Misogyny


In today's New York Times, columnist Bob Herbert did a piece on misogyny, pointing out that it is the most ignored aspect of the campaign. Sexism in its many masks permeates every aspect of American life. Men who have daughters and granddaughters are sending each other pictures, daily in some cases, of women being fucked by water buffalo and sea lions. In other cases, women are abused by men with dicks engorged with petroleum products which give them the flexibility of rubber hoses, typically employed to exact confessions to trumped up charges.

Misogyny is covered up by what is presented to the outside world as a sense of humor. A lot of really sadistic behavior is accompanied by, "Hey, I'm kidding." As Ellen DeGeneres said, "Then why aren't we both laughing?"

There's a passage in the Bible somewhere: "Thou art that man." The Bible is a product of a strictly patriarchal society, in which the all powerful male owns the entire shooting match. In contemporary society the passage would be revised to, "Thou art that person."

The unknown, the stranger, that you pass judgement on, is your denied self. The act of denial is the seed of violence, and what the other person enlivens in your unconscious reflects back your relationship to that part of yourself. That's why when Indians, or those influenced by them, bow and say, "namaste," it is an acknowledgement of the deity in the other. That isn't just a sentiment, it's the objective situation.

So it's an observable fact that the relationship of a man with the feminine in the outside world reflects the relationship in the psyche between the masculine and feminine elements. Men typically define themselves in their masculine identity through their resistance to, or opposition to, the feminine. It's easy to forget that the feminine is not the enemy of the a man, but the other polarity in a unified field of energy. For one polarity to think it's going to be stronger by abusing the other is a special kind of ignorance, in which you not only know nothing, you don't even suspect nothing.

The masculine in the woman will reflect in the man, and the feminine of the man will reflect in the woman.

Robert Bly wrote something about the two weddings, as I recall. When the wedding is going on in the church, on the conscious level, another wedding is taking place in the church basement. At the upper level the man's masculine predominates as does the woman's feminine. But in the unconscious it is the opposite, and there is a cross fertilization between the woman's masculine and the man's feminine. If this doesn't work well, Jung writes, the relationship has a major problem.

Everything contains the opposite part, and the demeaning behavior toward women that prevails in society during this particular time reflects the fear of a patriarchy which has already lost its power. The abortion issue is really an issue of patriarchal power over the body. War is really an issue of patriarchal power over the body. Every soldier knows that the one thing he can't do is think of the enemy as a person. He has to render him an object and kill him without hesitation. The environment is the same issue. In reality, most all of the issues, from health care to elderly care to education to drug use, have to do with the treatment of the human body, the integrity of the human body, and the ownership of the body by the occupant.

Gender equality is the underlying issue in America as in the MIddle East. We can see that their right wing fundamentalists are demeaning toward and fearful of the feminine but we don't see it so easily in our own.

There is a sad truth that nobody talks much about: gender equality comes at a tremendous cost to a lot of men. They have to surrender their superiority. Now, I'm realistic in that I don't expect it's possible to surrender real superiority. But real superiority has no need to call attention to itself, and no more need to surrender than to attack.

It's just the false superiority that has to go. It's the laughing face and "joke" that has to be taken in good humor, even though it's poisonous and women know it. Underneath all the anger and resentment and nastiness, it's fear of the feminine, and the sooner that's surrendered the happier everybody will be. Imagine the joy of walking into a room and not having to feel uncomfortable with any body.

One of the difficulties with stopping misogyny is defining it. Feminine and masculine are normally what a hypnotist calls "process words." That is, they don't have an objective meaning, really, so each person finds the meaning internally. But "feminine" actually can be connected to an object: the human body. All bodies are feminine by definition, including the earth. They are materialized, as opposed to existing in spirit. Derisive comments about the body are in fact derisive of the feminine.

The most serious problem with misogyny is that it is an evolutionary dead end. There's no way to get to full consciousness from there. Our children are moving into a future where organs will be grown from stem cells, and people can be genetically modified, or implanted with a chip that will hold all the information now stored in memory. We have no idea what human beings will become in the next hundred years. Maybe toast, if we keep going in the direction we're headed.

To love our children isn't to mold them to what worked in the past, but rather to what will work in the future. The image of the devouring mother or father isn't the image of somebody who doesn't care about their children. It can easily be somebody who provides too much protection, or locks them inside a system that blocks their evolution. It is vanity that creates the devouring aspect of love. It's the drive to protect which masks the witch eating the child.

Drives always have two polarities, and the sweet spot is perfect balance between them. Each of the polarities can be personified, as for example in the images of Mother Mary on the one hand and the Witch on the other. While it might appear to be a good idea to move to the Mother Mary polarity and be done with evil, it doesn't work like that. Both polarities are always going to be there and at the polarity the energy shifts to its opposite charge. So trying to be perfect will lead you to hell.

My favorite film depiction of the devouring mother was "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," in which Jade Fox tells Jen that the reason she's being such a bitch is because she doesn't want to be left behind. Parents, similarly, don't want to be left behind. They have a hunger for the beauty and youth of the children. It's a kind of devouring hunger, actually, like the hunger Rapunzel's mom had when she was pregnant, for watercress (rapunzel).

So Rapunzel's cut off from the feminine in a building that looks like a dick. The connection to the earth, or body, has been magically severed. The hair grows from her head, like thoughts do, and it can reach the ground. At the connection to the ground, the witch mother climbs along her thoughts and into her head. Does this woman really need to be told her tits don't match?

It would seem that men, observing women's relationships with their mothers, would be ashamed to be misogynistic.

"Damn! Her mama split into a witch and Mother Mary. Divided like a goddamned cell."

One of the most entertaining depictions of the split is in Jodorowsky's "Santa Sangre," (Sacred Blood), which is about a family of circus performers. The father is the ringmaster and the son is the magician. The mother is split. In one aspect she is a pious woman who goes to a temple where a virgin had her arms cut off so that a man could rape her, and there is the miracle of a spring of sacred blood. In an alternate aspect she is the seductress, the girl the ringmaster throws the knives at, the one who seduces him from his wife with her wanton sexuality.

The best line in the film is from the Cardinal who comes to verify the miracle of the sacred blood. "This is paint, woman!"

I'll bet it's not paint when Jesus fills his chalice with sacred blood.

Men might not have any consciousness of their feminine except as they see it in women, the way a dog thinks there's another dog in the mirror, but that doesn't make it less real. Misogyny is on a large scale what derision and cruelty toward an individual woman is at the personal level. In either case it doesn't turn out well for anyone involved. And as the feminine is damaged, the masculine suffers equal and opposite damage.

The proliferation of misogyny by American men reminds me of Peter Sellers as Dr. Strangelove, who is so dissociated from his left side the hand continually attacks him and tries to choke him, or to stiffen into a Nazi salute.

Posted: Tue - January 15, 2008 at 08:24 PM