6. Reverse Sexism

Though expressed in subtler ways than misogyny (and often masked as wifely or motherly concern), misandry, or reverse sexism, permeates the power women wield in society. Women’s influence may be mostly hidden but, like that of the proverbial grey eminence, it is as dominant behind the scene as men’s is on it. Which, I contend, makes acts of reverse sexism every bit as damaging to the male psyche as sexist acts are to the female. And since it’s in the maternal role that women exercise most power, the males hardest hit by reverse sexism are their sons.

The home

To understand how women establish their power we need to take a good look at their predicament in patriarchy. To make up for their lack of influence within the official, male-ruled social order, women build an unofficial, female-ruled social order in the home, the only field of activity accorded them. And since becoming a mother is a woman’s one shot at power (except for the outside chance of getting married to a powerful man), women put mother at the head of their shadow realm and enlarge her role out of all proportion to its original purpose.

I don’t think we have a clue to what makes society tick until we face two underlying and hugely consequential facts. One, that women’s aim when constructing the maternal role was to give themselves a big enough dose of ego-fulfillment to make up for the many indignities their sex was subject to; two, that repressed animosity to masculinity is part of every mother’s unconscious legacy to her son.

Motherhood

Motherhood grants woman liberty to mold her children’s hearts and minds pretty much as she pleases. Not only is mother given a near-monopoly on her kids' care and upbringing (particularly at their earliest and most crucial stage of growth), but her performance--unlike that of any other executive in a democracy--is virtually exempt from lawful checks and balances. Unlimited power is dangerous also for the power-holders themselves, because of the risk they run of losing their boundaries. For patriarchy’s women (whose lot is to foster new broods of sexists), the risk of the inflated mother role is license to vent their repressed anger at men on their hapless sons.

But wait a little. How can I say that women use motherhood to retaliate against men? Don’t most mothers dote on their sons and even consider it a mother’s duty to favor boys, members as they still are of the first sex? Well, that's just it. Unable to express their righteous anger openly, women have to use indirect ways like hiding their feelings under acts of exaggerated concern. One of the most popular--as well as most devious--of these is to spoil their male children rotten. What could be a better way of sabotaging manhood than for the saboteur to dress in sheep’s clothing?

Differently put, come on, sisters, who do we think we’re kidding when playing the game of victims sacrificed on the altar of male power?

For more on the corrupting practice of favoritism, one of the most vicious and best hidden examples of reverse sexism--and a major wellspring of the monumental male inferiority complex, see next post.

                                                 

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4. The Male Inferiority Complex I

Webster’s Dictionary defines inferiority complex as “an acute sense of personal inferiority resulting either in timidity or through overcompensation in exaggerated aggressiveness.” (Complex = “a group of repressed desires and memories that exerts a dominating influence upon the personality.”) Other definitions add the “wholly or partly unconscious” character of this feeling of inferiority and give “spectacular achievement or extreme anti-social behavior” as examples of compensation for it. If extended to mean an acute sense of collective inferiority, all these definitions fit the complex I see entrenched in the entire male sex.

My definition

What I call the monumental male inferiority or mother complex is not the same as a man’s neurotic bond to his mother, although it may have that effect also in individual men. It is first and foremost a collective disorder buried deep in men‘s unconscious (somewhere at the bottom of the iceberg Freud used as a metaphor for the human mind, in which only the tip that's visible above the surface represents the conscious part). And it originates, I suggest, in the archaic belief that women create children on their own and must possess magical power. Research shows that in these cultures people believed--even after men’s role in procreation was recognized, which supposedly took a long time,--that this magic continues to cling to womanhood, thanks not least to a long-lived and universally practiced goddess cult.

At this cult’s annual Fertility Festival the youth chosen to mate with the Great Mother Goddess (incarnated in the High Priestess) is ritually killed after the act of impregnation. My take on this bloody custom of male sacrifice is that it awakens in men a fear so profound of woman, both as authority figure and as sexual being, that it engraves on them a debilitating sense of inferiority (in websterian terms “an acute sense of gender inferiority“).

To me the founding of patriarchy (which I place rather late in the annals of humankind) is men’s enraged response when the matriarchs refuse to meet their demand for power-sharing.  And since I consider this demand perfectly reasonable in a period of evolving consciousness, I largely ascribe the violent overthrow of the matriarchy and its goddess cult to a final explosion of the volcanic anger that this complex has whipped up in men. Thus, the misogynistic social order we all are heirs to is a perfect example of how that complex--“through overcompensation”--resulted in “exaggerated aggressiveness” towards women.

But why does this complex remain today long after people stopped believing in goddesses? 

Repressed memory of woman power
I see two major reasons. One is that men bury their complex in their collective unconscious and slam a fake sense of superiority on top. Instead of looking their feeling of inferiority in the eye (and getting a chance to shed it once they discover its roots in pure superstition), they choose to build a male-ruled society on their need to deny it. A society that invents a theory of female inferiority and denies women a voice in its affairs.

Says psychologist Carl Gustav Jung, ‘When the individual remains undivided and does not become conscious of his inner contradictions, the world must perforce act out the conflict and be torn in opposite halves.”

The other reason is that women reinforce the complex. I think we’ve grossly underestimated the dynamics of the resentment against men that millennia of patriarchy accumulate in women. Far from disappearing, this emotion seeps into women's relations with men where it manifests as what I call ‘reverse sexism’ or 'misandry' (Greek misos=hate, andros=man), i.e., attitudes and behaviors as full of contempt for men as sexism or misogyny is for women, and as common.

The existence of reverse sexism is a sign that something has gone as seriously wrong with women’s healthy instincts as with men’s. Misandry and misogyny generate each other; not only do they balance each other, we can't have one without the other. Nor can we get rid of one without getting rid of the other.

Now, because men can’t admit that behind their complex lies (for good reasons) a deep fear of womanhood, they also can’t admit that women possess power. But although this omission may fire them to beef up their own power, it may also inspire them to make a timid response because of the risk they run of being victims of female manipulation.

For a look at how this complex expresses itself, see next post.


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2. On Equality

Because equality is a key concept in this book, let me start by giving my definition of it and how I think it applies to the sexes.

Equal doesn't mean identical.
For two things to be equal, one must not be more nor less than the other in an identified respect. For example, I can’t be more or less of a human being than you (nor you than I) whether you‘re a man or a woman, because being members of the same species both of us possess its biologically determined attributes. But equal doesn’t mean identical or ‘the same,’ as is often alleged, since we--unlike almost all other species--are individuals. To quote philosopher Mortimer J. Adler: while behavior is similar in each animal species, in man the similitude consists not in behavior but in potentialities, which can manifest in a variety of ways. For instance, there may be thousands of languages, but the potential for learning any human language is the same in all infants.

I base my argument about the innate equality of the sexes on the premise that male and female are complementary forces of nature--just like other polar opposites in the universe (particle and wave, matter and energy, organic and inorganic). A premise based in turn on the picture of the world that emerges from modern physics, where polar opposites are two sides of the same thing and both are required for a complete understanding of reality. 

Equality by law of nature versus by human law.
Now since male and female are two sides of one and the same physical phenomenon, homo sapiens, I propose - and make it my working assumption - that sexual equality is a natural law. As such it’s also inflexible, by which I mean that it applies regardless of outer circumstances. Whether women enjoy equal rights with men or not (which is a matter of jurisdiction) has no bearing on this law, because, being a natural phenomenon, female power can neither disappear nor diminish. If barred from expressing itself openly, it only goes into hiding where it invariably redresses its equilibrium with male power.

But since this isn’t a commonly held view, let me put it differently:

(thesis) The sexes have equal power.
(antithesis) Women’s power is unequal to men’s on all levels of society.
(synthesis) Women’s societal powerlessness is counterbalanced by a hidden power that, though different in kind, is as dominant in the inner workings of society as male power is in the outer.

Or, as Einstein said when postulating that the universe is simmering with a kind of invisible, ‘dark’ energy, “Beware of empty space! It may have created the world.”

(Einstein’s groundbreaking discovery that empty space is not empty but contains infinite energy parallels the view of the Void in Eastern mysticism. In Hinduism, Buddhism and Daoism ultimate reality is said to be formless, empty, void, but that doesn’t mean it’s a nonentity; on the contrary, it’s the essence of all phenomena, an infinitely creative potential and the origin of all forms.) 

When did we lose sight of nature?
I think time has come for us to disabuse ourselves of the illusion that the sexes have unequal power and realize that society is as much a creation by women as by men; i.e., women are as responsible as men for its sexist bias. Or else we’ll never find out what played havoc with men’s mating instincts, which is the problem at the heart of sexism.

In saying this I don’t imply that women chose to live at the mercy of men, restricted in all areas of life by laws men invented and enforced. What I do maintain is that they chose to concur with this system, because it allowed them to create a shadow society in the home where they in turn, as wives and mothers of boys, could victimize men by practicing a ‘reverse sexism.’

Today, luckily, men and women are becoming more aware of their inherent equality and are more willing, at least in some parts of the world, to make it visible. But unless we journey far back in time and do some real deep-digging I suspect we’re only scratching the surface of a nut as hard to crack as the delusion that one sex is either more or less than the other.

To cut the first sod, see next post.


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For the full blog click originofsexism.blogspot.com