Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

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These male and female sets are defined as archetypes,

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

are other. (Women have never understood that they

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

and female, are opposite, they are complementary, two

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

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

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

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

so-called female principle of Eros that all the paraphernalia

of patriarchy conspires to suppress through the psychological,

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

evil.

T he identification o f the feminine with Eros, or

erotic energy (carnality by any other name), comes

from a fundamental misunderstanding o f the nature o f

human sexuality. The essential information which

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

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describe the creation of the first human being as male

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

wrong model, the wrong myths, on which to construct

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

all reveal relatively recent pieces of human history.

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

are gross perversions of original creation myths which

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

scious and more conscious, peoples. The original myths

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

uphold patriarchal notions of sexual polarity, duality,

male and female as opposite and antagonistic. The

myth of a primal androgyne survives as part of a real

cultural underground: though it is ignored, despised

by a culture which posits other values, and though

those who relate their lifestyles directly to it have been

ostracized and persecuted.

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

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