Within the modern world, both masculinity and femininity do rather poorly, because a machine-world has no need for unique and well-developed individuals, but instead only benefits from automatons which will build and maintain it. Because both of those polarities are ultimately qualitative, they do not fit snugly within a literal description, though we can still try to point at the general difference and essence of each.
Following on Darren Allen's great descriptions of both genders 1, masculinity points to the transcendent: that which can rise above its starting condition through a journey of self-mastery in order to create something more lasting than itself. This can take many forms, such as acts of selfless heroism, beautiful art or music, practical invention, or simply raising a prosperous family.
Masculinity is more disembodied, better suited for abstract realms, and on the contrary, femininity is more embodied, more present, and thus we could say it is immanent. Within human beings, we have the loving mother and the healer as archetypes for deep femininity, and more broadly speaking, we talk about Mother Nature, not Father Nature, to refer to its feminine qualities, the way it sustains life, but also how it is an embodied reality, something experienced through the senses, and ultimately something we cannot fully grasp through our mind. Nature, and woman, is fundamentally a mystery, which we can try to put into words through metaphors, such as we find in poetry, but can never be perfectly captured with literal descriptions.
'Flower' as a generic category either refers to its function, the reproductive part of a plant, or the parts it is made of, its petals and pistils and stem, but neither of those utilitarian descriptions capture the simple and mysterious beauty of the actual flower, that which I experience selflessly, or rather through a softened self, one that doesn't need to get anything from the flower and can simply perceive it as it is.
Coming back to their interaction with the modern world, femininity is doing even more poorly than masculinity, though the latter isn't given much room to properly grow either. The journey of self-overcoming of masculinity isn't allowed to be properly completed, because it requires a phase of death, the low point of the Hero's journey from which real growth can occur. 2
Death is not acceptable within modern society, because it is a collective wholly aligned with the known, that which we can manage with the mind and with methods, in order to appeal to the self through utility. The reason why utility is favored is because ... it is useful, thus it gives the self advantages such as power, convenience, safety, and so on, which are all nice things to have—only a madman would say no to using tools—but when they are the only thing a collective can allow, then it denies the reality of death, pain, uncertainty, all of which are inevitable and can be instructive when accepted.
Everything in society must be an addition from the past, all problems must be solved with new methods, and what is new is obviously better than the past. These are some of the myths of our society, and while they can solve a great deal of technical problems, they create a massive blind spot in our relationship with Reality, since the latter contains uncomfortable truths such as Death, suffering and limitations.
I wouldn't necessarily say that Death and suffering are absolutely necessary in order to grow, but in practice, those who run away from them do not become mature human beings who can handle the hardships of life and live for something greater than themselves, and instead become men-children who depend on the techno-wombs of the modern world for everything in their life. Death is the teacher, and its lesson is ultimately Love, i.e. feeling and living for something greater than just your self. Language reflects that self-overcoming quite beautifully, as the word "courage" has its root as 'cor', for heart—the French word for heart is "coeur"—because to face great fears, one must also hold great love.
What about femininity, and why do I say that it is doing even worse than masculinity? To start with, the modern world has no use for embodiment whatsoever, because it isn't useful to it. To be fully present in your body is one of the great joys of being alive, something which connects you with your immediate environment and the people around you, but that is not a manageable quantity, because it is an experience of qualities. Women, being more embodied than men, suffer greatly from living in modern times, where we live our lives entirely mediated through the screen, and dependent on institutions and their complex requirements.
The game played out by the modern world is that of power, a very abstract form of power that has done away with much of the coercion of the past, and which has refined control and scaling to a science. 3 This isn't exactly a masculine endeavor, because as mentioned previously the masculine is characterized by a journey of growth through self-overcoming, but such an abstract, complicated world certainly benefits men, who tend to be better at power games and navigating abstract realms. The feminine on the other hand couldn't care less about control or even "winning" per se, because thinking in terms of "winning" and "losing" requires you to split up from Reality and try to control it, which is contrary to how the feminine operates.
As such, because the games that surround us are all about control, the feminine experiences other losses much more strongly, such as:
Which is to say that sensitive people feel the loss of close relationships, and feeling a part of a context that connects people together, much more strongly than others, to the point that many can barely function in the alienating and cold modern world, whether they are men or women. 5
Because femininity is more subtle than masculinity, its loss isn't perceived as acutely. For instance, weak men are viscerally repulsive to women and men alike. A guy who does not have his life in order, who spends all his waking time on the internet, video games, or porn, and who does not have any aspiration besides sustaining his cycle of distraction and hedonism is obviously seen as a bad example, as is the macho man who treats women—or people in general—like objects, or life like a massive game of acquiring things for his own selfish needs. Men, when they deviate from their path of self-mastery in service of something good, appear more obviously corrupt, which is why in public discourse one can talk about toxic masculinity, but not about toxic femininity.
Which is what exactly? The difficulty is that merely talking about toxic femininity is likely to attract a lot of attention from women who will do everything they can to shut you down, because that is exactly how toxic femininity works. Whereas egoic men play power games in obvious ways, almost to the point of satire, egoic women play their power games in concealed ways. Gossiping, spreading rumors, bickering, social exclusion, cancel culture, all of those are ways of influencing others in a way that is favorable to you, without having to explicitly confront anyone directly, and those are the type of games of toxic femininity—and I might add, of weak men who do not know how to confront others in healthy ways.
On top of that, modern feminism carries many of the same dynamics of toxic femininity listed above. I wouldn't group all of feminism under that category, as there have been many waves of feminism, and many different groups who had quite significantly different opinions from one another, but modern feminism is a very common way nowadays for women who want to get power within the system to get in a position of relative influence over others.
This is not to say that women have become the privileged group in our times, this is certainly not the case in general, but instead I am saying that feminism encourages women to shape themselves like men in order to fit into the system, playing the same games as they do and possibly come out on top, without questioning the structures themselves. Women are supposed to chase career goals and financial success, whether they want to or not, a value system which ultimately benefits the technological system, a system which receives very little scrutiny compared to the dreaded patriarchy.
While there is a lot to be outraged about women's conditions in the modern world, as well as in the past, which indeed tended towards patriarchies and was thus abusive to women all over the world, because feminists cannot afford to seriously question, let alone oppose the very system which gives them their power and influence in the first place, they indirectly promote a system which ends up alienating women from their embodied, loving nature, and forces them to take part in male structures, which is why by and large, the most powerful people in the world still are men, because women are too empathetic and embodied to function in our abstract, alien environments.
As such, feminism as it is understood today is largely a masculine, power-driven worldview, which is why feminists hardly talk about love, embodiment, empathy, nature, art, but pretty much always talk about power games, domination, outrage, etc. The loss of femininity is so subtle that people cannot even tell that feminism has very little to do with femininity, even though anyone who can detect the dreadful state of love in our times can spot that immediately.
Some feminists say that what they advocate for is equality, not the domination of women over men, which is a good intention which some genuinely believe in, but in practice, even equality tends to benefit men over women, as strange as it might sound, and more importantly, the technological system at the end of the day. The real equality of men and women is that they are complementary, not that they can do the exact same things at the exact same standards, in the exact same way. The latter is not equality, it is homogenization of meaningful differences into a mono-gender, which is what the system promotes, because it turns people into replaceable parts in order to operate.
When men and women are made equal, i.e. their domains vanish and they are made to work on the same things, then the result is that man's stronger need to master himself and his environment, his innate drive for improvement and competition, and his greater ability for abstraction tend to make him better at performing the tasks of the system than women, which is why those working in sciences, tech and finance are overwhelmingly men in our times, as is the case in other non-physical domains, such as playing chess.
Of course a woman could be very good at mathematics, and there certainly are several great female chess players, but most women are not interested in those things first of all, in part because as feminists say little girls are not encouraged to pursue those things, but mainly because women are innately more embodied, more social, more loving, and therefore less abstract and less structured than men, and so less interested in those activities. Women are more romantic and tend to strive for a simpler life, whereas men strive for mastery of difficult environments, and living up to their potential.
A truly egalitarian society would praise such feminine qualities. Think for instance of what makes a good mother: the deep care and attention given to her children, the unconditional love despite all the hardships she goes through, the sense of peace that radiates from her, and the devotion to her husband and her family. Of course women can do a lot more things than just be mothers, there is no problem in allowing a woman to focus on her career if that is what she so wishes, but my point is that our society only praises works which are transcendent, those which leave a trace in History such as the masterpieces in art, or the inventions that build our current world, and the activities that benefit the technological system, and pays next to no attention to the mountain of everyday care which a woman can provide to her family and those around her.
Praising the few women who manage to acquire power within the system isn't a celebration of femininity, because again it has to squash women into becoming men, since feminine qualities are at best useless to it, at worst a huge disadvantage. Try being a successful business owner if you are someone who has much empathy for those working for you, and see how far you can go. Whenever women are involved in office work, the fact that they are a woman tends to spill in their professional life, which is why they tend to be deeply unhappy—though they have no idea why—or not very interested in being competent at their job, or they are terrible at leadership, being unable to say 'no' to some and provide a clear direction for others to follow for instance, all of which is why, by and large, the ones at the top remain men, despite all the talks about 'equality'.
The masculine and the feminine as qualitative poles have no place in the technological system, much like how wild nature is constantly destroyed and domesticated, such that only a harmless version of either can be used for the purposes of society. Women have suffered from the effects of civilization far more than men, and as such it is somewhat understandable that they blame us men for all the problems in the world. Men should listen to the pain behind those words, without internalizing the shame and guilt that might come with them, because after all, civilization is not built from fully developed and conscious men, but from soldiers, technicians and automatons who can blindly obey the orders of their respective society in order to spread their influence, and the few tyrants who stir the ship.
The current climate of gender discourse is incredibly toxic, but needless to say that such conflicts will never address the root of the problems, which is on the collective level the unconscious machinic system which restricts our freedom and allows unconscious monsters to thrive, and on the individual level the vastly egoic tendencies to reject the Other and shape everyone and everything around us to our selfish liking, without any consideration whatsoever for their own needs.
Men and women are different, and to reject such a claim is insanity. But they aren't so different that they cannot understand one another, and feel the other from within, which is the basis of true Love. A sane world would celebrate the differences between men and women without the need to deform one group into the other, and they would each have their respective strengths, their respective domains, which the other could occasionally step into if it is ever needed, without feeling the need to impose its own law.
Unfortunately, we do not live in a sane world, and as such, the only place that men and women can have real agency is in their personal relationships. It is only in those intimate exchanges that Love emerges in, the mysterious union of embodied polarities, something which the system has no need of, and no understanding of anyway, because it only deals with formalizable knowledge, not mysterious qualities. If the core of the technological system is control, then the core of Love is self-softening, such that one does not compelled to control Reality or other people, and is able to experience something beyond one's self.
Even without the company of others, such a move of self-softening is always available in how we relate to our body: control or feeling, mind or presence? Because after all, it is in the body that gender expresses itself. Quality is not some spectral force that hovers around material existence, it is material, but here we must remind ourselves that there is a tremendous difference between matter, physicality, and the body, and the ideas of our mind about those things. The (isolated) mind sees the body as a set of parts it can dissect and causally relate with one another, but when we experience the body from within, it becomes something totally different, it is the source of power and vitality, the impulse to laugh and explore, the felt empathy at someone else's pain, and so much more.
The reason why gender is so intellectualized in our times, to the point of being seen as an absurdity that doesn't even exist, is because we have become so intellectualized that we cannot feel the mystery of our body. If we did, we wouldn't need to talk so much about genders, we would simply love one another. Only the hard, alienated mind sees division and complication everywhere it looks upon. Love on the other hand is ultimately quite simple, for those who can softly feel.
1 Such as his piece on 'Man and woman'
2 To see an elaboration of this point, and why our culture might be so obsessed with the Hero's journey, see also River Kenna's essay on how the Hero's journey is a jammed door.
3 Or as Jacques Ellul would call it, a Technique.
4 This one is interesting because women tend to be far more agreeable than men, so in a way they are "better" at fitting in institutions. But problems inevitably manifest in their lives if they decide to compromise on themselves, which is why modern women are often considered moody or drama queens, often have eating disorders or chronic illnesses, have life-crippling depression which they cope with using social media, the internet, food or drugs, feel constantly anxious, and overall harbor a deep sense of shame in themselves, or general hatred for the world. They have a visceral feel that something is wrong, but instead of seeing the system and its games for what they are, women try to fit themselves inside that unreal world regardless, which can only end poorly. Of course all these symptoms occur in modern men too, but men have more options to escape from this reality by 1) putting all their attention in their career and succeeding in it, and 2) engaging in surrogate activities like sports, video games, and whatever new thing the modern world can manufacture. Men tend to be better at distracting themselves, and better at being alone too, so they handle the unreal nature of the modern world "better" in a narrow sense. But of course, men and women are ultimately wild beings, and nothing wild can survive within the fences of the modern zoo, which must castrate and domesticate all people in order for them to stay compliant, so neither side wins out in our times.
5 Unless this wasn't clear, sensitivity is a beautiful strength, but it is not rewarded in modern societies. Sensitive people are more empathetic and thus more loving, and more creative because of their depth and breadth of perception. But within the modern world, it becomes a curse which makes people highly sensitive to the dysfunctions and suffering in our society, far more prone to people-pleasing, and so it creates the all too familiar archetype of the woman who keeps giving to everyone around her but who receives nothing in exchange, and who might eventually swing all the way to the other end, the incredibly cold and cruel woman who has decided that all men are trash and the only way forward in society is to give all power to women rulers. A tragic tale of unmet love.
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Gender Masculinity Technosystem Embodiment Herosjourney
2026-09-16