Masculinity and femininity

Here’s a spicy one, which is lengthier than the other entries, and which I have decided to put in later in this post because I do not wish people to parse through the post and only label my thoughts without engaging in them.

1 - Introduction

Within the modern world, I would say that masculinity and femininity are both doing rather poorly, because again a machine-world has no need for unique and well-developed individuals, but instead only benefits from automatons who will feed it. Because both of these polarities are qualities, they do not fit snuggly 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 ⁵ and translating them to my understanding and my own vocabulary, I would say that 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, 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: a mystery, which we can try to put into words with metaphors, such as through poetry, but can never be perfectly captured with literal descriptions. There is the lake as an object, a body of water at a certain location in space, but then there is the lake as a full experience, one which gives a sense to anyone who witnesses it of something greater and ultimately weirder than the physical-objective description.

2 - Masculinity and self-overcoming

Coming back to their interaction with the modern world, I would say that 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, as can be seen in the low point of the Hero's journey. ⁶
Death is not acceptable within 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 you advantages like power, convenience, safety, and so on, which are all nice things to have—only a madman would say no to them in every situation whatsoever—but when they are the only thing a collective can allow, then it denies the reality of death, decay and simply shrinkage.
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 society, and while they can solve a great deal of technical problems, they create a massive blindspot in our relationship with Reality, since the latter contains uncomfortable truths such as Death, suffering and limitations.
I am not sure I would go as far as to say that Death and suffering are absolutely necessary in order to grow, but in practice, those who run away from it do not become mature human beings, who can handle the totality of their experience, and instead become manchildren who live in the techno-wombs of the modern world their entire life, not men who can put themselves out there for something greater than their own little comfort.
Death is the teacher, not necessarily what is valuable in and of itself—though I am open to hear the contrary opinion—and the 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” for instance—such that to face great fears, i.e. being courageous, one must also hold great love for someone or something other than yourself.

3 - Femininity and embodiment

This was about masculinity, and how the rejection of Death and suffering stunts the journey of self-overcoming. What about femininity, and why do I say that it is doing even worse? To start with, the modern world has no use for embodiment whatsoever, because it isn't directly useful. 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.
I would summarize the game of the modern world as that of power, through control and scaling. This isn't purely masculine, because as mentioned previously the masculine is about a journey of self-growth, but it certainly benefits men, who tend to be far more masculine than women, a lot more, because they’re 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 the feminine is Reality.
As such, because the games that surround us are all about control, the feminine experiences other losses much more strongly, such as:

Losing out on local community, and also family life, since they are hindrance to a global technological system
Having to deform yourself in order to fit in a hard, controlling world, such as those of the office or academia ⁷
Feeling the daily emotional cuts of rejection, like being rejected when applying for a company, or someone denying an invitation to meet up, etc.

⁸

4 - Feminism and asymmetric losses

Because femininity is more subtle than masculinity, its loss isn’t perceived as strongly. 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, porn, 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—and all other people in fact—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, appear more obviously “wrong”, which is why in public discourse one can talk about toxic masculinity but not 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 how it works: whereas egoic men play power games in obvious ways, egoic women play similar power games in concealed ways. Gossiping, spreading rumors, bickering, social exclusion, cancel culture, all 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.
While I wouldn’t label all of feminism in that category—there have been many waves of feminism, and many different people who I am sure had quite significantly different opinions from one another—there is certainly a lot of the same energy in the current form of feminism. I would describe it as a literal worldview, which is to say that it operates purely through the mind and treats concepts as reality itself, used by alienated women to get power within our system.
While there is a lot to be outraged about women’s conditions in the modern world, the feminist answer consists in finding ways to shape the system so as to make it more favorable to women when it comes to power games, while completely ignoring questions such as the necessity of the system in the first place, and whether women “winning” at power games truly adds to their quality of life. In practice, feminism encourages women to shape themselves like men, playing the same games as they do, so that women can be on top of the hierarchies and thus punish men for the terrible living conditions that women had to suffer for many centuries.
As such, feminism is actually significantly more masculine than it is feminine, which is why feminists never talk about love, embodiment, mystery, art, but pretty 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.

5 - Conclusion

The masculine and the feminine have no place in the modern world, much like how wild nature is constantly destroyed and domesticated, such that only a harmless version of it 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 them for all the problems in the world. Men should listen to the pain behind those words, without internalizing a sense of shame and guilt, because after all, civilization is not built from fully developed and conscious men, but from soldiers and technicians and automatons who can blindly obey the orders of their respective society in order to spread their influence.
The current climate of gender discourse is incredibly, incredibly polarized, 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 see and feel Reality from the other’s perspective, which is the basis of 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 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, whether with people of the same sex or the other. It is only in those intimate exchanges that Love emerges, as can be seen by the fact that the system has no need for Love whatsoever, which is why it is never mentioned in “serious” discussions. If the core of our unreal society is control, then the core of Love is I would say softening, such that one does not compelled to control Reality or other people, and can perceive what the other feels at a given moment. And even in the absence of relationships with other people, such a move of softening is always available in how we relate to our body: control or Love?

Footnotes

³ It is truly amazing how politics can devolve from a 2D space of Left-Right and Libertarian-Authoritarian, which is still reductive of course but allows much more nuance in discourse, to a 1-dimensional spectrum of Left-Right which still allows for some nuance, to eventually a binary ingroup vs outgroup dynamic. One of the biggest losses of mass media is as always, the loss of nuance, and the problem is that when it happens over and over again, people no longer have the ability to discern distinctions for themselves and as such thinking converges to irreconciliable poles.

⁴ Not that hypocrisy shouldn’t be held accountable, but this particular example is notably different in my opinion. To use a computer and complain about them when you have a living situation that affords you to not interact with them is pure hypocrisy. To talk about the dangerous effects that technology have in our lives while living in a world that basically makes it impossible to live without a computer is not, it’s simply pointing out the extent to which the technological prison has covered the planet. There are many aspects of the modern world I don’t interact with and only give a cursory treatment as to why I am not interested in them because ultimately I am not forced to engage with them: consumerism, sports, the news, dating apps, amongst others. But the system as a whole is not avoidable, and neither is computer usage, unless you live in a rural community which is perfectly self-sustainable, which is not my case and I doubt many people can claim that to be true.

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2024-10-27