The concept of ‘gynocentrism’ was recently cited in research on domestic violence in Trinidad and Tobago. This is viewed by stakeholders as a positive development toward understanding the complex dynamics involved in IPV and why men are reluctant to report it.

“Traditionally, Trinidad and Tobago’s society is patriarchal in its ontology, however, there is a tendency on the island towards gynocentrism or the inclination to place the needs, wants, and desires of women ahead of all others (Elam, 2016).

“This non-reporting of spousal violence by males in the study can also be attributed to the effect of gynocentrism which creates a cultural default on the micro and macro level where women’s DV victimization reporting is a call to action and a man’s DV victimization reporting is seen as taboo (Elam, 2016). In the context of Trinidad and Tobago, the authors of this article submit that gynocentrism pervades all aspects of the criminal justice system as well as society, hence the apprehension by men in the study to report their DV victimization to the police. For male respondents, the main barrier to non-reporting DV victimization to the police was embarrassment/shame (17%).”

 

SOURCE:

Justice Policy Journal ? Volume 16, Number 1 (Spring, 2019)

The following is part 2 of my article on debunking the bedrock of the female supremacist belief system that drives gynocentrism; the golden uterus. Please read part 1 before continuing. – Peter Ryan

The Naturalistic Fallacy

Often reproductive reductionists will appeal to nature to justify their bigoted beliefs that we should treat men as a lower class of human being, or even regard men as subhuman on the basis that having a uterus makes an individual more biological valuable to the species. The assertion that having a uterus makes an individual more biologically valuable is wrong, because it assumes that reproduction is the sole determining factor of biological value – and I have explained in part one of this article why this is wrong.

But I want to assume for the moment that reproductive reductionists and female supremacists are right. Should we value human life on its utility? Should we base society and government policy on the survival of the fittest and selectively abort males prior to birth and subjugate the males that are born, as some female supremacists put forward? We have numerous examples of genocides in the 20th century that were the inevitable end result of such ideas.

We have seen what happens when such a society dehumanises a group of people and the destruction it brings for such societies. We have observed the legacy and the guilt such atrocities have on their culture. History is littered with such examples, and there is a reason why societies that dehumanise groups of people remain either undeveloped tribal shitholes or deteriorate into such shitholes given enough time. It never ends well for the society that dehumanises a group within their population, let alone the half of the population responsible for keeping most of the infrastructure going, etc.

If we are concerned about making sure civilisation remains functional enough so that it can sustain itself, then we should consider the reality that dehumanising half the population which keeps the water running and the lights on at night, will invariably lead to its collapse.  When enough men are that marginalised they have nothing left to lose, history shows it leads to revolution and war. That is just me citing history, it is not a threat. The United States itself was founded in the wake of marginalised men fighting a tyrannical government. If national security matters to our governments, then they might want to consider what happens when large numbers of men are raised with no father for generations, have little or no employment prospects and are marginalised in society.

For the record, I do not want to see a violent revolution happen. I want to peacefully go about my business. However I am concerned about the growing likelihood of this eventuality occurring, and the steps we should be taking right now to reduce the risk of future national instability in Western countries from large numbers of marginalised men. The solution is not to marginalise men further. The solution is simply to respect men, invest in them, support them, and guide and provide them with an avenue to voluntarily contribute to society in a way that is personally fulfilling and constructive.

Treating men as subhuman, creating a male underclass and demonising and marginalising men and boys on the basis they are male, is a sure-fire way to bankrupt your country, collapse your economy, socially destabilise your society and destroy your country from within through civil unrest, crime, revolution and war. If you treat men and boys with no compassion, then do not be surprised when you create monsters and witness a surge in mass shootings, organised crime, roaming gangs of male thugs and eventually an organised militia and then an army. I do not want to see that future unfold, but that is where society is headed if we don’t start treating men as human beings and supporting them.

So on a purely rational level, appealing to nature to subjugate and marginalise men is not sustainable or functional for the long-term prosperity and the continued existence of civilisation. The Nuremburg trials that were organised after World War 2 are a testament to that reality in the aftermath of the atrocities committed by the Nazis against the Jews.

In the words of Justice Jackson¹,

The privilege of opening the first trial in history for crimes against the peace of the world imposes a grave responsibility. The wrongs which we seek to condemn and punish have been so calculated, so malignant, and so devastating, that civilization cannot tolerate their being ignored, because it cannot survive their being repeated. That four great nations, flushed with victory and stung with injury stay the hand of vengeance and voluntarily submit their captive enemies to the judgment of the law is one of the most significant tributes that Power has ever paid to Reason.”

A statement that needs to be etched in stone. When we dehumanise men or any group of people, we undermine the basis of civilisation itself- human dignity. We do not just undermine the dignity of the group that is dehumanised, but our own dignity by participating in the abuse or letting it happen. Once dignity is gone, civilised behaviour quickly goes as well and with it civilisation.

Some people infer from history and from the present day, that dehumanising men and treating them as disposable is natural, normal and okay, as they believe it is required for civilisation. Slave owners used to use similar arguments to justify slavery. Disposability implies that something can be discarded without any consequence and that it can easily be replaced. Civilisations and tribal communities have certainly required a contribution of protection, provision and innovation from men to ensure their continuation. However just as with reproduction and evolutionary success, male contribution to the community is not automatically interchangeable with male disposability. Men can contribute to communities without being disposed of and the less that are lost, the more men are available to contribute in the future.

Any community or civilisation that loses its men or fails to invest in its men, or fails to adequately support them, loses some or all of its manpower and some or all of the contribution men bring to sustaining civilisation and their communities. The loss of male life and the marginalisation of men is something to be minimised and avoided, because it costs communities and it costs civilisation. Any community that exploits and marginalises men and neglects them, squanders and wastes the value men can provide to society. By avoidably undermining the well-being and health of men, communities and civilisations undermine themselves.

Any community that exploits and marginalises men and neglects them, squanders and wastes the value men can provide to society.

It is indeed the case that men have sacrificed their lives in war for their countries countless times, but that does not mean it was ideal for that society that they lost their men. The loss of male life in war was just unavoidable, just as women dying performing their reproductive role in childbirth was unavoidable for centuries. The country that not only won battles but did so with the least amount of male casualties, had the larger army to win the war and the men available to rebuild their societies and occupy and rebuild the societies of the territory they captured.

As with women in childbirth, men have died in performing their role for society. Society has days to recognise the cost of the sacrifice of millions of men in war. Anzac Day, Memorial Day and Remembrance Day come to mind. Disposable utilities do not have days of remembrance. We say, “Lest we forget” on Anzac Day for a reason. Deep down we recognise the loss that society, countless families and the men themselves incurred, from losing men in war. We have days of remembrance in part to remind ourselves of the cost of war and the cost of losing men. It is a solemn warning not to forget the cost of war.

Countries that raised their men and boys properly and invested in them and supported them, had more available men that were equipped to power their economy and participate in a larger and fitter military in times of war. Strong support for men and boys creates strong men and strong men create strong empires. The empires that not only harness the potential of their men, but look after their men and lose as little of their men as possible, prevail and win. These are not an either/or set of priorities for a given civilisation, one priority is dependent on the other.

The simple truth is that civilisations that look after men so they can in turn look after society, prosper and they eventually surpass civilisations that exploit their men and treat them as disposable. Yes societies require men to contribute to their continued existence and prosperity, but with the least amount of loss to male life and well-being. Societies that follow that simple rule thrive over societies that do not.

I am not suggesting that we have never had elements of society and our culture over history and in the present day, that have marginalised men, exploited men and treated men as disposable. We certainly have. The difference between the past and the present though, is that in the past we recognised to a certain extent the need to minimise needless male sacrifice as much as possible, despite the far greater incidence of male sacrifice. The sacrifice of men was not ideal for past society, it was just often unavoidable. Unavoidable male sacrifice is not the same as regarding men as disposable. One perspective recognises the value in men and the other does not. Over the last 250 years and particularly over the last 50 years, this perspective has been lost.

In the present prosperous, safe, well nourished and risk free society we live in, we take men for granted. We have normalised men’s marginalisation and exploitation and confused unavoidable male sacrifice in the past as a justification to treat men today as disposable. Society can get away with this temporarily until the safety bubble of prosperity bursts, from its own decadent recklessness and disregard for the men keeping society running.

Current Western society does indeed marginalise men and has increasingly treated men as disposable, as the costs of male sacrifice for society have faded into distant memory since World War 2. However the West does so to its own detriment and eventually given enough time neglecting the men it relies on to sustain itself, will result in the collapse² of the West as other societies take its place.

Male disposability proliferating and becoming normalised, is a characteristic of the final stages of a decadent and complacent civilisation on the decline. It is a pathology arising from societal decadence. Some collective pathological behaviour will always be present in a society, regardless as to what stage it is at. However it is in the final stages of civilisation, that pathological behaviours previously minimised and confined to the margins of society, start to spread and become normalised. This is the same pattern that has occurred with male disposability.

In the last 1000 years, male disposability and gynocentrism has slowly grown century after century from the fringes of our culture, to a substantive and enduring level. Much of the proliferation of male disposability within our culture, has occurred in the last 250 years and especially in the last 50 years. We have always had some degree of male disposability in the past, just as we have always had murder and rape. That does not mean we considered it to be normal or acceptable to the point it was pervasive within every aspect of the entire culture, like we see today.

Like I said earlier, regarding men as disposable and society accepting the unavoidable level of male sacrifice required to protect and sustain society, is not the same thing. One perspective recognises the value of male life and the other perspective does not. The difference in the current cultural climate is that now we are rationalising and justifying male disposability, and gynocentric double standards in an effort for our society to convince itself it is “normal”, when it is anything but normal.

There are plenty of behaviours that have natural and biological underpinnings that are not optimal for society and are morally repugnant. Rape, murder and infanticide are seen in the wild and in other primate species and are driven in part by hormones, genes and biology. A man that rapes a woman or a young underage girl who is fertile, enhances his reproductive fitness. That does not make it okay to rape them. Plenty of violent, pathological and deviant behaviours have a biological basis to them and improve reproductive fitness. None of these acts are morally right and normalising them on the basis they are natural will not allow a civilisation to prosper and sustain itself over long periods of time. In fact normalising such behaviour is a recipe to turn civilisation into an uncivilised barbaric primitive tribal shithole.

If female supremacists want to argue treating men as disposable and as subhuman is acceptable and right because it is natural, then they should have no problem accepting that rape is acceptable and morally right because it is natural. Both of course are not acceptable or right. If female supremacists are going to rationalise double standards against men on biological grounds, we can argue the same when it comes to race and the biological differences between races. Again both forms of bigotry of course are wrong. However if female supremacists want to remain logically consistent, then they should at least have the honesty to acknowledge they are no different from the KKK and numerous other groups that claim group supremacy and appeal to nature to justify their beliefs. Claims of male supremacy or any other form of group supremacy on the basis of biology, are not morally justifiable either.

Acknowledging biological group differences does not automatically require making value judgements about the value of human life and justifying double standards based on the group an individual belongs to. Advanced society requires an advanced culture that acknowledges biological differences between individuals and groups, but rises above appealing to nature to justify bigoted and irrational beliefs and double standards that are demonstrably dysfunctional and that undermine the long term prosperity, stability and sustainability of civilisation. Societies that invest in men and support men will have the manpower to flourish, and societies that exploit men and marginalise men will not. That is just a fact. Whilst male sacrifice has been unavoidable at times, it came at a great cost to society. Those societies that minimised such sacrifice had enough healthy men available to live and fight another day and they prospered.

I do not think I need to describe the value men provide to civilisation in detail. Men discover, invent, design, build, maintain, repair and improve the bulk of basically every facet of our infrastructure, technology and buildings. Men are responsible for the majority of the leadership, innovation, research and expansion of the intellectual frontiers of civilisation and our political, legal and economic systems. Our military, police and emergency services all heavily rely on men. Men are the bulk of our Nobel laureates, Fields Medallists and inventors. None of this has changed despite 50-60 years of feminist social engineering and affirmative action. Whether or not feminists want to accept it, there are biological underpinnings to these realities and the value men provide to their families, their communities and their civilisation.

If men stopped working for a week, billions would be dead from thirst, starvation and violence before men went back to work, as a result of the lack of basic working utilities and mass unrestrained civil unrest. Men are not easy to replace either. It takes 18 years of parental and societal investment to raise an adult male from scratch and they must be raised properly so they have the required physical health, mental health, skills, knowledge and motivation, in order to productively contribute to society.

This is why our current society is screwed. Even if we started today reforming the education system, marriage, family courts and divorce, the legal system, health system and workplace etc, to attend to the social, medical, psychological, learning and employment needs of men and boys and ensure fathers play a role in raising children, it is going to take at least a generation to see any positive impact on society. This idea we can just disregard men and boys with no consequences to society and treat them as disposable, is an idea that will be unlearned through suffering and death on a scale society has not seen for centuries. Death and suffering on a scale that matches our own collective stupidity and reckless indifference toward male well-being.

Our best hope to stave off this social and economic catastrophe is to take as much redemptive action as quickly as possible, to reduce the long-term consequences of this multidecade indifference toward men and boys, and use the now unavoidable consequences coming our way as a lesson for future generations on what not to do. We need to value men, boys and masculinity again in our culture and we need to do it now.

Society requires men, because men like women have an intrinsic value that society depends on to survive and thrive. An intrinsic value that arises from the unique male biological potential they possess. If society harnesses this male potential and does not squander it by exploiting and marginalising men, society persists and advances. Just as women have the potential to bear children, men have the potential to provide, innovate and protect. If we are going to argue men are human doings because they only have value from what they produce, then why not argue women are human doings that only have value if they produce children? Of course I am not endorsing this, but I want to make a point here.

If we are going to argue men are human doings because they only have value from what they produce, then why not argue women are human doings that only have value if they produce children?

Using the bigoted logic of a reproductive reductionist, women’s reproductive utility has no value if women remain barren (as growing numbers of them are). That question and that logic provokes, or at least should provoke scepticism regarding the saying, “men are human doings and women are human beings”. If reproductive utility is the basis of the value of human life, then women themselves only have value based on the quantity of children they produce and those that remain barren are of no value at all. This is not my belief, this is just the logical conclusion that one arrives at by employing the reasoning of female supremacists and reproductive reductionists.

Human males and human females must be treated as human beings if they are to contribute anything to society. Like women, men are not machines. Men have personalities, emotions, hopes and dreams. Men and boys have to be raised properly, invested in, supported, nurtured and loved, to express their potential and do so in a constructive way. Dr. Warren Farrell’s book³ on the boy crisis has some good direction that. If the humanity of men is given no consideration, then their psychological and physical condition will reflect that neglect and their contribution to society will be significantly reduced or eliminated entirely. That is the flaw in treating men like they are human doings.

In some cases with abuse and neglect, male biological potential will not be reduced or eliminated, but instead be directed toward highly destructive and violent ends. If you abuse men and boys and neglect their suffering, then do not be surprised if some of them start shooting people and engaging in violent crime. That is not a justification for their actions, they are still responsible for their actions. However society is also partially responsible for such tragedies through our collective indifference toward the well-being of men and boys.

At the very least if we neglect male well-being, we get failure to launch (which is really nowhere to land), men checking out of society and an epidemic of male suicide. We all know what eventually happens if you fail to look after the general maintenance of your car. If we do not look after the basic needs of men and their general well-being and instead exploit them, then like a car that is not properly looked after, men will break down psychologically and physically. The male suicide epidemic, the falling employment and educational attainment of men, the plummeting fertility rate, the dissolution of the family and the slow and gradual social and economic implosion of Western society, is all partly the result of or entirely because we treat men as disposable and have neglected their humanity.

Exploiting men has a use by date for society, which it will either need to abandon or unlearn through unprecedented death and suffering of its own making. Failing that, natural selection itself will remove gynocentrism and male disposability from humanity, as populations that harness male potential but remember to invest and support their men, surpass populations that do not and replace them. I am not supporting social darwinism, I am just stating reality. Treating men as disposable has consequences.

Civilised society requires us to base the value human life on something beyond its simple biological utility. I am not being hyperbolic when I equate female supremacists with Nazis, because they both make the same fundamental mistake of equating the value of human life with its utility and biological characteristics. The mentally and physically disabled were exterminated with the Jews, because they were deemed by the Nazis to be biologically defective. Claiming men are biologically less valuable than women and using that to justify bigotry, leads to the gynocentric double standards we see today, and eventually given enough time it will escalate to the same outcomes as what occurred in Nazi Germany.

Gynocentrism is indefensible and just based on a different flavour of the same general bigoted logic of every other form of group supremacy in history. Like I said earlier in this article, we have numerous examples in the 20th century alone of what eventually happens to such societies and how it culminates in their decline as other countries prosper and often ends in their collapse. When you put half your population down to benefit the other half of the population, they both sink together.

Humans Are Not Mice or Microbes

As I mentioned in part one of this article, every species has a strategy to maximise its own evolutionary success by strategically investing in activities related to not just reproduction, but survival, growth and parental care (etc.) to differing degrees over their lifespan. Life history theory explains this in detail⁴. The species whose life history strategies prioritise reproduction, have fast life history speeds. They exhibit little parental investment, reach sexual maturity quickly and have short lifespans and put minimal investment in their own development and growth. They tend toward reproducing once (semelparity) and produce large numbers of offspring. They have relatively high mortality rates among their young and for the population in general, compared to other species with slower life history speeds. Bacteria, and many insects and small mammals like mice and rats, prioritise reproduction.

Complex lifeforms like elephants and humans have life history strategies that show a more balanced investment in survival in addition to reproduction and have slower life history speeds. They have high parental investment, mature slowly, have long lifespans and show substantial investment in their own development and growth. They tend to reproduce multiple times (iteroparity) and produce fewer numbers of offspring. They have lower mortality rates among their young and for the population in general, relative to species with fast life history speeds.

Human beings have high levels of parental investment, long intensive developmental periods and slow rates of maturation. Humans have long life spans, are iteroparous and produce relatively few offspring. We are not a species that focuses on maximising reproduction. Humans perform very poorly relative to other species when comparing rates of reproduction. Humans have a life history strategy that invests considerably in activities other than reproduction, such as survival, parental investment and development and growth. Human communities and human individuals are driven to optimise their own life history strategy, not to just simply maximise their rate of reproduction. Simply focusing on reproduction alone or overemphasising reproduction in a species like humans, leads to evolutionary failure and not evolutionary success. We are not simple microbes, insects or mice that can just rely on breeding our way to the future.

Human beings are social animals that have developed a large brain and a sophisticated culture, precisely because we are so heavily invested in activities beyond reproduction. Many of these activities are focused on maximising our own survival in often unforgiving and harsh environments that demand a more sophisticated life history strategy than simply maximising reproduction. Just pumping out babies does not cut it for humans. That is why we have civilisation and have landed on the Moon. None of that happens if the priority is reproduction and maximising the quantity of offspring. Such a life history strategy does not allow for the developmental period or the somatic effort to be long enough and great enough for a large brain to develop and make such feats possible. If our lineage evolved on the basis of maximising reproduction, we would resemble small mammals with large litters of offspring. There is a reason why mice, insects and microbes are not building rockets to go to Mars. When a species is on the track to maximise reproduction, there is little time or energy for anything else other than reproduction, aside from doing the bare minimum to subsist.

I have experience in the molecular life sciences and a general understanding of evolutionary biology. Yes I am aware of Bateman’s principle, the Trivers-Willard hypothesis etc. None of these evolutionary concepts state women are biologically more valuable than men, or that reproduction alone is the sole determining factor of evolutionary success. That is a twisted inference of evolutionary theory to justify an agenda. It is not science, it is dogma masquerading as science.

Conclusion

What I have described in this article could be mostly arrived at by employing common sense (which is worryingly becoming not so common), that is how simple and basic this is. I find it telling that our culture is so gynocentric that many people are blind to such obvious realities. I find it concerning that even some scientists who should know better, will actually beat a drum claiming female superiority⁵ because it fashionable to do so in this man-hating culture and I can cite more than one example of this. This is no better than scientists who claimed male superiority in the past and female supremacists make the same error in basing the value of human life on its utility. They cherry pick data and omit facts that do not support their narrative and make unsubstantiated and oversimplified inferences from the data, as this article discusses⁶.

Make no mistake, there are people with a vested interest in framing human evolution along gynocentric lines to justify their own bigotry. It is simply a matter of time before feminism switches from ignoring sex differences, to acknowledging sex differences and then twisting the science to justify their own female supremacist agenda. The manosphere needs to identify this, be prepared for the switch in strategy from feminists and be ready to address it head on when it surfaces.

It is simply a matter of time before feminism switches from ignoring sex differences, to acknowledging sex differences.

What I have described in this two part article is just the beginning of debunking the underserved worship of the golden uterus. This is just the opening salvo, there is much more to come. In closing I have provided a link⁷ from evolutionary biologists Dr. Bret Weinstein and Dr. Heather Heying, on why it is neither “better” to be a man or a woman from an evolutionary perspective and why neither sex is more “valuable”. I will have more to say regarding this excellent video discussing Fishers principle⁸ and other important evolutionary factors at a later date. For now I encourage people to watch it and am glad to see that at least some of academia has not yet been polluted with female supremacist man-hatred.

Men and women are simply two reproductive components in one reproductive system which the genome fabricates to perpetuate itself. The propagation of a lineage has nothing to do with sexual superiority and everything to do with optimising the interdependent relationship between the sexes that best propagates the genome, given the prevailing environmental conditions. Arguing female superiority in the context of genome propagation is like arguing in the superiority of your reproductive system over your circulatory system. It is a meaningless false dichotomy. It is time for society to see the forest through the trees when it comes to men and women. We are all part of a system bigger than ourselves. Astronauts call this awareness the overview effect⁹. It is time for humanity to grow up and move beyond these reductionist perspectives of sexual, racial and group superiority and narrow concepts of value and instead look at the big picture.

I note Dr. Robert Sapolsky from Stanford University shares a similar perspective to my own on the dangers of employing reductionist “categorical thinking”, when examining human behavioural biology and I would encourage people to watch his first lecture¹⁰ discussing that very danger (in a brilliant highly recommended lecture series on human behaviour). As he discusses, plenty of monstrous activities have occurred on the basis of bad, bigotry driven science. Female supremacists in the sciences twisting the data to push their narrative, are not an exception.

Men and women might be different, but that does not mean society shouldn’t treat men and women with equal dignity (that does not mean equality of outcome). The equal value of human life of all people regardless of race or sex, must be considered sacrosanct for civilisation to remain civil and not descend into tribalism.

References:

1. Wikiquote: Robert H. Jackson
2. The Fempocalypse!!
3. The Boy Crisis: Why Our Boys Are Struggling and What We Can Do About It
4. Life History Theory
5. The Natural Superiority of Women
6. Review of Melvin Konner, Women After All: Sex, Evolution, and the End of Male Supremacy
7. Sex: An Evolutionary Perspective | Bret Weinstein & Heather Heying
8. Fisher’s principle
9. The Overview Effect
10. Introduction to Human Behavioral Biology

By Peter Ryan

The Pedestalisation Of Female Fertility:

Source: Hackney and Kingsland Gazette – Wednesday 12 July 1871

The following article mentions a popular theory of gynocentrism (created by Lester Ward) circulating at the start of the twentieth century. Feminists of the time believed, and still believe, that gynocentrism should serve as the dominant social order.- PW.

The following are a few clippings from newspaper archives pointing to the existence of an “Anti-Man Movement” – so called by the women who formed them –  existing as early as 1830. Clearly ‘anti-man’ turned out to be a branding problem which would later be changed to ‘suffragettes/feminists.’ – PW

___________________________________

Anti-Man Society.

A meeting of the ladies in Maine has lately been held, to take into consideration the propriety of establishing a society to be called the Anti-man Society. It is said be an established fact that for the last century the male party have, by unholy combination, contrived keep all political offices to themselves, to the exclusion women. They are now resolved to put down this unrighteous combination, and if not exclude men entirely at least to have equal share among themselves.— Philadelphia Paper.

Source: Reported in Northampton Mercury – Saturday 19 June 1830
_______________________________________________

This next one from 1842 mentions the ‘Anti-Man Society’ briefly in the second paragraph:

Source: Evening Mail Wednesday 26 October 1842
_________________________________________________________________

The next item details an Anti-Man movement in the year 1895:

SOURCE: Lucifer the Light-Bearer, 23 Aug 1895, Fri, Page 3

_____________________________________________

This last one is more recent, and I’m not sure what if any relation it has with the original 1830 Anti-Man Society:

Source: The Cumberland Argus and Fruitgrowers Advocate Newspaper, Wed 13 Jun 1923

Above is a painting of Frau Minne  from Southern Germany, 1320-1330 ca. The image depicts the male lover presenting Frau Minne with his heart which has been pierced by three arrows. There are two German inscriptions with the image, the first of which translates as “Lady, send me solace, my heart has been wounded,” while the second reads as “Gracious Lady, I have surrendered.”

Frau Minne (vrouw minne) is the personification of courtly love from German Middle Ages. She is frequently addressed directly in Minnesang poetry, usually by a pining lover who is complaining about his state of spiritual suffering.

She is often referred to as the “Goddess” of romantic love, which is differentiated strongly from other kinds of love such as Christian agape as embodied in the figure of Jesus. To make the distinction clear, romantic love is understood as passion, whereas Christian and Buddhist love is understood as compassion.

A rare allegorical painting of ca. 1400 (see figure 1), discovered in a guild house in Zurich in 2009 shows Frau Minne presiding over the suffering of male lovers who are having their hearts torn from their breasts. In this cruel scene Goddess Minne, the mistress of love, sits on a throne consisting of two men. She has just torn out the heart of a man to her left which she holds in her hand, while she is already cutting open the chest of another man to her right to rip his heart out.¹

Romantic love involves the deployment of superstimuli, including titillating courtship rituals such as male chivalry toward fetishized ladies that in many ways resembles the power dynamic of sado-masochistic practices. Nevertheless, this still forms the basis of a spiritual practice, and the originators of this religion stated that if you were not suffering, you were not experiencing the fullness of the goddess’s divine power. Such passion-inducing love contrasts with other kinds of love as mentioned above, such as friendship love, parental love extended to children, or that of Christianity or Buddhism which focuses on human compassion.

In Figure 2. (below) N. R. Kline states,  “The central section depicts Frau Minne as she presides over a couple that seeks her advice. The bearded lover is presumably the author of the text telling of his plight at having to leave. He points to his chest, with text leading from his mouth that reads: ‘st hat dahin’ (you have my heart [in your hand]). The woman to whom he speaks holds the heart to which the man presumably refers. After a series of entreaties his lady finally gives him her blessing and, in the course of the conversation from one panel to the next, the lady offers her fidelity and the man promises the same. On the cover, winged and crowned, Minne, as both judge and witness, sits on a subjugated crouching man as her throne, a visual metonym of triumphant female power. There are no symbols of the religious trappings of betrothal and marriage.”²

The Rhenish tapestry below (1400-1425) shows a young woman tying both an old man and a young man to the fence that encloses the court of Frau Minne (see highlighted detail). Alison G. Stewart explains the scene as follows; “This tapestry illustrates the already well-known concept of Love as an enslaver of men of all ages. In particular, it points to the idea that women have the power to reduce interested men to slaves or fools, an idea seen as early as the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in depictions on Minnekästchen (small ornamental boxes which served as love tokens), on capitals, and in frescoes of Aristotle and Phyllis or Samson and Delilah.” ³

According to Johan Winkelman of the University of Amsterdam, Frau Minne is identified (see figure 4) with a crowned vulva carried aloft by servile, erect penises, thus depicting Minne by her most extreme elemental power.⁴

As mentioned in a previous essay, romantic love began as a code of conduct among the aristocratic classes of the middle ages. However, the trend made its way by degrees eventually to the middle classes, and finally to the lower classes, and ultimately broke class distinctions altogether in the sense that all Western peoples became inheritors of the customs of romantic love regardless of their social station. This breaking of class barriers is marvellously rendered in the painting below by Hans Koberstein (figure 5), who portrays Frau Minne leading a helpless throng of individuals consisting of royalty and pauper, young and old, who are equally held under her sway.

A 15th century depiction “The Power of Frau Minne” (figure 6, below) captures the pain and pathology so widely known to be part of the romantic love experience. The pathology associated with romantic love is so disturbing, in fact, that clinical psychologist Dr. Frank Tallis has written a book detailing the sickness associated with it based on his extensive clinical experience:

Obsessive thoughts, erratic mood swings, insomnia, loss of appetite, recurrent and persistent images and impulses, superstitious or ritualistic compulsions, delusion, the inability to concentrate—exhibiting just five or six of these symptoms is enough to merit a diagnosis of a major depressive episode. Yet we all subconsciously welcome these symptoms when we allow ourselves to fall in love. In Love Sick, Dr. Frank Tallis, a leading authority on obsessive disorders, considers our experiences and expressions of love, and why the combinations of pleasure and pain, ecstasy and despair, rapture and grief have come to characterize what we mean when we speak of falling in love. Tallis examines why the agony associated with romantic love continues to be such a popular subject for poets, philosophers, songwriters, and scientists, and questions just how healthy our attitudes are and whether there may in fact be more sane, less tortured ways to love. A highly informative exploration of how, throughout time, principally in the West, the symptoms of mental illness have been used to describe the state of being in love, this book offers an eloquent, thought-provoking, and endlessly illuminating look at one of the most important aspects of human behavior.⁵

References:

[1] Frau Minne hat sich gut gehalten, 2009
[2] Naomi Reed Kline The Proverbial Role of Frau Minne: ‘Liebe macht Blind’ – Or Does It? in The Profane Arts: Norms and Transgression, Brepols (2016)
[3] Alison G. Stewart, Unequal Lovers: A Study of Unequal Couples in Northern Art, (1978)
[4] The world upside down. Secular badges and the iconography of the Late Medieval Period, in Journal of Archaeology in the Low Countries 1-2 (November 2009) “Malcolm Jones has pointed out that the crowned vulva on this badge should be interpreted as a persiflage on Mary (Jones 2000, 100-101), whilst Johan Winkelman, Emeritus Professor of Historical German Literature at the University of Amsterdam, identified the vulva as an extreme depiction of Vrouw Minne (i.e. the Middle Dutch equivalent of Venus, a symbol of lust) (Winkelman 2002a, 231). According to the attributes with which she is associated, Vrouw Minne, portrayed as a vulva, is the counterpart symbol of Mary, just like Eve in the above-mentioned miniature from the Book of Hours of Catharina van Kleef.”
[5] Love Sick: Love as a Mental Illness, by Frank Tallis – overview on Goodreads

 

See also: Romantic love and the medieval birth of the heart emoji