.

So why is white male+female supremacy a euphemism for white women worship? Because men’s part in the much touted “supremacy” culture is geared largely to the role of servicing white women, a role otherwise known as chivalry or benevolent sexism.

Whether men traditionally called her ma’am, m’lady, madam or some other highfalutin title, the sexual dynamic was always one that positions woman as dominatrix, and the man as submissive liegemen – i.e., it closely resembles sadomasochism. That same sadomasochism has been the centrepiece of the women’s movement in which, for example, early feminists looked down sneeringly on their ebony lessers, claiming as Susan B. Anthony did, “I will cut off this right arm of mine before I will ever work or demand the ballot for the Negro and not the woman,” and which we see continued in the spa and nail shops which have exclusively women of color carving the toejam out of pampered and ’empowered’ white women’s nails.

In her blog post Three Cheers for White Men, medievalist Rachel Fulton Brown waxes poetic about men’s having aided and abetted a culture of worshipping white women — a worship that we know has led to the three evils of misandry, racism, and (white) female narcissism. Here is her post:

1. When white women (see Marie de France and Eleanor of Aquitaine) invented chivalry and courtly love, white men agreed that it was better for knights to spend their time protecting women rather than raping them, and even agreed to write songs for them rather than expecting them to want to have sex with them without being forced.

2. When white men who were celibate (see the canon lawyers and theologians of the twelfth century and thereafter) argued that marriage was a sacrament valid only if both the man and the woman consented, white men exerted themselves to become good husbands rather than expecting women to live as their slaves.

3. When white women (see Christine de Pizan, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the suffragettes) invented feminism, white men supported them (see John Stuart Mill) and even went so far as to vote (because only men could vote at the time) to let them vote, not to mention hiring them as workers and supporting their education.

Fulton Brown copped a lot of flack for praising white men’s chivalry and women’s associated pedestalization. But she was right, even if I would radically differ with her in response to this history — ie. my reaction is one of disgust and rejection of the narcissism and sadomasochism embedded in the heart of the same construct.

Alison Phipps, a Professor of Gender Studies at Sussex University, recently published an essay titled White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism, and more recently a book titled Me, Not You: The Trouble With Mainstream Feminism.

There is much detail in her feminism-inspired corpus that I am at odds with, and no doubt much in my work that she too would be at odds with. However, I find her thesis readable in parts where describing the power of white women’s tears (a tradition I refer to as damseling), along with white men’s symbiotic enmeshment with those tears in the form of “chivalric” protection frequently involving warrantless, exaggerated violence, especially in colonial settings. This compact is aptly referred to by Phipps as “a circuit” between white women’s perceived vulnerabilities and white men’s reactivity on their behalf.

Phipps’ essay is the first from a feminist perspective that positions males and females as conspiring together as a circuitous dyad, a position contrasted with that of most other feminist authors who prefer to lump all power and evil with men, and all goodness with women. Phipps describes the sexual relations contract of white European descendants as malignant and exploitative, and while I do agree with her in certain key respects I find her thesis too reductive and totalising in its demonization.

The following are a few excerpts from her essay on White Women’s Tears:

“Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people.

“In an article on #MeToo, Jamilah Lemieux (2017) commented: ‘white women know how to be victims. They know just how to bleed and weep in the public square, they fundamentally understand that they are entitled to sympathy’. Lemieux was not claiming the disclosures of #MeToo were not genuine; she was highlighting the power brought to mainstream feminism by the power of white women’s tears. White-lady tears, to use Cooper’s phrase: bourgeois white women’s tears are the ultimate symbol of femininity, evoking the damsel in distress and the mourning, lamenting women of myth (Phipps 2020, p71)… the power of bourgeois white women’s tears was solidified in the modern colonial period, as ‘women’s protection’ became key to the deadly disciplinary power that maintained racialised and classed regimes of extraction and exploitation.

“Structurally, bourgeois white women’s tears support what Sharpe (2016, p16) calls ‘reappearances of the slave ship’: ‘protecting (white) women’ fuels the necropolitics of criminal punishment and the border regimes of Fortress Europe, North America and other parts of the world. These tears enter a world in which marginalised people are disposable, whether they are Black people killed by police, migrants left to starve or drown (Sharpe 2016, pp43-44, 54), or trans people and sex workers (many of them people of colour) disproportionately left to survive outside bourgeois families, communities and the law. The circuit between white women’s tears and white men’s rage means that because we cry, marginalised people can die. As some forms of reactionary feminism exploit this circuit in their engagements with the far right, their narratives of victimhood can themselves be understood as violence. The ship, then, stays afloat: captained by white men, but suspended in a pool of white women’s tears.

After reading Phipps’ essay I’m immediately reminded of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old African American who was lynched in Mississippi in 1955 after being falsely accused of offending a white woman. White men bashed him for offending a white women’s fragile sensibilities (which it turns out was fabricated by the woman) and proceeded to showcase their “chivalry” via the act of torturing and brutally bashing the boy to death. In this one image is captured the scenario painted by Phipps – the compact that would keep white women (and their white male protectors) at the top of the food chain.

While I won’t join Phipps in her general malignment of white men, the question remains have certain men throughout history showcased white supremacy, sometimes brutally? Yes they have – but to what ends? I’m going to finish with an unpopular conclusion: that white male supremacy, if and when it has existed, has been driven partly, and perhaps even largely, by a desire to protect a culture of white female supremacy. Keep in mind that this conclusion is becoming recognized not only in the rarefied writings of feminists and MRAs, but also among the everyday populace which has in recent times immortalized the ‘Karen’ figure as an example of racist, misandrist, and narcissistic entitlement.

 

 

In a time when anti-white racism and critical race theory are gaining momentum (something I do not wish to fuel), keep in mind that some white women are not like that, even if many are. It still pays to follow the dictum of Martin Luther King who encouraged us to look at content of character before color of skin, and by that route we avoid the fallacy of exaggerated class guilt.

See also:

• Women of color feminists vs. white feminist tears
• Damseling, chivalry and courtly love in the feminist movement
• Two Modes of Damseling
• The evolution of gynocentrism via romance writings
• Gynocentrism As A Narcissistic Pathology
• Bastardized chivalry: from concern for weakness to sexual exploitation

 

 

Alison Phipps, a Professor of Gender Studies at Sussex University, recently published an essay titled White tears, white rage: Victimhood and (as) violence in mainstream feminism, and more recently a book titled Me, Not You: The Trouble With Mainstream Feminism.

There is much detail in her corpus that I am at odds with, and no doubt much in my work that she too would be at odds with. However, I find her thesis broadly accurate when describing the power of white women’s tears (a tradition I refer to as damseling), along with white men’s symbiotic enmeshment with those tears in the form of “chivalric” protection frequently involving warrantless, exaggerated violence, especially in colonial settings. This compact is aptly referred to by Phipps as “a circuit” between white women’s perceived vulnerabilities and white men’s reactivity on their behalf.

Phipps’ essay is the first from a feminist perspective that positions males and females as conspiring together as a circuitous dyad, a position contrasted with that of most other feminist authors who prefer to lump all power and evil with men, and all goodness with women. Phipps describes the sexual relations contract of white European descendants as malignant and exploitative, and while I do agree with her in certain key respects I find her thesis overly reductive and totalising in its demonization.

The following are a few excerpts from her essay on White Women’s Tears:

“Using #MeToo as a starting point, this paper argues that the cultural power of mainstream white feminism partly derives from the cultural power of white tears. This in turn depends on the dehumanisation of people of colour, who were constructed in colonial ‘race science’ as incapable of complex feeling (Schuller 2018). Colonialism also created a circuit between bourgeois white women’s tears and white men’s rage, often activated by allegations of rape, which operated in the service of economic extraction and exploitation. This circuit endures, abetting the criminal punishment system and the weaponisation of ‘women’s safety’ by the various border regimes of the right. It has especially been utilised by reactionary forms of feminism, which set themselves against sex workers and trans people.

“In an article on #MeToo, Jamilah Lemieux (2017) commented: ‘white women know how to be victims. They know just how to bleed and weep in the public square, they fundamentally understand that they are entitled to sympathy’. Lemieux was not claiming the disclosures of #MeToo were not genuine; she was highlighting the power brought to mainstream feminism by the power of white women’s tears. White-lady tears, to use Cooper’s phrase: bourgeois white women’s tears are the ultimate symbol of femininity, evoking the damsel in distress and the mourning, lamenting women of myth (Phipps 2020, p71), and it is likely that this power is not fully accessible to working class white women, who are often figures of classed disgust (Tyler 2008). While it might date back to the ancients, the power of bourgeois white women’s tears was solidified in the modern colonial period, as ‘women’s protection’ became key to the deadly disciplinary power that maintained racialised and classed regimes of extraction and exploitation.

“The narrative – that reactionary feminists are the real victims but their voices are not being heard – achieves several aims. It disseminates reactionary feminist ideas; it deploys Strategic White Womanhood to avoid accountability; it uses the device of white women’s tears to deny humanity to the Other. Reactionary feminists seize womanhood – and personhood – while sex workers become uncaring ‘happy hookers’ and trans women become shadowy threats. We see the weeping Madonna versus the unfeeling whore. We see the weeping survivor versus the menacing predator. Neither sex workers or trans women are entitled to complex feelings or to claim victimisation on their own behalf.

“Structurally, bourgeois white women’s tears support what Sharpe (2016, p16) calls ‘reappearances of the slave ship’: ‘protecting (white) women’ fuels the necropolitics of criminal punishment and the border regimes of Fortress Europe, North America and other parts of the world. These tears enter a world in which marginalised people are disposable, whether they are Black people killed by police, migrants left to starve or drown (Sharpe 2016, pp43-44, 54), or trans people and sex workers (many of them people of colour) disproportionately left to survive outside bourgeois families, communities and the law. The circuit between white women’s tears and white men’s rage means that because we cry, marginalised people can die. As some forms of reactionary feminism exploit this circuit in their engagements with the far right, their narratives of victimhood can themselves be understood as violence. The ship, then, stays afloat: captained by white men, but suspended in a pool of white women’s tears.

__________________________________

 

See Also:

• Women of Color Feminists Vs. White Feminist Tears
• The Near-Irresistible Lure of Damseling
• Damseling, Chivalry and Courtly Love In The Feminist Tradition
• The Origins Of Damseling
• Two Modes Of Damseling
• Damseling By Women In European Politics

 

 

In the following study How Venus Got Her Furs: Courtly Romance as Sadomasochistic Erotica, sadomasochism is shown to characterize the European sexual relations contract in the form of masochistic-chivalry and romantic love. It can also be observed that the same sadomasochistic culture has spawned the rise of gynocentrism, feminism, and the essentially male-led servicing of these same traditions.

Article reprinted here by permission of Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.

Hate sex. Those two words appearing together come across as awkward, even oxymoronic, for who in their right mind hates sex? Its true that we might hate sex with the wrong person according to our criteria of what’s hot, but very few people in this world hate sex altogether.

The phrase hate sex however isn’t intended to suggest a person hates sex, but rather that they desire it with a person they are currently fighting with or alienated from.

Other variations on the phrase include rage sex, grudge sex, and angry sex, each offering slightly different meanings but often tied together in the act of having sex with someone you don’t feel so good about.

Sex of this kind is widely believed to be more intense than normal sex, and for that reason the phrase “We love having make-up sex” is a common euphemism for angry grinding.

The begging question is why would a couple want to have sex if they are experiencing serious resentment or alienation?

One school of psychology provides some answers.

British Object Relations psychologists claim that if relationship bonds are constantly rendered insecure then the desire for sex is harnessed as a way to reinstate vanishing relationship security. When relationships become fragmented, weak or broken, we desire to be more in synch again, more loved, more on the same page. We want to reaffirm that our future together is secure, that we can still walk into the sunset hand in hand, worldview intact.

Instead of that security, we feel the relationship has become tenuous, hanging by a thread, on the verge of dissolving into….. the unknown. Insecurity and anxiety reign. In this scenario hate sex is utilized in the service of fixing weak intimate bonds, an instinctual attempt to repair those bonds through the complex release of hormones that ultimately serve to re-establish love and connection.

The theory that sex repairs a failing relationship bond was first proposed back in 1941 by psychologist Ronald Fairbairn, who announced a deviation from the traditional Freudian formula that humans are primarily pleasure-seekers. For Fairbairn we are first and foremost “object seekers” by which phrase he meant seekers of other people to have relationships with:

“Freud spoke of libidinal aims and defined these aims in terms of erotogenic zones – as oral aims, anal aims and so on. What he described however are not really aims but modes of dealing with objects; and the zones in question should properly be regarded, not as the dictators of aims, but as the servants of aims… The real libidinal aim is the establishment of satisfactory relationships with objects; and it is, accordingly, the object that constitutes the true libidinal goal.”¹

Fairbairn’s position is summarized, in the words of GoodTherapy.org, by stating that the primary motivational factors in one’s life are based on human relationships, rather than sexual or aggressive triggers. Object relations is a variation of psychoanalytic theory which diverges from Freud’s belief that we are pleasure seeking beings; instead it suggests that humans seek relationships.

The Object Relations theorists view hate-sex as a way to potentially relieve tension over failed or failing relationships, and also as a vehicle by which that relationship might be re-established. The theory is summarized perfectly by Fairbairn who says, “Explicit pleasure-seeking is thus not a means of achieving libidinal aims, but a means of mitigating the failure of these aims.”

“Pleasure-seeking is not a means of achieving libidinal aims,
but a means of mitigating failure of these aims.”

Is it true that sexual pleasure is a way to mitigate and repair failing relationships? The urgency of hate-fucking as it arises on top of a fierce argument appears to support this hypothesis, and if we accept it we are faced with a revision to the goals of our pleasure-seeking culture – no longer is sex an act of pleasure alone but a psychobiological reflex intended to repair relationship damage and foster attachment.

That such damage is rife in modern relationships is undeniable. The misandry, misogyny, gynocentrism and the growth of cultural narcissism are enough to make any intimate bond unravel, including those of biological family. As mentioned in another article the toying with relationship bonds to extract compliance from a partner is a particular cause for weakness.

As cruel as it sounds, withholding affection, sex, approval and love have become part of women’s repertoire employed to coerce men into compliance and servitude (eg. “If you don’t earn more money, I’ll stop loving you”) – a coercion that men often acquiesce to in order to salvage what feels like an increasingly fragile relationship bond. Indeed, one of the core strategies of romantic love is to keep the relationship bond in the realm of tantalizing denial, a formula that emulates the techniques of animal behaviorism, but instead of the model being learned from Skinner or Pavlov, it is taught by grassroots dating culture; the message being to keep your man in a position of uncertainty. Aside from other relationship tensions, this approach to relationships is one that potentially elicits the insecure grudge fuck.

The obsession some men have with sex, porn, prostitutes, sexbots, sex toys etc. raises a question of whether the intensity is partly driven by frustrated opportunities for human attachment, with hate-sex themes arising from unconscious aims of mitigating relationship frustrations. Whatever the case, it’s an open question as to why some men indulge in hate fucking and fantasizing about same. More broadly, we might ask why any securely-attached couple would bother nursing regular grudges and hate in the first place? The answer is, securely attached couples probably wouldn’t!

Next time you hear someone talk about hate sex as if it were fun, just a little “make up” sex as they like to call it, consider how much fun is really involved in a big picture of that relationship. If hate sex is an attempt to repair relationships damaged by emotional manipulation, alienation and abuse — especially if happening on a regular basis — then it’s about as far away from fun as you can possibly get.

*This revised articled first published on June 23, 2017.

References:

[1] Ronald Fairbairn, Psychoanalytic Studies of the Personality, pp. 82-83

Further reading:

Don’t Make Love, Make Hate: Have You Ever Hate-F*cked?
Why You Should be Having Sex With the Man You Hate

By Paul Elam

“The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned, cannot, indeed must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified mis-understanding. ‘Live,’ Nietzsche says, ‘as though the day were here.’ It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal––carries the cross of the redeemer––not in the bright moments of his tribe’s great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair.”  

Joseph Campbell ~ The Hero with a Thousand Faces

***

Anyone suggesting that they have ideas that will actually help men, psychologically speaking, has an obligation to place their philosophy, their rationale, front and center for men to see. I also understand that most practitioners don’t really do that, especially in what I loosely define as the “mental health” industry.

Usually what you get is a short and sputtering list of platitudes about “wholeness,” finding your “inner this” or “inner that,” accompanied by an obscure definition of the practitioner’s approach. It is either that or you get nothing but the bill.

Sometimes, often actually, they will inform you that they subscribe to feminist theory, which is an admission of their philosophy, except to the extent that it should be viewed cautiously, regardless of your sex.

This writing is intended to explain what I do in regards to assisting men, specifically in their more modern struggle for identity and an understanding of where they fit in the world. This is particularly important as the lack of those things may well result in some serious problems. Among them are family dysfunction, substance abuse, suicide, violence, anxiety, depression, shame and a lack of self-respect that often crosses the line into self-hatred.

It is not that the current crisis of male identity is the sole cause of these problems. It certainly isn’t. For example, family dysfunction is a self-perpetuating malady passed down from parents to children. In and of itself it has little to do with modern masculinity. Alcoholism is not a “male problem,” nor is violence or other forms of abuse, though those practicing under a feminist shingle may send that very message.

When assessing problems, it can be very difficult to tell the difference between cause and symptom, between a problem and its source. Does family dysfunction cause substance abuse or is substance abuse the cause of the dysfunction? Is violence at the root of relationship problems or do relationship problems fuel and promote the violence? Do communication problems cause hostility or does hostility cause communication problems?

Are all these problems symbiotic, just a teeter-totter interaction of various pathologies feeding each other? If so, can we ameliorate one problem by successfully intervening on another?

I suggest that there may be some truth answering those last two questions in the affirmative. There are, however, workarounds, back doors if you will, to what may well form part of the root structure of an array of problems with no readily visible connection. The good news about that is that you don’t need to see the connection initially in order to do something about it.

The philosophy here is that solutions begin with a recognition that there is indeed a crisis in male identity and male self-respect. It affects all of us, gay or straight, black or white or other race, regardless of religion or socioeconomic status.

Fifty years of gender politics have thrust all men into a new paradigm of sexual politics with no rule book. We are now three generations of men who have been pummeled with messages of who we are, almost all of them wrong, and who we are supposed to be, almost all of them destructive in one way or another. Our mental health industry is one of the prime proponents of these misguided ideas. They are espoused, for profit, at the expense of our men and boys.

The Old School Archetypes

The classic, historical masculine archetypes of Hero, Villain, Ruler, Warrior, Creator, Sage, Rebel and Explorer, all of which either defined what men chose or what they were driven to be. They provided men a model of what they chose not to be as well. They gifted men with a sense of identity and purpose, a rudder for their navigation of life. To a great degree (with some downsides) they worked. Jungian analysts, in the days before the ideological corruption of the field of psychology would likely tell you that these archetypes are rooted in our biology.[1]

It is also important to note that all these archetypes are anthropomorphic projections of the human male experience. They took root in our earliest mythologies because they were already in play in human life. Strangely, “mythology” told the real story of our lives. Every epic battle, great journey, tragedy and triumph of mythical figures mirrored the internal and external experience of real human beings in some way or another.

And so it went from epoch to epoch.

All that has been supplanted with a new and toxic narrative. To simplify it, we now live in a Zeitgeist where all male archetypes have been reduced to that of Villain, with the expectation that they will assume the role of Hero when needed…and directed.  The ongoing expectations of men to protect, provide, sacrifice and endure have not changed. The change in narrative, however, demands that recognition and honoring of those things ceases in favor of persistent demonization.

Similar changes have happened in the lives of women. The Manipulator, the Bitch, the Saboteur, the Queen and the Damsel in Distress have usurped the timeless archetypes of mother (Demeter), daughter (Persephone), lover (Aphrodite), civic life and learning (Athena), etc.. While all these and other female archetypes are on full social display, the spectrum of those archetypes has begun to degrade into a vacillation between two roles based on immediate perception. Women are universally seen as the Queen, unless they are in distress or claim to be in distress. Once the perception of female distress registers, social consciousness reverts them to being the original Damsel in Distress. It is as though they live in a perpetual state of flux between empowered and helpless, depending on which is more advantageous, just as we see play out today across the geopolitical landscape.

That, too, is ultimately heading for a crisis of identity in women, though for the purpose of this discussion we need not explore that further.

The denial of all this, and the assumption that it has not had a tremendous impact on the psyches of men, has left them in an emotional and social wasteland that produces more of the psychosocial problems already identified in this writing.

This leads to an inescapable conclusion. While men do need assistance with specific problems, they are also suffering in a famine of functional archetypes. Failing to recognize this, even if we seek in earnest to help them with problems symptomatic of that deficit, is putting a Band-Aid on potentially mortal wounds.

If we are to help men, it requires us to enable them to nurture a new narrative of themselves and their lives. They need new archetypes that foster a new sense of identity if they are going to thrive in a new age.

So what exactly is an archetype?

The Greek root words are archein, meaning “original or old,” and typos, meaning “Model or type.” Archetype: Original Model. Archetypes are the old, original models on which men, in the unconscious recesses of their biology, shape and mold their lives.

Perhaps in the days when there were payoffs, e.g. honor, appreciation, respect and status, men’s unconscious movement toward one archetype or another made more sense.

We do not live in those times any more, and we haven’t for most or all of your lifetime. What remains for most men in modern life is a world of expectation without reward, burden without honor and service without self.

Most men know on some level that this is true, but many have a very hard time facing it out of fear. Fear of the loss of social approval, the loss of love and the loss of what they imagine is the only space the world grants them.

Some of the fear is at least superficially warranted. Facing these issues means reaching a level of consciousness sufficient to make you a bad fit in the world of the walking blind. It means a new mythology with new archetypes born of a newer and more accurate picture of the world.

The daunting challenge is that men can no longer afford the luxury of allowing biology alone to write their story. Technology and ideology have rendered that too dangerous. The old model makes men far too easy to manipulate and far too willing to comply with the manipulation to their own detriment. You can find this same story throughout classic mythology so it is nothing new. Those, however, were cautionary tales, the moral lesson from which has been erased from the cultural consciousness. Most dare not speak honestly of Hera and Medea in the modern age.

The results of that resembles a modern genocide of the male soul.

Fortunately, that which has been forgotten can be learned again. And that which has been learned in error can be corrected. The fruits of that effort are the restoration and “wholeness” so easily promised and seldom delivered.

The risks of embracing this on a personal level is actually an illusion. Once you walk the newer path you will most probably find you don’t particularly want to return to the old one. The feigned approval of others loses its luster when the vision clears.

Despite appearances, all of this is really not so arcane. It is actually quite simple. You can start with most any problem in life; relationship and family issues are a good start. Map the mythology that got you there, that determined your actions and reactions. Were you playing the role of the Hero? The Warrior? Were you surrendering to the Siren’s Song? Was the Damsel in Distress a façade with something more sinister behind the surface impression?

Did a faulty narrative of your place and worth in this world lead you directly into a painful wall? And if that is true, do you have the fortitude to face it and change the story?

Imagine the consciously constructed mythology that would lead you to a better place with better people. Imagine the story of you being written by your own hand.

The solutions are not always easy, but they are made much more accessible when you make the decision to clear your own path; when you are at the helm, navigating your own way, when the stars in the sky are arranged according to your own dreams and desires.

How many miserable professional men out there can remember a time when they aspired to be artisans, writers or artists, only to watch those dreams buckle beneath the oppressive weight of a story that they did not write?

How many desperate men are clinging to the role of provider and protector, having become automatons in loveless, abusive marriages that have ground their self-respect into the dust?

How many men have stories that end with a bottle of scotch and a handgun because they cannot breathe and do not know where to find free air?

Men need an alternative to the new mythology’s archetypes of Servant, Slave and Scapegoat. The only thing preventing that from happening is being trapped in or clinging to a narrative they did not produce and which has never served them.

We have seen the results of men living in a world that is devoid of any honoring of men’s roles or even of men’s being. How can men cope in this sort of world?  How can therapists or anyone else facilitate a man moving from this restrictive, prison-like consciousness into a more truly masculine path that embraces his well-being, self-interest and happiness?

That is what my work is about. Not just a place for men to tell their stories, but to author and own them with support and encouragement from other men.

[1]Andrew Samuels, Jung and the Post-Jungians ISBN 0415059046, Routledge (1986)

The space devoted in Utne Reader and The Nation to Katha Pollitt’s well-written piece on gender issues represents the continued disproportionate attention given to this contemporary symptom in our national psychological debate–the virtues of feminism and of the men’s movement notwithstanding. Is gender worth the trees felled for bringing it so often to print?

I have three main objections to discussions of gender and would like to make one recommendation. First, I follow old Alfred Adler in considering all oppositional thinking to be a neurotic mental activity. The male-female opposition was for him the most basic of the polar pairs, and hence the most neurotic. This explains why it is so crazy-making trying to step aside from gender arguments once they are broached in friendly conversations, public forums, or academic articles. You get immediately entwined, for/against, better/worse, and reduced to opposing arguments, which bears witness to Adler’s thesis that one is trapped inside an insoluble neurotic loop once gender enters a discussion.

Second, gender is a class concept, dividing the populace of the world into some three billion folks amassed on either side of a barbed conceptual fence. A class concept does fundamental injustice to the complexities and idiosyncrasies of individuals, who are by definition distinct from one another, and only alike in the most vague and gross ways. To know any individual, you do worst by starting off with the widest category she or he belongs to and do best by being most precise. I cannot ever know myself “as a man,” and can never find my “true manhood,” “essential masculinity,” etc.

The class concept exists only as an abstraction, apart from actual human beings, each one different, none exactly fitting any class definition, unless that definition is to be diluted beyond significance, Even if the idea “man” is raised to a universal archetype, it is knowable only as it presents itself in a particular person. I cannot know “the masculine” or “the feminine,” but l can know myself and you in terms of specific traits, features, behaviors, and quirks. And it is just so that I wish to be known and to know others.

Third, this obsession with the hurt child of the past and with gender by the psychologically interested citizenry continues two massive diversions from the issues at the core of our national malaise, issues such as racism; violence; inability to grieve, repent, and hold accountable; worship of The Economy; retreat to security; our addiction to innocence (denial); and that prime event of the ’90s — our sinking ship. The whole bloody planet—its species, primordial peoples, biosphere, differentiated languages, gene pools—is sliding fast into extinction. As the ship goes down, does it matter whether it’s men or women who are the first to drown? Even Victims can pull an oar.

Oh yes, the recommendation: a ban on gender articles for anyone over 16 years of age.

James Hillman
Thompson, CT
_____________________________________

Source: Utne Reader, 1993 edition.

_____________________________________

Addendum: Further remarks by James Hillman on the gender question, from alternative sources:

“Another one of the fake issues is gender. We pit men against women and all the bookstores are filled with talk of men against women. It’s irrelevant! — this gender-war. It’s bullshit! It should be men and women against the oppressors.” [Discussion with Stephen Capen – 1996]

And finally, I boast this triumph: a book with a passionate psychological intent whose passion was not diverted into the indulgences of the gender war. As civilization subsides into its own waste deposits, it doesn’t matter whether you are feminine or masculine or any composite of them. We all dissolve together. Far more urgent matters than gender call out to the passion of psychology.” [Introduction to The Soul’s Code – 1996]

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JH: when intellectuals spend their time on the gender conflict without realizing that we’re all gonna die together, and that the environmental disasters affect men and women equally, and that gender discussions are irrelevant to the major questions of the time. They’re not a matter of breaking through the glass ceiling. They’re a matter of the planet, a matter of the distortion of economics that keeps the thing the way it is. We’ve been taught that big government is a horror in the last five years. It’s not big government, it’s big corporations. If you wipe out big government, there’s nothing that can oppose the big corporations. Nothing. The rape of the planet is not done by big governments, mainly. It’s done by helpless governments in the face of big corporations. Brazil, for example. And the gender thing distracts us, because it’s personalized, it’s immediate, it’s my own personal battle with my woman, or her personal battle with me. They become magnified by this. And then the resentments of years of oppression.

CP: It’s not just at the level of political exigency, either. I recall your writing at one point that there’s no respect for gender at the deepest levels of the psyche.

JH: Fate isn’t a gender matter. Death isn’t a gender matter.

[CP interview with JH]
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By Elizabeth Hobson & Peter Wright

Stories frequently succeed in arousing strong feelings, like when we read a novel and become moved to tears or anger, or when we see scenes in a movie which make our skin crawl, give goose bumps, or make our hair stand on its proverbial end. Such strong feelings, and the stories that generate them, seem to put a lie to the popular phrase “Facts Don’t Care About Your Feelings”. The reverse seems more likely in evidence, even when we know that a fantasy novel or movie is not factually real – our feelings remain dominant.

This is why old-world mythologies, complete with kooky beliefs, have flourished and sustained large civilizations – civilizations which thrived and expanded under the guiding influence of those same unfactual stories. Even when the stories promote a geocentric universe with a flat earth, or mythical gods requiring human sacrifices, deadly wars or violence over the divinely mandated length of men’s beards, or whether a woman’s mandated head covering is pleasing to the divine powers. You would think these things would cause a civilization to collapse and die out, however it appears that those more rational civilizations who deconstruct myths have birth rates plummeting whilst cultures based in fanciful stories enjoy explosive birth rates.

Perhaps it’s time to consider the painful possibility that feelings don’t always care about our facts. That’s certainly the case in many cultures, and it may indeed be a default setting of human beings generally – we are story creatures, and facts are often seen as an affront that offends both the stories we believe in and feelings associated with them.

Writing in the year 1984,³ professor emeritus of communication Walter R. Fisher explored these two approaches to reality – the approaches of both story and rationality – and named them 1. ‘the narrative paradigm’ and 2. ‘the rational world paradigm.’

Fisher describes the narrative paradigm in much the same way as we are presenting it in this article; as a reflection of the fact that we use stories to communicate with each other, and to provide a shared map of meaning among a group of people.

Stories help by gathering the scattered bric-a-brac of everyday existence and combining it into a coherent whole, or what we might refer to as a template, that we use to orient ourselves and our goals in harmony with the shared orientation and goals of others. In short stories provide us with a shareable world.

As we have seen, religious stories and folk tales can be both benevolent by way of organizing the masses into a harmonious moral unit, or they can be destructive as we see in stories promoting warfare against innocent nations, and even those stories which, today, promote gender wars.

What Fisher refers to alternatively as the ‘rational world paradigm’ consists in five presuppositions, which I can paraphrase as: 1. That humans are essentially rational beings, 2. That human decision-making and communication is a form of argument depending on clear-cut inferential and implicative structure, 3. That the conduct of such argument is ruled by legal, scientific and legislative dictates (etc), 4. That rationality is determined by subject matter knowledge, argumentative ability, and skill in employing the rules of advocacy in given fields, and finally, 5. The world is a set of logical puzzles which can be resolved through logical analysis and application of reason conceived as an argumentative construct.

Fisher notes the frequent failure of the rational world paradigm in the modern context, and goes on to conclude that:

This failure suggests to me that the problem in restoring rationality to everyday argument may be the assumption that the reaffirmation of the rational world paradigm is the only solution. The position I am taking is that another paradigm may offer a better solution, one that will provide substance not only for public moral argument, but also all other forms of argument, for human communication in general. My answer to the second question then, is: “Yes I think so.”

Adoption of the narrative paradigm, I hasten to repeat, does not mean rejection of all the good work that has been done; it means a rethinking of it and investigating new moves that can be made to enrich our understanding of communicative interaction.¹

The narrative communication paradigm, or more simply the use of stories, has been criticised from a rational perspective when applied to scientific or legal issues, with the charge being that there is no way to make a choice between two equally coherent narratives. This is a valid complaint, but not one that practitioners of the rational world paradigm completely escape – this due to their frequent preferencing of one set of data over another, of placing the accent on one set of findings while neglecting others – a tendency that renders “rationalist” conclusions more subjective than they might like to admit – just like those of the story tellers.

Ultimately the rational and narrative approaches need to work in tandem if we wish to provide strong results, but at present the men’s movement has been wary of narrative approaches due to their tendency to subjectivity and corruption. Unfortunately, storytelling remains the preferred mode of communication and decision-making of the human species, therefore we can’t simply wish it away as irrelevant because that would be to deny the fact that humans have evolved to be narrative creatures – Homo Narrans – who preference communication via stories. It is a biological and evolutionary fact, so it isn’t going away, and hating it will do little to change its biological necessity.

If story is here to stay, then we need to enter the fray. We need to get down into the alphabet soup and wrestle with those destructive narratives perpetuated by feminists and others who would reduce men and boys to a tiny fraction of their lived experience. This can be done by challenging any element of the dominant gender narratives currently circulating – by amending the stories to conclude the male hero is “good” rather than “toxic,” or by crafting new stories altogether that incorporate the positive experiences of men and boys.

That is our challenge to you all today: not to do away with rational or data-based approaches, but to broaden them by offering new endings to the destructive stories currently on offer, re-narrating them, or by telling new stories in ways so compelling and emotionally moving that they displace the destructive ones currently on offer.

Source:

[1] Fisher, W. R. (1984). Narration as a human communication paradigm: The case of public moral argument. Communications Monographs, 51(1), 1-22.

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SEE ALSO: The history of the “Henpecked Club”