κατ᾽ εἰκόνα Θεοῦ ἐποίησεν αὐτόν, ἄρσεν καὶ θῆλυ ἐποίησεν αὐτούς.
Ad imaginem Dei creavit illum; masculum et feminam creavit eos.
In the image of God he created him; male and female he created them.Genesis, 1:27; color added; see here for "male" and "female" in Greek.
ʾInnā ḫalaqnākum min ðakarin waʾunθā.
Indeed, we created you from a male and a female!ʾal-Qurʾān, Sūrah 49, Verse 13; color added.
καὶ πρὸς τὸν ἄνδρα σου ἡ ἀποστροφή σου, καὶ αὐτός σου κυριεύσει.
Et sub viri potestate eris, et ipse dominabitur tui.
Your desire will be for your husband, and he will rule over you.Genesis 3:16; addressed to Eve.
Γραμματικοῦ θυγάτηρ ἔτεκεν φιλότητι μιγεῖσα
παιδίον ἀρσενικόν, θηλυκόν, οὐδέτερον.A grammarian's daughter, having known love,
gave birth to a masculine, feminine, and neuter child.Palladas of Alexandria, The Greek Anthology, Volume III, Book IX, Epigram 489, translated by W.R. Paton, Loeb Classical Library, Harvard Univesity Press, 1917, p.273; translation modified; color added.
Sugar and spice and everything nice,
That's what little girls are made of.
Snips and snails and puppydog tails,
That's what little boys are made of.Traditional
"Girls are made of water, men of mud," he [Jia Baoyu] declares.
Cao Xueqin & Gao E,
A Dream of Red Mansions, Volume I
[Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1994, 2005, p.34]
Lady, since I am going now beneath the earth, as my last entreaty I ask you to care for my orphaned children: marry my son to a loving [φίλη] wife and give my daughter a noble [γενναῖος] husband. And may they not, like their mother, perish untimely but live out their lives in happiness in their ancestral land.
Alcestis, addressing Hestia, the goddess of the Hearth, Alcestis, by Euripides, 162-169, Loeb Classical Library, Eurpides: Cyclops, Alcestis, Medea, translated by David Kovacs [Harvard University Press, 1994, 2001, pp.170-171]
Man wird, im Ganzen genommen, die Anmuth mehr bey dem weiblichen Geschlecht... finden, wovon die Ursache nicht weit zu suchen ist. Zur Anmuth muß sowohl der körperliche Bau, als der Charakter beitragen; jener durch seine Biegsamkeit, Eindrücke anzunehmen und ins Spiel gesetzt zu werden, dieser durch die sittliche Harmonie der Gefühle. In beydem war die Natur dem Weibe günstiger als dem Manne...
L'Etoile Perdue, "The Lost Pleiad," 1884, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) Anmuth wird also der Ausdruck der weiblichen Tugend seyn, der sehr oft der männlichen fehlen dürfte.
As a general rule, one finds more grace [χάρις] among women..., and the origin of this is not hard to find. The physical form has to contribute to grace, as well as the character;
the physical through its flexible ability to receive impressions and to be set in play, the character through the moral harmony of feelings. In both, nature was more favorable towards woman than towards man...
Grace will thus become the expression of womanly virtue, and very often might be missing from manly virtue.
Friedrich Schiller, Über Anmuth und Würde, "On Grace and Dignity," Schiller's "On Grace and Dignity" in Its Cultural Context, Essays and a New Translation, Edited by Jane V. Curran and Christophe Fricker [Camden House, 2005, pp.153-154,204-205], translation modified.
Us girls we are so magical
Soft skin, red lips, so kissable
Hard to resist, so touchable
Too good to deny itKaty Perry, "I Kissed a Girl," Published by When I'm Rich
You'll Be My Bitch (ASCAP), administered by WB Music, 2008
Everyone is familiar with the behavior of a group of young girls or teens who, giggling or even shrieking, are excited about clothes,
make-up, hair, ribbons, jewelry, music, boys, nails, pink things, or other characteristically feminine diversions. This is "girly" behavior; and traditional feminism is about as sympathetic to it as would be a Marine drill sergeant. Even feminists who "valorize" the feminine, perhaps with notions that it represents something morally superior to predatory male actions, are unlikely to see really "girly" behavior as anything more than trival, vain, and, at best, insufficiently serious. In the end, however, one might wonder, as Christina Hoff Sommers did, "Do feminists like women?" Or, when we are talking about the obvious joy and excitement that girls take in their diversions, we might ask if feminism is itself not just a form of anhedonic political moralism, which it certainly is, but even a form of real misogyny. Anyone who really likes girls, however silly it may all look from the viewpoint of sober maturity, really doesn't want them to be any other way.
Ἐγκλινοβάραγγος
(Enklinobarangus), cf. the scene in Coneheads [1993] where Beldar (Dan Aykroyd) drives his daughter and her friends around shopping [note].
Why can't a woman be more like a man?
Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historic'ly fair;
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Well, why can't a woman be like that?
Why does ev'ryone do what the others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Why do they do ev'rything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up -- well, like their father instead?
Why can't a woman take after a man?
Men are so pleasant, so easy to please;
Whenever you are with them, you're always at ease.
Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours?Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick Loewe, 1956
A woman wants one man to satisfy her every need.
A man wants every woman to satisfy his one need.Unattributed
He says, You knew I was like this when you married me.
The righteous cry of married men everywhere, for it's a cliché that every woman signs up thinking her husband will change, while every husband signs up believing his wife won't: both dead wrong.
Mary Karr, Lit, A Memoir, 2009, Harper Perennial, 2010, p.182 [note]
How to Impress a Woman:
Wine her, Dine her, Call her, Hug her,
Hold her, Surprise her, Compliment her,
Smile at her, Laugh with her,
Cry with her, Cuddle with her,
Shop with her, Give her jewelry,
Buy her flowers, Hold her hand,
Write love letters to her,
Go to the end of the earth and back for her.How to Impress a Man:
Show up naked.
Bring beer.Dr. Laura Schlessinger [note]
Diamonds are a girl's best friend and dogs are a man's best friend. Now you know which sex has more sense.
Zsa Zsa Gabor (1917-2016)
For a man this might be a pleasant trip down memory lane, counting up his conquests. But for a girl, it's a whole other story. I had let these men inside me, wanting that to make me matter to them. Wanting it to make me matter...
A boy once said to me, "Boys have to put forth real effort to get laid, while all you have to do is stand braless in the wind." It's true. What's easier for a girl than to get noticed for her body?
Kerry Cohen, Loose Girl, a Memoir of Promiscuity
[Hyperion, New York, 2008, pp.2-3]
Conduct a thorough reading of questionable college rape reports, and you'll begin to see a pattern: A legion of confused young women, long coached that sex means nothing -- casual sex is just something that empowered women do, after all -- who quickly and traumatically realize, either consciously or not that something feels dreadfully wrong...
Bathed in the sexual revolution and its culture of sexual freedom, many young Americans, male and female, now have no idea how -- or why -- to impose even the flimsiest moral framework around the most intimate, exposing, literally naked act in which two human beings can engage. Having been told that sex is easy, meaningless, and always pleasurable, many young people are shocked [shocked!] to discover that's not invariably the case -- that sex is often anything but casual, that it triggers deep and powerful emotions and needs they cannot integrate with the cultural insistence that sex is no big deal. They do not have the vocabulary or the clarity to grasp why. What has happened to them feels wrong, not right. It is disturbing, not ecstatic. And for these feelings, they believe they deserve redress.
Heather Wilhelm, "The 'Rape Culture' Lie," Commentary, March 2015, pp.27 & 29
Yet studies consistently find that following hookups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress. Female pleasure is rare during casual sex. Men in casual relationships are just not as good at bringing women to orgasm in comparison with men in committed relationships: In first-time hookups, only 10% of women orgasm, compared with 68% of women in long-term relationships. These figures don’t suggest a generation of women reveling in sexual liberation. Instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant sex out of a sense of obligation...
The word “chivalry” is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what we need. As the feminist theorist Mary Harrington writes: “‘Chivalrous’ social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But…the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.”
Louise Perry, "How the Sexual Revolution Has Hurt Women," the Wall Street Journal, August 20-21, 2022, pp.C1,C4.
Sich im Grundprobleme »Mann und Weib« zu vergreifen, hier den abgründlichsten Antagonismus und die Nothwendigkeit einer ewig-feindseligen Spannung zu leugnen, hier vielleicht von gleichen Rechten, gleicher Erziehung, gleichen Angsprüchen und Verpflichtungen zu träumen: das ist ein typisches Zeichen von Flachköfigkeit, und ein Denker, der an dieser gefährlichen Stelle sich flash erwiesen hat -- flach im Instinkte! --, darf überhaupt als verdächtig, mehr noch, als verrathen, als aufgedeckt gelten... Ein Mann hingegen, der Tiefe hat, in seinem Geiste, wie in seinen Begierden, auch jene Tiefe des Wohlwollens, welche der Strenge und Härte fähig ist, und leicht mit ihnen verwechselt wird, kann über das Weib immer nur orientalisch denken: er muß das Weib als Besitz, als verschließbares Eigenthum, als etwas zu Dienstbarkeit Vorbestimmtes und in ihr sich Vollendendes fassen, -- er muß sich hierin auf die ungeheure Vernunft Asiens, auf Asiens Instinkt-Überlegenheit stellen..
To be wrong on the fundamental problem "man and woman," to deny the abysmal antagonism, the necessity of forever hostile tension, to dream of equal rights, equal education, equal claims and obligations -- is a typical sign of short-sightedness. A thinker who proves short-sighted in this dangerous spot, shallow in instinct, should be looked upon with suspicions, and more; he should be considered revealed, uncovered!... A man who has depth, on the other hand, depth of mind as well as of desires, and also that depth of good will which is capable of rigor and hardness (and is easily mistaken for them) --
such a man can only think orientally about women. He must comprehend women as a possession, a property that can be closed off, as something predestined for service and thereby fulfilling its nature. He must place himself on the side of Asia's enormous rationality, Asia's superior instincts...
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §238, translated by Marianne Cowan, Henry Regnery Company, 1955, pp.165-166, translation modified; Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, pp.153-154 [verschließ- for verschliess-], color added.
Wenn ein Weib gelehrte Neigungen hat, so ist gewöhnlich Etwas an ihrer Geschlechtlichkeit nicht in Ordnung. Schon Unfruchtbarkeit disponirt zu einer gewissen Männlichkeit des Geschmackts; der Mann is nämlich, mit Verlaub, »das unfruchtbare Thier«.
When a woman is inclined to learning, there is usually something not in order with her sexuality. Barrenness already disposes her to a certain masculinity of tastes; the man indeed -- if I may say so -- is "the barren animal."
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, §144, ibid., p.84, translation modified; Jenseits von Gut und Böse, Philipp Reclam, Stuttgart, 1988, p.82.
Das niedrig gewachsene, schmalschultrige, breithüftige und kurzbeinige Geschlecht das schöne nennen konnte nur der vom Geschlechtrstrieb umnebelte männliche Intellekt: in diesem Triebe nämlich steckt seine ganze Schönheit. Mit mehr Fug könnte man das weibliche Geschlecht das unästhetische nennen.
Only the male intellect, clouded by the sexual impulse, could call the undersized, narrow-shouldered, broad-hipped, and short-legged sex the fair sex; for in this impulse is to be found its whole beauty. The female sex could be more aptly called the unaesthetic.
Arthur Schopenhauer, "On Women," Parerga and Paralipomena, Volume 2, §369, Oxford, Calarendon Press, 1974, p.619
Paul said: "There is in each of us an ancient force that takes and ancient force that gives.
A man finds little difficulty facing that place within himself where the taking force dwells, but it's almost impossible for him to see the giving force without changing
into something other than man. For a women, the situation is reversed."
Duke Paul Atreides, Dune, by Frank Herbert [Ace Books, 1965, p.457]; "Atreides" is the patronymic of Atreus, father of King Agamemnon Atreides of Mycenae.
War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is Strength. The penised individual who raped you is a woman.
J.K. Rowling, Twitter, 12 December 2021.
Ballet is woman. George Ballanchine (1904-1983)
Save her! Save the girl!
Will Smith, I, Robot [Fox, 2004]
37. Chia Jê / The Family [The Clan]
☴ above SUN / THE GENTLE, WIND
☲ below LI / THE CLINGING, FIRETHE JUDGMENT
THE FAMILY. The perseverance of the woman furthers.
The foundation of the family is the relationship between husband [
] and wife [
]. The tie that holds the family together lies in the loyalty and perseverance of the wife. Her place is within (second line), while that of the husband is without (fifth line). It is in accord with the great laws of nature that husband and wife take their proper places. Within the family a strong authority is needed; this is represented by the parents. If the father [
] is really a father and the son [
] a son, if the elder brother [
] fulfills his position, and the younger [
] fulfills his, if the husband is really a husband and the wife a wife, then the family is in order. When the family is in order, all the social relationships of mankind will be in order.
The I Ching or the Book of Changes, The Richard Wilhelm Translation rendered into English by Cary F. Baynes, Bollingen Series XIX, Princeton University Press, 1950, 1967, pp.143-144. See "The Six Relationships."
| The Pythagorean Table of Opposites | ||
|---|---|---|
| 1 | limited | unlimited |
| 2 | odd | even |
| 3 | one | plurality |
| 4 | right | left |
| 5 | male | female |
| 6 | resting | moving |
| 7 | straight | curved |
| 8 | light | darkness |
| 9 | good | bad |
| 10 | square | oblong |
This is first noticeable in Parmenides, for whom Being is limited, One, and resting, rejecting the "unlimited" only because it is "not lawful." Subsequently, there seems little doubt that the Greeks associated the male, the straight, the light, and the good together, and similarly the female, the curved, darkness, and the bad. To feminists, this is all a system of patriarchal gender stereotypes.
What is curious about the system, however, is that it is very similar to the system of opposites in Chinese philosophy that we find in the doctrine of Yin and Yang. There, the associations of Yin are unmistakably even, female, and darkness, while those of Yang are odd, male, and light. The differences are also interesting: the Greek male is "resting," the female "moving," while the Chinese male is active, the female passive.
As feminists would point out, whatever the system, the male gets the attribute with the higher prestige. Thus, active is better than passive; but, for the Greeks, to be free of all motion is superior to being a subject of motion, whether actively or passively. We see exactly the same thing in India, where the male side of the god Shiva is detached, remote, and unmoving, while the female side is active, creative, and powerful. In India, detachment is definitely superior to participation.
These cross-cultural similarities suggest that we may be dealing, not with gender stereotypes as cultural artifacts, but with something deeper: sexual archetypes that are not produced by culture. The parallels between Greece, India, and China, not to mention countless other cultures, certainly explode a favored feminist thesis (with an element of anti-Semitism) that "patriarchy" was something created by Judaism and Christianity (cf. The Creation of Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner, Oxford, 1986) [note].
Ancient Egypt, for instance, with not more than three ruling queens in three thousand years (with the memory of the most notable, Hatshepsut, deliberately erased by her nephew and successor, Thutmose III), does not sound like a contradiction of patriarchy, whatever else the status of women may have been like. Indeed, while many praise the status of women in Ancient Egypt, they are clearly associated with the home and children, although, unlike some other cultures, we also find them in business [note].
As C.G. Jung would say about such things, archetypes, since they are part of the architecture of the unconscious, are going to turn up however much anyone dislikes them or tries to suppress them. Jung's view of sexual archetypes, however, is a complex one: The psyche actually seeks a balance between opposites. The manifestation of one sexual archetype anywhere in the mind, therefore, will lead to a covert manifestation of the opposite one elsewhere. The balance is especially a matter of the unconscious compensating for the contents of consciousness.
Thus, for Jung, the male unconscious contains an archetypal image of the female, the anima, while the female unconscious contains an archetypal image of the male, the animus. The unconscious images are spontaneously projected and recognized externally, with the characteristic that the external objects become numinous and fascinating. To the extent that a person is immature and unaware of the nature of this fascination, it will produce irrational effects, i.e. the object may be loved or hated, regardless of what it is actually like, and, especially, the person will be unaware that the fascination produces no knowledge of the object, which actually may have nothing whatsoever to do with what the subject thinks or expects about it.
The duality between internal and external, or subject and object, and between conscious and unconscious, produce an overlapping map of the psyche. The mind, which is the conscious subject (internal and conscious), contains another couple of sexual archetypes for Jung: eros & logos. This is probably the most offensively "sexist" thing about Jung's theory, since eros is a female capacity for emotion, while logos is a male capacity for reason [note].
However, both of these functions exist in male and female minds. What is characteristic is the dynamic that is set up. Jung says that men tend to have irrational sentiments, while women tend to have irrational opinions. He did not think that all women had irrational opinions, or that all of a woman's opinions were irrational. He did think, however, that reason in women and emotion in men have a powerful unconscious potential, which means that men unaware or out of touch with emotion will tend to have the irrational sentiments, while women unaware or out of touch with reason will tend to have irrational opinions.
Since a large number of people in real life are unaware and out of touch with emotion and reason, the tendency will be for more men to have the irrational sentiments, and more women to have the irrational opinions.
This theory seems no worse than one of a universal patriarchal conspiracy when such stereotypes seem to occur in most historic cultures. For instance, Socrates says that people would think that Athenians "are in no way better than women," because of the emotional and histrionic way they carry on in court.
But many miles, centuries, and civilizations away from Socrates, in the 1716 manual of the samurai ethos, Hagakure by Yamamoto Tsunetomo (celebrated in the 1999 Forest Whitaker movie Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai), we find:
Aru hito, "ri to fu to no katachi o shiri tari" to un fu. Sono katachi o toi eba, "Ri wa kaku naru mono, kiwamarite ugoku koto nashi. Fu wa maruki mononari, zen'aku jasei o iya hazu, tokoro mo sadamezu korobu mononari" to iheri.
A certain man said, "I know the shapes of Reason and of Woman." [Japanese text, Hagakure, The Book of the Samurai, Yamamoto Tsunetomo, 山本常朝; Kodansha International, Tokyo, no date, p.238; English translation, William Scott Wilson, Discus Books, 1981, p. 138] Here we get a combination of contrasts involving geometry (square/round), thought (rational/irrational), and moral disposition (moral/immoral), with a harsh connection made betwen female roundness, irrationality, and immorality. A great deal of this misogyny in Japan can be traced back to China, where we have already seen the tradition of stereotypes.
The theory of the sexual dynamic of the psyche in Jung is conformable to the theory of male and female patterns of conversation in Deborah Tannen's best selling book You Just Don't Understand [1990]. Tannen, as a result of her own research, contends that men use conversation to establish status, or for "information," while women use conversation to establish closeness. This contrast seems to display the logos/eros functions, since information is rational while closeness is emotional. When a woman talks to a man about a problem she is having, they may speak at cross purposes. She may basically just want to be comforted and encouraged, while the man may think that she is seeking a solution that he can give to her quickly and then move on.
Something similar is described by the pop psychologist John Gray Men with a problem will not want to be bothered; and, if they are bothered, it can only be because a succinct "solution" is being offered to their problem. But women will tend to bother them without a "solution," which the man will find very irritating. Similarly, a man may avoid a woman with a problem, thinking she would like to be left alone. If she then seeks contact, he may respond by abruptly telling her how to fix it and then going away again. Both Tannen and Gray, like Jung, expect that as each sex learns what the other seeks, they will, at the least, not insensibly work at cross-purposes.
Tannen, like Jung, sees the opposite of each disposition emerge unconsciously. Men do want closeness, and women do want status. The dynamic, however, is that men may seek closeness by means of status, while women may seek status by means of closeness. Similarly, a good looking woman from nowhere could have a reasonable expectation that merely attracting the attention of the right man could result in considerable status: the husband of the Queen of England might not be the King, but the wife of the King would be the Queen. This dynamic also occurs among those of the same sex. Women, according to Tannen, may achieve status according to the closeness to the "in" social group, as seen in recent movies like Heathers [1989], Clueless [1995], and Mean Girls [2004] -- The feminist argument, of course, is that everyone naturally loves status and closeness equally, but that men seize status by force and women are just left with the dregs of closeness. However, since feminists also tend to think that women cannot achieve equal status (the "glass ceiling") without the help of anti-discrimination and sexual harassment laws, they seem to concede that women are not willing or able to compete on equal terms with men. Furthermore, part of the feminist argument often is that status hierarchies and competitive business are bad in the first place. Companies should be run with cooperation and closeness. How this is supposed to play out is unclear. No one is going to believe that uncompetitive business is better than competitive when the law is used to force competitive businesses to do things they don't already want to do, i.e. granting status positions to women who would not have gotten it otherwise.
There are at least three incommensurable claims in all this: (1) If women are naturally as competitive as men, then all that feminists need to do is raise a generation of women through "non-sexist" education that will simply take what is theirs, the way men did (since it has been some forty years since the "women's movement" conceived this goal, it should have happened by now). (2) If women are not naturally as competitive as men, but have a right to the same status positions, then the law ought to simply give it to them. And (3) If non-competitive business is best, then women should just start their own companies (which they can and do, with more than half the wealth of the country in their hands), which will then out-perform the patriarchal ones and drive them out of business, with the same result as (1). These alternatives cannot be all true together, but choosing one over the others makes for very different views of human nature and very different policy objectives [note].
The other factor in this may well be that feminists tend to have all the ideological biases of the Left, which means that they favor command and control economics in the first place, i.e. socialism. Gloria Steinem (b.1934) finally admitted that she had always been a socialist anyway. Thus, for such people, whether businesses are competitive or not, profitable or not, may be irrelevant. The irrationality of feminist expectations becomes part and parcel of the ignorance and irrationality of socialist economics, which now dominate American "education" and the Ruling Class.
The truth seems to be that some women are just as competitive as men and will do just fine in a regime of freedom. While feminists think that men want to keep women out of their workplace, men are, in fact, usually quite pleased to have agreeable women around. They just are uncomfortable directly competing with them. Particular women, with enough drive, can overcome this. Otherwise, the customary and helpful approach is to make some distinction that separates the competition.
The object and part of the subject are conscious, while the unconscious and part of the conscious are internal, i.e. in the subject.
Male and female bodies are conscious objects (they have consciousness, but especially they are objects of consciousness).
或人、「理と婦との形を知りたり」と云ふ。
その形を問へば、「理は角なるもの、 極まりて動くことなし。
婦は丸き物なり、善惡邪正を嫌はず、所も定めずころぶものなり」といへり。
When asked about this, he replied, "Reason is four-cornered and will not move even in an extreme situation.
Woman is round. One can say that she does not distinguish between good and evil or right and wrong and tumbles into any place at all."
in the popular Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus [1992]: When they have a problem, men go into a "cave," retreating from contact, to work things out. Women, on the other hand, seek contact. If men and women are aware that the other has a problem and, as Confucius says, use their own feelings as a guide, they will tend to treat the other in exactly the opposite way they want to be treated [note].
Historically and cross-culturally, women tend to marry "up" in status, with older, more established men. Thus, historically, a higher status man could expect to attract women i.e. closeness (as the form er "alpha male" of the United States, Bill Clinton, attracted the attentions of White House interns) [note].
not to mention the fantasy of an outsider's revenge in Carrie [1976]. At the same time, men may gain entry to a group by some achieved status: An "old boy" is immediately a friend to fellow alumni, however unknown to him. The new kid on the block who hits the home run is suddenly everyone's friend.
Most women, however, do not want the same things as men, reflecting millions of years of evolution; and, once they are not hectored by egalitarian, utopian, moralistic political exhortations, they will simply behave differently and put together kinds of lives that are somewhat different from men, though often with the dreaded feminist defect of being dependent on men, who may earn the income to support them and the rest of their family [note].
| Diana and Endymion, 1822, |
|---|
Thus, in Greek mythology, there are nine Muses and seven Pleiades, all women. We do not see such large groups elsewhere, whether in Greek mythology or in the real world examples that follow [note].
The number three for women is particularly strong in Greek mythology. Three turns up in the association of the Moon goddesses Artemis, Selēnē, and Hecatē, Ἄρτεμις, Σελήνη, Ἑκάτη, with the three stages of women's lives (virgin, mother or matron, and "crone"). There are three Graces, three Hours, three Fates, and three Furies, all goddesses. There are also the three goddesses whose jealously sparked the Trojan War: Hera, Athena, and Aphroditē, Ἥρα, Ἀθήνη, Ἀφροδίτη [note].
The television series Charmed starred Shannen Doherty (Prue), Holly Marie Combs (Piper), and Alyssa Milano (Phoebe) as young witches who use the "power of three" in their spells (there were later cast changes). We also get three women in The Witches of Eastwick [1987], Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer (from John Updike's, The Witches of Eastwick, 1984).
The number five, missing from those examples, turns up in popular all girl rock groups of the 1980's and 90's: There were five Go Go's and (originally) five Spice Girls (Baby, Ginger, Posh, Scary, and Sporty). I thought there were five Bangles, but there were actually only four.
There are only four cartoon character Bratz (Jade, Yasmin, Sasha, and Cloe); but in their video Genie Magic and with the accompanying dolls we do get a fifth (Meygan -- a redhead, which is a nice addition since the others have black, blond, and brown hair).
Then there were five Desperate Housewives: Felicity Huffman, Eva Longoria, Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross, and Brenda Strong.
On the other hand, the conspicuous occurrence of the number two in Greek mythology is with the Dioscuri (Διόσκουροι), the "Twins" (Gemini), Castor & Pollux, or Κάστωρ & Πολυδεύκης.
Twin brothers or just two "buddies" have become a specific literary and movie genre -- e.g. Gilgamesh & Enkidu, Krishna & Arjuna, Hawkeye & Chingachgook, the Lone Ranger & Tonto, and, in the first of the now endlessly multiplied "buddy" movies, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid, while two man acts dominate the history of comedy: Laurel & Hardy, Abbot & Costello, Cheech & Chong, Bill & Ted, Bevis & Butthead, Jay & Silent Bob, etc. There seems little in the way of corresponding female pairings,
except in conscious imitation of the male ones (e.g. Thelma & Louise).
Similarly, there is a powerful archetype behind the number four, from the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to the four Beatles (John, Paul, George, & Ringo), the four Cartwrights in the TV series Bonanza (Ben, Adam, Hoss, & Little Joe -- it was never quite right after Adam, played by Pernell Roberts, ironically the last surviving one of the four (d.2010), left the series), the four men on horseback at the climax of the western movie Silverado (Kevin Kline, Kevin Costner, Danny Glover, & Scott Glen [1985]), the four Ghostbusters at the climax of the movie Ghostbusters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, & Ernie Hudson [1984]), all the way to the four super-hero "Ex-Presidents" (Ford, Carter, Reagan, & Bush) in a series of cartoons on NBC's venerable Saturday Night Live -- parodying, of course, similar groups of cartoon super-heroes, like the "Fantastic Four" [note].
Finally, we get the six members of the Monty Python troup: Graham Chapman (d.1989), John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. It is hard, however, to envision these six as a coherent group, since they never appeared together as an organized team in any of their shows or movies -- and Terry Gilliam did animations but rarely appeared as a character himself (perhaps most memorably as "Cardinal Fang" in "The Spanish Inquisition" episode). In terms of performance, Carol Cleveland was functionally more like the sixth Python.
Gillian's subsequent career was largely as a director, especially of the Python's own Monty Python and the Holy Grail [1975], Time Bandits [1981], Brazil [1985], The Fisher King [1991], 12 Monkeys [1995], and The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus [2009]. While most of the movies were only modest successes at the box office, they drew many big name stars, including Bruce Willis in 12 Monkeys.
Of the British troup, Gillian was actually an American, growing up in Los Angeles and attending Birmingham High School, in the San Fernando Valley, and Occidental College. While he says that in the 1960's he was constantly pulled over by the police and "brutalized" as a "hippy," I was driving around Los Angeles at the same time in my sporty 1959 Triumph TR3, with hippy hair, and was only pulled over once, by a polite officer, for a speeding ticket. I can't say why Gilliam's experience was so different, embittering him to the point where he eventually renounced his US citizenship (not until 2006, in protest of George W. Bush deposing the beloved dictator Sadam Hussein).
Playboy magazine (March 1999) featured a layout that combines the male and female group numbers. In "The Girls of KISS," the members of the revived, strange 70's heavy metal rock band KISS, all four of them, are photographed with groups of women, five for each member of the band, all with the matching black-and-white face paint worn, in distinctive patterns, by each band member. "Goupies," women who throw themselves at rock musicians, are generally seen as attracted to the status and charisma of rock bands. Where five devotees would not fit easily on the cover of the magazine, we only find three grouped there with the bizarre leader of the band, Gene Simmons, in his signature, tongue-out pose.
The four roles in the Bushman hunting party were: (1) the leader, (2) the master hunter, (3) the shaman, and (4) the joker. In the image above, I have illustrated the functions with some Egyptian glyphs, even though the Egyptians and the Bushmen have nothing to do with each other. But the glyphs are often good illustrations. Unfortunately, there is no "comedian" glyph, so I have chosen one for "jubilation," since clearly the role of the joker is to keep the group happy and diverted, as the "shaman" here is an Egyptian praying.
This seemed to match up pretty well with the four guys left at the party (I was the shaman). This pattern is also conspicuous in the classic science fiction television show, the original A recent television show on NBC, Third Rock from the Sun, was about a group of four extra-terrestrials passing as human: In somewhat less clear terms does the pattern fit the group of four in the very successful comedy series Seinfeld, where Some similar uncertainty comes up with the four members of the Ghostbusters team in Ghostbusters (1984). This makes Murray the leader, although his personalibility tends towards the hucksterish, and he seems at least as interested in hustling a date with Sigourney Weaver as in furthering their business -- she characterizes him as more like a "game show host" than a scientist. Although there are many exceptions to the odd/even group archetype for female and male (e.g. the five Beach Boys, the five Rolling Stones, the Seven Sages of Greece, the Seven Sages of India, the Seven Against Thebes, or The Seven Samurai, remade as the Western, The Magnificent Seven), and one might object that the female characters in Third Rock and Seinfeld break the pattern (though 25% of roles isn't exactly the "gender equity" feminists had in mind), the reversal of the Pythagorean opposites seems itself to raise the main question.
Why would Greeks and Chinese settle on odd for male and even for female? If these kinds of physical impressions are the origin of the odd/even assignments, then Jung's principle of compensation accounts for their reversal in the groups: This would also fit in with Camille Paglia's notion (in Sexual Personae, 1991) that females are complete in themselves in a way that males are not. A male group, to be "complete," requires the fourth member. Sally and Elaine completing the groups in Third Rock and Seinfeld might actually remind Jung of his theory that the Virgin Mary completes the group of the Christian Trinity (Father, Son, & Holy Spirit). The theory of male and female archetypes as physical metaphors for the male and female bodies is of great interest to Paglia. This brings us to the "light" and "darkness" terms of the Pythagorean table of opposites and the Yin-Yang theory. It might be enough if male and light are both thought to be good to dictate the assignment of darkness to the female. Darkness itself can be a metaphor for evil and ignorance, which no doubt sounded female enough for the old patriarchs.
On the other hand, Paglia notes that female sexual organs are, in fact, largely hidden and dark, from being concealed and internal. Even external female genitalia are ordinary hidden, not just to others looking at a nude female, but even to a woman herself, who, unless she is exceedingly limber, is going to need a mirror to see her own labia, vagina, and clitoris very well. If the dark, the hidden, and the internal is the female archetype, there is plenty of expression of this in myth and history. Egyptian tombs, as places of rebirth, are appropriately vaginal and womblike, and very much dark, hidden, and internal. Egyptian temples are thus not usually towering and phallic, but supine and womblike. The story is about a young woman who was chosen as a child to be the high priestess of an ancient cult on the island of Atuan (in LeGuin's "Earthsea" fantasy world). In these terms, the story then turns out to be not quite what one expects. This is all a rather astonishing turn for the story if LeGuin was otherwise any serious kind of feminist. In the only interview I have seen with her, she did seem to be in the grip of, indeed, So why would Ursula LeGuin alienate her priestess of vagina and labyrinth from the chthonic deities? Perhaps because the archetype here was more of Jung's "Devouring Mother" than of real fertility. The priestess has no name. She is the "Eaten One." The magician eventually picks a name for her. Her gods are nameless also, and not evidently female in form; and the cult has no particular trappings of growth or fertility. LeGuin, perhaps, was not so much being rescued by some man, but was more escaping from a suffocating mother. In any case, the archetypal imagery all seems out of LeGuin's conscious control; it does not make for a story of the feminist future. Again, one wonders if the artist was aware of the archetypal images, or gender stereotypes, being employed. The young woman, patient and passive, in the literal and metaphorical heart of her labyrinth, awaits the questing male, who may not actually know that "Stay Forever" is what he is questing for! If there is an archetypal female quest for closeness, the enclosed, protected, intimate space of the maze provides a powerful image of it. Meanwhile, the restless male, wandering around, wanders into the design, literally, of the female: the stereotype of the female, deprived of power by the male, restorting to stratagems and scheming, which is then morally condemned by the male as feminine deviousness. In this instance, it is sad that anyone would see a political crime in the eternal play of courtship. As Oscar Wilde says, "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are corrupt without being charming. This is a fault."
Unfortunately, the existence of "lipstick lesbians" and gay male drag queens pretty decisively explodes this theory. The former don't have to please any men, and the latter are imposing the most elaborate rituals and instruments of female beauty on themselves. Even apart from actual drag queens, many have noted a tyranny of beauty in gay male interaction that is suggestive, indeed, of what traditionally would have been called female "vanity." The only possible feminist response might be that both lesbians and homosexual men have internalized the "false consciousness" of patriarchal stereotypes. Their conscious preferences do not need to be taken seriously. They are victims. We find much the same thing in Japanese Tales, by Yei Theodora Ozaki, originally published in 1908 [now Currant Books, 2023], where there is quoted an "old proverb," that "As the sword is the soul of a samurai, so is the mirror the soul of a woman" [in "The Mirror of Matsuyama," p.73]. The statement about the samurai, 刀は武士の魂, Katana wa Bushi no Tamashii, is endlessly repeated in martial arts literature, and presumably the same word for "soul," in this case But there is also the discordant circumstance that harshly patriarchal societies, like Saudi Arabia and Iran today, Calvin's Geneva and Puritan Massachusetts in the past, have fiercely suppressed and condemned expressions of female vanity, especially in public. At the same time, periods of great liberalization and openness, like the 1920's, have seen women cut lose with shocking displays of flesh and consumption of cosmetics.
To traditionalists, all the painted women flaunting their legs, shoulders, and décolletage were bringing about nothing less than Sodom and Gomorrah. Today, Saudis still ask why a woman would want to show all her charms in public unless she is a prostitute. The feminist response is often all too similar:
The mirror itself creates the kind of duality that characterizes female identity and as such has drawn considerable attention from thoughtful feminists. Mostly hostile, of course. A woman looking in a mirror sees... another woman, a woman who is herself and yet not herself, This is somewhat contrary to the sense of the mirror in the Japanese story above -- mirrors in both China and Japan have a magical valence, with mirrors even enshrined as representing Shinto gods. From this, we might imagine that through a mirror we are seeing an inner essence. But I don't think that is the way mirrors function in the psychologtical dynamic of the female.
The duality of the mirror always makes the image a potential adversary. Time in front of the mirror with cosmetics always involves altering one's self and then observing this effect in the image.
This adversarial relationship and possible hostility may be reflected in the Picasso painting at left, Girl before a Mirror. It has been noted that the face of the woman at left is more flattering in color and shape than the one in the mirror. The shape of the image What could this mean? The woman wants to ignore her pregnancy, while wishing to retain her full sexuality? Also, the labia seem to be unnaturally adjacent to a buttock, which doesn't appear in the original at all. So, however distorted, what the woman sees is her sexuality, even while the appeal of her face is curiously degraded, and darker than the rest of the body. It is as though we see a statement, "Perhaps I'm ugly, but I would rather be sexually appealing rather than (or as well as) pregnant." These could be the concerns of a real women, as, in this case, Picasso's lover Marie-Thérèse Walter, who was the model.
Now, one wears a mask mainly to conceal one's identity. Thus, the woman in the mirror is concealing her own identity from herself, just as female inner existence is sundered from the external image in the mirror. This dynamic is not otherwise made so explicit. And there is a striking feature of the image. This is an intriguing combination. She is detaching her inner self from an erotic and seductive presentation. This may happen in practice in certain circumstances, where a woman uses her seductive power but without any desire for intimacy or a personal relationship. Just looking in a mirror, however, the woman would seem to be rejecting a personal relationship with herself, or at least with her body. This may also happen in practice, as a woman may feel alienated from all that her body is or does. The relationship of a woman with a mirror can descend into bizarre pathologies, such as when the starving, skeletal anorexic continues to see herself as fat, or as the mutilated "cosmetic surgery addict" sees her grotesque face as increasingly beautiful. While the pathologies may be a dangerous exaggeration of the normal, feminism, of course, sees them as falsifying and refuting the normal. There would be no anorexia or elective cosmetic surgery without concern for appearance. Well, no (except for the "divine anorexia" of ascetic fasting). But without any concern for appearance, we are back to what Nietzsche called a "furious, vindictive hatred of life." At the same time, a male could not devote a tithe of the time to a similar activity without being considered unmanly, far too self-absorbed to be properly masculine. The Egyptian caricature at right, from an ostracon, found with many other cartoons, often erotic, from the same sources, is evidence for us that the feminine engagement with mirrors and makeup is very ancient, indeed, about as ancient as it can get. Anaesthetic feminism relies on us not knowing this -- or the Japanese example above -- since it wants to accuse more recent, specific culture, like Judaism, Christianity, the Roman Empire, Capitalism, or advertising, for such female preoccupation. On this page, we also see this problem in relation to male/female hair length. Anaesthetic feminism, which sees female vanity as slavery imposed by men, puts itself in the strange company of Ayatollahs and Calvinists when it comes to its attitude towards female beauty. But the paradox does remain: How can the female archetypes be contradictory, both hidden and internal, superficial and external? The answer is indeed that beauty is imposed by the male, but not by way of society, culture, convention, and force. In the same way, just as there are women, like the anaesthetic feminists, who feel driven, plagued, and unhappy by male expectations of them (which, in a sense, will be their own animus expectations of themselves), As women often complain, men cannot decide whether they want a Whore or a Madonna. Of course, the trouble is that men want both, after a fashion; and women mostly would hate to admit that they would like to be both, since they would like to be appreciated and desired both for their (hidden) true selves and for their (very unhidden) physical bodies. This is just the paradox of human life, In the solitude of subjective consciousness, we wish for contact with others, but that contact is mediated by bodies, which often have their own agenda -- e.g. fighting between men, gossiping between women, loving between men and women, and all the strange variations that occur as random histories and psychological variations send people off in a kaleidoscope of different directions.
Even if Camille Paglia is right that women are more psychically whole than men, they nevertheless labor under the difficulty that archetypal female identity has this dissociation between internal and external. The middle ground, or the bridge, between Jungian Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious and imagery that is metaphorical of the differences between male and female bodies would be male-female differences that are the result of evolutionary adaptations of behavior. These would be, like the body, the result of innate genetic differences but would also be, like the archetypes, principles of higher order organization, knowledge, and behavior.
The kind of study of human behavioral differences in an evolutionary context is called "sociobiology," but this is often attacked as simply an attempt to use Darwinism to reinforce reactionary attitudes about women, or as a misunderstanding of human evolution, which is now largely cultural. However, using Darwinism for anything hardly fits in with what is considered the principal source of "reactionary attitudes" today, namely religious fundamentalism, where Darwinism for any purpose is anathema. And, while it is true that human evolution now is largely cultural, One fundamental sociobiological consideration is just of the cost of sex. Thus, a male can impregnate a female and then disappear. Before paternity suits, and even after, this minimized the cost of reproduction for males and thus could be a possibly effective reproductive strategy (all that really counts evolutionarily). If a male could impregnate enough females, then, even if the solitary females with children would have less chance of survival, the sheer numbers might outweigh the drawback of those cases. On the other hand, the cost of sex for a female, before birth control and safe abortion, would be high indeed. Burdened with pregnancy for months and then with children for years, a female's life would be powerfully and probably permanently affected.
For many mammals this would not make that much difference. Tigers, for instance, are solitary animals, and the males and females do not live together. The female is thus left with the cubs, but then they grow up quickly. Humans are different, mainly because humans are not individually very strong in the first place (not many animals want to mess with a female tiger or lioness), females are rendered acutely more vulnerable while pregnant (not true for many mammals), and the children are helpless for many years, requiring much more care and protection than any other mammal young. Human evolution thus passed up solitary motherhood altogether.
Because of the cost of sex, males and females most sensibly would pursue different courtship practices. Now, since cost sets up a real economic dynamic, it is not hard to imagine human institutions responding to it through cultural evolution without there being an innate and genetic component. It would violate Ockham's Razor to gratuitously posit innate propensities if learned ones would already account for human institutions. There appears to be some evidence of this. In a regime of "welfare rights," where the government supports any children women may have, we have seen male responsibility all but evaporate and many women, "welfare mothers," indulge in much of the same kind of irresponsible promiscuity that was supposed to be characteristically male. While this is a recent phenomenon, there is also some older evidence of it. As examined in more detail elsewhere, Pacific island cultures have often been more tolerant of pre-marital sex and pregnancy. There costs were lowered through institutions that allowed for easy adoption (hānai adoption in Hawai'i), so that pre-marital pregnancy did not impose serious costs (apart from the dangers of pregnancy and childbirth) on girls. Indeed, at least one pre-marital pregnancy, in some places, was seen as evidence of fertility, enhancing prospects for marriage.
Does this kind of evidence simply establish that courtship behavior is cultural rather than innate (gender rather than sexual)? No, for a couple of reasons. One is that innate differences are not expected to result in fixed and inflexible behaviors. They are about potentials that result in a statistical spread of behavior. That is how evolution works, through random variation, a range of characteristics, and then the differential success of some variations. Thus, if the evolutionary environment changes, e.g. through the removal of the costs of sex for females, then the behaviors, out of the range of variation already present, suited for that new environment, will flourish. Women who already have an inclination for promiscuity can achieve great reproductive success by becoming "welfare mothers" and having all their children supported by the government. If the new environment persists, then over time any genetic component for that promiscuity will become more widespread. That is how evolution works.
The value of the evidence about "welfare mothers" for the argument therefore depends on the statistical size of the phenomenon. In a welfare state regime, how many women become promiscuous "welfare mothers"? Nowhere near a majority, though even this itself is confused by variations, since some communities have much higher illegitimacy rates than others and this likely due to varying cultural and economic factors within those communities. Thus, it would help to have some other kinds of evidence as well. The cumulative weight of that evidence does seem to be against the purely "cultural" thesis. This has been examined in many studies, from The Evolution of Human Sexuality by Donald Symons [Oxford, 1979] to popular presentations like "Boys & Girls Are Different -- Men, Women, & The Sex Difference," an ABC television special with reporter John Stossel (1995, MPI Home Video, 1995). A recent book on the issue is Gender Gap, The Biology of Male-Female Difference, by David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton [Transaction Publishers, 1997, 2002] -- a physician & psychologist couple at great pains to display their feminist bona fides despite the evidence they present for male-female differences.
Part of the graphic at right is something based on what a character says in the late Whitney Cummings comedy Whitney, which ran two seasons [2010–2013]. He referred to women and men as "holes and poles." He was rebuked for this, but his role on the show seems to have been to express things in relatively crude ways. What he reminded me of was the literal meaning of the names of the Hawaiian gods, Hina and Ku, which as "supine" and "upright," respectively, are similarly suggestive of sexual differences in physical images. Cummings was also responsible for a talk show, Love You, Mean It [2012] and another comedy, 2 Broke Girls [2011-2017]. The talk show, like Whitney, was not very successful, but 2 Broke Girls was substantilly successful, running six seasons -- but Cummings seemed to have relatively little do with it. Broke Girls featured the engaging Kat Demmings and the original Saturday Night Live alumnus Garrett Morris. I liked a lot of Cummings' humor, but Whitney seemed to get too far into silly, neutrotic stories.
For example, one kind of evidence considered by Symons and Barash & Lipton is what happens when homosexuality becomes socially acceptable. The existence of homosexuality is itself strong evidence of natural variation in behavior, since nothing could be more of a dead end as a reproductive strategy than homosexuality. Given a homosexual group, then, we do have a natural experiment in sexual behavior where only the propensities of one sex are involved. Lesbians do not even seem to be as sexually active as heterosexual women, who are, of course, often responding to the desires of their mates. Sexual promiscuity has even been valorized in much gay ideology as a salient and ennobling characteristic of the "gay lifestyle." But when it became clear that bathroom and bathhouse promiscuity was spreading new and dangerous venereal diseases, ultimately meaning AIDS, there was, and is, great resistance to the idea that prudence alone should rule out that characteristic of the "lifestyle." "Safe sex" became the way of preserving promiscuity while preventing disease. Unfortunately, sex with condomns does not feel like sex without them, and "unprotected" gay sex has continued, even, by 1999, increasing again, resulting in infection rates that have ceased to drop.
[Note that the "Ruby" image for By contrast, AIDS is all but non-existence in the lesbian community, where the idea of anonymous sex in toilets is about as disagreeable as it is to heterosexual men and women. An interesting anecdote in that respect is what happened to radio "shock jock" Howard Stern when he ran his "lesbian dating game." Stern wanted to match up lesbians for dates and then hear afterwards about their sexual activities together.
To his disappointment, the lesbians often did not have sex at all on their dates; and one woman even told him that "lesbians only have sex after they've dated for six months." As it happens, at the height of "women's liberation" in the 1970's, there was a deliberate effort by many women to participate in the "meat market" dating scene of single's bars with just as much abandon as men, precisely to demonstrate that women could be just as interested in free love as men. While there were, of course, some women who liked that just fine, the overall impression, even before the specter of disease arose, was that this was a particularly empty experience for most women.
So, while gay men continue at an unusual level of promiscuity, with or without "safe sex," both lesbians and most heterosexual women have reverted to something rather like the gender stereotype. This outcome, however, would seem to indicate that the stereotype reflects genetic and not just cultural adaptations. Indeed, the great variety in human cultural evolution has only occurred in the last 10,000, perhaps only the last 5,000, years, while the original forms of human culture and society, In these terms, what we would reasonably expect is a persistence, with variation, of innate and genetic behaviors, i.e. a tendency of men to fix on female appearance and to seek multiple sexual partners and a tendency of women to value something more than appearance and to choose new partners rarely and carefully. There is an excellent example of this in the current (1999) President of the United States, Bill Clinton, and his wife Hillary. Clinton told Monica Lewinsky that he had been with "hundreds" of women (and that he would not have hit on Kathleen Willey because her breasts Meanwhile, Hillary, who in 1992 publicly ridiculed the feminine "stand by your man" ethos, practiced it to a fault in 1999. Feminists have hypocritically accepted all this rather than give aid and comfort to their political enemies, even to the extent of affirming that such promiscuity is just natural behavior, which it is up to Hillary to forgive or reject -- this despite the feminist thesis that there really isn't any "natural" behavior and that a woman like Hillary must be suffering from low self-esteem and false consciousness to be tolerating a faithless rat like Bill. (Juanita Broaddrick's accusation that Clinton actually raped her in 1978, for which there really are no rationalizations left in the feminist arsenal, is mostly handled by being ignored).
The political enemies of mainstream feminism are, of course, both those who believe in traditional society and those who simply believe in freedom. Either view would preclude the kind of social engineering desired by the feminists. Advocates of traditional society also believe in social engineering, just to very different ends, i.e. to discourage or preclude the kind of social variation that we see in a free society. Feminist social engineering is to discourage or preclude the kinds of traditional roles that we also continue to see in a free society. A free society, in turn, where there are only mutually voluntary relationships, allows (1) people to do what they want, and (2) for the kinds of social and behavioral variation that enable both cultural and, ultimately, genetic evolution to work. In a free society there is actually no need for a determination on whether gender stereotypes or sexual archetypes are innately or culturally determined. We simply note, in retrospect, whether the "stereotypes" persist voluntarily or disappear with the winds of cultural change. Both the authoritarianism of traditional society and the totalitarianism of a feminist utopia would suppress just those kinds of evidence that might falsify their own theses.
One may be excused the suspicion that the advocates of traditional society don't really believe that it is entirely natural and spontaneous, which means it must be enforced by the state, while feminists don't really believe that everything is "culturally constructed," which means that fierce political "re-education" and police measures can and must be employed to suppress what really are natural inclinations in men and women. What they all fear is being proven wrong by the uncoerced, free, natural, and spontaneous behavior of individuals living their own lives [note].
A recent idea of some feminists, examined by Christina Hoff Sommers in The War Against Boys, has been that women act by different moral standards than men, with men applying abstract principles and women acting out of sympathy and compassion. This suggests comparison with some of the typological categories examined elsewhere The "orange" tiger (which would really be white in Chinese five element theory) is female and represents Yin, even though its corresponding element is metal, whose hardness is archetypally Yang. If we do a similar reversal of sex with the phoenix (Yang fire) and the turtle (Yin water), we get virtues that make for pretty good gender stereotypes. The dragon with righteousness gives us the notion referenced of acting by principles as masculine. The phoenix with sympathy, or kindness, gives us the similar connection of acting out of compassion as feminine. The remaining two are more novel assignments. The tiger with propriety can match with a very ancient feminine stereotype: vanity. Vanity is about appearances, which is the essence of the Chinese virtue of properity and good manners.
Indeed, it is not men who ever worried much about Amy Vanderbilt or "Miss Manners." Do women or men worry more about what other people think about them? While certain, touchy men may worry, the stereotype would seem to be that women worry more generally, especially with the idea in mind that "there will be talk." Finally, the turtle with prudence gives us the image of the sober, stolid, phlegmatic, careful man, who may in fact be patiently enduring a party for the sake of his wife, who simply wants to be "seen" and make a good appearance, and who consequently instructs her husband how to behave, even though he actually "behaves" very little. More like endures. Each of these types, however, encompases the opposite sex also. "Good hearted impulse" gives us the image of a stout, florid, and jovial man (e.g. Santa Claus); "honor" evokes a ramrod hidalgo, fully prepared to be insulted at the slighest awkward gesture towards him. The prudent woman may be a weary and put-upon wife and mother trying to run a household while a husband is out drinking, gambling, whoring, etc.
Scattered around on this page, we've been seeing tomatoes and potatoes. These have been representing the female and the male, respectively. The potato is drawn most directly from the expresson "couch potato," which could mean anyone who lounges on the couch, eating snack food and watching televion, and probably drinking beer. However, it is generally males who are associated with such behavior, and the general roughness and lumpiness of the potato is more suggestive of the male. Potatoes also have "eyes," which remindes us of the "male gaze," In turn, a good locus classicus for the tomato as female is the epigraph cited above from the movie Play It Again, Sam, where a fantasy version of Humphrey Bogart refers to the character played by Diane Keaton as "a real tomato." While the skin of a tomato is certainly smooth in relation to the potato, with the suggestion of female skin, and with an attractive coloration, the association with female sexuality, and female sexual arousal, is certainly in relation to the water content of the fruit. Tomatoes, unlike potatoes, are squeezable and juicy. Karen A. Smyers, Ph.D., Jungian Analysis
Starship Troopers, The Shower Scene
Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, 1862-1863, Édouard Manet
Classical Indian Women's Dress
The Erotic as an Aesthetic Category
While it may be objected that the adventures of Beldar Conehead are fictional, we now have a longer, somewhat less fictional version of them in the narrative of Dave Barry:
I especially have this feeling when it's my turn to drive the soccer practice car pool for my daughter, Sophie, and some of her teammates. This involves spending up to an hour in a confined space with a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls, all high school freshmen, listening to them discuss the concerns that girls of that age have, such as racism, bullying and global climate change.
I am of course kidding. Here are the top ten concerns of my daughter and her friends, based on their car pool conversations:
All of the girls discuss all of these topics simultaneously at high volume while at the same time (they are excellent multi-taskers) thumbing away on their phones and listening to the radio, which is cranked way up so they can hear it over the noise they're making.
So they're very loud. They're spooking cattle as far away as Scotland. But here's the thing: It's a happy noise. These girls are the happiest people I know. Everything makes them laugh. They love everything, except the things they hate, and they love hating those things. They literally cannot contain their happiness: It explodes from them constantly in shrieks and shouts, enveloping them in a loud cloud of pure joy. It gets even louder when the radio plays their favorite song -- which is basically every song -- and they all sing joyfully along at the top of their lungs.
[Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster), Life Lessons and Other Ravings from Dave Barry, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2015, pp.3-5] The high politically correct consciousness of this passage is evident in the circumstance that Barry is driving the girls to soccer practice rather than to shopping. Of course he then spoils it with the sexist term "freshmen," rather than "first year [genderless] students." This scene, except for the details of the conversation, is well illustrated in the Coneheads. Indeed, one of the loud songs enjoyed by Beldar's daughter and her friends, and obviously endured, at the time, with ill grace by Beldar (as Dave Barry probably has limited tolerance for Katy Perry or Taylor Swift), he later uses to encourage himself in the midst of a desperate contest for his own life. Thus, teeny-bopper values triumph in interstellar conflict. As we might expect.
I recently heard an explanation of a difference between men and women that coheres nicely with Mary Karr's observation. Thus, it is said, in evaluating a man for a relationship, a woman thinks about his future, while in evaluating a woman for a relationship, a man thinks about her past.
The woman, especially if she is thinking about having a family and perhaps even being a housewife, will want a man who will be a good provider and an In turn, a man wants to know what a woman has been like in other relationships. Has she been promiscuous? Has she been unfaithful? Mary Karr's principle is then that the women expecting to change an unsuitable man will be disapointed, while a man who expects a woman to continue unchanged also will be. Of course, we might also add that the man who expects a woman's looks to remain unchanged may be way out of his reckoning, and Karr may in fact be thinking particularly of that.
On the other hand, a woman might discount a man's looks from the start, if other things about him are appealing, like wealth. We can also add to this the expectation that women are generally expected to rarely retain their looks with age, while men often look better, more "distinguished." Hence the ability of older, successful men to divorce the wives of their youth and marry a "trophy" wife. We may expect such a man to be playing off his success or his wealth, but older men may even have an advantage in their looks. Younger men may seem callow and immature to some women, however young they are themselves.
Besides the issue of past and future, we might even match the distinction made by Alcestis to Mary Karr. Thus, Alcestis wants for her son a "loving," φίλη, wife, while she hopes her daughter will have a "noble," γενναῖος, husband. Both of these can involve information from the past used to predict the future. A woman, indeed, will be better off to find a man who has always been "noble," than just someone she thinks can be made that way.
The "noble" man, however, can be expected to exhibit certain kinds of behavior, which will be especially suitable for someone looking for a mate who is not a violent deadbeat. He can be expected to be an attentive and successful provider. On the other hand, the "loving" wife is about different qualities. Being "loving" should attend the qualities sought in the past, of faithfulness, monogamy, and affection, with the expectation that these will continue into the future. Indeed, there is a better chance that Mary Karr's principle will be violated in these respects, rather than in the expectation of men for good looks in their partner.
The dynamic here will suggest evolutionary considerations. A women vulnerable and dependent in pregnancy and childbearing will value a reliable man being around. On the other hand, a man may want a woman both sexually attractive, especially in youth, and who will not behave in ways to confuse the paternity of his children. The dynamics in each case will not work at all going the other way.
From the Kauṣītaki Brāhmaṇa, in Hindu Myths, translated with an Introduction by Wendy Doniger O'Flaherty, Penguin Books, 1975, p.31, cf. Hindu gods We don't see a lot of women showing up naked for dates, although there was one episode of the television show Blind Date (1999-2006) where the woman knocked at the man's apartment door naked from the waist up. She didn't have beer, but she certainly got the fellow's attention.
A more interesting version of this to consider would not involve a date at all, but instead a form of professional meeting. In detective stories, or spy stories, there is usually a scene where the client meets the detective, or the detective or the spy meets someone, often a Powerful Person, who is a suspect, ally, or villain. These encounters may occur at offices, homes, lairs, or island fortresses (in the case of super-villains).
A male detective who greeting a female client naked in his office probably would witness her exiting the office forthwith. Even if the detective were young and handsome, it likely would not make any difference. The opposite, however, might give us pause. A man, of any age, unless religiously devout, entering the office of a young, or even mature but handsome, naked woman might be made uncomfortable, but in a very different way. He might think he should not stare, and it would all be very strange, but the prospect of having a good look at her would militate strongly against a precipitous departure. It would leave any of us, including women, curious about what was going on.
On the old Bob Newhart Show, where Bob played a psychologist, he was once invited to an event at a location that he did not realize was a nudist colony. Walking into the office of the director, presumably right off the parking lot, and with the receptionist absent, Bob was startled to find the man naked. Informing him of the situation, the director protested his conservatism, that in fact "I liked Ike." Bob responds in classic fasion: "And Ike liked clothes." We learn later that Bob, in the end, participated, unseen by us, without his clothes.
We see something close to naked female reception in some movies. In Basic Instinct [1992], directed by Paul Verhoeven, Sharon Stone receives Michael Douglas in her home. She is not naked, but in changing clothes she is aware that he can see her in a mirror, where he both sees her naked and realizes that she will be wearing no underwear for the interview at the police station. He will not be surprised when she (famously) flashes her genitals during the interrogation. As it happens, Mae West (1893-1980) accomplishes much the same mystification of men without the slightest bit of explicit sexuality (prohibited at the time) -- although her dialogue was dense with innuendo, much of it still fondly remembered.
We see an example of a fully naked reception in the erotic and semi-comic science fiction movie Barbarella [1968], where Jane Fonda (whose husband, Roger Vadim, directed the movie), lounging in her fur-lined spaceship, is interviewed for a rescue mission. This is not done in person, so we don't have a man physically entering her ship, and the scene is curiously sexless; so, in terms of the era, it is not so remarkable. The genre isn't a detective or spy story, but the agent-on-a-mission plot bears comparison to both.
Outside of pornography, no one seems to have gone full boat this with motif. We do sometimes get suggestive forms, as in the James Bond character of Pussy Galore (in the novel, 1959, and movie, 1964, of Goldfinger); but Pussy never gets to display anything remotely close to the eponymous body part indicated by the double entendre of her name -- the innuendo must carry the sexual weight.
In 2015, we might say there was a missed opportunity. In Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation, the lovely Rebecca Ferguson receives Tom Cruise and his associate at a house in Morocco. They find her in the swimming pool, where she is actually practicing holding her breath, for reasons that become clear later. She emerges from the pool to greet them, in a way reminiscent of Ursula Andress coming out of the ocean to meet Sean Connery in Dr. No [1962]. Now, Rebecca Ferguson has no reason to be wearing a swim suit in her own home (or whatever), and as an accomplished secret agent she is not going to be embarrassed or bashful about her body, whose charms we can imagine she has used on many occasions in her work. At the same time, we are uncertain about her attitude or loyalty in the story, and it would be consistent with her character to keep Tom Cruise off guard by confronting him with her full sexuality -- this is already suggested by having her wearing no more than the swim suit. Of course, in 1962, Urusla Andress could not have been shown naked, and in our own time nudity, which was not unsual in the 1970's (a particularly lush example, both male and female, was in Altered States), has retreated from most mainstream movies. It was a shame not to see it here. [note]
A similar problem occurs, in homoerotic form, in the movie 300 [2006], which is supposed to be about the defense of Thermopylae by the 300 Spartans in 480 BC. Thus, unlike the heavily armored hoplites of Greek warfare, the movie Spartans run into battle all but naked. This looks good if you just want to admire their bodies, but even the Spartans were more practical than that. Even so, the hard muscles of a man's chest at least suggest some resistance to weapons. Large, soft breasts do not.
But there is power and there is power. The Powerful Person who is a naked woman, luxuriating in her island fortress, is the sort of thing that seems no more unlikely than most of the rest of the goings-on in things like James Bond movies, or science fiction. Such a person need go into no battle and yet may be absolutely confident in her power, to the extent of enjoying her nudity, without feeling threatened by any robust visiting male. Indeed, to the extent that she can, in effect, taunt him with her sexuality, she displays her power all the more convincingly. Sharon Stone certainly does it in Basic Instinct, without full nudity. In general, women may be more reluctant to go naked -- a problem for all nudist colonies -- out of a sense of vulnerability. The naked Powerful Woman may display herself in absolute confidence of her invulnerability.
As a thought experiment, what we may see is that the prospect of the man or the woman being naked produces a very different impression. This because the sexual allure of the female is different from that of the male, and the nature of this is independent of social conventions about "gender" because it is much like the homoerotic appeal that we see in something like the movie 300. The erotic becomes magical, glamorous, and even numinous. These all add something to the merely physical, whether one is talking about women or men, although for heterosexuals, even heterosexual women, these valences tend to belong to women. This not because of "objectification," as the feminists would say, for the magical, glamorous, and numinos character of these bodies goes beyond what can be accounted for in physical existence. While it can be said that this is "imposed" by, for instance, the "gaze" of the male, and so is literally "in the eye of the beholder," it is also something perceived by women and, as noted, is even "imposed" by some males on other males. With the venerable porn star Christy Canyon at right, we see the deliberate effort to present her in terms that are beautiful, erotic, and glamorous, precisely to sell her pornographic movies, since this is from advertising for one of her movies. Spontaneous ejaculation would go a little beyond what she would like (since it removes the reason to buy the movie), but the power to produce an erotic response, and climax, is clearly the goal. Her pose, often called the "S" pose, is itself erotic in history and effect, yet this version of it manages to conceal all the features that are specifically prohibited by "indecent exposure" laws. It is thus about as modest as one can get while simultaneously presenting a woman who is obviously naked. Yet the erotic power of the result is different in kind from the naked women, sitting at a Thanksgiving dinner, in the advertising picture at the top of this note. Even Canyon's large hair has an erotic implication, despite the irrelevance of hair to actual sex. It is part of the aura, even as it provides a nimbus around Canyon's head and upper body.
Porn stars, of course, would like nothing better than to be seen as goddesses, although their social position, even in tolerant times, is a serious cut below other kinds of actors. With those who might give them more credit for what they do, there is an element of embarrassment, and of worry of transgressing the political correctness imposed by anhedonic feminism. Even the feminism that embraces "sex workers," doesn't seem to have much effect on this dynamic. But somehow, among "scenes I'd like to see," Christy Canyon receiving James Bond for an intereview, in this pose, with no intention of bedding him, stands pretty high.
Although it doesn't really fit into the argument here, a variation on the Powerful Person interview might be aesthetically or erotically pleasing to contemplate. And that is, the Powerful Person, modestly dressed, is found in the company of naked attendants and servants. This would not seem so extraordinary if the Powerful Person is a man and his attendants are naked women. We might wonder whether this is ever actually done by rich men, who might be willing to pay whatever it would take to employ willing women to perform rather ordinary services in such a way. But we don't really hear about this happening outside pornography.
The opposite, with naked men attending the Powerful Woman, is also something we see in pornography, often with the added feature that the men are expected to maintain erections while performing their (non-sexual) services. We should note the presence of naked female servants in Egyptian art, which we see at right in a National Geographic version (from Everyday Life in Ancient Times). This image is faithful, however, to things we see in Egyptian tombs, reproductions of which can be examined in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Why the girls are naked is a good question. These Egyptian banquets are not orgies, and the girls are not there for sex. We see that some of them were musicians. It may be that their nakedness is more appealing in the company than the lower class clothing that otherwise might be in their possession.
Of course, at modern banquets, the staff would be clothed by the host, and nudity (usually) would not really be an alternative (except in pornography). We don't get the kind of detail about Egyptian practice to know whether staff at such functions were ever clothed by the hosts or not; but we do know that the Egyptians were not very alarmed by casual nudity, although something was usually done about the genitals, male and female. The string of beads around the bottom of the standing girl here actually may be a thong, as from the front it is attached to a piece that covers, barely, her genitals. The National Geographic image does not show the front, and the Egyptian images actually don't show the rear, except from the side. Thus whether this is a thong, attached up the cleft of the buttocks, is not clear from the Egyptian images. On the other hand, since the Egyptians customarily shaved even public hair, the women here don't need to worry about a bikini wax.
Return to Text Both these tables are from Right Hand, Left Hand, The Origins of Asymmetry in Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures, by Chris McManus [Harvard University Press, 2002, pp.25-28]. McManus is not particularly interested in gender differences. They come up because he is interested in what is associated with right and left. The universal association looks like the right and the male with what is good, clean, and sacred, while the left and the female with what is bad, unclean, and profane.
In these tribal cultures, as in the Bible, there is always intense concern with the pollution attendant upon menstruation. Menstruating women are often segregated in a dedicated house, typically as far away as possible from any sacred precincts. With the Purum, even ordinary houses are ritually laid out, on right and left, to reflect the systematic dualism -- e.g. the right side private and family, the left side public and for strangers. The women of the household, of course, do not live on the public side, mixing with strangers, but on the private side. Symbolically that is the masculine. This may be the essence, in fact, of patriarchy. Women represent what is wild, strange, and dangerous; but they are properly contained in the male sphere. In the Middle East, of course, the private and women's part of a house is the ḥarīm (i.e. "harem"), "forbidden, sacred" etc. Women who are not properly contained and controlled do become an active source of trouble and danger. A witch, indeed, an independent woman, is a conduit for death, evil spirits, sickness, poisons, and all the negative features that the Purum, Gogo, and Pythagoreans assign to the feminine.
A noteworthy inversion here involves the sun and moon. The Purum, like the Japanese and Germans, take the sun as female and the moon as male. What is more familiar is the Egyptian, Babylonian, and Greek assignment of the sun as male. For the Egyptians and Babylonians the moon was also male, but the Greek view of the moon as female has now been enshrined in the modern "valorization of the feminine" because of the correspondence and quite reasonable comparison of the lunar month to menstruation -- menses is simply the Latin word for "months" (sing. mensis). It is noteworthy where we get these kinds of variations cross-culturally and where we don't.
In the minds of feminists like Gerda Lerner, men and women are, of course, naturally identical in every way, except for actual genitals. One curious feature of this is the idea that the hair of men and women is naturally of the same length and that cutting it at different Now, anybody can cut their hair; and obviously women could cut it very short and men could let it grow out. This doesn't happen very often in history. Buddhist monks and nuns both shave their heads. Otherwise, we tend to get the universal stereotype that women's hair is relatively longer than men's, as we see in the image of a typical Ancient Egyptian married couple at right. Here, in relation to the styles of the 1950's, the man's hair is rather long; but his wife has hair down to her (Empire) waist. We see the same thing in the XIX Dynasty sculpture from the Metropolitan Museum of Art below. This is especially noteworthy when one finds feminists actually arguing that short hair for men and long hair for women was culturally "created" either by St. Paul (those Christians, or Jews, again) or by the Roman Army.
Jews and Romans did seem to have an ideal of hair length for men that was shorter than they often saw among Gentiles or Barbarians, respectively. Much later, more traditional cultures, such as tribal Navajos, sometimes are noted being "long hairs" in relation to current Western fashions. Western fashion, however, also changes. Meanwhile, it is obvious that, in general, women are able to grow their hair out considerably longer than men can. Also, while there is baldness among both women and men, "female pattern baldness" involves thinning, while "male pattern baldness" involves the total loss of hair. It has been experimentally demonstrated that male pattern baldness is caused by testosterone.
Male and female bodies differ in so many ways that a lengthy book would be necessary to detail them all with their causes and suggested purposes. I've commented on some of this elsewhere. That women have substantilly less body hair is conspicuous. More subtle is the difference in the quality of the skin. Women's skin feels and generally looks different than men's. A clearer indication of this emerges with aging. Women develop "cellulite," or a sort of orange peel or cottage cheese quality in their skin, which is really a characteristic of the underlying fat and not merely of the skin. Men rarely develop this characteristic without disease or artificial hormone manipulation. Thus, women may be able to cut their hair and look more masculine, or at least boyish, but once the cellulite develops, there is little that can really be done about it. It betrays how different the female body is in terms of one's flesh itself.
Or maybe not "the most offensively 'sexist' thing about Jung's theory." In a new book, The Essential Difference, The Truth About the Male and Female Brain [Basic Books, 2003], Cambridge professor of psychology and psychiatry Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the female brain, in general, is specialized for emphathy (eros), while the male brain, in general, is specialized for systemizing (logos). Baron-Cohen is at some pains to denounce sexism, racism, "classism," stereotyping, and oppression, so I gather that sex differences (and Baron-Cohen says "sex," not "gender") are no longer sexist. He is not careful enough about stereotyping, however, since in a world of limited knowledge, good generalizations about types are good clues about what to expect in individuals. But if he is liable to be accused of sexism just for saying that, in general, male and female brains are different, chances are he is not going to put too fine a point on it. On the other hand, talking about "classism" makes him sound like a Marxist. "Essential" in the title, however, sets a heterodox tone, since the bien pensants ritually denounce "Essentialism."
The cover photo of the book nicely illustrates the thesis. The male face above, with a blue tint, and the female face below, with a red tint, have very different expressions. The male eyes are narrowed and looking away, while the female eyes are wide, looking straight on camera, and have relatively dilated pupils -- usually a sign of friendly or receptive emotions. The female face thus possibly displays empathy, while the male face is clearly concerned about, or tracking, something else.
The small pupils, which improve focus, make the male eyes seem hard. Also, the largest area of skin in the male face is the forehead, while that of the female face is the cheek. We may be seeing a female association of the face in the Mayan glyph and affix for "woman" (ixik), which is also used as a grammatical "feminine agentive prefix" (ix-) in the language. The Mayan languages do not otherwise have grammatical inflection for gender. The masculine agentive prefix, aj-, which can also be used in the common gender in association with ix- (i.e. ixaj-), is of much more abstract form. While the female glyph does not have any overt sexual overtones to me -- indeed, it is hard to see it as distinctively female at all -- it is striking that such an image was taken by the Maya as representive of the feminine. If there is something "sexist" in this, it was hardly something cooked up or "socially constructed" by Romans, Jews, or Christians.
Confucius says, "Women and servants are most difficult to deal with. If you are familiar with them, they become insolent. If you keep your distance, they resent it" [Analects 17:25]. Here we definitely see the issue of status, and its conflict with closeness.
That women tend to mate and marry up in status is called "hypergamy." The simplest manifestation of this is that women may marry older men -- the average is four years older -- especially older men who are established and financially secure. We see extremes of this when aging millionaires marry quite young women, In the diagram, the lines go both ways. All the females want the alpha male, while the alpha male can sample all the females. King Solomon, of course, just took all the females, as powerful men have all through history.
A striking illustration of the evolutionary dynamic is in the current use of the "dating app," which means computer applications that facilitate dating choices, where men and women post their profiles and then offer or entertain questions for dates with other users. The experience seems to be that many women receive a lot of inquiries from men, while only the most appealing men receive a lot of inquries from women, leaving most men -- about 80% -- to be accepted by few women. Women who experiment by pretending to be men on line are usually surprised, very surprised, how difficult it is to get positive responses from women in these venues.
The impression is that most women will not "settle" for anything but will restrict themselves to the most appealing men. There is even a "rule," the "6-6-6 rule," that a man should be six feet tall, earn a six figure income, and have "six pack" abdominal muscles ("abs"). The qualifying men get called the "Chads," and in evolutionary terms they are the "alpha" males. The alpha males tend to prefer the alpha females (the "Stacy"), but they actually have their choice of almost any woman. Thus, they tend to avoid commitment, so that they can run through all that is available.
A remarkable example of just such a practice turns up with the movie star Leonardo diCaprio. He has dated or reported to have dated at least 38 women, including Gisele Bundchen, Naomi Campbell, Blake Lively, Camila Morrone, Bridget Hall, Claire Danes, Kristen Zang, Amber Valletta, Gigi Hadid, Meghan Roche, Erin Heatherton, Vittoria Ceretti, Nina Agdal, Rihanna, Chelsey Weimar, Kelly Rohrbach, Toni Garrn, Madalina Ghenea, Bar Refaeli, Anne Vyalitsyna, Eva Herzigova, Bijou Phillips, Natasha Henstridge, Helena Christensen, Kristen Zang, Bridget Hall, etc. What people have noticed about diCaprio, who is now 49, is that he may date women until they are 25 or 26, and then he breaks up with them. He moves on to another 20-something. This begins to sound like the "Deer Park," the Parc-aux-Cerfs, of Louis XV, where mistresses of the King were housed until they became pregnant and were rotated out, with modest titles and stipends. Women who have dated diCaprio don't seem to have become pregnant or earned such benefits.
Women who fail to secure the Chad, can also run through all that is available, because, if they are appealing at all, all the beta men will express an interest in them. They are liable to be unsatisfied with most of their relationships, however, hoping that they can eventually "trade up" more toward the alpha. Men, in turn, may find this frustrating and annoying. Thus, for the alpha males and most women, actual commitment is a questionable ideal -- even for women who say that they want a committed relationship. It then doesn't help if the woman is a committed feminist who tells her date, "I don't need a man." When they begin to get older, however, they "hit the wall," which means their shelf life has expired for the alpha males. Physically, they aren't as appealing -- and that is much of what the alphas were looking for, much more than income or status. That is certainly what we see with Leonardo diCaprio.
This dynamic was not so obvious when relationships had to be initiated through personal encounters. If you start dating someone at work, there is going to be a very limited pool of candidates. Or, if you engage in pick-ups at singles bars, the pool there, and the kind of candidates, is also going to be limited, and skewed. The dating apps open things up, but then the evolutionary dynamic has room to express itself. This turns out not to be very satisfying for a large portion of the men and the women. The men find little response from the women; and the women have little chance of a durable relationship with a "Chad."
The feminist is also liable to think that her income, accomplishments, degrees, and status will attract men, just as these features in men attract women. However, her income is precisely likely to attract the wrong kind of man, who is looking to become a parasite. That an honest man might want someone who is, as Alcestis tells Hestia, loving [φίλη], may put off the feminist who thinks that this is too feminine, traditional, and patriarchal. Good luck with that.
Thus, women begin to complain that they have been dating for years without any commitment from men -- i.e. they have avoided the men who would have committed. Meanwhile, men may swear off dating, since the level of interest from women is low and humiliating.
There is also the awkward possibility, which is the kind of thing we see in hierarchy groups in mammals (as in chimpanzees or wolves), that the sexes compete among their own sex to establish status and hierarchy, while the two sexes do not compete directly with each other. The relationship between the sexes is simply that the two hierarchies match up: The highest status ("alpha") male and female pair off with each other, and so on down the line. This is rather like what we see in many human relationships, as in the frequent pairing of movie stars with movie stars, even as the rewards for achievement, like the Oscars for acting, have different categories by sex.
If there is anything natural for humans about the intra-sexual competition, having males and females then compete against each other could produce a great deal of confusion and conflict, as competitive signals are confused with non-competitive sexual signals. Indeed, this is pretty much what we see in the legal and moral quagmire of sexual harrassment law, which contrasts with the much older and universal human practice of reducing confusion by separating the sexes, or at least having them in different kinds of categories where they do not directly compete. Of course, the latter was the more recent solution in Western societies when males and female both sought employment in businesses, but then the female jobs (e.g. secretary, nurse) generally had an overall lower status ("pink collar") than the male jobs (e.g. executive, doctor). Where some social change or legal social engineering affects that phenomenon, what can happen in response is "male flight" from newly feminized categories. That may be a factor right now in declining male enrollment and graduation from college, even as female enrollment and graduation have surged.
The age old dependence of human females on males, although very nearly the root of all evil to feminism, nevertheless is simply transferred, not abolished, by most feminist political agendas. Thus, if the ancient principle was that women have the right to be protected and supported, political feminism absolutely agrees with this but merely wishes to see the job discharged by the government rather than by fathers, husbands, gentlemen, or religious charity. Thus we suddenly had in the 60's the notion of "welfare rights," which no one had taken very seriously previously, that women had an absolute entitlement to government support of their children, however irresponsibly they may have come by them. Similarly, in the 80's we had a vast expansion of anti-discrimination law, that women had a right to federal civil rights protection from unwanted sexual proposals, nude pictures, dirty jokes, or even vaguely "sexist" language in the workplace.
I think that much of the charm of 19th century mythological paintings is the freedom with which the artists can indulge their attraction to nudity, both male and female. Greek clothing, worn the way Greek women never would have worn it, in comparison, say, to the nudity of Greek male athletes, helps.
Here, the Seven Sisters of the Pleiades represent what is actually some fairly melancholy mythology. Their father, the Titan Atlas, after losing in the war between the gods and the Titans, was condemned to carry the heavens on his shoulders. One version of the story of the Pleiades is that they all committed suicide in grief,
In another version of their story, they have lost the protection of their father and so are vulnerable to the pursuit and harassment of the huntsman Orion, who otherwise we know committed a rape and ended up killed by the goddess Artemis. The Pleiades are protected from him by being translated into the sky, as, again, their own conspicuous constellation.
The "lost" Pleiad is Merópē, whose star (French étoile) in the Pleiades seems to have faded from visibility in historical times. This would have been a noteworthy phenomenon, when such things tended to be overlooked in traditions, like that of the Greeks, where the heavens, particularly that of the fixed stars, were regarded as unchanging.
The stellar Pleiades are an Open Cluster, which means young stars recently born together and beginning to spread away from each other. This is more than 400 light years away from the Earth and thus makes a more compact group than the Hyades Cluster, which is considerably closer.
Return to text The Three Fates are Klōthṓ, Lákhesis and Átropos, Κλωθώ, Λάχεσις, Ἄτροπος; and the Furies, Aléktô, Tisíphonē, Megaīra, Ἀληκτώ, Τισιφόνη, Μέγαιρα, "Endless Anger, Jealous Rage, and Vengeful Destruction."
The Hours is also a 2002 movie, starring Nicole Kidman, Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. Nicole Kidman won an Oscar as Best Actress for her role, in which she is unrecognizable in makeup as Virginia Woolf. Although the story is about three women, the allusion of the title is evidently simply to time and not to the Greek goddesses. The movie is of interest for its gender theme, which evidently is that Virginia Woolf had bouts of insanity because the times did not allow her to express her lesbianism. There is almost nothing in the Virginia Woolf part of the movie to suggest this, except for one woman-on-woman kiss; but then the other (fictional) stories in the movie, of Julianne Moore in 1951 and of Meryl Streep recently, seem to make the case.
Julianne Moore nearly commits suicide and does end up abandoning her husband and children, evidently because of lesbian feelings, though (again) we see no more than one kiss. Meryl Streep is "out" and living openly with another woman, and is also looking after a poet friend, played by Ed Harris, who is dying of AIDS. Julianne Moore turns out to have been Harris's mother.
We are left to understand that Streep, who keeps being called "Mrs. Dalloway," As it happens, Woolf and the Ed Harris character are apparently the truly creative people in the movie, both of whom are seen committing suicide. One is easily left with the impression that creativity perhaps requires suffering and inner conflict to a degree that might bring on insanity and suicide. This would be a counter-current to the more obvious gay liberation theme, the appropriateness of whose application to Virginia Woolf is beyond my ability to judge.
Another movie with a theme of three women, although with no possible reference to Greek goddesses, is the aptly named 3 Women [1977], by director Robert Altman, starring Shelley Duvall, Sissy Spacek, and Janice Rule. I did not find the story very memorable or edifying. It seems to boil down to Altman studying some odd personalities.
See discussion of words like menstrual "period," περίοδος, "menarche," μηνάρχη, and "menopause," μηνοπαῦσις, under, of all things, the Olympic Games. As it happens, they are all Greek words.
Lohan is a new student at a high school, having largely grown up in Africa, and ends up joining a group of three girls widely known as the "Plastics," because of their good looks, good clothes, and careful cosmetic makeup. Lohan was good enough looking to fit in. All she needed was an upgrade in clothes and makeup.
To the Archetypal group of three women, Lohan thus makes a fourth. The problem with this is that her previous and original new friends at the school were more or less kinds of Goth outcastes, especially one played by Lizzy Caplan. Thus, Lohan, who is not really that sympathetic with the "Plastics," conspires with Caplan to undermine the friendships in the group, especially involving the leader, McAdams.
This conspiracy is successful but results in disruption far beyond the confines of the "Plastics," including McAdams actually getting hit by a bus, while she and Lohan are arguing in the street in front of the school. Consequently, much physical and social patching-up needs to be done, and the conflicts are more-or-less resolved by the end of the movie.
This is played out, in further symbolism, in one of the comic moments of the movie. Thus, the group of four that we see in the photograph above proceeds to walk down a hall in the school, and Lohan, at the end of the line, falls head first into a trash bin, so that we see her at left with her legs, a lot of legs, kicking wildly up in the air.
There are things of note about this. One is that she has been symbolically tossed from the group, since she doesn't actually belong and doesn't even want to belong. No one takes this as an omen, and in fact the whole thing is just played for laughs, and for all the attention paid to it -- none -- it might never have happened. But it is like a statement that the fourth girl violates the Archetype.
On the other hand, I am intrigued by its sexual overtones, which also occasion no comment or consequences in the movie. But think about it. Lohan's privates, ἰδία, are laid open and vulnerable, with attractive legs marking the spot. The short skirt might as well be a flower opening for the orchid within. It is inviting. Since the movie is written by Saturday Night Live alumna Tina Fey (who also has a part in it), one wonders if she considers these overtones. On the one hand, it makes Lohan look ridiculous; but, on the other hand, a rescuer, as well as what he will see, will probably need to wrap his arms around her legs to pull her out. Works for me.
This may bear on the odd debate where some seriously claim that women are not funny. This is prima facie preposterous, since there are many comediennes, and we see Dezi Arnaz as just the straight man to the comedy of Lucille Ball. But there seem to be two real conditions that restrict the comedy of women. One is that we don't get a lot of, or any, pratfall humor with them. A good reason for that is that women have finer bones and are more easily injured than men. Chevy Chase did a "fall" on Saturday Night Live every week, and he injured his back to an extent that it bothered him for years afterwards. The "Jackass" movies, conspicuously starring Johnny Knoxville, involved nothing but physically dangerous stunts. It was pretty much all men.
Apart from that, it seems to me that women doing pratfalls always runs the risk of appearing sexual. Sex can be funny. Men injuring their testicles can be funny. But Lindsay Lohan upside down in a trash can looks arousing. In general, women in dresses or skirts always run the risk of exposing something that is suggestive. Thus, while sex can be funny, arousal is sobering.
There may be other reasons why some people do not think that women are funny, but in this kind of case I think we see where what is funny can quickly trip over into what is sexually suggestive. In general, this is a function of the fact, I suspect, that men exposing their genitals is not appealing, but women exposing their breasts or buttocks is. The latter is what we see at Mardi Gras, while the former grosses everyone out.
In fact, socially this group is more like Lohan's Goth friend in Mean Girls. Balk in particular dresses very Gothy. As such, they are at the opposite end of the social spectrum from the "Pastics" in the other movie, and we see social hostility expressed in various ways, including some racism, since Rachel True is black. Thus, some of the witchcraft is retaliation in the social conflict, and we tend to sympathize with the "witches." The conflict in this case arises internally. It starts with the jealousy of Balk against Tunney, who potentially has greater paranormal powers than the other girls. Balk has a hostile and crazy streak, which her two original friends have the bad judgment to tolerate. This leads to murder and to a full out assault on Tunney, from which Campbell and True flee, and in which Balk is defeated, disempowered, and reduced to insanity. Thus, unlike Mean Girls, we do not have reconciliation in the end. Campell and True approach Tunney and attempt to apologize, but they then have the bad judgment to insult her within earshot. Tunney demonstrates her continuing power, and we gather that there will no future friendship here.
Balk does a very good job of furious frenzy, and she never has any intention of using her powers for any good end -- unlike her far more delightful character in The Waterboy [1998], where her just-out-of-jail roughness helpfully serves the cause of Adam Sandler.
Of all the cast, we have probably seen the most of Neve Campbell, who I recently liked in Skyscraper [2019] with Dwayne Johnson.
By helping the group develop their witchcraft, Tunney inadvertently sets off the conflict that disrupts and destroys the group. Unlike Lohan, Tunney has no ill intentions; but, in archetypal terms, we might wonder if what we are seeing is that a group of four females will be inherently unstable.
A case where the pattern of fours doesn't seem to work at all is with the four boys who are the central characters in the popular South Park series on the cable network Comedy Central. Kyle (Broflovski), Stan (Marsh), Kenny (McCormick), and (Eric) Cartman. Kyle and Stan are clearly the central characters in the group. Kenny usually gets killed in very episode (until recently). Cartman is frequently at odds with the other boys and breaks away to act on his own (for instance, in the March 2004 send up of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, Cartman begins his own neo-Nazi movement) -- he is the only member of the group typically addressed by his last name (not always affectionately). It is very hard to say whether any of this makes Cartman the leader, joker, master hunter, or shaman. The same with Kenny, while Stan and Kyle are usually only distinguishable in that Kyle is Jewish and frequently the butt of Cartman's remarks about Jews.
The reason for this indefiniteness may be in the origin of the characters. Stan and Kyle are stand-ins for the authors of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone. Archetypally, the group is thus really not four, but two -- the Twins. Kenny and Cartman were added to fill things out, indeed to get a group of four, but the dynamic is still that of the Twins. When Kenny dies and Cartman leaves, the Twins are frequently, as it happens, all that is left.
In Tutankhamon's tomb, the Canopic Chest was found housed in a wooden shrine, with four protective goddesses on each of the four sides. Four goddesses would then seem to be one of the exceptions to our archetypal number rules, but there is something odd about the group: it is not a group that occurs otherwise in Egyptian mythology or religious imagery.
Isis and Nephthys are sisters, occurring in the group of four with their brothers Osiris and Seth, but then Neith is a very ancient goddess with no mythological connection to the first two, and the fourth, the scorpion goddess Serket, otherwise hardly even turns up in accounts of Egyptian religion. The four goddesses thus seem to have assembled specifically to match the symmetry of the Sons of Horus and the Canopic Chest, and indeed there is a specific association of each goddess with one of the Sons [The Complete Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Richard H. Wilkinson, Thames & Hudson, 2003, p.88].
We might consider if there is a mathematical analogy to the archetypal characteristics of the feminine and the masculine. At the most basic level, negative terms more than positive ones are like the stereotypes and paradoxes of the feminine. Thus, if the feminine is the opposite (internal, hidden) of what it seems (external, obvious), this is like negatives which, when multiplied by themselves, become positive. On the other hand, while the positive/negative opposition would seem to fit the Pythagorean or Chinese sense of opposities, a gender stereotype of the "negative" for the feminine would seem to be just too, well, negative.
There are more elaborate oppositions in mathematics, for instance between sine and cosine functions. This seems to fit our archetypes, or stereotypes, quite suitably. Even the graphs of the functions through 360 degrees (2π radians) exhibit an asymmetry for the sine and a symmetry for the cosine functions, as we might say that even numbers exhibit greater symmetry (or at least bisymmetry) than odd numbers.
This kind of mathematical asymmetry and symmetry also turns up in quantum mechanics: Asymmetrical wave functions (ψ), which change their sign as two particles are exchanged, are characteristic of fermions (Fermi-Dirac statistics), which are the kind of particles (protons, neutrons, electrons) that constitute matter, while symmetrical wave functions, which do not change their sign as two particles are exchanged, are characteristic of bosons (Bose-Einstein statistics), which are the kind of particles (photons, gravitons) that transfer energy in the universe.
The Greek stereotype of the feminine as moving and the Indian notion of the Goddess representing power (Shakti) fit the latter quite nicely. Indeed, massless bosons like photons and gravitons spontaneously move at the velocity of light. So, for what it is worth, we could extend the male/female, Yin/Yang opposition into abstractions unanticipated by the Greeks, Indians, or Chinese.
Late one evening in Austin, Texas, around 1976, a friend of mine said he had once heard the theory that small groups of men tend to shake down to four, where each corresponds to a specific function in a Bushman hunting party (the Bushmen formerly, for a while, called the "!Kung" -- part of the continuing confusion about what to call them). This came up because there were, indeed, four guys left from a party earlier that evening. I have never heard this theory, or any such specific information about Bushman hunting parties, anywhere else (though I saw a movie in my Freshman anthropology class about Bushman hunting parties); but, if true, it would put male archetypes well outside Judeo-Christian patriarchy, or even the "ice people" (so-called by politically correct racists) periphery of Eurasian steppe culture.
It also seems to match up, for instance, with the Beatles: John was definitely the leader, Paul the master hunter (or composer in this case), George the shaman (heavy on Vishnu), and Ringo the joker (appearing, indeed, in several subsequent movie comedies).
Star Trek. The core cast members were Captain Kirk (William Shatner), clearly the leader, First Officer Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy, d.2015), the master hunter, Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley, d.1999), the shaman, and Chief Engineer Scotty (James Doohan, d.2005), the joker. Star Trek was not a comedy, and so Scotty's role as the joker is subdued; yet his Scottish accent, suggested by Doohan himself, simply cannot be imitated without a comic effect. Other characteristic lines spoken by Scotty, often about his inability to provide more power to ship, are still reproduced in countless comic contexts. As the Science Officer, Mr. Spock supplies all the theoretical expertise in the show and so represents the scientific version of hunter. Dr. McCoy, apart from his own expertise in medical science (as Scotty is the expert in engineering), is frequently involved as the moral adviser and conscience of Captain Kirk. In stories conspicuously lacking religion (falling to outright atheism in the subsequent series), McCoy is the closest to a religious voice.
McCoy often provides a conflicting perspective in relation to Mr. Spock, who tends to provide dispassionate and impersonal observations. To McCoy, this often seems unfeeling and inhuman; and he says so.
Dick (John Lithgow) is the "high leader," Sally (Kristen Johnston) is the military veteran "security officer," Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the old hand "intelligence officer," and Harry (French Smith) is, well, no one was originally quite sure, but he turned out to be, to his own surprise, the "communications officer." Since Third Rock is, of course, a comedy, no one is quite what one might expect from their roles: the leader is a self-obsessed ditherer, the military man (master hunter) is, well, a woman (though the aggressive and statuesque Kristen Johnston pulls it off convincingly), and the older veteran (the shaman) is a teenage boy. The only role that doesn't need to be comically reversed is that of the joker, and indeed, French Smith does all the physical pratfall humor, is the constant butt of jokes, and has all the dumb-and-dumber lines.
Jerry would be the (rather ineffective) leader and Kramer definitely the joker (all the pratfall humor, and the craziest schemes, again). Between George and Elaine the assignment is less certain; but George seems best as the comic reversal of the master hunter, since he is always trying to fulfill, or at least be seen to fulfill, some such role, while Elaine, as the closest we get to the "conscience" of the group, can be the comic shaman:
her problems more often start with sensible dilemmas or observations, and only later collapse into chaos -- like the time all she wanted to do was get her old school acquaintance to wear a bra.
Dan Aykroyd, playing Ray Stantz, is clearly the engineer of the group, the one building the equipment and spouting the techno-babble (something Aykroyd himself loves to do). This makes him fairly obviously the master hunter. Harold Ramis, playing Egon Spengler, is the theoretician of the group, humorless and cerebral. This makes him the shaman. Bill Murray, playing Peter Venkman, is the most personable of the group, with not much to do on the technical or theoretical side.
However defective, this is leadership. But these principal characters leave the Ghostbusters with only three members. For the fourth we get someone who is literally the "dark other," Ernie Hudson playing Winston Zeddmore.
This adds something real to a group that otherwise already consists entirely of jokers. [note]
Although there is little to go on but speculation, one might suppose the male and female bodies to suggest this. Although both bodies have homologous organs that are mostly bisymmetrical, the female body displays conspicuous development of symmetrical organs (breasts, buttocks, labia major, labia minor), while in the male body these are underdeveloped (except for the testicles). On the other hand, the most developed and characteristic male organ, the penis, is a single, center-line part, while the homologous female organ, the clitoris, is ordinary entirely hidden between the labia.
Males, representing oddness, are balanced by occurring in even numbered groups, while females, representing evenness, are balanced by occurring in odd numbered groups. The result, multiplying odds by evens, is, of course, always even, which should please feminists: the idea of "balance" itself implies evenness and symmetry.
Complete unity, in turn, would be in the union of male and female, the kind of imagery we find in
Tantrism, in both Hinduism and Buddhism, what Jung called the "mysterium coniunctionis" (in alchemy, Jung's Mysterium Coniunctionis, Princeton, 1977).
Male sexual organs are not only all "hanging out," but they are also situated closer to the ventral part of the body (the underside of quadrupeds, the front of humans), where they can easily be examined by their owner.
What the male organ is for and what it does is obvious to all and the subject of endless humor; but what goes on inside the female body, with ovaries and uterus, was not obvious to anyone and could rarely be a subject of humor. People are conceived and carried in, and born from, the womb. This does not seem particularly funny -- like a penis squirting semen does (as in the Egyptian hieroglypic at right). Instead, it is mysterious.
Mycenaean Greek tombs, with a buried, womblike chamber, also feature an open approach to the entrance, the dromos, which might suggest the space between legs leading to the vagina.
This is also the impression of most Egyptian temples, where a series of avenues, courts, and entrances becomes progressively smaller, until leading to the dark and enclosed inner sanctum, the place of the god, which also represents the place of the birth of the world.
The sun temples of the V Dynasty, however, and of course the Old Kingdom pyramids themselves, have the towering quality -- though the pyramids then contained the vaginal passages to the womblike place of rest and rebirth. The earth itself, with its hidden fertility, its dark caves, etc. is commonly seen as female, "Mother Earth," with some interesting exceptions. The Egyptians had an earth god and a sky goddess, the opposite of what we see in Greece, India, China, etc.; but this makes some sense in Egypt, since the earth itself was mostly desert and could be seen as sterile. The Nile, flowing upon the earth, is what was fertile. The Nile god, Hapi (one of the, unsurprisingly, four Sons of Horus [note]), was male, but he is commonly shown with breasts, a compromise, at the least, with the female imagery of fertility.
The supreme image of the hidden, mysterious, and internal would have to be the Labyrinth, Λαβύρινθος, originally the mythic creation of the architect Daedalus to hold the Minotaur. Theseus, as it happens, is only able to master the Labyrinth with the help of Ariadne's umbilical-like thread. The full archetypal potential of this imagery, however, we can see in a modern creation, the fantasy novel The Tombs of Atuan (1971), by the science fiction and fantasy writer Ursula LeGuin, who often uses gender themes.
The "Tombs" mark the most ancient part, and the most ancient gods, of her temple complex (which otherwise features, interestingly, a temple of twin "God-Brothers"). Under the Tombs is a great cave, the "Undertomb," into which it is forbidden to bring light. Connected to the Undertomb is a vast labyrinth, which she can enter and explore with the help of a light. LeGuin went to considerable trouble to actually produce a plan of the labyrinth, as seen at left, complete with all the features mentioned in the story. This is, in more recent feminist terminology, a "sacralization of the feminine" with a vengeance: A cult of female priests resting, literally, on a vast chthonic metaphor for the female body, entered through the sacred darkness of a stone vagina.
LeGuin's hero magician, from her other Earthsea stories, shows up, dares to burn a light in the Undertomb and, when captured by the priestess, wins her over, escapes from the island, and takes her with him to start a new life (not with him) and, we are left to assume, live happily ever after. She is "rescued" from her chthonic deities, resulting in an earthquake and partial collapse of the "Tombs."
a particularly bitter form of feminism, complaining that she could not walk down a street alone without being fearful of groups of men nearby (a politically correct sentiment only so long as one does not say "black men" nearby, in which case fear of "male violence" instantly becomes the racism of "white privilege"). Jung himself might have said she had a animus problem, as feminism itself represents an "animus" in the more ordinary sense.
Equally interesting imagery turns up in a Valentine's Day card. This was drawn by Susan Hunt Yale (printed by the Marcel Shurman Company Inc.). There was no date on it, but it was for Valentine's Day circa 1995. The card shows a small heart-shaped maze. At the center is a heart-shaped pool and heart-shaped fountain. On the edge of the pool sits a young woman. Overhead is a banner that says "Stay Forever." At the entrance to the maze stands a young man. Over the entrance is a banner, held up by Cupid figures, that says "Start Here."
This is all very far from being politically correct, but it is also very evocative and sweet, which is the point on Valentine's Day.
The female archetypes of the hidden, interior, dark, chthonic, etc. stand in stark contrast to other female stereotypes: The skin-deep quality of female beauty and the "objectification," as the feminists say, of the female body. How can the female be, all at once, primarily a surface appearance and, at the same time, the dark and hidden? Beauty is a thing of light, knowledge, externality, and the unhidden.
One way to deal with this is simply to say, as many feminists do, that all this beauty stuff is something that men impose upon women. The "male gaze" turns women into objects, and the mystified female, in the grip of false consciousness, responds with the kinds of self-torture (make-up, shoes, hairdo, corsets, dieting, breast implants, etc.) that men require.
The mirror and the female have, indeed, been associated as long as there have been mirrors, which means all the way back to Ancient Egypt. Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet with her jewelry, cosmetics, and mirror; XII Dynasty Furthermore, we find in a collection of Japanese ghost stories the remark, "She thought about the old saying that a mirror is the Soul of a Woman -- (a saying mystically expressed, by the Chinese character for Soul, upon the backs of many bronze mirrors)..." ["Of a Mirror and a Bell," Kwaidan, Stories and Studies of Strange Things, by Lafcadio Hearn, Charles E. Tuttle Company, 1904, 1971, 1986, p.55]. As it happens, there are two Chinese characters for "soul," and I have not been able to track down which one is referred to by this story.
, is being used for the mirror. If we follow the structure of the samurai saying, then the one about women could be, 鏡は女の魂, Kagami wa Onna no Tamashii, "The mirror is the soul of a woman."
female sensual and sexual exuberance, all the way to women flashing their breasts or bottoms at Mardi Gras
in New Orleans, are symptoms of male oppression and domination and so of a kind of political Sodom and Gomorrah. The religious and political anhedonia are comparable.
Venus with a Mirror, 1555, Titian (1490-1576), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC a distillation of her appearance. Her attitude towards that other woman may be a frank evaluation, admiration, criticism, or delusion. But there is no doubt that any interiority of the observing woman is unrepresented in the image.
Will the image respond in a satisfactory way? So there may be a kind of antagonistic back-and-forth. One alteration may not look good, so one must try again. The adversary is unresponsive or recalcitrant. This may go on for some time, generating an archetypal feminine pastime. Every day, this Other will be confronted every so often, in a ritual examination and upgrade, a sort of dance or duel that will continue in a mixture of caution, respect, hostility, and perhaps some admiration for years.
Girl before a Mirror, 1932, Pablo Picasso (1881-1973), Museum of Modern Art, New York in the mirror also seems more distorted than the original, and it possesses labia and a rima pudendi, making it more sexually explict -- while the original itself seems to be pregnant, a condition not at all obvious in the mirror.
The painting at right by Max Kurzweil also illustrates the issues of duality. Kurzweil was part of the "Vienna Secession" (Wiener Secession) art movement, which I have noted elsewhere in relation to Gustav Klimt (1862-1918). In the art of the period there are many other paintings of nudes, German Weiblicher Akt, even before mirrors; but Kurzweil's is the only one I've noticed where the woman wears a mask.
Weiblicher Akt vor Spiegel, "Female Nude before Mirror," 1907, Max Kurzweil (1867-1916), Leopold Museum, Vienna The woman sits upright, with her arms back, and her chest thrust forward. So she is not just examining her features passively, she is projecting a provocative pose, with her breasts pushed forward.
Even the Victoria's Secret model at left, so perfect in form, looks like she has some issue with her reflection, grasping her hair, with a tentative or inquisitive expression. But we see more of her sexual appeal than she does, and she can hardly be wondering whether her καλλίπυγος, "beautiful bottom," is sufficiently attractive. This is where a male in the room might have trouble restraining himself.
But the principal sin of the "pretty boy" is that he is neglecting the female in order to admire himself. A woman before her mirror may even tolerate male presence and observation with some complacency.
The Toilet of Venus, or "The Rokeby Venus," 1647-51, Diego Velázquez (1599-1660), the National Gallery, London; although in many of the mirror pictures, we see the woman seeing herself, Velázquez makes it look like Venus is looking at the viewer, rather than at herself; we also have a curious use of a mirror in Las Meninas. Female vanity is imposed by the male of the female unconscious. A woman not only knows what a man wants, but, as an unconscious male herself, it is she who wants it -- hence its independence, not only of any actual males, but often of any actual attraction to males.
there are men who feel driven, plagued, and unhappy by female (or anima) expectations of them to be strong, supportive, protective, achieving, status seeking, etc. Psychic freedom from that stress, besides simply not worrying about it and becoming unambitious (the archetypal male "couch potato"), can be found in the assumption, to greater or lesser degrees, of female roles -- as a passive gay male, a transvestite, a transsexual female, etc. These things can be sorted out in all sorts of ways. Or some males just become super-masculine super-achievers (e.g. Donald Trump), decide that all that women ever want is their status, and so lose themselves in their work, probably with a string of failed marriages, or prostitutes (e.g. Eliot Spitzer), behind them.
Thus, women know that their true selves are hidden. As Tannen says, women may bond by telling secrets. They want a man who is seeking and respects their true selves. At the same time, a woman will feel bad about herself if she thinks she looks bad. And she wants to please the man who likes her by looking good for him. Similarly, men are attracted to good looking women, can even hold them in awe (Ed Bundy's response to Playboy Playmates, in the recent Fox television series Married with Children, is a good example), but they will also become contemptuous of an airhead and know that a woman whose vanity is completely self-centered can be real trouble.
that we are creatures that are objects, having physical bodies, but also are consciousnesses whose minds seem to float free of any objects or bodies.
To the male, the male body is more or less just the instrument of the male self; but the female does not like the sense of her body as an instrument. But it cannot be entirely valuable in itself either, because her true self is internal and hidden. A woman cannot be the ugly Socrates with the beautiful soul without a sense of tragedy. There is nothing tragic in the same way about the foolish or evil man who is handsome -- he is more the archetype of the seducer or the devil.
this was not always so, it is unreasonable that any pre-cultural adaptations would just disappear completely, and, as it happens, even a little bit of sociobiology goes a long way. Because of the hostility provoked by sociobiological arguments, the discipline (or parts of it) now is frequently referred to as "evolutionary psychology."
Lions are rather more sociable, but the females give birth off on their own and care for the young that way for a while. The males would help provide some protection to the group once a female returns with her cubs, but they do not otherwise make any contribution to rearing the young.
A male determines the attractiveness of a female quickly and wishes to mate quickly. Since the only way to determine attractiveness quickly is through appearance, that looms large in the estimation of the male. On the other hand, females do not want to mate until the male exhibits a more durable commitment, lest they face the consequences of pregnancy alone.
This can be tested: If courtship behaviors are culturally created, then we would expect them to change if the costs of sex are dramatically changed.
Where heterosexual courtship involves an interaction of men and women, homosexual courtship enables each sex to exhibit behaviors unaffected by those of the other. The results are persistant and interesting. Homosexual men (gay men) seem to be much more promiscuous and sexually active than homosexual women (lesbians).
Ruby's Diners, displayed at right, has now been modified by the company to eliminate the curve of the posterior that previously has been visible under her skirt. This certainly was criticized for being too sexually suggestive, which, of course, is exactly why it was nice -- despite its irrelevant and perhaps disturbing juxtaposition with food. The shoes, however, remain with the sort of heels that would be hell to any actual waitress.]
Now, the idea that women are not as naturally promiscuous and not as sexually driven as men is one of the oldest gender stereotypes in the book, while no one in society is as hostile and militant about "gender stereotypes" as politicized lesbians. One might expect, therefore, that radical lesbians, even if they didn't feel it, would be at some pains to celebrate and practice promiscuity just as much as gay men simply to demonstrate the falsehood of the stereotype. But this is not what we see. It is hard not to conclude that they really don't feel it.
preserved in a few essentially paleolithic communities even into the 20th century, may have persisted for ten of thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years. Recent variations are thus in a period that is really too short for any real physical evolutionary change to have occurred, while the older human society would have developed at a time when human communities simply would have been natural variations on older primate communities and cultural evolution would really not yet be a factor. The great generalized intelligence that now we might think would automatically abolish innate behaviors and make for cultural variation was relatively late to develop. Australopithecines and Pithecanthropines (Homo erectus) had increasingly large brains, but nothing like the bulging skull of Homo sapiens, though the former already had a basic stone tool culture, while the later may have already had a pidgen-like language (cf. Derek Bickerton Language and Species, U. of Chicago Press, 1990).
weren't large enough). Even though he felt bad about that, he was continuing to do pretty much the same thing.
, here shown combining Chinese symbols and virtues with various quasi-Jungian distinctions. The green dragon is male and represents Yang in the Chinese system, even though the element to which it corresponds, wood, is a Yin element.
which feminists find "objectifying" and dehumanizing -- at times motivating feminists to avoid attractive clothing and grooming.
Copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D. All Rights Reserved
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 1
So I have been blessed with many blessings. I should be happy. And I am, sort of. But I can't escape the nagging feeling that I'm not really happy, at least not the way I was when I was young and carefree and basically an idiot.
1. Boys
2. The hideous totally unwarranted cruelty of high school teachers.
3. What this one boy did in this one class OMG.
4. Some video on some Internet thing that is HILARIOUS.
5. Hair.
6-10. Boys.Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 2
attentive lover and not a violent deadbeat. The curious thing, however, is that a women may find a man who does seem to be a violent deadbeat, but this can get discounted or dismissed with "I know he is really good." In other words, whatever he has been like, she can change him, through her own devotion and goodness. This rarely works out as desired. A wiser, woman, however, may predict the future from the past.
If she has actually been monogamous, faithful, and affectionate, then he can rely on her continuing to be like that. So he assumes that the evidence of the past is the key to the future. But an unfaithul or promiscuous woman, let alone a violent one, will continue to be like that.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 3
Dawn [Prabhāsa], the daughter of Prajāpati, took the form of a celestial nymph and appeared before them [Fire, Wind, Sun, & Moon, her brothers]. Their hearts were moved by her and they poured out their seed. Then they went to Prajāpati, their father, and they said, 'We have poured out our seed. Let it not be lost.' Prajāpati made a golden bowl, an arrow's breadth in height and in width, and he poured the seed into it. Then the thousand-eyed god with a thousand feet and a thousand fitted arrows arose.
We might consider a thought experiment using the opposite of this, where a naked women receives the visit of a man. This certainly happens with people who know each other, and may have even happen in casual dating if it involves nudists. We see something of the sort in the current television show Dating Naked (2014, 2015), which does not involve nudists, and has even involved a woman who had never even seen a naked man (the date didn't last long). The show also experienced a risable lawsuit from a woman whose genitals the show, at one point, failed to pixilate out. Presumably they had not been pixilated for her date, the camera crew, or possible bystanders.
Pin-up art, which can be mildly or strongly pornographic, and frequently involves some degree of nudity, and is alway intended to be erotic, often trades on themes of powerful women, usually as warriors or as having supernatural powers, i.e. vampires, etc. The warrior women, or Amazon, versions may end up faintly comical, in the sense that we are given to imagine the women, who sometimes wear fragments of body armor, nevertheless are almost always bare breasted, and usually voluptuously so (as we see at left in the image by Claudio Aboy, from his collection Voluptuous). But it is hard to imagine such a woman rushing into battle, bearing close-quarter, shock weapons like spears, swords, or axes, without the slightest protection for parts of the body the most exposed, sensitive, and vulnerable. They are never scarred in the artworks, a condition that warriors tend to pick up on various parts of their bodies, whether they've been protected or not.
It is a version of divinity and indeed goes back to beliefs about the gods. In Indian mythology, the mere sight of a naked goddess can produce spontaneous ejaculation in less powerful men, even her own brothers, as in the epigraph above.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 3, Note
This is the sort of thing we find in pornography that would defy credibility in the real world. But it seems to have its appeal, since men maintaining erections as ornaments is something we find in Anne Rice's classic bondage novels, The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty [1983], Beauty's Punishment [1984], and Beauty's Release [1985]. Today, when we are warned that some drugs may produce erections lasting four hours, the attendants of the Powerful Woman have some hope of artificial help in their duties.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 4
Purum dual
symbolic systemRight Left Male Female Masculine Feminine Moon Sun Sky Earth East West Life Death Good death Bad death Odd Even Family Strangers Wife-givers Wife-takers Gods, ancestral spirits Mortals Back Front Kin Affines Private Public Superior Inferior Above Below Auspicious Inauspicious South North Sacred Profane Sexual abstinence Sexual activity Village Forest Prosperity Famine Beneficient spirits Evil spirits, ghosts
On the left here is the symbolic system described by anthropologists for the Purum tribe, who live around the border of India and Burma. On the right is the symbolic system for the Gogo tribe of Tanzania. Both of these are rather far from Greece, and Burma is separated from China, geographically and historically, by mountains and jungle.
Gogo dual
symbolic systemRight Left Male Female Man Woman Clean hand Dirty hand Strength Weakness Superior Inferior Clever Stupid Side man lies on during intercourse Side woman lies on during intercourse Side on which men buried Side on which women buried Bow Calabash, drum Bush-clearing Seed-planting Threshing Winnowing, grinding East West South North Up Down Ritual side of house Side of house with midden Fertility, health Death, sickness Cool Hot Medicines Poisons Black Red/white Older people Younger people First wife Junior wives Father Mother
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 5
lengths is a cultural imposition.
One sees very long hair (often wigs, like the Egyptians) among European men in the 17th and early 18th centuries. This is striking when women at the same time typically wore their hair up, giving the visual impression of short hair among women and long hair among men. Men's hair often gets shorter with changes in political climate. Thus, Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War were called "round heads," because they cut their hair short, as opposed to the typical 17th century fashions of the Royalist "Cavaliers." Similarly, the French Revolution introduced the 19th century European norm of short hair on men. In both these cases, there seems to be a moralistic reaction against the implied sensuality of the earlier fashion -- a sensuality that might seem effeminate (this is also when men wore lace), except that its associations were with the violent values of armed aristrocrats (as when the Spartans let their hair grow when at war, implying that war was luxurious).
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 6;
The Essential Difference
The former may imply thought, while the latter, with the softest large area on the face, invites a kiss. The effect of the two images is striking, even as the blue and the red (cool and warm) recall the blue and pink that conventionally mark male and female babies.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 7
,
;
,
.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 8;
Hypergamywho then often end up in legal fights over wills and inheritance with the grown children of the millionaire, once he dies.
European men were fascinated by Ottoman harems precisely because this dynamic was clearly displayed. Since the European men included artists (e.g. Eugène Delacroix, 1798-1863), we have visual records, which embarrass apologists for traditional ʾIslāmic society, who can defend themselves with accusations of modern (Western) political crimes, e.g. "Orientalism."
Eugène Delacroix, Les Femmes d'Alger dans leur appartement, 1834; Louvre Museum Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 9
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 10
As Katie Roiphe [at right] has noted (The Morning After, Sex, Fear, and Feminism on Campus, 1993), much of this is a return to Victorian ideas that women are too innocent and fragile even to be exposed to certain words and images. The only difference is that, where before women would be protected by chaperones, relatives, and decent society, now they can seek protection from Federal Prosecutors. Similarly, Camille Paglia sees the program and personalities of anti-porn feminists as little different from the religious fervor and anhedonia of Carry Nation. What this may show is no less than the phenomenon noted above, of the reemergence of archetypes, after they have been suppressed in one form, in different ones. Since this reemergence is in a political context of support for statism and the expansion of the power of government, its irony is eclipsed by the danger of its support for ongoing leftist and authoritarian assaults on freedom.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 11;
The Pleiades
The Pleiades, 1885, by Elihu Vedder (1836–1923),
Metropolitan Museum of Art
but then Zeus paid tribute to them by making them stars in their own conspicuous constellation.
L'Etoile Perdue, "The Lost Pleiad," 1884, by William-Adolphe Bouguereau (1825–1905) Merópē is said to be a dim star (as what must be her figure is darker in the Elihu Vedder painting above) because she married a mortal, Sisyphus, who deceived the gods and was condemned to torment in Hades. The fate of Sisyphus is compared to our own life by the Existentialist Albert Camus. Why M. Bouguereau has Merópē floating naked in the air (and the other Pleiades behind her naked also), I cannot say, although it looks like, from the beauty of her form, she might have attracted someone better than Sisyphus. It does remind me of the ending of the movie Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon [2000], where the young girl, played by Zhang Ziyi, after many foolish and sobering adventures, leaves her lover and jumps off Mt. Wudang to float off (clothed) into the clouds. Perhaps Merópē is similarly motivated.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 12
The Three Graces (at right by Vincenzo Cucca) are Euphrosýnē, Tháleia, and Aglaḯa, Εὐφροσύνη, Θάλεια, Ἀγλαΐα, "Joy, Bloom, and Brilliance."
The Three Hours are Dikḗ, Eunomía, and Eirḗnē, Δική, Εὐνομία, Εἰρήνη, "Justice, Good Law, and Peace"; or they are Thallṓ, Auxṓ, and Karpṓ, Θαλλώ, Ἀυξώ, and Καρπώ, "Blossoms, Growth, and Harvest."
after the novel that Woolf is seen writing (and Moore seen reading) in her part of the movie, is the happiest and best adjusted of the women. However, she doesn't always seem so happy, and she also seems to have devoted much of her life to the Ed Harris character, who repays her devotion by committing suicide in front of her.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 13
Among all the exceptions to the number three rule for females and the number four rule for males, a curious case is in the movie Mean Girls [2004], starring Rachel McAdams, Lacey Chabert, Amanda Seyfried, and particularly Lindsay Lohan, one of the four Bimbos of the Apocalypse.
What interests me is the sense we might get that the fourth member of the Archetypal group is inherently disruptive, a kind of extra thumb or fifth wheel, in a way that is symbolic of the actual conspiracy to undermine the relationships.
A chivalrous male hurrying to her rescue is going to at least see her underwear. An occasion we do not get.
There are parallels between Mean Girls and the memorable movie The Craft [1996]. Again we have a group of three girls, Fairuza Balk, Neve Campbell, and Rachel True; but now they are aspiring witches and not just a good looking social elite. They are then joined by a fourth girl, Robin Tunney, who, like Lindsay Lohan, is new to their school and trying to fit in; but the movie is not a comedy.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 14
Otherwise what he says is usually unintelligible.
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 15
In Egyptian burials, the four Sons of Horus (Imset, Hapi, Duamutef, and Qebesenuf) are conspicuously associated with the four chambers of the Canopic Chest, which contains the internal organs of the deceased (liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines).
Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 16
Sine and cosine functions actually have all the same values, but they are out of phase by 90 degrees. This seems a small difference, but it results in some interesting contrasts. The sine of a negative angle is equal to the negative sine of the positive angle, but the cosine of a negative angle is the same as the cosine of the positive angle. Whether or not the angle is negative is thus, we might say, "hidden" by the value of the cosine.