The following essay exploring archetypal transsexual archetypes appearing in traditional mythology was first published in Spring – A Journal Of Archetype And Culture, in the edition titled ‘Pink Madness’ (1995). The essay is republished below by permission of the author.
Wright, P. ‘Unintended Effects Of Transgender Activism On Men’s Issues,’ in New Male Studies An International Journal, ISSN 1839-7816 ~ Vol10, Issue 2,2021, Pp. 71–80, Issue 2, © 2021 Australian Institute Of Male Health And Studies
The Rationalisation Of Bigotry
Bio-gynocentrism was first coined by Vernon Meigs in his article The Eight Traits Of A Bio-gynocentrist1, to describe people who resort to twisted interpretations of human biology and evolution to justify the practice of male chivalry and the pedestalisation of women in our gynocentric culture. Bio-gynocentrism attempts to rationalise gynocentrism as what nature intended and therefore an ideal to aspire to. Bio-gynocentrism is an example of the naturalistic fallacy and the fallacy of appealing to nature2.
Bio-gynocentrism is based on the underlying assumption that because something that favours women is perceived to have a biological basis to it and be good for women, it must therefore be good for society and what is optimal for society. This is despite numerous examples where traits and behaviours that have a biological or evolutionary basis to them, actually produce dysfunctional and also evolutionary maladaptive outcomes. The instinctual forces driving addiction and obesity in the modern world and our superresponses to supernormal stimuli3, are such examples where our evolved biology can express itself in exaggerated and maladaptive ways. The psychology of gynocentrism itself shares a great degree of similarity with addiction and is one example of a dysfunctional superresponse to superstimuli4.
Expanding on Vernon Meigs article, I would define bio-gynocentrism more broadly as the selective interpretation of scientific research in the biological sciences through a gynocentric lens that favours women, omits information to the contrary and consequently is disconnected from broader reality. Bio-gynocentrism is in essence the women are wonderful effect5 expressing itself in the interpretation and dissemination of scientific research on human biology and evolution.
Bio-gynocentrism is quite prolific not just from the commentary of scientific research in the mainstream media and social media, but also within academia itself. Gynocentrism is fundamentally a bias in human perception and behavior that favours women over men. Bio-gynocentrism is one of the ways gynocentrism manifests itself in skewing our perception of reality and is a form of gamma bias6. Bio-gynocentrism can be observed7 when looking at how people respond to research on sex differences and can be identified and critiqued even when examining work8 within the supposedly objective scientific community itself. Bio-gynocentrism is also reflected in the general attitudes held in society about men and women9 and their perceived strengths.
There are two main examples of bio-gynocentrism and they overlap considerably.
1. Arguments put forward by female supremacists that women are inherently biologically superior to men10. They often cherry-pick and spin facts about sex differences in genetics and scholastic achievement for example to convey a narrative that supports their conclusion that women are superior and then casually omit or downplay the vast quantity of information that does not support their preconceived conclusion of female superiority.
A classic example of this can be seen from an excellent critique by one learned reviewer11 of a book12 making the absurdly broad generalisation that women are genetically superior to men. Books like this from bio-gynocentrists in academia are common. They are examples of the women are wonderful effect in academia undermining the objectivity of scientific research.
The male sex that produced the works of Einstein, Newton, Shakespeare and Beethoven, invented the aeroplane, discovered and harnessed electricity, split the atom and landed on the moon, is regarded as inferior by bio-gynocentrists. Like horses with blinders on, bio-gynocentrists are incapable of objectively assessing human biology without becoming fixated on satisfying their desire to pedestalise women and developing tunnel vision.
Beliefs in the supposed inherent superiority of women, are often based on extreme and simplistic generalisations like other forms of bigotry. Briffault’s law is another example of such a generalisation, which is based on the implied assumption of female social omnipotence (see articles where I debunk that myth here13 and here14).
2. Arguments put forward by female supremacists and gynocentric traditionalists, that women are more valuable than men because women are supposedly more important to the continuation of the community as a result of being the rate limiting factor of reproduction. These arguments are collectively called the golden uterus dogma.
Reducing The Complexity Of Human Biology Down To Goddess Worship
On the surface these simplistic biogynocentric arguments appear to make logical sense. However, on closer examination the arguments are actually highly reductive and omit many important facts as a consequence of the selective cherry-picking of scientific information and the skewed evaluation of the information that is reported. Like the feminist position on the gender wage gap, bio-gynocentrism dramatically simplifies complex multivariate aspects of biology and evolution and in the process grossly mischaracterises them.
For example, whilst the female role in reproduction is important, the golden uterus argument fails to adequately consider the importance of the male role in ensuring the continued survival of the community so that people can reproduce in the first place and also raise any resultant offspring to sexual maturity. Such a reductive overemphasis on reproduction, also ignores the limited carrying capacity of the environment to sustain high rates of reproduction and the reality that our species has a slow rate of reproduction in comparison to other forms of life and did not evolve to place enormous importance on reproduction.
Adherents of the golden uterus dogma will argue that a population that loses most of its women will struggle to replace itself, but then fail to differentiate such an extreme reality from the more common reality that populations generally have a surplus number of women beyond the critical minimum amount required and can actually tolerate a significant loss of women. These sycophants of the golden uterus, also fail to consider that a population that loses most of its men will struggle to survive and may not live long enough to even have a chance at replacing itself or ensure enough offspring live to adulthood.
The golden uterus argument for gynocentrism, also begs the question why do we protect women over 40 whom have limited or zero prospects of giving birth to healthy live offspring? The reality is the golden uterus dogma is not just a weak rationalisation for gynocentrism, it is also a weak explanation for its pervasiveness in society.
There many other factors and details beyond what I have raised here which the golden uterus argument omits (please refer to this article15 for more information). Unsurprisingly, it is the enormous level of detail and nuance in human biology and evolution that bio-gynocentrism fails to take into consideration, which ultimately undermines its validity in a way that is fatal and unrecoverable.
As I have discussed before in previous articles, bio-gynocentrism is an example of categorical thinking16 which Prof. Sapolsky described in his first lecture on behavioural biology citing numerous horrific examples of it involving prominent scientists in the 20th century. When we oversimplify and overgeneralise complex biological systems like human biology, we can make horrific mistakes. When we don’t recognise what led to our mistakes, we are destined to repeat those mistakes.
We should stop and pause on the implications of applying a biogynocentric perspective on human behaviour and biology and the consequences that will flow from it. The same thinking behind bio-gynocentrism, is the same type of lazy thinking behind the scientific racism and eugenics observed in the early 20th century. Bio-gynocentrism is just a different flavour of the same backward thinking.
Bio-gynocentrism fails to account for the fact that human males and females are part of one biological system that replicates itself. Both the human male and human female are equally essential components to that system. The male and the female have coevolved to perform different, but complementary and equally important roles in the propagation of the genome.
We cannot consider the relative strengths of women or men, without considering how they are interlinked with the strengths of the other sex. Neither sex alone can perform their biological role in a way that leads to the propagation of the genome and the continuation of the community, without the other sex adequately performing their biological role.
The evolutionary dynamics of Fishers principle17 generates an equal parental investment in producing male and female offspring and this focuses the forces of natural selection and sexual selection to drive a sexually interdependent coevolution in which both males and females share equal importance toward the propagation of the genome. There is a selective pressure to select against imbalances where the propagation of the genome is more dependent on one sex than the other and where the dynamics of Fishers principle operates and drives equal parental investment in the production of male and female offspring.
Over many tens of millions of years of evolution within the constraints of Fishers principle, our lineage has produced a male and female sex that are both equally valuable to the propagation of the genome. It cannot be any other way when there is a natural force driving equal parental investment in male and female offspring and a distinct evolutionary disadvantage in relying too heavily on one sex, especially over timescales of tens of millions of years.
Consider the reasoning behind diversifying a market portfolio to minimise risk, or the old adage to not put all your eggs in one basket. Being overly reliant on one half of the population to continue the community and propagate the genome from an evolutionary perspective, represents a significant risk and a cost that over long timescales of tens of millions of years would have been selected against under evolutionary pressures.
Natural selection and sexual selection would have favoured males that contributed equally to the burden of supporting the community and the propagation of the genome. That is precisely what we see when we examine male traits and observe male behaviour in our species and the multitude of ways men have kept the community and their children alive both directly and indirectly in prehistoric times and right up until the modern day.
If men walked off the job for one day today, many people would die. If men walked away from their tribe many tens of thousands of years ago for one day, there may not have been a tribe left to return to. These are the realities our gynocentric culture and bio-gynocentrists will never acknowledge or fully appreciate.
The reality is that if the female role in reproduction truly had the level of importance bio-gynocentrists place in it, then all life on this planet would reproduce asexually. If bio-gynocentrists were right, producing males and sexually reproducing would be too costly and wasteful. If bio-gynocentrists were right, then where sexual reproduction did emerge, any species would strictly be comprised of hermaphrodites since having half the population unable to give birth to offspring would again be too costly and wasteful.
Bio-gynocentrism does not leave any room to consider the biological value the male sex might provide to the continuation of a population and a species. It does not permit any consideration of how a male biological role might actually be extremely adaptive and drive evolution to favour a sex that does not give birth and instead contributes to the propagation of a species in other ways. Socially contributing to community survival may actually have greater value than simply gestating offspring and lactating and feeding small infants, especially in harsh climates and scarce habitats.
One has to simply ask why women do more than just gestate and feed offspring when supporting their community, to see the short sightedness in overemphasising the female role in pregnancy and looking after infants. These are certainly important activities for a community to perpetuate its existence, but so are many of the activities related to community survival that men predominantly do. The golden uterus is simply not as important as bio-gynocentrists assert it is and that reality is glaringly obvious when considering hunter-gatherer communities in harsh environments, past civilisations and the challenges they faced and also modern civilisation.
Pedestalising Women Is Not For The Greater Good Of Society Or Science
The greater good of the community is also often conflated with prioritising what is best for women thanks to bio-gynocentrism. This is despite ample evidence that when a society prioritises the female sex over other interests, it routinely neglects to address matters of great importance and also the well-being of the very men civilisation is dependent on to sustain itself.
The reality is that when a society puts men down to lift women up, fertility rates plummet as a result of courtship, relationships, marriage and family formation being undermined. When a society puts men down to lift women up, fatherlessness becomes widespread and so does the serious social and economic consequences that flow from that. When a society puts men down to lift women up, it undermines its economic productivity and its primary source of innovation because it is predominantly men driving essential sectors supporting GDP and consumer spending, inventing new technology and making major discoveries and contributing the bulk of tax revenue.
When a society puts men down to lift women up, it compromises its own national security and safety, as crime goes up and civil unrest becomes more frequent from directionless young men and external threats become harder to challenge from a weakened society that has marginalised and disincentivised it’s male protectors and armed forces.
Gynocentric cultures are cultures of death and not cultures of life. They do not replace themselves and they do not socially, economically or militarily sustain themselves. Karen Straughan called the process of decline from gynocentrism the Fempocalypse18. The long process of decline and the slow gradual collapse of society from gynocentrism in tandem with other destructive forces in our culture, has already begun. Gynocentric cultures of death rely on endless debt and migration to stave off their inevitable decline, but eventually they socially and economically implode from within and are overtaken by cultures that do have a functional non-gynocentric social balance between the sexes.
Bio-gynocentrism reduces our understanding of human biology and evolution by selectively omitting facts, evidence and perspectives that do not support a position that females are inherently superior or more valuable than males. Bio-gynocentrism hijacks legitimate biological science and research and converts them into gynocentric dogma that has more in common with a new age religion of female worship than actual science. Pedestalising women is not for the greater good of society or science.
References:
Addendum:
I’m suspicious of scholarly works which “find” romantic love all over the world, appearing seamlessly throughout all places and all periods of history. After reading many such essays I’ve come to the conclusion they confine their definitions of romantic love to biological universals such as the desire for sex, the need for attachment, limerence, social interaction and so on and so forth — all of which falls well short of the complex European-derived phenomenon known as courtly & romantic love.
Those academic surveys conveniently omit the idiosyncratic elements that might cast doubt on their universality thesis of romantic love – details like the inherent displays of male masochism, uniquely stylized feudal relationships borrowed from from French or German class conventions, the conceptualization of the Virgin Mary and her purity and how that plays into conceptions of gender and love, along with other complex behaviors and influences which make up the courtly love complex arising in medieval Europe.
When Gaston Paris first coined the phrase ‘Courtly Love’ (1883) he was referring precisely to those idiosyncratic elements that render the phenomenon distinct from the universals many scholars reduce it to.
Gaston Paris’ description of courtly love can be summarized as follows:
“It is illicit, furtive and extra-conjugal; the lover continually fears lest he should, by some misfortune, displease his mistress or cease to be worthy of her; the male lover’s position is one of inferiority; even the hardened warrior trembles in his lady’s presence; she, on her part, makes her suitor acutely aware of his insecurity by deliberately acting in a capricious and haughty manner; love is a source of courage and refinement; the lady’s apparent cruelty serves to test her lover’s valor; finally, love, like chivalry and courtoisie, is an art with its own set of rules.” 1
Thus courtly love as defined by Paris has four distinctive traits;
It’s clear that what we call romantic love today continues each of these conventions with the sole exception of illegitimacy and furtiveness. With this one exception romantic love can be regarded as coextensive with the courtly love described by Paris.
Many scholars researching this area conveniently overlook (or refuse to mention) the sexual feudalism inherent to the European-descended model of romantic love. Attempts to homogenize and cast romantic love as a global universal, while avoiding all mention of the unsavory sexual feudalism that might render it more problematic and complex, is unhelpful to say the least, and misleading at worst. European-descended romantic love, now the dominant version globally, deserves to be considered separately and need not be confused with more simple theoretical constructs on offer.
In summary, to reduce romantic love to a consistently and universally expressed set of evolutionary behaviors amounts to an attribution error.
Note:
[1] Roger Boase, The Origin and Meaning of Courtly Love: A Critical Study of European Scholarship, p.24, Manchester University Press, 1977
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For more about romantic love as a confabulation of the middle ages, see the following video which explores the unique creation of supernormal sign stimuli which lies at the heart of the romantic love trope.
Love service is a ritualized form of male love-devotion toward women, especially noble women, that was popularized in the Middle Ages.[1][2][3]
The practice of love service appeared first in Medieval Europe and was modeled on a combination of feudalistic class distinctions, courtly love tenets, and gendered aspects of the chivalric class code regarding respectful treatment of women.[4][5]
Love service had certain resemblances with vassalage, especially the concept of obedience. According to Sandra R. Alfonsi the entire concept of love-service was patterned after the vassal’s oath to serve his lord with loyalty, tenacity, and courage. These same virtues were demanded of the male supplicant. Like the liegeman vis-a-vis his sovereign, the male approached his lady with fear and respect, submitted obediently to her and awaited a fief or in this case an honor of reception as did the vassal.[6]
The vocabulary of love service borrowed some terminology from the vocabulary of feudalism indicative of the ties between a man to his lord. Examples are servitium (service), dominus (denoting the feudal Lord, or Lady), homo ligius (addressing the Lord’s liegeman or ‘my man’), homage (duty toward Lord), and honor (honoring gestures). The men were sometimes referred to as domnei or donnoi, meaning an attitude of chivalrous devotion of a knight to his Lady based in servitude and duty.[7]
Cultural Narratives
– Mythologies of the men’s rights & feminist movements (Peter Wright)
– Men Who Sit At The Screens (Peter Wright)
– One True Masculinity (Peter Wright)
– Feelings Don’t Care About Your Facts (Elizabeth Hobson & Peter Wright)
– Where Do Stories Come From? (Richard Kearney)
– Stories and The Christian Faith – Part 1 (Paul Elam)
– Stories and The Christian Faith – Part 2 (Paul Elam)
– The Men’s Rights Movement: Changing The Cultural Narrative (Peter Wright)
Personal Narratives for Men
– Men Authoring Their Own Lives (Paul Elam & Peter Wright)
– Narrative Therapy With Men (Paul Elam & Peter Wright)
Below is an amended excerpt from an interview with Greta Aurora which touches on archetypes of masculinity and femininity appearing in traditional mythologies.
Greta Aurora: You previously mentioned you don’t agree with looking at masculinity and femininity as the order-chaos duality. Is there another archetypal/symbolic representation of male and female nature, which you feel is more accurate?
Peter Wright: Some archetypal portrayals in mythology are distinctly male and female, such as male muscle strength and the various tests of it (think of the Labours of Hercules), or pregnancy and childbirth for females (think Demeter, Gaia etc.). Aside from these universal physiology-celebrating archetypes, many portrayals of male or female roles in traditional stories can be viewed instead as stereotypes rather than archetypes in the sense that they are not universally portrayed across different mythological traditions (as would be required of a strictly archetypal criteria in which images must be universally held across cultures).
For example you have a Mother Sky and a Father Earth in classical Egyptian mythology, which is a reverse of popular stereotypes, and males are often portrayed as nurturers. This indicates that material nurture is not the sole archetypal province of a feminine archetype. Also, many archetypal themes are portrayed interchangeably among the sexes – think of the Greek Aphrodite or Adonis both as archetypal representations of beauty, or Apollo and Cassandra as representatives of intellect, or of the warlikeness to Ares or Athene.
To my knowledge the primordial Chaos described in Hesiod’s Theogony had no apparent gender, and when gender was assigned to Chaos by later writers it was often portrayed as male. There is no reason why we can’t assign genders to chaos and order to illustrate some point, but we need to be clear that this rendition is not uniformly backed by archetypal portrayals in myths – and myths are the primary datum of archetypal images. So broadly speaking the only danger would be if we insist that chaos must always be female, and order must always be male as if that formula were an incontrovertible dogma.
There’s also a rich history of psychological writings which look at chaos as a state not only of the universe, or of societies, but as a potential in the psyche or behavior of all human beings regardless of gender; e.g. this factor elaborated for example in the writings of psychiatrists R.D. Laing and by W.D. Winnicott .
ARTICLES DESCRIBING THE NATURE OF ‘DAMSELING‘
ARTICLES ON WOMEN’S ATTRACTION TO THE CHILD ARCHETYPE
By Peter Wright & Paul Elam (2017)
A wise man once suggested that when it comes to marital discord couples fight more over one issue: who is going to play the child in the relationship and who is going to play the responsible parent.
His comment rings true on its face, with men historically being the ones who take on the parental role in marriage. It’s witnessed in the centuries of men taking responsibility for the financial and other security concerns of wives, and also hinted at in the relationship age gap. Males marry younger females — not to control their sexuality (as we are frequently misled to believe) – but because women seek an older male to place in the responsible, paternal role, to enhance the child theme they intend to play out in the relationship.
Women collectively spend billions annually to neotenize their appearance, enhancing their efforts to assume the infantilized role.
We see the same theme appear in our language when men are shamed for being ‘Peter Pans’ or ‘man babies’ along with the injunction to ‘man-up’ — which has no counterpart for women; they are phrases intended to jolt men out of any inclination to regress to a childlike state of dependency. Never do we hear women being chastised as immature Wendys, woman babies, nor do we hit them with the demand to ‘woman-up.’
To be fair we may see the occasional man playing a full-time child to his female partner, and we can say that all men experience occasional moments of regression to boyishness in their relationships. However, society frowns upon men indulging too much of the child within. And such indulgence is roundly met with sexual rejection by women. The child role is reserved exclusively for women within the relationship context.
The stresses that this dynamic places on relationships and especially on men cannot be overstated; the catering to a child within an adult’s body is exhausting and ultimately demeaning to both the infantilized woman and the parentified man. Standardizing childishness in one partner and hyperagency in the other prohibits any sort of relationship between adult peers. Instead, it breeds contempt and conflict.
The structure of this type of arrangement ultimately results in an assured relationship killer. Hostile dependency. It is impossible for the infantilized partner to maintain respect for, or a healthy emotional connection to, her chief enabler. And it is impossible for the chief enabler to maintain respect or a healthy emotional connection to what amounts to a financial, emotional and familial parasite. Self-respect in both parties is also a casualty of this arrangement.
Before getting more into the dynamics posed by this dysfunctional relationship, we’d like to elaborate a bit more on the concept of the adult child which is something quite different from the literal child we look after when they are small. The ‘child’ is also one of the fundaments of the human psyche, operating equally in biologically mature adults and in children, thus the popular qualifier of ‘the inner child.’
The great 20th century psychologist Carl Jung wrote a paper on the inner child, or what he preferred to call the child archetype,1 where he outlined its main psychological features which include 1. growth toward independence, 2. vulnerability, and 3. a state of innocence.
1. Growth toward independence (but never reached)
This aspect of the child archetype is concerned with futurity, and is captured in the phrase ‘what I want to be when I grow up.’ It reflects the ongoing state of becoming without ever arriving at the destination – it remains an eternal child. In this respect the child archetype differs from the archetype of individuation, a more heroic path that does eventually culminate in mature autonomy and self-reliance.
The ambition for perpetuated childhood, as we commonly see in modern women (and enabled by men), is the inevitable outcome of the child archetype. As men and women collude to remove the destination of adult autonomy from the life-map, they effectively kill the archetype of mature individuation – the path of true potential for growth. And instead they give birth to the child of static permanency. Individuals dominated by the child archetype will always position themselves as eternally incapable of personal agency, even relying on the chief enabler to help fabricate a web of denial about their true nature.
This is reflected in the spiritual, financial, or relationship ‘growth’ workshops attended largely by women, who appear to pursue adult goals but who are in reality only participating in a charade. The true goal is more dependency and more childhood. These pursuits are often funded through the hard labor of the hopelessly paternalized male.
We also see this acted out in the psychodrama of the modern housewife, “taking charge” of such matters of household finances and other matters of home and hearth, without any responsibility for creating wealth, taking the risks that come with those efforts, or any other matter of real consequence. The perpetuated child chooses the colors but cannot buy the paint or climb the scaffold with brush in hand.
2. Vulnerability
Vulnerability is one of the main guises of the child, and so the woman dominated by this archetype is constantly signalling threats to herself from the surrounding environment. She is in danger of getting lost, hurt, abandoned and frightened, and just like the child of fairy tales she projects herself as lost in the woods with snarling bears and wolves, or afloat on the river Nile in a flimsy basket where she is in danger of getting lost or going under.
She is “at risk” at all times, including the risk of exposure to her chief enabler’s frustrations or his wishes for her to realize adulthood.
The vulnerable, permanent child, communicates with the wider world through these threat narratives2 which most everyone is familiar with through the archetypal damsel in distress — tied to the railway tracks, the locomotive of adult agency barreling down on her, or being held prisoner by a dragon from which she must be freed by your parental, sacrificial rescue.
3. Innocence
The child’s way of defending its perpetual dependency is to project its innocence: “I don’t know”, “I didn’t realize”, “I didn’t mean anything”, “It just happened”, “I got carried away by my feelings.” Yes, her own emotions can be the villain in her threat narrative. And the understanding of a hyper-responsible male is required to save her from it. Because she claims ignorance she divests herself of all responsibility for what happens, leaving others to pick up the tab – most likely her male partner if she has one.
We see this even in women’s general predisposition to gravitate toward victim politics, supporting male candidates who offer enabling paternalism from the state, and the vision of woman as perpetually in distress.
Moving on from Jung, perhaps the best conceptualization of the child archetype comes from Eric Berne, whose transactional analysis shows three possible relationship dynamics:
The first of these – child to parent – encompasses all that we’ve said so far about the child archetype and its exploitative style of relating with others. The second – parent to child – represents the parental relationship to a child. And the last one – adult to adult – represents a healthier mode of conducting relationships based on steering a middle path between the more extreme demands of both parent and child. This latter is where we might hope to be along with anyone we might choose for pair bonding.
The perpetual child, however, demands that the default relationship setting be parent to child, an emotionally incestuous arrangement that affords some comfort to the irresponsible child, but that does so at the expense of a healthy adult connection.
Eventually, and we think invariably, this results in the parentified male viewing the infantilized female as inept, incapable and deserving of pity over respect. It can also breed a lot of anger that goes both ways, from the frustrated, overburdened male, and the dependent, irresponsible female whose life is a constant reminder of her lack of meaning.
The parental brain
Juvenile characteristics have long been known to evoke in caretakers a neurological state known as the ‘parental brain.’ Children’s faces and various other child gestures provoke hormonal changes that prime parents to be more sensitive towards infant cues and needs, resulting in nurturance, caretaking and protectiveness.
Adult women who learn to mimic child features through cosmetics, and the feigning of childlike behaviors of innocence and vulnerability, evoke in their male partners a very similar parental response. Like parents of literal infants men can be seen to respond with care-taking and protection, and if women are skilled at peppering the routine with threat-narratives she gains the ability to prompt him like a philharmonic concert conductor. Such is the obedient, reflexive state of readiness to rescue that defines the lives of so many men.
Listeners are probably familiar with this charade being played out between men and women, one which was not lost on Esther Vilar when she gave a sardonic description of it in her 1971 book The Manipulated Man. There she writes:
Woman’s greatest ideal is a life without work or responsibility – yet who leads such a life but a child? A child with appealing eyes, a funny little body with dimples and sweet layers of baby fat and clear, taut skin – that darling minature of an adult. It is a child that woman imitates – its easy laugh, its helplessness, its need for protection. A child must be cared for; it cannot look after itself. And what species does not, by natural instinct, look after its offspring? It must – or the species will die out.
With the aid of skillfully applied cosmetics, designed to preserve that precious baby look; with the aid of helpless exclamations such as ‘Ooh’ and ‘Ah’ to denote astonishment, surprise, and admiration; with inane little bursts of conversation, women have preserved this ‘baby look’ for as long as possible so as to make the world continue to believe in the darling, sweet little girl she once was, and she relies on the protective instinct in man to make him take care of her.”3
Vilar hits the nail right on the head; that many women have been taught they will be protected while having every whim catered for by simply playing the child.
This parent~child dynamic, perhaps more than any other theme, captures the dilemma most men are wrestling with – a theme more central than sexual attraction, more central than pair bonding, and more than romantic love and all the other social mandates. The biological urge to care for children is king, and it’s also an Achillies’ Heel for those who abide by it unconsciously.
The good news is that our vulnerability to abuse is corrected in one move: by men refusing to play parent, whether indulging or trying to correct women who are perpetual children. Instead we have to insist that female partners woman-up right alongside men, showing reciprocal responsibility between two adults. Or be prepared to show them the door once it’s apparent that the task is too much for them to take on.
Esther Vilar’s comment that a woman’s greatest ideal is ‘a life without work or responsibility’ requires someone to facilitate it, and that someone is almost always a man. But men need not play the role of parent and they do have the option to seek a relationship between adult peers: two responsible adults supporting each other in the walk through life. Such a woman may be a unicorn but unicorns do exist. And success, if you are lucky enough to get it, will be more likely tied to the women men reject than the woman they seek.
References:
[1] C.G. Jung, ‘The Psychology of the Child Archetype’ in The Archetypes and the Collective Unconscious, Princeton University Press (1969)
[2] Alison Tieman, Threat Narrative series
[3] Esther Vilar, The Manipulated Man (1971)