understood as a pathological reaction, but it can be equally viewed as a healthy adaptation to an unhealthy, male-denigrating environment — for if I renounce maleness I protect myself from corrosive states of imposed self-hatred, along with de-personalizing those attacks directed at me from a misandric world.
The position I have been leading to can be stated simply this way: Internalized misandry + gyneolatry + autogynephilia = transwoman. Of those three factors, I would consider autogynephilia somewhat more variable than the other two, and while often present, it is not always.
In order to render this triplicate formula more palpable, I encourage readers to watch the following Benjamin Boyce interview with former trans individual NJada6 who masterfully illustrates the operation of internalized misandry and gyneolatry in his own experiences.
In conclusion, this article claims that autogynephilia, and gender dysphoria prove insufficient as “causes” of the desire to transition but may nevertheless operate as one factor among many. As a student of gender politics I have expanded the causa efficiens to three:
Lastly, and on a more general note Kara Dansky,7 a trans-exclusionary radical feminist who is leading the charge against transgender individuals, recently tweeted, “It is, in effect, a men’s rights movement intended to objectify women’s bodies and erase us as a class. It is left-wing misogyny on steroids. I say this is as a leftist and a Democrat.”
In response I feel it important to clarify that the transgender movement is not a cause célèbre driven by men’s rights advocates, but rather the current support for transgender individuals/rights is derived from the power of government administrations and global regimes playing “freedom one-upmanship” – ie., the feigning of moral purity to position themselves at top of the global hierarchy.
Feminists were the ones who cleared this forest path for the global elites to walk on, and Dansky is right in the sense that it opens a window to become of benefit to men’s rights movement – ie. it dissolves customary culture privileges that have accumulated around the female sex, making those privileges available to all humans, including men and boys, for the first time.8
The following article appeared in the 1948 edition of the ‘Men’s Review’ – an antifeminist, pro men’s rights initiative that was active in Britain during the 1940s. This will be the first of a series of articles to be published on this website from the first editions of the Men’s Review, which will also be the first time these articles have been made available in digital form for the internet. – PW
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A Convention Condemned
by “Woman’s View”
MANY features of modern society have struck me as extremely odd. Among these, perhaps that which seems to me the oddest is the curious convention whereby a gentleman who goes to a place of entertainment, or to a place of refreshment, with a lady, is expected to pay the bill without any help from her.
After deep reflection I have decided that this convention (nine out of ten observed only when people of the opposite sex are together) annoys me intensely. I will try to summarise my main objections to this convention with utmost brevity.
First, I think the convention unfair. Unfair because it puts upon the shoulders of men the financial burden which, according to logic, should be shared by women. For generally speaking our participation in the benefits paid for is at least equal to the man’s. In modern times we women are, with a diminishing number of exceptions, as well off as our male counterparts.
Secondly, it leads to a greater extravagance than would exist under a “fifty-fifty” system, since the man is placed in the position in which he is not able to suggest economising on the expenses, while where he able to regard the woman as a share-and-share-alike partner, he could suggest economy without embarrassment at all.
Thirdly, the convention tends in many cases to put inter-sex relationships upon a commercial footing. The woman tends to prefer the man who takes her to the half-a-crown seats to the otherwise equally attractive man who takes her in the one-and-sixpenny seats. I happen to believe in equality of opportunity, and it is psychologically bad for women since it tends to make for an unnatural suppression of our real affections beneath the gold-digging smartness.
I AM REVOLTED
The man is tempted to wonder what return he is going to have for the money he has paid out and to arrive at what appears to be a reasonable explanation, mainly that his return will be in terms of kisses and caresses. Hereupon he, and for that matter the woman too, may begin to regard kisses and caresses as something for sale, and idea which, in my opinion, is revolting.
Much could be said in discussion of this convention, which, as I hope to have shown, links up with our modern social outlook in an enormous number of ways.
The success of such an attempt would mean that we have changed the course of social history, and changed it, I believe, for the better. I do not deny that the thrill of this thought is as much of an inspiration as a mere desire to profit ourselves from the more convenient and fair system which I have advocated.
To those scoffers who say “You can’t change human nature,” “Every woman has her price,” or whatever expression you may use, I have only to point out the vast changes in inter-sex relationships that have taken place in our lifetime and those changes for which the Society (for men’s rights) will most surely bring about.
The seemingly endless cycle of school shootings by young men continues in the USA, and as always more students lay dead. The usual scapegoats are wheeled out for blame: its the fault of Democrat policies, Republican policies, fatherlessness, gun availability, misogyny, inadequate school security and check-in cards, or perhaps people choose to blame police lethargy and lack of speedy intervention.
Over and over it goes, year in, year out. Nothing changes.
Omitted from the above list is an alternative cause – a proverbial smoking gun, one that literally everyone is too bigoted to acknowledge: lack of psychological & social supports for struggling young men.
Let me say that again: the cause of most school shootings is the lack of psychological and social supports for troubled young men.
Let me take a step back and explain how I arrive at this position. In my work I support troubled young men, and over time some of those men have expressed fantasies of acting-out murderously, along with their reasoning for same. The fantasies have real potential.
The first thing I note is that these men sometimes feel comfortable to express their murderous fantasies to someone they trust, or to someone they are hoping to gain emotional support from. After talking these fantasies through, having a space to express their reasoning, it becomes clear that many of them are terrified of both people and of the world – often with good reason – and their murderous musings are a wish to hurt other people before other people get a chance to hurt them. In other words, its a convoluted self-defense reflex.
Such men are often relentlessly assaulted by life, perhaps raised by one or both parents who are violent, neglectful, drug addicted, impoverished or emotionally abusive, or it may be that such men have a psychiatric disorder such as schizophrenia, paranoia, head-injury, or autism spectrum disorder that leads to them standing out at school and suffering years of bullying — bullying that almost always results in PTSD and a permanently anxious, hypervigilant, and frankly paranoid state of mind.
The antidote to much of their suffering is to make them feel safe (often for the first time in their lives) by providing genuine and ongoing support. I have listened to these men and assured them that they were not going to need to act out in order to protect themselves or to be heard by a deaf world, because I would pledge to visit regularly, be available on the phone, and accompany them to the shops or gym and help them communicate with, or protect them from others – effectively to be a bodyguard. I hasten to add that my need to protect them from various social or physical assaults was completely absent or at least negligible, as the potential threats had been exaggerated in their minds.
After providing this kind of support for young men, the change in their eyes and body language is nothing short of profound. The steely vigilance and fear in their eyes gives way to eyes projecting trust and thanks, and their stiff, combat-ready bodies relax – all visually palpable. And most importantly, after a short time of providing such support their conversation changes too – with no more talk of acting out, and often with a calm recognition of how extreme and unnecessary their former fantasies now seem to be.
Will such positive outcomes always result from offers of support? No, there will always be one man who is too psychotic or too damaged to reach, and who will take a gun to the streets regardless of support offered. But in the vast majority of cases I believe a positive outcome can be reached, and the vast majority of deaths spared.
Of course more father involvement or more mother involvement can help if they are savvy to the needs of their son – which is sadly not always assured regardless of more involvement. But I’d go further and say anyone-involvement will make an enormous difference if they are able to offer substantive support; father, mother, sibling, friends, neighbors, social workers, psychiatrists, paid support workers or yes even support animals. Any one of these people could make the difference between outcomes of safety, and avoidable killings.
The implementing a nation-wide program to support vulnerable young men could start with identifying which individuals or groups need support, and applying social campaigns and adequate funding. One study of 239 killers, for example, found that 21.34% had had a definite or suspected head injury, and a further 28.03% of them had definite, highly probable or possible autism spectrum disorder.1 This is not to suggest that autism causes people to be killers, but rather that autism combined with other factors such as bullying, isolation, lack of support etc. – the typical male experience – can lead to a pathological outcome.
As an aside I was pleased to learn former U.S. President Donald Trump had increased support funding of the Autism Cares Act,2 some of which will go to support boys whom the CDC says are four times more likely to have an autism spectrum disorder than girls.
If a culture of support could be extended to all vulnerable male demographics we’d have less need for the media with their gloating condemnation of young male perpetrators, and those same men could get the support they so desperately need.
Guilt is a trap used to enslave men. By citing real or concocted transgressions, people are quick to saddle men with guilt (you did wrong) and social shame (you are not a good man), charges which are then leveraged to extract male labor as a means of atonement. This dynamic of male existence is nowhere better illustrated than in the story of The Twelve Labors of Heracles.
Heracles (known to Romans as Hercules) is one of the best-known heroes of classical mythology. Looking past his admirable masculine swagger, we see that his life was no picnic. He endured many trials and completed many daunting tasks, with the reward for his struggles being that he might live forever as a Real Man™ among the mythical gods of Olympus.
Focusing on his misdemeanors or on his great feats, but never on his pain (the story of everyman!), we tend to overlook the fact that Heracles life was beset by tragedy, exploitation, and stress, with many of his deeds driven by a desire to escape intolerable feelings of guilt. Like a determined MMA fighter Heracles took all of this in his stride, and the fact that he displayed courage, strength, skill and endurance while under stress deserves that we take a closer, and dare we say compassionate look at the demons that assailed him.
The story of the Twelve Labors of Heracles
The rise of guilt
There’s no doubt that Heracles’ feelings of guilt arose from the misdeeds he perpetrated; from his occasional insensitivity, to the more damning crime of murder (of which we will say more below). However, there was much more going on behind the scenes that worked to strain his composure and pushed him to commit such terrible deeds. The primary provocateur, who was constantly provoking him to lash out, was his step-mother Hera — the very same goddess who was pleased to see him tormented by guilt after his crimes had transpired.
Hera’s provocations of Heracles were not isolated to a few occasions, as she is said to have persecuted him from the moment of his birth and throughout his entire life; “Even as an infant not yet a year old,” tells the myth, “Hera sent venomous snakes to kill the boy while he slept in his cradle, but Heracles awoke and strangled them.”
Young Heracles killing a snake
We can conclude that Hera embodied the archetype of the spiteful feminist who frequently disdained men while viewing their role as one of service to women. After reading many of the Greek stories it’s fair to conclude that Hera can be considered, more than all the other goddesses, a poster girl for coercive control, manipulation, spite, jealousy and nagging – she is what we might call the Queen of relational aggression.
According to American sociologist Philip Slater, Hera represents narcissism in her attitude toward Heracles, stating that this was part of the reason she dealt the severest blows to him and imposed pain, grief, and labor on him — she both envied Heracles and wanted him to bring her status and glory.1 Representing a kind of love-hate dynamic, Slater summarizes:
Heracles is attacked in the womb, as an infant, and as a grown man, with Hera once again the persecutor. The attack which destroys him, however, comes after all of these, in his gruesome death on Mount Oeta. Even his labors are an expression of Hera’s malevolence, as well as many of the supplementary difficulties which he must endure in carrying them out.
Hera’s enmity toward Heracles is supposed initially to have been aroused by Zeus’s affair with Alcmene (Heracles’ mortal mother). This is an absurdly weak reason, since Zeus’s infidelities were legion, while no one suffered Hera’s wrath so persistently as Heracles. But we are not to expect too much reason and coherence from such a melange of unrelated and contradictory traditions. What we do know is that the relation between Hera and Heracles is an intense one, and by no means always negative. That we are left with the contradictions, largely unrationalized, suggests that such ambivalence did not seem altogether strange to the Greeks—that it tapped something meaningful in their experience.1 (p.340)
Heracles sent mad by Hera
Hera’s persecution eventually drove Heracles mad, by design, causing him to murder all his children and two sons of Iphicles. In some versions he also slew his wife Megara. When he recovered from the madness and realized what he had done an intolerable sense of guilt rose up in his soul. The Oracle at Delphi instructed him to serve Eurystheus and perform the many hard labors that would be set for him as the only way he could atone for his guilty deeds.
No sooner were these accomplished, however, than Heracles committed another murder for which the only way he could make amends was to be sold into slavery to Queen Omphale. While serving in this capacity he achieved several more heroic exploits, and followed up his slavery with a military expedition to Troy, the killing of a sea-monster, further battles, and a new marriage — one which was to bring about his death.1
Philip Slater states that Heracles tries, without succeeding, to renounce his raw instinctual nature in favor of developing a sanitized urban consciousness, a process that entails a transition from a primitive condition to a more modern subjection to “guilt culture.”1 He adds that the failure of Heracles to achieve this goal is perhaps why his ascendancy to Mt. Olympus is associated with so little sense of rejoicing, and his suffering so little regarded as a means to a divine end: it is never in the least clear, as Freud pointed out in his Civilization And Its Discontents, that the achievement of guilt and its subsequent atonement is worth all the trouble:
In any case, Heracles presents us with a curious contradiction. On the one hand he is all impulse, with his gross appetites and lack of restraint or foresight. On the other, he is a man engaged in chronic labor, with no release from suffering, no real love or enjoyment of life—a kind of unwitting adherent of the Protestant Work Ethic. Heracles is a civilizing force, but not civilized. He is proto-urban but not urban, chronically industrious without the capacity for sustained effort and self-denial. His is the blind and uncontrolled ambition out of which the capacity for civilization may accidentally arise. From his blocked pleasure derives the energy for cultural achievements. Yet he is, as noted, proto-urban, the force but not the product. He is like the crude lower-class racketeer who achieves economic success but not social respectability, and is rejected by his children for the very origins from which his success has insulated them.1 (p.388)
In the same way that Heracles is captured by Hera’s emotional snares, modern men are often subject to the same behavioral experiment both on a cultural level, and in their personal relationships. Routine inculcation of guilt saddles men with the feeling that they owe a debt, with a payback framed as servitude or slavery to the self-elected debtors.
Károly Kerényi, one of the founders of modern studies of Greek mythology, claims that Heracles demonstrates the characteristics of an archaic servant and rescuer of women.2 If this is an accurate assessment, Hera not only exploited his gynocentric tendencies but seeded in him an enduring anxiety over masculine destructiveness and the associated guilt burden – an anxiety that may have played a part in the hero’s eventual episodes of cross-dressing and other feminine displays.
Heracles engages in transvestitism
After completing his twelve labors, Heracles continued his adventures but he once again became subjected to exploitation and betrayal – this time by Eurytus, king of Oechalia. After his previous experiences, the new betrayals triggered a kind of PTSD response, sending him into a rage that resulted in him lashing out and killing the king’s son, Iphitus. We are not told whether the crime was self-inspired or the result of madness inflicted on him by Hera, but whatever the case Heracles then descended into a serious bout of insanity.
Heracles was exhausted by these events and appealed for help to cure his madness, and to lift the burden of guilt. He was answered by the Delphic Oracle who advised him to accept another period of slavery in order to cleanse his soul from guilt and atone for his blood crime.
It followed that he was sold into slavery to queen Omphale of Lydia, a subservient role considered shameful for a man, especially to a woman from Lydia which was considered a barbarian nation. During his new period of servitude, which lasted three years, Heracles undertook numerous labors in a similar way to his period of servitude to Eurystheus (12 labors), though his new labors were often trivial and demeaning:
There is general agreement that Heracles was Omphale’s slave and lover, and there are many stories concerning the effeminacy to which the hero was reduced during this bondage. Later authors describe, and painters show, how the couple exchanged clothes—Omphale donning the lion pelt, Heracles her golden gown, slippers, and jewelry [Plutarch; “Whether an Old Man Should Engage in Public Affairs” 785E]. There are various elaborations on this theme, such as Heracles being forced to spin or carry Omphale’s parasol, and a mistaken sexual approach to Heracles by Pan, but these are decidedly of later origin.1 (p.379)
Hercules and Omphale, by Gustave Boulanger (1861)
Later references in texts or art depicted Omphale wearing the skin of the Nemean Lion and carrying Heracles’ olive-wood club, while Heracles wore women’s clothing while being forced to do various kinds of women’s work which included holding a basket of wool while Omphale and her maidens did their spinning.
While Heracles engaged in episodes of transvestitism (he did this on two other occasions as well), we can assume his aim was not to become a female but to compensate for his previous existence. However, it’s intriguing that he did so without complaint when he could easily have resisted and preserved his masculine integrity – after all it was considered absolutely shameful and denigrating for a man to behave this way.
Did Heracles secretly desire time-out as relief from his existence in guilty masculinity? He could easily have avoided this humiliation by employing his legendary strength to either refuse or escape, but it seems he may have viewed such effeminization as less burdensome than the crushing sense of guilt that came with his natural masculinity.
Rejecting the shame of being branded a ‘toxic male’ is the task of all men today, as it was throughout history. In extreme cases men might choose to renounce their masculinity as a means of compliance, and we might also wonder if this sentiment is at work for at least a portion of men who cross-dress, or identify as transwomen. In such cases the solution tends to look more like a sickness than a cure.
The psychology of guilt
There’s a basic formula showing how accusations of toxicity, and associated guilting of males, is used as a means to increase male labor and productivity – a result that works well to the benefit of women, companies, and the State.
That formula is stated simply as – Aggression, Guilt, Repair.
It refers to a psychological process that happens when someone commits an aggressive or slightly destructive act and they notice the damage they have caused (or are made to notice the damage by others). This triggers an automatic guilt reaction for feeling that one has damaged people they love or care about and, after feeling guilty, they move to repair the damage.
It doesn’t matter whether the claims of destructiveness are accurate, somewhat trumped up, or completely fabricated; it has the same effect of generating concern in the minds of the accused, and they react with various attempts to fix the problem and smooth it over.
This formula is laid out by pediatric psychiatrist Donald Winnicott3 who described the process already at work in earliest childhood. During the first years, infants already show a concern over the results of their own destructiveness. Thus, when an infant bites his mother’s nipple hard, or screams and kicks, mother gets frustrated and upset and proceeds to walk away from the infant. At that moment the baby descends into a guilt state (becoming listless, crying, fearful), then when mother returns the baby goes all out trying to repair the damage – reaching out to hug mother, smiling, offering mother a rattle, etc. This again is the process of aggression – guilt – repair,4 and it’s a cycle repeated thousands of times during everyone’s infancy.
The repair efforts, it goes almost without saying, are absolutely vital to any infant who is dependent on his mother for existence, and so we all carry that primal fear of loss when momma walks out of the room…… will she return? As a social and pair-bonding species the concern is real, and no-doubt hardwired. The concern might also explain the popular cliché “If momma aint happy, aint nobody happy!”
Winnicott says that such reparative gestures underlie all productivity and labor in the wider social space – ie. that people want to contribute into society to atone for supposed past destructiveness, and especially on behalf of future destructiveness that has not yet happened (and may never happen!). People want to feel good with the world, and so they work to store-up capital in their reparative bank accounts – usually in the form of labor and financial accumulation, though it could equally be in the currency of thoughtfulness, deference, verbal compliments and the like.
When we consider that the reparative gestures more often take the form of labor – especially men’s labor – we could perhaps equally render Winnicott’s formula as Aggression – Guilt – Labor, and lose nothing of its meaning.
Here we note that the phrase ’emotional labor’ takes on a whole new, and very male sense.
On a more tangible level I’ve talked with a lot of men who admitted that when they feel they’ve done something bad, or that they’ve done something destructive in the eyes of their wife or partner, they go all-out trying to repair the damage. Not just giving her flowers, but they might labor around the yard or paint the interior of the house or some other manual task, and via these constant reparative gestures provide far more labor than would normally be the case. This unfortunately can become a sick game between couples; if a man (or woman) can be made to feel bad enough, and frequently enough, they become pathologically productive.
To that end, many men feel that their wives have become daughters of B. F. Skinner, regularly hearing the nagging din of “You’ve been very insensitive to me recently, and you haven’t even painted the house yet!”
Heracles life is paradigmatic of this cycle, showing the same pattern described by Winnicott in an endless loop; he commits destructive deeds, feels guilt and then attempts to repair the damage through hard labors. His desire to repair things often comes via contributing to society, by helpful assertions of strength to rid the world of monsters and lawless creatures, performing useful engineering feats, while at the same time vigorously denying any weakness that would slow him down. As Slater observes;
The Heraclean myths also include the self-abasing strategy. This is inferred, not from his appearance as a buffoon in Attic drama, but from his role as a servant of the gods and a slave to women. He consistently performs “dirty work” for others, killing pests, cleaning the Augeian stables, herding cattle, reaping grain, and so on. Indeed, his entire life is one of suffering, servitude, and degradation, relieved only by his achievements and final apotheosis. From the slave of the cowardly Eurystheus he becomes the slave of Omphale, and is constantly being cheated of his wages (e.g., by Eurystheus, Augeias, Eurytus, and Laomedon).1 (p.375)
Heracles, and every man like him who labors compulsively is motivated to repair what he unconsciously feels are the results of his own destructiveness — even his potential destructiveness that may never manifest in real behavior. The mere potential of destructiveness is enough to set the compulsive work cycle in motion, especially if under the watchful direction of a scold.
We can only imagine what the world would look like if men were not operating under pressure of guilt; it would probably look more like a series of traditional villages than the marvels of frenetic civilization we see around us today. When it comes to measuring national productivity, the benchmark GDP should be equally interpreted as men’s Guilty Domestic Product.5
The mechanics of misandry
Misandry is not a simple scapegoating reflex, although that is a part of it. Misandric blaming is also an assist for increasing the power and enrichment of the State, of corporations, and of course women, because it increases men’s productivity.
The Heracles story highlights many elements of male existence, but especially misandry. Everybody disparages and treats him as toxic: Hera disparages him; the king he is in service to for twelve labors denigrates him; his Lydian slave-mistress demeans him, and so on. All through the story people are praising his legendary feats, but at the same time calling him toxic while he goes about his labors in an attempt to better both himself, and his reputation. Such denigration is where misandry derives its internal power, not only as a convenient method of scapegoating, but also as a built-in societal custom that ensures productivity.
That payoff is why misandry has remained normalized, but it doesn’t have to remain that way for conscious men.
Some of the phrases directed at men are proof of the desire to increase men’s labor; phrasings like “You need to man up!” which often means a man needs to work harder. Men are called deadbeats (not producing enough money), ‘man-babies’ (for not wanting to overdo things nor put their health at risk), or Peter Pans (too busy enjoying life instead of working), or they may be characterized sarcastically as a ‘failure to launch’ (for younger men failing to rush headlong into a career and a job by which he can contribute his labor to society).
Or, in the recent past, what about the negative disparaging of a man as “gay” (whether he was or not), which implied such a man was failing to indenture himself in service to women and family with some kind of productive contribution (gay men were busying themselves doing non-gynocentric things). We’ve even heard that some men assaulted homosexual men, on rare occasions, as if they were a reminder of their own beaten up, freedom-yearning soul. As ugly as this is, it provides an example of men’s internalized misandry that attempts to ‘put a man in his place,’ by violence if necessary.
In conclusion we can say that misandry is not only a vehicle for cathartic blame, but is more geared to ‘keep men in their place’ – and that place is to be a guilt-driven provider. Women in the long-ago past were similarly subjected to these ‘in your place’ roles, but those days for women are long gone in most developed nations.
It is now men’s turn to break the cycle and say no to imputed guilt, or at least refuse to make genuine guilt available for others to exploit. If you fail to protect yourself in this regard, you are on a fast track to slavery and, in all likelihood, are already there.
References
[1]. Philip Slater, The Glory Of Hera: Greek Mythology and The Greek Family, Beacon Press, (1968) [2]. Károly Kerényi, The Heroes of The Greeks, Thames & Hudson, (1952) [3]. Donald Winnicott, The Development Of A Capacity For Concern (1963), Chapter 6 in The Maturational Process And The Facilitating Environment, International universities Press, (1965) [4]. Donald Winnicott, Aggression, Guilt and Reparation (1960), Chapter 16 in Deprivation And Delinquency, Tavistock Publications, (1984) [5]. Note: for those who are inclined to take comments literally, rest assured this comment about traditional villages (and GDP) is intended hyperbole.
The following poem that appeared in the London Punch over a century ago (Vol. CXXV, August 5, 1903, p. 79), in response to the new ‘gynocentrism theory’ formulated by Lester F. Ward in which he proposed that woman is primary and essential in the evolutionary scheme; that originally and normally all things centre around women, and that man is a mere after-thought of nature.
Gynaecocentricity
Hence, androcentric theory, Of ignorance and male perverseness born, That doomst me night and morn To endless labors, masculine and dreary. Cribbed in some city den, Where fog and darkness spread their sooty wings, And the typewriter rings, Thou bidst me toil and slave the long day long Amid the madding throng, With painful care driving a clerkly pen. But come thou system, called by me Sweet Gynaecocentricity! Make me as a cypher, nought But a trifling after-thought, While to woman you restore All the might was hers of yore. Once again command that she Man’s support and centre be, Guiding with her wiser powers All her own affairs and ours. I would cling to MARY ANN, I the woman, she the man; Independence I would drop, She the pole and I the hop. Every privilege my sex Would from MARY ANN’S annex I would yield her up and be Trampled under foot as she. I would see her, sun or rain, Hurry for the early train, And only leave her desk to crunch At 2 p.m. her lightning lunch. Meantime I with prudent care, To my work-box would repair, Draw my knitting from the box, Or proceed to darn the socks, Or the garden I would seek, Where soft Zephyrs fan the cheek; There within the checkered shade Which the weeping willows made In my swinging hammock I With my favorite books would lie, And read and meditate and moon Through all the lazy afternoon. This give and I will live with thee, Sweet Gynaecocentricity!
The above poem appears to be a sort of parody on Milton’s Allegro, which was widely copied by the global press.
