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GREEN PARADISE LOST |
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4. From Nature-As-Mother to Nature-As-Wife It seemed pitch-black to me as I stepped out of the lighted room onto the darkened porch facing the water. I could make out nothing in the blackness at first. But as I paused, I could hear the lovely sounds of the shore at night -- the rain falling vigorously on the deck beside me, the slurp-slosh of the tide as it lapped its way around the cove, the gentle sad sound of the gulls calling, the quiet throb of an approaching tug hauling a barge of trap rock down to New York City. Off to my right I could see the lights of boats moored by the dock shimmering in long streaks from them to me. Slowly, from beyond the rocks on my left, came the tug lit with white lights like a Christmas tree and moving with dignified solemnity down the channel. Then gradually, as I stood and listened to these gentle beach sounds, I began to be able to distinguish visual patterns. The railings and stairs to beach level. The straight mast of the sailboat I knew was pulled up on the beach. The chairs and tables on the porch. Even the shape of our black cat as she prowled the deck beside me. The damp smell of the sea and the rain breathed around me as I sat and listened and watched. Slowly the tug grew smaller and smaller and finally disappeared into the distance. But the tide and the rain and the gulls and the shimmering streaks of dock lights stayed in a constant moist fabric of companionship with me. I could shut it all out by going back inside and closing the door, but while I lingered to prolong the evening, we were in dialogue. Have people always felt this immediacy of their natural environment, I wondered? I felt wrapped around, pervaded, "wombed" by the shapes and sounds and moist smells of the sea environment -- as pervasive and immediate an environment as that cast out by the television medium, which equally reaches out to enfold us. I was a participant, who received the visual images, took in the smells, registered the sounds on sensitive eardrums. And my breathing added to the moist air even as it unconsciously synchronized its rhythm with the regularity of the waves. How could we humans get so out of step to these rhythms? ... so out of dialogue with these receptions? ... so out of participation in this immediacy? Culture as Male The thinking and writing of history, philosophy, theology, and literature through the ages have been almost exclusively a male enterprise. Cultures world-wide have been dominated in their life by the decisions and thought-world of males. What difference has this made? Charles Ferguson has addressed this question in his historical study, The Male Attitude. Men have kept the records of the race. They have decided what to tell and how to tell it, the impressions to leave and how deeply those impressions are to be engraved. First with the chisel, then with the stylus, then with the pen, then with the speeded keyboard of the typewriter and the beneficence of the printing press, men have multiplied words into elaborate systems of thought, and the spine and ganglia of all these systems are male presumptions. Men have associated and identified the acceptable with the masculine. They have given their opinions the name of philosophy and theology. They have sung the songs and the sagas, wrought the dramas and the operas. They have drawn and painted the pictures, seeing what the male saw and sees. They have made the estimates and appraisals and served as the sole critics of what men have done en masse. [1] (Emphasis added.) • • • Enjoying exclusive custody of language in written form, the scribe was quite naturally unaware of himself as male when it came to recording his deeds and his views. Clothes of the late Middle Ages were designed and cut to emphasize a man's equipment. Ostentatious codpieces called attention to his genitals. In writing, however, there was no need to display his structure or to connect it with his writing. Rather he could present his views as personal and individual opinions or proudly as eternal verities handed down through him. [2] (Emphasis added.) • • • Men presented the way they acted as if it followed the natural course of events, sometimes deplorable but in the main inevitable. I could not find in my reading cases where men watched themselves, even out of the corner of their eyes, behave as males. It was always I. Men might cry out as individuals ("I am the master of my fate, the captain of my soul") or they might evolve prodigious theories of human behavior and designate them as natural laws and these might express an obvious and unmistakable masculine bent, but men seemed wholly unaware of the sex origin of their ideas. [3] (Emphasis added.) • • • The male thinks of himself as the universal, so that you find much about Man (embracing Woman) in such stentorian terms as Man's Unconquerable Spirit, Man and His Destiny, Man and Civilization, Man and His Gods, Man Above Humanity, Man and the Future, Man Against Nature, Man and the Universe. All of these terms, appearing in titles or subtitles, represent idealized concepts and have nothing to do with sex. They project gender to its ultimate. And it is projected also into the infinite, for the very idea of the Very God is expressed commonly, not to say solely, in the masculine. To refer to God as feminine gets a laugh from shock or embarrassment. The godhead is encased by theologians, virtually all of them men, in phrases that preserve and sanctify the male ego. [4] (Emphasis added.) Charles Ferguson has documented in his extensive historical study the rise of what he calls "the male attitude" in the Western tradition, particularly during the past five hundred years. Those reassured by academic respectability might like to know that the eminent Yale historian C. Vann Woodward "read the manuscript as a friend and criticized it as a historian." What, then, does Charles Ferguson's work signify for our earlier consideration of "the pictures in our minds of the world beyond our reach"? Certainly we must take a closer look at the picture of the cosmic pyramid or hierarchy; and we must ask if this Up-and-Down metaphor has roots not just in the human psyche but in the male psyche. The Maleness of the Genesis Myth of Creation For example, let us examine the Genesis creation myth for clues to its sexual origin and sexual perspective. We begin by noting that the Genesis myth reverses the "normal" processes of birth -- so that man is not born of woman but woman is born from the body of man. She is not only created second, but as an afterthought and in response to male need and is intended to fit around his life. Rather than his body being made from the life processes of a woman's body, she is made from his body. Charles Ferguson suggests that the male relationship to the machine provides the appropriate backdrop against which to view the Genesis myth: Emotionally, the dream of the machine is very old, and a kind of reverence for it can be spotted in some early sacred writings when the machine process was equated with the performance of the Deity or with deities. In the Hebrew account of Creation, the Deity is represented as Maker. He turned out the heavens and the earth in six working days. He made the world, the whole wide world, in a six-day week, and threw in man for good measure, using such raw materials as were at hand, and then He went on to make woman as a byproduct of man. There was no concept of conception, no gestation, no fetus, no growth in uterus, no birth. Rather the job was done by fiat: Let there be! The stupendous ability of the working god was stressed and made to appear natural, smooth and uninterrupted. [5] (Emphasis added.) I think we have to ask ourselves, Who profits from such a myth? The Genesis myth establishes a hierarchical structure of inequality and legitimates the temporal priority and higher status of the male. It "de-births" the origin of the human species by taking away woman as birth-giver. It demotes the earth as the source of life itself. In the Genesis myth the ontological priority belongs to a male spiritual deity, and the earth has all of the status of potter's clay, which has even been produced by a magician-creator out of nothing! And when the world has been produced, it and all its creatures are firmly placed under the foot of the male who is to reign on earth as the male deity already reigns in heaven. Who but males does such a myth benefit? And as the sociologist Peter Berger pointed out in The Sacred Canopy, there is a close relationship between what is viewed as the order of things in the heavens and what is viewed as the legitimate or rightful order of things below on earth. Our Myths Are Male Myths, Not Human Myths I am told that "there is a universality in myths -- a plot which seems to recur over and over again .... There is the Call to Adventure, where the hero is drawn out of the world of his ordinary experience (e.g., herding pigs) through a Magical Threshold (the hollow trunk of an old tree) into a new extraordinary place. Here he must set out upon the Road of Trials (climb the Glass Mountain) in order to gain access to the Lady (witch or beautiful princess). He confronts and comes to peace with the Father (King), is given (or steals) the Boon (Golden Egg, elixir of life), and Returns to the realm of ordinary life to Transform it." [6] These myths obviously arise from the psyche of the male. They express his sense of the heroic life he would aspire to. Yet we have never seen them as male myths but as human myths. We have seldom asked how mythology as well as cultural life in general has been designed by the male quite unself-consciously as an expression of male needs, male anxieties, male pretensions and male idealizations. So, for example, in 1976 a new book about the human body's immune system was given by the author and publisher the title The Body Is the Hero. They apparently were oblivious to the fact that for one-half of the human race, the body is not the hero. "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" With the maleness of culture in mind, it now seems appropriate to reexamine even the basic distinction between culture and nature, a distinction which has nearly always been made in a hierarchical fashion with culture assumed superior to nature. Consider first the distinction between "culture" and "nature" that seems to exist in every society. A group of female anthropologists at Stanford University has addressed this and related questions in Woman, Culture and Society. In an overview of the book Michelle Zimbalist Rosaldo reminds us of the "domestic" orientation of women due to childbearing and childrearing. She contrasts this with the "public" orientation of men, who are free to organize the "activities, institutions, and forms of association that link, rank, organize, or subsume particular mother-child groups." [7] It is men who are free to create "those broader associations that we call 'society,' universalistic systems of order, meaning, and commitment that link particular mother-child groups." [8] Culture or society, then, is a product of the non-domestic life of the men. The view of reality projected by a men's culture can then be expected to "tilt" reality according to the way life is perceived by men. In "Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" Sherry B. Ortner assumes that culture is created by "rising above nature." "Every culture, or generically, 'culture' is engaged in the process of generating and sustaining systems of meaningful form (symbols, artifacts, etc.) by means of which humanity transcends the givens of natural existence, bends them to its purposes, controls them in its interests.'' [9] She argues that since culture automatically sees itself as "above" nature, women universally have an inferior status because, in their involvement with menstruation, childbearing, and childrearing, they seem closer to nature and thus are "pulled down" in status. But just suppose that Sherry Ortner has the situation reversed. Could it be that nature is "pulled down" in status because of its psycho-sexual linkage with women, especially Mother? Certainly Becker illustrates such a linkage. "Mother Nature" Let us consider for a moment our feminizing of nature as "Mother Nature." I have found it fascinating to read John Passmore's book Man's Responsibility for Nature where in a very scholarly interpretation he studiously and consistently avoids ever sexualizing (feminizing) nature and discusses nature always as an "it." Yet many of those whom Passmore has chosen to quote slip quite unconsciously into feminine portrayals of nature ("virgin resources," and so on). Examples abound. Passmore quotes Fichte as saying "Nature shall ever become more and more intelligible and transparent even in her most secret depths; human power, enlightened and armed by human invention, shall rule over her without difficulty." [10] (Emphasis added.) He quotes W. A. Gauld as saying "Man has implanted so much of his own design that he appears less a subject of Nature's decrees than a partner who enables her to reveal new amplitudes of power, to render new services to material well- being, and not without grace and beauty to share with Man the great experiment of life." [11] (Emphasis added.) Passmore quotes Edward Malins as calling "Nature ... a raw goddess" [12] and George Perkins Marsh as saying "The ravages committed by man subvert the relations and destroy the balance which nature has established between her organized [sic. "organic"?] and her inorganic creations; and she avenges herself upon the intruder, by letting loose upon her defaced provinces .... " [13] (Emphasis added.) Passmore quotes others and then, either not noticing or ignoring their feminizing of nature, he resumes his own completely neuter approach. Only when the context demands it does Passmore permit himself a sexualization of nature: Man does not, on this view, "rape nature." Rather, to continue the metaphor, he seeks to gain intellectual knowledge of her, overcoming her resistance not by force but by his intimate knowledge of her secrets, by seduction. [14] • • • We shall begin, rather, with the principal accusation -- that Western attitudes to nature are infected with "arrogance," an arrogance which has continued into the post-Christian world and makes men think of nature as a "captive to be raped" rather than as a "partner to be cherished." [15] How can it be that Passmore can use so many quotations which do feminize nature, as well as occasional quotes which use the potent metaphor of "rape," and yet never think to raise the question of the relationships in men's minds and psyches between nature and the feminine? During a recent trip to Iceland I was struck by an outdoor larger-than-life statue done by Iceland's outstanding sculptor Asmundur Sveinsson. It portrays a large bosomy woman bending nude over a toddler who is sitting up sucking on one breast while the mother-figure indulgently is kissing the child's head. Inside the sculptor's studio there is a small model of the finished statue labeled "Mother Earth." I thought to myself, How incredible! -- here it is -- the ultimate portrait of Mother Nature! The Sense of Nature as Inexhaustible Mother The psychologist Dorothy Dinnerstein in her pioneering book The Mermaid and the Minotaur (1976) is clear that the male psyche makes a crucial connection between the primal parent (female) and the rest of nature. She cites Margaret Mead [16] and H. R. Hays, [17] among others, as having "documented the tendency, expressed by people under a wide range of cultural conditions, to see in woman a mystic continuity with non-human processes like rain and the fertility of plants." [18] Our difficulty in coming to grasp the fact of the mother's separate human subjectivity (like our related difficulty in outgrowing the early feeling that she is omnipotent and responsible for every blessing and curse of existence) has central consequences not only for the way we look at women, but also for our stance toward nature. Because the early mother's boundaries are so indistinct, the non-human surround with which she merges takes on some of her own quasi-personal quality. In our failure to distinguish clearly between her and nature, we assign to each properties that belong to the other: We cannot believe how accidental, unconscious, unconcerned -- i.e., unmotherly nature really is; and we cannot believe how vulnerable, conscious, autonomously wishful -- i.e., human -- the early mother really was. Our over-personification of nature, then, is inseparable from our under-personification of woman. We cannot listen to reason when it tells us that the mother -- who was once continuous with nature -- is a fully sentient fellow person; nor can we listen when it tells us that nature -- which was once continuous with the mother -- is wholly impersonal, non-sentient. If we could outgrow our feeling that the first parent was semi-human, a force of nature, we might also be able to outgrow the idea that nature is semi-human, and our parent. [19] (Emphasis added.) • • • Inextricable from the notion that nature is our semi-sentient early mother is the notion that she is inherently inexhaustible, that if she does not provide everything we would like to have it is because she does not want to, that her treasure is infinite and can if necessary be taken by force. This view of Mother Earth is in turn identical with the view of woman as Earth Mother, a bottomless source of richness, a being not human enough to have needs of an importance as primary, as self-evident, as the importance of our own needs, but voluntary and conscious enough so that if she does not give us what we expect, she is withholding it on purpose and we are justified in getting it from her any way we can. The murderous infantilism of our relation to nature follows inexorably from the murderous infantilism of our sexual arrangements. To outgrow the one we must outgrow the other. [20] (Emphasis added.) Men's exploitation of Mother Nature has so far been kept in check largely by their conception of the practical risk they themselves ran in antagonizing, depleting, spoiling her. (In preliterate societies, we are told, ritual apologies are offered by hunters to the animals they kill, and by woodcutters to the spirits who inhabit the trees they chop down.) As technology has advanced, and they have felt more powerful, one part of this sense of risk -- the fear of antagonizing her -- has abated. A euphoric sense of conquest has replaced it: the son has set his foot on the mother's chest, he has harnessed her firmly to his uses, he has opened her body once and for all and may now help himself at will to its riches. What remains is the danger that she will be depleted, spoiled. Men's view of this danger has been fatally shortsighted; it has not kept pace with the actual growth of their destructive power. What has kept it so short-sighted has been, at least in part, the strength of their vindictive, grabby feelings. To maintain a longer, more enlightened view, these feelings -- unleashed by their sense of conquest -- would at this point have to be pulled back in, and kept under control, by a more powerful effort of will than they seem to be able to muster. [21] Perhaps because of the psychological realities Dinnerstein describes, mythic consciousness throughout the ages has closely linked Earth/Mother/Sex/Death. "... The Great Goddess had several faces," writes William Irwin Thompson, "she was huge and called us from her womb, she was beautiful and called us to her bed, and she was ugly and called us to death." [22] "The concomitant of birth is death," writes Fontaine Belford. "And to the mythic imagination they have both come into the world through woman. The earth is a 'maternal mouth that spits out and sucks back in forever' (Helen Diver, Mothers and Amazons, p. 20). The earth may be the womb from which all life springs; it is also the tomb to which all life returns." [23] This fear may be accentuated in the life of the male because only he experiences the loss of semen as well as the loss of erection within the vaginal mouth of the female. The various ways in which we all, females as well as males, at times feminize nature suggests a very fundamental question: Is there something about our very human dependence upon nature which reminds us all of our early dependence upon our physical mothers? And, if this is so, what are the emotional or psychic consequences of this resemblance? The Infant's Sense of Oneness with Mother The anthropologist Nancy Chodorow writes about infantile dependence and the dawn of identity in her article "Family Structure and Feminine Personality": All children begin life in a state of "infantile dependence"... upon an adult or adults, in most cases their mother. This state consists first in the persistence of primary identification with the mother: the child does not differentiate herself/himself from her/his mother but experiences a sense of oneness with her. [24] I would underscore this perception that both sexes begin in a state of primary identification with the female parent. However, I would want to go a good bit further and point out that the experiences of the two sexes differ sharply when a child begins to develop its own separate identity, as well as its own gender identity. Girls discover that they have made their primary identification with someone of the same sex. Girls are thus encouraged to continue modeling themselves after the female. The consequences which follow from this state of affairs are, in my view, most important. The Special Psychic Predicament of the Boy-Child Consider the difficulty faced by the boy-child. He finds that his early primal-identification with the mother-figure is an identification with the wrong sex. Furthermore, his potential male model is mostly absent -- and thus invisible -- whether (as in primitive times) off hunting or (today) off working in factory or bureaucracy. But even this does not totally encompass the boy-child's problem, for he has not only made his primal and most tender identification with someone of the other sex but with someone of the (female) sex that is treated as "nigger." A parallel to the psychic predicament of the boy-child can be found in Lillian Smith's Killers of the Dream. Lillian Smith tells of the psychic tensions experienced by white children growing up in the Old South where young whites were often raised from a very early age by mothering black women. These children would form deep emotional attachments with their mammie -- only to discover that within the caste system of the South she was a "nigger." To grow up white in that society they had to distance themselves emotionally from what was a primal tender identification and disown their own deepest emotional attachment. ... This dual relationship which so many white southerners have had with two mothers, one white and one colored and each of a different culture that centered in different human values, makes the Oedipus complex seem by comparison almost a simple adjustment. ... Before the ego had gained strength, just as he is reaching out to make his first ties with the human family, this small white child learns to love both mother and nurse.... Strong bonds begin to grow as the most profound relationships of his life are formed, holding him to two women whose paths will take them far from each other.... Because white mother has always set up right and wrong, has with authority established the "do" and the "don't" of behavior, his conscience, as it grows in him, ties its allegiance to her and to the white culture and authority which she and his father represent. Big white house, little cabin, enter the picture he is slowly forming in his mind about this strange world he lives in, and both begin subtly to give pattern to it. A separation has begun, a crack that extends deep into his personality. He erects "white" image-ideals and secretly pulls them down again. He says aloud what his heart denies stubbornly. Part of him stays more and more in the world he "belongs" in; part of him stays forever in the world he dare not acknowledge. He feels deep tenderness for his colored nurse and pleasure in being with her, but he begins to admire more and more the lovely lady who is his "real" mother.... However they dealt with it, nearly all men-and-women-of the dominant class in the South suffered not only the usual painful experiences of growing up in America but this special Southern trauma in which segregation not only divided the races but divided the white child's heart. [25] What Lillian Smith describes seems to me an exact parallel to what the male child experiences when he is "mothered" by a woman and then must strive to grow up male in a society which denigrates the female. He too resolves this deep psychic tension and separation by repressing and rejecting that part of himself which is tender and emotional and dependent and rooted in those deep recesses of his earliest life and memories. Male as "Not-Female" Nancy Chodorow has written about the boy-child's response to this earliest identity crisis: A boy, in his attempt to gain an elusive masculine identification, often comes to define this masculinity largely in negative terms, as that which is not feminine or involved with women .... Internally, the boy tries to reject his mother and deny his attachment to her and the strong dependence upon her that he still feels. He also tries to deny the deep personal identification with her that has developed during his early years. He does this by repressing whatever he takes to be feminine inside himself, and, importantly, by denigrating and devaluing whatever he considers to be feminine in the outside world. As a societal member, he also appropriates to himself and defines as superior particular social activities and cultural (moral, religious, and creative) spheres -- possibly in fact, "society" ... and "culture" ... themselves. [26] (Emphasis added.) I regard the boy-child's response to his earliest identity crisis as being of critical importance to our understanding of the psychosexual development of males -- and to our understanding of the psychodynamics at work in the cultures which males create. So in what follows, I am going to consider each of the boy-child responses Nancy Chodorow describes. I will also cite substantiating evidence from other widely varied sources. The first response of the boy-child is to try to define his masculinity in negative terms. His problem is one of wresting a male identity for himself out of an earlier period of helpless dependence upon mother. His identity has been blurred and his selfhood merged with hers. "Men learn from the time they're boys," Warren Farrell says, "that the worst possible thing is to be considered feminine -- a 'sissy.' The male's fear that he might be thought of as a female -- with all the negative implications that carries -- has been the central basis of his need to prove himself masculine." [27] (Emphasis added.) "Not-Dependent" Equals "Masculine" This assertion by the boy-child of his own identity is a separation and drawing apart in an attempt to delineate himself as not dependent, and thus masculine. He resists feelings of weakness or vulnerability or dependence. Such feelings are repressed and denied, because they would evoke memories of his earlier dependence. His neurotic fear is that such "baby" feelings will pull him back to baby-like dependencies -- and a man is "not a baby." Marc Feigen Fasteau is a young lawyer who in his book The Male Machine writes about this male problem with feelings of dependence: What is particularly difficult for men is seeking or accepting help from friends. I, for one, learned early that dependence was unacceptable .... "You can't express dependence when you feel it," a corporate executive said, "because it's a kind of absolute. If you are loyal 90% of the time and disloyal 10%, would you be considered loyal? Well, the same happens with independence: you are either dependent or independent; you can't be both." "Feelings of dependence," another explained, "are identified with weakness or 'untoughness' and our culture doesn't accept those things in men." [28] Such ambivalence about dependent feelings has enormous psycho-sexual repercussions both for males' relationships with females and also, of course, for their relationship with whatever they perceive as feminine. Is it possible then for men to think clearly and feel positively about our human dependence upon the ecosystems of the biosphere (i.e., upon nature) if they have not resolved in a satisfactory way their basic psycho-sexual conflict about feelings of dependence and weakness? I would suggest not. The Cult of Toughness Marc Feigen Fasteau has written about the effect in the Vietnam War period of hang-ups about "tough" masculinity and about not being dependent. He cites David Halberstam's account of the behavior of U.S. political leaders in that period: He [President Lyndon B. Johnson] had always been haunted by the idea that he would be judged as being insufficiently manly for the job, that he would lack courage at a crucial moment. More than a little insecure himself, he wanted very much to be seen as a man; it was a conscious thing.... He had unconsciously divided people around him between men and boys. Men were activists, doers, who conquered business empires, who acted instead of talked, who made it in the world of other men and had the respect of other men. Boys were the talkers and the writers and the intellectuals, who sat around thinking and criticizing and doubting instead of doing.... • • • As Johnson weighed the advice he was getting on Vietnam, it was the boys who were most skeptical, and the men who were most sure and confident and hawkish and who had Johnson's respect. Hearing that one member of his Administration was becoming a dove on Vietnam, Johnson said, "Hell, he has to squat to piss." The men had, after all, done things in their lifetimes, and they had the respect of other men. Doubt itself, he thought, was almost a feminine quality, doubts were for women; once, on another issue, when Lady Bird raised her doubts, Johnson had said of course she was doubtful, it was like a woman to be uncertain. [29] (Emphasis added.) Is it disturbing to realize how early psychic conflicts remain unresolved in our leaders -- and affect decisions involving death and life for thousands of human beings? Fasteau summarizes his view of the effects of the "cult of toughness" upon U.S. foreign policy in that period: In short, Presidents Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon and their advisors drew an analogy between the politics of the fifties [the McCarthy era] and the politics of the sixties without examining the realities of either. This failure of analysis and the readiness to believe that the right, which might accuse them of being too soft and weak if they withdrew from Vietnam, had great political power, was in large part the result of their personal preoccupation with toughness and the projection of that preoccupation onto the voting public. [30] As Eugene Bianchi has so aptly observed, "Deliberation and decision at the top take place in a male lodge where the cultural myths of masculinity reign supreme." [31] Such unexamined, unfaced, unresolved fears about dependence, weakness, and masculine identity will also plague us when we try to acknowledge our human dependence upon natural ecosystems. My own observations are like Fasteau's: men do not like to feel dependent or acknowledge feeling dependent. Feeling dependent resonates for them as-yet-unresolved emotional issues. It seems in some strange way to remind them of that powerful and infantile relationship to mother -- and this they fear. Rituals of Growing Up Such attitudes did not spring Athena-like full-blown out of the forehead of Zeus in the adulthood of men like Kennedy and Johnson. Such a masculine mystique has to be carefully taught (as indeed it is) by all the nuances and rituals of "growing up male" in America. Biographical accounts in Straight/White/Male [32] and essays in Men and Masculinity [33] document the extent of these insistent social pressures upon boys and men to "prove" their masculinity by being tough. Eugene Bianchi also analyzes these pressures which pervade boyhood and continue in adulthood to structure the life of the male: Big-time football manifests and reinforces the ideal of masculine identity through its aggressive ethos. The real man is aggressive and dominant in all situations. The weekend trek to the arena is not an escape from the world of corporate America; rather it is a weekly pilgrimage to the national shrines where the virtues of toughness and insensitivity can be renewed. [34] • • • Although we don't want to acknowledge it, rape is the prototype example of the masculine game that pervades society. The competitor, the opponent, the enemy needs to be reduced, humiliated, made powerless, made into woman. [35] • • • The male psychic patterns at work in rape are also disclosed, though in more refined and respectable ways, in economic life. I am not only referring to the financial rapaciousness of the criminal underworld, sometimes called the Mafia, but rather to the legal structures and dynamics of our capitalist system where masculine self-identity and value are closely linked to performing according to an intense, competitive code. The motivating ideal of the hero/ hunter capitalist is to become worthy by maximizing profits, by amassing ever more wealth. This ideal calls for the virtues of toughness, aggressiveness and a willingness to sacrifice mere humanistic considerations for technological efficiency and material gain .... I submit that the fundamental impulse of our economic system is rapacious at home and abroad because such "rape" fulfills male ego-needs conditioned by our culture. [36] Wife as Mother-in-Chains Any wife will tell you that within the marriage relationship men are very dependent in certain ways. "He's just like a baby when he gets sick." "He couldn't boil water for himself." "I have to be so careful of his male ego." "He needs me to bolster him up when he's down." "He's so vulnerable inside but he won't let anyone else see it." Isn't this dependence? Ah yes, but dependence-with-a-crucial difference. It is dependence not upon a powerful female mother-figure but dependence within a dominant/submissive relationship and involves dependence upon an impotent, non-threatening female figure known in our culture as a "wife." A patriarchal culture programs a wife to be submissive, to be economically impotent, and in many other ways to be inferior and non-threatening to her man. In short, a wife is to be below her man, not above. Warren Farrell has characterized women's support of male egos: "Women are the jockstraps of the world. They are always supporting us, but never quite showing. The real and metaphorical jockstraps protect the two most fragile parts of the male anatomy," [37] Dorothy Dinnerstein points out that -- ... [W]hile man takes over her overt power, as protecting and providing despot, woman as food preparer continues literally to feed him, as body servant goes on grooming him, as housekeeper maintains for him the comforting surround over which he, however, formally presides: again, her old services are made available with the old indignities and risks deleted, indeed to some degree reversed. [38] *** ... A naturally keen childhood fantasy-wish (lived out widely by adult men with the women whom they rule) is to keep female will in live captivity, obediently energetic, fiercely protective of its captor's pride, ready always to vitalize his projects with its magic maternal blessing and to support them with its concrete, self-abnegating maternal help. [39] This male dependence upon a wife's non-threatening and submissive support of her man is an understandable development, when it is viewed against the psycho-sexual backdrop of Nancy Chodorow's boy-child in search of an "elusive masculine identity." After the boy denies his dependence upon his mother -- repressing whatever inside himself he feels is feminine (the weakness, the softness, the doubts, the uncertainties Fasteau describes) -- then at the same time, Nancy Chodorow points out, the boy also feels it necessary to be "denigrating and devaluing whatever he considers to be feminine in the outside world." [40] (Emphasis added.) This is clearly visible, for example, in the scorn of girl-toys, girl-ways, and girl-attributes among preschool-age boys as young as three years. This is the psychological need -- what I have been calling the psycho-sexual root -- that underlies the inferior and submissive status assigned to females. The societies that assign females this status are societies which are the product of men's freedom from childcare; where women and men share equally in the childcare, the status of women is not inferior. The cultures referred to are the Ilongots in the Philippines and the Mbuti pygmies of Africa and the Arapesh in New Guinea. "The most egalitarian societies are not those in which male and female are opposed or are even competitors, but those in which men value and participate in the domestic life of the home. Correspondingly, they are societies in which women can readily participate in important public events." [41] The Mastery of Mother Nature It is important for us to see that men have done with Mother Nature this same dominance/submission flip-flop. They have by their technologies worked steadily and for generations to transform a psychologically intolerable dependence upon a seemingly powerful and capricious "Mother Nature" into a soothing and acceptable dependence upon a subservient and non-threatening "wife." This "need to be above" and to dominate permeates male attitudes toward nature. It is as though men did not like any feelings of depending upon "Mother Nature." Nature must be below, just as Wife must be below, for to be a man a man must be in control!
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