Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

Matriarchy preceded patriarchy because patriarchal

values (particularly the need for complex organization)

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

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

mind) which can be defined as a capacity for logical

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

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

over anarchic, emotional, sensitive —looniness?: but

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

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

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

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

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

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Woman Hating

imagery is substantial; ignoring any feminine imagery

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

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

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

also may become aware of impulses and thoughts

which are not in accord with her conscious attitudes

but are the direct outcome of the crude and untamed

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

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

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

And indeed it is her task to stand between the Eros

which is within her, and the world without, and

through her own womanly adaptation to the world

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

the nonhuman feminine principle. 1

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

Harding is absolutely representative of the Jungian

point of view.

It is a natural consequence of this dualistic stance

that male and female are pitted against each other and

that conflict is the dynamic mode of relationship open

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

These discrepancies in their attitudes are dependent

on the fact that the psychic constitution of men and

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