Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

  sexual and creative energy and activity, penetrates even

  into what Freud called the id, gives nightmare shape to

  natural desire. In order to achieve proper balance in

  interhuman interaction, we must find ways to change

  ourselves from culturally defined agents into naturally

  defined beings. We must find ways o f destroying the

  cultural personae imposed on our psyches and we must

  discover forms o f relationship, behavior, sexual being

  and interaction, which are compatible with our inherent

  natural possibilities. We must move away from the perverse, two-dimensional definitions which stem from sexual repression, which are the source o f social oppression, and move toward creative, full, multidimensional modes o f sexual expression.

  Essentially the argument is this: we look at the world

  we inhabit and we see disaster everywhere; police states;

  prisons and mental hospitals filled to overflowing; alienation o f workers from their work, women and men from each other, children from the adult community,

  governments contemptuous o f their people, people

  filled with intense self-hatred; street violence, assault,

  rape, contract murderers, psychotic killers; acquisition

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  gone mad, concentrated power and wealth; hunger,

  want, starvation, camps filled with refugees. Those

  phenomena mark the distance between civilized man

  and natural man, tribal man, whose sexual and social

  patterns functioned in a more integrated, balanced

  way. We know how it is now, and we want to know how

  it was then. While we cannot reconstruct the moment

  when humans emerged in evolution into recognizable

  humanness, or analyze that person to see what existence

  was like, while we cannot seek to emulate rituals and

  social forms of tribal people, or penetrate to and then

  imitate the dynamic relationship primitive people had

  with the rest of the natural world, while we cannot even

  know much of what happened before people made

  pottery and built cities, while we cannot (and perhaps

  would not) obliterate the knowledge that we do have

  (of space travel and polio vaccines, cement and Hiroshima), we can still find extant in the culture echoes of a distant time when people were more together, figuratively and literally. These echoes reflect a period in human development when people functioned as a part

  of the natural world, not set over against it; when men

  and women, male and female, were whatever they were,

  not polar opposites, separated by dress and role into

  castes, fragmented pieces of some not-to-be-imagined

  whole.

  In recent years, depth psychologists in particular

  have turned to primitive people and tribal situations

  in an effort to penetrate into the basic dynamics of

  male and female. The most notable effort was made by

  Jung, and it is necessary to state here that, admirable

  as his other work sometimes is, Jung and his followers

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  have carried the baggage o f patriarchy and sexual dualism with them into the search. Jung describes male and female in the absolute terms native to the culture, as

  archetypes preexistent in the psyche. Male is defined

  as authority, logic, order, that which is saturnian and

  embodies the consonant values o f patriarchy; female is

  defined as emotional, receptive, anarchic, cancerian.

  Matriarchy preceded patriarchy because patriarchal

  values (particularly the need for complex organization)

  inform advanced societies, whereas female values inform more primitive tribal societies. As far as individual men and women are concerned, the male psyche has a

  feminine component (the subconscious) which is anarchic, emotional, sensitive, lunar, and the female personality has a male component (the conscious, or

  mind) which can be defined as a capacity for logical

  thought. O f course, biological women are ruled, it

  turns out, by the subconscious; men are ruled, not surprisingly, by the conscious, mind, intellect. One might imagine a time and place where intellect is not valued

  over anarchic, emotional, sensitive —looniness?: but

  that would be the most gratuitous kind o f fantasy. Jung

  never questioned the cultural arbitrariness o f these categories, never looked at them to see their political implications, never knew that they were sexist, that he functioned as an instrument o f cultural oppression.

  In the book Woman's Mysteries: Ancient and Modem,

  M. Esther Harding, a lifelong student o f Jung and a

  Patron o f the C. G. Jung Institute, applies Jungian ontology to a study o f mythology. Taking the moon, Luna, as the patron saint o f women (ignoring any masculine imagery associated with the moon, and this

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  imagery is substantial; ignoring any feminine imagery

  connected with the sun, and this imagery is substantial),

  Harding ultimately identifies the female with the demonic, as did the Catholic Church:

  But if she will stop long enough to look within, she

  also may become aware of impulses and thoughts

  which are not in accord with her conscious attitudes

  but are the direct outcome of the crude and untamed

  feminine being within her. For the most part, however,

  a woman will not look at these dark secrets of her own

  nature. It is too painful, too undermining of the conscious character which she has built up for herself; she prefers to think that she really is as she appears to be.

  And indeed it is her task to stand between the Eros

  which is within her, and the world without, and

  through her own womanly adaptation to the world

  to make human, as it were, the daemoniac power of

  the nonhuman feminine principle. 1

  Eros, the subconscious, the flow of human sexual energy— described as the witch burners described it, “the daemoniac power of the nonhuman feminine principle. ”

  Harding is absolutely representative of the Jungian

  point of view.

  It is a natural consequence of this dualistic stance

  that male and female are pitted against each other and

  that conflict is the dynamic mode of relationship open

  to male and female, men and women, when they meet:

  These discrepancies in their attitudes are dependent

  on the fact that the psychic constitution of men and

  women are essentially different; they are mirror opposites the one of the other.. . . So that their essential nature and values are diametrically opposed. 2

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  These male and female sets are defined as archetypes,

  embedded in a collective unconscious, the given structure o f reality. T hey are polar opposites; their mode o f interaction is conflict. T hey cannot possibly understand each other because they are absolutely different: and o f course, it is always easier to do violence to something Other, something whose “nature and values”

  are other. (Women have never understood that they

  are, by definition, Other, not male, therefore not human. But men do experience women as being totally opposite, other. How easy violence is. ) T here is, because Jung was a good man and Jungians are good people, a happy ending: though these two forces, male

  and female, are opposite, they are complementary, two

  halves o f the same whole. One is not superior,
one is not

  inferior. One is not good, one is not bad. But this resolution is inadequate because the culture, in its fiction and its history, demonstrates that one (male, logic, order,

  ego, father) is good and superior both, and that the

  other (guess which) is bad and inferior both. It is the

  so-called female principle of Eros that all the paraphernalia

  of patriarchy conspires to suppress through the psychological,

  physiological, and economic oppression of those who are biologically women. Jung’s ontology serves those persons and institutions which subscribe to the myth o f feminine

  evil.

  T he identification o f the feminine with Eros, or

  erotic energy (carnality by any other name), comes

  from a fundamental misunderstanding o f the nature o f

  human sexuality. The essential information which

  would lead to nonsexist, nonrepressive notions o f sexuality is to be found in androgyny myths, myths which

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  describe the creation of the first human being as male

  and female in one form. In other words, Jung chose the

  wrong model, the wrong myths, on which to construct

  a psychology of male and female. He used myths infused with patriarchal values, myths which gained currency in male-dominated cultures. The anthropological discoveries which fueled the formation of his theories

  all reveal relatively recent pieces of human history.

  With few exceptions, all of the anthropological information we have deals with the near past. * But the myths which are the foundation of and legitimize our culture

  are gross perversions of original creation myths which

  molded the psyches of earlier, possibly less self-con-

  scious and more conscious, peoples. The original myths

  all concern a primal androgyne —an androgynous godhead, an androgynous people. The corruptions of these myths of a primal androgyne without exception

  uphold patriarchal notions of sexual polarity, duality,

  male and female as opposite and antagonistic. The

  myth of a primal androgyne survives as part of a real

  cultural underground: though it is ignored, despised

  by a culture which posits other values, and though

  those who relate their lifestyles directly to it have been

  ostracized and persecuted.

  With all of this talk of myth and mythology, what is

  myth, and why does it have such importance? The best

  definition remains that of Eliade, who wrote in Myths,

  Dreams, and Mysteries:

  *

  It is estimated that the time space between 70 0 0 b . c . (when people

  began to domesticate animals'and make pottery) and 1 9 7 4 a . d . is only 2 percent of the whole o f human history.

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  What exactly is a myth? In the language current during the nineteenth century, a “myth” meant anything that was opposed to “reality”: the creation of Adam,

  or the invisible man, no less than the history of the

  world as described by the Zulus, or the Theogony of

  Hesiod —these were all “myths. ” Like many another

  cliche of the Enlightenment and of Positivism, this,

  too, was of Christian origin and structure; for, according to primitive Christianity, everything which could not be justified by reference to one or the other

  of the two Testaments was untrue; it was a “fable. ”

  But the researches of the ethnologists have obliged us

  to go behind this semantic inheritance from the Christian polemics against the pagan world. We are at last beginning to know and understand the value of the

  myth, as it has been elaborated in “primitive” and

  archaic societies — that is, among those groups of mankind where the myth happens to be the very foundation of social life and culture. Now one fact strikes us immediately: in such societies the myth is thought to

  express the absolute truth, because it narrates a sacred

  history; that is, a transhuman revelation which took

  place at the dawn of the Great Time.. . . Being real

  and sacred, the myth becomes exemplary, and consequently, repeatable, for it serves as a model, and by the same token, a justification, for all human actions. In

  other words, a myth is a true history of what came to pass

  at the beginning of Time, and one which provides the pattern for human behavior. 3 [Italics added]

  I would extend Eliade’s definition in only one respect.

  It is not only in primitive and archaic societies that

  myths provide this model for behavior —it is in every

  human society. T he distance between myth and social

  organization is perhaps greater, or more tangled, in

  advanced technological societies, but myth still operates

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  as the substructure of the collective. The story of Adam

  and Eve will affect the shape of settlements on the moon

  and Mars, and the Christian version of the primitive

  myth of a divine fertility sacrifice saturates the most

  technologically advanced communications media.

  What are the myths of androgyny, and how do we

  locate them behind the myths of polarity with which we

  are familiar? Let us begin with the Chinese notions of yin

  and yang.

  Yin and yang are commonly associated with female

  and male. The Chinese ontology, so appealing in that

  it appears to give whole, harmonious, value-free description of phenomena, describes cosmic movement as cyclical, thoroughly interwoven manifestation of yang

  (masculine, aggressive, light, spring, summer) and yin

  (female, passive, dark, fall, winter). The sexual identifications reduce the concepts too often to conceptual polarities: they are used to fix the proper natures of

  men and women as well as the forces of male and female.

  These definitions, like the Jungian ones which are based

  on them, are seemingly modified by the assertions that

  (1) all people are composed of both yin and yang,

  though in the man yang properly predominates and in

  the woman yin properly predominates; (2) these male

  and female forces are two parts of a whole, equally

  vital, mutually indispensable. Unfortunately, as one

  looks to day-to-day life, that biological incarnation of

  yin, woman, finds herself, as always, the dark half of

  the universe.

  The sexual connotations of yin and yang, however,

  are affixed onto the original concepts. They reflect an

  already patriarchal, and misogynist, culture. Richard

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  Wilhelm, in an essay on an ancient Chinese text called

  The Secret of the Golden Flower, gives the uncorrupted

  meanings o f yin and yang:

  Out of the Tao, and the Tai-chi [“the great ridge

  pole, the supreme ultimate”] there develop the principles of reality, the one pole being the light (yang) and the other the dark, or the shadowy, (yin). Among

  European scholars, some have turned first to sexual

  references for an explanation, but the characters refer

  to phenomena in nature. Yin is shade, therefore the

  north side of a mountain and the south side of a river.

  . . . Yang, in its original form, indicates flying pennants

  and, corresponding to the character of yin, is the south

  side of a mountain and the north side of a river. Starting only with the meaning of “light” and
“dark, ” the principle was then expanded to all polar opposites,

  including the sexual. However, since both yin and yang

  have their common origin in an undivided One and

  are active only in the realm of phenomena, where yang

  appears as the active principle and conditions, and yin

  as the passive principle is derived and conditioned, it

  is quite clear that a metaphysical dualism is not the

  basis for these ideas. 4

  Light and dark are obvious in a phenomenological

  sense —there is day and it slowly changes into night

  which then slowly changes into day. When men began

  conceptualizing about the nature o f the universe, the

  phenomena o f light and dark were an obvious starting

  point. My own experience is that night and day are

  more alike than different —in which case they couldn't

  possibly be opposite. Man, in conceptualizing, has

  reduced phenomena to two, when phenomena are

  more complex and subtle than intellect can imagine.

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  Still, how is it that it is the feminine, the sexually

  female, that is embodied in yin? Even patriarchy and

  misogyny began somewhere. Here I can only guess. We

  know that at one time men were hunters and women

  were planters. Both forms o f work were essential and

  arduous. Both demanded incredible physical strength

  and considerable knowledge and skill. Why did men

  hunt and women plant? Clearly women planted because they were often pregnant, and though pregnancy did not make them weak and passive, it did mean that

  they could not run, go without food for long periods of

  time, survive on the terms that hunting demanded. It

  is probable that very early in human history women

  also were hunters, and that it was crucial to the survival

  of the species that they develop into planters — first to

  supplement the food supply, second to reduce infant

  and woman mortality. We see that the first division of

  labor based on biological sex originated in a fundamental survival imperative. In the earliest of times, with no contraception and no notion of the place of the