2. I find the idea that "The weak" could be bred out of humanity, through history, to be quite naive. The problem with "weak" is that we define it socially. To some minds, "weak" is the incapacity to endure assaults day after day. To others, "weak" is the lack of creativity, the incapacity to innovate, the tendency to prefer the tried and tested at the expense of something new.

    Humans are so diverse that they embody all sorts of possible conceptualisations of weakness and strength. Arguably, it is this very diversity that is needed for humans as a group to survive.

    BY CONTRAST, if we look at what Darwin meant by "the fittest" that are assured survival, his conceptualisation is much more tautological than value-laden. The fittest to survive are precisely those that happen to survive any particular environment or conditions. The fittest to survive a very oppressive workplace, for instance, can often be those who do not really register much, emotionally or intellectually. They just do what they're told.
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  3. Let us suppose that it has been established that men are traditionally culturally conditioned to repress their emotions in order to become 'masculine'.

    Some social ramifications of male emotional repression need to be considered. The compulsory divorce from emotions, which turns babies into men, tends to lead to a hankering for the past (specifically for the mother), for emotionality and so on. In this way, (although this will be denied, due to repression), emotionality becomes idealized in the male mind as a possible cure-all. This is why traditional men will hanker after traditional women just as much as they yearn to recover their lost emotionality indirectly -- that is, via a relationship with a very emotional woman.

    Arguably, there are other ways that traditional males might be able to find, to achieve emotional wholeness.

    The right wing agenda of forcing women to become traditional is too costly for women, as this also forces them to divorce themselves from their intellects and from the characteristics that would make them more robust. To require that women fulfill a negative role, as people who exemplify only about one half of the full dimension of being human, simply isn't a healthy solution to the ongoing problem of male emotional repression.
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  4. The patriarchal attitude to sex seems to have originated with men feeling a need to gain control over their emotions in order to be able to set goals and stick to them. The strongest emotions are, of course, sexual. Men feel that they must disavow these sexual emotions in order to be free to make their own decisions, apart from the control of women (who would, potentially, control men through sexuality). So men deny their own sexuality and project sex, as such, into women. But then, this seems like they have earned the bum end of the deal. They have deadened themselves and this doesn't feel good. So they reason that it should be women who deaden themselves, so that males can feel good. This is how women came to be both "the sex" and sexless, at the same time, while many men are unable to have a genuinely intimate relationship with a woman, but resort to pornography.
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  6. The means by which traditional gender relations are maintained is through projective identification.

    Projection is itself a virtually mystical form of transaction, since most people are completely unaware that they are doing it. Patriarchal texts encourage men to deny the parts of their humanity that they are taught to consider "weak" or more specifically "feminine". These qualities, which all of humanity shares, which include self-doubt, sensitivity, the emotions associated with victimisation and so on, are all denied by males in the process of gaining masculinity. They "transcend" these qualities by denying that they have them, whilst at the same time anticipating that women are defined by them. This is projective identification. The process of projecting one's negative qualities into women must itself feel like an experience of elevation, of spiritualisation -- even though it is based on self-delusion (to a very large part, if not entirely). It is most threatening to patriarchal men when strong women demonstrate to these men that their tricks of transcendence and projection are not all that amazing.

    Each tactic of masculine transcendence comes at a cost to women. Those women who understand the intricacies of women's health know that what damages it most is patriarchal projection. The patriarchal investment of negative energies into women also threatens to betray a patriarchal vulnerability. More than often, those women who realise that they have been projected into are also the ones who implicitly understand how and why patriarchal men have been secretly using projective mechanisms.

    These women who know men's "secrets" are a great threat to the whole patriarchal edifice.
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  7. I understand, now, why I run into trouble so often in Judeo-Christian culture. It's because tone is an ultimate modifier, a mode of relating and, ultimately a language of its own. One can speak the same language as another and use the same words, yet due to a slight elevation of tone, one can be communicating on quite the wrong wavelength, with dire consequences.

    My tone is inevitably jubilant and mischievous. I fathom that my outlook on the world may be defined in terms of some kind of paganism. I may write serious words, but often enough I do not mean them in a serious way. That is to say, I believe my political and social criticisms should be taken to heart -- but I would hate myself intensely, all the same, if I were to leave a heavy impression on someone else's psyche, moralistically. Even if taking action against another by means of moral reproof were likely to win my battle for me, I would be unable to do it. I can't take away another's self-determination from him. I would lose my own sense of well-being that way. My sense of pleasure in the world is largely dependent upon another having a sense of pleasure in himself.

    My paganism, although irreverent, has an ethical structure. My mockery does not imply disrespect, but rather a sense of marvel at the unknown. (I hold what I do not yet know in particular religious esteem, much more than what I happen to already know about.) I mock because I seek revelation -- not of the reproving moral sort, but in the form of nature's gradual unfolding.

    Tone is a decoder -- and I have read my own work in two different ways. In the first way, which is the sense in which I originally wrote, I have a sense of the precipitous awakening of consciousness. Reading the same work in a moralistic tone, I find I no longer make sense, even to myself. From a point of view that uses as its backdrop the severity of moral absolutes,my own work looks frivolous, inclined to miss the point and not to hit home with some stinging moral criticism. It seems as if I lack the power of firmer minds, which would immediately condemn the wrongs of the world, whilst compelling "evil-doers" to accept their category of a negative identity in the world.

    Then, finally, I return to myself -- and I realise I'd been reading my own work through an entirely alien prism.
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  8. The tendency to dismiss women's concerns as "silly" is linked psychologically to the fear of men of appearing silly. Nobody wants men to appear silly. Therefore we allow men to release their hot air by attributing silliness to women, thus consolidating their positions in their own minds as "non-silly" people.

    Unfortunately what seems to be of little consequence -- the tendency of puffed up patriarchal men to let off a bit of steam -- has broad implications as to how women are viewed in society.

    * * *

    The thing about conservatives is that they cannot see their perspectives from the outside. They take their views as necessary and hegemonic and they aim to make them that way.  But there is no God, no stabilising mechanism, that would guarantee that their views remain fixed and hegemonic. Secular conservatives are more vulnerable to this fact than religious conservatives are. In the corner of their wee, little minds, they must realise that the cartoons that they hold as archetypal representations of human affairs can be easily dismissed.

    Take Erick Erickson's recent notion of "women backseat drivers" (Obama's advisers)supposedly misdirecting him, according to this ideologue, concerning the last U.S. military intervention. It only takes one woman to come along who is aware that her mode of travelling by car is very different from the one depicted. Her innate ability to compare reality to the gender stereotype of an air-headed "backseat" driver will play havoc with the conservative's goal of stabilising this cartoon within his mind as a depiction of what is serious and necessary about the world.
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  10. Thus spoke Zarathustra is a very shamanic book in that it aims to expand our grasp of otherwise hidden elements of the psyche.It is also a warrior code, with regards to the means by awareness is to be expanded. (One must face the inevitability of one's destruction courageously.) The book suggests that most people live mediocre lives because they choose to preserve themselves. One could say that this tendency to prefer mediocrity to living fully is due to the nature of the "superego", to harness a Freudian concept.

    Superego is the psychological apparatus that cautions us to choose conformity as a way of assuring freedom from death -- i.e. it prevents us from defying powers that be or the nature of the social order. The psychology behind this book is that if we view our own destruction as inevitable, we can then gain the upper hand in directly combating this reflexive tendency within each of us towards self-preservation (and thus towards mediocrity).

     Nietzsche's Zarathustra is actually a persona (a kind of prophet who bases his understanding in philosophy, history and psychology) who advocates that one is to destroy "the law tablets" of the "good and the just". Georges Bataille followed somewhat in Nietzsche's footsteps by suggesting that one can expand consciousness by facing one's destruction and (more specifically) by "sinning".
    http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2009/08/jungian-view-of-creative-regression.html

    http://unsanesafe.blogspot.com.au/2011/09/nietzsche-morality-shamanism.html
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  11. What defines an interaction as being thwarted by patriarchal influences? It comes down to realizing that all contents of one's communication over the years have been discarded by the interlocutor. Instead of retaining the meaning of what had been said, he has retained only a very general emotional impression of any set of interactions. Often, these are produced as projections of female stereotypes, from within his head.

    By contrast with this psychologically projective mode of relating,we discover the protocol of responding appropriately to others' overtures through a book that teaches foreigners. The pattern demonstrated is as follows:

    Person A remarks on something.  
    Person B then comments, acknowledging what A has said. Alternatively he might follow with a secondary question (for instance to get more information, ask for clarification, etc.) 

    If this is the normal pattern of harmonious social interaction, one can tell when a situation has acquired an artificial ideological dimension simply by the fact that person B will not first acknowledge what A has said before  stating his own point of view.

    This breach of protocol at a fundamental level is indicative of the violent nature of patriarchal interactions overall. It expresses an imperative: "I'm only open to affirming my existing point of view!"

    Although it is hard to know, initially, if such a person has understood what has been said to him, eventually time itself proves that he hasn't understood much that had been communicated over a length of several years.

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  12. Many people grow up with some damage, some injury to their self esteem, which makes them vulnerable to those capable of dominating them.

    If you have a basic injury at the level of your emotional being, you are liable making the kinds of mistakes that come from not being a whole emotional being. You can't see others' motivations clearly enough, because there is a part of your perceptual apparatus (related to your emotional wholeness) missing. So you trust the wrong sorts of people -- the people who have themselves been damaged and discovered a partial release from their externally imposed state of masochism by becoming sadists (flipping over). At the same time, because you suffer from a lack of wholeness, you try to make up for it with perfectionism.

    The practiced sadist automatically taps into this sense of striving to be complete and turns it to his ends -- towards malicious ends. So, you end up working hard for the sadist, fulfilling his needs to try to make himself whole by dominating another (a project in which he is also destined to fail). Your lack of wholeness is guaranteed so long as you remain in this externally imposed masochistic position.

    That is because the sadist needs you to remain incomplete and striving in order for him to gain a temporary sensation of feeling complete.
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  14. Kudakwashe Rukanda requests to know some of my philosophical axioms, especially as they pertain to gender.

    My axioms are not for everyone. They make sense to me because of my distinct experiences, but I do not expect them to make sense to anyone else simply by virtue of my posting them here. One really has to experiment with life to come up with one's own axioms. Some of them may turn out to be similar to mine, but there is no guarantee that this will be so, unless your experiences also happen to be very similar to mine, by virtue of the historical time you live in, by virtue of social structure and by virtue of the attitudes directed towards you because of your particular characteristics (some known and obvious and some unknown, even to yourself).

    Having said that, I do not consider my axioms to be remotely arbitrary. They are not narrowly personal even though the situations I have lived through have been personal because they are formulated in the context of an ongoing battle which has been waged since the beginning of time. The battle itself has generals and strategic systems, along with established tactics that are used by forces on each particular side. Although the tactics and strategies have changed over time, each generation that enters the battle learns from the past. Not all lessons are remembered, but some are never forgotten. Boundary lines are maintained. Tactics that have worked in the past are tried again, only with a new justification.

    My axioms come from having learned some lessons in this war.

    LESSONS

    1. The battle is not fought for the reasons it is claimed to be fought for. Truth and justice and rationality are barely more than peripheral reasons. The gender war is fought so that those of each side can recover missing 'soul parts'.

    2. In terms of the gender war, men believe they are best positioned to recover their missing soul parts if they can convince women to become masochists.

    3. The "soul parts" that women most need to recover -- which men have stolen from them -- are their reason and their knowledge of the deep workings of political machinations.

    4. Both men and women are biologically (and therefore in all other senses) MORE THAN their definitions according to gender would make them out to be. Both men AND women are equipped with the capacity to use reason AND experience emotion. Biologically this is true. It is only culture that says otherwise.

    5. Patriarchy is a cultural system that says otherwise, in direct contradistinction to biological fact.

    6. Patriarchy has advocated, throughout the ages (especially through its holy books) the direct plundering of women by turning them into masochists (and men, correspondingly, into sadists), so that males can obtain their missing soul parts, which they claim women have stolen.

    7. Women, who have been plundered throughout the ages, are also often missing soul parts, particularly emotional soul parts such as aggression, along with some intellectual soul parts and knowledge of their own history -- all of which have been stolen by traditional and contemporary holy men writing spiritual precepts.

    8. The patriarchal principle of plundering women has robbed both sexes of their vitality and wholeness.

    9. One can only find one's missing soul parts by delving into history to see where they went missing. Such understanding of one's historical past will suffice to restore one's missing soul parts -- that, and courage.

    10. One learns the truth of these axioms only by engaging in many battles.

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