Woman Hating: A Radical Look at Sexuality

Yin and yang are commonly associated with female

and male. The Chinese ontology, so appealing in that

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

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

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

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

These definitions, like the Jungian ones which are based

on them, are seemingly modified by the assertions that

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

though in the man yang properly predominates and in

the woman yin properly predominates; (2) these male

and female forces are two parts of a whole, equally

vital, mutually indispensable. Unfortunately, as one

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

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

the universe.

The sexual connotations of yin and yang, however,

are affixed onto the original concepts. They reflect an

already patriarchal, and misogynist, culture. Richard

Androgyny: The Mythological Model

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Wilhelm, in an essay on an ancient Chinese text called

The Secret of the Golden Flower, gives the uncorrupted

meanings o f yin and yang:

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

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

European scholars, some have turned first to sexual

references for an explanation, but the characters refer

to phenomena in nature. Yin is shade, therefore the

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

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

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

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

including the sexual. However, since both yin and yang

have their common origin in an undivided One and

are active only in the realm of phenomena, where yang

appears as the active principle and conditions, and yin

as the passive principle is derived and conditioned, it

is quite clear that a metaphysical dualism is not the

basis for these ideas. 4

Light and dark are obvious in a phenomenological

sense —there is day and it slowly changes into night

which then slowly changes into day. When men began

conceptualizing about the nature o f the universe, the

phenomena o f light and dark were an obvious starting