So why is white male+female supremacy a euphemism for white women worship? Because men’s part in the much touted “supremacy” culture is geared largely to the role of servicing white women, a role otherwise known as chivalry or benevolent sexism.
Whether men traditionally called her ma’am, m’lady, madam or some other highfalutin title, the sexual dynamic was always one that positions woman as dominatrix, and the man as submissive liegemen – i.e., it closely resembles sadomasochism. That same sadomasochism has been the centrepiece of the women’s movement in which, for example, early feminists looked down sneeringly on their ebony lessers, claiming as Susan B. Anthony did, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” and which we see continued in the spa and nail shops which have exclusively women of color carving the toejam out of pampered and ’empowered’ white women’s nails.
In her blog post Three Cheers for White Men, medievalist Rachel Fulton Brown waxes poetic about men’s having aided and abetted a culture of worshipping white women — a worship that we know has led to the three evils of misandry, racism, and (white) female narcissism. Here is her post:
1. When white women (see Marie de France and Eleanor of Aquitaine) invented chivalry and courtly love, white men agreed that it was better for knights to spend their time protecting women rather than raping them, and even agreed to write songs for them rather than expecting them to want to have sex with them without being forced.
2. When white men who were celibate (see the canon lawyers and theologians of the twelfth century and thereafter) argued that marriage was a sacrament valid only if both the man and the woman consented, white men exerted themselves to become good husbands rather than expecting women to live as their slaves.
3. When white women (see Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the suffragettes) invented feminism, white men supported them (see John Stuart Mill) and even went so far as to vote (because only men could vote at the time) to let them vote, not to mention hiring them as workers and supporting their education.
Fulton Brown copped a lot of flack for praising white men’s chivalry and women’s associated pedestalization. But she was right, even if I would radically differ with her in response to this history — ie. my reaction is one of disgust and rejection of the narcissism and sadomasochism embedded in the heart of the same construct.
There is much detail in her feminism-inspired corpus that I am at odds with, and no doubt much in my work that she too would be at odds with. However, I find her thesis readable in parts where describing the power of white women’s tears (a tradition I refer to as damseling), along with white men’s symbiotic enmeshment with those tears in the form of “chivalric” protection frequently involving warrantless, exaggerated violence, especially in colonial settings. This compact is aptly referred to by Phipps as “a circuit” between white women’s perceived vulnerabilities and white men’s reactivity on their behalf.
Phipps’ essay is the first from a feminist perspective that positions males and females as conspiring together as a circuitous dyad, a position contrasted with that of most other feminist authors who prefer to lump all power and evil with men, and all goodness with women. Phipps describes the sexual relations contract of white European descendants as malignant and exploitative, and while I do agree with her in certain key respects I find her thesis too reductive and totalising in its demonization.
“Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people.
“In an article on #MeToo, Jamilah Lemieux (2017) commented: ‘white women know how to be victims. They know just how to bleed and weep in the public square, they fundamentally understand that they are entitled to sympathy’. Lemieux was not claiming the disclosures of #MeToo were not genuine; she was highlighting the power brought to mainstream feminism by the power of white women’s tears. White-lady tears, to use Cooper’s phrase: bourgeois white women’s tears are the ultimate symbol of femininity, evoking the damsel in distress and the mourning, lamenting women of myth (Phipps 2020, p71)… the power of bourgeois white women’s tears was solidified in the modern colonial period, as ‘women’s protection’ became key to the deadly disciplinary power that maintained racialised and classed regimes of extraction and exploitation.
“Structurally, bourgeois white women’s tears support what Sharpe (2016, p16) calls ‘reappearances of the slave ship’: ‘protecting (white) women’ fuels the necropolitics of criminal punishment and the border regimes of Fortress Europe, North America and other parts of the world. These tears enter a world in which marginalised people are disposable, whether they are Black people killed by police, migrants left to starve or drown (Sharpe 2016, pp43-44, 54), or trans people and sex workers (many of them people of colour) disproportionately left to survive outside bourgeois families, communities and the law. The circuit between white women’s tears and white men’s rage means that because we cry, marginalised people can die. As some forms of reactionary feminism exploit this circuit in their engagements with the far right, their narratives of victimhood can themselves be understood as violence. The ship, then, stays afloat: captained by white men, but suspended in a pool of white women’s tears.
After reading Phipps’ essay I’m immediately reminded of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being falsely accused of offending a white woman. White men bashed him for offending a white women’s fragile sensibilities (which it turns out was fabricated by the woman) and proceeded to showcase their “chivalry” via the act of torturing and brutally bashing the boy to death. In this one image is captured the scenario painted by Phipps – the compact that would keep white women (and their white male protectors) at the top of the food chain.
While I won’t join Phipps in her general malignment of white men, the question remains have certain men throughout history showcased white supremacy, sometimes brutally? Yes they have – but to what ends? I’m going to finish with an unpopular conclusion: that white male supremacy, if and when it has existed, has been driven partly, and perhaps even largely, by a desire to protect a culture of white female supremacy. Keep in mind that this conclusion is becoming recognized not only in the rarefied writings of feminists and MRAs, but also among the everyday populace which has in recent times immortalized the ‘Karen’ figure as an example of racist, misandrist, and narcissistic entitlement.
In a time when anti-white racism and critical race theory are gaining momentum (something I do not wish to fuel), keep in mind that some white women are not like that, even if many are. It still pays to follow the dictum of Martin Luther King who encouraged us to look at content of character before color of skin, and by that route we avoid the fallacy of exaggerated class guilt.
There is much detail in her corpus that I am at odds with, and no doubt much in my work that she too would be at odds with. However, I find her thesis broadly accurate when describing the power of white women’s tears (a tradition I refer to as damseling), along with white men’s symbiotic enmeshment with those tears in the form of “chivalric” protection frequently involving warrantless, exaggerated violence, especially in colonial settings. This compact is aptly referred to by Phipps as “a circuit” between white women’s perceived vulnerabilities and white men’s reactivity on their behalf.
Phipps’ essay is the first from a feminist perspective that positions males and females as conspiring together as a circuitous dyad, a position contrasted with that of most other feminist authors who prefer to lump all power and evil with men, and all goodness with women. Phipps describes the sexual relations contract of white European descendants as malignant and exploitative, and while I do agree with her in certain key respects I find her thesis overly reductive and totalising in its demonization.
“Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people.
“In an article on #MeToo, Jamilah Lemieux (2017) commented: ‘white women know how to be victims. They know just how to bleed and weep in the public square, they fundamentally understand that they are entitled to sympathy’. Lemieux was not claiming the disclosures of #MeToo were not genuine; she was highlighting the power brought to mainstream feminism by the power of white women’s tears. White-lady tears, to use Cooper’s phrase: bourgeois white women’s tears are the ultimate symbol of femininity, evoking the damsel in distress and the mourning, lamenting women of myth (Phipps 2020, p71), and it is likely that this power is not fully accessible to working class white women, who are often figures of classed disgust (Tyler 2008). While it might date back to the ancients, the power of bourgeois white women’s tears was solidified in the modern colonial period, as ‘women’s protection’ became key to the deadly disciplinary power that maintained racialised and classed regimes of extraction and exploitation.
“The narrative – that reactionary feminists are the real victims but their voices are not being heard – achieves several aims. It disseminates reactionary feminist ideas; it deploys Strategic White Womanhood to avoid accountability; it uses the device of white women’s tears to deny humanity to the Other. Reactionary feminists seize womanhood – and personhood – while sex workers become uncaring ‘happy hookers’ and trans women become shadowy threats. We see the weeping Madonna versus the unfeeling whore. We see the weeping survivor versus the menacing predator. Neither sex workers or trans women are entitled to complex feelings or to claim victimisation on their own behalf.
“Structurally, bourgeois white women’s tears support what Sharpe (2016, p16) calls ‘reappearances of the slave ship’: ‘protecting (white) women’ fuels the necropolitics of criminal punishment and the border regimes of Fortress Europe, North America and other parts of the world. These tears enter a world in which marginalised people are disposable, whether they are Black people killed by police, migrants left to starve or drown (Sharpe 2016, pp43-44, 54), or trans people and sex workers (many of them people of colour) disproportionately left to survive outside bourgeois families, communities and the law. The circuit between white women’s tears and white men’s rage means that because we cry, marginalised people can die. As some forms of reactionary feminism exploit this circuit in their engagements with the far right, their narratives of victimhood can themselves be understood as violence. The ship, then, stays afloat: captained by white men, but suspended in a pool of white women’s tears.
Throughout history we witness the continuing fight between powers of order and those of chaos, a battle that takes place on the cultural scene, and within our own psyche.
Understood via the language of mythology, both monotheism (singular order) and polytheism (multiple order) provide protections against chaos, although the monotheistic mindset might argue that polytheism is itself a form of chaos; a charge that falls flat on further investigation.
The polytheism showcased in traditional mythologies, with its participatory democracy among the gods, provides a helpful restraint against chaos via the following routes:
Individual gods & their cults apply restraint against over-reach by other gods and their cults.
The Olympian pantheon is governed by the principle of inclusive democracy.
Tragedy, as portrayed in polytheistic mythology, serves as a warning against disintegrative practices of hubris, narcissism and lawlessness.
Representation of Titans as forces of unstructured (and deconstructing) excess are actively suppressed by ordered Olympian society.
Polytheism can thus be understood as a framework embracing a plurality of value systems, social customs, and political structures: in a word, order. In this sense it works as a foil against chaos.
In his excellent book The New Polytheism (1974), David Miller contrasts polytheism’s ‘many centres of order’ with the alternative of chaos:
Polytheism is the name given to a specific religious situation. The situation is characterized by plurality, a plurality that manifests itself in many forms. Socially, polytheism is a situation in which there are various values, patterns of social organization, and principles by which man governs his political life. These values, patterns and principles sometimes mesh harmoniously, but more often they war with one another to be elevated as the single center of normal social order. Such a situation would be sheer anarchy and chaos were it not possible to identify the many orders as each containing a coherence of its own. [Miller, 1974]1
To Miller’s observation about intra-warring tendencies within polytheism I would also add that the monotheistic mindset engages in a comparable extra-warring tendency toward individuals and societies possessing contrary religious values or gods, thus rendering moot any distinction between monotheism and polytheism when it comes to a war reflex targeting the proverbial ‘other.’ The basis of polytheistic theology, however, is an inbuilt assumption that a variety of gods and their imperatives belong within the overall pantheon – whereas monotheism is more often “jealous” about the right to hold exclusive power.
The chaos that both monotheism and polytheism negate was personified in Greek mythology by the Titans, and I will be using the rest of this article to explore the nature of these mysterious and destructive figures.
The Titans were never well defined, certainly not with the sharp borders and contours typical of the Olympians with their respective domains of interest; so on that basis the Titans fall short of the clear structuralism we reserve for archetypes. We could perhaps stretch the notion of archetypes into a rubbery shape, as did one author who proposed it is possible to view Titanism as the “archetype of excess,” but this clear definition belies their shapeshifting, amorphous and ultimately form-destroying natures.
Much confusion has arisen within Jungian circles as to what constitutes an archetype. While excessiveness or destructiveness are certainly part of our human repertoire, they fall short of what we might call complex personality structures, acting instead as singular impulses, functions, or instincts.
The question Jungians often ask is- should we refer to simplistic human functions as ‘archetypal’ in nature, or reserve this designation for more complex configurations? The Greeks for example tended to personify complex figures such as Aphrodite and Apollo, which are reasonably referred to as archetypal patterns. But the Greeks also personified simplistic functions such as Phobos (fear), Phthonos (envy), Nemesis (revenge), Oizys (misery), Limos (hunger) etc. which lacked the complexity of the Olympian archetypes. For this article, then, we will stick with the practice of naming simple impulses or instincts (such as titanic destructiveness) as functions, and reserve the word archetypal for the more elaborate configurations.
Chaos and the Titans
The very first association of the Titans with Chaos comes from Hesiod’s Theogony (700 BC) where he tells that after being defeated by the Olympian order, the Titans dwelt beyond the threshold of Chaos:
“There lies the sources and the limits of black earth and of mist-wrapped Tartaros, of the barren sea, too, and of the starry sky, and they are grim and dank and loathed even by the gods.
There stand the gates of marble and the threshold of bronze, unshakable and self-grown from the roots that reach deep into the ground. In front of these gates, away from all the gods dwell the Titans, on the other side of murky Chaos.“2
As Hesiod tells here, the Titans dwell in murky chaos far away from the Olympian gods, suggesting that these two forces cannot mix to form a harmonious synthesis.
Jungian author Rafael Lopez-Pedraza provides a further analysis from an archetypalist point of view, detailing specific features of Titanism in the following survey:
“Kerenyi gives us a general picture of the psychology of the Titans: no laws, no order, no limits.
For didactic purposes, we can say that, just as the Greeks thought of the Titanic times as the reign in earlier times of more savage celestial Gods, in the ontogenesis of man, there have also been Titanic times. Our own adolescence probably contains a large element of Titanism — excess, unboundedness, lawlessness, chaos, barbarism and so on…
Let us push this Titanic element even further. Kerenyi’s view of the Titans, that they represent a particular function, is perhaps what I am trying to get at concerning this Titanic ingredient which exists in us all. However, we are faced here with a difficulty; a function suggests something specific, whereas Titanism seems so disparate and wild…
I have already mentioned the well-defined Gods and Goddesses with their consistent images; in other words, the archetypes. Nilsson again: “Anthropomorphism has, therefore, a characteristic limitation.” If that is so, it is difficult to see the Titans (whose main characteristic is excess) as archetypes with their own inherent limitation, and even more difficult to see them as the images of an archetype. Furthermore, Nilsson states: “The Titans are abstractions or empty names of whose significance we cannot judge.” So to call the Titans archetypes, or even representatives of a particular function, is a bit risky. If we were to follow Kerenyi on this point and agree that the Titans represent a particular function, then the Titans, with their excessiveness, could be called the archetype of excess.
Nevertheless, in poetry and iconography the Titans are personified, represented as forms, enabling us, perhaps, to broaden our view of anthropomorphism and imagine the forms of the Titans as a sort of borderline anthropomorphism. Personally, I prefer to view them as mythological figures representing mimicry and excess, for they are not archetypal configurations. In order to gain insight into this mimetism, jargon and excess, we need a strong archetypal training and point of view; it is only by having those well-defined forms as a background that we can have insight into what is, by definition, formless in human nature…
We have the literature running from Camus’ The Outsider, published during the war (in 1942), to Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, to confirm this impression. I connect what Camus and Burgess expressed in their novels, in terms of mythology and Archetypal Psychology, with the Titanic level in man which we have been tracking: no laws, no order, no limits — in short, excess. Once again, it is literature which has opened the door to an exploration (which we in psychology are just beginning) of those levels in man where the Titan lurks. But, following Kerenyi again, we have to accept that, in the history of human life, the Titanic expresses itself where we are excessive. In this sense, the Titanic could be, if not an archetype, then a particular function.” 3
Note his many descriptions of the Titans – no laws, no order, no limits, formless, excess, savage, unboundedness, lawlessness, chaos, barbarism, disparate and wild, (etc.) – descriptions which we will use, along with other features, to construct a final picture of Titanism below.
The next description of the Titans comes from James Hillman’s article titled And Huge Is Ugly: Zeus and the Titans,4 where he singles out the presence of destructive excess:
“A sign of the absence of the gods is hugeness, not merely the reign of quantity, but enormity as a quality, a horrendous or fascinating description, like Black Hole, Conglomerate, Megapolis, Trillions, Gigabytes, Star Wars. Whether presented in the images of multinational corporations, polluted oceans, or vast climatic changes, hugeness is the signature of the absent god. Or, let us say that the divine attributes of Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence alone remain. Without the benevolent governance of qualifying divinities, Omnipotence, Omniscience, and Omnipresence become gods. In other words, without the gods, the Titans return.
Are we re-enacting the beginnings of things as recounted by the Theology of Hesiod? The first great task of the gods was to defeat the Titans and to thrust them in Tartarus where they were to be kept away from the human earth forever. Zeus then married Metis (intelligence or measure); lay with Themis (who bore him Hours, Order, Justice, Peace, and the Fates); lay with Eurynome, through whom came the Graces; with Mnemosyne, mother of the Muses, and with Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis. These archetypal principles and powers come into the world only when titanism is safely kept at bay. The cultured imagination and the imagination of civic order begins only when excess is encompassed.
Titans were imagined as Giants; in fact, the popular imagination, says Roscher, never distinguished between Giants and Titans. The root of the word titan means: to stretch, to extend, to spread forth, and to strive or hasten. Hesiod’s own etymology (Theogony 209) of titenes is “to strain.” This straining, striving effort suggests that the major contemporary complaint of stress is the feeling in the Promethean ego of its titanism. (Prometheus is perhaps the most well-known of the Titans, the figure whom Kerényi has called “the archetype of human existence,” thereby pointing to the titanic propensity in each of us.) Stress is a titanic symptom. It refers to the limits of the body and soul attempting to contain titanic limitlessness. A true relief of stress begins only when we can recognize its true background: our titanic propensity.
We may note a difference between titanism and hubris. Hubris is a human failure to remember the gods. When we forget or neglect the gods, we extend beyond the limits set by the gods on mortals, limits given mainly by Zeus through his union with Metis, Themis, and Mnemosyne.
Titanism, however, takes place at the level of the gods themselves. We are not Titans nor can we become titanic – only when the gods are absent can titanism return to the earth. Do you see why we must keep the gods alive and well? Small is beautiful requires a prior step: the return of the gods.
***
“Despite evidence of flagrant titanism all around us, the Titans themselves are invisible, like the black night sky of Uranos, their terrible father, and hidden by their mother, Gaia, in her deepest womb. They are sometimes imagined as ghosts. They work invisibly in darkness and in the impulses and fantasies arising from the depths. López-Pedraza points out, referring to the mythologists Nilsson and Kerényi, that the Titans – because they are invisible or unimaged – therefore do not have limits. Without image they become pure expansion. Hence, their punishment requires severe limitations: the chains that bind Prometheus; incarceration in Tartarus.
Limitation in our society tends to mean repression. We imagine the defeat of excess by means of tougher laws, harder education, severer systems of management control. However, the cure of enormity through more discipline is but an allopathic measure, a cure through the opposite which often leads to a righteous puritanical totalitarianism. The correction of one titanism can easily convert into another sort, e.g., totalitarian moralism, unless we understand what Zeus is truly about: the ordering power of the differentiated imagination: polytheism.
***
“Though the Titans may be invisible, an unimaged limitless greed locked inside human nature, titanism is all around. It strikes the ears, the membranes and eyeballs and fingers. Our senses touch and recoil. Repulsed by the huge and the ugly, we close off the world. We grab a bite on the run, drive thru our days. The common world is lost to sense, and too, the words of sense, the common descriptive language of adjectives and adverbs that give texture and shading. Instead, a titanism of acronyms and the justification for the ugly and the huge with abstract imageless reasons named economy, practicality, time-saving, comfort, accessibility, convenience, and national security.4
In this excerpt Hillman provides further signifiers for the titanic impulse, each associated with an outcome of formless excess; specifically the expansive, striving, spreading, straining and stretching toward outcomes of hugeness and enormity, ultimately to demonstrate what existence looks like without boundaries or limits.
Lastly, I will take five popular dictionary definitions of titanism for added detail, which are as follows:
Oxford: 1. An attitude of resistance to, or defiance of, the established order of things; especially one which is grandiose or romantic but ultimately futile. Compare note at “Titan”. 2. The quality or fact of being titanic; very great size or power.
Mirriam-Webster: Defiance of and revolt against social or artistic conventions
Collins: A spirit of defiance of and rebellion against authority, social convention, etc.
Dictionary.com: Revolt against tradition, convention, and established order.
Thefreedictionary.com: Revolt against tradition, convention, and established order.
Summary
Based on the descriptions above we can now distil a summary of the traits associated with Titans, and the behavior titanism, with its driving impetus toward chaos: Titanism represents the drive towards destruction of established structures, in both self and society, in preference for a state of excessiveness, anarchy and chaos.
That, then, is the definition of titanism based on the above sources. While the overall picture remains one of destructiveness, it should also be noted that the Titans of mythology inaugurated a levelled landscape, a kind of tabula rasa on which the Olympians could move in and build their social order. In this sense titanic forces might be understood to preside over the process of entropy that works to break down established structures after they become encrusted and repressive – an impetus formalized in today’s philosophical obsession with deconstructionism and post-structuralism. Ultimately such shifts represent phases of the civilizational cycle, preferably short lived in duration thus minimizing the suffering that is always associated with violence and breakdown.
We’ve seen the titanic drive emerge at numerous points throughout history, especially in the closing phases of empires. We are witnessing it again in the West today within trends that are overtly violent or alternatively disguised behind a highbrow philosophical veneer of postmodern deconstructionism — which serves as camouflage for that same naked impulse toward destruction and chaos. We are witnessing the end of many things we took for granted: architectural uniformity, responsible individualism, free speech, self-restraint, modesty, manners, social hierarchy, familiar understandings of gender, family cohesiveness, national pride, and many other structures previously enjoyed as norms.
As social unrest increases and our streets continue to burn, we can hope that a well prepared Olympian family awaits in the wings to address the chaos, preferably sooner rather than later.
Sources:
[1] David L. Miller, The New Polytheism: Rebirth of the Gods and Goddesses, (1974) [2] Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Translated by A. Athanassakis, (1983) [3] Rafael Lopez Pedraza, Cultural Anxiety, (1990) [4] James Hillman, And Huge Is Ugly: Zeus and the Titans, in Mythic Figures, (2007)
Hate sex. Those two words appearing together come across as awkward, even oxymoronic, for who in their right mind hates sex? Its true that we might hate sex with the wrong person according to our criteria of what’s hot, but very few people in this world hate sex altogether.
The phrase hate sex however isn’t intended to suggest a person hates sex, but rather that they desire it with a person they are currently fighting with or alienated from.
Other variations on the phrase include rage sex, grudge sex, and angry sex, each offering slightly different meanings but often tied together in the act of having sex with someone you don’t feel so good about.
Sex of this kind is widely believed to be more intense than normal sex, and for that reason the phrase “We love having make-up sex” is a common euphemism for angry grinding.
The begging question is why would a couple want to have sex if they are experiencing serious resentment or alienation?
One school of psychology provides some answers.
British Object Relations psychologists claim that if relationship bonds are constantly rendered insecure then the desire for sex is harnessed as a way to reinstate vanishing relationship security. When relationships become fragmented, weak or broken, we desire to be more in synch again, more loved, more on the same page. We want to reaffirm that our future together is secure, that we can still walk into the sunset hand in hand, worldview intact.
Instead of that security, we feel the relationship has become tenuous, hanging by a thread, on the verge of dissolving into….. the unknown. Insecurity and anxiety reign. In this scenario hate sex is utilized in the service of fixing weak intimate bonds, an instinctual attempt to repair those bonds through the complex release of hormones that ultimately serve to re-establish love and connection.
The theory that sex repairs a failing relationship bond was first proposed back in 1941 by psychologist Ronald Fairbairn, who announced a deviation from the traditional Freudian formula that humans are primarily pleasure-seekers. For Fairbairn we are first and foremost “object seekers” by which phrase he meant seekers of other people to have relationships with:
“Freud spoke of libidinal aims and defined these aims in terms of erotogenic zones – as oral aims, anal aims and so on. What he described however are not really aims but modes of dealing with objects; and the zones in question should properly be regarded, not as the dictators of aims, but as the servants of aims… The real libidinal aim is the establishment of satisfactory relationships with objects; and it is, accordingly, the object that constitutes the true libidinal goal.”1
Fairbairn’s position is summarized, in the words of GoodTherapy.org, by stating that the primary motivational factors in one’s life are based on human relationships, rather than sexual or aggressive triggers. Object relations is a variation of psychoanalytic theory which diverges from Freud’s belief that we are pleasure seeking beings; instead it suggests that humans seek relationships.
The Object Relations theorists view hate-sex as a way to potentially relieve tension over failed or failing relationships, and also as a vehicle by which that relationship might be re-established. The theory is summarized perfectly by Fairbairn who says, “Explicit pleasure-seeking is thus not a means of achieving libidinal aims, but a means of mitigating the failure of these aims.”
“Pleasure-seeking is not a means of achieving libidinal aims, but a means of mitigating failure of these aims.”
Is it true that sexual pleasure is a way to mitigate and repair failing relationships? The urgency of hate-fucking as it arises on top of a fierce argument appears to support this hypothesis, and if we accept it we are faced with a revision to the goals of our pleasure-seeking culture – no longer is sex an act of pleasure alone but a psychobiological reflex intended to repair relationship damage and foster attachment.
That such damage is rife in modern relationships is undeniable. The misandry, misogyny, gynocentrism and the growth of cultural narcissism are enough to make any intimate bond unravel, including those of biological family. As mentioned in another article the toying with relationship bonds to extract compliance from a partner is a particular cause for weakness.
As cruel as it sounds, withholding affection, sex, approval and love have become part of women’s repertoire employed to coerce men into compliance and servitude (eg. “If you don’t earn more money, I’ll stop loving you”) – a coercion that men often acquiesce to in order to salvage what feels like an increasingly fragile relationship bond. Indeed, one of the core strategies of romantic love is to keep the relationship bond in the realm of tantalizing denial, a formula that emulates the techniques of animal behaviorism, but instead of the model being learned from Skinner or Pavlov, it is taught by grassroots dating culture; the message being to keep your man in a position of uncertainty. Aside from other relationship tensions, this approach to relationships is one that potentially elicits the insecure grudge fuck.
The obsession some men have with sex, porn, prostitutes, sexbots, sex toys etc. raises a question of whether the intensity is partly driven by frustrated opportunities for human attachment, with hate-sex themes arising from unconscious aims of mitigating relationship frustrations. Whatever the case, it’s an open question as to why some men indulge in hate fucking and fantasizing about same. More broadly, we might ask why any securely-attached couple would bother nursing regular grudges and hate in the first place? The answer is, securely attached couples probably wouldn’t!
Next time you hear someone talk about hate sex as if it were fun, just a little “make up” sex as they like to call it, consider how much fun is really involved in a big picture of that relationship. If hate sex is an attempt to repair relationships damaged by emotional manipulation, alienation and abuse — especially if happening on a regular basis — then it’s about as far away from fun as you can possibly get.
*This revised articled first published on June 23, 2017.
References:
[1] Ronald Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, pp. 82-83
E.B. Bax outlined two forms of damseling; 1. “simple weakness,” and 2. “aggressive weakness.” In his view simple weakness deserves consideration on its merits, whereas aggressiveweakness deserves no consideration.
“For modern Feminists of the sentimental school, the distinction is altogether lost sight of between weakness as such and aggressive weakness. Now I submit there is a very considerable difference between what is due to weakness that is harmless and unprovocative, and weakness that is aggressive, still more when this aggressive weakness presumes on itself as weakness, and on the consideration that might be extended to it, in order to become tyrannical and oppressive. Weakness as such assuredly deserves all consideration, but aggressive weakness deserves none save to be crushed beneath the iron heel of strength. Woman at the present day has been encouraged by a Feminist public opinion to become meanly aggressive under the protection of her weakness. She has been encouraged to forge her gift of weakness into a weapon of tyranny against man, unwitting that in so doing she has deprived her weakness of all just claim to consideration or even to toleration.” Chapter 5: The “Chivalry” Fake, in The Fraud of Feminism (1913)
Whether real or purely fabricated, these displays of vulnerability represent the two main faces or modes of enacting the damsel-in-distress archetype. Both begin their display with an announcement of vulnerability and powerlessness, but their ways of enlisting assistance differ considerably. The simple damsel invites assistance by displaying utter helplessness, imparting a sense of inadequacy, impotence and a complete lack of agency to deal with the situation responsible for her distress. The aggressive damsel, on the other hand, angrily denounces the forces assailing her, and demands redress with bitter and vindictive calls for the world to exact revenge on her behalf.
Unlike the simple damsel, the aggressive damsel feels unable to attract chivalric reinforcements via the simple act of broadcasting her helplessness. Thus, she loudly seeks the attention of men and governments, demanding they provide chivalric redress for whatever ‘distress’ is assailing her. This kind of damsel relies particularly on governments to address her grievances, and she is likely the kind of woman that John Stuart Mill, an advocate of feminism, had in mind when he wrote the following;
“From the moral influence exercised by women arose the spirit of chivalry … a special submission and worship directed towards women, who were distinguished from the other defenceless classes by the high rewards which they had it in their power voluntarily to bestow on those who endeavoured to earn their favour, instead of extorting their subjection.
Chivalry left without legal check all those forms of wrong which reigned unpunished throughout society; it only encouraged a few to do right in preference to wrong, by the direction it gave to the instruments of praise and admiration. But the real dependence of morality must always be upon its penal sanctions – its power to deter from evil… The beauties and graces of the chivalrous character are still what they were, but the rights of the weak, and the general comfort of human life, now rest on a far surer and steadier support.” [John Stuart Mill, The Subjection of Women1869]
Many readers will recognise Bax’s simple weakness in the behaviour of traditional gynocentric women, and likewise will recognize aggressive weakness in the behaviours of feminist women. However, contrary to Bax’s trusting view of non-aggressive displays of weakness, readers might recognize that these too can amount to manufactured displays of weakness every bit as manipulative and undeserving of assistance as that of aggressive weakness.
Damseling is a biologically-based behavior that’s as old as the human race. Technically speaking, the behaviour we refer to as damseling refers to any human being who announces its vulnerability to others – to husband, family, friend, stranger or to one’s tribe.
The announcement of vulnerability stimulates a neurological system in the brain of observers, thereby eliciting reflexes of protection, caretaking and nurturance typically reserved for vulnerable children and infants.
Curiously, the same neurological system can be exploited by adults who find themselves in a vulnerable situation, or by adults feigning vulnerability in order to acquire resources of protection, provision or comfort – essentially a hacking of the human operating system.
While such vulnerability can be displayed by any human, whether a child or adult of either sex, when we use the word damseling it refers especially to adult women who engage in theatrical versions of these behaviours.
The word damsel derives from the French demoiselle, meaning “young lady”, and the phrase “damsel in distress” in turn is a translation of the French demoiselle en détresse. The behaviour of the damsel in distress; her screams, her fear, her appeals for relief in the face of immanent danger, are captured in the words of Julia Kristeva who says of life in the Middle Ages, “Roles were assigned to woman and man: suzerain and vassal, the lady offering up a ‘distress’ and the man offering a ‘service.'”
Ancient mythologies around the world have captured the theme of damseling, and also the ‘parental brain’ state of the heroes who set out to rescue vulnerable maidens. While these tales are numerous, the practice of damseling did not become the centrepiece of any culture until a catering to women’s vulnerability was codified as a social expectation for men in the Middle Ages – a codification whereby men were asked to specialize as servicing agents in the role of alleviating women’s distresses. Giving birth to this idea, chivalry, courtly love, and a new sexual relations contract coalesced that placed women’s safety and comfort at the top of the hierarchy of social customs.
This gendered social development is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the “Enterprise of the Green Shield with the White Lady” a chivalric order founded by French knight and military leader Jean Le Maingre and twelve knights in 1399, committing themselves for the duration of five years to the protecting of all damsels in distress:
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, including widows.
According to his Livre des faits, in 1399 Jean Le Maingre, tired of receiving complaints from ladies, maidens, and widows oppressed by powerful men bent on depriving them of the lands and honours, and finding no knight of squire willing to defend their just cause, out of compassion and charity founded an order of twelve knights sworn to carry “a shield of gold enamelled with green and a white lady inside” (une targe d’or esmaillé de verd & tout une dame blanche dedans). The twelve knights, after swearing this oath, affirmed a long letter explaining their purpose and disseminated it widely in France and beyond her borders.
The letter explained that any lady young or old finding herself the victim of injustice could petition one or more or the knights of the ‘Enterprise of the Green Shield with the White Lady’ for redress and that knight would respond promptly and leave whatever other task he was performing to fight the lady’s oppressor personally.
During this period, men saving damsels was referred to euphemistically as love service, which saw male lovers referred to as homo ligius (the woman’s liegeman, or ‘my man’) who pledged honor, and servitium (service) to the lady via a posture of feudal homage. This growth of gynocentric specialization would later allow Modesta Pozzo to write the following:
“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.” (Pozzo – 1590 AD)
Such is the social ascendency of women and their ever-increasing cries of distress. Today we have a different dilemma in that damseling has evolved into a victim cult extending well beyond women. The damseling attitude now blankets much of the world with aggressive demands for redress, with social movements arising from the trope that are fomenting violence and decay within human societies. Exploiting primal reflexes, particularly those designed for parenting vulnerable juveniles, has become a runaway train with little to stop it. We can only hope that the current destruction will serve as the moment of reflection and restraint toward the damsel’s demands.
Voices around the world are announcing a rapid decay of culture forms and a descent into dystopia. On a grass roots level, much of that decay is driven by the rise of infantile narcissism centered on ‘me and my vulnerabilities’ along with ‘me and my demands’ — a pathological focus that channels its energy into topics like racial or gender-diversity tribalisms, and the violent insistence that one’s needs be taken care of by others.
The force of such tribalism tends to take as prisoner all remaining citizens who don’t identify themselves with the child archetype, creating a two-class society of childlike adults who set out to pull on the heartstrings of more matured, responsible adults within the same society.
The result is a society operating not so much on a division between generations, races, genders, income or sexual orientations, but divided instead by those with a psychological attitude of children vs those with an adult mindset.
Using biological language, what we are witnessing is a hacking of the parental brain of society, garnering its collective sympathies with the bait of dramatized neoteny. When our biological operating system is hacked in this way, and the hack is taught as cultural operating practice within government institutions, universities and in popular culture, there is little chance to circumvent its omnipotent demands.
The only way to circumvent the aggressive vulnerability of the child archetype is for a portion of society to say NO when faced with its demands — demands which tend to appear as an insistence for redress of female victimhood, race victimhood, “marginalized” sexuality, wage inequality and so on — the masks of the child archetype.
Biologists, neurologists, evolutionary psychologists, and ethologists have long recognized parent and child instincts in the form of parents’ urge to caretake and protect juveniles, and conversely of juveniles having an impulse to announce their vulnerability as a signal of their need to be cared for.
This biological fact was independently discovered and understood by archetypal psychologists (parent & child archetypes), object relations psychologists (parent & child objects), and by other schools of psychology dealing with the ‘inner child’ and its need for caretaking. Object relations psychology goes so far as claiming the sexual libido is subservient to the evolutionary imperative of parent~child bonding, making this dyad the strongest motivator in human affairs.
As a side observation, Jungians differentiate between the child archetype as described above, and what they alternatively refer to as the ‘puer archetype.’ These radically different archetypes can be represented respectively by the images of a baby or toddler (child archetype), or by an image of an older child/teenager (puer archetype). The puer archetype is perfectly represented by the figure of Peter Pan – youthful, loving of new experiences, playful, spontaneous, optimistic, adventurous and independent.
Contrary to the phenomenology of child archetype which is represented by a dependent infant in need of coddling and protecting, the puer archetype mentioned above is an independent child or youth; an imperative vital to the psychological health of all men and women.
This Jungian differentiation between the motives of infantile child archetype, and youthful puer archetype respectively, leads me to reject psychopathologising of the puer impulse, as happens when people refer to it as a Peter Pan syndrome or as a failure to launch, which essentially brands men as “pathetic man babies” and attempts to shame them into assuming one-sided, and indeed one-dimensional posture of adult responsibility. Failure to launch applies more properly to an overidentification with the child archetype – a posture that does deserve challenging when it reaches the status of personal or cultural dominance.
James Hillman on the child archetype
While the above video provides only half of the full speech given by Hillman on the child archetype, it does impart a good overview of the topic. Hillman touches on Jung’s description of the child archetype as including traits of vulnerability, a sense of futurity (that life will begin in the future), innocence, and also a feeling of hermaphroditism. This sexual orientation (hermaphroditism) of the child archetype is also confirmed in Freud’s idea that toddlers are polymorphous perverse and not yet forming what Freud understood as an appropriate genital identity as boy or girl.
Perhaps those early observations by Jung and Freud make sense when you consider the concerns of the ‘marginalized’ wokesters today who champion multiple genders, non-binarism, bisexuality, transgenderism etc. and aggressively demand to be taken care of.
The following is a 1995 interview with Shepherd Bliss, the man who coined the phrase ‘Mythopoetic Men’s Movement’ and who was a notable participant within the movement. Contemporary men’s movements will find much in Bliss’s views to disagree with, however he did articulate some valuable perspectives as belonging to the mythopoetic mindset, such as the rejection of reductionist definitions of masculinity in favour of a multiplicity of male archetypes. – PW
__________________________________
Bert: As one way to start, perhaps I should go into my own personal story. I wonder if it reflects what’s happening with the men’s movement. When Bernetta was in a women’s spirituality group I lamented that there was nothing to get into men’s spirituality; men’s deep inner work. Robert Moore and Doug Gillette’s book King, Warrior, Magician, Lover moved me so much that I designed a seminar around it. A group of friends and I did a six week King, Magician, Warrior, Lover and Green Man seminar. At that stage I wasn’t even content with staying with the four because I thought that the Green Man was important for our focus on the Earth.
Now I find Alan Chinen’s Once Upon a Midlife and Beyond the Hero a breath of fresh air. In Beyond the Hero he describes the Shaman/Trickster as an older and deeper archetype than the King, Warrior or Hero.
I’ve given some thought to the misgivings you have, about the Warrior archetype.
Shepherd: I’m glad you added that vital Green Man. Your experience, the connection that you made to the Moore/Gillette book, has happened to a number of men. Their book is entry-level work. It can ignite people and get things started. I honor that work.
Then the question is — what’s next? What more is there? People get frozen in a metaphor, such as the Warrior, as if that were the whole story or the guiding star. The problem is, if you have a whole group of people who are all catalyzed by that image, it is not a community that has diversity. It’s similar to what happens in support groups where everybody has the same problem and is working on the same issue. From ecology we learn that an ecological system is strongest when it is diverse. Life on Earth is based on biodiversity. That’s what’s behind my concern with that singular focus. Some people are too oriented toward the Warrior energy. It is a component of Men’s Work. But too much focus in that direction takes you more into men’s rights than into mythopoetic work.
Bert: Are you suggesting that warrior is not mythopoetic?
Shepherd: Mythopoetic implies polytheistic. Mythopoesis has to do with change — not getting fixated. There are multiple archetypes, not just a single archetype. If you’re moved by a single metaphor you could be mythological, but not necessarily mythopoetic.
Warrior work is young men’s work. It’s a developmental stage everybody should go through. Some people get stuck there. As you know, I’m not into this warrior stuff. I don’t like the language. Men who are drawn to it need to mature. They need to go on.
Bert: Is expanding into King going in the right direction? For example, generativity, of course, is what we associate with the King archetype.
Shepherd: I don’t associate generativity with the King. What I associate with the King archetype is ruling, commanding, dominating. I associate generativity with someone who’s beyond the King, beyond the Hero. The generativity of the Trickster. The Fool. The crazy old man.
Why talk about Kings? People came to America to get away from Kings. I don’t want Kings. I want peers, equals,democrats. I want strong men. Powerful men. Men who do good for the community. I don’t call that the King. There’s so much darkness to the King. It’s inherent to the King. Let’s go beyond monarchism and feudalism. I want to challenge this language.
Mythopoesis means re-mythologizing. The mythopoetic approach comes at times of cultural chaos, such as we have now. That’s historically been the case. Mythopoetic images arise when you break through and articulate new images. We need to study the old stories in order to go beyond them, to go to new stories and images, not merely to repeat the old stories and get stuck there.
Bert: I’ve been told you coined the word, “mythopoetic?”.
Shepherd: No. What I did was to apply the word to the men’s movement. The men’s movement rehabilitated the word, but it’s been in the literary tradition. People were calling us the Robert Bly Men’s Movement or the New Age Men’s Movement because of Keith Thompson’s interview of Robert Bly, “What Do Men Really Want?” in the New Age Journal. I did an article on the men’s movement about 10 years ago, for Yoga Journal in 1986. I studied and thought for months about language. I came across this archaic word, “mythopoetic,” which is used in literary traditions. It does not mean myth and poetry. It means to re-mythologize. When I applied it, it stuck.
Bert: David Whyte, the poet and author of The Heart Aroused: Poetry and the Preservation of the Soul in Corporate America, recently did an interview that we will publish soon. David talked quite a bit about the mythopoetic. He never talked about it in the context of Men’s Work.
Shepherd: I imagine that someone like David Whyte comes to it from the literary tradition. He does honor Robert Bly in a recent issue of New Dimensions. He is very respectful to Robert and quotes some of his translations of Rilke. I think a lot of people have been fed by the men’s movement, directly or indirectly. I’m glad the word “mythopoetic” is catching on in its wider context as well as this narrow context.
Bert: Here is one of David’s poems, Enough
enough
these few words are enough
if not these words this breath
if not this breath the song here
This opening to the life we have refused again and again until now
David describes the entire mythopoetic tradition as one which tries to get us to open to the inner.
Shepherd: It’s a beautiful poem. In that poem one can see what I’m talking about. It’s about staying in present time and allowing ourselves to be guided by what’s happening in the moment. It’s a deeply spiritual and deeply wounded truth that David gets to there. That is the historic mythopoetic tradition. In its essence it’s re-mythologizing, not just telling the old stories. I think people don’t realize mythopoesis has this forward-moving change component.
The King and the Warrior are immature, partial images. They have dominated men’s work and they are a primary reason, in my opinion, why we have failed. The media picked these images up and ridiculed us. We deserved it. We have contributed to our demise as a mass movement. We never dealt with those images and their limitation s in a clear way.
Bert: There are places in their books where Robert Moore and Doug Gillette seem to say that these are the four that are hardwired. At the Mendocino Men’s Conference and in some of his audiotapes, he said that these are just a model and that these are not the only four archetypes.
Shepherd: I think Robert Moore and Doug Gillette are absolutely wrong. People haven’t questioned them enough. They speak only a partial truth. I don’t blame this problem on them. I blame it on our movement. They reduced the great diverse stream of masculine down to four archetypes — as if there weren’t a hundred. There are a hundred!
The hardwiring stuff is bullshit. It’s biological determinism. It’s hierarchical thinking. They are not polytheistic and polycentric. They’re hierarchical. They’re authoritarian, in their forms of leadership and in their forms of thinking. It’s fine if some people do that kind of thinking, but they aren’t much into serious intellectual dialog. They’re hard to engage.
Bert: I would love to see Alan Chinen and Robert Moore discuss the base archetypes.
Shepherd: I think they should, because Chinen is a much more substantial thinker than Moore, in my opinion. He is forward moving and futuristic whereas Moore is too rooted in the past. Chinen is on much more solid ground as a scholar, in my opinion, than Moore.
Moore obviously spoke to a need that men have. The popularizer. He has a mission. He has a messianic quality to him. Chinen, as you know from your interview with him (fall 1993), is a reserved, receptive man who comes from a different place. He doesn’t have an ideology. He’s out there story telling. In the future Alan Chinen’s work is going to appear in this period of time to have a particular importance.
I would turn the tables on Moore’s thesis. Moore says that the Trickster is immature. There is an immature Trickster. But the Hero can also be is immature. The Hero comes at an early stage in human development. And it comes early in a man’s life. The teenage years, the early twenties, thirties.
We need to be, both individually and in the culture, in a post-heroic time. The mature Trickster is very interesting because he works on behalf of the community as a whole. He trips up authoritarian figures, the hierarchical types who would like to be King, who have something in them that wants to rule and control. I don’t consider that a mature feeling. It’s something many of us have, and it can be life enhancing. It can have many positive aspects to it. But ultimately there is something, when you move beyond this, which has to do with genuine equality. The genuine Elder. The genuine Crone for a woman. But this Elder isn’t into commanding. The King commands. The elder has mastery but he tends to evoke it in a different way.
Bert: As I talk with you I see another dimension I hadn’t seen before. I’m not so sure that if the Magician means the master of high technology, rather than the shaman, that the Magician is the mature role and the Trickster is the immature role.
Shepherd: Science and technology are primary problems in the world today. When people criticize men for what we have done to the Earth, often what they are seeing is the effect of industrialism, with pesticides, herbicides, agribusiness, and the denigration of the Earth when we moved from being hunter/gatherer societies to agrarian-based societies and, eventually, industrial agriculture.
Three recent books document what I’m saying here – Chellis Glendinning’s My Name is Chellis, and I’m Recovering from Western Civilization, Jed Diamond’s The Warrior’s Journey Home, and Jerry Mander’s In the Absence of the Sacred. All three of these writers have a strong criticism of technology.
It’s not a question of good versus bad technology. It’s a question of technology versus indigenous wisdom, the kind of wisdom which is nature based. I don’t think we can take away technology. What happens, though, is that technology creates problems. It then promises that it will solve these problems with more advanced and higher technology. But in fact what happens is the Earth gets further polluted, further damaged. We are on a collision course right now. We are threatening to destroy the Earth. The most important single thing that the men’s work can do now, as far as I’m concerned, is to make alliances with environmental work and ecological work. Father/son work and other personal work is important and must continue, but we also need to mature beyond this work.
At the Redwood Men’s Center we’re refocusing work to support the environment, to engage in activity on behalf of the Earth. It isn’t as popular, and we won’t necessarily have the cathartic kinds of response for men that earlier work on the fathers had, but it’s important work.
Bert: Where do you see Men’s Work going?
Shepherd: Our movement has the chance to deepen and mature, now that we have been defeated by the mass media. John Stewart Mill says that every successful mass movement has three stages: The first stage is ridicule. The second is discussion. The third is acceptance. That happened with the anti-slavery movement, and slavery was ended. It happened with the suffragettes, and women got the right to vote.
The men’s movement is stalled in the stage of ridicule. We deserve it. With all this talk about warriors and kings, we have contributed to our fall as a mass movement. The powers that be have basically liquidated the mass quality of our movement.
But individual men and groups and geographical areas which are strong – like Portland, Seattle, and the Bay Area – continue as men meet in regular face-to-face relationships. It might even be that this demise as a mass movement can strengthen us in our capacity to do our work. It does mean that the cultural change part of our work is impeded. But it can also make us look inside – to look at what we did wrong. What did we do that contributed to our downfall? How could we not make those mistakes again?
Bert: What, in your opinion, are some of the major things that went wrong?
Shepherd: Robert Bly, Michael Meade and James Hillman, wonderful men that they are, represent traditional masculinity.
Bert: A traditional masculinity?
Shepherd: They tell basically traditional stories. They represent old values.There’s a lot of beauty, dignity, and strength in those values, but they’re all tough. I’ve seen all three of them mature in the midst of not only how they contributed to the men’s movement but in how the men’s movement contributed to them. They’re all more tender than they used to be.
We need a new story, which emerges from the old story. I’m not offering an answer to you. It needs to be part of our teaching to men. I don’t know what the next step is.One of the things I really like about Michael Meade is his important multi-cultural work these days.
The men’s movement is hierarchically based. We’re too based on stars. I don’t blame it on Robert Bly. I blame it on us. Robert is an exceptionally skilled and talented man. I go to hear him read poetry every chance I get. But we gave him too much authority and power. This contrasts to the women’s movement, which is polytheistic, polycentric, many centered. The mythopoetic men’s movement was too organized around Robert and his chosen elite, the people he was drawn to.
Our society runs on the Great Man theory rather than on a more egalitarian, democratic way. But we’ve failed as a movement. We really didn’t get to an Elder’s Council, or a democratic movement. Robert Bly’s personality stamps it too much. Bly’s particular strengths and weaknesses over-influenced the movement. Now I want to be very clear. I’m not blaming him for this. I think the problem has been in us as Americans. We lack a certain tribal quality — the kind of indigenous quality of community empowerment.
We need new voices in Men’s Work. We were just talking about David Whyte. I like his kind of understatement. I’ve only done one workshop with him a few years ago. I love his voice, but he’s not a super charismatic performer like Angeles Arien was when they recently did something together. But I like the voices of Alan Chinen, David Whyte, Jean Shinoda Bolen. They have a reflective, sure quality to it. Is that your experience with David?
Bert: He’s not that quiet. When he begins to speak he’s rather forceful and commanding with his words. He does not put his words out with hesitancy. It’s low key and low energy, his way of conveying those forceful words. And he doesn’t have charisma in that fiery sense. But when he begins to speak the audience generally becomes very quiet so that they hear all of his words. He’s captivating in that sense. He weaves a spell for the audience. It’s not charismatic. It’s a different kind of spell that he weaves. He weaves a poet’s spell even in his prose.
Shepherd: I like what you’re saying. That’s the kind of leadership that I respond to – that I’m comfortable with – right now. I think we need it at this time. I think the men’s movement can benefit from people like him who are on the periphery.
One of the things that’s really good about the men’s movement is these ongoing little groups of 6 to 8 men. I know some that have been meeting for twenty years. That’s the essence of Men’s Work. That’s the heart of men’s work.
Bert: There are gatherings, big events, and there are wisdom councils like we have up here, with 200 men gathering once a month. These are the showcase. Hopefully those are vehicles by which people will become involved in a small intimate group on the grass roots level.
Shepherd: To me, events like the Mendocino Men’s Conference are not what’s most important. It’s those little groups, most of which we never hear about. But what gets the attention and the publicity is the Mendocino conference. Mendocino gets overrated by those of us who went.
I think it’s important to stay local and not to turn to national people. That doesn’t mean important things can’t be done by bringing people in from outside and listening to them. But there needs to be local metaphors, local issues. There is a distinctly Boston character, a distinctly West Coast character. Every group must have its regional quality, its particular spice, particular soul. It’s important to be responsive to the historical moment and to be in present time and as much as possible to be diverse. To recognize the pains of others. To listen to them.
Bert: What about the inner work/outer work focus. So much of the mythopoetic is in doing the inner work of men getting in touch with their feelings and what’s going on with them. I was just reading the introduction to Sam Keen, in his new book on spirituality, Hymms to an Unknown God, quotes Bill Moyers to the effect that every journalist now says the question of the day is where are we on our spiritual journey?
Shepherd: I think you’re right, Bert. The men’s movement is a religious movement. “Religious” rather than just “spiritual” because it has an organized quality. It’s the inner life in community with others, which is religion – as you know, the word comes from “binding together”. So it has a community element to it. That has drawn me to the men’s movement.
I’d also like to talk about the “backlash.” So far, I’ve been speaking from a mythopoetic viewpoint. I think feminist men have made another set of mistakes by being so angry at men — and the men’s rights people by being so angry at women.
One of the many good things that Michael Meade did was to talk about men’s movements – plural rather than singular. There are, in my opinion, at least three distinct movements: the mythopoetic, men’s rights, and the feminist men. We should have dialog with all of these movements. There has been too much infighting. There hasn’t been enough looking at each other and working together.
Bert: Sometimes there does not seen any way to dialog with the men’s rights side. They are so adamant. They’re so political. Frequently this attack on women is connected with right wing politics. A lot of their rhetoric is bombastic. So I don’t see either Men’s Work or healing between the genders coming out of the men’s rights side.
Shepherd: I agree. Let me talk to the two groups that I see as dangerous: Warren Farrell’s work and the Promise Keepers.
Bert: In what respect do you think that Warren Farrell’s work is dangerous?
Shepherd: Farrell really was hurt by women, by being in the National Organization of Women. He has been fighting back ever since. I don’t trust him. He does represent a certain constituency. But it’s not a constituency which wants to listen or work with other men. It wants to control. Warren is a charismatic leader. He’s handsome, articulate. But I really see the dangers in these charismatic leaders. They’re not really group-based. It’s a leader/follower relationship.
Let me get to the Promise Keepers, because of the things that Susan Faludi and others have criticized us for. The mythopoetic movement is not a backlash. It is not a reaction to the women’s movement. It responds more to economic reality – men’s lives in sexist society in terms of how we are disadvantaged by dying seven years younger than women. Men’s movements are authentic and genuine attempts to deal with this issue. They are not a backlash.
The Promise Keepers is the group, started by a football coach, who have been gathering 50,000 at a time in a stadium in Boulder, Colorado, and now in other parts of the country.They stand for a return to family values, Christian fundamentalism, and homophobia. This is the real backlash. These Promise Keepers and the right wing Christians are a serious threat to the men’s movement and to democracy today. The Republicans had a massive landslide victory which I think is very dangerous in this country. Newt Gingrich is a potentially fascist man. I use that word carefully, because I lived in a fascist country, Chile. Even here in Sonoma County, which is relatively progressive and liberal, we have major victories at the school board, the board of supervisors, and in city councils, by right wing Christians who really do not believe in toleration. They do not believe in diversity. One of the elements of Men’s Work can be a call for diversity of sexual orientation, races, of creeds. A poly-centric view that I think is so important. Not monotheistic. We don’t all have to believe in a Christian god, the same Bible, the same fundamentals. We can be in a time in the twenty first century of expanding rather than shrinking our toleration of differences.
There’s a dangerous, angry mood in the country today. The people who brought to power these right wingers were white males. The largest gender gap ever in history occurred in this election. Women were much more progressive in their voting. There does seem to be a backlash of white males who are reacting to some of the gains of women. Some men are feeling a lot of fear today, in terms of work, in terms of changing family structures. But these are not the mythopoetic men.
I don’t fall in line behind all these so-called “family values.” They’re often homophobic. They’re often a way of putting down single men. I don’t think because a man is a father that he’s any better than any other man. The Republicans are thinking of giving a big tax break to children. I think we should give a tax break to people who don’t have children. The biggest problem in the world today is over-population. We don’t need more incentives to have children.
America consumes by far the greatest percentage of unrenewable resources in the Earth, particularly fossil fuels. We’re very dominating, very controlling of nature. Humans have become thieves. I live in the Cunningham Marsh. Developers want to come in here and take the homes of salamanders, fresh water shrimp, and owls and put six human homes in what today is thousands of homes for wildlife. This march of technology, of development into the marsh which provides habitat for wildlife, is messing this whole beautiful place up.
We need to return to the cooperative masculinity that men used to harvest food, raise barns, and volunteer to fight fires together. We lost that and replaced it with a competitive technological masculinity. The problem is not masculinity; it’s technological masculinity. We as men need to take our economic and political privilege, admit that we have it, and use it to do good.
Now let me talk about another issue, that is very much on my soul these days: the mother in South Carolina who killed her two babies. It was very upsetting to me. I was very angry with her. What made me angry was that some people tried to blame her boyfriend because he wrote her a letter saying that he didn’t want to be with her. People can’t get it straight, can’t accept that the majority of infanticide is done by women, not men. 55% of the parents who kill children are female. The majority of child abuse is not done by men, it’s done by women. Now, I’m not blaming women for that. In a sexist society women are at home with the children more often, so they get angrier. But what backs me up against the wall is the self-righteousness of women who blame men for all the abuse. Women who kill their husbands use the defense that they are battered, therefore they have a right to kill their husband. But it’s not right. I was in a discussion recently with some ultra-feminist women in a public panel in a book reading. I got this victim stuff, that we should have compassion for this mother who killed her children. But there was no compassion in this woman for men who are battered. This society systematically batters men. When anybody kills we need to protect society from those people – be they male or female. We need to understand why men and women do this, but we need not to defend the behavior. It’s unethical, morally incorrect behavior. We should speak out against any kind of violence – be it against men, women, children, plants, animals, or the Earth itself.
Men need to unite with women. I want allies among women who will come out and admit the violence that exists in women, the scapegoating of the masculine that occurs, the projecting of women’s violence onto men. What bothers me is that men are the activists on the front line doing the work that kills us seven years younger. Fighting in the wars.And we get blamed for it. But it’s really a collusion between men and women in this sexist system — that keeps the whole thing going.
Bert: Did you see Carolyn Baker’s article, “Confessions of a Recovering Feminist”? We ran her article on the shadow side of feminism. (December, 1994 issue.) What she says is that women and feminists need to get in touch with the shadow side of feminism first.
Shepherd: Yes.Carolyn is an ally to men. There needs to be a priority upon gender reconciliation. Part of the women’s movement is very receptive towards men. You see it in the work of Aaron Kipnis and Liz Herron, for example. (authors of Gender War, Gender Peace. A three-part interview with them is in our July, August and September, 1994 issues.) Gender reconciliation is very important work. Carolyn and I have spent the last few years in a gender reconciliation group. She understands men’s pain, and is part of this new wave of women. Too often we get into a good woman/bad man dualism; we need to see the dark side of women and the light side of men. Being in dialog with women such as Carolyn is important.
I was very disturbed after reading in your last issue the excellent article by James Smethurst on Naomi Wolf. When asked if she would have her baby circumsized, she joked, “No, I’ll have him castrated.” It was important that he pointed out the contradictions in what she writes, which is more advanced than what she said in person. The joking about castration was inexcusable. It is important that he call her to task on that and that he stand up for us as men.
Circumcision is a key issue. Men need to address it. I’m glad he’s doing that. And I’m glad you’re publishing articles on it. I remember my circumcision as an infant. It was the most painful thing that ever happened in my life. I’ve been hit. I’ve been shot at. All kinds of stuff. But nothing hurt me as much as that. So I think we do need to speak up on these issues.
Bert: In an editorial for the December, 1994 issue I cited you as raising the question whether the mythopoetic men’s movement is dead. The vision that I’m having is grow or die. And I don’t know how we’re going to get more cultural diversity or more outreach — outfocus into the community. But we have to.
Shepherd: Well, I have some ideas on that. Next weekend we’re showing a film called The Color of Fear (ed. – reviewed in our last issue), made by an Asian American. It’s a video about a men’s group that actually shows an anglo man change his ideas about race. It’s a very emotional film which we’re using to stimulate dialog around racism and multi-cultural work.
There is a part of me that is embarrassed and shamed to be a Californian given proposition 187. It is a racist anti-human proposition. The so-called illegal aliens are human beings who work very hard, and help hold up the agriculture of this state and of the nation. They work for four or five dollars an hour. I can assure you that they give more than they take.
We’re watching a rise in racism now. My partner is Japanese American. There is a tremendous rise in anti-Japanese sentiment. There’s a lot of anti-Arab sentiment. This can be mobilized by right wing Christians.
I also think that it is important that men continue to work on homophobia, that we continue to advance a biodiverse human community. Anybody who does not have close gay men friends is impoverished. Any man who does not have close lesbian friends is limited. Humans seem to be made by the Creator in various heterosexual, homosexual, bisexual, racial components.
Any system, we know from ecology, is strong if it’s diverse. It’s weak when the gene pool becomes restricted, when there’s inbreeding. When a man is courageous enough to speak up about the need for diversity, he deserves all the support that we can give him.
Bert: I’ve heard it said that if men of color don’t think there are enough men of color at Wisdom Councils and monthly gatherings, that these men of color should go out and bring in people of diversity.
Shepherd: I think it’s the role of the dominating group to do that. You don’t throw it back to the minority. It’s incumbent upon anglos to bring in people of diversity. It’s done partly through friendship. If there are not men of color at a men’s gathering, the men need to look at their racism. In my opinion it is strongly our responsibility, those of us who benefit from this white skin privilege, to be open to men of color. In this way, Alan Chinen is important because he is a Japanese American man.
Bert: Some might question whether he has suffered from it. It’s possible to see him as someone who has played the game by society’s rules and become a very successful psychotherapist and a leading edge scholar.
Shepherd: Well, let me tell you how he suffered. It really struck me because when you look at Alan, he does appear to be a very successful man.His name, Chinen, is not obviously an Asian name. He’s told stories of clients coming to him and discovering that he’s Japanese American and being surprised and disappointed. He said no anglo has ever come to him, found that he is Japanese, and honored and appreciated that. It strikes me as very racist for people to to come in and not get the white person that they expected, and to walk away, to act in a way that is disrespectful.
Even though Asian Americans do not have the financial poverty that African Americans do there is definitely racism against them. It contributed in part to the crime of Hiroshima-Nagasaki, which were irresponsible, unnecessary taking of life. The atomic bomb would never have been used by America against an anglo people, even though obviously Hitler and Germany were the real threats.Japanese Americans on the West Coast lost their land with 48 hours notice even though they were AmericansThey’re just as American as anybody with a white face. Alan is as fully American as anybody. One of the strengths of America is its diversity.
This last election should make us all do some soul searching now about this mood of anger and resentment in America today. And how to deal with it in a healthy way. The men’s movement needs to be responsive because of these Promise Keepers, these right wing Christian men who believe in the family and don’t believe in gayness as natural.
You ask about where is the men’s movement going? It does need to mature from the inner work to the outer work while continuing to do the inner work. But we need, in part, to be protectors. The male role of protecting can be a good role. I recently saw a film about Hitler’s Czechoslovakia where there were the so-called “White Jews” who helped protect Jews. Christian monks would hide them. We need to be responsive to the people of our society who are oppressed because of sexual orientation or race. Here in California the Mexican people need to be supported by anglo people.
This historic male role of the Protector, which when taken in excess could be a problem, is a positive image. The Protector, the Husbandman. The men who till the Earth, take care of the Earth, not as nurturers but as generators. There’s that regenerating quality. I make a distinction between the nurturing that women do and generating that men do.
We need to think about biodiversity in human-kind. We think about it mainly in terms of wildlife and nature. But humans are a part of nature. We need to apply some of the thinking in the environmental circles to Men’s Work and some of the thinking in Men’s Work to environmental circles. For example, some of us here from the Redwood Men’s Center are thinking of going to an environmental meeting in masks. We would take on speaking for the whales, the salmon, the oak, and the douglas fir, and the redwoods. There’s something positive about the zany quality of our men’s gatherings up in Mendocino that really goes to the edge. I’d like us to bring that more into the mass culture and environmental awareness. We as men both individually and in our movement have a lot to offer to our society as a whole.
Have you noticed everyone attempting to nail down the one true definition of masculinity? Its a bit like arguing which is the One True God. Likewise, with every earnestly researched and precisely crafted definition of masculinity, a broad acceptance of any single definition seems out of reach.
If you have an hour to waste on the internet you can discover hundreds of competing definitions of masculinity, each one vastly different, which raises the question of why we can’t agree on a singular, universal statement. Why the ongoing lack of agreement, even within the men’s movement which sets out to champion that very topic of “men” and “masculinity”?
There’s no doubting that underlying physiological structures are shared among all males, the base unity of masculine potentials: a Y chromosome, androgens, muscles and penises. But this tells us little about how individual men will behave in the real world – and behave individually, and variably, they certainly do.
Defining masculinity appears doomed because we tend to rely on singular expressions of it – and singular definitions likewise follow; “masculinity is to be interested in things, not faces” “masculinity is striving for status,” “masculinity is to be more rational and less emotional” (etc.). Are some men like this? sure. Are all men like that? Hell no – far from it. And, naturally, in response to such monocentric definitions the disagreements come lightening fast, with detractors claiming that masculinity is something far more, or something other, than the reductive definition offered.
When we seek singular stereotypes (whether they be based on some example of a traditional male social role, or on some author’s view such as “the way of men,” on singular evopsyche fantasies, or on singular fixations on testosterone as the whole picture) – in such mono-models we will never feel settled on the question of masculinity because there are too many outliers from whatever singular definition we’ve chosen.
Obviously masculinity is more than one thing – more than testosterone, more than intelligence, more than muscle mass, more than status-seeking, and more than a powerful urge to have sex and reproduce. Its more than the sum total of these things, and individual men’s expression of them will widely vary. On that basis a plural understanding of masculinity appears to be the only way to save the concept, though I don’t for a second subscribe to feminist ideas of ‘masculinities’ with their convoluted and unscientific hierarchies of “good” and “bad” instances of masculinity.
Viewing masculinity as plural can be as simple as returning to ancient Greek culture, or to any other classical culture, or even Bible-based cultures for that matter in which varieties of masculine styles are showcased. The Greeks for example had many gods, each expressing a different archetypal face of masculinity. Those expressions ranged from effeminate Dionysus to macho Ares, from instinctual Pan to the ordered and intellectual God Apollo. There is Zeus and his concerns for leadership and hierarchy, and Hephaestus with his labor consciousness, and so on and so forth.
Instances of masculinity, never all seen together in one character, each god or man tending to specialise in one way or another.
It might be argued that because feminists have seized the term masculinities and subsequently twisted the concept into perverted, misandric typologies, that we should shy away from plurality and stick instead with the traditional idea of a masculine singularity – a kind of Vitruvian man who displays all masculine behaviours at once. That’ll teach those femmos!
But this defensive retreat from feminist dominance over the gender discussion is a needless one that throws out the baby with the bathwater. That retreat avoids forthright celebration of male plurality and leads not to better understanding of various masculine dimensions of behaviour, but rather to singular and often reductive definitions that few men can relate to. Furthermore, insisting (as some have) that many expressions of masculinity can be accounted for within a singular definition of masculinity hasn’t helped to provide an agreed definition thus far, so why would we believe it can do so in future? Fighting over the One True Definition rages on.
Nailing down a singular definition of masculinity that everyone will agree with reminds increasingly of Sisyphus rolling his boulder up a hill, only to have it roll back down to the bottom before he starts rolling a new definition up the hill – over and over ad infinitum. Isn’t the definition of insanity that of repeating the same process over and over but expecting a different outcome?
This is why personally I’m an advocate of classical models over modern monocentric ones – people relate to them, and tend to agree with them.
Feminists can never own the concept of masculine variety, even if they have seized on the plural masculinities. Ironically, their attacks on masculinity tend to be one-dimensional caricatures, and when they do get around to exploring plurality of male expression, they tend to make value hierarchies out of the different masculinities, dividing them into good and evil according to arbitrary misandric criteria. For example the more typically effeminate male = good, and the less typically effeminate = bad. This is why their attempt at a plurality of masculinities is junk science and why we men are turned off from celebrating our very real diversity – ie. even though its a fact of life, it has been poisoned with needless ideology.
The word masculinities has been around for at least a few hundred years, referring in the 1800s to any behaviors deemed a departure from the narrowly assigned gender roles of the day, or alternatively to any male behaviors considered inappropriate for polite society. Feminist activists from the gender studies world revived the word during the 1980s and 1990s, basically reaffirming the practice of deeming some masculinities toxic (eg. “hegemonic masculinities” – R. Connell)1 and others as non-toxic.
One academic, Eric Anderson, who was embedded in the scene during that period of “problematizing” masculinity, broke ranks with the obsessive pathologizing narratives and emphasised rather that men of different styles can and are forming what he calls “inclusive masculinities.”2 This approach admits that men are more accepting, or at minimum more tolerant of differences than we were led to believe by the misandric character assassins Robert Connell, Michael Messner or Michael Kimmel et.al who portrayed the vast majority of men as ruthlessly intolerant.
This approach, celebrating masculine variety, is not new to readers here. In fact A Voice for Men has honoured the very plurality I’m describing, and it has done so consistently for over a decade. Men, strong and weak, stoic or sensitive, physical or intellectual, gay, or straight….. we’ve demonstrated inclusive masculinity from the outset. This article serves as a reminder of the importance of those values, while introducing the concept of masculine variety to new readers.
When it comes to terminology, we need not rest only on the loaded term masculinities. Well before Connell and his henchpersons began to discriminate and denigrate so many examples of masculinity, the Jungian and archetypal psychologists already viewed men in terms of masculine variety, and they didn’t apply any of the familiar pathologizing narratives – they simply referred to them as male archetypes. For example, the Archetypal Psychologist Adolf Guggenbuhl-Craig wrote the following statement in the year 1976, which is long before sociology got onboard with its plurality of masculinities:
“It should be clear that there is not only one masculine archetype and one feminine archetype. There are dozens, if not hundreds, of feminine and masculine archetypes. Certainly there are many more of them than we usually imagine. But not all archetypes are dominant at a particular period in the life of an individual. Moreover, every historical epoch has its dominant masculine and feminine archetypes. Women and men are determined in their sexual identities and behavior by only a select number of archetypes.
Behavior is determined only by those patterns that are momentarily dominant in the collective psyche. This leads to a grotesque but understandable error: the archetypes that dominate masculine and feminine behavior in a particular time come to be understood as the masculine and feminine archetypes. And from this limited number of archetypes it is decided what “masculinity” and “femininity” are. This misunderstanding has led, for example, to the assumption in Jungian psychology that masculinity is identical with Logos, and femininity with Eros. It is assumed that the essence of femininity is personal, related to one’s fellow man, passive, masochistic, and that the essence of masculinity is abstract, intellectual, aggressive, sadistic, active, etc. This naïve assertion could have been made only because the masculine and feminine archetypes that were dominant at that time and in that culture were understood as the only valid ones.”3
A contrast between feminist and archetypalist views is that the latter admits that archetypal styles arise from biology even if they are socially manipulated; that they are not socially conferred onto ‘blank slates’ by society, as some sociologists might view it. Our biology-based archetypes may lay dormant if not facilitated by culture, or they may arise at certain stages and phases of life, and of course we are each born with our peculiar masculine predilections, or style, that may not be the lot of the next man. Despite that complexity, biology remains a fundamental factor in the theory of archetypes – and yes, environment remains important too.
While the mythopoetry movement of the 1980-90s emphasised singular masculine archetypes, such as Robert Bly’s Wild Man,4 the movement also tended to follow the Jungian tradition of honouring a variety of male archetypes and expressions. For those who are new to the men’s movement, it might be worth studying this aspect of the mythopoetic tradition to help you avoid the pitfalls of an overly singular view of masculinity.
Ultimately its a personal choice whether to see masculinity as one or many, or as both, but in my experience an overemphasis on ‘the one’ tends always to swallow the many, and in the process we lose too much.
References:
[1] Connell, R., Hegemonic masculinities (Wikipedia) [2] Anderson, E., Inclusive Masculinities (2009) [3] Guggenbühl-Craig, A., Marriage Is Dead – Long Live Marriage! (1976) [4] Bly, R., Iron John: A Book About Men (1990)
*Joseph Campbell provides a synopsis of the classic romance tale of Tristan and Iseult
Tristan and Iseult
The great tale of Amor is the tale of Tristan and Iseult. Though we know that Chrétien wrote a version of this tale, it has not come down to us, and so the greatest of the existing versions was written by Gottfried von Strassburg in the very early thirteenth century.
Tristan was a young orphan who was born in Brittany, the place from which this whole tradition emerges. An enormously talented youth, he could speak no end of languages, play no end of musical instruments, and he knew how to butcher game— he knew everything. Tristan goes to serve his uncle King Mark in Cornwall.
There is an interesting aspect to these Arthurian stories: it is always the nephew and the uncle, the mother’s brother: the matrilineal line. You’ve got Tristan and Mark, Arthur and Mordred, and so forth.
When Tristan arrives he learns that a warrior has arrived from Ireland to collect tribute from the Cornish people because the Irish king had conquered Cornwall. The tribute consisted of youths and maidens to be brought to Ireland to serve in the Irish court, and the people didn’t want their children to go. Tristan said to his uncle Mark, “Let me take care of this. I’ll go and meet him in single combat, defeat him, and then there will no more tribute.” This is a deliberate echo of the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, an intentional restating of ancient Classical motifs.
Morholt, the Irish champion, has a sword that has been anointed with poison by the queen of Ireland, who is named Iseult— and whose daughter is also named Iseult. This is a common trope in courtly love: poison on the sword. The combat takes place and Morholt’s sword comes down on Tristan’s thigh and cuts it, and the poison is introduced. Tristan’s sword comes down on Morholt’s helmet, cuts right through, and smashes Morholt’s skull, killing him, but a little chink of Tristan’s sword is left in Morholt’s head.
The tribute is finished, and Morholt is brought back to Ireland. Now, his little niece Iseult, the daughter of Queen Iseult, loved her uncle and when the chink was extracted from Morholt’s head she kept it as a memorial in her little treasure box.
Back in Cornwall Tristan’s poisoned wound begins to stink and nobody can bear it, and he says to Mark, “Put me in a little boat, and the boat will carry me by magic to the very place where the healing will be attended to”— the healing has to be accomplished by the one who injured him.
In Amor, the love wound— the sickness no doctors can cure— can be cured only by the one who issued the wound: namely, the one you fell in love with. This is a replay of the poison-in-the-sword motif.
So Tristan sails off in the boat and it carries him indeed to Ireland, to the court of the very person whose poison is killing him. He is playing the harp out in the little boat, feeling very sick, as he sails into Dublin Harbor. The people ashore go out and hear this youth play— this is Orpheus. They bring him ashore and lo and behold, they carry him to be cured by the very queen who poisoned him.
For some reason the queen doesn’t know that this man is the one who killed her brother Morholt. Of course, our hero had changed his name and called himself Tantrist (French: “too sad”) instead of Tristan, so how could she know who he was? So she works to cure him, as she is a compassionate woman. When the wound no longer stinks, she invites her daughter, Iseult, in to hear this wonderful harpist, and when the daughter enters, Tristan plays more marvelously than he’s ever played in his life. In other words, he’s fallen in love— only he doesn’t know it yet. This is the mystery of this whole tale: he doesn’t know it.
Finally Tristan is cured, and he goes back to Cornwall. He’s so excited about this wonderful girl that he talks her up to his uncle and says, “You ought to marry her!” Can you beat it? He’s so innocent of his own emotions that he thinks his uncle should marry this girl.
Well, everybody thinks his uncle should get married anyhow because they need a queen, so they send Tristan back— with his name still twisted around— to fetch this girl. Well, he arrives back in Ireland to find that there is a dragon making it tough for people. And the king has said, “Whosoever kills this dragon shall have Iseult in marriage.”
Well, of course, Tristan rides out to kill the dragon. There is also, however, a seneschal, a sort of courtier who isn’t capable of killing dragons, but he wants very much to marry Iseult. So whenever he gets a notion of somebody going out to kill that dragon, he trails along.
When Tristan has slain the dragon, he opens its mouth, cuts out its tongue as proof of his deed, sticks the tongue in his shirt, and walks away.
The seneschal comes afterward and cuts off the dragon’s head, then brings the head to court to claim Iseult.
Poor Tristan. One thing you should never do with a dragon’s tongue is stick it in your shirt— because it’s poisonous. So while he is walking away with the dragon’s tongue in his shirt, Tristan faints and falls into a pool, and the only part of him sticking out is his nose, so he’s breathing all right.
Iseult and her mother happen to be out for a stroll along the pool, and as they stroll along, they look and say, “There’s somebody down there!” So they pull Tristan out— for some reason they don’t even recognize that he is Tantrist, the one who was there before— and take him to court once again to heal him.
They put him in the bathtub to heal him. In the meanwhile, Iseult is fooling around with Tristan’s equipment in his room when she pulls his sword out of its sheath, and lo and behold, “My gosh, there’s a nick in this sword!” So she goes to her little treasure box and there is this missing piece. She sees that it fits, and oh, she loved her uncle! So she takes this heavy sword and goes in to kill Tristan in the bathtub.
He looks up and says, “Hold on. You knock me out and that seneschal dope gets you.”
Iseult has to admit that this is a good point. In the meantime, the sword is getting kind of heavy, so that is the end of that.
Once Tristan has once again been healed, he is brought to court with the big question: Who gets Iseult? The first claim is made by this chap the seneschal, who comes in with the dragon’s head, which looks very conclusive.
Tristan, however, has only to say, “Open its mouth and let’s see what’s missing there.” No tongue. And where is the missing part? “It’s here!” says Tristan, holding out the tongue, and so he got Iseult.
This stupid little boy, he still wants to bring her back to uncle Mark. So her mother, the one who prepared the poison that brought this whole thing about, prepares a love potion for Iseult to deliver to Mark so that the two will have a love marriage.
Now, this is a great problem theologically and in every other way. In any case, the queen puts the potion and her daughter into the keeping of young Iseult’s faithful nursemaid, Brangaene.
Well, Brangaene doesn’t pay very close attention. On the way back, Tristan and Iseult, both about fifteen years old, each take a sip of the love draught, thinking it is wine. Suddenly the couple becomes aware of the love that has been gradually growing in their hearts.
When Brangaene learns what happened, she is appalled. This is a wonderful moment: she goes to Tristan and says, “You have drunk your death!”
And Tristan answers, “I don’t know what you mean. If by death you mean this pain of love, that is my life.”
This is the essential idea of Amor, experiencing the pain. The essence of life is pain, all life is suffering. In Japan in almost the same period Lady Murasaki writes The Tale of Genji, and you have this love play of the cloud gallants and the flower maidens— they’re experiencing in a very sensitive way the Buddha’s wisdom, that all life is suffering, and the suffering of love is the suffering of life and where your pain is, there is your life.
Tristan continues, “If by this love, this agony of love, you mean my death, that is my life. If by my death you mean the punishment that will be ours when discovered in adultery, I accept that.” This is pushing right through the pair of opposites of life and death, and this is where love is: the pain pushed through. And then he finishes, “And if by death you mean eternal death in Hell, eternally I accept that too.”
Now, that’s a big, big statement, and this is the spirit of Amor in the Middle Ages. You can’t call it just an aristocratic game, and it wasn’t just a love affair. It was a mission transcendent of all the values of this world and a pitch into eternity.
