Archetypal Psychology: Defining “Archetype” and “Archetypal”

By “archetype” I can only refer to the phenomenal archetype, that which manifests itself in images. The noumenal archetype per se cannot by definition be presented so that nothing whatsoever can be posited of it. In fact whatever one does say about the archetype per se is a conjecture already governed by an archetypal image. This means that the archetypal image precedes and determines the metaphysical hypothesis of a noumenal archetype. So, let us apply Occam’s razor to Kant’s noumenon. By stripping away this unnecessary theoretical encumbrance to Jung’s notion of archetype we restore full value to the archetypal image.’

(Hillman 1971).

The archetypal school rejects the noun “archetype,” even as it retains the adjective “archetypal.” For Hillman (1983), the distinction between archetypes and archetypal images, which Jung regards as comparable, respectively, to Kantian noumena and phenomena, is untenable. According to him, all that individuals ever encounter psychically are images – that is, phenomena. Hillman is a phenomenologist or an imagist: “I’m simply following the imagistic, the phenomenological way: take a thing for what it is and let it talk” (p. 14). For the archetypal school, there are no archetypes as such – no neo-Kantian categories, or noumena. There are only phenomena, or images, that may be archetypal.

For Hillman, the archetypal is not a category but a consideration – a perspectival operation that an individual may perform on any image. Thus Hillman (1977, pp. 82–83) says that “any image may be considered archetypal.” The archetypal is “a move one makes rather than a thing that is.” To consider an image archetypal is to regard it as such, from a certain perspective, to endow it operationally with typicality – or, as Hillman prefers to say, with “value.” Thus, perspectivally, an individual may “archetypalize” any image. Merely considering it so makes it so – or, as Hillman (1975/1979) says, merely capitalizing it makes it so – as in the “Sunburnt Girl” (p. 63). In effect, the archetypal school embraces what Jung tries (never, he admits, entirely with success) to avoid – that is, what he (CW 9.i, p. 59) calls “metaphysical concretism.” Jung says that “any attempt at graphic description” of an archetype inevitably succumbs to metaphysical concretism “up to a point,” because the qualitative aspect “in which it appears necessarily clings to it, so that it cannot be described at all except in terms of its specific phenomenology.” Concrete descriptive qualities cling quite obviously to an archetype like the Great Mother (less evidently to an archetype like the Anima, which is more abstract) – as they also do to the Sunburnt Girl. Most Jungians would be reluctant to dignify the Sunburnt Girl as equal in status to the Great Mother – or even to regard the image as “archetypal” at all. When Hillman capitalizes the Sunburnt Girl, he considers the image archetypal, typical, or valuable. He does not posit or infer the metaphysical existence of archetypes prior to the images. For archetypal psychologists, any and every image, even the most apparently banal, can be considered archetypal.

This post-Jungian, post-structuralist usage of the term “archetypal” is controversial. Most Jungians retain the term “archetype” and continue to define it as Jung did. One Jungian analyst, V. Walter Odajnyk (1984), criticizes Hillman for adopting the name “archetypal psychology.” According to Odajnyk, Hillman should simply have called the school “imaginal psychology” to avoid unnecessary terminological ambiguity. “Archetypal psychology,” Odajnyk (1984, p. 43) says, “sounds as though it were based on the Jungian archetypes, when in fact it isn’t.” This criticism is cogent to Jungians who remain strict structuralists. It is unpersuasive to archetypal psychologists, for they believe that the archetypal, or the typical, is in the eye of the imaginer – or in the imagination’s eye. In a sense, the archetypal is in the eye of the beholder – the subject who beholds an image – but it is also, in another sense, in the eye of the imagination, a transcendent dimension that archetypal psychologists regard as ultimately irreducible to any faculty immanent in the subject.

Source: Michael Vannoy Adams, ‘The Archetypal School,’ Chapter-6 in The Cambridge Companion to Jung. 2008

Archetypal Image

ARCHETYPAL psychology axiomatically assumes imagistic universals, comparable to the universali fantastici of Vico (Scienza Nuova, par. 381), that is, mythical figures that provide the poetic characteristics of human thought, feeling, and action, as well as the physiognomic intelligibility of the qualitative worlds of natural phenomena. By means of the archetypal image, natural phenomena present faces that speak to the imagining soul rather than only conceal hidden laws and probabilities and manifest their objectification.

A psychological universal must be considered psychologically. An archetypal image is psychologically “universal,” because its effect amplifies and depersonalizes. Even if the notion of image regards each image as an individualized, unique event, as “that image there and no other,” such an image is universal because it resonates with collective, trans-empirical importance. Thus, archetypal psychology uses “universal” as an adjective, declaring a substantive perduring value, which ontology states as a hypostasis. And, the universals problem for psychology is not whether they exist, where, and how they participate in particulars, but rather whether a personal individual event can be recognized as bearing essential and collective importance. Psychologically, the universals problem is presented by the soul itself whose perspective is harmoniously both the narrow particularity of felt experience and the universality of archetypally human experience. In Neoplatonic thought, soul could be spoken of as both my soul and world soul, and what was true of one was true of both. Thus, the universality of an archetypal image means also that the response to the image implies more than personal consequences, raising the soul itself beyond its egocentric confines (soul-making) and broadening the events of nature from discrete atomic particulars to aesthetic signatures bearing information for soul.

Because archetypal psychology gives priority to particular pattern over literal particle – and considers that particular events are always themselves imagistic and therefore ensouled – imagination too is assumed to be primordially patterned into typical themes, motifs, regions, genres, syndromes. These kinds of patterns inform all psychic life. Gilbert Durand (1960, 1979) – following upon the lines opened by Bachelard – and Durand’s Centre de Recherche sur l’Imaginaire (w3.u-grenoble3.fr/cri/) have been charting the inherent organization of the imaginary as the basis of cultural anthropology and sociology, even as the basis of psychological meaning in all consciousness. Durand’s papers published in the Eranos Yearbooks since 1964 present a range of archetypal cultural analysis.

Archetypal psychology has pressed beyond the collection of objective data and the correlation of images as verbal or visual symbols. If archetypal images are the fundamentals of fantasy, they are the means by which the world is imagined, and therefore they are the models by which all knowledge, all experiences whatsoever become possible: “Every psychic process is an image and an ‘imagining,’ otherwise no consciousness could exist …” (CW 11:?889). An archetypal image operates like the original meaning of idea (from Greek eidos and eidolon): not only “that which” one sees but also that “by means of which” one sees. The demonstration of archetypal images is therefore as much in the act of seeing as in the object seen, since the archetypal image appears in consciousness itself as the governing fantasy by means of which consciousness is possible to begin with. Gathering of data does less to demonstrate objectively the existence of archetypes than it does to demonstrate the fantasy of “objective data.”

Furthermore, unlike Jung who radically distinguishes between noumenal archetype per se and phenomenal archetypal image, archetypal psychology rigorously refuses even to speculate about a nonpresented archetype per se. Its concern is with the phenomenon: the archetypal image. This leads to the next step: “… any image can be considered archetypal. The word ‘archetypal’ rather than pointing at something … points to something, and this is value … by archetypal psychology we mean a psychology of value. And our appellative move is aimed to restore psychology to its widest, richest, and deepest volume so that it would resonate with soul in its descriptions as unfathomable, multiple, prior, generative, and necessary. As all images can gain this archetypal sense, so all psychology can be archetypal… ‘Archetypal’ here refers to a move one makes rather than to a thing that is” (Hillman 1977b).

Here, archetypal psychology “sees through” itself as strictly a psychology of archetypes, a mere analysis of structures of being (gods in their myths), and, by emphasizing the valuative function of the adjective archetypal, restores to images their primordial place as that which gives psychic value to the world. Any image termed archetypal is immediately valued as universal, trans-historical, basically profound, generative, highly intentional, and necessary.

Since “archetypal” connotes both intentional force (Jung’s “instinct”) and the mythical field of personifications (Hillman’s “gods”), an archetypal image is animated like an animal (one of Hillman’s frequent metaphors for images) and like a person whom one loves, fears, delights in, is inhibited by, and so forth. As intentional force and person, such an image presents a claim – moral, erotic, intellectual, aesthetic – and demands a response. It is an “affecting presence” (Armstrong 1971) offering an affective relationship. It seems to bear prior knowledge (coded information) and an instinctive direction for a destiny, as if prophetic, prognostic. Images in “dreams mean well for us, back us up and urge us on, understand us more deeply than we understand ourselves, expand our sensuousness and spirit, continually make up new things to give us – and this feeling of being loved by the images … call it imaginal love” (Hillman 1979a). This message-bearing experience of the image – and the feeling of blessing that an image can bring – recalls the Neoplatonic sense of images as daimones and angels (message bearers). “Perhaps – who knows? – these eternal images are what men mean by fate” (CW 7:?183).

Although an archetypal image presents itself as impacted with meaning, this is not given simply as revelation. It must be made through “image work” and “dream work” (Hillman 1977b, 1979a). The modes of this work may be concrete and physical as in art, movement, play, and occupational therapies; but more importantly (because less fixedly symbolic), this work is done by “sticking to the image” as a psychological penetration of what is actually presented including the stance of consciousness that is attempting the hermeneutic. Image work is not legitimately such unless the implicit involvement of a subjective perspective is admitted from the start, for it too is part of the image and in its fantasy.

Image work requires both aesthetic culture and a background in myths and symbols for appreciation of the universalities of images. This work also requires a series of tactical moves (Hillman and Berry 1977), frequently linguistic and phonetic (Sardello et al. 1978; Severson 1978; Kugler 1979b) and etymological (Lockhart 1978, 1980; Kugelmann 1983), and also grammatical and syntactical experimentation (Ritsema 1976; Hillman 1978a). Other tactical moves concerning emotion, texture, repetitions, reversals, and restatements have been described by Berry (1974).

The primary intention of this verbal work with images is the “recovery of soul in speech” (Sardello 1978a), which at the same time reveals the erotic and aesthetic aspect of images – that they captivate, charm, persuade, have a rhetorical effect on soul beyond their symbolic content. Image-work restores the original poetic sense to images, freeing them from serving a narrational context, having to tell a story with its linear, sequential, and causal implications that foster first-person reports of the egocentric actions and intentions of a personalistic subject. The distinction between image and narrative (Berry 1974; Miller 1976a) is fundamental to the distinction in imaginative style between archetypal polytheistic psychology and traditional psychologies that are egocentered, epic narrations (therapy).

Three further developments in theory of archetypal images are worth attention. Paul Kugler’s work (1978, 1979a) elaborates an acoustic theory of images as structures of invariant meaning apart from linguistic, etymological, semantic, and syntactical meaning. Charles Boer and Peter Kugler (1977) have correlated archetypal images with the theory of perception of J.?J. Gibson, asserting that archetypal images are afforded directly by the environment (and are not subjective), so that “archetypal psychology is mythical realism.” Casey (1979) sets forth the idea that imagination is so closely related with time, both psychologically and ontologically, that actual image-work not only takes time into soul or makes temporal events soul events but also makes time in soul.

Source: Hillman, James. Archetypal Psychology: A Brief Account (Uniform Edition). Spring Publications.

Toward a Gender Transition Movement – by Warren Farrell

Toward A Gender Transition Movement

By Warren Farrell

“Taking what had worked for most women in the past and seeing it as a plot against them led us to see men as “owing” women. This created Stage II entitlement: women being entitled to compensation for past oppression. This prevented us from seeing the need to make a transition from Stage I to Stage II together : the need not for a women’s movement or a men’s movement, but for a gender transition movement.”

– Myth of Male Power

A gender transition movement will be the longest of all movements because it is not proposing merely to integrate blacks or Latinos into a system that already exists; rather, it is proposing an evolutionary shift in the system itself—an end to “woman-the-protected” and “man-the-protector.” This division is rooted in our biology; it exists among animals.

Gender transition starts by opening the lace curtain and closing down feminism-as-the-one-party-system-of-gender-politics. That combination frees women to hear what men at least could say if the media, academia, and government were not frustrating the already silent sex. It would bring into communication with each other the four major gender perspectives: traditional men, traditional women, transitional men, and feminists.

What does the communication consist of? For starters, how we can allow maximum freedom for both sexes without losing sight of our commitments to our partners and children. Redistributing housework, childcare, and work outside the home within each family; solutions to domestic violence, date rape, and sexual harassment that incorporate men’s experiences. Funding the thirty-four neglected areas of men’s health; making men’s birth control a reality….

An Equal Rights Amendment (ERA) might be relabeled an Equal Rights and Responsibilities amendment (ERA) and made user-friendly to men. Such an amendments legislative guidelines might suggest that congressional districts be deprived of welfare funding if judges assigned the children to women more than 60 percent of the time in cases of contested custody; it would deprive universities of public monies as long as there were significantly more women’s studies courses than men’s studies courses; it would deprive TV stations of federal licensing if the FCC found a consistent pattern of male-bashing or consistent attention to women’s issues and neglect of men’s issues. Being user-friendly to men includes funding research on the denial of dad time, on false accusations, and on violations of due process and the Fourteenth Amendment.

The ERRA would mean a new era—an era of shared rights and shared responsibilities.

Life and Death

A gender transition movement would incorporate men’s issues. Men’s issues are issues of life and death. Why do men whose spouses die or who are divorced commit suicide ten times as often as the women? Why are men in all ten “glass cellars” of disposability (e.g., more of the street homeless than women and children combined, 94 percent of the workplace deaths, dying five years sooner) even as we only discuss “glass ceilings”? Instead of having only an Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), men’s issues of life and death might best be addressed by an Equal Life Opportunity Commission (ELOC).


* * *

“Ideally there should not be a men’s movement but a gender transition movement; Only the power of the women’s movement necessitates the temporary corrective of a men’s movement.” ~ Warren Farrell.


Source: Farrell, Warren, and James P. Sterba. Does Feminism Discriminate Against Men?: A Debate (Point/Counterpoint). Oxford University Press (October 10, 2007), 2008. (pp.105-106)

What is a Man?

By Vernon Meigs

In late June I had published my article Biogynocentric Hypocrisy: TERF Edition (War on the Biological Male) in which I had made the following statement:

When I was noticing sponsored posts on Facebook by Matt Walsh’s page abut his new film What Is A Woman?, what grabbed my attention was the text on one of them: ‘One of the surgeons I interviewed for this documentary confessed to having mutilated the genitals of a 16 year old boy. The Left says this isn’t happening. They’re lying, as always.’

I admitted surprise at his choice of words: ‘mutilated the genitals of a 16 year old boy’. I wondered aloud, how much does he actually care about a child’s genital integrity across the board? What are Mr. Walsh’s attitudes towards routine infant circumcision? Assuming that he is just another traditional conservative, I had thought that he couldn’t give a shit about male genital mutilation and the serious consequences of it. However, I left it at that because that was all it was: an assumption. I wouldn’t speak more on it until I had concrete proof of what would be his hypocritical stance, and I’d be completely open to be proven wrong as well, delighted to be in fact.

About a week ago, I got my answer.

For clarity, the quote reads thus:

You lose credibility when you call circumcision “elective amputation”. Particularly because “amputation”, in the medical sense, generally refers to the removal of a limb. Make your point without being ridiculous. And parents frequently make decision for their infants. In fact, I’m not sure how else to raise an infant. You aren’t “infringing on their liberty.” Come on, that’s just absurd. Make your point without resorting to laughably hysterical rhetoric.

This screenshot was shared by a mutual follower on Twitter, Nikos Anti-MGM, who imparted to me that it in itself was originally something a Facebook friend of his posted. Regardless, the importance of sharing it cannot be understated. Matt Walsh, who grandstands that he is “obsessed with stopping people from mutilating and sterilizing children”, is proven to be yet another high-profile hypocrite regarding what kind of child is on the receiving end of the genital mutilation, and what ideology conducts it.

And yes, those were Walsh’s own words. Clearly he’s either not obsessed enough, or in fact obsessed strictly with refusing to admit that Americans have been making a mistake in eviscerating infant male foreskins for generations:

Some may be asking why I am spending a lot of energy going after these specific individuals who are open in their double standards about the genital mutilation of children. After all, too many Americans casually buy into the scam that calling all of them out one by one would be wasted effort. My response would be that anybody directly talking about the genital mutilation of children, especially when those are the exact terms that are used, must be consistent and deplore every context and every situation that this happens.

When they aren’t, and the likes of Walsh go forth and mock intactivists and hurl the same fallacies used to justify male infant genital mutilation, they absolutely deserve to be called out. They must be put to question whether they actually are against all forms of child mutilation, or are just tailoring their narrative to appease their large conservative fanbase that still thinks nothing about what trauma they put their infant sons through in an environment completely normalized for that.

As the backlash against woke nonsense gains more momentum and high-profile personalities such as Walsh, Ben Shapiro and Jordan Peterson become ever-increasingly influential voices, it is crucial to expose their shortsightedness when they are being disingenuous in their given advocacies. This is of grave concern because the mindset they are smuggling in is not only a matter of a difference of opinion, but a genuine, serious risk for infant boys’ well-being.

This is why I think we must get more serious in scrutinizing the attitudes of these personalities, and dismantle their hypocritical takes. As more of these gynocentric acts of throwing the male of the species under the bus while white knights plead for FtM trans surgery victims more so than the more numerous MtFs, if not exclusively the former, we will be on the track of casting into broad daylight the truth about their motives, none of which bode well for men and boys.

Anyway, it’s time to get into the intended focus of this article, to dissect and analyze Matt Walsh’s crude remark regarding the male foreskin and the amputation thereof. Speaking of, the subject of amputation is the first thing he blunders on.

You lose credibility when you call circumcision “elective amputation”. Particularly because “amputation”, in the medical sense, generally refers to the removal of a limb. Make your point without being ridiculous.

According to the featured expert on the subject of amputation from John Hopkins Medicine, Jaime Troyal Shores, M.D, “Amputation is the loss of removal of a body part such as a finger, to, hand, foot, arm or leg.” While the examples he immediately references include limbs because that is what tends to be in the forefront of the minds of those thinking about amputations, he appears to be clear enough that he is talking about a removal of any body part – and not exclusive to limbs. In the same web page under the entry for Amputation, under ‘Types of Lower Extremity Amputation’ a reference to pelvic amputation (hemipelvectomy) is made; last I checked, a pelvis is not itself a limb.

If this was not convincing enough, the Wikipedia page on amputations clearly states the different amputations that aren’t limbs, and unequivocally listed is the removal of the foreskin.

To add to that, a search on scholar.google.com for “amputation of the foreskin” and “foreskin amputation” would yield you over 100 results and over 70 results respectively. In short, the very act of referring to foreskin removal as an amputation is neither ridiculous nor non-credible.

For all his mockery on those who use the term “amputation” for MGM, I wonder if Walsh would at least entertain the idea that it is in fact closer to castration, especially since slaves or men on the losing side of a war have been so circumcised in lieu of actual castration. Also would he consider that children have literally lost or had their genitalia horribly damaged beyond saving due to a “botched” operation?

Recalling Walsh’s preoccupation about amputations being for limbs only; by his own logic, neither is breast removal an amputation, then. Does he not know that the breast is but a modified sweat gland to begin with? Furthermore in response to the common attitude that alleges that circumcisions are like inoculations that you do for children as a part of medical practice you generally do in caring for your infant; if circumcision makes sense so his rate of diseases can lower, then by that logic those mastectomies that these girls are having would be great things, since they’d be reducing the risk of breast cancer!

Since we’re on the subject of the argument for genital mutilation on the basis of alleged medical parental care, the next error:

And parents frequently make decision for their infants. In fact, I’m not sure how else to raise an infant.

Does that make piercing an infant girls’ ears during infancy an acceptable act? Does that qualify as raising an infant?

Let’s take a deep dive into this “decision” parents are making for their infants. Let’s make it so that even Matt Walsh can understand.

  • The decision to remove not “just the tip” as commonly and falsely advertised, but 33-50% of penile skin along with the sensitive nerve endings for fine touch as well as protection of the glans which then becomes thickened like a callus.
  • The decision to put the male infant through literal extreme pain resulting in brain changes due to high levels of cortisol as well as neurogenic shock (what circumcisers and their nurses euphemistically refer to as “sleeping through the operation”)
  • The decision to leave the male infant with a wound that is left alone and open to infections, including but not limited to herpesmeningitis, sepsis and cysts.
  • The decision to doom so early in life the prospects of a proper sexual experience during his adulthood onwards, by removing the functional gliding and sensitive component.
  • The decision to consign the male infant to the increased likelihood of sexual dysfunction during his adulthood, loss of sensation, and alexithymia – “the inability to recognize or describe one’s own emotions” which is connected to depression, and even suicide if the truth about what you’ve done to him comes to light. Next time a guy tells you he’s fine after being circumcised as an infant, that’s probably the alexithymia talking.
  • The decision to play American Roulette with your infant male. 

By the last part, I mean risking dying just for being born male. It’s not a gun but a knife that you play American Roulette with, and it never misses. The gamble is whether he actually dies of  infection, the blood loss, or other ensuing complications that get brushed off euphemistically as Sudden Infant Death Syndrome so the circumcisers aren’t held accountable.

If you think you’re practicing a medical act for your son by doing this, for example if you think it reduces your son’s chances of an STD or if it’s cleaner, then once again the same can be said about mastectomies, or even your run-of-the-mill female genital mutilation. And if you think you’re going to make him more appealing to ignorant American women cruel enough to self and others to prefer a “cut” penis, then you’re a sexual groomer of your own son; there is nothing else to describe you.

And finally it’s time to pick apart the last mistake of Mr. Walsh:

You aren’t “infringing on their liberty.” Come on, that’s just absurd. Make your point without resorting to laughably hysterical rhetoric.

I’ll refer back to the fact that a parent precludes his son’s ownership of his own intact sex organ before he even has developed the ability to exercise his own volition. Does Walsh understand the actual meaning and message of liberty or is he just too much of a conservative to look past his own neotraditionalist priorities and how liberty applied at large doesn’t always go the way he may want to?

Once again, let’s make clear this so even Matt Walsh can understand it:

  • Self-ownership is a crucial, integral component to the philosophy of liberty.
  • Self-ownership as a value applies to the human individual.
  • A human is valued as such upon, and even before, birth.
  • Self-ownership therefore is already in effect at infancy.

Let us also debunk the problem with the often-touted “parent’s choice”.

  • Liberty is about negative rights; entitlements are positive rights.
  • Negative rights are in line with self-ownership, and the right to be uninfringed by the force of others.
  • Positive rights presume the “right” over another individual. Reminder that this is the opposite of liberty.
  • The responsibility to the life you bring into the world is consistent with self-ownership; personal accountability and liberty are not in conflict.
  • Legitimate medical practices as well as raising and caring for the child are both consistent with the aforementioned responsibility and the fact that you are cultivating the child into a being that can exercise and become aware of his own self-ownership.
  • Non-medical or cosmetic acts do not count towards raising the child and depending on the lasting effect is tantamount to abuse of the child.
  • Male genital mutilation is a non-medical, cosmetic, and downright harmful act – by all definitions acts of entitlement over another being.
  • Self-ownership of the child is under assault by MGM as it includes both damage and theft of a crucial part of the male anatomy at a point in his life in which he is neither mentally or physically able to resist.
  • The child’s liberty is infringed via the assault on his self-ownership.

In short, there is no such thing as a “parent’s choice” aside from the best practices of raising one’s own child and the responsibility to his safety. Routine infant circumcision is a betrayal of that trust, safety, and the respect of self-ownership.

Also by Walsh’s own logic, anyone who practices FGM are not assaulting girls’ liberties. Oh wait, chances may be high that he may in fact consider it such an assault. What’s the big difference in this case: “It’s much worse for a girl”, “Infants have no rights”, “We must protect the girls but boys got to learn to take it”? Gynocentrists are so predictable.

The reader may be wondering right now whether the title I gave this article, “What is a Man?”, was nothing more than a way to grab attention as well as a pastiche of Walsh’s film “What is a Woman?” I confess that my intents leaned towards provocation in this regard, but if we think about it, we can very well ask and then answer the question “What is a Man?” in the context of the subject of the intact, whole, and unsacrificed male.

“What is a man?” may as well be a question that Walsh could ask himself, but I cannot trust any answer he may have.

So what is a man, anyway? I’m not here to give you a comprehensive answer on that at this moment, furthermore as individuals a man cannot afford to be condensed to one definition or even one archetype. For that matter, women as individuals likewise cannot afford to be so condensed (so much for “What is a woman?” am I right?). However the question of archetypes and the permutation of models for men and women is a subject I will save for a future article. In the meantime, let’s clarify a few things that we can:

A man has his liberty, and his self-ownership, his free will to exercise himself in this world as an individual as well as his own expression of masculinity.

As a masculine, self-owning free being, a man has his desires – including prospects of pairing with a woman counterpart, which under proper circumstances include his expression of sexual desire. (We are speaking of the heterosexual world for the moment, though it is clear that those that aren’t have their own such expressions and desire)

A man is fully equipped with everything he needs anatomically to exercise his sexual desires peacefully. He has a foreskin that is in no way a minor detail of this anatomy, but a crucially functional one. It is not an accident of birth.

Here we now have the conceptualization of the anatomically intact man, and answers the question in this respect. The act of routine infant circumcision, then, boils down to a mitigation of the qualities that make one a male. If foreskin amputations were regarded indeed as a form of “castration lite”, it is an act that translates into making the male less of one. The answer to “What is a man?” is not “something you cut the anatomy of”. “Man up” has been the go-to form of goading and shaming to advertise the circumcision industry and cultural practice. Routine infant circumcision is not the response to “What is a man?” but rather “How to destroy a man?”

What grand irony that it is the conservative that continues to moralize and defend this practice in the same breath as he decries the trans agenda for child operations. What irony, that the conservative who talks about “real men” and how masculinity is important to keep society going is the same one who wishes to surgically lower how much of a male someone is, so early in life. This is nothing short of punishment for males for being male – the radical feminists would be proud. It is no surprise to me why conservatives like Walsh and Tucker Carlson are so eager to “establish dialogue” with Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminists just to own the biological males.

A few more thoughts to close off on:

I am betting everybody in the men’s movement and intactivist movement who read this, if they aren’t instead incensed by Walsh’s hypocrisy, are howling with laughter at the prospect of him demanding “rallies outside of hospitals that butcher children” as if it were a brilliant new proposition. Clearly he hasn’t heard of Bloodstained Men and Their Friends before…or maybe he has but is instead opting to screech with eyes closed and fingers in his ears whenever someone reminds him of it. In short, Mr. Walsh – there already is a movement of which you speak of. The ball is already rolling. Frankly, you’re proving to be just an obstacle without a good point to make.

I can only hope that we can bring this hypocrisy into light so much that the likes of Matt Walsh will have no choice but to stop ignoring it. They should be made to admit their blundering attitude on the subject and the fact that they’ve disingenuously grandstanded on a subject that goes deeper than they are willing to admit themselves. It is a travesty that what is a toxic fad by comparison is the specific type of child mutilation given disproportionately more attention than the vastly practiced, normalized and casually encouraged child mutilation that is MGM. This mutilation runs so deep in the cultural practice that the men who survive it are like most male domestic abuse victims: in denial, perhaps feeling like they deserved it, and do not consider what happened to them as abuse.

If anybody takes a stand against child mutilation, routine infant circumcision is rightfully the forefront issue. Matt Walsh symbolically and literally mocks the intactivist movement as he envisions himself as the forerunner against the kind of mutilation he can conveniently strike a crusade against. Consider these points the next time you think of Walsh as “brave” for speaking out myopically on an issue he has no moral authority on.

My thanks to the following links for sources on the damage of MGM:

https://breakingtheglasses.blogspot.com/p/intactivist-links.html#.YvsaNxTMJD_

https://menarehuman.com/mgm/embed/#?secret=85aFUwMFkk#?secret=Uh2tvSjFu5

Also thanks to Peter Wright for his input as well as Nikos Anti-MGM from Twitter.

The ‘Spirit of Chivalry’ personified as female in 1845 London exhibition

The following graphic depicting the spirit of chivalry was exhibited in Westminster Hall, London, in August 1845. The author of this image describes the scene as follows:

The spirit, or “personification” of Chivalry is surrounded by men of various pursuits — religious, military, and civil — who represent, as by an Upper Court, or House, the final acquisition of her honours and rewards. Beneath, as not having obtained, though within reach of the Crown, a young Knight vows himself to chivalric services, attended by his Page, and invited by his Lady’s favour. Beside, or around him, in various grades, other figures are introduced to connect the abstract representation of Chivalry with its general recognition of intellectual influences. Among them the Painter, the Sculptor, the Man of Science; the Bard inspiring Youth by his recitals; the Troubadour and his Mistress; the Palmer from the Holy Land; and the Poet-Historian, from whom future ages must derive their knowledge of the spirit and the deeds of Chivalry.

The Spirit of Chivalry – Westminster Hall Exhibition (1845)

The following graphic depicting the spirit of chivalry was exhibited in Westminster Hall, London, in August 1845. The author of this image describes the scene as follows:
The spirit, or “personification” of Chivalry is surrounded by men of various pursuits — religious, military, and civil — who represent, as by an Upper Court, or House, the final acquisition of her honours and rewards. Beneath, as not having obtained, though within reach of the Crown, a young Knight vows himself to chivalric services, attended by his Page, and invited by his Lady’s favour. Beside, or around him, in various grades, other figures are introduced to connect the abstract representation of Chivalry with its general recognition of intellectual influences. Among them the Painter, the Sculptor, the Man of Science; the Bard inspiring Youth by his recitals; the Troubadour and his Mistress; the Palmer from the Holy Land; and the Poet-Historian, from whom future ages must derive their knowledge of the spirit and the deeds of Chivalry.

Gynocentrism: The Real Gender Cult

By Vernon Meigs

In light of the trend of transgender mania and woke and politically correct culture, those on the conservative traditionalist side are keen on throwing around terms like “gender cult.” This gender cult they speak of is that of gender subjectivism, denial of organic attributes of sex, and divorcing the metaphysical and behavioral aspects of sex from the biological real-world component – what progressives would like to call sex assigned at birth.

It’s not that they’re necessarily wrong here, calling this a gender cult. It is; albeit a specialized reactionary one that professes to rebel against gender norms. Ironically enough transgender identity relies on stereotyped ideas about gender to then say they are defying it.

What I want to address is the idiocy of those who claim to be fighting this gender cult, namely the hypocrisy of calling it a gender cult when they as neotraditionalists are likely to indulge and take for granted a gender cult of their own, one which is more massive and has a bigger, more longstanding history than even feminism itself.

Gynocentrism and gyneolatry contain qualities in every way attributable to an actual gender cult. The fact that it actually gave way to feminism, which in turn gave way to political transgender ideology, is evident but conveniently ignored too often by these conservatives. They don’t want to address it because, as practitioners of the gynocentric gender cult, they either are dependent on it to keep the approval of the women in their immediate lives as well as from the public, or suffer from a serious normalized case of Stockholm Syndrome.

Anyway, to the heart of the subject of this article: The gender cult that the traditional conservative promotes and refuses to denounce.

Men are expected to die in wars while the royal class of women are subject to protection by these men. That is a gender cult.

Men are expected, from the point of courtship til well after the divorce, to financially and in effect materially provide for womankind. That is a gender cult.

Men are expected at one day old to have a crucial component of their genitalia ripped off, despite the risk of infection, physical complications that follow, and death, as well as guaranteed psychological trauma manifesting itself at varying degrees later in life — apparently for the sake of anywhere from Sandra Bullock’s, Oprah’s, and Kate Beckinsale’s facial creams to the depraved whims of women sexually attracted to broken manhood. That is a gender cult. Circumcision of baby boys is a gender cult.

Women are regarded as equivalent of nature, designated as the big choosers, and the men as vassals that must commit degrading acts of altruism to earn their attention, this despite the fact that men and women are both choosers and members of nature together. This one-sided attitude is a gender cult.

Families, in particular in North America, favor supporting daughters after adulthood, whereas men are generally kicked out of the house when they reach the age of 18, expected to fend for themselves because “a man should take care of himself” else he gets shamed as a dweller in his parents’ basement with no life. Women categorically reject men at the slightest hint of them receiving assistance in any such way in the dating market, for instance. I call that a gender cult.

To engage in romance a man must first place himself in a position of self-degradation of bending his knee in front of a woman and present her with a hunk of rock, which may or may not be a blood diamond, that he has spent a ridiculous amount of his fortune on. That’s the first edge. What is either a curt rejection and no further regard by the woman for the trouble the man went through or, if she did accept, then the wedding will be even more of a fortune lost on the man’s part and it will be again when the divorce follows, which happens at this point too often to not consider it an event to expect, and practically schedule. Either way, royal woman looks down at vassal man. That is the image of the man going down on his knee and proposing. That is a gender cult.

Violence against men, especially by women, is subject to laughter. The very act of entertaining the idea of violence against women, especially by men, is grounds for ostracism at best, violent retribution at worst. Self-defense is not tolerated even if the man is faced with a rabid crazed blade wielding unhinged psycho woman on a rampage. That is a gender cult.

Happy wife, happy life. If Momma ain’t happy, ain’t nobody happy. Placing women on status of maniacal ruler whose whims must be satisfied else the man’s existence is not justified. That is a gender cult.

To the traditional conservatives out there, and anyone who professes to ally with feminists and other misandrists just so they could own the trans gender cult — this discussion is for you. The gender cult which you profess to wage war on is but a fad compared to the grander gender cult that is gynocentrism that you take for granted and bask in.

I’ll close with something that I want you to get through to your head. Gynocentrism is a gender cult. It is the biggest such cult. Gyneolatry is woman-worshipping in this gender cult. Biogynocentrism is the means of rationalizing it with the alleged argument from biology and evolution in this gender cult. Male disposal is the end goal of this gender cult. Gynocentrism is a gender cult.

MGTOW aligns with an LGBTQIA category: Aromantic

The headline is likely to provoke an emotional reaction from both the woke and the virulently anti-woke, but I stride forth with my flack jacket on in order to make a salient point: that far from being a fringe group of misogynistic terrorists who refuse to court the ladies, MGTOW is perfectly aligned with the LGBTQIA category ‘Aromantic’ – a term indicating a profound disinterest in romantic love.

When it comes to romantic love they simply don’t want it.

I was surprised to learn that the ‘A’ in LGBTQIA can mean either asexual or aromantic, as described in the following LGBTQIA Wiki Fandom definition:

Aromantic, often shortened to aro, describes people who do not experience romantic attraction. One of the meanings of the A in LGBTQIA+ is Aromantic.[1] Aromanticism may involve forms of attraction that are not necessarily romantic, or interests in relationships that are intimate in other ways. There is no singular experience of aromanticism.[3]

The aromantic spectrum, also known as “aro-spec”, ranges from aromantic to alloromantic, the latter referring to people who regularly and consistently experience romantic attraction.[1] People within the aromantic spectrum are part of a community that has much in common. They may use the label aromantic as a close fit for their experiences or use other labels that further describe them.

Men Going Their Own Way are unmoved by the fantasy of romantic love, viewing its latent BDSM overtones as a theatre of female dominatrixes and male subs, a model that has grown from a kind of sexual feudalism instituted by affluent ladies of the medieval era. MGTOW typically reject this model because it requires men to go down on a literal and proverbial knee before a woman. This qualifies MGTOW as Aromantic because, as stated on the LGBTQIA Wiki Fandom page, aromantic individuals “may choose to opt out of anything coded as romantic or feel discomfort with the idea of romantic relations.”

 

I should add, for the slow of mind, that MGTOW orientation is concerned with a wider array of issues than this. However, the romance problem forms a molten core around which many of their concerns for male self-determination revolve.

The result of ‘Men going their aromantic way’ is in some ways striking. These men have inaugurated an enduring sex strike, putting quietly into practice what women routinely threaten if they don’t get their own way – as we recently saw from Joy Behar who called for ‘sex strike’ after Supreme Court abortion law leak. As usual it seems men have beaten women to the punch:

As this graph demonstrates, young men are driving a decline in sex.  Perhaps more accurately they may be rejecting the pathological contamination of sexual intimacy with romantic love – aka, the idea that men need to demonstrate obeisance and servitude toward “romantic” partners before being “rewarded” with sex.

The sex slump is not sufficiently explained by labeling reluctant men as ‘involuntary celibates,’ because the yearly baseline for numbers of incels has blown out. A more plausible explanation is that men of the West are becoming increasingly aromantic – much as they did en masse in Japan with the rise of grass eaters. This is certainly true of the growing numbers of MGTOW, who may be interested in other kinds of sex and relationship (casual relationships, intimate friendships, non-romantic intimate partnerships, relationships of peers, etc) but who are no longer moved by the false fairy-tale of romance.

Far from being a fringe group that warrants deplatforming, men going their aromantic way deserve to be embraced as a speshul minority,  deserving of special rights and protections afforded to every other vulnerable demographic. Is it not true that MGTOW are bullied, harassed and treated with extreme bigotry? That should qualify them for special protections and considerations under the law. 

MGTOW probably won’t be entering a Pride float anytime soon, but in theory their cause is every bit as deserving under the umbrella of that one, powerful word – AROMANTIC.

Nothing Envy and the Fascration Complex – by David L. Miller

The following excerpts are from David L. Miller’s 1991 essay Why Men Are Mad: Nothing Envy and The Fascration Complex. At a time when multiple sexualities are now topical, including transgendered identities, Miller’s essay provides an imaginative springboard for contemporary audiences. In this article Miller emphasizes men’s adherence to ‘patriarchal’ fantasies while simultaneously harboring a wish to be free of same, and while ‘patriarchy theory’ was a feminist invention of 1980s-90s when the author penned these thoughts (now considered an imaginary artifact that holds questionable explanatory power), the essay itself contributes new and complimentary layers to Freud’s ‘penis envy’ theory. He does this by posing that men, too, may envy the un-membered state of womanhood. Whether this perspective aids in better understanding the dynamics of transgender and other sexualities will be left to the imagination of the reader.

________________________________________________________________________

NothingEnvy and the Fascration Complex

By David L. Miller

One clue to the hurt men feel, to their crazy rage, can be discerned in an essay entitled “Some Psychical Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes” (1925), where Freud describes a traumatic moment of childhood, the discovery of penis envy. The little girl “has seen it and knows that she is without it and wants to have it” (252).

But, according to Freud, the little boy’s experience, or at least the screen-memory of the experience, is different. Only later when confronted with the threat of castration does the boy or man recall the sight of the little girl. Then he knows of the real possibility of losing a part of his body. There arises an anxiety — the so-called “castration complex” — together with two possible reactions to women: either “horror of the mutilated creature” or “triumphant contempt for her” (Freud, 1961: 252; 1959; 1964b; Du Bois: 10-11). The neurotic consequence of childhood trauma for the woman is envy and inferiority; for the man, anxiety and superiority.

There is an asymmetry in Freud’s theory. Why has he not moved to observe envy in the man as in the woman, and anxiety in the woman as in the man? Is there no complex in the woman to correspond to castration in the man? And is there no envy in the man to correspond to the envy for the penis in the woman?

A few theorists and therapists have wondered about these questions. Bruno Bettelheim thought that “penis envy in girls and castration anxiety in boys have been over-emphasized” by psychoanalysis, and that there is “a possibly much deeper psychological layer in boys that has been relatively neglected.” He called this deeper matter “vagina envy” (20). Karen Horney, also, has spoken of a “femininity complex” in men and has raised the question of “why no corresponding impulse to compensate herself for her penis envy is found in women” (61; also 21, 60). But in this theorizing, the envy noted in the male has to do with the woman’s ability to bear children, “pregnancy envy,” as Eric Fromm calls it (233). This focuses on only one aspect of woman, an aspect which a patriarchal tradition is eager to totalize.

* * *

If the little girl sees something, and then envies this thing, one could say that the little boy sees nothing and envies that nothing. The traumatic physical moment produces psychological “nothing-envy.” Nothing-envy is the desire lurking as the diabolical other-side of the castration anxiety. The fundamental ambivalence of the psyche demands that a person face the two-sidedness of fear. There is a latent wish in the symptom of anxiety. Castration is what a man wants as well as what he most fears. What does a man want? Nothing.

* * *

Similarly, men have no desire to be deprived of their penises. This is not what nothing-envy is about. The penis, besides being an efficient piece of plumbing, gives a good deal of pleasure. But the phallus is a different thing. The very patriarchy which has connected dominance, power, aggression, initiative, rational meaning, thinking and commitment to maleness, that perspective which has deprived women of a phallus, has also loaded more on men than they wish to bear. What a relief it would be to be rid of this thing, to have nothing.

Ernest Wallwork has called my attention to evidence of this nothing-envy in men. A bit of play familiar to all men from their days in school locker rooms is that of pulling the penis back and holding it between one’s legs so that one looks like a woman. The play is the symptom of a wish. The little boy looking upon the little girl in wonder experiences both fear and desire. The trauma produces not only a castration complex but also nothing-envy. Mysterium Tremendum et fascinosum: I am afraid of nothing, of losing something, and, at the same time, I am drawn to nothing. Freud noticed the former, but he missed the latter.

* * *

There is a long litany of female affirmations of women’s weavings, and they have little or nothing to do with envy of men. Rather, these testimonies and expressions have deep archetypal rooting in Athena and Arachne, in Persephone, in Philomela, and in Charlotte’s Web (see Gubar: 74, 89, 91). What is the missing female complex to which weaving points? I propose to name it “the fascration complex,” drawing upon a Mediterranean word having to do with weaving. Fasces is a bundle of twigs woven together, a bit of wicker work, the work of the wicca (who is by no means a witch). The term fasces gives us our word “basket,” as well as “fasten,” “fascination,” and “fascist.”

What the little boy sees when he gazes upon what is non-a-thing is the female “basket” and later he will come to admire the webs and tapestries a woman can weave with it. She is anxious about losing her basket, her weaving, her fasces, for this, not the penis, is her power.

* * *

An erotics of male desire discloses a projection of a wish based on lack… a lack of nothing. It is a desire for nothing because men ‘don’t got plenty of nothing.’ The irony, of course, is that that is exactly what they have plenty of — which is why they are mad. The return of the repressed is the return of something that never went away. A man never did not have nothing. If a man could withdraw his projection onto women of nothing, he could be who he is, one-in-himself, male and female, something and nothing. There is nothing of which to be envious. We are always and already nothing.

* * *

Why Men Are Mad: NothingEnvy and the Fascration Complex, by David L Miller, Spring Journal 51, Spring: Dallas, 1991. [FULL TEXT pdf made available by permission of the author].