Man and Woman
Man and Woman
Gods, Gender, Pornography, and Canola Oil for the Soul
Deucalion and Pyrrha
Mythologically, the first modern humans, the progenitors of our race, were Deucalion and Pyrrha, the survivors of a great flood that ended the previous age. In the telling of this myth, their journey - our journey - begins with the couple stranded on a floating chest suspended in the world-subsuming waters of the deluge. The apocalyptic waters, though, are also amniotic and generative. They are representative of the womb, the cosmic egg, the shifting dreamscape and the inaccessible realm of mystery from which Dionysus emerges and to which he returns. Once they have done their work in shaping and forming the new world, they begin to recede. In their wake the human realm, the realm of the seen and understood, begins to expand.
The first things to emerge from the receding waters are the peaks of mountains, symbols of lofty vision and wisdom, who according to this account are thus the oldest places on this earth and the only things to have witnessed its entire unveiling. It is on one of these mountains, either Parnassus, Etna, or Athos depending on the source, that Deucalion and Pyrrha first come ashore. Their landfall is symbolic of the arrival of the human consciousness into the embodied portion of its soul; I will remind you that your body is a part of your soul, just as the seasonal flower and fruit is the product of a perennial branch. At this stage of generation, our stage, the male and female arrive concurrently and as a unit, though in separate bodies as each stage of generation grows more divided and intricate as it emanates from the form of the Good - in earlier stages we may indeed have been Plato’s four-armed androgyne.
The structure of this world and our bodies makes the negotiation of our two halves one of the most essential yet daunting tasks in our lives, and in typical human fashion we have always stumbled through processions of haphazard measures whose primary evolutionary imperative is to be as idiot-proof as possible. Never has this been more true than today, when abstraction, alienation, oversocialization, and memetic psychosis have made the task of idiot-proofing our social systems nearly impossible. The re-negotiation of our marriages to ourselves will be a long process entailing many, many drastic changes from today’s status quo, and at the heart of this negotiation will have to be a deepened and renewed understanding of the sexual polarity that operates not just between people but also inside of every individual.
Biology and Beyond
Before progressing further with this piece it will be necessary to establish what exactly is meant by “male” and “female,” as these words have become subjects of much confusion lately. Their meanings have become primarily biological to us (or “socially constructed” according to the spawn of tumblr), but I am going to put forth that the biological reality of sex is actually a reflection, an extension, a flower, of a spiritual reality. The cellular process of meiosis attests to this. Animal organisms, including ourselves, are made up of “diploid” cells; there are two sets of chromosomes within them. The sex organs then employ meiosis to mix and strain the genetic material in their own cells in order to create haploid cells, gametes, with only one set of chromosomes. When the gametes of two different organisms meet and combine, they produce a new set of diploid cells, the embryo of a new creature who will grow to repeat the same process in itself in a spiraling reenactment of the processes of division, reflection, and reunion through which the worlds themselves are produced by the Nous’ beholding of the Good.
“Maleness” and “Femaleness” then are united in each being, as they necessarily form a unity between themselves. In practical terms, a thing has or expresses maleness or femaleness less as a function of what it is and more as a function of what does, what it is meant to bring forth into the world. Thus the sex of that creature becomes more and more pronounced as the layers of its being approach the material. In humans, the bifurcation seems to happen somewhere rather early in our psyche if we are to give any heed to the phenomenon of the Jungian animus and anima that can be supposedly encountered in our dreams.
But what exactly do each of these different ways for life to express itself entail? This, as is so often the case, can be recovered with a careful and respectful observation of pre-modern traditions and their mythologies. In nearly every society we know of who depicted divinity anthropomorphically, the Gods were received and understood along gendered lines. Conversely, we receive and understand gender along divine lines; in early Rome, a man would often refer to his masculine spirit or genius as his “Jove,” and a woman likewise would call her feminine genius her “Juno.” A modern academic may tell you that it is mere hubris or anthropocentrism that the ancients would read their own norms or structures into the shape of the cosmos itself, but we adhere to the Hermetic and Platonic principles that things are below as they are above and that the incarnate world is a living icon, idol, image, of the worlds prior to it. Accusations of anthropocentrism may also be softly rebuked by the presence of clearly gendered dynamics in many other animals, dynamics which can even be reminiscent of our own sex differences. The bird of paradise with his elaborate displays, the territorial tomcat, the protective mother bear, even the mating process of the praying mantis wherein the male is consumed by the female; all of these speak to some sort of interplay between two distinctly ordered expressions of the soul which we have come to label as male and female because they are most visible when they manifest in these pairs of organisms.
Diluvial Leapfrog
The interplay between male and female in nature is a kinetic process of division and reunion which can actually be visualized like the double helix of a DNA strand, with the two helices never touching but constantly forming bridges between each other reminiscent of the progressive generations of creatures. This metaphor breaks down slightly, though, when it comes time to consider the functional differences between the sexes, the differences in what they are meant to bring forth and how. At this point a more apt image might be a dolphin breaching and then returning to the water, where the masculine is a pioneering force who tests and crosses the boundaries of the feminine world in order to breathe and enact change which will then be assimilated, completed, continued, and iterated upon by the feminine.
In human life, male outcomes tend to be much more extreme or uncertain than those of women. Men tend to be both the criminal element and the fringe intellectual or military elements from which social change emerges, but in all of these cases the survival and implementation of any change is reliant on the eventual participation of a female element. Just as on the paleolithic tundra, the male moves and acquires what the female then metabolizes into the next generation and into the entire social structure the culture inhabits - much of modern feminism, interpreting the world through the ironically masculine lens of its quietly gynophobic materialism, greatly underestimates the actual importance and agency of women traditionally not just as mothers and craft-workers but also as lore keepers, physicians, and oracles.
Our society is individualistic, i.e. the standard unit of culture is the single person (and all the units he or she participates in are simply contracts that can be escaped). It is thus difficult for us to sympathize with the old state of affairs wherein people were integrated with each other as parts of a clan or family that forms a much more robust and enduring unit of culture. In such a composite unit, forces and “types” such as the mother, warrior, maiden, artisan, father, and bard were free to express themselves more sharply in individual people without compromising the balance of the entire unit whereas a modern person often must integrate and balance all of them just to be minimally functional. In that environment the masculine and feminine elements of humanity are able to participate more fully in their leapfrogging dance of polarity, and the result is that those cultures are irrefutably more fertile, vibrant, and less anxiously listless than the modern West.
The Masculine
Let us now get into the specifics of the male expression. As we have said, its function and its role in generation is to depart from its prior state and establish the grounds, blueprint, or impetus for the new state or next stage. The examples set for the masculine expression are heroes like Aeneas, Perseus, Theseus, and Hercules, whose narratives revolve around overcoming some obstacle or destroying some monster in order to pave the way for the foundation of a society in places where such conditions made it previously impossible. In such a mythos, both the monster which is subdued and the society which is established are sometimes represented in feminine terms, one as foe and one as bride, the secret being that the savage artemisian forest and the fruitful demetrian field are of the same substance and differ only in their relationship to the masculine principle.
And this is all just on the human or psychic level, which is only an echo of the higher cosmogonic activities of the Gods and Goddesses. Although by no means a work of scripture, especially in the Neoplatonist tradition, a certain reading of Hesiod’s theogony is useful here. Among the first things to spontaneously emerge from Chaos is Gaia, who we consider to be the first hypostasis of Hera. According to Hesiod, Ouranos, the first hypostasis of Zeus, then emerges from her, and their marriage spawns the first generation of deities called Titans; in other words, the masculine emerges from its shapeless origin and then enables further creation by reuniting with it just as the noetic power produces the universe by contemplating its own origin.
In the day-to-day life of the human male the thin shadows of that divine act are exhibited primary through “hunting” and the many, many faculties and activities that accompany it. The departure from home, the strengthening of male alliances or rivalries through shared hardship, the affinity for tools and technique, the adversarial yet respectful relationship with nature, the acquisition of wealth and the exchange of that wealth for social credit with the community culminating in the establishment of the family - these are the themes eternally present and recurrent in the mythography of the male experience, and they are crucial to understanding the expression of masculinity at every level.
Our Jove
Ouranos-Kronos-Zeus expresses his masculinity in the fertilizing power of the sun and rain, in the illuminating power of clean air and lightning, and in the genii of the eagle, snake, and bull. All of these forces have a corresponding power acting within the microcosm of the human soul. As with so many things, past a certain point words simply fail. Understanding is a matter of seeing and feeling. The most elaborate or powerful symbols can only go so far, and words are symbols made for precision rather than power. If there is a failure on the part of modern people to grasp what is meant at the very roots of these things, then it must be blamed on a poverty of symbolism, ritualism, plain experience, and most cripplingly the lack of a vocabulary or episteme through which to categorize and understand that experience, through which to access our own microcosmic expressions of the rain and the lighting and the eagle and the bull.
For better or worse our society is increasingly un-gendered, and this transformation is happening much faster in our media and our mannerisms than in our actual bodies and psyches. There are natural, human impulses and patterns which modern people are unable to understand or express healthily because they lack cultural vocabulary for them, the result being disordered and toxic manifestations of them. For boys, there is increasingly a lack of two things crucial for healthy development: Opportunities for reckless adventurism and male-exclusive spaces. Without hard knocks, without camaraderie and competition, without direction, the impulses towards conquest, ownership, and independence do not diminish. They simply express themselves in the weaselly, predatory way characteristic of creeps and criminals. Boys with low self esteem and weak male bonds are more, not less, dangerous to women and to the social fabric. In many cases they turn their hunting faculties against women and fellow men instead of against problems and projects that would be constructive to those relationships, becoming obsessed with their “body count” or with “flexing on” their acquaintances, pursuing the signs and simulacra of success instead of the actual accomplishments which should underline them.
We best embody the masculine principle when we are proactive, accepting of difficulty and separation, and oriented towards what is far away either in space or time. To a large extent, to be male is to lack intrinsic value and desirability and therefore to be forced to earn it through your deeds. Mythographically, the trope of the knight who wins the princess through his heroism is not strictly about man and woman as separate beings; it is also about the achievement by the man of the inner sense of place, position, and continuity that was traditionally afforded to women by virtue of birth and beauty. It is about his winning of the position of fatherhood that allows his Jove to transition from the lacking, striving faculty of adolescence into the jolly, generous faculty of the patriarch whose mission is already accomplished and who now lives to empower and guide his descendants (whether genetic or spiritual) along the same journey. That transition is of course enabled by union with the feminine, who draws out the qualities of both phases in different ways. Because our society has become so inhospitable for the natural female principle and so repressive for the male, like a tyrant chieftain choking out any opportunities for upstarts to emerge, for perhaps the first time in history we are obligated as young men and women to enact both sides of this drama.
A person who is truly in touch and balance with their Jove is one who embodies and embraces their hunting faculties and places them in a productive dialogue with their society, with their roles and relationships in it. If that society rejects or ignores the hunting faculty altogether, though, its men will be unable to have that productive dialogue. Such men are forced to choose between being true to their maleness or being loyal to their culture; the first type is exemplified by people like “Bronze Age Pervert” while the second can be seen in the nerdoid, the fanboy, the “male feminist.” Neither type has attained the fatherhood which is striven after and so are left incomplete, leaking out the neurotic sense of lack and urgency that characterizes the questing adolescent. The repression of the second type frequently results in antisocial and stealthily predatory behavior. The first type, although it often overcompensates, oversimplifies, or is misguided, at least has a spark of the creative potential necessary to the only solution available when societies become this suffocating and necrotic; exit, incubation, and usurpation, like Zeus being raised in the Diktaean cave away from Kronos’ oppressive gaze.
The Feminine
The female expression is more difficult to write about because it is considerably more mysterious, and that mystery is an important part of its expression. The feminine reveals itself reactively, apophatically. The faculty of seeing and knowing is solar, male, the eye of Helios and the ear of Heimdall. To some degree the masculine is the grammatical subject and the feminine the grammatical object (things that are and must be present in all people), the Other which is perceived and who provides for the seer either a mirror and a path to self-knowledge or a distracting maze of entrapment. In the first case she is Ariadne freeing Theseus from the labyrinth, in the second she is the paralyzing power of Medusa whose snake-heads represent appetitive desire.
The feminine also presides over the chaotic force of raw, pure “Becoming,” the swirling ocean of potentiality that generates existence when it comes into contact with the steady, changeless Being of the forms. The crossing of these two forces can be symbolized by the axis mundi: Yggdrasil, Mount Meru, The Omphalos at Delphi. This symbol is both phallic and umbilical, piercing, stabilizing, and nurturing creation. Because of this it would of course be very reductive and untrue to relegate the female expression just to “spooky chaos that the strong man has to make right.” Opposition is cooperation and at no point are the male and female principles actually fully separate.
As matron or as maiden, the feminine principle also maintains cosmic order, especially on earth. Demeter hands down civil law to mankind as necessary adaptations to agricultural life. Hera and Vesta preside over statehood as an extension of familial life. Artemis drives away order-threatening cacodemons represented as the beasts of the wilderness. Freya provides insight into the ordained workings of Fate, and Skadi maintains social order through games and by rooting out bad actors. In each case the activity is revelatory, reactive, or situated socially or relative to the home, and so we can see where there is actually continuity rather than discord between the primordial, diluvial object-expression and the more ordered heavenly expressions of this principle.
Our Juno
In our lives, we best embody the feminine principle when we are nurturing, discriminating, and attuned to other people, to our bodies, and to our environments. Sensitivity, connection, and belonging are the cornerstones that allow the full and positive expression of this principle. But it will not be denied; when those things are lacking, it does not fail to express itself, rather it comes as the wrathful mother determined to ruthlessly wipe away obstacles to the stability of her generative power. It is Kali Ma, and it is Demeter searching after the lost Persephone. One could even suggest, though I won’t do so with any certainty, that the processes of climate change and communication breakdown which will soon threaten the Aquarian regime of global “free trade” are examples of this same process playing out in our own sphere.
As well as being the nourishing source and the enforcer of order within the home on both micro and macro scales, the female principle is the origin of rage, ecstasy, and insight. It is the soma, the wine, the mead of poetry, whose consumption/conception/perception by the various iterations of the noetic “sky-father” empowers his acts of victory and liberation. It is also deeply tied to cosmological love, the magnetic force that serves to bind everything together from the subatomic to the supernatural; what binds atoms together into elements is understood to be, if not the same force, a force of the same descent as the force that pulls humans into their partnerships and friendships.
Just as we are now at such a high risk of our masculinity becoming imbalanced and unhealthy, our femininity is equally precarious. When it has no anchors for its caring and nurturing faculties, when its magnetism is suppressed or unreciprocated, and when it lacks a safe, open space to establish a hearth, the results can vary from sociopathic apathy to berserk mood swings, depression, mania, attachment disorders, manipulative behavioral patterns, substance abuse, and intentional self-harm. These issues abound in both genders and intersect disastrously with the predatory patterns of thwarted masculinity described earlier, and the conditions for their emergence are so common as to nearly be the norm in American society; our educational, cultural, and pharmo-dietary regimes form a symphony of disaster that makes us weak, agitated, unfocused, over-sexualized, and under-connected. And because we’re born into it, most of us never even realize how much better life could be
Porno-Capitalism
There is perhaps no single more distilled example - or perhaps driving force - of our modern sexual dysfunction than pornography and its trickle-down leaking into advertisement and culture in general (which America has made synonymous). The negative physiological effects of it are well known; dopamine burnout directly results in fatigue, social withdrawal, and anxiety. It also puts frequent users on a path of seeking increased intensity and novelty to overcome their desensitization, a path that has ruined many peoples’ ability to enjoy actual sex. These physiological issues accompany more abstract ones, especially as regards gender expression. Pornography - any sexual visual media, really - accustoms the viewer to a narrow experience of sexuality that is sheerly visual, excluding the senses of touch and smell and distance that comprise the rest of the experience. More importantly, it unmoors that experience from the active and willing participation of a living, breathing, present partner. Literally, grammatically, the desired person is completely objectified, stripped of any subjectivity. In turn the viewer is both de-subjectified, having no agency over the events witnessed, and dis-objectified, losing the senses of self, place, and exposure that are required for self-esteem and for mutual sexual connection.
A living person active in the world must be both subject and object, to his or her self and to others, in order to function. Something which threatens that is undoubtedly dangerous. To add to the harm, pornography does this along mostly gendered lines that attack the vulnerabilities and exacerbate the worst tendencies of both sides. The male is accustomed to separate and abstract himself and to treat the female as a tool, dehumanizing her and removing the possibility of rehumanizing himself through reunion with the principle she represents. The increased emphasis on visual processing latent in his brain’s evolved hunting faculty is hijacked and his center of self is drawn outwards so that self awareness is rendered more and more difficult. All of his male faculties are recruited towards serving a chemical dependence on pleasure, rather than the pleasure faculty serving as a pro-social reinforcement tool as it originally did. The exact same dynamic plays out in our diets, with sugary starches short-circuiting our sense of taste and causing a negative feedback loop in our energy levels via insulin resistance.
Our relation to our femaleness is likewise harmed by this sexual climate, though in this case social media and music shoulder slightly more of the blame. Social media in specific forms a similar feedback loop to the one detailed above. Alarmingly, it does this by turning your friends into content, content which you consume in between advertisements. Human interaction is flattened by limitations like character limits or video length, and the gamification of the platforms incentivizes specific types of interactions, even negative ones like dogpiling on the bad tweet of the week. And because a person is to a large degree the sum of their habits and interactions, incentivizing spiteful, neurotic interactions literally manufactures spiteful and neurotic people. What’s more, because the feminine principle is especially concerned with both connection and order/conformity, our feminine faculties are especially attacked by the new incentive structures set up by social media. This is most sharply expressed in the new abundance of body dysmorphia and eating disorders which are partly caused by a need to conform to the hypervisual pornographic consciousness detailed above. The hyper-slick, hyper-rapid access to each others’ inner monologue, or to our socially conscious simulations of that monologue, enabled by social media ultimately has a similarly alienating effect as pornography does, and this cuts deep against our feminine need to be connected.
With regards to the porn-addled male, the objectification of femininity is likewise an alienation from it. In the wake of that alienation, fetishization arises. In extreme cases, the coomer seeks to assimilate the feminine principle to himself not through a relationship with a woman but through the fetishistic emulation of autogynephilia. At its worst this can lead to identity crisis and self-mutilation. With regards to women, the harm comes through a few primary vectors: Negative self-image, adherence to toxic social/medicinal norms, and trouble mediating relationships with one’s self and others. Blame in the last vector is evenly shared with men, especially those whose masculine expression has grown unhealthy.
The reason I have titled this section “porno-capitalism” is because every single one of these issues is, if not driven, then at least taken advantage of, by profit-seekers. The internet and international sea/air travel have broken down almost every single barrier to commerce and monetization; the only challenge remaining is how to get people’s attention. The obvious answer to this question is to attack them at the level of their most basic instincts with both positive and negative stimulation. Positive in the form of aspirational things to be either possessed or embodied, and negative via the threat of ostracization and the “fear of missing out.”
Self-Perpetuated Advertising
The scope of advertising has long since evolved from the primitive mission of selling an item into the current paradigm of engineering the conditions for an item to be profitable. An excellent example is canola oil and the “low fat” craze. Canola oil is a modified derivative of rapeseed oil. The infrastructure for mass production of rapeseed oil was established in Canada during WW2 as industrial lubricant for American warships. When the war ended, demand plummeted, leaving an entire industry up in the air. In a final bid to save their companies, the industry raced to breed a form of rapeseed plant with low enough levels of erucic acid to be regarded as safe and then instigated a media blitz to cast traditional fats such as butter and tallow as “heart-unhealthy.” Between the media frenzy and the new classifications of the heavily lobbied FDA, the general public fell for the lie and began swapping butter and olive oil for the cheaper-to-make canola oil in one of the most profitable psychological operations of the last half century. The result is that millions upon millions of people now consume, daily, an industrial lubricant which oxidizes under heat, suppresses the immune system, and encourages inflammation throughout the entire body.
If we are willing to take this example as one which might reveal to us the rule rather than the exception in this economic regime, we might see some concerning trends in our entertainment and media culture. For a long time social engineers worked with television, which was effective because of its ubiquity and the ease with which messaging could be controlled. Now they are forced to contend with social media. While social media is a little more slippery, it has higher potential returns because its interactivity is highly hypnotic. The preferred method of message control there, besides for collusion with moderators, is to encourage people to segment into smaller groups centered around certain beliefs. This is really easy thanks to human psychology and only needs a small nudge from algorithms. Each of these groups represents two things: a very useful advertising block and a shared narrative. Often these narratives center on shared problems, a shared perception of certain groups as under/over- privileged or desirable/undesirable, or simply a shared aesthetic taste. All three types are useful to advertisers because they provide an immediate pre-known emotional gateway. The first two, though, sometimes spiral into self-fulfilling prophecies for the participants since the algorithms will always present you content similar to that you’ve consumed even if it’s negative and harms your emotional wellbeing. For example, a forum about depression may end up counterproductive for the users simply because people who have already beaten depression will no longer use the site even though they’re the ones who may have the most helpful information.
This is doubly troublesome because mankind is not just a social animal: we are also a narrative animal. We rely on stories in order to form an episteme, to figure out how to categorize the overwhelming amount of information we process just by living in such a complex world. Low quality stories create low quality epistemes, which means our ability to interact effectively with the real world is damaged. And right now, mass culture is proliferating some very low quality narratives about the origins and purposes of sexuality and gender expression. “Masculinity is inherently toxic”, “Gender identity is socially constructed”, “The fewer obstacles to sex the better”, these are all paraphrases of increasingly popular narratives which are dangerous because they have academic merit but translate poisonously into daily life, which defeats the point of an episteme in the first place.
21st Century Normoid Man
What’s especially insidious about each of those narratives is the ease with which they slot into a lifestyle which is mathematically optimized for maximum consumption, maximum dependence, maximum abuse. The life of a person who religiously observes the dictates of modern youth culture’s cutting edge may look a little bit like this:
They eat a “plant based diet” in which they overpay for soybean patties and crumbly pastries. They modify their bodies with expensive tattoos, piercings, and dyes. They pay monthly subscriptions for 3+ streaming services which exist to advertise to them. They will pay extra for ones where the advertising is subliminal rather than explicit. The music and visual media they consume will usually transmit at least one of the following messages:
“I, a rich and famous person, am seeking pleasure through drugs and new sexual partners, come experience this vicariously.”
“Life is hard and sad and you are Valid for being sad. Don’t feel bad about being sad, really, it’s fine to be sad so just don’t worry about it.”
“If you want to experience struggle and purpose, the approved avenue for doing so is via woke activism. Please support it, but not too loudly because then you’re Decentering Marginalized Voices.”
They will pay high rent at least partly because they cannot live with their estranged parents. In some cases this will be due to differing political views, i.e. being victims of different advertising campaigns than those of the 80’s. Many of them will be diagnosed with either a mental illness or chronic physical ailment by age 30, and will have to treat this illness with expensive pharmaceuticals.
Often they will have either few friends, shallow friendships, or both. These friendships will often revolve around consuming similar media, similar drugs, or mere inertia and convenience. They will witness at least one person they care about have their life permanently altered for the worse by drug or alcohol dependence, or suffer it themselves. An understanding between friends of mutual responsibility to the bond is becoming rare. If this person is in a monogamous relationship, it may be strained by the other person’s experience of the same hellish mental prison as them. If they are not, then they may idealize having multiple partners. Their attempt to live this ideal will result in shallow, unsatisfying, sex with another similarly unhappy person anywhere from once a year to once a week depending on their looks and status. They may be physically or emotionally blunted and stunted either because they consume too much pornography, because they were prescribed mind-altering chemical birth control as a young teen seeking an acne remedy, or both.
Because of their limited social network, they have significantly less opportunities to acquire vital goods and services for cheap or free via connections. Again consumption is optimized. Because of their poor physical and mental health, their agency is diminished and they are made more susceptible to programming, which is ideal for advertisers. Their emotional investment in certain “identity politics” often causes them to self-segregate into hyperspecific gender or racial identities, which are then extremely easy to advertise to because any targeting of the demographic will feel validating. If they have a well-paying job, it is probably highly abstract and disconnected from the production of any tangible good or survival-necessary service. Again they must turn to liquid capital in order to fulfill any of the basic needs of life, which makes them particularly subject to its fluctuations and therefore beholden to the governmental and corporate bodies that most influence its flow, a flow that now determines the very landscape of the entire culture thanks to the power of advertising.
Narrative Sovereignty
The purpose of the clan unit, as mentioned earlier, is to create the smallest and most reliable scale for sovereignty to meaningfully take place. Doing so means having enough individuals locked into an interwoven network of obligations, obligations which are required for basic tasks like food production, shelter maintenance, and security. People who are embedded in such a system are dependent on each other, yes, but they are not beholden to anyone outside of that system. Power still operates on them, but they are not alienated from it. Sovereignty acts through their mother and their father and their neighbor. The post-industrial system of techno-capital has one prime directive: Remove people from their embeddedness in any other network so that all of their productive and consumptive power is devoted to the capital economy. All sovereignty must belong to the emergent artificial intelligence of The Market and the people it benefits. When sovereignty becomes this distant and abstracted from its subjects, the inevitable result is a failure of understanding and mutually beneficial coordination. This failure of coordination is the root of oppression in all those instances in which it could be called systemic.
The hypothetical person detailed in the last section is exactly the subject that The Market wants to create and rule over, and such an important part of that subjection is the alienation of that person from the gender dynamic that was traditionally so integral to determining the network of obligations within a clan or family. We can debate what those dynamics and obligations ought to look like. Technology can make roles a lot more flexible. The suggestion that these things have a necessary role isn’t a suggestion that anyone needs to be oppressed or subjugated; it’s simply a call to critically reexamine what we think we know about gender relations, perhaps with an eye towards who taught them. What is not up for debate, though, is that masculinity and femininity are natural principles that carry with them distinct experiences, and that these experiences are accessible to all people but to different degrees for each. The sooner we can remember this and begin to actually understand and value these experiences, the sooner we can reconstruct nodes of sovereignty that protect us from The Market, its false prophet of individualism, and the inevitable messy failure of its fecal centrifuge.
A reconciliation with our Joves and with our Junos will have to be a conscious re-ordering of significant portions of our lives. Tools of suppression and distraction will have to be traded for tools of focus and psychological self-determination, tools like ritual meals, shared narratives, debate, and meditation. Really, it has to be only a part of a wider campaign to return ourselves to the experience of being embedded in a structured, ensouled, divinely prolific world that exists for our benefit just as much as we exist for its glorification. The reward for such a project is, in no uncertain terms, our own humanity.