Have you ever thought of men’s rights and feminism as competing mythologies? In what follows I will do just that, while paying special attention to the fact that the feminist myth has triumphed in capturing global imagination. By ‘mythology’ I mean those guiding stories that provide meaning and direction to the lives of all who follow them, including the men’s rights story, and the feminist story. While myth may or may not be scientifically true, it is true in the sense that people actively believe in myths and act them out in their daily lives.
In his 4-volume work¹ surveying the history of world mythologies, Joseph Campbell gives a snapshot of the evolving history of mythology from the earliest days of ‘Master Bear god’ painted on cave walls, until the present day.
Campbell demonstrates that, over and over, dominant mythologies get replaced or absorbed by newer mythologies, and such changeability appears to be the only constant in the long sweep of history. There were periods of mythological stability in all cultures, but without exception every traditional mythology was modified or replaced as forces within the culture reached critical mass.
Catalysts for revisions of myth are numerous, with such examples as foreign invaders who overran a traditional culture and implanted their own mythology, or alternatively it may happen that a new mythology brewing in the back waters of a culture begins to gain grassroots appreciation, leading eventually to its ascendancy with a concomitant decline (or reinterpretation) of the previous mythological setup. By yet another route the change in mythology may be instituted by a ruler who adopts a new religious belief and then mandates it as the official belief of the masses, examples being;
- Indian King Ashoka promoted Buddhist mythology across ancient Asia;
- Emperor Constantine promoted the Christian story as religion of the Roman Empire;
- Queen Eleanor of Aquitaine and her daughter crafted the mythos of romantic love and chivalry which was disseminated throughout Europe and the world.
In some situations the dominant myths did not give way to a revision for a considerable time, usually because there wasn’t a compelling mythology jostling to replace it. Even when the prevailing mythology has become stale and uninspiring, the human mind will never reject it in favor of a story vacuum: to be without some kind of guiding mythology leads the human mind into an existential paralysis, and nature refuses to tolerate such a void.
Feminism as a Mythology
Now lets consider all of this in the light of feminism, a movement crafted from florid imaginings of the mythic imagination. To get to the heart of this myth we need to start at the medieval beginnings of those accreted layers of story that constitute the end product we know as modern feminism.
In his volume Creative Mythology,² Campbell documents how stories of chivalry and romantic love during the Middle Ages formed a new mythology that not only competed with Christian religion for social legitimacy, but eventually surpassed it in cultural importance. Today romantic love saturates popular media, song, cinema, dance and the arts, and is the number one selling genre of literature, outselling the books of traditional religion, ie., the Qu’ran, Bible, Vedas, Bhagavad Gita, Tipitaka, Tao Te Ching and so on. Romantic love is, as Campbell states, the world’s current leading mythos.
So what does all this have to do with men’s rights and feminism?
Well, everything.
When caught in a moment of honesty, feminists freely admit that chivalry and romantic love form ground zero of the feminist enterprise, constituting something of a Genesis Story of women’s improved social position, pedestalization and ongoing increases in power. As told by feminist Dr. Elizabeth Reid Boyd of the School of Psychology and Social Science at Edith Cowan University, romance writings can be called the “first form of feminism”:
“I muse upon arguments that romance is a form of feminism. Going back to its history in the Middle Ages and its invention by noblewomen who created the notion of courtly love, examining its contemporary popular explosion and the concurrent rise of popular romance studies in the academy that has emerged in the wake of women’s studies, and positing an empowering female future for the genre, I propose that reading and writing romantic fiction is not only personal escapism, but also political activism. Romance has a feminist past that belies its ostensible frivolity. Romance, as most true romantics know, began in medieval times… Love songs and stories, like those of Lancelot and Guinevere, Tristan and Isolde, were soon on the lips of troubadours and minstrels all over Europe. Romance spread rapidly. It has been called the first form of feminism.” ³
Reid Boyd, like so many other feminists before her, makes clear that romantic-love mythology provides bedrock for the later development of feminism. Faced with that fantastical adversary, men’s advocates can argue they have excellent statistical data demonstrating a growing narcissism among women and a neglect of men – facts that should lead right-thinking people away from the grip of feminism. Those facts, however, are only in the early stages of being woven into a story; one that might, in time, be crafted into an epic like the Odyssey or Mahabharata.
Axiom: ONLY STORY CAN DISPLACE OR ABSORB OTHER STORIES.
Facts be damned.
Until a new mythology rises to challenge the hegemony of feminist mythos, non-gynocentric people are destined to wander the planet like lost souls in search of a place to call home.
For many men, the dominant mythology of our time has erased our story, and with it men’s valued existence in the world. Campbell addressed this problem when he declared “Myths are public dreams, dreams are private myths,” concluding that when your personal understanding of life doesn’t align with the dominant public myth, your path in life will be painful:
“If your private myth, your dream, happens to coincide with that of the society, you are in good accord with your group. If it isn’t, you’ve got a long adventure in the dark forest ahead of you.” 4
While that sums up the experience of many men today, all is not lost. A growing number of voices have declared the mythology of feminism overripe for change, that it is rotting to the core as a guide to civilization, and there are in fact compelling stories poised to replace it.
The Structure of Feminist Mythology
Before we look at alternative stories that have potential to help men and women live more cooperatively, lets first survey how the feminist mythos resembles other mythological traditions.
As with the great civilization-building and sustaining mythologies of the past, feminism has narrated; an Eden story of how ancient men and women co-existed and organized their society; a fall from grace; a set of laws to guide humans away from their fallen ways, and; liberation in a future utopia.
Each of the four elements, which could be expanded to dozens more, appear in feminist mythos as follows:
- Once upon a time, much of European society was matriarchal, peace-loving, agrarian, and Goddess worshiping, with men serving women as the labor force. 5,6
- Patriarchal tribes from the North invaded and suppressed this idyllic Eden, supplanting it with a hierarchical, patriarchal, and woman-oppressing culture. 5,6
- Proto-feminists of the Middle Ages, followed by modern feminists, rebelled and challenged the grip of ‘the patriarchy’ and its institutions, allowing women to come out of the wilderness and into the center of society. They created the romantic love ethos and instituted laws, one by one, that would not only give women equal power to men, but would “compensate” women for previous losses of power.
- Women would once again rule, as a benevolent female aristocracy, with men learning to be obedient, loving and dutiful servants, inaugurating a new golden age. 7
While these beliefs are fanciful to the rational mind, they are well documented and widely believed myths underpinning the feminist movement. With the enormous currency of feminist mythology in modern society, these fantasies constitute ‘the story’ that we are all, to some extent, ‘in.’
Indeed there’s no outside of mythological perspectives — culturally we are all living inside them in one way or another. Those of us with a bent for factual accuracy prefer to align with stories that are truer to science, with narratives that are compatible with the facts without departing from them as myths so often do. But whether we enjoy them, or rail against them as childish fantasies, the fact is that mythologies full of kooky, flat-earth ideas have guided civilizations for millennia without being based on facts at all, and yet the societies they governed continued to flourish regardless.
Mythologies clearly don’t need to be factually correct to guide societies. They need only provide a shared operating system that glues people’s otherwise separate minds into one harmonious whole.
Toward a Men’s Human Rights Mythology
Those of us with a penchant for scientific fact can hope that a new mythology incorporates more factual data than the flat-earth science of our current gynocentric mythology — one eminently more suited to the scientific age in which we live, and one that many more people could relate to.
To prepare ourselves for inevitable new mythologies, it helps to first become aware of the dominant myths already governing society. And as the philosopher Gianni Vattimo once advised, the post-modern paradox of every social-mythology is to wake up and realize that we’ve been dreaming — and yet continue dreaming anyway!8 In other words, we realize we still need stories to live by but we can now consciously choose the guiding narratives we wish to align with instead of going along with them unconsciously.
For men’s human rights advocates, that raises questions about our own ‘mythologies.’ What are they? Have we sufficiently developed and articulated them? In contrast to the four elements of feminist mythology listed above, lets make a rudimentary sketch of the men’s human rights story to date. Before I do that, I hasten to add that this sketch is not prescriptive and may be at odds with narratives already held by devout Christian, Muslim, or XYZ-believing men. However, this mythological sequence will limit itself solely to the gender relations problem as it has been articulated by many men’s advocates today:
- A ‘Genesis story’ for today can rest on any of the familiar ones offered by traditional religions: Christian, Muslim, Jewish (same root story), Hindu, Celtic, Germanic, Mayan, you name it. To that catalogue we can add the now popular ‘story’ of human evolution, a compelling narrative about our remote past and how humans clawed their way out of the deserts and jungles to eventually build the wonders of modern science and civilization.
This story can be supported by scientific rationale about human biology in action — of how early men and women displayed partially different sexual and survival strategies, and how human offspring were protected due to biological imperatives of pairbonding, parental investment and kinship cooperation. It’s a story of cooperation between men and women as they dreamed the human adventure forward. Any traditional genesis stories that underline this ‘team family’ and the need for cooperative toil are compatible with this perspective. - Regardless of which creation story is preferred, we can legitimately add that a ‘fall’ took place which undermined the cooperative equilibrium between men and women. That fall began with the arrival of a new gender relations mythology — romantic gynocentrism — which arose in the Middle Ages. This marked the moment when men were captured within a sexual relations template designed to grant maximum power to women, with men slaving for them as Moses once slaved for the Egyptians. This belief system also presided over the destruction of the delicate family unit as the romantic couple assumed more importance than kinship ties.
- Over the centuries men of iron will and good conscience mounted a resistance to the destructive template and a desire for Exodus; a desire to walk away from the dictates of gynocentric feminism as free men.
- Finally, men and women began to live the GOOD NEWS of this New Testament: cooperative pairbonding, family, liberty, equality of opportunity, compassion and multi-options for all – this time including men.
These four sub-narratives form a larger body that we might call a mythology, one that would improve on the current toxic mythos of feminism. As mentioned it’s a thought exercise only to show how narrative can be reformulated, and is given here for playful, illustrative purposes and is not prescriptive. Any new mythology will arise organically like a nighttime dream and flourish within the culture; and like dreams, we never know when it will arrive or exactly what shape it will take. But the dream, the new myth, will definitely arise…. of that we can be 100% sure.
If we continue playing with these narratives and elaborating them in greater depth, continuing to tell them more compellingly with each recitation, then one day our society will have a necessary stone to jump to.
References:
[1] Joseph Campbell, Masks of God (4 volume series) (1959 – 1968)
[2] Joseph Campbell, Creative Mythology, volume 4 of Masks of God series (1968)
— Occidental Mythology, volume 3 of Masks of God series (1959)
— Transformations of Myth Through Time, (1988)
[3] Elizabeth Reid Boyd, Romancing feminism: From women’s studies to women’s fiction (2014)
[4] Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth (1988)
[5] Cynthia Eller, The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory: Why an Invented Past Won’t Give Women a Future, (2001)
[6] Lucy Goodison, Ancient Goddesses, (1999)
[7] Peter Wright, A new Aristocracy, published at gynocentrism.com, (2018)
[8] Richard Kearney, Poetics of Imagining: Modern to Post-modern (1998)
