Around 1978 I was really very occupied with the whole issue of sexuality and male violence. It was this coercive violence which ultimately underlay all the less obvious ways in which women were put down by men. A brilliant article by Kokopeli & Lakey (1982) has the memorable sentence which really came home to me - 'Rape is the end logic of masculine sexuality'. Rape, they said, is not so much a sexual act as an act of violence in a sexual way.
Some of the feminists (Brownmiller 1976) were seeing rape as the key to patriarchy, and at the same time the ultimate insult to women. As the ultimate insult it deserved the ultimate punishment - castration. There seemed to be something in the thought of castrating rapists which made the feminist spirit rise: there was a badge which showed an axe with blood dripping from it and the words - 'DISARM RAPISTS'. But it also made more thought-out sense. Mary Daly said:
The method of liberation, then, involves a castrating of language and images that reflect and perpetuate the structure of a sexist world. It castrates precisely in the sense of cutting away the phallocentric value system imposed by patriarchy [which] . .. has amounted to a kind of gang rape of minds as well as bodies. . . . Now [we] are rising up to castrate not people but the system that castrates - that great 'God-Father' of us all which indulges senselessly and universally in the politics of rape.
These are strong words, which make a strong appeal to some women who I see as being very central to feminism and what it stands for. But they make me scared, because the feeling that comes through is that, if this talk of castration goes on long enough, it is my penis which is going for the chop. Castration strictly means the removal of the testes, but at an unconscious level it means also removal of the whole penis. It seems to me that this image of castration may inspire some women, but it cannot be accepted by men. It is too close, too personal, too threatening.
But if that is the case, what can men see as their hope, their function, their role in a feminist world, or a post-patriarchal world? I got a clue from something very personal which happened to me.
In my therapy I had started to criticise my father's attitude to sex and to women. I became convinced that he really hated women and wanted to punish them with his penis. I was angry that all his attitudes to sex and to women were power-orientated, patriarchal. I acted out a scene where I tore his penis (his bad, exploitative, aggressive penis) right off and stuffed it down his throat.
Later I started to see that it was part of myself that I was trying to get rid of - my own bad penis, my own hostile attitudes, my own power orientation. But what was I going to have instead? The prospect of not having a penis at all seemed unacceptable and in any case unrealistic and inappropriate.
One answer seemed to be the idea of having a nicey-nicey penis, which would never do anyone any harm. But the nicey-nicey penis seemed too sweet, too totally determined by being the very opposite of the bad penis, like two ends of a line: BAD PENIS-----NICEY-NICE PENIS. Was the answer to move to the middle of the line, and be a bit of each, a compromise between the two?
The answer which came up was no to this. There was another possibility, which emerged in a later session. I could have a good penis. This I saw as being strong and powerful, but non-oppressive. If the bad penis was like a bayonet, a pistol or a club, and the nicey-nicey penis was like a passive tassel or a glass tumbler, the good penis was like a bridge, a crane or a communication tower. And this seemed to be on another dimension to the first line, including both the assertiveness of the bad penis and the receptivity of the nicey-nicey penis, but not reducing to the one-sidedness of either of them. The line now turned into a triangle, like this:
Putting this in terms which I feel happy with, but I know not everybody does, the bad penis was the thesis, the nicey-nicey penis was the antithesis, and the good penis the synthesis of the two. What this meant to me in practice was that there was a good way of being a man, an OK way of having genuine male power that could be non-oppressive to women. I think I have to add here that I couldn't have arrived at this without having already worked through my very complicated feelings about loving and hating my mother, which I have described in an article elsewhere (Rowan 1975). I was already a lot clearer on my feelings about women when I began this.
So far this is all about me, and my experience in my own process of development. Is there a way of linking this in with anything more general, which possibly more people can relate to?
Many people, perhaps the majority of the human race, feel that they have no power, and do not exercise very much social power at all. Now one of the reasons why people do not move out of this position is that they believe there is only one kind of power - power over people. That is, coercive power, autocratic power, 'masculine' power, potentially violent power - power which rides roughshod over people and makes them into inferiors. So again we have a line: POWERLESSNESS-----POWER OVER. If the choice is between being nice and powerless or nasty and powerful, some people would rather stick to being powerless, and feel guilty if they don't. Sometimes they try to go halfway along the line as a kind of compromise.
What one theory says, however, is that this is a false choice, which wrongly dominates our thinking about power and paralyses us when we need to act (Fordyce and Weil, 1971). There is another dimension to be brought in, which again gives us a triangle. We can think and work in terms of power with other people. Again we can say if we like that powerlessness is the thesis, power-over the antithesis and power-with the synthesis, because power-with gives us both the niceness and superficial attractiveness of powerlessness, together with the ability to get things done of power-over. We are now talking about social synergy, which Joanna Macy (1983) has written about - the power to make things happen by getting together with other people in a co-operative way. This is non-oppressive power which is able to get things done without bringing up inferiority or superiority. It does not suppress leadership, but sees it as something which anyone can do at times.
Once we see power-with as an option, we don't need to be afraid to leave our state of powerlessness, because there is somewhere good to go to. We can exercise power without being oppressors, although of course the details may take a lot of working out. When I remembered this theory, it occurred to me that it fitted with the triangle I had come to through my own therapy:
And what it now means, as I see it, is that we now have a theory of power which is specifically relevant to men. Instead of shuffling hopelessly along a line where the only choice is to be harmful or harmless, we can go on to a positively good place, where we can define our own real strength in a non-patriarchal way.
From the power-over position we can only relate to women as oppressors; from the powerlessness position, we can only relate to women as superior to us - we are underlings; but from the power-with position we can relate in co-operative ways with any women or men who have got to a similar position in their own terms.
What I believe is that the inner and the outer, the personal and the political, are basically one and the same. My own personal changes and the changes in other people and in the wider scene are not widely distant. This is why I feel my own personal history may be highly relevant, in a number of ways, to what other people are going through. We all have to make changes, if the patriarchal world is going to change, at the personal level and the institutional level too.
None of this is easy to do - we all have our various hang-ups which get in the way. But if the theory is of any use, it can help us to see what directions to look in.
(This article is based on Chapter 4 of The Horned God.)
REFERENCES
Brownmiller, Susan (1976), Against our will: men, women and rape, Harmondsworth, Penguin.
Daly, Mary (1973), Beyond God the Father: toward a philosophy of women's liberation, Boston, Beacon Press.
Fordyce, J K and Weil, R (1971), Managing with people, Reading, Addison-Wesley.
Kokopeli, Bruce and Lakey, George (1982), 'Masculinity and violence', Peace News, 20 May 1977. Reprinted in Pam McAllister (ed.), Reweaving the web of life: feminism and non-violence, Philadelphia, New Society Publishers.
Macy, Joanna Rogers (1983), Despair and personal power in the nuclear age, Philadelphia, New Society Publishers.
Rowan, John (1975), 'A growth episode', Self and Society, 3/11 20-27.
Androgyny (male and female in one, both sexes in one person) is often put forward as the answer to patriarchal consciousness, which favours the male as against the female. So if, as I have argued consistently (Rowan 1987) the central problem of our time is how to change patriarchal consciousness, we need to examine this concept rather closely
At the humanistic psychology conference in 1980 I went to a couple of workshops on sex roles, and got more and more worried about androgyny being put forward as some kind of an answer to all the problems of male-female relations; it seemed to me to show a lack of political insight. The acute analysis of patriarchy, and the anger about it, which had come from the feminists seemed largely ignored. There was a kind of vague line floating around about the goodness of androgyny, which didn't seem to be written down anywhere, but which was just taken for granted. It seemed to me misleading, harmful, liberal, comforting and powerless. Later I realised it had been written down after all.
I had written it down myself, in an article (Rowan 1980) which had been published just before the conference. It went like this:
Instead of patriarchy what we want seems to be described as an androgynous or gynandrous society. Any human being needs to have the ability to be active and passive, assertive and receptive, instrumental and expressive, tough and tender, strong and vulnerable, independent and sociable - there is nothing necessarily mutually exclusive about these pairs of qualities. People actually do have all these qualities, but the patriarchal myth is that they don't, and at the moment the myth wins every time. In an androgynous society, each person would be able to express their own personal qualities in their own personal way, and not be expected to live up to some image of what they were supposed to be like.
But of course I was not alone in saying this. Five years earlier one of the better books on men (Fasteau 1975) was saying things like:
... Human beings, in other words, are naturally androgynous. This integration of the 'masculine' and 'feminine' aspects of the self is possible because opposition between them, sometimes characterized as 'doing versus being' or 'instrumental or expressive' is false.
And two years before that such an eminent feminist as Mary Daly (1973) had been saying a whole series of things such as this:
The healing process demands a reaching out toward completeness of human being in the members of both sexes -that is, movement toward androgynous being.
One of the most seductive and attractive versions of this doctrine was put forward by Sukie Colegrave (1979) in a book which was much acclaimed at the time about the ancient Chinese idea of the Yin and the Yang - the everlasting Tao:
at every level of human nature, spiritual, psychological and physical, both sexual poles are present even though their relationship may be one-sided.
The argument is that certain qualities which have been called feminine are really Yin qualities, which are culturally associated with women, but can be found both in women and men. Certain qualities which have been called masculine are Yang qualities, which are attributed socially to men, but can be found both in men and women. All that is wrong is that these two sets of qualities have become too separated and specialised. Each on its own is truncated, mutilated, inadequate to the idea of a whole human being, a fully functioning person. If we could encourage men to develop their Yin qualities, and women to develop their Yang qualities, we would achieve a good psychologically balanced androgyny. This kind of androgyny means that people have a well-rounded character, with Yin and Yang qualities fully integrated. This seemed like good Taoism, and was surely what humanistic psychology and many others were aiming at?
Now in its original derivation, Yin is 'the cloudy' or 'the overcast', and Yang is 'banners waving in the sun', and hence anything shone upon or bright. Soon the terms came to mean the shaded side of a hill, and the bright, sunlit side of it. The Shuo Kua (in Baynes 1968) says:
In ancient times the holy sages... determined the tao of heaven and called it the dark and the light. They determined the tao of the earth and called it the yielding and the firm. They determined the tao of humanity and called it love and rectitude.
It can be seen that at this early date there was nothing about the feminine and the masculine - this was a later addition and interpretation. Nor is it true that Yin and Yang have a fixed connotation, applying to women and to men alike. A Yin man is very different from a Yin woman; and a Yang woman is very different from a Yang man. This is such an obvious point that it hardly needs to be said; yet it throws considerable doubt on the whole enterprise.
And so it does not surprise me when I find a conservative textbook (Harari and Kaplan 1977) advocating psychological androgyny (by which they mean not identifying exclusively with either the male or the female sex-role stereotype), and saying - 'Striving for androgyny is not a simple solution, but we feel it is a good one.' It will make you more popular they say, and more well-adjusted.
Well, if we don't think much of the Yin and Yang of ancient China as giving us the answers, how about Jung? The Jungians have written a great deal about masculine and feminine qualities and their relating. Singer (1976) has a long discussion of this, and von Franz (1964) and Whitmont (1983) go on at great length about the feminine and the anima (Jung's idea of the female within every male).
Esther Harding (1971) is as typical as any when she says that the essential feminine qualities are emotion and relatedness, which are personal in character, and the essential masculine qualities are thinking, impersonality and spirit, leading to a concern for justice, logic and a cause.
Empirical research has shown that masculine qualities, such as being aggressive, dominant and competitive, are consistently expected of men and boys. Duberman (1975) in her well-researched book, found that:
The male ideal exalts being a good talker rather than a good listener, logic as opposed to emotion, conflict and adventure rather than constructive and incremental growth, self-confidence rather than humility and modesty, quick decision-making rather than thoughtful pondering, charisma and dynamism rather than a general desire to achieve even if power does not accompany the achievement, politics and business as an end in itself rather than a human concern as an end, a tough aggressive approach instead of a soft persuasive approach, responsiveness to external rewards (money, trophies, votes) rather than internal satisfaction, sexuality rather than sensuality.
| MEN CAN CRY AND CRY & STILL PULL THE TRIGGER |
Warren Farrell (1975) puts forward rather a similar list, again based on a good deal of research. He says of the feminine qualities, for example:
The woman's socialization encourages domesticity, nurturance, dependency, modesty, coyness, deviousness, warmth, emotionality, illogicality, the ability to be sensually and sexually arousing (while simultaneously properly inhibited and submissive), fearfulness, the need for protection, tenderness, fragility, displays of affection and 'sugar and spice and all things nice' (meaning: something extra to be added to the main substance). These traits are off-limits for the male.
These qualities from Duberman and Farrell are the things which men get points for or against when their masculinity is being judged by themselves or by others.
And it is definitely these characteristics which come up over and over again in the discussions in anti-sexist men's groups. The move towards androgyny is seen as a move toward accepting more of the qualities regarded as feminine and questioning the qualities regarded as masculine. Marine (1972) has a more lengthy statement about this, where he says that men pick out certain only of the feminine qualities to emulate - mostly those which have to do with being more gentle and less aggressive and competitive. If this is pushed further, it could even seem as if to look feminine would help - I remember one discussion in a men's group where we were all urged to wear pink jeans instead of blue jeans to raise consciousness.
But this will not do. The idea of diminishing the masculine and enlarging the feminine is not the real point, and not the answer. There are a few men about who can be mistaken for women, just as there are a few women about who can be mistaken for men, but this is not a trend, it is just a few exceptions. In any case this seems suspiciously close to the sixties idea of unisex, which was always an illusion. Men didn't cease to be oppressive just by wearing pink shirts, long hair and flowered ties, any more than women ceased to be oppressed by wearing jeans, short hair and tee-shirts. This is playing with sex typing, not changing it:
There is a paradox inherent in the ideal of androgyny, namely that, while it calls for the elimination of the sexual stereotyping of human virtues, it is itself formulated in terms of the discredited concepts of masculinity and femininity which it ultimately rejects. (Warren 1980)
Further, the usual concept of androgyny does not do justice to both sides of the equation, even in its own terms. As Gloria Steinem (1984) points out:
Androgyny also raised the hope that female and male cultures could be perfectly blended in the ideal person; yet because the female side of the equation has still to be affirmed, androgyny usually tilted toward the male. As a concept, it also raised anxiety levels by conjuring up a conformist, unisex vision, the very opposite of the individuality and uniqueness that feminism actually has in mind.
In trying to understand why, in spite of all this, androgyny is still so appealing as an ideal, we have to recognise that androgynous people probably are nicer and more effective than gender-stereotyped people (Bem 1977), and in a non-patriarchal society it would probably be easier for people to be androgynous. But it seems clearer and clearer to me that in itself it means very little on a social scale. Joan Baez once said -'I remember the first thought I ever had about women's lib was that if women could teach the men to cry, maybe we wouldn't have to go to war.' I don't know how she feels now about that statement, but what I believe is that men can cry and cry, and still pull the trigger; can tremble with fear and still drop the bomb; can go into paroxysms of guilt and still push the button. Just as a woman can be strong and fearless, and still let a man walk all over her. So this approach to androgyny does not seem to offer us any real answer to the problems of patriarchal consciousness.
To be any use, the concept would have to offer us a true maleness and a true femaleness not contaminated by social stereotyping. But it seems to me that because of the prevalence of patriarchy and its all-pervasive influence, we really have no idea of what males are really like under all the conditioning, or females either. Over the past few years, feminists have been struggling and wrestling with language and culture to try and discover what being a female might be - some of the bravest and most exciting efforts in this direction being by Mary Daly (1979 1984). And it is worth noticing that in her striking book Gyn/ecology she says:
Experience proved that this word [androgyny] which we now recognise as expressing pseudo wholeness in its combination of distorted gender descriptions, failed and betrayed our thought.
This is the key to understanding why the usual idea of androgyny won't do. It is an attempt to repair the distortions of one patriarchal position by using material from the opposite distortion of another. Carol Christ (1980) puts it this way in her moving discussion of the later work of the poet Adrienne Rich (I978):
Because she identifies men with the violence of their world, Rich declares: There are words I cannot choose again - humanism androgyny. Such words have no shame in them, no diffidence before the raging stoic grandmothers. Androgyny implies that women accept what men have been as part of the wholeness they seek. This Rich can no longer accept. Increasingly, Rich sees more to admire in the resilient creative energy of women than in the union of or transcendence of male and female.
What Rich is saying here is that the underlying true femaleness is resilient and creative, and does not need to be added to or transcended. Perhaps something similar could be true of maleness too.
Goldenberg (1979) too says much the same thing from her own perspective, and points out that androgyny tends always to do with Utopia, with some distant future state; it always retains, she says, unrealistic, otherworldy quality. It is a dead end.
So finally I want to say that the appeal to androgyny is a way of avoiding many of the real and painful difficulties of redefining ourselves against the grain. Masculinity and femininity are fatally flawed concepts, culturally loaded, patriarchally based, unusable except as names of harmful stereotypes. Male and female are perhaps more biological terms, which bear no definite cultural meanings other than those we build, discover, choose, co-create and explore. If we want to deal with patriarchal consciousness, we can perhaps start there and realise that for a full solution to the problem we have to work at more than one level. I have argued (Rowan 1987) that men have to meet the challenge at the social level; at the unconscious level; and at the spiritual level.
REFERENCES
Baynes, C.F. (1968), I Ching or book of changes, London, RKP.
Bem, Sandra (1977), 'Beyond androgyny: some presumptuous prescriptions for a liberated sexual identity' in C.G. Carney and S.L.McMahon (eds.) Exploring contemporary male/female roles: a facilitator's guide, La Jolla, University Associates.
Christ, Carol P. (1980), Diving deep and surfacing: women writers on spiritual quest, Boston, Beacon Press.
Colegrave, Sukie (1979), The spirit of the valley: androgyny and Chinese thought, London, Virago.
Daly, Mary (1973), Beyond God the Father: toward a philosophy of women's liberation, Boston, Beacon Press.
Daly, Mary (1979), Gyn/Ecology, Boston, Beacon Press.
Daly, Mary (1984), Pure lust, London, The Women's Press.
Duberman, Lucille (1975), Gender and sex in society, New York, Praeger.
Farrell, Warren (1975), The liberated man, New York, Bantam.
Fasteau, Mark Feigen (1975), The male machine, New York, Dell.
Goldenberg, Naomi R. (1979), Changing of the gods: feminism and the end of traditional religions, Boston, Beacon Press.
Harari, H. and Kaplan R.M. (1977), Psychology: personal and social adjustment, New York, Harper Row.
Harding, Esther (1971), Women's Mysteries, London, Rider and Co.
Jung, Carl Gustav (1972), 'Introduction' in R.Wilhelm, Secret of the golden flower, London, RKP.
Marine, Gene (1972), A male guide to women's liberation, New York, Avon Books.
Rich, Adrienne (1978), The dream of a common language, New York, Norton.
Rowan, John (1980), 'Patriarchy: what it is and why some men question it', Self and Society 8/7 207-212.
Rowan, John (1987), The horned god: feminism and men as wounding and healing, London, RKP.
Singer, June (1976), Androgyny, New York, Doubleday.
Steinem, Gloria (1984), Outrageous acts and everyday rebellions, London, Fontana.
von Franz, M-L (1964), 'The process of individuation' in C.G.Jung (ed.), Man and his symbols, London, Aldus Books.
Warren, Mary Anne (1980), The nature of woman: an encyclopedia and guide to the literature, Inverness (California), Edgepress.
Whitmont, Edward C. (1983), Return of the Goddess, London, RKP.
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