Gender Stereotypes

and Sexual Archetypes

Sugar and spice and everything nice,
That's what little girls are made of.
Snips and snails and puppydog tails,
That's what little boys are made of.
Traditional

"Girls are made of water, men of mud," he [Jia Baoyu] declares.

Cao Xueqin & Gao E,

A Dream of Red Mansions, Volume I

[Foreign Languages Press, Beijing, 1994, 2005, p.34]

Us girls we are so magical

Soft skin, red lips, so kissable
Hard to resist, so touchable
Too good to deny it
Katy Perry, "I Kissed a Girl," Published by When I'm Rich
You'll Be My Bitch (ASCAP), administered by WB Music, 2008

Everyone is familiar with the behavior of a group of young girls or teens who,
giggling or even shrieking, are excited about clothes, make-up, hair, ribbons,
jewelry, music, boys, nails, pink things, or other characteristically feminine
diversions. This is "girly" behavior; and traditional feminism is about as

sympathetic to it as would
be a Marine drill sergeant.
Even feminists who
"valorize" the feminine,
perhaps with notions that it
represents something
morally superior to
predatory male actions, are
unlikely to see really
"girly" behavior as
anything more than trival,
vain, and, at best,
insufficiently serious. In
the end, however, one
might wonder, as Christina Hoff Sommers did, "Do feminists like women?" Or,
when we are talking about the obvious joy and excitement that girls take in their
diversions, we might ask if feminism is itself not just a form of anhedonic
political moralism, which it certainly is, but even a form of real misogyny.
Anyone who really likes girls, however silly it may all look from the viewpoint
of sober maturity, really doesn't want them to be any other way.
Enklinobarangus (
), cf. the scene in Coneheads [1993] where Beldar
(Dan Aykroyd) drives his daughter and her friends around shopping [note].

Why can't a woman be more like a man?

Men are so honest, so thoroughly square;
Eternally noble, historic'ly fair;
Who, when you win, will always give your back a pat.
Well, why can't a woman be like that?
Why does ev'ryone do what the others do?
Can't a woman learn to use her head?
Why do they do ev'rything their mothers do?
Why don't they grow up -- well, like their father instead?
Why can't a woman take after a man?
Men are so pleasant, so easy to please;
Whenever you are with them, you're always at ease.
Would you be slighted if I didn't speak for hours?
Henry Higgins, My Fair Lady, book and lyrics by Alan Jay Lerner, music by Frederick
Loewe, 1956

A woman wants one man to satisfy her every need.

A man wants every woman to satisfy his one need.
Unattributed

How to Impress a Woman:

Wine her, Dine her, Call her, Hug her,
Hold her, Surprise her, Compliment her,
Smile at her, Laugh with her,
Cry with her, Cuddle with her,
Shop with her, Give her jewelry,
Buy her flowers, Hold her hand,
Write love letters to her,
Go to the end of the earth and back for her.
How to Impress a Man:
Show up naked.
Bring beer.
Dr. Laura Schlessinger [note]

For a man this might be a pleasant trip down memory lane, counting up his
conquests. But for a girl, it's a whole other story. I had let these men inside me,
wanting that to make me matter to them. Wanting it to make me matter...
A boy once said to me, "Boys have to put forth real effort to get laid, while all
you have to do is stand braless in the wind." It's true. What's easier for a girl
than to get noticed for her body?
Kerry Cohen, Loose Girl, a Memoir of Promiscuity
[Hyperion, New York, 2008, pp.2-3]

Conduct a thorough reading of questionable college rape reports, and you'll

begin to see a pattern: A legion of confused young women, long coached that
sex means nothing -- casual sex is just something that empowered women do,
after all -- who quickly and traumatically realize, either consciously or not that
something feels dreadfully wrong...
Bathed in the sexual revolution and its culture of sexual freedom, many young
Americans, male and female, now have no idea how -- or why -- to impose even
the flimsiest moral framework around the most intimate, exposing, literally
naked act in which two human beings can engage. Having been told that sex is
easy, meaningless, and always pleasurable, many young people are shocked
[shocked!] to discover that's not invariably the case -- that sex is often anything
but casual, that it triggers deep and powerful emotions and needs they cannot
integrate with the cultural insistence that sex is no big deal. They do not have the
vocabulary or the clarity to grasp why. What has happened to them feels wrong,
not right. It is disturbing, not ecstatic. And for these feelings, they believe they
deserve redress.
Heather Wilhelm, "The 'Rape Culture' Lie," Commentary, March 2015, pp.27 & 29

Save her! Save the girl!

Will Smith, I, Robot [Fox, 2004]

Naturam expelles furca tamen usque recurret.

"You expel nature with a pitchfork, but it just comes back."
Horace

On the right is the Pythagorean table of opposites as given in Aristotle's

Metaphysics. That there are just ten opposites is a consequence of Pythagoras
believing that ten was the perfect number. The association of the opposites with
others in the same column, however, is something else. This is first noticeable in
Parmenides, for whom Being is limited, One, and resting, rejecting the
"unlimited" only because it is "not lawful." Subsequently, there seems little doubt
that the Greeks associated the male, the straight, the light, and the good
together, and similarly the female, the curved, darkness, and the bad. To
feminists, this is all a system of patriarchal gender stereotypes. What is curious
about the system, however, is that it is very similar to the system of opposites in
Chinese philosophy that we find in the doctrine of Yin and Yang. There, the
associations of Yin are unmistakably even, female,
and darkness, while those of Yang are odd, male,
and light. The differences are also interesting: the
Greek male is "resting," the female "moving,"
while the Chinese male is active, the female
passive. As feminists would point out, whatever the
system, the male gets the attribute with the higher
prestige. Thus, active is better than passive; but, for
the Greeks, to be free of all motion is superior to
being a subject of motion, whether actively or
passively. We see exactly the same thing in India,
where the male side of the god Shiva is detached, remote, and unmoving, while
the female side is active, creative, and powerful. In India, detachment is
definitely superior to participation.

The Pythagorean
Table of Opposites
1

limited

unlimite
d

odd

even

one

plurality

right

left

male

female

resting moving

straigh
curved
t

light

darkness

These cross-cultural similarities suggest that we may be dealing,

9 good
bad
not with gender stereotypes as cultural artifacts, but with something
deeper: sexual archetypes that are not produced by culture. The
parallels between Greece, India, and China, not to mention
10 square oblong
countless other cultures [note], certainly explode a favored feminist
thesis (with an element of anti-Semitism) that "patriarchy" was
something created by Judaism and Christianity (cf. The Creation of
Patriarchy, Gerda Lerner, Oxford, 1986). Ancient Egypt, for
instance, with not more than three ruling queens in three thousand
years (with the memory of the most notable, Hatshepsut,
deliberately erased by her nephew and successor, Thutmose III),
does not sound like a contradiction of patriarchy, whatever else the status of women may have been like
[note]. As C.G. Jung would say about such things, archetypes, since they are part of the architecture of
the unconscious, are going to turn up however much anyone dislikes them or tries to suppress them.

Jung's view of sexual archetypes, however, is a complex one: The psyche actually seeks a balance
between opposites. The manifestation of one sexual archetype anywhere in the mind, therefore, will lead
to a covert manifestation of the opposite one elsewhere. The balance is especially a matter of the
unconscious compensating for the contents of consciousness. Thus, the male unconscious contains an
archetypal image of the female, the anima, while the female unconscious contains an archetypal image of
the male, the animus. The unconscious images are spontaneously projected and recognized externally,
with the characteristic that the external objects become numinous and fascinating. To the extent that a
person is immature and unaware of the nature of this fascination, it will produce irrational effects, i.e. the
object may be loved or hated, regardless of what it is actually like, and, especially, the person will be
unaware that the fascination produces no knowledge of the object, which actually may have nothing
whatsoever to do with what the subject thinks or expects about it.
The duality between internal and external, or subject and object, and between conscious and unconscious,
produce an overlapping map of the psyche. The object and part of the subject are conscious, while the
unconscious and part of the conscious are internal, i.e. in the subject. Male and female bodies are
conscious objects (they have consciousness, but especially they are objects of consciousness). The mind,
which is the conscious subject (internal and conscious), contains another couple of sexual archetypes for
Jung: eros & logos. This is probably the most offensively "sexist" thing about Jung's theory, since eros is
a female capacity for emotion, while logos is a male
capacity for reason [note]. However, both of these
functions exist in male and female minds. What is
characteristic is the dynamic that is set up. Jung says
that men tend to have irrational sentiments, while
women tend to have irrational opinions. He did not
think that all women had irrational opinions, or that all
of a woman's opinions were irrational. He did think,
however, that reason in women and emotion in men have a powerful unconscious potential, which means
that men unaware or out of touch with emotion will tend to have the irrational sentiments, while women
unaware or out of touch with reason will tend to have irrational opinions. Since a large number of people
in real life are unaware and out of touch with emotion and reason, the tendency will be for more men to
have the irrational sentiments, and more women to have the irrational opinions. This theory seems no
worse than one of a universal patriarchal conspiracy when such stereotypes seem to occur in most historic
cultures. For instance, Socrates says that people would think that Athenians "are in no way better than
women," because of the emotional and histrionic way they carry on in court. But many miles, centuries,
and civilizations away from Socrates, in the 1716 manual of the samurai ethos, Hagakure by Yamamoto
Tsunetomo, we find:
A certain man said, "I know the shapes of Reason and of Woman." When asked about this, he
replied, "Reason is four-cornered and will not move even in an extreme situation.
Woman is round. One can say that she does not distinguish between good
and evil or right and wrong and tumbles into any place at all." [William
Scott Wilson translation, Discus Books, 1981, p. 138]
Here we get a combination of contrasts involving geometry (square/round), thought (rational/irrational),
and moral disposition (moral/immoral), with a harsh connection made betwen female roundness,
irrationality, and immorality. A great deal of this misogyny in Japan can be traced back to China, where
we have already seen the tradition of stereotypes.
The theory of the sexual dynamic of the psyche in Jung is conformable to the theory of male and female
patterns of conversation in Deborah Tannen's best selling book You Just Don't Understand. Tannen, as a
result of her own research, contends that men use conversation to establish status, or for "information,"
while women use conversation to establish closeness. This contrast seems to display the logos/eros
functions, since information is rational while closeness is emotional. When a woman talks to a man about
a problem she is having, they may speak at cross purposes. She may basically just want to be comforted
and encouraged, while the man may think that she is seeking a solution that he can give to her quickly and
then move on. Something similar is described by the pop psychologist John Gray in the popular Men are

from Mars, Women are from Venus:

When they have a problem, men go
into a "cave," retreating from
contact, to work things out. Women,
on the other hand, seek contact. If
men and women are aware that the other has a
problem and, as Confucius says [note], use their
own feelings as a guide, they will tend to treat the
other in exactly the opposite way they want to be
treated. Men with a problem will not want to be
bothered; and, if they are bothered, it can only be
because a succinct "solution" is being offered to
their problem. But women will tend to bother them
without a "solution," which the man will find very
irritating. Similarly, a man may avoid a woman
with a problem, thinking she would like to be left
alone. If she then seeks contact, he may respond by
abruptly telling her how to fix it and then going
away again. Both Tannen and Gray, like Jung,
expect that as each sex learns what the other seeks,
they will, at the least, not insensibly work at crosspurposes.
Tannen, like Jung, sees the opposite of each
disposition emerge unconsciously. Men do want
closeness, and women do want status. The
dynamic, however, is that men may seek closeness
by means of status, while women may seek status
by means of closeness. Historically and crossculturally, women tend to marry "up" in status,
with older, more established men. Thus,
historically, a higher status man could expect to
attract women i.e. closeness (as the former "alpha
male" of the United States, Bill Clinton, attracted
the attentions of White House interns). Similarly, a
good looking woman from nowhere could have a
reasonable expectation that
merely attracting the attention
of the right man could result in
considerable status: the
husband of the Queen of
England might not be the King, but the wife of the
King would be the Queen. This dynamic also
occurs among those of the same sex. Women, according to Tannen, may achieve status according to the
closeness to the "in" social group, as seen in recent movies like Heathers (1989), Clueless (1995), and
Mean Girls (2004) -- not to mention the fantasy of an outsider's revenge in Carrie (1976). At the same
time, men may gain entry to a group by some achieved status: An "old boy" is immediately a friend to
fellow alumni, however unknown to him. The new kid on the block who hits the home run is suddenly
everyone's friend.
The feminist argument, of course, is that everyone naturally loves status and closeness equally, but that
men seize status by force and women are just left with the dregs of closeness. However, since feminists
also tend to think that women cannot achieve equal status (the "glass ceiling") without the help of antidiscrimination and sexual harassment laws, they seem to concede that women are not willing or able to
compete on equal terms with men. Furthermore, part of the feminist argument often is that status
hierarchies and competitive business are bad in the first place. Companies should be run with cooperation

and closeness. How this is supposed to play out is unclear. No one is going to believe that uncompetitive
business is better than competitive when the law is used to force competitive businesses to do things they
don't already want to do, i.e. granting status positions to women who would not have gotten it otherwise.
There are at least three incommensurable claims in all this: (1) If women are naturally as competitive as
men, then all that feminists need to do is raise a generation of women through "non-sexist" education that
will simply take what is theirs, the way men did (since it has been some forty years since the "women's
movement" conceived this goal, it should have happened by now). (2) If women are not naturally as
competitive as men, but have a right to the same status positions, then the law ought to simply give it to
them. And (3) If non-competitive business is best, then women should just start their own companies
(which they can and do, with more than half the wealth of the country in their hands), which will then
out-perform the patriarchal ones and drive them out of business, with the same result as (1) [note]. These
alternatives cannot be all true together, but choosing one over the others makes for very different views of
human nature and very different policy objectives.
The truth seems to be that some women are just as competitive as men and will do just fine
in a regime of freedom. Most women, however, do not want the same things as men,
reflecting millions of years of evolution; and, once they are not hectored by egalitarian,
utopian, moralistic political exhortations, they will simply behave differently and put
together kinds of lives that are somewhat different from men, though often with the
dreaded feminist defect of being dependent on men, who may earn the income to support them and the
rest of their family [note]. While feminists think that men want to keep women out of
their workplace, men are, in fact, usually quite pleased to have agreeable women
around. They just are uncomfortable directly competing with them. Particular women,
with enough drive, can overcome this. Otherwise, the customary and helpful approach
is to make some distinction that separates the competition.
The Pythagorean table of opposites suggests other sexual archetypes, though with the familiar paradoxes
of unconscious compensation. It is curious that the Pythagoreans and the Chinese should agree that the
male is to be associated with odd numbers (7 & 9 for the I Ching) and the female with even ones (6 & 8
for the I Ching), for we often seem to see just the opposite, especially in the imagery of myth and of
popular culture. Thus, in Greek mythology, there are nine Muses
and seven Pleiades, all women. The number three turns up in the
association of the Moon goddesses Artemis, Seln, and
Hecat with the three stages of women's lives (virgin, mother
or matron, and "crone"). There are three Graces, three Hours, three
Fates, and three Furies, all goddesses [note]. There are also the
three goddesses whose jealously sparked the Trojan War: Hera,
Athena, and Aphrodit. The recent television series Charmed
starred Shannen Doherty (Prue), Holly Marie Combs (Piper), and
Alyssa Milano (Phoebe) as young witches who use the "power of
three" in their spells (there were later cast changes). We also get three women in The Witches of Eastwick
[1987], Cher, Susan Sarandon, and Michelle Pfeiffer (from John Updike's, The Witches of Eastwick,
1984). The number five, missing from those examples, turns up with a vengeance in popular all girl rock
groups of the 1980's and 90's: There were five Go Go's, five Bangles, and (originally) five Spice Girls
(Baby, Ginger, Posh, Scary, and Sporty). There are only four cartoon character Bratz (Jade, Yasmin,
Sasha, and Cloe); but in their video Genie Magic and with the accompanying dolls we do get a fifth
(Meygan -- a redhead, which is a nice addition since the others have black, blond, and brown hair). Now,
there are five Desperate Housewives: Felicity Huffman, Eva Longoria, Teri Hatcher, Marcia Cross, and
Brenda Strong. On the other hand, the conspicuous occurrence of the number two in Greek mythology is
with the Dioscuri, the "Twins" (Gemini), Castor & Polydeuces (Pollux). Twin brothers or just two
"buddies" have become a specific literary and movie genre (e.g. Gilgamesh & Enkidu, Krishna & Arjuna,
Hawkeye & Chingachgook, the Lone Ranger & Tonto, and, in the first of the now endlessly multiplied
"buddy" movies, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid), while two man acts dominate the history of
comedy: Laurel & Hardy, Abbot & Costello, Cheech & Chong, Bill & Ted, Bevis & Butthead, Jay &
Silent Bob, etc. There seems little in the way of corresponding female pairings, except in conscious
imitation of the male ones (e.g. Thelma & Louise). Similarly, there is a powerful archetype behind the

number four, from the Four

Horsemen of the Apocalypse, to the
four Beatles (John, Paul, George, &
Ringo), the four Cartwrights in the
TV series Bonanza (Ben, Adam,
Hoss, & Little Joe -- it was never
quite right after Adam, played by
Pernell Roberts, ironically now the
only surviving one of the four, left
the series), the four men on
horseback at the climax of the
western movie Silverado (Kevin
Kline, Kevin Costner, Danny Glover, & Scott Glen [1985]), the four Ghostbusters at the climax of the
movie Ghostbusters (Bill Murray, Dan Aykroyd, Harold Ramis, & Ernie Hudson [1984]), all the way to
the four super-hero "Ex-Presidents" (Ford, Carter, Reagan, & Bush) in a series of cartoons on NBC's
venerable Saturday Night Live -- parodying, of course, similar groups of cartoon super-heroes, like the
"Fantastic Four." Finally, we get the six members of the Monty Python troup: Graham Chapman
(d.1989), John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. It is hard, however, to
envision these six as a coherent group, since they never appeared together as an organized team in any of
their shows or movies -- and Terry Gilliam did animations but rarely appeared as a character himself
(perhaps most memorably as "Cardinal Fang" in "The Spanish Inquisition" episode). In terms of
performance, Carol Cleveland was functionally more like the sixth Python.
Recently, Playboy magazine (March 1999), has featured a layout that
combines the male and female group numbers. In "The Girls of KISS," the
members of the revived, strange 70's heavy metal rock band KISS, all four
of them, are photographed with groups of women, five for each member of
the band, all with the matching black-and-white face paint worn, in
distinctive patterns, by each band member. "Goupies," women who throw
themselves at rock musicians, are generally seen as attracted to the status and
charisma of rock bands. Where five devotees would not fit easily on the
cover of the magazine, we only find three grouped there with the bizarre
leader of the band, Gene Simmons, in his signature, tongue-out pose.
Late one evening in Austin, Texas, around 1976, a friend of mine said he had
once heard the theory that small groups of men tend to shake down to four,
where each corresponds to a specific function in a Bushman hunting party
(now "K!ung" seems to be used instead of "Bushman"). This came up because there were, indeed, four
guys left from a party earlier that evening. I have never heard this theory, or any such specific information
about Bushman hunting parties, anywhere else (though I saw a movie in my Freshman anthropology class
about Bushman hunting parties); but, if true, it would put male archetypes well outside Judeo-Christian
patriarchy, or even the "ice people" periphery of Eurasian steppe culture. The four roles in the Bushman
hunting party were: (1) the leader, (2) the master hunter, (3) the shaman, and (4) the joker. This seemed
to match up pretty well with the four guys left at the party (I was the shaman). It also seems to match up,
for instance, with the Beatles: John was definitely the leader, Paul the master hunter (or composer in this
case), George the shaman (heavy on Vishnu), and Ringo the joker (appearing, indeed, in several
subsequent movie comedies).

This pattern is also conspicuous in the classic science fiction

television show, the original Star Trek. The core cast members
were Captain Kirk (William Shatner), clearly the leader,
First Officer Mr. Spock (Leonard Nimoy), the master hunter,
Dr. McCoy (DeForest Kelley, d.1999), the shaman, and Chief
Engineer Scotty (James Doohan, d.2005), the joker. Star Trek
was not a comedy, and so Scotty's role as the joker is
subdued; yet his Scottish accent, suggested by Doohan
himself, simply cannot be imitated without a comic effect.
Other characteristic lines spoken by Scotty, often about his
inability to provide more power to ship, are still reproduced in
countless comic contexts. As the Science Officer, Mr. Spock
supplies all the theoretical expertise in the show and so
represents the scientific version of hunter. Dr. McCoy, apart
from his own expertise in medical science (as Scotty is the
expert in engineering), is frequently involved as the moral
adviser and conscience of Captain Kirk. In stories
conspicuously lacking religion, McCoy is the closest to a
religious voice. McCoy often provides a conflicting perspective in relation to Mr. Spock, who tends to
provide dispassionate and impersonal observations. To McCoy, this often seems unfeeling and inhuman;
and he says so.
A recent television show on NBC, Third Rock from the Sun, was about a group of four extra-terrestrials
passing as human: Dick (John Lithgow) is the "high leader," Sally (Kristen Johnston) is the military
veteran "security officer," Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is the old hand "intelligence officer," and
Harry (French Smith) is, well, no one was originally quite sure, but he turned out to be, to his own
surprise, the "communications officer." Since Third Rock is, of course, a comedy, no one is quite what
one might expect from their roles: the leader is a self-obsessed ditherer, the military man (master hunter)
is, well, a woman (though the aggressive and statuesque Kristen Johnston pulls it off convincingly), and
the older veteran (the shaman) is a teenage boy. The only role that doesn't need to be comically reversed
is that of the joker, and indeed, French Smith does all the physical pratfall humor, is the constant butt of
jokes, and has all the dumb-and-dumber lines.
In somewhat less clear terms does the pattern fit the group of four in the very successful comedy series
Seinfeld, where Jerry would be the (rather ineffective) leader and Kramer definitely the joker (all the
pratfall humor, and the craziest schemes, again). Between George and Elaine the
assignment is less certain; but George seems best as the comic reversal of the master
hunter, since he is always trying to fulfill, or at least be seen to fulfill, some such role,
while Elaine, as the closest we get to the "conscience" of the group, can be the comic
shaman: her problems more often start with sensible dilemmas or observations, and
only later collapse into chaos -- like the time all she wanted to do was get her old school acquaintance to
wear a bra.
Some similar uncertainty comes up with the four members of the Ghostbusters team in Ghostbusters
(1984). Dan Aykroyd, playing Ray Stantz, is clearly the engineer of the group, the one building the
equipment and spouting the techno-babble (something Aykroyd himself loves to do). This makes him
fairly obviously the master hunter. Harold Ramis, playing Egon Spengler, is the theoretician of the
group, humorless and cerebral. This makes him the shaman. Bill Murray, playing Peter Venkman, is the
most personable of the group, with not much to do on the technical or theoretical side. This makes him
the leader, although his personalibility tends towards the hucksterish, and he seems at least
as interested in hustling a date with Sigourney Weaver as in furthering their business -- she
characterizes him as more like a "game show host" than a scientist. However defective, this
is leadership. But these principal characters leave the Ghostbusters with only three
members. For the fourth we get someone who is literally the "dark other," Ernie Hudson
playing Winston Zeddmore. Although Ernie has some funny lines, he is not a comedian and his
character never appears in the ridiculous forms that Murray, Aykroyd, and Ramis do. This would make

him something rather different from being the joker. But the grouping works, so the trick must be that,
with the other members of the group so comical, we get a comic reversal of the joker, making him the
most serious and ordinary, the most "every man," of the Ghostbusters, the outsider who tells the others he
wants his own lawyer or can testify to the Mayor as a disinterested observer. This adds something real to
a group that otherwise already consists entirely of jokers. [note]
Although there are many exceptions to the odd/even group archetype for female and male (e.g. the five
Beach Boys, the five Rolling Stones, the Seven Sages of Greece, the Seven Sages of India, the Seven
Against Thebes, or The Seven Samurai, remade as the Western, The Magnificent Seven), and one might
object that the female characters in Third Rock and Seinfeld break the pattern (though 25% of roles isn't
exactly the "gender equity" feminists had in mind), the reversal of the Pythagorean opposites seems itself
to raise the main question. Why would Greeks and Chinese settle on odd for male and even for female?
Although there is little to go on but speculation, one might suppose the
male and female bodies to suggest this. Although both bodies have
homologous organs that are mostly bisymmetrical, the female body
displays conspicuous development of symmetrical organs (breasts,
buttocks, labia major, labia minor), while in the male body these are
underdeveloped (except for the testicles). On the other hand, the most
developed and characteristic male organ, the penis, is a single, center-line
part, while the homologous female organ, the clitoris, is ordinary entirely
hidden between the labia. If these kinds of physical impressions are the
origin of the odd/even assignments, then Jung's principle of compensation
accounts for their reversal in the groups: Males, representing oddness, are balanced by
occurring in even numbered groups, while females, representing evenness, are balanced by occurring in
odd numbered groups. The result, multiplying odds by evens, is, of course, always even, which should
please feminists: the idea of "balance" itself implies evenness and symmetry. This would also fit in with
Camille Paglia's notion (in Sexual Personae, 1991) that females are complete in themselves in a way
that males are not. A male group, to be "complete," requires the fourth member. Sally and Elaine
completing the groups in Third Rock and Seinfeld might actually remind Jung of his theory that the
Virgin Mary completes the group of the Christian Trinity (Father, Son, & Holy Spirit). Complete unity, in
turn, would be in the union of male and female, the kind of imagery we find in
Tantrism, in both Hinduism and Buddhism, what Jung called
the "mysterium coniunctionis" (in alchemy, Jung's Mysterium
Coniunctionis, Princeton, 1977).
The theory of male and female archetypes as physical metaphors
for the male and female bodies is of great interest to Paglia. This
brings us to the "light" and "darkness" terms of the Pythagorean
table of opposites and the Yin-Yang theory. It might be enough
if male and light are both thought to be good to dictate the
assignment of darkness to the female. Darkness itself can be a
metaphor for evil and ignorance, which no doubt sounded
female enough for the old patriarchs. On the other hand, Paglia
notes that female sexual organs are, in fact, largely hidden and dark, from being
concealed and internal. Even external female genitalia are ordinary hidden, not just to others looking at a
nude female, but even to a woman herself, who, unless she is exceedingly limber, is going to need a
mirror to see her own labia, vagina, and clitoris very well. Male sexual organs are not only all "hanging
out," but they are also situated closer to the ventral part of the body (the underside of quadrupeds, the
front of humans), where they can easily be examined by their owner. What the male organ is for and what
it does is obvious to all and the subject of endless humor; but what goes on inside the female
body, with ovaries and uterus, was not obvious to anyone and could rarely be a subject of
humor. People are conceived and carried in, and born from, the womb. This does not seem
particularly funny -- like a penis squirting semen does (as in the Egyptian hieroglypic at
right). Instead, it is mysterious.
If the dark, the hidden, and the internal is the female archetype, there is plenty of expression of this in

myth and history. Egyptian tombs, as places of rebirth, are appropriately vaginal and womblike, and very
much dark, hidden, and internal. Mycenaean Greek tombs, with a buried, womblike chamber, also feature
an open approach to the entrance, the dromos, which might suggest the space between legs leading to the
vagina. This is also the impression of most Egyptian temples, where a series of avenues, courts, and
entrances becomes progressively smaller, until leading to the dark and enclosed inner sanctum, the place
of the god, which also represents the place of the birth of the world. Egyptian temples are thus not usually
towering and phallic, but supine and womblike. The sun temples of the V Dynasty, however, and of
course the Old Kingdom pyramids themselves, have the towering quality -- though the pyramids then
contained the vaginal passages to the womblike place of rest and rebirth. The earth itself, with its hidden
fertility, its dark caves, etc. is commonly seen as female, "Mother Earth," with some interesting
exceptions. The Egyptians had an earth god and a sky goddess, the opposite of what we see in Greece,
India, China, etc.; but this makes some sense in Egypt, since the earth itself was mostly desert and could
be seen as sterile. The Nile, flowing upon the earth, is what was fertile. The Nile god, Hapi
(one of the, unsurprisingly, four Sons of Horus [note]), was male, but he is commonly
shown with breasts, a compromise, at the least, with the female imagery of fertility.

The supreme image of the hidden, mysterious, and

internal would have to be the Labyrinth, originally the
mythic creation of the architect Daedalus to hold the
Minotaur. Theseus, as it happens, is only able to master
the Labyrinth with the help of Ariadne's umbilical-like
thread. The full archetypal potential of this imagery,
however, we can see in a modern creation, the fantasy
novel The Tombs of Atuan (1971), by the science fiction
and fantasy writer Ursula LeGuin, who often uses
gender themes. The story is about a young woman who
was chosen as a child to be the high priestess of an
ancient cult on the island of Atuan (in LeGuin's
"Earthsea" fantasy world). The "Tombs" mark the most
ancient part, and the most ancient gods, of her temple
complex (which otherwise features, interestingly, a
temple of twin "God-Brothers"). Under the Tombs is a
great cave, the "Undertomb," into which it is forbidden
to bring light. Connected to the Undertomb is a vast
labyrinth, which she can enter and explore with the help
of a light. LeGuin went to considerable trouble to
actually produce a plan of the labyrinth, as seen at left,
complete with all the features mentioned in the story.
This is, in more recent feminist terminology, a
"sacralization of the feminine" with a vengeance: A
cult of female priests resting, literally, on a vast
chthonic metaphor for the female body, entered through
the sacred darkness of a stone vagina.

In these terms, the story then turns out to be not quite what one expects. LeGuin's hero magician, from her
other Earthsea stories, shows up, dares to burn a light in the Undertomb and, when captured by the
priestess, wins her over, escapes from the island, and takes her with him to start a new life (not with him)
and, we are left to assume, live happily ever after. She is "rescued" from her chthonic deities, resulting in
an earthquake and partial collapse of the "Tombs." This is all a rather astonishing turn
for the story if LeGuin was otherwise any serious kind of feminist. In the only
interview I have seen with her, she did seem to be in the grip of, indeed, a particularly
bitter form of feminism, complaining that she could not walk down a street alone
without being fearful of groups of men nearby (a politically correct sentiment only so
long as one does not say "black men" nearby, in which case fear of "male violence" instantly becomes the
racism of "white privilege"). Jung himself might have said she had a animus problem, as feminism itself
represents an "animus" in the more ordinary sense. So why would Ursula LeGuin alienate her priestess of
vagina and labyrinth from the chthonic deities? Perhaps because the archetype here was more of Jung's
"Devouring Mother" than of real fertility. The priestess has no name. She is the "Eaten One." The
magician eventually picks a name for her. Her gods are nameless also, and not evidently female in form;
and the cult has no particular trappings of growth or fertility. LeGuin, perhaps, was not so much being
rescued by some man, but was more escaping from a suffocating mother. In any case, the archetypal
imagery all seems out of LeGuin's conscious control; it does not make for a story of the feminist future.
Equally interesting imagery turns up in
a Valentine's Day card. This was drawn
by Susan Hunt Yale (printed by the
Marcel Shurman Company Inc.). There
was no date on it, but it was for
Valentine's Day circa 1995. The card
shows a small heart-shaped maze. At
the center is a heart-shaped pool and
heart-shaped fountain. On the edge of
the pool sits a young woman. Overhead
is a banner that says "Stay Forever." At
the entrance to the maze stands a young
man. Over the entrance is a banner,
held up by Cupid figures, that says
"Start Here." Again, one wonders if the
artist was aware of the archetypal
images, or gender stereotypes, being
employed. The young woman, patient
and passive, in the literal and
metaphorical heart of her labyrinth,
awaits the questing male, who may not
actually know that "Stay Forever" is
what he is questing for! This is all very
far from being politically correct, but it
is also very evocative and sweet, which
is the point on Valentine's Day. If there
is an archetypal female quest for
closeness, the enclosed, protected,
intimate space of the maze provides a
powerful image of it. Meanwhile, the
restless male, wandering around,
wanders into the design, literally, of the
female: the stereotype of the female,
deprived of power by the male, restorting to stratagems and scheming, which is then morally condemned
by the male as feminine deviousness. In this instance, it is sad that anyone would see a political crime in
the eternal play of courtship. As Oscar Wilde says, "Those who find ugly meanings in beautiful things are
corrupt without being charming. This is a fault."

The female archetypes of the hidden, interior, dark, chthonic, etc.

stand in stark contrast to other female stereotypes: The skin-deep
quality of female beauty and the "objectification," as the feminists
say, of the female body. How can the female be, all at once,
primarily a surface appearance and, at the same time, the dark and
hidden? Beauty is a thing of light, knowledge, externality, and the
unhidden. One way to deal with this is simply to say, as many feminists do,
that all this beauty stuff is something that men impose upon women. The "male
gaze" turns women into objects, and the mystified female, in the grip of false
consciousness, responds with the kinds of self-torture (make-up, shoes, hairdo,
corsets, dieting, breast implants, etc.) that men require. Unfortunately, the
existence of "lipstick lesbians" and gay male drag queens
pretty decisively explodes this theory. The former don't
have to please any men, and the latter are imposing the
most elaborate rituals and instruments of female beauty
on themselves. Even apart from actual drag queens,
many have noted a tyranny of beauty in gay male
interaction that is suggestive, indeed, of what
traditionally would have been called female "vanity."
The mirror and the female have, indeed, been associated
as long as there have been mirrors, which means all the
way back to ancient Egypt. Thus, we find in a collection
of Japanese ghost stories the remark, "She thought about the old saying that a
mirror is the Soul of a Woman -- (a saying mystically expressed, by the Chinese
character for Soul, upon the backs of many bronze mirrors)..." ["Of a Mirror and a
Bell," Kwaidan, Stories and Studies of Strange Things, by Lafcadio Hearn, Charles
E. Tuttle Company, 1904, 1971, 1986, p.55].
There is also the discordant circumstance that harshly patriarchal societies, like Saudi Arabia and Iran
today, Calvin's Geneva and Puritan Massachusetts in the past, have fiercely suppressed and condemned
expressions of female vanity, especially in public. At the same time, periods of great liberalization and
openness, like the 1920's, have seen women cut lose with shocking displays of flesh and consumption of
cosmetics. To traditionalists, all the painted women flaunting their legs, shoulders, and dcolletage were
bringing about nothing less than Sodom and Gomorrah. Today, Saudis still ask why a woman would want
to show all her charms in public unless she is a prostitute. The feminist response is often all too similar:
female sensual and sexual exuberance, all the way to women
flashing their breasts or bottoms at Mardi Gras in New Orleans,
are symptoms of male oppression and domination and so of a kind
of political Sodom and Gomorrah. The religious and political
anhedonia are comparable.
The mirror itself creates the kind of duality that characterizes
female identity and as such has drawn considerable attention from
feminists. Mostly hostile, of course. A woman looking in a mirror
sees... another woman, a woman who is herself and yet not herself,
a distillation of her appearance. Her attitude towards that other
woman may be a frank evaluation, admiration, criticism, or
delusion. But there is no doubt that any interiority of the observing
woman is unrepresented in the image. This always makes the
image a potential adversary. Time in front of the mirror with
cosmetics always involves altering one's self and then observing
this effect in the image. Will the image respond in a satisfactory
way? So there may be a kind of antagonistic back-and-forth. One
alteration may not look good, so one must try again. The adversary is unresponsive or recalcitrant. This
may go on for some time, generating an archetypal feminine pastime. Every day, this Other will be

confronted every so often, in a ritual examination and upgrade, a sort of

dance or duel that will continue in a mixture of caution, respect, hostility,
and perhaps some admiration for years. It can descend into bizarre
pathologies, such as when the starving, skeletal anorexic continues to see
herself as fat, or as the mutilated "cosmetic surgery addict" sees her
grotesque face as increasingly beautiful. While the pathologies may be a
dangerous exaggeration of the normal, feminism, of course, sees them as
falsifying and refuting the normal. There would be no anorexia or elective
cosmetic surgery without concern for appearance. Well, no (except for the
"divine anorexia" of ascetic fasting). But without any concern for
appearance, we are back to what Nietzsche called a "furious, vindictive
hatred of life." At the same time, a male could not devote a tithe of the time
to a similar activity without being considered unmanly, far too self-absorbed to be properly masculine.
But the principal sin of the "pretty boy" is that he is neglecting the female in order to admire himself. A
woman before her mirror may even tolerate male presence and observation with some complacency.
Anaesthetic feminism, which sees female vanity as slavery imposed by men, puts itself in the strange
company of Ayatollahs and Calvinists when it comes to its attitude towards female beauty. But the
paradox does remain: How can the female archetypes be contradictory, both hidden and internal,
superficial and external? The answer is indeed that beauty is imposed by the male, but not by way of
society, culture, convention, and force. Female vanity is imposed by the male of the female unconscious.
A woman not only knows what a man wants, but, as an unconscious male
herself, it is she who wants it -- hence its independence, not only of any actual
males, but often of any actual attraction to males. In the same way, just as there
are women, like the anaesthetic feminists, who feel driven, plagued, and
unhappy by male expectations of them (which, in a sense, will be their own
animus expectations of themselves), there are men who feel
driven, plagued, and unhappy by female (or anima) expectations
of them to be strong, supportive, protective, achieving, status
seeking, etc. Psychic freedom from that stress, besides simply not worrying about it and
becoming unambitious (the archetypal male "couch potato"), can be found in the
assumption, to greater or lesser degrees, of female roles -- as a passive gay male, a
transvestite, a transsexual female, etc. These things can be sorted out in all sorts of ways. Or some males
just become super-masculine super-achievers (e.g. Donald Trump), decide that all that women ever want
is their status, and so lose themselves in their work, probably with a string of failed marriages, or
prostitutes (e.g. Eliot Spitzer), behind them.
Thus, women know that their true selves are hidden. As Tannen says,
women may bond by telling secrets. They want a man who is seeking and
respects their true selves. At the same time, a woman will feel bad about
herself if she thinks she looks bad. And she wants to please the man who
likes her by looking good for him. Similarly, men are attracted to good
looking women, can even hold them in awe (Ed Bundy's response to
Playboy Playmates, in the recent Fox television series Married with
Children, is a good example), but they will also become contemptuous of an
airhead and know that a woman whose vanity is completely self-centered
can be real trouble. As women often complain, men cannot decide whether
they want a Whore or a Madonna. Of course, the trouble is that men want
both, after a fashion; and women mostly would hate to admit that they would
like to be both, since they would like to be appreciated and desired both for
their (hidden) true selves and for their (very unhidden) physical bodies. This
is just the paradox of human life, that we are creatures that are objects,
having physical bodies, but also are consciousnesses whose minds seem to
float free of any objects or bodies. In the solitude of subjective
consciousness, we wish for contact with others, but that contact is mediated
by bodies, which often have their own agenda -- e.g. fighting between men,

gossiping between women, loving between men and women, and all the
strange variations that occur as random histories and psychological
variations send people off in a kaleidoscope of different directions. Even if
Camille Paglia is right that women are more psychically whole than men,
they nevertheless labor under the difficulty that archetypal female identity
has this dissociation between internal and external. To the male, the male
body is more or less just the instrument of the male self; but the female
does not like the sense of her body as an instrument. But it cannot be
entirely valuable in itself either, because her true self is internal and
hidden. A woman cannot be the ugly Socrates with the beautiful soul
without a sense of tragedy. There is nothing tragic in the same way about
the foolish or evil man who is handsome -- he is more the archetype of the
seducer or the devil.
The middle ground, or the bridge, between Jungian Archetypes of the
Collective Unconscious and imagery that is metaphorical of the
differences between male and female bodies would be male-female
differences that are the result of evolutionary adaptations of behavior.
These would be, like the body, the result of innate genetic differences but
would also be, like the archetypes, principles of higher order organization,
knowledge, and behavior. The kind of study of human behavioral
differences in an evolutionary context is called "sociobiology," but this is
often attacked as simply an attempt to use Darwinism to reinforce
reactionary attitudes about women, or as a misunderstanding of human
evolution, which is now largely cultural. However, using Darwinism for
anything hardly fits in with what is considered the principal source of
"reactionary attitudes" today, namely religious fundamentalism, where
Darwinism for any purpose is anathema. And, while it is true that human
evolution now is largely cultural, this was not always so, it is unreasonable
that any pre-cultural adaptations would just disappear completely, and, as
it happens, even a little bit of sociobiology goes a long way. Because of
the hostility provoked by sociobiological arguments, the discipline (or
parts of it) now is frequently referred to as "evolutionary psychology."
One fundamental sociobiological consideration is just of the cost of sex. Thus, a male can impregnate a
female and then disappear. Before paternity suits, and even after, this minimized the cost of reproduction
for males and thus could be a possibly effective reproductive strategy (all that really counts
evolutionarily). If a male could impregnate enough females, then, even if the solitary females with
children would have less chance of survival, the sheer numbers might outweigh the drawback of those
cases. On the other hand, the cost of sex for a female, before birth control and safe abortion, would be
high indeed. Burdened with pregnancy for months and then with children for years, a female's life would
be powerfully and probably permanently affected.
For many mammals this would not make that much difference. Tigers, for instance, are solitary animals,
and the males and females do not live together. The female is thus left with the cubs, but then they grow
up quickly. Lions are rather more sociable, but the females give birth off on their own and care for the
young that way for a while. The males would help provide some protection to the
group once a female returns with her cubs, but they do not otherwise make any
contribution to rearing the young. Humans are different, mainly because humans are
not individually very strong in the first place (not many animals want to mess with a
female tiger or lioness), females are rendered acutely more vulnerable while pregnant
(not true for many mammals), and the children are helpless for many years, requiring much more care and
protection than any other mammal young. Human evolution thus passed up solitary motherhood
altogether.
Because of the cost of sex, males and females most sensibly would pursue different courtship practices. A

male determines the attractiveness of a female quickly and wishes to

mate quickly. Since the only way to determine attractiveness quickly
is through appearance, that looms large in the estimation of the male.
On the other hand, females do not want to mate until the male exhibits
a more durable commitment, lest they face the consequences of
pregnancy alone.
Now, since cost sets up a real economic dynamic, it is not hard to
imagine human institutions responding to it through cultural evolution
without there being an innate and genetic component. It would violate
Ockham's Razor to gratuitously posit innate propensities if learned
ones would already account for human institutions. This can be tested:
If courtship behaviors are culturally created, then we
would expect them to change if the costs of sex are
dramatically changed. There appears to be some
evidence of this. In a regime of "welfare rights," where
the government supports any children women may
have, we have seen male responsibility all but evaporate and many
women, "welfare mothers," indulge in much of the same kind of
irresponsible promiscuity that was supposed to be characteristically
male. While this is a recent phenomenon, there is also some older
evidence of it. As examined in more detail elsewhere, Pacific island
cultures have often been more tolerant of pre-marital sex and
pregnancy. There costs were lowered through institutions that allowed
for easy adoption (hnai adoption in Hawai'i), so that pre-marital
pregnancy did not impose serious costs (apart from the dangers of
pregnancy and childbirth) on girls. Indeed, at least one pre-marital pregnancy, in some places, was seen as
evidence of fertility, enhancing prospects for marriage.
Does this kind of evidence simply establish that courtship behavior is cultural rather than innate (gender
rather than sexual)? No, for a couple of reasons. One is that innate differences are not expected to result
in fixed and inflexible behaviors. They are about potentials that result in a statistical spread of behavior.
That is how evolution works, through random variation, a range of characteristics, and then the
differential success of some variations. Thus, if the evolutionary environment changes, e.g. through the
removal of the costs of sex for females, then the behaviors, out of the range of variation already present,
suited for that new environment, will flourish. Women who already have an inclination for promiscuity
can achieve great reproductive success by becoming "welfare mothers" and having all their children
supported by the government. If the new environment persists, then over time any genetic component for
that promiscuity will become more widespread. That is how evolution works.
The value of the evidence about "welfare mothers" for the argument therefore depends on the statistical
size of the phenomenon. In a welfare state regime, how many women become promiscuous "welfare
mothers"? Nowhere near a majority, though even this itself is confused by variations, since some
communities have much higher illegitimacy rates than others and this likely due to varying cultural and
economic factors within those communities. Thus, it would help to have some other kinds of evidence as
well. The cumulative weight of that evidence does seem to be against the purely "cultural" thesis. This
has been examined in many studies, from The Evolution of Human
Sexuality by Donald Symons (Oxford, 1979) to popular
presentations like "Boys & Girls Are Different -- Men, Women, &
The Sex Difference," an ABC television special with reporter John
Stossel (1995, MPI Home Video, 1995). A recent book on the
issue is Gender Gap, The Biology of Male-Female Difference, by
David P. Barash and Judith Eve Lipton (Transaction Publishers,
1997, 2002 -- a physician & psychologist couple at great pains to
display their feminist bona fides despite the evidence they present
for male-female differences).

For example, one kind of evidence considered by Symons and Barash & Lipton is what happens when
homosexuality becomes socially acceptable. The existence of homosexuality is itself strong evidence of
natural variation in behavior, since nothing could be more of a dead end as a reproductive strategy than
homosexuality. Given a homosexual group, then, we do have a natural experiment in sexual behavior
where only the propensities of one sex are involved. Where heterosexual courtship involves an interaction
of men and women, homosexual courtship enables each sex to exhibit behaviors
unaffected by those of the other. The results are persistant and interesting.
Homosexual men (gay men) seem to be much more promiscuous and sexually active
than homosexual women (lesbians). Lesbians do not even seem to be as sexually
active as heterosexual women, who are, of course, often responding to the desires of
their mates. Sexual promiscuity has even been valorized in much gay ideology as a salient and ennobling
characteristic of the "gay lifestyle." But when it became clear that bathroom and bathhouse promiscuity
was spreading new and dangerous venereal diseases, ultimately meaning AIDS, there was, and is, great
resistance to the idea that prudence alone should rule out that characteristic of the "lifestyle." "Safe sex"
became the way of preserving promiscuity while preventing disease. Unfortunately, sex with condomns
does not feel like sex without them, and "unprotected" gay sex has continued, even, by 1999, increasing
again, resulting in infection rates that have ceased to drop.
[Note that the "Ruby" image for Ruby's Diners, displayed at right, has now been modified by the
company to eliminate the curve of the posterior that previously
has been visible under her skirt. This certainly was criticized for
being too sexually suggestive, which, of course, is exactly why
it was nice -- despite its irrelevant and perhaps disturbing
juxtaposition with food. The shoes, however, remain with the
sort of heels that would be hell to any actual waitress.]
By contrast, AIDS is all but non-existence in the lesbian
community, where the idea of anonymous sex in toilets is about
as disagreeable as it is to heterosexual men and women. An
interesting anecdote in that respect is what happened to radio
"shock jock" Howard Stern when he ran his "lesbian dating
game." Stern wanted to match up lesbians for dates and then
hear afterwards about their sexual activities together. To his
disappointment, the lesbians often did not have sex at all on
their dates; and one woman even told him that "lesbians only
have sex after they've dated for six months." Now, the idea that
women are not as naturally promiscuous and not as sexually
driven as men is one of the oldest gender stereotypes in the
book, while no one in society is as hostile and militant about
"gender stereotypes" as politicized lesbians. One might expect,
therefore, that radical lesbians, even if they didn't feel it, would
be at some pains to celebrate and practice promiscuity just as
much as gay men simply to demonstrate the falsehood of the stereotype. But this is not what we see. It is
hard not to conclude that they really don't feel it. As it happens, at the height of "women's liberation" in
the 1970's, there was a deliberate effort by many women to participate in the "meat market" dating scene
of single's bars with just as much abandon as men, precisely to demonstrate that women could be just as
interested in free love as men. While there were, of course, some women who liked that just fine, the
overall impression, even before the specter of disease arose, was that this was a particularly empty
experience for most women.
So, while gay men continue at an unusual level of promiscuity, with or without "safe sex," both lesbians
and most heterosexual women have reverted to something rather like the gender stereotype. This
outcome, however, would seem to indicate that the stereotype reflects genetic and not just cultural
adaptations. Indeed, the great variety in human cultural evolution has only occurred in the last 10,000,
perhaps only the last 5,000, years, while the original forms of human culture and society, preserved in a
few essentially paleolithic communities even into the 20th century, may have persisted for ten of

thousands, even hundreds of thousands, of years. Recent variations are thus in a period that
is really too short for any real physical evolutionary change to have occurred, while the
older human society would have developed at a time when human communities simply
would have been natural variations on older primate communities and cultural evolution
would really not yet be a factor. The great generalized intelligence that now we might
think would automatically abolish innate behaviors and make for cultural variation was relatively late to
develop. Australopithecines and Pithecanthropines (Homo erectus) had increasingly large brains, but
nothing like the bulging skull of Homo sapiens, though the former already had a basic stone tool culture,
while the later may have already had a pidgen-like language (cf. Derek Bickerton Language and Species,
U. of Chicago Press, 1990).
In these terms, what we would reasonably expect is a persistence, with variation, of innate and genetic
behaviors, i.e. a tendency of men to fix on female appearance and to seek multiple sexual partners and a
tendency of women to value something more than appearance and to choose new partners rarely and
carefully. There is an excellent example of this in the current (1999) President of the United States, Bill
Clinton, and his wife Hillary. Clinton told Monica Lewinsky that he had been with "hundreds" of women
(and that he would not have hit on Kathleen Willey because her breasts weren't large enough). Even
though he felt bad about that, he was continuing to do pretty much the same thing.
Meanwhile, Hillary, who in 1992 publicly ridiculed the feminine "stand by your man"
ethos, practiced it to a fault in 1999. Feminists have hypocritically accepted all this
rather than give aid and comfort to their political enemies, even to the extent of
affirming that such promiscuity is just natural behavior, which it is up to Hillary to
forgive or reject -- this despite the feminist thesis that there really isn't any "natural" behavior and that a
woman like Hillary must be suffering from low self-esteem and false consciousness to be tolerating a
faithless rat like Bill. (Juanita Broaddrick's accusation that Clinton actually raped her in 1978, for which
there really are no rationalizations left in the feminist arsenal, is mostly handled by being ignored).
The political enemies of mainstream feminism are, of course, both those who believe in traditional
society and those who simply believe in freedom. Either view would preclude the kind of social
engineering desired by the feminists. Advocates of traditional society also believe in social engineering,
just to very different ends, i.e. to discourage or preclude the kind of social variation that we see in a free
society. Feminist social engineering is to discourage or preclude the kinds of traditional roles that we also
continue to see in a free society. A free society, in turn, where there are only mutually voluntary
relationships, allows (1) people to do what they want, and (2) for the kinds of social and behavioral
variation that enable both cultural and, ultimately, genetic evolution to work. In a free society there is
actually no need for a determination on whether gender stereotypes or sexual archetypes are innately or
culturally determined. We simply note, in retrospect, whether the "stereotypes" persist voluntarily or
disappear with the winds of cultural change. Both the authoritarianism of traditional society and the
totalitarianism of a feminist utopia would suppress just those kinds of evidence that might falsify their
own theses.
One may be excused the suspicion that the advocates of traditional society don't really believe that it is
entirely natural and spontaneous, which means it must be enforced by the state, while feminists don't
really believe that everything is "culturally constructed," which means that fierce political "re-education"
and police measures can and must be employed to suppress what really are natural inclinations in men
and women. What they all fear is being proven wrong by the uncoerced, free, natural, and spontaneous
behavior of individuals living their own lives [note].
A recent idea of some feminists, examined by Christina Hoff Sommers in The War Against Boys, has
been that women act by different moral standards than men, with men applying abstract principles and
women acting out of sympathy and compassion. This suggests comparison with some of the typological
categories examined elsewhere, here shown combining Chinese symbols and virtues with various quasiJungian distinctions. The green dragon is male and represents Yang in the Chinese system, even though
the element to which it corresponds, wood, is a Yin element. The "orange" tiger (which would really be
white in Chinese five element theory) is female and represents Yin, even though its corresponding
element is metal, whose hardness is archetypally Yang. If we do a similar reversal of sex with the phoenix

(Yang fire) and the turtle (Yin

water), we get virtues that
make for pretty good gender
stereotypes. The dragon with
righteousness gives us the
notion referenced of acting by
principles as masculine. The
phoenix with sympathy, or
kindness, gives us the similar
connection of acting out of
compassion as feminine. The
remaining two are more novel
assignments. The tiger with
propriety can match with a
very ancient feminine
stereotype: vanity. Vanity is
about appearances, which is
the essence of the Chinese
virtue of properity and good
manners. Indeed, it is not men
who ever worried much about Amy Vanderbilt or "Miss Manners." Do women or men worry more about
what other people think about them? While certain, touchy men may worry, the stereotype would seem to
be that women worry more generally, especially with the idea in mind that "there will be talk." Finally,
the turtle with prudence gives us the image of the sober, stolid, phlegmatic, careful man, who may in fact
be patiently enduring a party for the sake of his wife, who simply wants to be "seen" and make a good
appearance, and who consequently instructs her husband how to behave, even though he actually
"behaves" very little. More like endures. Each of these types, however, encompases the opposite sex also.
"Good hearted impulse" gives us the image of a stout, florid, and jovial man (e.g. Santa Claus); "honor"
evokes a ramrod hidalgo, fully prepared to be insulted at the slighest awkward gesture towards him. The
prudent woman may be a weary and put-upon wife and mother trying to run a household while a husband
is out drinking, gambling, whoring, etc.

Pages on Feminist Issues

Against the Theory of Pornograph
"Sexist Language"
y

Feminis
m

Anaestheti
c
Abortion
Feminism

Defense of Christina Hoff Sommers published in The

Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical
Association, 66:7
Women in
the
Apology

Karen A. Smyers, Ph.D., Jungian Analysis

The (Two) Human Breasts
Le djeuner sur l'herbe, 1862-1863, douard Manet
The Erotic as an Aesthetic Category

Letter in defense of Christina Hoff Sommers sent

to the Los Angeles Times

Psychological Types
The Emotions
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Ethics
Home Page
Copyright (c) 1998, 1999, 2000, 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 Kelley L. Ross, Ph.D.
All Rights Reserved

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 1

While it may be objected that the adventures of Beldar Conehead are fictional, we now have a longer,
somewhat less fictional version of them in the narrative of Dave Barry:
So I have been blessed with many blessings. I should be happy. And I am, sort of. But I can't
escape the nagging feeling that I'm not really happy, at least not the way I was when I was
young and carefree and basically an idiot.
I especially have this feeling when it's my turn to drive the soccer practice car pool for my
daughter, Sophie, and some of her teammates. This involves spending up to an hour in a
confined space with a group of fourteen- and fifteen-year-old girls, all high school freshmen,
listening to them discuss the concerns that girls of that age have, such as racism, bullying and
global climate change.
I am of course kidding. Here are the top ten concerns of my daughter and her friends, based
on their car pool conversations:
1. Boys
2. The hideous totally unwarranted cruelty of high school teachers.
3. What this one boy did in this one class OMG.
4. Some video on some Internet thing that is HILARIOUS.
5. Hair.
6-10. Boys.
All of the girls discuss all of these topics simultaneously at high volume while at the same
time (they are excellent multi-taskers) thumbing away on their phones and listening to the
radio, which is cranked way up so they can hear it over the noise they're making.
So they're very loud. They're spooking cattle as far away as Scotland. But here's the thing: It's
a happy noise. These girls are the happiest people I know. Everything makes them laugh.
They love everything, except the things they hate, and they love hating those things. They
literally cannot contain their happiness: It explodes from them constantly in shrieks and
shouts, enveloping them in a loud cloud of pure joy. It gets even louder when the radio plays
their favorite song -- which is basically every song -- and they all sing joyfully along at the

top of their lungs.

[Live Right and Find Happiness (Although Beer is Much Faster), Life Lessons and Other
Ravings from Dave Barry, G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2015, pp.3-5]
The high politically correct consciousness of this passage is evident in the circumstance that Barry is
driving the girls to soccer practice rather than to shopping. Of course he then spoils it with the sexist term
"freshmen," rather than "first year [genderless] students." This scene, except for the details of the
conversation, is well illustrated in the Coneheads. Indeed, one of the loud songs enjoyed by Beldar's
daughter and her friends, and obviously endured, at the time, with ill grace by Beldar (as Dave Barry
probably has limited tolerance for Katy Perry or Taylor Swift), he later uses to encourage himself in the
midst of a desperate contest for his own life. Thus, teeny-bopper values triumph in interstellar conflict. As
we might expect.
Return to text

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 2

Dawn [Prabhsa], the daughter of Prajpati, took the form of a celestial nymph
and appeared before them [Fire, Wind, Sun, & Moon, her brothers]. Their hearts
were moved by her and they poured out their seed. Then they went to Prajpati,
their father, and they said, 'We have poured out our seed. Let it not be lost.'
Prajpati made a golden bowl, an arrow's breadth in height and in width, and he
poured the seed into it. Then the thousand-eyed god with a thousand feet and a
thousand fitted arrows arose.
From the Kaus.taki Brhman.a, in Hindu Myths, translated with an Introduction by Wendy
Doniger O'Flaherty, Penguin Books, 1975, p.31, cf. Hindu gods

We don't see a lot of women showing up naked for dates, although there was one episode of the television
show Blind Date (1999-2006) where the woman knocked at the man's apartment door naked from the
waist up. She didn't have beer, but she certainly got the fellow's attention.
We might consider a thought experiment using the opposite of this, where a naked women receives the
visit of a man. This certainly happens with people who know each other, and may have even happen in
casual dating if it involves nudists. We see something of the sort in the current television show Dating
Naked (2014, 2015), which does not involve nudists, and has even involved a woman who had never even
seen a naked man (the date didn't last long). The show also experienced a risable lawsuit from a woman
whose genitals the show, at one point, failed to pixilate out. Presumably they had not been pixilated for
her date, the camera crew, or possible bystanders.

A more interesting version of this to consider would not involve a

date at all, but instead a form of professional meeting. In detective
stories, or spy stories, there is usually a scene where the client
meets the detective, or the detective or the spy meets someone,
often a Powerful Person, who is a suspect, ally, or villain. These
encounters may occur at offices, homes, lairs, or island fortresses
(in the case of super-villains).
A male detective who greeting a female client naked in his office
probably would witness her exiting the office forthwith. Even if
the detective were young and handsome, it likely would not make
any difference. The opposite, however, might give us pause. A
man, of any age, unless religiously devout, entering the office of a
young, or even mature but handsome, naked woman might be
made uncomfortable, but in a very different way. He might think
he should not stare, and it would all be very strange, but the
prospect of having a good look at her would militate strongly
against a precipitous departure. It would leave any of us, including women, curious about what was going
on.
In other contexts, we see something close to this in some movies. In Basic Instinct [1992], directed by
Paul Verhoeven, Sharon Stone receives Michael Douglas in her home. She is not naked, but in changing
clothes she is aware that he can see her in a mirror, where he both sees her naked and realizes that she will
be wearing no underwear for the interview at the police station. He will not be surprised when she
(famously) flashes her genitals during the interrogation. As it happens, Mae West (1893-1980)
accomplishes much the same mystification of men without the slightest bit of explicit sexuality
(prohibited at the time) -- although her dialogue was dense with innuendo, much of it still fondly
remembered.
We see an example of a fully naked reception in the erotic and semi-comic science fiction movie
Barbarella [1968], where Jane Fonda (whose husband, Roger Vadim, directed the movie), lounging in
her fur-lined spaceship, is interviewed for a rescue mission. This is not done in person, so we don't have a
man physically entering her ship, and the scene is curiously sexless; so, in terms of the era, it is not so
remarkable. The genre isn't a detective or spy story, but the agent-on-a-mission plot bears comparison to
both.
Outside of pornography, no one seems to have gone full boat this with motif. We do sometimes get
suggestive forms, as in the James Bond character of Pussy Galore (in the novel, 1959, and movie, 1964,
of Goldfinger); but Pussy never gets to display anything remotely close to the eponymous body part
indicated by the double entendre of her name -- the innuendo must carry the sexual weight.
In 2015, we might say there was a missed opportunity. In Mission: Impossible -- Rogue Nation, the lovely
Rebecca Ferguson receives Tom Cruise and his associate at a house in Morocco. They find her in the
swimming pool, where she is actually practicing holding her breath, for reasons that become clear later.
She emerges from the pool to greet them, in a way reminiscent of Ursula Andress coming out of the
ocean to meet Sean Connery in Dr. No [1962]. Now, Rebecca Ferguson has no reason to be wearing a
swim suit in her own home (or whatever), and as an accomplished secret agent she is not going to be
embarrassed or bashful about her body, whose charms we can imagine she has used on many occasions in
her work. At the same time, we are uncertain about her attitude or loyalty in the story, and it would be
consistent with her character to keep Tom Cruise off guard by confronting him with her full sexuality -this is already suggested by having her wearing no more than the swim suit. Of course, in 1962, Urusla
Andress could not have been shown naked, and in our own time nudity, which was not unsual in the
1970's (a particularly lush example, both male and female, was in Altered States), has retreated from most
mainstream movies. It was a shame not to see it here.
Pin-up art, which can be mildly or strongly pornographic, and frequently involves some degree of nudity,

and is alway intended to be erotic, often trades on themes of powerful

women, usually as warriors or as having supernatural powers, i.e.
vampires, etc. The warrior women, or Amazon, versions may end up
faintly comical, in the sense that we are given to imagine the women,
who sometimes wear fragments of body armor, nevertheless are
almost always bare breasted, and usually voluptuously so (as we see
at left in the image by Claudio Aboy, from his collection Voluptuous).
But it is hard to imagine such a woman rushing into battle, bearing
close-quarter, shock weapons like spears, swords, or axes, without the
slightest protection for parts of the body the most exposed, sensitive,
and vulnerable. They are never scarred in the artworks, a condition
that warriors tend to pick up on various parts of their bodies, whether
they've been protected or not.
A similar problem occurs, in homoerotic form, in the movie 300
[2006], which is supposed to be about the defense of Thermopylae by
the 300 Spartans in 480 BC. Thus, unlike the heavily armored
hoplites of Greek warfare, the movie Spartans run into battle all but naked. This looks good if you just
want to admire their bodies, but even the Spartans were more practical than that. Even so, the hard
muscles of a man's chest at least suggest some resistance to weapons. Large, soft breasts do not.
But there is power and there is power. The Powerful Person who is a naked woman, luxuriating in her
island fortress, is the sort of thing that seems no more unlikely than most of the rest of the goings-on in
things like James Bond movies, or science fiction. Such a person need go into no battle and yet may be
absolutely confident in her power, to the extent of enjoying her nudity, without feeling threatened by any
robust visiting male. Indeed, to the extent that she can, in effect, taunt him with her sexuality, she displays
her power all the more convincingly. Sharon Stone certainly does it in Basic Instinct, without full nudity.
In general, women may be more reluctant to go naked -- a problem for all nudist colonies -- out of a sense
of vulnerability. The naked Powerful Woman may display herself in absolute confidence of her
invulnerability.
As a thought experiment, what we may see is that the prospect of the man or the woman being naked
produces a very different impression. This because the sexual allure of the female is different from that of
the male, and the nature of this is independent of social conventions about "gender" because it is much
like the homoerotic appeal that we see in something like the movie 300. The erotic becomes magical,
glamorous, and even numinous. These all add something to the merely physical, whether one is talking
about women or men, although for heterosexuals, even heterosexual women, these valences tend to
belong to women. This not because of "objectification," as the feminists would say, for the magical,
glamorous, and numinos character of these bodies goes beyond what can be accounted for in physical
existence. While it can be said that this is "imposed" by, for instance, the "gaze" of the male, and so is
literally "in the eye of the beholder," it is also something perceived by women and, as noted, is even
"imposed" by some males or other males. It is a version of divinity and indeed goes back to beliefs about
the gods. In Indian mythology, the mere sight of a naked goddess can produce spontaneous ejaculation in
less powerful men, even her own brothers, as in the epigraph above.

With the venerable porn star Christy Canyon at right, we

see the deliberate effort to present her in terms that are
beautiful, erotic, and glamorous, precisely to sell her
pornographic movies, since this is from advertising for one
of her movies. Spontaneous ejaculation would go a little
beyond what she would like (since it removes the reason to
buy the movie), but the power to produce an erotic
response, and climax, is clearly the goal. Her pose, often
called the "S" pose, is itself erotic in history and effect, yet
this version of it manages to conceal all the features that
are specifically prohibited by "indecent exposure" laws. It
is thus about as modest as one can get while
simultaneously presenting a woman who is obviously
naked. Yet the erotic power of the result is different in kind
from the naked women, sitting at a Thanksgiving dinner, in
the advertising picture at the top of this note. Even
Canyon's large hair has an erotic implication, despite the
irrelevance of hair to actual sex. It is part of the aura, even
as it provides a nimbus around Canyon's head and upper
body.
Porn stars, of course, would like nothing better than to be
seen as goddesses, although their social position, even in
tolerant times, is a serious cut below other kinds of actors.
With those who might give them more credit for what they do, there is an element of embarrassment, and
of worry of transgressing the political correctness imposed by anhedonic feminism. Even the feminism
that embraces "sex workers," doesn't seem to have much effect on this dynamic. But somehow, among
"scenes I'd like to see," Christy Canyon receiving James Bond for an intereview, in this pose, with no
intention of bedding him, stands pretty high.
Return to Text

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 3

On the left here is the symbolic system described by anthropologists for the Purum tribe, who live around
the border of India and Burma. On the right is the symbolic system for the Gogo tribe of Tanzania. Both
of these are rather far from Greece, and Burma is separated from China, geographically and historically,
by mountains and jungle.

Purum dual
symbolic system
Right

Left

Male

Female

Masculine

Feminine

Moon

Sun

Sky

Earth

East

West

Life

Death

Good death

Bad death

Odd

Even

Family

Strangers

Wife-givers

Wife-takers

Gods,
ancestral
spirits

Mortals

Back

Front

Kin

Affines

Private

Public

Superior
Above
Auspicious
South
Sacred

Both these tables are from Right Hand,

Left Hand, The Origins of Asymmetry in
Brains, Bodies, Atoms and Cultures, by
Chris McManus [Harvard University Press,
2002, pp.25-28]. McManus is not
particularly interested in gender
differences. They come up because he is
interested in what is associated with right
and left. The universal association looks
like the right and the male with what is
good, clean, and sacred, while the left and
the female with what is bad, unclean, and
profane.
In these tribal cultures, as in the Bible,
there is always intense concern with the
pollution attendant upon menstruation.
Menstruating women are often segregated
in a dedicated house, typically as far away
as possible from any sacred precincts. With
the Purum, even ordinary houses are
ritually laid out, on right and left, to reflect
the systematic dualism -- e.g. the right side
private and family, the left side public and
for strangers. The women of the household,
of course, do not live on the public side,
mixing with strangers, but on the private
side. Symbolically that is the masculine.
This may be the essence, in fact, of
patriarchy. Women represent what is wild,
strange, and dangerous; but they are
properly contained in the male sphere. In
the Middle East, of course, the private and
women's part of a house is the h.arm (i.e.
"harem"), "forbidden, sacred" etc. Women
who are not properly contained and
controlled do become an active source of
trouble and danger. A witch, indeed, an
independent woman, is a conduit for death,
evil spirits, sickness, poisons, and all the
negative features that the Purum, Gogo,
and Pythagoreans assign to the feminine.

A noteworthy inversion here involves the

sun and moon. The Purum, like the
Inferior
Japanese and Germans, take the sun as
female and the moon as male. What is
more familiar is the Egyptian, Babylonian,
Below
and Greek assignment of the sun as male.
For the Egyptians and Babylonians the
Inauspicious moon was also male, but the Greek view of
the moon as female has now been
enshrined in the modern "valorization of
North
the feminine" because of the
correspondence and quite reasonable
Profane
comparison of the lunar month to

Gogo dual
symbolic system
Right

Left

Male

Female

Man

Woman

Clean hand

Dirty hand

Strength

Weakness

Superior

Inferior

Clever

Stupid

Side man lies Side woman

on during
lies on during
intercourse
intercourse
Side on
which men
buried

Side on which
women
buried

Bow

Calabash,
drum

Bushclearing

Seed-planting

Threshing

Winnowing,
grinding

East

West

South

North

Up

Down

Ritual side of Side of house

house
with midden
Fertility,
health

Death,
sickness

Cool

Hot

menstruation -- menses is simply the Latin word for "months" (sing. mensis). It is noteworthy where we
get these kinds of variations cross-culturally and where we don't.
Return to text

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 4

In the minds of feminists like Gerda Lerner, men and women are, of course, naturally identical in every
way, except for actual genitals. One curious feature of this is the idea that the hair of men and women is
naturally of the same length and that cutting it at different lengths is a cultural imposition.
Now, anybody can cut their hair; and obviously women
could cut it very short and men could let it grow out. This
doesn't happen very often in history. Buddhist monks and
nuns both shave their heads. Otherwise, we tend to get
the universal stereotype that women's hair is relatively
longer than men's, as we see in the image of a typical
Ancient Egyptian married couple at right. Here, in
relation to the styles of the 1950's, the man's hair is rather
long; but his wife has hair down to her (Empire) waist.
We see the same thing in the XIX Dynasty sculpture
from the Metropolitan Museum of Art below. This is
especially noteworthy when one finds feminists actually
arguing that short hair for men and long hair for women
was culturally "created" either by St. Paul (those
Christians, or Jews, again) or by the Roman Army.
Jews and Romans did seem to have an ideal of hair
length for men that was shorter than they often saw among Gentiles or Barbarians, respectively. Much
later, more traditional cultures, such as tribal Navajos, sometimes are noted being "long hairs" in relation
to current Western fashions. Western fashion, however, also changes. One sees very long hair (often
wigs, like the Egyptians) among European men in the 17th and early 18th centuries. This is striking when
women at the same time typically wore their hair up, giving the visual impression of short hair among
women and long hair among men. Men's hair often gets shorter with changes in political climate. Thus,
Parliamentary forces in the English Civil War were called "round heads," because they cut their hair
short, as opposed to the typical 17th century fashions of the Royalist "Cavaliers." Similarly, the French
Revolution introduced the 19th century European norm of short hair on men. In both these cases, there
seems to be a moralistic reaction against the implied sensuality of the earlier fashion -- a sensuality that
might seem effeminate (this is also when men wore lace), except that its associations were with the
violent values of armed aristrocrats (as when the Spartans let their hair grow when at war, implying that
war was luxurious).

Meanwhile, it is obvious that, in general, women are able

to grow their hair out considerably longer than men can.
Also, while there is baldness among both women and men,
"female pattern baldness" involves thinning, while "male
pattern baldness" involves the total loss of hair. It has been
experimentally demonstrated that male pattern baldness is
caused by testosterone.
Male and female bodies differ in so many ways that a
lengthy book would be necessary to detail them all with
their causes and suggested purposes. I've commented on
some of this elsewhere. That women have substantilly less
body hair is conspicuous. More subtle is the difference in
the quality of the skin. Women's skin feels and generally
looks different than men's. A clearer indication of this
emerges with aging. Women develop "cellulite," or a sort
of orange peel or cottage cheese quality in their skin,
which is really a characteristic of the underlying fat and
not merely of the skin. Men rarely develop this
characteristic without disease or artificial hormone
manipulation. Thus, women may be able to cut their hair
and look more masculine, or at least boyish, but once the
cellulite develops, there is little that can really be done
about it. It betrays how different the female body is in
terms of one's flesh itself.
Return to text

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 5

Or maybe not "the most offensively 'sexist' thing about Jung's theory." In a new book, The Essential
Difference, The Truth About the Male and Female Brain [Basic Books, 2003], Cambridge professor of
psychology and psychiatry Simon Baron-Cohen argues that the female brain, in general, is specialized
for emphathy (eros), while the male brain, in general, is specialized for systemizing (logos). BaronCohen is at some pains to denounce sexism, racism, "classism," stereotyping, and oppression, so I gather
that sex differences (and Baron-Cohen says "sex," not "gender") are no longer sexist. He is not careful
enough about stereotyping, however, since in a world of limited knowledge, good generalizations about
types are good clues about what to expect in individuals. But if he is liable to be accused of sexism just
for saying that, in general, male and female brains are different, chances are he is not going to put too fine
a point on it. On the other hand, talking about "classism" makes him sound like a Marxist. "Essential" in
the title, however, sets a heterodox tone, since the bien pensants ritually denounce "Essentialism."

The cover photo of the book nicely illustrates the thesis [click on the
image for a larger popup]. The male face above, with a blue tint, and the
female face below, with a red tint, have very different expressions. The
male eyes are narrowed and looking away, while the female eyes are wide,
looking straight on camera, and have relatively dilated pupils -- usually a
sign of friendly or receptive emotions. The female face thus possibly
displays empathy, while the male face is clearly concerned about, or
tracking, something else. The small pupils, which improve focus, make the
male eyes seem hard. Also, the largest area of skin in the male face is the
forehead, while that of the female face is the cheek. The former may imply
thought, while the latter, with the softest large area
on the face, invites a kiss. The effect of the two
images is striking, even as the blue and the red
(cool and warm) recall the blue and pink that
conventionally mark male and female babies.
We may be seeing a female
association of the face in the Mayan
glyph and affix for "woman" (ixik),
which is also used as a grammatical
"feminine agentive prefix" (ix-) in
the language. The Mayan languages
do not otherwise have grammatical
inflection for gender. The masculine agentive prefix, aj-,
which can also be used in the common gender in association
with ix- (i.e. ixaj-), is of much more abstract form. While
the female glyph does not have any overt sexual overtones
to me -- indeed, it is hard to see it as distinctively female at all -- it is striking that such an image was
taken by the Maya as representive of the feminine. If there is something "sexist" in this, it was hardly
something cooked up or "socially constructed" by Romans, Jews, or Christians.
Return to text

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 6

Confucius says, "Women and servants are most difficult to deal with. If you are familiar with them, they
become insolent. If you keep your distance, they resent it" [Analects 17:25]. Here we definitely see the
issue of status, and its conflict with closeness.
Return to text

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 7

There is also the awkward possibility, which is the kind of thing we see in hierarchy groups in mammals
(as in chimpanzees or wolves), that the sexes compete among their own sex to establish status and
hierarchy, while the two sexes do not compete directly with each other. The relationship between the
sexes is simply that the two hierarchies match up: The highest status ("alpha") male and female pair off
with each other, and so on down the line. This is rather like what we see in many human relationships, as
in the frequent pairing of movie stars with movie stars, even as the rewards for achievement, like the
Oscars for acting, have different categories by sex.
If there is anything natural for humans about the intra-sexual competition, having males and females then
compete against each other could produce a great deal of confusion and conflict, as competitive signals
are confused with non-competitive sexual signals. Indeed, this is pretty much what we see in the legal and
moral quagmire of sexual harrassment law, which contrasts with the much older and universal human
practice of reducing confusion by separating the sexes, or at least having them in different kinds of
categories where they do not directly compete. Of course, the latter was the more recent solution in
Western societies when males and female both sought employment in businesses, but then the female jobs
(e.g. secretary, nurse) generally had an overall lower status ("pink collar") than the male jobs (e.g.
executive, doctor). Where some social change or legal social engineering affects that phenomenon, what
can happen in response is "male flight" from newly feminized categories. That may be a factor right now
in declining male enrollment and graduation from college, even as female enrollment and graduation have
surged.
Return to text

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 8

The age old dependence of human females on males, although very nearly the root of all evil to feminism,
nevertheless is simply transferred, not abolished, by most feminist political agendas. Thus, if the ancient
principle was that women have the right to be protected and supported, political feminism absolutely
agrees with this but merely wishes to see the job discharged by the government rather than by fathers,
husbands, gentlemen, or religious charity. Thus we suddenly had in the 60's the notion of "welfare rights,"
which no one had taken very seriously previously, that women had an absolute entitlement to government
support of their children, however irresponsibly they may have come by them. Similarly, in the 80's we
had a vast expansion of anti-discrimination law, that women had a right to federal civil rights protection
from unwanted sexual proposals, nude pictures, dirty jokes, or even vaguely "sexist" language in the
workplace.
As Katie Roiphe [at right] has noted (The Morning After, Sex,
Fear, and Feminism on Campus, 1993), much of this is a return to
Victorian ideas that women are too innocent and fragile even to be
exposed to certain words and images. The only difference is that,
where before women would be protected by chaperones, relatives,
and decent society, now they can seek protection from Federal
Prosecutors. Similarly, Camille Paglia sees the program and
personalities of anti-porn feminists as little different from the
religious fervor and anhedonia of Carry Nation. What this may
show is no less than the phenomenon noted above, of the
reemergence of archetypes, after they have been suppressed in one
form, in different ones. Since this reemergence is in a political
context of support for statism and the expansion of the power of

government, its irony is eclipsed by the danger of its support for ongoing leftist and authoritarian assaults
on freedom.
Return to text

Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 9

The Three Graces (at right by Vincenzo Cucca) are

Euphrsyn, Thalea, and Aglaa, "Joy, Bloom, and
Brilliance"; the Hours Dik, Eunoma, and Eirn, "Justice,
Good Law, and Peace"; the Fates, Klth, Lkhesis and
trpos; and the Furies, Alktn, Tisphon, Megara.
The Hours is also a 2002 movie, starring Nicole Kidman,
Julianne Moore, and Meryl Streep. Nicole Kidman won an
Oscar as Best Actress for her role, in which she is
unrecognizable in makeup as Virginia Woolf. Although the story
is about three women, the allusion of the title is evidently simply
to time and not to the Greek goddesses. The movie is of interest
for its gender theme, which evidently is that Virginia Woolf had
bouts of insanity because the times did not allow her to express
her lesbianism. There is almost nothing in the Virginia Woolf
part of the movie to suggest this, except for one woman-onwoman kiss; but then the other (fictional) stories in the movie, of
Julianne Moore in 1951 and of Meryl Streep recently, seem to
make the case. Julianne Moore nearly commits suicide and does
end up abandoning her husband and children, evidently because
of lesbian feelings, though (again) we see no more than one kiss.
Meryl Streep is "out" and living openly with another woman,
and is also looking after a poet friend, played by Ed Harris, who
is dying of AIDS. Julianne Moore turns out to have been Harris's
mother. We are left to understand that Streep, who keeps being
called "Mrs. Dalloway," after the novel that Woolf is seen
writing (and Moore seen reading) in her part of the movie, is the
happiest and best adjusted of the women. However, she doesn't
always seem so happy, and she also seems to have devoted much of her life to the Ed Harris character,
who repays her devotion by committing suicide in front of her. As it happens, Woolf and the Ed Harris
character are apparently the truly creative people in the movie, both of whom are seen committing
suicide. One is easily left with the impression that creativity perhaps requires suffering and inner conflict
to a degree that might bring on insanity and suicide. This would be a counter-current to the more obvious
gay liberation theme, the appropriateness of whose application to Virginia Woolf is beyond my ability to
judge.
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Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 10

A case where the pattern of fours doesn't seem to work at all is with the four boys who are the central
characters in the popular South Park series on the cable network Comedy Central. Kyle (Broflovski),
Stan (Marsh), Kenny (McCormick), and (Eric) Cartman. Kyle and Stan are clearly the central characters
in the group. Kenny usually gets killed in very episode (until recently). Otherwise what he says is usually
unintelligible. Cartman is frequently at odds with the other boys and breaks away to act on his own (for
instance, in the March 2004 send up of Mel Gibson's The Passion of the Christ, Cartman begins his own
neo-Nazi movement) -- he is the only member of the group typically addressed by his last name (not
always affectionately). It is very hard to say whether any of this makes Cartman the leader, joker, master
hunter, or shaman. The same with Kenny, while Stan and Kyle are usually only distinguishable in that
Kyle is Jewish and frequently the butt of Cartman's remarks about Jews. The reason for this indefiniteness
may be in the origin of the characters. Stan and Kyle are stand-ins for the authors of South Park, Trey
Parker and Matt Stone. Archetypally, the group is thus really not four, but two -- the Twins. Kenny and
Cartman were added to fill things out, indeed to get a group of four, but the dynamic is still that of the
Twins. When Kenny dies and Cartman leaves, the Twins are frequently, as it happens, all that is left.
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Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 11

In Egyptian burials, the four Sons of Horus (Imset, Hapi,

Duamutef, and Qebesenuf) are conspicuously associated with the
four chambers of the Canopic Chest, which contains the internal
organs of the deceased (liver, lungs, stomach, and intestines).

In Tutankhamon's tomb, the Canopic Chest was found housed in a wooden

shrine, with four protective goddesses on each of the four sides. Four goddesses
would then seem to be one of the exceptions to our archetypal number rules, but
there is something odd about the group: it is not a group that occurs otherwise in
Egyptian mythology or religious imagery. Isis and Nephthys are sisters, occurring
in the group of four with their brothers Osiris and Seth, but then Neith is a very
ancient goddess with no mythological connection to the first two, and the fourth,
the scorpion goddess Serket, otherwise hardly even turns up in accounts of
Egyptian religion. The four goddesses thus seem to have assembled specifically to
match the symmetry of the Sons of Horus and the Canopic Chest, and indeed there
is a specific association of each goddess with one of the Sons [The Complete
Gods and Goddesses of Ancient Egypt, Richard H. Wilkinson, Thames & Hudson,
2003, p.88].
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Gender Stereotypes and Sexual Archetypes, Note 12

We might consider if there is a mathematical analogy to the archetypal characteristics of the feminine and
the masculine. At the most basic level, negative terms more than positive ones are like the stereotypes
and paradoxes of the feminine. Thus, if the feminine is the opposite (internal, hidden) of what it seems
(external, obvious), this is like negatives which, when multiplied by themselves, become positive. On the
other hand, while the positive/negative opposition would seem to fit the Pythagorean or Chinese sense of
opposities, a gender stereotype of the "negative" for the feminine would seem to be just too, well,
negative. There are more elaborate oppositions in mathematics, for instance between sine and cosine
functions. Sine and cosine functions actually have all the same values, but they are out of phase by 90
degrees. This seems a small difference, but it results in some interesting contrasts. The sine of a negative
angle is equal to the negative sine of the positive angle, but the cosine of a negative angle is the same as
the cosine of the positive angle. Whether or not the angle is negative is thus, we might say, "hidden" by
the value of the cosine. This seems to fit our archetypes, or stereotypes, quite suitably. Even the graphs of
the functions through 360 degrees (2 radians) exhibit an asymmetry for the sine and a symmetry for
the cosine functions, as we might say that even numbers exhibit greater symmetry (or at least
bisymmetry) than odd numbers. This kind of mathematical asymmetry and symmetry also turns up in

quantum mechanics: Asymmetrical wave functions ( ),

which change their sign as two particles are exchanged, are
characteristic of fermions (Fermi-Dirac statistics), which
are the kind of particles (protons, neutrons, electrons) that
constitute matter, while symmetrical wave functions,
which do not change their sign as two particles are
exchanged, are characteristic of bosons (Bose-Einstein
statistics), which are the kind of particles (photons,
gravitons) that transfer energy in the universe. The Greek
stereotype of the feminine as moving and the Indian notion
of the Goddess representing power (Shakti) fit the latter
quite nicely. Indeed, massless bosons like photons and
gravitons spontaneously move at the velocity of light. So,
for what it is worth, we could extend the male/female, Yin/Yang opposition into abstractions
unanticipated by the Greeks, Indians, or Chinese.
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