The following except is from the book Inter–Views, by James Hillman. – PW

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Feminism and femininity is a desperate topic. I steer clear of it. Once you see the whole world in terms of gender you close your mind in a set of blinders, caught in a pair of opposites, and you lose the particular person, like you, in front of me, who happens to be of the female gender. People, you, are far more than female or male. I lose you, the person there, if I reduce you to a supposed feminine essence. Maybe if we used the full vocabulary of psychological traits that were laid out in 1935 by two Harvard psychologists — there were some nineteen thousand traits, that described a personality. Only some of those words are gender words, having to do with external gender characteristics, psychosexual characteristics, sociogender characteristics…

There may be only a few hundred such gendered words out of thousands. Besides that, there are thousands of things about you that have nothing to do with gender. If I put you into your gender, I have made a racist move. It’s like putting you into being Italian or putting you into being a certain age or a certain class. I have lost you in a sociological category. So I don’t want to answer any questions about the feminine, feminism, and so on. I will talk about certain structures of consciousness that have been called feminine and what happens when they are called feminine; we can talk about hysteria or about Dionysus, because Dionysus was considered a Lord or God of women, and the way that works. But I don’t want to speak of “the feminine” in a literal sense. These structures of consciousness that we call feminine are in men and are in women and are in neither. They are structures of consciousness. Archetypal patterns, that appear again and again. This touches only tangentially the social problems of women – not being paid equal wages, for instance. That’s a basic social economic problem. It should and must be dealt with. Or certain laws about property. Or inheritance laws and women…

But let’s not get confused between dealing with those things and defining some kind of consciousness as female or feminine. As my wife says in her paper [The Dogma of Gender], either feminists say there are no gender differences and I can climb a telephone pole and shoot a gun and drive a truck just the same as any man (they’re assuming already that driving a truck or climbing a telephone pole is male; it’s already set up that way), or feminists take the other position and say, the feminine is different. It belongs to the moon, it has to do with instinct and nature and womb and menstruation and breasts and a mode of being that a man doesn’t understand. They identify with a particular archetypal pattern, a lunar constellation, say, and define that as “the feminine.” In both of those situations the individuality of the woman is trapped in being either no feminine or all-feminine; and both the ideas of what’s feminine are stereotypes.

Psyche, you see, tends to ignore that gender question, curiously enough. Just like the psyche tends to ignore a lot of the questions that the ego thinks are important and identifies with. The psyche doesn’t really know in its dream whether you’re rich or poor. It doesn’t know whether you went to grade school or to college. It doesn’t know whether you’re a man or a woman. It doesn’t know – when I say it doesn’t know this, I mean the material it presents in a dream ignores it.

I’m handed a written dream. I can’t tell if that dream is dreamed by a man or a woman necessarily. I can’t tell if that dream is dreamed by someone twenty or sixty or eighty. I don’t know if the dreamer is a city person or a country person, because a city person can have extraordinary dreams about landscapes and rivers. And a country person can be in the middle of a city, because the city is an eternal image and the country is an eternal image, not a sociological or a geographical place only. One can be anywhere in one’s dreams. I can be in a Greek landscape or I can be in a Scandinavian forest and I may never have been either in Greece or Scandinavia. So the psyche tends to ignore the categories that social psychology organizes things into. It’s like married or unmarried, mother or not mother, and so on. In dreams men breast feed, and women have penises. Why not?

You can always take a dream and reduce it to sociological categories; but the dream as phenomenon seems not to care about that. Just like it doesn’t seem to care about life and death that much. You can have death dreams when you are young and right in the middle of life – a whole series of dreams which seem to be quite clear that you are dying of cancer or that you will die on a certain date. I had such dreams. I was supposed to die on a certain date, and it was as real as could be. On the other hand, I’ve worked with people who have died in analysis, and the dreams never made it clear when they would die or even if they would die. Maybe I was too dense to see…. Anyway, the idea that dreams have a sexual origin, of course, would then say dreams have a gender origin, and that men’s dreams must be different from women’s dreams because their sexual organs are different. And their chromosomes are different and so on. A dream — I’m sitting in my home on the edge of my bed, and Marybelle in a light blue dress comes in with a bunch of tulips, and I put my arm around her. End of dream. Whose dream is that? A man’s dream or a woman’s dream? If it’s a woman’s dream, Mary Bell is still the child from childhood bringing into my reception a chance to meet this child again. And the same thing is true for a man’s dream. You can’t immediately say the man has an infantile sexuality. But who hasn’t – thank God! But what would deprive a woman of having an infantile sexuality, too, with Marybelle? No reason – unless you start off with prejudices. So the sexual origin is not only theoretically questionable, but it leads to gender thinking. It gives you two problems at once! And it prevents you from just being with that girl who’s just walked in the room in the dream. Because you’re starting off by categorising it somewhere. The psyche ignores all that.

I recently mentioned to a friend that feminist verbiage amounts to little more than organized female nagging — the endless attempt to shame & guilt men into serving women. Is it any wonder that feminist street placards emphasise “having a voice,” “women speaking up,” “not being silenced,” and “speaking out”?  These phrases are nothing more than euphemisms for the ear piercing, fingernails-on-blackboard nagging that women have never gone without. Sadly, the days of being able to deal with nagging by use the following device are long gone:

So universal is the archetype of the nagging woman that I visited Amazon in the certainty that someone would have written a book titled “The History Of Female Nagging,” but to my surprise found there was none.

I guess its like other universals such as ‘everyone has a buttocks,’ – so blatantly obvious that no book is necessary. That said, I still wanted to dig deeper into the topic and so decided to check an online etymology dictionary, which reads as follows:

nag (v.) 1828, intransitive, “find fault constantly;” by 1840, intransitive, “annoy by continued scolding, pester with petty complaints,” originally a dialectal word meaning “to gnaw” (1825, Halliwell), probably ultimately from a Scandinavian source (compare Old Norse gnaga “to complain,” literally “to bite, gnaw,” dialectal Swedish and Norwegian nagga “to gnaw”), from Proto-Germanic *gnagan, related to Old English gnagan “to gnaw” (see gnaw). As a noun, 1894, “act of nagging;” by 1925, “person who nags.” Related: Nagged; nagger; nagging.1

What struck me here was the association of nagging with acts of biting and gnawing, which is exactly what feels like is happening to your soul when being nagged, as any man or child will confirm. In this respect it reminds of the mythical eagle gnawing at the liver of Prometheus, only to have it happen again the very next day in an endless round of torture.

Considering the longevity and ubiquity of female nagging, and considering also that gynocentrism and feminism are collective nagathons, I think the future looks bleak in terms of a breakthrough for men. Our modern world has successfully institutionalized nagging at the highest levels – from the United Nations to national governments, and all the way down to schools.

This leads to the disturbing definition of feminism as “Institutionalized female nagging.”

Let the naggers chew on that definition for a while.

Perhaps we can put a positive spin on it and say that the drip, drip, drip of female nagging, from bassinet to coffin, has a toughening effect on men, bringing out the best of stoic resistance and emotional control that men are famed for. At least when its not driving men to die early, or to suicide at four times the rate of women.

Having got the gist of what I already knew about nagging, I searched the internet a bit further and noticed the following blog article, which is relegated to Creative Commons. It digs a bit deeper into the topic, so I repost the following excerpts for your interest:

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A brief history of nagging

The nagging wife is the universal villain of married life. From the earliest pages of human history there is perhaps no literature and folk tradition where the character of the nagging wife is not found widely. Along with archetypes of the sacrificing mother, forsaken lover, tragic hero and evil lord, the nagging wife will be found in all societies and cultures at all times in history. Even in today’s world, irrespective of the differences of race, wealth, religion, culture, language and social reform, the character of the nagging wife is universal. She keeps popping up in jokes, films, songs, novels and other cultural cultural creations.

Socrates, the famous Greek philosopher, is supposed to have had a nagging wife who drove him to spend his time in the city squares and gymnasia, much to the benefit of philosophy. The figure of the nagging wife finds mention in the Bible, (indirectly) in the Quran, and is a crucial moment in the story of the Ramayana. She is to be found in renassaince Italy, in medieval England, on the expanding border of America’s “wild west”, in the bedrooms of colonial India and in the sit-coms of post-modern Europe.

What is interesting about this figure of the nagging wife is that it is one of those few characters who transcend history. Like the sacrificing mother, the unrequited lover or the tragic hero, the nagging wife can be found in ancient, slave owning agricultural societies, in prosperous trading medieval ones and in post-industrial wastelands of contemporary West. What is it about the nagging wife which makes this character so universal and transcendental?

***

It is not only the wife who deploys this weapon of the weak. Children use it to excellent effect. In that context (parent – child) it is not generally called nagging but rather ‘pestering’. It too emerges from a similar context of powerlessness of children within the family, where the only way for them to get their point across is to ‘pester’ their parents till they accept defeat. Today, the power of children to pester their parents into taking decisions is an important weapon in the arsenal of advertisers who use “pester-power” to sell everything from groceries to cars.

In the contemporary world, many families have moved out of the context under which nagging by wives exists. Women own property, often they are in positions of power and are effective decision makers. Nagging does not automatically end in these contexts, just like it does not automatically exist in all patriarchal families. Today nagging is not necessarily confined to the patriarchal family and has been, in a sense, freed from the context of the patriarchal family under which it originated and survived. It has become a cultural archetype which women (and men) absorb into their personalities in the process of socialisation. Where it exists outside the immediate context of the patriarchal family, it exists only as a weapon of offence and not as a survival skill of the weak wife and it “forges its own chains” for those who deploy it in inter-personal relations. The question arises, are we courageous enough to surrender this weapon? ²

References:

[1] Nag, in Online Etymology Dictionary.
[2] Aniket Alam, A brief history of nagging, Creative Commons(2008)

See Also: The Henpecked Club

We often talk about men’s duties and responsibilities, or their failures to man-up and adequately serve women and society. But we rarely talk about men’s needs, nor encourage them to carve out some self-actualized living.

Abraham Maslow’s model of human needs is depicted as a series of hierarchical levels on a pyramid. At the base are what he calls the deficiency needs (D-needs) which must be fulfilled before moving up to enjoy the higher needs. Any absence in deficiency needs, such as social belonging or having enough to eat, creates a sense of deprivation that motivates people to seek satisfaction of those needs.

D-needs are comprised of the lower four of the following levels of need: Physiological, safety, belonging, and self-esteem.

The guiding principle in this model is that each base-need must be satisfied before moving onto the next level of need motivation, culminating finally in the pursuit of personal ‘self-actualization,’ a flowering of human potential inviting more free-time and the luxury of not being preoccupied with servicing base needs for ourselves and others.

Sadly, catering to the deficiency needs of everyone around them is precisely what most men find themselves doing. Men collectively spend most of their waking hours servicing the base needs of others, particularly female others who are freed to pursue the more luxurious need goals related to self-actualization.

Think of the so called ‘housewife’ or ‘home maker,’ or of women who make the sensible choice of working part time so their work-life balance is not deleterious to their higher order needs nor aspirations for self-actualisation.

Meanwhile, we often fail to ask who is labouring away at servicing the base needs of society; who is growing the most meat and vegetables to cater to human need; who is transporting the food; who is working longer hours to earn the bigger weekly wage to pay for all the foodstuffs that mostly others will eat? Who is building the houses and infrastructure for people to luxuriate within; Which sex is putting themselves on the line to ensure the safety of others? And which sex is pandering to women’s relationship ideals – including the funding of regular holiday packages, latte and shopping money, and big helpings of benevolent sexism to ensure the ‘esteem needs’ of women are fully met?

You guessed it – they are the base needs servicing army.

Alternatively, and on a more personal level, which sex suffers most homelessness, street violence, workplace injuries, health deprivation, safety deprivation, love/belonging deprivation, depression, suicide or early death? Clearly men are not very good at servicing their own base needs – perhaps because they are so preoccupied serving those of others.

Analysed honestly, a picture emerges of men preoccupied their whole lives with catering to base needs of women and children, and in many cases neglecting those very same needs in themselves. And too often women appear reluctant to fill the breach – perhaps because they are preoccupied with enjoying higher order needs and their own creative pursuits toward self-actualization.

Maslow conceptualized his model as a universal path regardless of one’s gender, a human path not requiring sharp distinctions between the big-picture needs of men or women respectively. This however appears far from the reality when we consider that his pyramid today has been carved into distinctly gendered turf, with men relegated to servicing the bottom need-rungs for women (especially physiological and safety needs), or indirectly servicing them via paying taxes to a government who services those same needs, thus allowing women to devote energy to the creative pursuits of romantic love, belonging, self-esteem, and of course the cherry on the top – self-actualization.

Not only do men take care of most physical needs and safety issues, they feel compelled to provide support for whatever higher-need whims their female partners inevitably dream up — “I just do whatever she wants so she can be happy”.

Betty Friedan, champion of the women’s liberation movement and instigator of second-wave feminism called for self-actualization for all women, writing “Only by such a personal commitment to the future can American women break out of the housewife trap and truly find fulfillment… by fulfilling their own unique possibilities as separate human beings.”¹

Friedan cited Maslow’s higher-order description of ‘self-actualization’ as essential for women to achieve this aim – and achieve it they have, in spades.

To-date we are still waiting for the cry to go out for male self-actualization.

To a large extent men, being perpetually stuck catering to bottom order needs is a hangover of human survival roles in which men and women divided labours between themselves in order to ensure survival of the family unit and, with it, the species. Having realized that survival, and living now in societies with far less disease, danger, and with greater material abundance, women have collectively seen fit to “liberate” themselves from traditional roles while men, generally speaking, have not. This is what we call the blue-pill conundrum — one sex is living the liberated dream, while the other remains stuck in a traditional service role.

The idea of men reaching for higher order needs is among the hottest of men’s rights questions arising today: i.e. should we remain welded to our traditional roles of protector and provider and hope that “liberated” women will disavow their multi-option lives and come join us in the trenches? Or do we join them and insist that neither sex should be responsible for the base needs of the other while simultaneously neglecting their own safety and higher fulfillment?

I think the question is self-answering.

Men and boys might now pause to consider they have the option to focus on their own base needs as much as anyone else’s. We also have the option to pursue Maslow’s higher-order needs of self-actualization, described as, “the desire for self-fulfilment, namely the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.”²

Self-actualization is further defined by Dictionary.com as “the achievement of one’s full potential through creativity, independence, spontaneity, and a grasp of the real world.” It entails nothing less than the realization of one’s creative, aesthetic, intellectual, and social potential, but it can only come about by the commitment of the self-determined, red pill man to live a life of freedom. He is the one who opts for being over and above selfless sacrifice and catering to survival needs alone. He is the one builds, dreams, cooks, rides a Harley, has hobbies, visits friends, goes on an adventure.

If we accept that there are no victims in life, only volunteers, that means there is literally nothing standing in the way of a more a fulfilling, self-actualized existence. The choice as always is ours.

Peak Experiences
Another concept presented by Maslow’s is peak experiences –those moments of intense happiness that stand apart from usual mundane experience, something he suggested was more likely to occur with regularity for the self-actualized person.

According to Maslow, feelings accompanying peak experiences included “wonder, awe, reverence, humility, surrender, and even worship before the greatness of the experience.” And he added that reality is perceived with a sense of “truth, goodness, beauty, wholeness, aliveness, uniqueness, perfection, completion, justice, simplicity, richness, effortlessness, playfulness, self-sufficiency” ³

Those humans lucky enough to enjoy the self-actualized life, punctuated as it is with peak experiences, would seem to live a privileged existence.

The following Wikipedia list offers some typical characteristics of peak experiences — experiences which in many ways are comparable to the freedoms described under red pill living:

• loss of judgment to time and space
• the feeling of being one whole and harmonious self, free of dissociation or inner conflict
• the feeling of using all capacities and capabilities at their highest potential, or being “fully functioning”
• functioning effortlessly and easily without strain or struggle
• feeling completely responsible for perceptions and behavior. Use of self-determination to becoming stronger, more single-minded, and fully volitional
• being without inhibition, fear, doubt, and self-criticism
• spontaneity, expressiveness, and naturally flowing behavior that is not constrained by conformity
• a free mind that is flexible and open to creative thoughts and ideas
• complete mindfulness of the present moment without influence of past or expected future experiences
• a physical feeling of warmth, along with a sensation of pleasant vibrations emanating from the heart area outward into the limbs.

Every detail of that list has been described by men who have swallowed the red pill and decided to live life on their own terms.

When men are no longer preoccupied in servicing the needs of Betty Friedan’s liberated women, no longer preoccupied by honey-do lists, the long work hours and the burden of social guilt that accompanies the role of servicing (and ultimately failing) women’s expectations, they can then begin to pursue their own needs as self-actualized men.

Those men who have swallowed the red pill report a new experience of freedom, one that comes with transcendence of temporal time and space as men become less chained to the clock and its plantation-like schedules. There’s far less ‘dissociation or inner conflict’ as blue-pill cognitive dissonance becomes a thing of the past, and self-actualization becomes second nature.

Feminists since Betty Freidan have succeeded in managing all levels of Maslow’s ladder, from physiological needs upwards, for their own self-benefit. They’ve treated human needs as a gendered turf war, with Maslow’s pyramid divided up like real estate on a Monopoly board where all the good properties are owned by women, while men pay rent on their Mayfair and Park Lane stopovers, or go straight to jail. The time to level the playing field is long overdue. 

Sources:

[1] Friedan, Betty, The Feminine Mystique (1963)
[2] Maslow., A. A Theory of Human Motivation, Psychological Review 50, pp. 370-396. (1943)
[3] Maslow, A.H. (1964). Religions, values, and peak experiences. London: Penguin Books Limited

Esther Vilar protests to the United Nations about their proclamation of 1975 as “International Women’s Year”. Vilar insists men deserve that honor. She was not merely a book writer, she was quite the MR activist!

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Source: Dayton Daily News Mon, Feb 5, 1973

Men and disability – Part 1
Men and disability – Part 2
Men and disability – Part 3

In part one of this series we looked at men with disabilities who achieved greatness. In part two we looked at an emerging culture of gynocentrism in the disability sector, along with the impoverished and at times hostile “support” extended to men in need of assistance. In this third and final part we look at a new kind of man with a disability – a man who says “No” to bigotry and other forms of mistreatment, and who gears his life toward the cultivation of self-respect.

To illustrate this new kind of man we will turn to the Greek myth of the goddess Hera and her disabled son Hephaestus – a son who has to challenge his mother’s ableism and bigotry before he can take his rightful place in the Olympian society. In this myth Hephaestus plays a role not unlike the hero Perseus who must stop Medusa’s hostilities before men can go about their lives again in safety and dignity.

The son of Hera and Zeus, Hephaestus was born parthenogenically – ie. from Hera alone and not from the result of a sex act with Zeus. We are told that she planed to give birth to a son after Zeus went and gave birth to Bright Eyed Athena who became a golden child of the gods. Hera was incensed that Zeus would give birth to Athena without her sexual aid, and her creation of Hephaestus was carried out in revenge. Hera’s message was essentially “You give birth without me, well I can do that too!”

Some myths suggest her son was born disabled, and others say he became disabled after his mother (or father) threw him from Mt. Olympus whereupon he landed hard on the earth and damaged his legs. In any case the dominant legend is that Hera gave birth to him already disabled, for which she was mightily disgusted in his lack of perfection.

Hera was angry and spoke thus among the assembled gods:

 “Hear from me, all gods and goddesses… my son Hephaestus whom I bore was weakly among all the blessed gods and shrivelled of foot, a shame and a disgrace to me in heaven, whom I myself took in my hands and cast out so that he fell in the great sea. But silver-shod Thetis the daughter of Nereus took and cared for him with her sisters: would that she had done other service to the blessed gods!”¹ 

Zeus gestures to his daughter Athena, while Hera hurls her disabled son from Mt. Olympus circa 200-150 B.C.

Hera was ashamed of her son’s disability, one which caused him to limp on both feet since the soles and heels were turned back to front and were not fitted for walking but only for a forward-rolling motion of the whole body.⁴ This ‘difference’ made Hephaestus a fringe person on Olympus, and threatened to put his mother on the fringes too, so she hid the secret by throwing her son to what she assumed would be his death. Fortunately he was saved by some kindly goddesses who nurtured him back to health.

After his fall from the heavens Hephaestus grew up on a secluded island and there learned the art of blacksmithing. He devoted himself to the task with such discipline that his artisan skills became the finest in the world. Despite the pride he took in these achievements he would not forget the cruel treatment of Hera who dismissed him as ugly and lacking in usefulness. Like so many men today who wish to be seen as something other than utilities for women and society, Hephaestus remains angry;

Hephaestus says: “Thetis saved me when I suffered much at the time of my great fall through the will of my own brazen-faced mother, who wanted to hide me for being lame. Then my soul would have taken much suffering had not Eurynome and Thetis caught me and held me… With them I worked nine years as a smith, and wrought many intricate things; pins that bend back, curved clasps, cups, necklaces, working there in the hollow of the cave, and the stream of Okeanos around us went on forever with its foam and its murmur.” ²

Classical sociologist Philip Slater suggests that Hera despises her son’s masculinity and his disability, preferring instead to have a son of heroic proportions who could provide her with utility and glory. Hera’s attitude provokes, in later myths, a kind of self-abasing buffoonery from Hephaestus that Slater interprets as “an appropriate response to his mother’s narcissistic resentment of males–she cannot deflate him if he is already deflated–but it is therefore all the more inappropriate for dealing with her contrary desire for him to be a display piece and an agent for the expression of her masculine strivings. It is for this reason, after all, that she threw him down from Olympus.”³

Like Hephaestus, many men with disabilities are angry. They realize that they are being doubly marginalized due to the curse of having a penis yet being unable, or perhaps unwilling, to perform as utilities for women and society – they know they are being negatively judged for it.

In her mythos Hera provides the quintessential example of gynocentric feminism, along with ableist and misandrist attitudes to boot. Her attitude represents much that is wrong with the disability sector today – an underlying bigotry that men must reject if they are to enjoy freedom, dignity and self-respect.

Challenging that bigotry is precisely what Hephaestus does. He gains redress against Hera for rejecting him by making her a magical golden throne which, when she sat on it, did not allow her to stand up. None of the other gods could release her and they begged Hephaestus to return to Olympus to let his mother go, but he refused, saying “I have no mother.”⁴

The gods were impressed with his rebuke of Hera and agree accept him back into Olympian society as one of their own. This may be viewed as a positive reappraisal of his disability – Hephaestus possesses previously unrecognized skills, is sharp of mind, humbles Hera, and is accepted by the other Olympians. Here is a synopsis of the story thus far;

After his abandonment, Thetis found him and took him to her underwater grotto and raised him as her own son.

Hephaestus had a happy childhood with dolphins as his playmates and pearls as his toys. Late in his childhood, he found the remains of a fisherman’s fire on the beach and became fascinated with an unextinguished coal, still red-hot and glowing.

Hephaestus carefully shut this precious coal in a clamshell, took it back to his underwater grotto, and made a fire with it. On the first day after that, Hephaestus stared at this fire for hours on end. On the second day, he discovered that when he made the fire hotter with bellows, certain stones sweated iron, silver or gold. On the third day he beat the cooled metal into shapes: bracelets, chains, swords and shields. Hephaestus made pearl-handled knives and spoons for his foster mother, and for himself he made a silver chariot with bridles so that seahorses could transport him quickly. He even made slave-girls of gold to wait on him and do his bidding.

Later, Thetis left her underwater grotto to attend a dinner party on Mount Olympus wearing a beautiful necklace of silver and sapphires that Hephaestus had made for her. Hera admired the necklace and asked where she could get one. Thetis became flustered, causing Hera to become suspicious; and, at last, the queen god discovered the truth: the baby she had once rejected had grown into a talented blacksmith.

Hera was furious and demanded that Hephaestus return home, a demand that he refused. However he did send Hera a beautifully constructed chair made of silver and gold, inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Hera was delighted with this gift but, as soon as she sat in it her weight triggered hidden springs and metal bands sprung forth to hold her fast. The more she shrieked and struggled the more firmly the mechanical throne gripped her; the chair was a cleverly designed trap.

For three days Hera sat fuming, still trapped in Hephaestus’s chair; she could not sleep, she could not stretch, she could not eat. It was Zeus who finally saved the day: he promised that if Hephaestus released Hera he would give him a wife, Aphrodite the goddess of love and beauty. Hephaestus agreed and married Aphrodite.⁵

After his mother rejects him for having a mobility impairment he becomes angry and he ensures that her mobility is impaired by trapping her in a throne. The gesture can be read as forcing Hera to experience a mobility challenge that she seemed utterly unable or unwilling to sympathize with.

Commenting on the story, disability advocate William Ebenstein states;

In the Hephaestus myth we can discern a positive psychology of anger that is grounded in the experience of disability. The disabled deity refuses to play the role of the passive victim. Instead he is an active creator in forging his future place in society. Hephaestus’ revenge is accomplished in such a clever and artful way that, in the end, it is enriching for the entire Olympian community.

In Hephaestus we find a character who is motivated by his anger to confront a world that has discarded him. He stages what amounts to a non-violent demonstration, an act of civil disobedience that completely shuts down Olympus. His stubborn anger does not lead to acceptance, adjustment or passivity. On the contrary it lifts him up to reclaim his dignity and civil rights. The story depicts a community that must adjust to someone who has been stigmatized, segregated, and discriminated against. It is the disabled character himself who creates the humorous situation as an effective tool to confront his oppression and challenge the existing order.⁶

Hephaestus’ anger energizes his expression of outrage in place of squashing it as a male character flaw. The problems he sees are in the world and Hephaestus takes action there, where it counts. His demonstration of outrage in response to an ugly world, or over acts of mistreatment, is mental health at its finest and similar expression needs to be encouraged and supported for all people with disabilities. In fact, speaking out of one’s anger is a perfect example of what is intended by the disability-related term self-advocacy.

Like our mythical protagonist, the ?Hephaestus man’ understands where the problem lies and will not have his concerns silenced.

Too often we see psychotherapists and rehabilitation counsellors engage in gender stereotyping, viewing positive anger as ‘male aggression,’ ‘patriarchy,’ or ‘toxic masculinity’ that in disabled and nondisabled men supposedly needs correcting. However killing the outrage is a misandric move, one that leads to a loss of personal agency in the world for men.

Thus far Hephaestus’ story has been one of rejection and redress. However the story is far more than a one-dimensional recounting of an “angrycrip” who ends up exacting revenge against his tormentors. It involves the larger vision of forging self-respect, the beginnings of which were long stirring before he sought to challenge the ableist culture among the gods.

Following his story from beginning to end we see the goal of self-respect is something Hephaestus cultivates quite independently from the respect he has won from the gods.⁷ After rejoining the Olympian hierarchy as dignified contributor – craftsman of the gods – he continues the inner work he started as a child when he located value in his own eyes, and not in the shallow eyes of others.

The key principle, one given in an incisive article by Paul Elam, is “self-respect isn’t earned, it’s taken.”⁸ When Hephaestus engages with the Olympian community, he doesn’t need to wait around for their validation, he has already wrested it by his own self-assessment.

The Hephaestus man is the one who expresses his outrage at offensive behavior, and who chooses to cultivate self-respect. By respecting himself and demanding the same from others, Hephaestus demonstrates exactly what these things mean for men in today’s world, disabled or not.

References

[1] Evelyn-White translation, Homeric Hymn to Pythian Apollo (1914)
[2] Richmond Lattimore translation, The Iliad by Homer (1951)
[3] Philip E. Slater, The Glory of Hera: Greek Mythology and The Greek Family (1968)
[4] Karl Kerenyi, The Gods of the Greeks, pp.155-158 (1951)
[5] Wikipedia, Greek myths of Hephaestus, (Roman name Vulcan changed to Hephaestus above)
[6] William Ebenstein, Toward an Archetypal Psychology of Disability Based on the Hephaestus Myth (2006)
[7] Murray Stein, Hephaistos: A pattern of introversion, in The Selected Works of Murray Stein (1973).
[8] Paul Elam, Self-respect isn’t earned, it’s taken (2015)

Men and disability – Part 1
Men and disability – Part 2
Men and disability – Part 3

As with parenting and school education, the disability sector is overwhelmingly managed and staffed by women. They are the nurses, community support workers, personal care assistants, physiotherapists, guidance counselors and so on. That domination ensures women’s views about gender govern the provision of services for most disabled men. Before discussing the problems created by this skewed situation, let’s begin with a look at the rise of the disability rights movement.

Although disability issues received varying levels of attention throughout history, they became an international cause célèbre from 1960s, this on the tail of the black civil rights movement in America, and coinciding with the rise of second wave feminism. This generated nothing short of a revolution in awareness about the lives and needs of people with disabilities.

The disability rights movement helped to secure greater access to the social and physical environment, as well as opportunities for independent living, employment, education, and housing. It also promoted freedom from abuse, neglect, and other violations, and the establishment of civil rights legislation to secure these opportunities and rights.

So far so good. However in recent years the movement has suffered mission-creep into the arena of gender politics. We are now more likely to hear about domestic violence and sexual assault against disabled women, their wage discrimination and other forms of double-disadvantage, while contrasting them with the depravity, privilege, rapiness and violence-proneness of disabled men — a narrative fostering denial of vulnerabilities men may face along with a demonizing of men to boot.

It’s a growing problem that needs to be stopped.

I’m not suggesting we should stop paying attention to issues like sexual assault and abuse against women, which absolutely must be addressed for this vulnerable demographic. But we needn’t demonize men and boys as the default perpetrator class, nor discriminate against them which we do by refusing to recognize males as victims of abuse and by dismissing or silencing those who might speak about it.

I know dozens of disabled men who have suffered serious violence or sexual abuse who have been afraid to tell someone for fear of being disbelieved, blamed or ridiculed. Marginalizing the issues of disabled men in the service of a one-sided gendered approach ultimately undermines the good work of the disability rights movement during the last 50 years – it shifts the focus from a humanitarian movement to a largely sexist one from within its own culture.

The gynocentric approach is compounded by the fact that most workers in the sector are women, who understandably have a more empathic appreciation of women’s concerns than men’s. The existence of female bias in the disability sector can be stressed in the following way: many women possess an inadequate understanding of the experiences and concerns of men with disabilities.

Poorly educated female workers, ie. those providing most of the frontline services, tend to rely on male stereotypes to guide their understandings of clientele, imposing the usual boilerplate images of males as utilitarian, rough, insensitive, sport obsessed, sex-obsessed, and so on. That vision is devoid of deeper knowledge of men generally, is at variance to the individuality of males specifically, and it tends to dictate the tone of care.

At this point readers may feel I’m being a little hard on female disability workers, which is correct. More accurately I’m being hard on the current culture of disability services because of the growing gynocentric trend, and pointing to an area of potential improvement in service provision. To be fair, I have no hesitation in admitting the existence of excellent female disability workers who do understand men’s issues and provide a very high quality of support, but these are more often the exception rather than the rule. This article however is attempting to show where disability services are failing in their duty of care for men, and the increasing gynocentric culture is, at least to my thinking, the area of greatest failure.

Having worked in the disability field for 30 years, I’ve had more opportunity than most to observe the provision of services to men. The following are six areas where gender stereotyping is failing men with disabilities.

1. Men do, women are
In a recent article I described how men are considered utilities or ‘action men’ expected to be of service to others.¹ The expectation is sadly no different for disabled men, and one of the first things female support workers often do is put him to work doing odd jobs and showing him how to be ‘useful’ to women and society. A woman with an identical disability will often get asked a different set of questions – like what do you want to do to have fun.

2. Male aggression or violence is an attempt to dominate
Both men and women with disabilities sometimes find life frustrating and lash out in anger. Typically males are lectured about how their aggression upsets other people, causes damage to the wider world, and are instructed on how to control their anger – while the disabled woman who lashes out in the same manner is calmed and asked what or who is bothering her and perhaps how the world might be rearranged so that it doesn’t upset her again. Disability support workers are less likely to consider the real distress or powerlessness that causes men to lash out.

3. Males are rarely victims of violence
Government media campaigns focusing solely on “violence against women” have encouraged the assumption that men are default perpetrators who don’t suffer violence. The belief among support workers that disabled men are safe from violence has created an environment in which abused men are less likely to speak up and seek help… there is no encouragement to do otherwise. Despite the fact that U.S. Department of Justice has reported violence crimes against disabled men and women at roughly equal rates,² a Google search for information delivers the following disparity of awareness:

• “Violence against disabled women” = 4330 results.
• “Violence against disabled men” = 9 results.

4. Males are unlikely to suffer sexual abuse or rape
As with men in prisons who experience high levels of sexual assault, disabled males are four times more likely than nondisabled men to be sexually assaulted or raped.³ The researchers of that study found that more than 5 percent of disabled men reported experiencing sexual assault during the past year, about equal to sexual assaults against disabled women.³

If ‘rape culture’ is based in social invisibility and voicelessness of a victim group, then disabled men are dealing with a legitimate rape culture – one entrenched by the people who receive a weekly pay-cheque to help lift that silence. Again a Google search speaks volumes:

• “Sexual violence against disabled women” = 1520 results.
• “Sexual violence against disabled men” = 0 results.

5. Men are less in need of assistance than women

As addressed in part one, disabled men are deemed privileged by patriarchy while women with disabilities are considered doubly disadvantaged by the same. The gynocentric privileges historically afforded to women have not yet entered the discourse – such as being recipients of living expenses drawn from male labor, or receiving greater provision and protection generally. Gynocentric prioritization is further underlined in phrases like “damsel in distress,” “ladies before gentlemen,” “girls before boys” or “ladies first,”, which are codes of chivalric and gentlemanly behavior that place disabled men in second place on the basis of their sex.

The stereotype of the cigar-smoking, brandy swilling patriarch, in combination with the custom of “ladies first,” sees that men are at a disadvantage to women in the fight for limited disability services.

6. Male sexual needs are socially unacceptable
Men’s sexual desires are gross and in need of suppressing or civilizing, so think some individuals charged with supporting men with disabilities. Cultural narratives characterizing male sexuality as dirty, violent and oppressive are clearly toxic to male self-image, however some among the mostly female workforce have adopted that negative mindset and with it created barriers to men’s attempts to enjoy healthy sexual expression.

When a disabled man desires a woman, or masturbates, or perhaps decides to hire a prostitute – all natural behaviors – female support workers tend to be unsupportive, believing sexual desires must be tamed in the service of something more civilized such as nonsexual dating and romantic love.

I have observed female staff match-make male and female clientele — treating them like Barbie & Ken in a child’s dolls house — while also instructing men in the arts of non-sexual chivalry, such as bringing gifts and flowers for a potential girlfriend or perhaps taking her to a romantic restaurant while the support worker plays hostess. While perhaps well meaning, my reading of such intervention is that it leaves out many aspects of male nature, especially male sexual needs, in favor of gynocentric themes which is ultimately an insult to the men in question.

. . .

These are just a few examples of biases men with disabilities face. Problems generated by gynocentrism and misandry within the disability sector (and beyond) are sometimes blatant and at other times subtle, but in either case they are mostly unrecognized and unquestioned by those on the front lines of service provision.

Men with disabilities receive little more empathy than their able-bodied counterparts – and in some respects they receive less. As with all men’s issues, from health funding to prostate cancer, birth control options, or homelessness, men are going to have to speak up – in fact they are going to have to shout up. Those in power might not see men’s pain, but they will hear men’s anger.

This leads to the next article in this series where we will look at a new kind of man with a disability – he is the one who says “No” to gynocentrism and other forms of mistreatment, and acts decisively to shut them down.

References

[1] Peter Wright, Don’t just do something, SIT THERE (June 2015)
[2] Harrell, E., Rand, M., Crime Against People with Disabilities, U.S. Department of Justice (2008)
[3] Mitra, Monika, Vera E. Mouradian, and Marci Diamond. Sexual Violence Victimization Against Men with Disabilities, American Journal of Preventive Medicine (2011)

Feature image: Cpl. Anthony McDaniel

Men and disability – Part 1
Men and disability – Part 2
Men and disability – Part 3

Throughout history men with disabilities have reached the heights of human achievement in personal and cultural terms, and they did so without the help of social justice warriors or modern reforms to laws, community access, or improved social attitudes toward disability.

Think of the presidents, artists, scientists, blade runners and the Everest-scaling amputees who reached for greatness, along with their less visible counterparts who went about their daily lives in less grandiose but nevertheless competent ways while living with a disability.

Disability always poses limitations on a person’s physical or mental abilities, but the disability never encompasses the entire person – there remain competencies that deserve equal recognition in the mix.

Said differently a person is never completely disabled, just as there is no such thing as a person without a disability, however mild; eg. asthma, eczema, or gluten allergy can likewise interfere with daily functioning, forcing you to buy special creams and soaps or having to skip lunch with friends because you can’t eat the food at that restaurant.

A study of high achievers illustrates the point of competency existing alongside disability. Franklin D. Roosevelt had post-polio paralysis, Ray Charles was blind, Christopher Reeve had a spinal injury, George Washington had dyslexia, Ludwig van Beethoven went deaf, Albert Einstein had Aspergers, Leonardo Da Vinci was epileptic, and the cosmologist Stephen Hawking has advanced motor neurone disease. Yet all of these men reached the top of their fields of interest.

Admiration of such men is today frowned upon by social justice warriors (SJWs) who believe the achievements misrepresent the common man with a disability and lead him to feel inferior by comparison. Referred to disparagingly as “supercrips” (super cripples), SJWs disparage high achievers as tall poppies who disrupt the level playing field, traitors who promote ableism instead of accepting their lot as sufferers without talents or abilities.

In a more reasonable use of the term, supercrip is sometimes employed as a reference to fanciful caricatures; eg. exaggerated claims about men on the autism spectrum as genius savants; or that the deaf have the sight of an eagle; or that the blind possess sonic radar abilities like dolphins or bats that help them move around the physical environment. There is no doubt, however, that the supercrip slur is also aimed at men with disabilities who genuinely achieved great things, but who are perceived as succeeding due to an unfair degree of male privilege.

Sound familiar? Most would have heard this criticism before, after 50 years of feminism’s attempts to tear down every man who has had the drive and discipline to reach the top of his field. Even our disabled heroes are not spared by feminists who refer to them as ‘privileged by patriarchy’ and thus less handicapped than disabled women:

“It will be argued in this paper that disability is a more severely handicapping condition for women than for men… [men] are relatively advantaged in that they can observe and may aspire to the advantaged place of males in today’s society. Women with disabilities are perceived as inadequate to fulfill either the economically productive roles traditionally considered appropriate for males.

“In research conducted by Mauer disabled females were more likely than disabled males to identify with a disabled storybook character; the disabled males were more likely to identify with the able-bodied character (1979). Disabled men may have a choice between a role of advantage (male) and a role of disadvantage (disability). Their decision is frequently a strategic identification with males.¹

Feminist scholars refer to this as a ‘double disadvantage’ experienced by disabled women because they suffer from both disability and sexism, while their male counterparts are presumably being served up with caviar in their patriarchally privileged, gold-plated wheelchairs. Referring to the intersectional model, many feminists would go further and talk of multiple disadvantages such as triple, quadruple, or quintuple handicaps as would be the case for a black, transgendered, albino woman with a disability….. but I digress.

Indeed, a survey of feminist-inspired literature reveals a disturbing emphasis on what is lacking in comparison to what is good in the lives of disabled individuals, with that fixation coming at the expense of recognizing the multiple competencies or abilities that disabled individuals might possess. Moreover, the practice of gender stereotyping obscures the uniqueness of the individual, as underscored by sociologist Tom Shakespeare who states, “Disabled people’s gender identity is more complex and more varied than this stereotypical view indicates. Some women feel liberated from social expectation as a result of impairment; some men feel doubly inferior.”²

The double-disadvantage meme has led to the widespread view that disabled men gain privilege at women’s expense, an advantage apparently in need of restricting in order to give disabled women a head start. In order to bring women forward we are led to believe we must push men back and downplay their extraordinary achievements.

Ridding the world of tall poppies, however, results in having no one to look up to. It forces us to lower our vision to a mean-average of attainment where social justice warriors seem bent on placing us – including those with disabilities. Some of us may be content with day-to-day existing and are not interested in pushing our personal limits, but there are others who want more. By honoring the achievements of exceptional people we understand a greater range of possibility, and can set our goals as high as we choose.

References

[1] Michelle Fine, ‘Disabled women: Sexism Without the Pedestal’ Journal of Sociology and Social Welfare (1977)
[2] Tom Shakespeare, ‘When is a man not a man? When he’s disabled,’ in Working with Men for Change, p.49 (1999)

Feature image of Stephen Hawking by Lwp Kommunikáció

On a recent Dad Talk Today Interview Dr. Warren Farrell spoke about a cultural feature of Western society called the Victim Industrial Complex:

“We have developed what some have called, and I agree with, a ‘Victim Industrial Complex’ where there’s tens of thousands of people who are making their living from the defense of women in courts, the defense of women in child custody cases, the defense of the victims, and appealing to the biological instinct that we all have to protect women, and then saying that men have the power as opposed to understanding if you are biologically programmed to protect somebody, that person who is protected is the one who has the power.”

In his book The Myth of Male Power,  Farrell refers to this problem as the creation of a Victimarchy:

But here’s the rub. When the entitled child has the majority of the votes, the issue is no longer whether we have a patriarchy or a matriarchy — we get a victimarchy. And the female-as-child genuinely feels like a victim because she never learns how to obtain for herself everything she learns to expect. Well, she learns how to obtain it for herself by saying “it’s a woman’s right” — but she doesn’t feel the mastery that comes with a lifetime of doing it for herself. And even when a quota includes her in the decision-making process, she still feels angry at the “male dominated government” because she feels both the condescension of being given “equality” and the contradiction of being given equality. She is still “the other.” So, with the majority of the votes, she is both controlling the system and angry at the system.” [The Myth of Male Power]

Elsewhere I have referred to the same phenomenon as a ‘Gynocentric Cultural Complex‘ which is comprised of three central motives: Damseling, chivalry and courtly love. Farrell’s mention of the Victim Industrial Complex taps the same three motives, especially the image of the damsel, or more accurately the ‘damsels in distress’ trope.

A cultural complex is defined as a significant configuration of culture traits that have major significance in the way people’s lives were lived. In sociology it is defined as a set of culture traits all unified and dominated by one essential trait; such as an industrial cultural complex, religious cultural complex, military cultural complex and so on. In each of these complexes we can identify a core factor – industry, religion, military – so we likewise we have core motives for the Gynocentric or Victim cultural complex in order for it to qualify for the title, and that core motive, as already mentioned, is the triad of damsels, chivalry and courtly love.