[Excerpts from an incomplete magazine article. Copyright 2009 by Christine M. Skolnik]
*Thanks and credit to Dennis Mead-Shikaly in conversation with whom these thoughts evolved
This article is about masculine and feminine energies or archetypes rather than men and women but for practical and rhetorical purposes I also offer examples of male-female communication. Integration of masculine and female parts of the self perhaps being the key to better inter-gender communication, I also focus on the self but with an eye toward social transformation.
I start by positing Gödel's incompleteness theorem as guiding metaphor: no formal system is complete without being contradictory. And no system can really be understood/critiqued within the terms of the system itself.
Patriarchy is such a contradictory system. Masculine energies “rule” but resist latent feminine power, while famine power languishes even as it has asserted its ethical authority over the male for centuries. We all, as individuals, comprise masculine and feminine energies but tend to reject one or the other because of the patriarchy, and project these tensions onto others. And thus women and men misunderstand one another as if they were separate.
Masculine energies “rule” but they remain reactive to (even fearful of) the feminine, perhaps recognizing the latent power of the feminine. One might even suggest that patriarchal authority performs its vulnerabilities in its own assertions of authority. Conversely, feminine energies feel subordinated even as they claim ethical superiority over the masculine in their status as victims. Thus patriarchal female authority performs its power in its own complaints (ressentiment) (See work of Cixous and Irigaray for example. Also Gilles Deleuze on Nietzsche and ressentiment.)
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How on earth do we tease out legitimate objections to the other’s criticism from projections on either side? And how do we get out of this paradox that women tend to see men as patronizing even as they “patronize” them from a feminist perspective . . . and men feel victimized by women even as they “call” them on their abject rhetoric? Both are being patronizing, and both are claiming some kind of “feminine” victim status. How can both be oppressors and oppressed at the same time, or in such rapid succession that the difference is irrelevant? Is this possible? Probably it is. The only way out of this tangled hierarchy is to begin to dissolve the binaries—gender stereotypes, victim and villain, self and other.
I propose two intertwining paths out of this paradox: one from various established psycho-spiritual traditions; the other from a contemporary post-feminist philosopher Judith Butler, whose work and person is perhaps not coincidently a graceful combination of masculine and feminine energies. These intertwining paths represent the double helix of the DNA as a vexed metaphor of both sexual difference and a symbol of the intertwining of the masculine and feminine biological energy and information.
One path out of this paradox is to realize that we psychologically embody both masculine and feminine energies, and try to resist gender identification. We can see patriarchal archetypes in play but we needn’t identify with them, and we needn’t identify others with them. We also remember that the patriarchy takes no prisoners. A typical feminine response may be “cry me a river”—assuming that, although men have been wounded by the patriarchy, their wounding is not as severe as ours. And then men remain trapped in a space of no compassion for themselves, from other men, or women. They are bereft of both motherly and fatherly love (as the feminine neither feels compassion nor respect for the masculine), and remain isolated and vulnerable both psychologically and physically. And they are incapable of giving motherly and fatherly love to others, because they don’t receive it from anyone around them. [I realize that I’m still working within a heterosexist paradigm here—but I think these various identifications are true of people of various gender identifications. We all identify with both genders on some level, but I think we all tend to take one or the other position in different relationships or at different moments . . . *to the extent that we all remain in thrall to patriarchal archetypes*.]
Conversely women and other “others” are isolated in their ethical superiority as victims. In one sense they gain power from their status as victims (Deleuze), but they cannot give or receive motherly or father love because 1) they lack the compassion of mothers and deny their authority as fathers, and 2) their ressentiment makes them difficult to feel genuine compassion for. Victim status is aggressive in the sense that it implies an antagonism—casts the other as villain. The “non-other” can thus be overwhelmed with guilt, or his own ressentiment as a victim of demonization.
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According to Oedipal logic from Sophocles to Freud we are all mothers and fathers, daughters and sons. Of course we are all daughters and or sons by dint of being born (and I don’t mean to posit these terms as biologically essential categories for someone with an alternative gender identity). But even if we don’t have offspring we represent mothers and fathers to others as we become adults.
Perhaps we could strive to love all human beings as our parents and our children. Parental respect is of course a central ethic of the Abrahamic religions as well as Eastern ethics. We might also argue that care of the child is a universal ethic expressed in ancient stories and scriptures of various cultures, and indeed the contemporary “universality” of the incest and infanticide taboos. If we are all parents and children, then, perhaps we owe each other the highest respect and care on this basis.
But the point is not to patronize each other like children, but to allow our compassion for others (as children) be balanced by a respect them (as parents). Indeed the infant born tomorrow is our parent in that he or she may represent a higher order of evolution, and be part of a force that leads us out of current planet-wide crises. On an abstract, philosophical level we are all peers, but since peer relationships are not of primary importance developmentally (at the earliest stages of development at least), we are perhaps better served by modeling the parent/child dynamic, from both sides. [Is this true—what about sibling wounds? I think we tend to identify siblings with parents or take on parental roles with them.]
We can also consciously cultivate archetypal images of the union of the feminine and masculine sacred in one whole as a paradigm for the individual, one on one relationships, family, and various nested systems. Here are some examples of such archetypal narratives or figures: 1) The first creation myth in Genesis, which precedes the Adam’s rib story, in which God makes man and woman both in his [sic] image. 2) Shiva-shakti images, and the tantric tradition which we could assert exclusive of its overtly “erotic” connotation. [Yes, it’s all about love and union but not necessarily physical love—which is beyond the purview of this article.] 3) The ying and the yang which expresses itself in terms of strict family hierarchy in the I-Ching, but which we can translate for contemporary contexts. Who is the father in us, the mother? The eldest son, or the youngest daughter? [How odd that these map on so well to baboon society—see Baboon Metaphysics.]
Embracing Opposites Within
Philosophically this is not about the joining of real men and women. It’s not about reasserting heterosexual or heterosexist assumptions. It’s not about romantic attachments or gendered relations even in families. Philosophically this is about embracing the opposite within us.
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