As I say from time to time, I definitely repeat themes, but what I intend are what amount to sketches, in which I try to flesh out ideas in new ways, and thereby find new pathways to new places. The treatment of women in our culture is a principle consideration of mine, and I am exploring that theme here in slightly new ways.
It seems to me that women retain and transmit 2/3rds of most cultures, if not more. Men may do most of the talking and most of the walking, but they feel keenly the women around them.
Women feel more deeply and more often than most men, in my view. They are more sensitive socially. They reach, in my view, states of connectedness and spirituality more readily than men. They enter into mythic worlds, in my view, more easily than men. I will grant to the reductionists one item on this: their brains are physically wired differently, such that they can use their entire brains with greater facililty. There are more connections between the hemispheres, and their hormonal cycles necessitate learning to manage and recognize mood changes. Emotional circulation is more or less necessitated by their biological reality, when that is much less the case with men.
Maternalistic cultures tend to lose in competitions with paternalistic cultures. Sensitivity will lose out to naked and structured aggression every time. Lao Tzu counseled “understanding the masculine but keeping to the feminine”. According to the legend, he said this on the way to an unknown fate out in the mists beyond the boundaries of the kingdom he was leaving for good.
As a sort of romantic ideal (and I use the word romantic in all sorts of senses; in this case what I intend is an outcome that would be emotionally fulfulling, in the sense that most of us are happy when the good guys win), I would like to see the triumph of Liberalism in the sense of much greater cultural diversity, and I cannot see how it can be retained psychosocially unless we empower women to BE women. Unless we respect them for what they can do BETTER than men, rather than demand of them that they BE men culturally, and only differ in their capacity for the physical reproduction of the species.
What do I mean by this? As it seems to me, women by far have the best aptitude for emotional and sexual satisfaction, IF, and ONLY IF, they are given the affection and safety they need to truly open up emotionally and spiritually. This, in turn, can only happen in a relationship in which sex is one of the factors, but not the primary one. This, in turn, leads to the creation of women who dominate their worlds qualitatively, who raise good kids, and empower their men to be men; and who in turn preserve our culture, as transmitted and influenced disproportionately by those women.
I feel, too, that most women do not want to be dominated (clearly, some categorilly do, as do some fewer number of men), but do want to be led in matters pertaining to the real world. They want men who are stable, reliable, mostly sensitive, and who know who they are and what they want. This is the field within which the optimal blossoming happens.
One needs to look, therefore, with great consternation to the widespread eradication of the notion of the woman as feminine. What was bought in the sexual revolution was greater social acceptance of women detaching themselves emotionally from their need to nurture, and instead pursuing pleasure as its own end, regardless of the emotional cost. Such women need never get married or have kids. They can pursue men solely based upon pleasure considerations, and not with regard to their characters, or with an aim to develop a deep and trusting relationship. They can abandon all pretense of pursuing love, in other words, and settle instead for physical relationships that are not qualitatively better than really good masturbation. I have seen women post on-line that they preferred dancing to sex. It’s easy enough to see why that would be the case.
And our culture is increasingly filled with anger at women. The black culture is particularly guilty of this. I have personally heard ten year old black kids refer to ten year old black girls as “hoes”. You could google almost any random hip-hop song and find aggressive and sexually brutal lyrics when it comes to women. They seem to view women as objects.
Most of them, statistically speaking, grow up in single parent homes, in which the father plays little to no role. This means they have to get all of their emotional nourishment from their mother, who was often emotionally underdeveloped when she had them. They have both an exaggerated need for her, and likely an underlying anger for putting them into that situation. Psychosocially, this leads to chronic and generally oppressive denigration of the feminine.
But this phenomenon is not confined there. I went to see the “X-Men: First Class” movie, and saw a number of somewhat disturbing scenes I wanted to point out as supportive of misogyny. First, the CIA agent has to pretend to be stripper/prostitute. One could say, I suppose, that our culture is becoming “stripperized”, in that normal housewives are taking stripping classes; it is a common way for college girls to earn tuition money; and it is talked about in the mainstream media all the time. When I was growing up, such clubs were for dirty old men. Tattoo parlors were for bikers, sailors, truckers, and convicts. Much has changed.
Then you get the image of a girl kissing a man while he is taking her blood, which Eric Lenscher says is “kinky”. Pain for the woman and pleasure for the man. One could almost, I suppose, see an echo of the vampirism that surrounds our kids nowadays. If you have kids or an interest, go check out the “teen fiction” section of your local bookstore. All the books whose colors are mostly red and black deal with images of what I would argue symbolize morally and emotionally defective human beings, projected onto fictional creatures like vampires or werewolves.
And Havoc does target practice with the forms of women. That is what he is destroying. They could have used bales of hay or anything else. They used female mannikins.
Emma Frost is tied up and briefly strangled, an image which follows shortly on that of her copulating with the Russian General. This is S & M.
Finally, we have the image of the sex-worker turning to hate and murder. One wonders if those balls she shoots out do not symbolize the internalization of the rage she felt performing oral sex, that is then thrown back out into the world as explosions.
All of these themes happen mythically, or if you prefer unconsciously, or semi-consciously. But they feed into the understandings of both men and women of what our proper relationship should be.
Actually, I will add that Charles Xavier had an absent mother. I wonder if the sensation of that is not increasingly common even among those who grow up in two parent homes, whose mothers are unfeminine and unnurturing.
I would think that is a common experience of children of single parent homes, whose mothers work a lot of hours, are tired when they are home, and all too many of whom are not up to the task of feeding their little ones emotionally.
Now, sexual relations are complicated. In what I believe is the world’s oldest extant epic, Gilgamesh, the hero starts the poem out by in effect making a habit of raping the wives of all the men in the kingdom. If memory serves, he was always the first one to have sex with a woman when she got married. He was big and strong, so no one could stop him. How they end this is the subject of the poem.
I know so many women–an amazing number of women–who seem to be somewhat masochistic. I hear stories, and wonder why they react the way they do. Women, in general, really do seem to want to be led/mildly dominated–even though of course they complain about it–and they will put up with a lot of crap from men to protect fundamentally unhealthy relationships. They talk endlessly about problems they never fix. It is relatively easy to conclude from this that they don’t mind the basic situation, provided they can talk about it enough.
It does seems to me our culture in some ways is getting meaner, at least in terms of the media presented to us, which is presumably indicative of larger fluctuations in taste. Part of this is directed at women.
Sartre had some sort of idea where he set up the relation between the sexes as fundamentally antagonistic. Clearly, this is the case sometimes. At the same time, there are cycles back and forth–even and perhaps particularly in healthy relationships-where power swings back and forth, love swings back and forth, attention swings back and forth, vulnerability swings back and forth. A healthy relationship is alive and evolving. At a minimum it is a reality that is fulfilling for both parties most days, in most ways.
This requires, though, respect for and appreciation of the feminine.