What constitutes Misogyny?

[wintler2]

.. The patriarchy also has set roles for men, and a pecking order for them.

And every man knows it, thus making it a handy reference/lookup table for fostering understanding of power and rank abuse in other realms. Alpha males will still be less likely to see the problem, but even they all have secret areas of low rank and preceeding or consequent personal stories ("i suck at ..") that can be useful lead-ins.

[Plutonia]

Stolen from SLAD’s Economic of Love thread

This is relevant. It goes into the evolutionary psychology aspect, of which I wholly disapprove.

Thanks for that S&M.

The author pretty much encapsulates my position on the "what constitutes misogyny" question in his introduction, for which I feel we must go outside of gender to answer, and which I don’t feel is productively addressed by simply cataloging injustices against women.

I disagree with you about evolutionary psychology though, as I find much that’s useful there.

The tentative title of the book I’m writing is “How culture exploits men,” but even that for me is the lead-in to grand questions about how culture shapes action. In that context, what’s good about men means what men are good for, from the perspective of the system.

Hence this is not about the “battle of the sexes,” and in fact I think one unfortunate legacy of feminism has been the idea that men and women are basically enemies. I shall suggest, instead, that most often men and women have been partners, supporting each other rather than exploiting or manipulating each other.

Nor is this about trying to argue that men should be regarded as victims. I detest the whole idea of competing to be victims. And I’m certainly not denying that culture has exploited women. But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause.

Also I think it’s best to avoid value judgments as much as possible. They have made discussion of gender politics very difficult and sensitive, thereby warping the play of ideas. I have no conclusions to present about what’s good or bad or how the world should change. In fact my own theory is built around tradeoffs, so that whenever there is something good it is tied to something else that is bad, and they balance out.

He follows that up with a comprehensive investigation into inherent gender differences, and how social roles that are useful for a cultures continuance become entrenched and exploited.

His ideas may be controversial but they are, I feel, worthy of this conversation.

Here’s how he concludes:

A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.
Men go to extremes more than women, and this fits in well with culture using them to try out lots of different things, rewarding the winners and crushing the losers.

Culture is not about men against women. By and large, cultural progress emerged from groups of men working with and against other men. While women concentrated on the close relationships that enabled the species to survive, men created the bigger networks of shallow relationships, less necessary for survival but eventually enabling culture to flourish. The gradual creation of wealth, knowledge, and power in the men’s sphere was the source of gender inequality. Men created the big social structures that comprise society, and men still are mainly responsible for this, even though we now see that women can perform perfectly well in these large systems.

What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally. Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values. They have to prevail over rivals and enemies in cultural competitions, which is probably why they aren’t as lovable as women.

The essence of how culture uses men depends on a basic social insecurity. This insecurity is in fact social, existential, and biological. Built into the male role is the danger of not being good enough to be accepted and respected and even the danger of not being able to do well enough to create offspring.
The basic social insecurity of manhood is stressful for the men, and it is hardly surprising that so many men crack up or do evil or heroic things or die younger than women. But that insecurity is useful and productive for the culture, the system.

Again, I’m not saying it’s right, or fair, or proper. But it has worked. The cultures that have succeeded have used this formula, and that is one reason that they have succeeded instead of their rivals.

[AhabsOtherLeg]

Prison is "a system designed and run by men for men", according to Time Magazine.

You have to admit that this western matriarchy grants men a considerable amount of freedom, in that they have been allowed to build a worldwide system of justice and punishment, stretching back millenia, which they can use to criminalise and confine one another (and others) to their heart's content?

It's quite an achievement, under our matriarchal system, that men can still do this. The fact that the prison system predates the women's movement by hundreds of years (if not thousands, in a less systematic form) just makes it all the more remarkable.

The unstated policy of the justice system is that women are morally pure and ought to be looked after, while men are dangerous and ought to be "taken care of" as it were, a rather infantilising attitude which is nonetheless beneficial for women.

This constitutes misogyny. Not what Stephen said (not this time anyway) but the fact that he's essentially right about the justice system's attitude to women. The justice system (partly designed and run by men for men, as Time said) is misogynist to it's core. Under Roman law, which still hangs about us like a reeking shawl, a woman could not testify without bringing shame upon herself. Testifying was manly, and women weren't supposed to be. Having testicles on which you could testify would make your testimony inherently better than those without. The oath of truth has been swore on the balls since very ancient times, and if you didn't have any you would have real trouble having your complaints taken seriously by the court (most women here will already know this feeling).

This legal nicety (or vulgarity) was common in Danelaw, and persisted (in spirit) into Common Law, and was even used under the British Raj to render the testimony of eunuchs inadmissable. The law is all about balls. And the law is the basis of our society.

Stephen, I need to ask you sumfink. I'm sure you've been asked it before, maybe even in the latter parts of this thread (I stopped on 55, skipped to 95, sorry).

Do you honestly believe that a voteless and voiceless part of our society, largely barred from education and the holding of political office, and bearing only the legal status of property despite many fine poems and legends (and exceptional cases) indicating otherwise, for thousands of years, was suddenly able in the middle part of the 1900s to produce so many highly effective political and intellectual and social activists that they turned everything around in half a century to become the unquestioned dominant caste? If so, you must hold a far, far higher opinion of women than I do. What you seem to be claiming as a political reality could only be achieved by the work of superheroes.

Goddamnit. I posted in the Misogyny thread. Goddamnit.

I think the best think we can do for justice is to make sure all the legal pitfalls which await men happen to women as often as possible. More injustice for women may be the In cases like [url]this[/url], for example. When bad things happen to women it causes outrage, when bad things happen to men no-one really cares. Make these things happen to women more often and they'll stop happening all together.

Yes, this is what we need. More bad things is the road to more good things. As Lenin (or Chernyshevsky) said - "The worse the better."

Fair is foul and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air

That's justice, right enough. And justice for all.

[JackRiddler]

Superheroes?

[AhabsOtherLeg]

You and your comic books!

[Canadian_watcher]

Goddamnit. I posted in the Misogyny thread. Goddamnit.

Yes you did and thank you for it! great points.

[Stephen Morgan]

Stolen from SLAD’s Economic of Love thread

This is relevant. It goes into the evolutionary psychology aspect, of which I wholly disapprove.

Thanks for that S&M.

Hmm.

The author pretty much encapsulates my position on the "what constitutes misogyny" question in his introduction, for which I feel we must go outside of gender to answer, and which I don’t feel is productively addressed by simply cataloging injustices against women.

I don't really see how it relates to misogyny. It's all about the way society, the culture, exploits people of both sexes. If anything it's a repudiation of the doctrine of misogyny, of patriarchy, and so on.

I disagree with you about evolutionary psychology though, as I find much that’s useful there.

True, I just find it objectionable. It assumes certain things are bred into humanity which I see it as humanity's primary purpose to transcend. I just find it horribly depressing. I'm a sensitive soul.

The tentative title of the book I’m writing is “How culture exploits men,” but even that for me is the lead-in to grand questions about how culture shapes action. In that context, what’s good about men means what men are good for, from the perspective of the system.

Hence this is not about the “battle of the sexes,” and in fact I think one unfortunate legacy of feminism has been the idea that men and women are basically enemies. I shall suggest, instead, that most often men and women have been partners, supporting each other rather than exploiting or manipulating each other.

Nor is this about trying to argue that men should be regarded as victims. I detest the whole idea of competing to be victims. And I’m certainly not denying that culture has exploited women. But rather than seeing culture as patriarchy, which is to say a conspiracy by men to exploit women, I think it’s more accurate to understand culture (e.g., a country, a religion) as an abstract system that competes against rival systems — and that uses both men and women, often in different ways, to advance its cause.

Also I think it’s best to avoid value judgments as much as possible. They have made discussion of gender politics very difficult and sensitive, thereby warping the play of ideas. I have no conclusions to present about what’s good or bad or how the world should change. In fact my own theory is built around tradeoffs, so that whenever there is something good it is tied to something else that is bad, and they balance out.

He follows that up with a comprehensive investigation into inherent gender differences, and how social roles that are useful for a cultures continuance become entrenched and exploited.

His ideas may be controversial but they are, I feel, worthy of this conversation.

They aren't traditional feminist ideas, apart from that they ought to be relatively uncontroversial. Also, things don't always balance out. Tradeoffs are like any trades, some are profitable and some aren't.

Here’s how he concludes:

A few lucky men are at the top of society and enjoy the culture’s best rewards. Others, less fortunate, have their lives chewed up by it. Culture uses both men and women, but most cultures use them in somewhat different ways. Most cultures see individual men as more expendable than individual women, and this difference is probably based on nature, in whose reproductive competition some men are the big losers and other men are the biggest winners. Hence it uses men for the many risky jobs it has.
Men go to extremes more than women, and this fits in well with culture using them to try out lots of different things, rewarding the winners and crushing the losers.

I'm not sure about this. The idea that women are considered inherently more valuable by biology, doesn't have historical evidence to support it. Something biological ought to be pan-cultural, but the "women and children first" mentality originates in the nineteenth century, as does the very phrase itself. And men being the biggest winners, as they tend to carry their associated women up with them, is an incomplete representation of reality.

What seems to have worked best for cultures is to play off the men against each other, competing for respect and other rewards that end up distributed very unequally. Men have to prove themselves by producing things the society values. They have to prevail over rivals and enemies in cultural competitions, which is probably why they aren’t as lovable as women.

The essence of how culture uses men depends on a basic social insecurity. This insecurity is in fact social, existential, and biological. Built into the male role is the danger of not being good enough to be accepted and respected and even the danger of not being able to do well enough to create offspring.
The basic social insecurity of manhood is stressful for the men, and it is hardly surprising that so many men crack up or do evil or heroic things or die younger than women. But that insecurity is useful and productive for the culture, the system.

This, the basic insecurity and so on, is one of those things I see it as our duty to transcend. That has been one of the core aims of religion and more recently mass socialist and democratic movements. Choose, if you like, to see in this one reason for the much greater tendency of men to join trade unions, to vote Labour rather than Tory, and so on. There are a few men at the top who benefit from discord below, the mass of men benefit from cooperative and collective action. Women don't figure in this dynamic and therefore don't play a major role in social justice movements, historically. I'm excluding feminism from the class "social justice movements", obviously. Identity politics therefore serves the interests of those at the top, although the role of feminism in this is something the "not an NWO conspiracy" (I'm interpreting any mention of global elites to count as NWO here) posting guideline prevents me from expanding upon.

[Stephen Morgan]

Prison is "a system designed and run by men for men", according to Time Magazine.

You have to admit that this western matriarchy grants men a considerable amount of freedom, in that they have been allowed to build a worldwide system of justice and punishment, stretching back millenia, which they can use to criminalise and confine one another (and others) to their heart's content?

I don't think I have to admit that at all. I don't deny that what I consider to be a matriarchal system has men in powerful positions, but they're obviously heavily outweighed by the much larger number of men in prison. You might as well suggest that people had a lot of freedom in the USSR because most people weren't in gulags.

It's quite an achievement, under our matriarchal system, that men can still do this. The fact that the prison system predates the women's movement by hundreds of years (if not thousands, in a less systematic form) just makes it all the more remarkable.

Those men operating the repressive organs of the state shouldn't be identified with those being imprisoned. They work on behalf of that class which is to be protected, whoever you believe that to be. It's a broad class, property owners, rich people, women, children, the general citizenry, but not men-as-a-class. A privileged class does not guard it's own prisons.

The unstated policy of the justice system is that women are morally pure and ought to be looked after, while men are dangerous and ought to be "taken care of" as it were, a rather infantilising attitude which is nonetheless beneficial for women.

This constitutes misogyny. Not what Stephen said (not this time anyway) but the fact that he's essentially right about the justice system's attitude to women. The justice system (partly designed and run by men for men, as Time said)

Well, it's run for men like the police is run for criminals.

is misogynist to it's core. Under Roman law, which still hangs about us like a reeking shawl, a woman could not testify without bringing shame upon herself. Testifying was manly, and women weren't supposed to be. Having testicles on which you could testify would make your testimony inherently better than those without. The oath of truth has been swore on the balls since very ancient times, and if you didn't have any you would have real trouble having your complaints taken seriously by the court (most women here will already know this feeling).

That's somewhat unlikely. The infantilisation confers special protection, the meaning of "women and children".

This legal nicety (or vulgarity) was common in Danelaw, and persisted (in spirit) into Common Law, and was even used under the British Raj to render the testimony of eunuchs inadmissable. The law is all about balls. And the law is the basis of our society.

Stephen, I need to ask you sumfink. I'm sure you've been asked it before, maybe even in the latter parts of this thread (I stopped on 55, skipped to 95, sorry).

I skipped a few myself, there.

Do you honestly believe that a voteless and voiceless part of our society, largely barred from education and the holding of political office, and bearing only the legal status of property despite many fine poems and legends (and exceptional cases) indicating otherwise, for thousands of years, was suddenly able in the middle part of the 1900s to produce so many highly effective political and intellectual and social activists that they turned everything around in half a century to become the unquestioned dominant caste? If so, you must hold a far, far higher opinion of women than I do. What you seem to be claiming as a political reality could only be achieved by the work of superheroes.

Your belief in the past position of women is incorrect, as in the information Plutonia posted from the blog I linked to, the position of women wasn't subordinate, so much as different. And there were only ten years in the UK during which adult men could vote and some adult women couldn't. There were only 96 years during which voting rights were assigned on different grounds by sex. Your belief about women in the past would be better applied to working class men, who were denied education more than upper or middle class women, denied political office at least as much as women, and actually were considered property, even in this country, until the end of villeinage. Nonetheless during the 40s, less than 30 years after poor men were given the vote, we had a former coal mining lad creating the NHS. Women were not a homogenous group with a solid block of political interests, there were always rich women who were well-educated, owned their own property, were protected by the law from having their property taken even by their husbands, and generally lived as co-workers and associates of their husbands through most of history, not as chattel slaves. You can consider women to have been oppressed if you like, but they were never in a state like that of the poor.

Besides, my point here was that women are given more value, their lives are worth more, their protection is worth more, their interests are worth more. Political organisation isn't really relevant to that. It may well be the case that this attitude originates in some medieval courtly-love type ideas, or in Victorian beliefs. What it amounts to is a special legal protection for women, crimes against women are more heavily punished, crimes by women more lightly punished, and so on. The same phenomenon can be observed in the pre-women's-suffrage era, I've got a book by a socialist objecting to it, when it wasn't a matter of the so-called "women's movement", it was more a "golden cage" sort of thing. Since then the cage has gone, the gold hasn't.

Goddamnit. I posted in the Misogyny thread. Goddamnit.

I think the best think we can do for justice is to make sure all the legal pitfalls which await men happen to women as often as possible. More injustice for women may be the In cases like [url]this[/url], for example. When bad things happen to women it causes outrage, when bad things happen to men no-one really cares. Make these things happen to women more often and they'll stop happening all together.

Yes, this is what we need. More bad things is the road to more good things. As Lenin (or Chernyshevsky) said - "The worse the better."

Well, outrage brings about change. Bad things happening to women gets outrage, bad things happening to men gets laughter.

Fair is foul and foul is fair:
Hover through the fog and filthy air

That's justice, right enough. And justice for all.

[Plutonia]

I’m going to reach back to respond to some posts I’ve been meaning to get to for a while.

During the early course of the semester, there occured four widely publicised violent rapes of women on the university grounds. Three more rapes followed in quick succession, and none of the perpetrators were caught. And though this was a somewhat shocking turn of events for most of us at the time, the administration and local police seemed to take it in stride, even as the women on campus grew more and more wary. What happened next, though, surpassed the most frightened expectations of any among us. The publicity accorded those early assaults seemed to ignite a violent spark in the surrounding community, and the attacks accelerated in number and violence for the next two months..

Horrific. Period. No question.

But it could be argued that your experience constitutes an example of mimetic violence re Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, rather than of misogyny, in which case how or even that the news media reported the first incidents, could make them culpable, as is in the case of copy-cat suicides (the Werther Effect.)

If two individuals desire the same thing, there will soon be a third, then a fourth. This process quickly snowballs. Since from the beginning the desire is aroused by the other (and not by the object) the object is soon forgotten and the mimetic conflict transforms into a general antagonism. At this stage of the crisis the antagonists will no longer imitate each other's desires for an object, but each other's antagonism.

Which makes it possible to imagine that the copycat rapists received and acted out the impulse to rape from the original rapist, as an alternative to "men are rapists." In other words, not inherent but rather susceptible to.

I can accept that mirror neurons exist, but i'm not convinced they are the root of it.

Well, no. But what Girard has done is propose a new psycho-social paradigm that accounts for much of what is bewildering about violence. Mirror neurons only provide a physiological substantiation of his analysis, which btw, supports Patricia Evans' Teddy Bear Syndrome which can be more deeply understood as a symptom of infantilization which relates directly to neoteny and, as it happens one of the more interesting theories about the origination of autism, which takes us back to Mirror Neurons.
http://www.neoteny.org/category/autism/

But the underlying principal is that observance creates transference.

Of all kinds of behaviors and mind-sets.



And although there is some work being done to connect mimetic theory to mirror neurons, the phenomenon of mimesis is not new to the social sciences:

http://www.mimetictheory.net/bios/artic ... tagion.pdf
http://www.imitatio.org/uploads/tx_rtgf ... t-1997.pdf

Social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon [and] can be seen in the tendency of large groups to conform to choices which may be either correct or mistaken, a phenomenon sometimes referred to as herd behavior. Although social proof reflects a rational motive to take into account the information possessed by others, formal analysis shows that it can cause people to converge too quickly upon a single choice, so that decisions of even large groups of individuals may be grounded in very little information.

Also: the bystander effect, critical mass (sociodynamics), crowd psychology, information cascades, tipping point (sociology), peer pressure, bandwagon effect, social influence, observational learning.


This also speaks to Willow’s point about biological factors at play:

So I'd argue we're dealing with biological issues, and behavior that is deeply ingrained in our species, not just the outcome of some kind of psychological disease process, as important as it is to name and understand those processes.

I agree completely.

Here’s a demonstration, if you will:



http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tpm4eNKd ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rP-KFnYg ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YLpDV5PN ... h_response

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AN5YbfFs ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgguEZCE ... re=related

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RJlPEHL8 ... re=related

WHY forchrissakes WHY!!!???

Ugh. Okay carrying on….

Most people laugh when I've said that (about History/Economics/Political Studies being essentially Men's Studies). I can tell a lot about how I"m going to be able to relate to a person from how they react to my attempt to explain myself. I do believe that men would benefit from a deconstruction of the concept of masculinity though.. obviously that is missing from traditional education in any stream or academic level. I would wager that very few men would sign up for even one "men's studies" course though, and I cringe to imagine how the entire concept might be usurped and applied by the old guard at modern universities/colleges.

That turns out to be wrong. I’m a little embarrassed that I assumed an absence of Men’s Studies, without checking. Oops. :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_studies
http://mensstudies.org/

Edited to fix links

[Canadian_watcher]

I’m going to reach back to respond to some posts I’ve been meaning to get to for a while.

During the early course of the semester, there occured four widely publicised violent rapes of women on the university grounds. Three more rapes followed in quick succession, ...

Horrific. Period. No question.

But it could be argued that your experience constitutes an example of mimetic violence re Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, rather than of misogyny, in which case how or even that the news media reported the first incidents, could make them culpable, as is in the case of copy-cat suicides (the Werther Effect.)

This application of this theory casts women as objects. Seeing females as objects - whether of desire or derision is an attitude rooted in misogyny. The media are certainly not as culpable as the rapists, unless you are arguing that upon hearing of a rape many men are propelled into a state of arousal and 'mimetic desire' so strong that they cannot resist it. Oh wait, you ARE saying that, I see, here:

Which makes it possible to imagine that the copycat rapists received and acted out the impulse to rape from the original rapist, as an alternative to "men are rapists." In other words, not inherent but rather susceptible to.

So how do we explain the fact that many if not most crimes take place in isolation in time/geography? One bank robbery in an area. One B&E. One murder? ... Or if not ONE each of these, a few perpetrated by the same person?

[Canadian_watcher]

That turns out to be wrong. I’m a little embarrassed that I assumed an absence of Men’s Studies, without checking. Oops. :

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men%27s_studies
http://mensstudies.org/

Edited to fix links

don't be embarrassed, you were right the first time. Those links you provided do not show "men's studies" classes at an academic institution, rather one simply seems to explain the concepts where the other is an Institute for Men. The odd "masculinity studies" class exists at some universities or are encapsulated into gender studies. I don't like the article I'm about to link to, but here it is:

http://www.thestar.com/living/article/811249--a-case-for-men-s-studie

[Plutonia]

The author pretty much encapsulates my position on the "what constitutes misogyny" question in his introduction, for which I feel we must go outside of gender to answer, and which I don’t feel is productively addressed by simply cataloging injustices against women.

I don't really see how it relates to misogyny. It's all about the way society, the culture, exploits people of both sexes. If anything it's a repudiation of the doctrine of misogyny, of patriarchy, and so on.

Well, that pretty much is my position, though I allow a misogynetic psycho-social aspect due to the early imprint of the conditionally available, all-powerful mother experience of the infant as just as I allow misandric psycho-social imprint resulting from the child’s Oedipal relationship with the father.

I'm not sure about this. The idea that women are considered inherently more valuable by biology, doesn't have historical evidence to support it. Something biological ought to be pan-cultural, but the "women and children first" mentality originates in the nineteenth century, as does the very phrase itself. And men being the biggest winners, as they tend to carry their associated women up with them, is an incomplete representation of reality.

I think his analysis goes beyond the “women and children first” moral affectation of the Victorians. I say affectation because of the brutal exploitation by Victorian Industrialists of women and children (and men,) whether in the colonies or at home. But I don’t understand what you are saying here: “And men being the biggest winners, as they tend to carry their associated women up with them, is an incomplete representation of reality.”

The essence of how culture uses men depends on a basic social insecurity. This insecurity is in fact social, existential, and biological. Built into the male role is the danger of not being good enough to be accepted and respected and even the danger of not being able to do well enough to create offspring.
The basic social insecurity of manhood is stressful for the men, and it is hardly surprising that so many men crack up or do evil or heroic things or die younger than women. But that insecurity is useful and productive for the culture, the system.

This, the basic insecurity and so on, is one of those things I see it as our duty to transcend...

I agree and as an outsider (which I think everyone has experience in one way or another, of one time or another), I ascribe that basic insecurity to a couple of things; the first being the anxiety of existing outside the morphogenetic field of the collective when survival generally depends on inclusion; the second being the sub-rational policing that goes on within the collective. Take bullying, for example. If we are predisposed to imitating each other, than a “weak” or “deviant” member may jeopardize the survival of the whole group, scapegoating that member removes the threat and unifies the group. Being different is dangerous and I doubt that any of us are not viscerally attuned to that.

I think Jung mapped the route to transcendence for us with his theories of Individuation, but that's me:

Individuation is the process of integrating the conscious with the unconscious, for the purpose of self-actualization.

Individuation is the goal of our psychological development

Individuation is a philosophical, spiritual and mystical experience (Jung, 1989b, p. 294). It is the goal of our psychological development and in metaphysical terms amounts to God's incarnation (Jung, 1989b, p. 157). Individuation is the central concept and purpose of Jung’s Analytical Psychology (Jung, 1989a, p. 209).

Differentiation

The first step to Individuation is Differentiation. It is to distinguish and separate each part, or psychological function of the psyche in order to consciously access and understand them.

The three parts of the psyche

According to Carl Gustav Jung, the psyche is divided into three major parts:
• The ego. This is the conscious mind.
• The personal unconscious. This includes forgotten or suppressed memories from our own personal lives.
• The collective unconscious. This is shared by all people. It is the collective memory of human thought and experience, from ancient to modern times. This includes the basic human instincts and the archetypes.

Integration of the psyche

Individuation is the transformational process of integrating the conscious with the personal and collective unconscious (Jung, 1962, p. 301).
Integrating the conscious with the personal unconscious involves the following:
• Finding the suppressed memories and curing the psychological traumas. This is the process commonly known as psychoanalysis.
• Realizing the thoughts that create the feelings.
• Acquiring general knowledge.
• Developing will-power.

Integrating the conscious with the collective unconscious, is realizing and harmonizing the archetypes.

Effect of Individuation on people

The Individuation process brings up the true personality of a person, it makes him an Individual. Individuation generally has a profound healing effect on the person. (Jung, 1962, p. 433).
People become harmonious, calm, mature and responsible. They feel and act like parents to the rest of humanity. They protect and promote the ideals of life, freedom and justice. They have amassed knowledge and have a deep understanding about human nature and the universe. Therefore it is relatively easy for them to psychologically analyze and even cure other people.

References
• Jung, C. G. (1962). Symbols of Transformation: An analysis of the prelude to a case of schizophrenia (Vol. 2, R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). New York: Harper & Brothers.
• Jung, C. G. (1989a). Memories, Dreams, Reflections (Rev. ed., C. Winston & R. Winston, Trans.) (A. Jaffe, Ed.). New York: Random House, Inc.
• Jung, C. G. (1989b). Psychology and Religion: West and East (2nd ed., R. F. C. Hull, Trans.). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

[Plutonia]

I’m going to reach back to respond to some posts I’ve been meaning to get to for a while.

During the early course of the semester, there occured four widely publicised violent rapes of women on the university grounds. Three more rapes followed in quick succession, ...

Horrific. Period. No question.

But it could be argued that your experience constitutes an example of mimetic violence re Rene Girard’s theory of mimetic desire, rather than of misogyny, in which case how or even that the news media reported the first incidents, could make them culpable, as is in the case of copy-cat suicides (the Werther Effect.)

This application of this theory casts women as objects. Seeing females as objects - whether of desire or derision is an attitude rooted in misogyny. The media are certainly not as culpable as the rapists, unless you are arguing that upon hearing of a rape many men are propelled into a state of arousal and 'mimetic desire' so strong that they cannot resist it.

Hamstrung by language. Sorry. I should perhaps have been clearer.

I'm using the word "object" in the psychological sense, not in the "thing" sense.

And "desire" in the larger sense, not just sexual um avarice, shall we say. Philosophically, what we desire ultimately, is the wholeness that we imagine can be conferred to us by the "magic" object that has "captured" our desire, whether that's a car, fame or a woman (or man.) This is pure projection, meaning what we see in the object, is what we are unconscious of within ourselves. This is the drama of Narcissus.

And is it so strange that if journalists are already held accountable for triggering copycat suicides, that should also be held to account for other forms of copycat violence. There has been a vigorous discussion of the role of the media in triggering the wave of revolutionary fervor in the Middle East. Why exempt sexual violence from a similar discussion?

Which makes it possible to imagine that the copycat rapists received and acted out the impulse to rape from the original rapist, as an alternative to "men are rapists." In other words, not inherent but rather susceptible to.

So how do we explain the fact that many if not most crimes take place in isolation in time/geography? One bank robbery in an area. One B&E. One murder? ... Or if not ONE each of these, a few perpetrated by the same person?

I was referring specifically to the example that Barracuda gave, for which mimetic escalation is arguably explicit. But I think you may be wrong about your premise, as demonstrated by the concept "crime wave," but that's a whole other area of investigation that I don't have time to dig around in.

[Plutonia]

Bringing these over from other threads:

Brings to mind a very fitting quote by H.L. Mencken, who wrote that the aim of public education is not “to fill the young of the species with knowledge and awaken their intelligence. … Nothing could be further from the truth. The aim … is simply to reduce as many individuals as possible to the same safe level, to breed and train a standardized citizenry, to put down dissent and originality.That is its aim in the United States.” [The American Mercury, April 1924]

... Autonomist Feminism is feminism engaged in the invention of a new subjectivity, not a feminism that seeks inclusion within or recuperation by the political subjectivities already on offer. In keeping with this focus, one of their primary targets – beyond the undeniable masculinism of the Marxisms at work in their historical conjuncture – was liberal feminism (in both its classic and egalitarian articulations). These women weren’t the first to critique liberal feminism – see Voltaraine deCleyre’s They Who Marry Do Ill, or Emma Goldman’s corpus (really, check the roots of contemporary Anarchafeminism), as well as De Beauvoir’s body of work, including her memoirs (all 7 volumes), The Second Sex, as well as The Ethics of Ambiguity (which, while not tacitly written against liberal feminism, charts an existentialist ethics fully incompatible with the linkage of one’s desires to mere institutional inclusion)
...

Autonomist feminism may have preached the necessity of not communicating with men, temporarily, while in the first throes of subjective reinvention – but they never did so with the aim of sedimenting or ‘essentializing’ atemporal, common, and inherent notions of what a woman was; rather, they engaged this process in order to de-sediment, to get away from the fucked faux-essentialisms forcefully constructing their realities. This, again, speaks to the radical autonomist gesture inherent in all feminisms that seek something other than liberal (or neoliberal) institutional inclusion; this gesture is the mobilization of one’s exclusion as an occasion of experimentation and invention with alternative social systems, non-official and non-statist ways of getting things (including yourself) done and done over.

Hilary Malatino

viewtopic.php?p=400665#p400665

[Canadian_watcher]

This application of this theory casts women as objects. Seeing females as objects - whether of desire or derision is an attitude rooted in misogyny. The media are certainly not as culpable as the rapists, unless you are arguing that upon hearing of a rape many men are propelled into a state of arousal and 'mimetic desire' so strong that they cannot resist it.

Hamstrung by language. Sorry. I should perhaps have been clearer.

I'm using the word "object" in the psychological sense, not in the "thing" sense.

And "desire" in the larger sense, not just sexual um avarice, shall we say. Philosophically, what we desire ultimately, is the wholeness that we imagine can be conferred to us by the "magic" object that has "captured" our desire, whether that's a car, fame or a woman (or man.) This is pure projection, meaning what we see in the object, is what we are unconscious of within ourselves. This is the drama of Narcissus.

Yes, I see the difficulty here with the language - it is making it tricky. However I think it is clear that we can't just play cat and mouse with it - I see what you are saying but see past it into what I am trying to say, too, which is that regardless of this theory rape does cast women as objects. Whether you add another layer of meaning/analysis to that doesn't change that pivotal aspect of rape.

Narcissus wanted his own reflection (the object of his desire was himself). Rapists want to overpower and humiliate a woman/women (and sometimes men) - the ultimate in objectification. Therefore the object (played by a woman in the case of rape) is objectification. To my way of thinking, objectification = hate.

And is it so strange that if journalists are already held accountable for triggering copycat suicides, that should also be held to account for other forms of copycat violence. There has been a vigorous discussion of the role of the media in triggering the wave of revolutionary fervor in the Middle East. Why exempt sexual violence from a similar discussion?

I'm not trying to exempt it at all, I just think that it is ridiculous to say that the media - by reporting rapes - causes more rape. One could argue but never prove that reporting of rapes prevents more rape.

I think the difference between the middle eastern revolutionary fervour being partly a product of the media and increased rape being partly a product of the media is that they are reporting on two very different sets of motivations. One is hate and one is hope. One might well get caught up in a wave of violence, to be sure - we witness revolutions become violent at times - or riots after winning soccer games, etc.. Another difference though is that rape is a solitary crime, usually, and revolutions are almost never a one-man-show.