Archetypes Present in Pornography and the Ethereal Female
Chapter II
Literature Review
A thinking woman sleeps with monsters.
The beak that grips her, she becomes. And Nature,
that sprung-lidded, still commodious
steamer-trunk of tempora and mores
gets stuffed with it all: the mildewed orange-flowers,
the female pills, the terrible breasts
of Boadicea beneath flat foxes’ heads and orchids.
Rich, 1963, p. 3
Archetypes Present in Pornography and the Ethereal Female
Ever since patriarchy has ruled our existence, the fascination with the ethereal bodies of females has become integral to our cultural complex and shadow. Thus, we relate to women not only as objects, but as incomplete parts. Linda Williams (1989), a professor at UC Berkeley in film, media, and rhetoric, tied together the advent of moving image media with technology’s frenzied investigation of the bodies of females (p. 36). In his poem “The Origin of Porno,” poet and Humanities professor Albert Goldbarth compared the study of Muybridge’s study of the horse (“Is there ever a moment when all four feet leave the ground?”) to pornography: “how hardcore followed the invention of photography. / There’s a dark compelling muscle framed by the flanks. There’s / a question, an academic question, of at / which point in a leap the female breast / is highest?” (as cited in Williams, 1989, p. 34). This is akin to the philosopher and social theorist Michel Foucault’s idea of scientia sexualis related to advancement of the medium of consumption. This concept implies that the creation of erotica “aimed at passing general knowledge from the experienced to the initiate,” which, as visual (and distributary) technology expands, creates and explores how “modern Western cultures have increasingly constructed . . . a hermeneutics of desire aimed at ever more detailed explorations of the scientific truths of sexuality” (Williams, 1989, p. 34).
Western contemporary culture upholds a sustaining image of women objectified as ethereal and mysterious. Lyn Cowan (2013), a formidable author and Jungian analyst, noted that “Jung answered the ancient question, ‘Does woman have a soul?’ with a twist, saying she doesn’t ‘have’ a soul (anima), she is soul” (Part I, Section 4, para. 10). However, in elevating the nymph, the virgin, the ethereal, near-transparent woman in the flowing gown, culture risks displacing the substantial woman, full of flesh and blood and guts. Angela Carter, a feminist author, illuminated the reductionist view of woman promoted over time: “All the mythic versions of women, from the myth of the redeeming purity of the virgin to that of the healing, reconciling mother, are consolatory nonsenses; and consolatory nonsenses; seems to me a fair definition of myth, anyway” (1978, p. 50). Although myth is a useful tool in a psychological approach, without an orientation that is applicable to real life, it is reduced to images without affect, and less clinically applicable. Rather than simply consolatory, the idea of our outdated images of women is considered compensatory in the Jungian and post-Jungian realm. As Cowan related:
When Jung says a woman “by nature” relegates “the whole realm of the applied masculine mind” to the “penumbra of consciousness, he mistakes the condition for the cause: the “masculine mind” has relegated woman to the penumbra of its consciousness. . . . The male is dominant because we see male dominance, therefore the male is dominant by nature. (2013, Part I, Section 1, para. 22)
Carter (1978) spoke to how myths can obscure the actual conditions of life and quell our own existential anxieties. Instead of fully incorporating myth, Western culture tends to imagine women as myth, literalizing this resolve and reducing females to their nurturing function, veritably breastfeeding on their own projection.
Archetypes
Though innumerable archetypes exist in pornography, archetypes discussed within will be the categories of (a) Moms/Hot Mom/Mother/MILF (b) Youth/Teen, and (c) 18 and Abused. Archetypes were originally a Platonic idea (ideal forms), and were transformed into psychological terminology through Jung’s life and work. Archetypes reflect aspects of the feminine and are present in pornographic imagery. Archetypes (“arche means first, typos means mold or pattern” [Shalit, 2002, p. 7]) exist in psychology and life as “characteristic patterns that preexist in the collective psyche of the human race, that repeat themselves eternally in the psyches of individual human beings and determine the basic ways that we perceive and function as psychological beings” (Johnson, 1986, p. 27). Archetypes can arise from constellated myths. Mythology can act as language that binds humans through cultures and over time. James Hollis, a Jungian analyst and an author, noted of working with archetype: “It is the means by which the individual brings pattern and process to chaos, and it is the means by which the individual participates in those energies of the cosmos of which we’re always a part” (2000, p. 7).
Mother. The Mother archetype is part of the character of the feminine structure, containing a complex and an archetype. Erich Neumann, a student of Jung, philosopher, writer, and psychologist, noted that this structure contains three things: “First we mean the Feminine as it is experienced in its projection, for example, through the godhead, the world, and life” (1972, p. 25). This could be translated through the purview of numinous. The Mother archetype is nearly too big to comprehend. It contains elements of the self, the self-object, the actual physical mother, the concept of mother, as well as the ideal mother images found and formulated in both myth and psyche. Johnson spoke to the all-encompassing and overwhelming aspect of the Mother archetype, and how it relates to Mother Nature, by saying:
This noble realm is the place of mother nature, life, nourishment, support, strength. The mother archetype surrounds us at all times and in every direction. It is the air we breathe, the water, the whole physical universe that supports us. Without the mother archetype we would not live for one second. It is the whole mothering world in its divine essence—reliable, nurturing, benevolent. It is not too much to say that the mother archetype is the feminine half of God. (1994, p. 32)
As this archetype contains so much within—life and rebirth, death and nurturing, love and hate, nature and person—Johnson surmised that “the two mother manifestations—complex and archetype—are the same entity, different only in the way we relate to them” (1994, p. 32). This is a split archetype, as we relate to it with complex first and ignore the fact that when interacting with the feminine, there is latent material from (m)other and nature. The fact that feminine qualities and psychological elements or processes are also ascribed to the feminine ideal is problematic as it furthers the split we have with the Feminine archetype(s). Neumann clarified this issue as related to culture:
But this problem of the Feminine has equal importance for the psychologist of culture, who recognizes that the peril of present-day mankind springs in large part from the one-sidedly patriarchal development of the male intellectual consciousness, which is no longer kept in balance by the matriarchal world of the psyche. (1972, p. xlviii)
Culturally, we denigrate the Great Mother as a singularly numinous source, rejecting the feminine function in its entirety. The rejection is demonstrative of a shift away from the feminine principle. Cultural historian William Irwin Thompson (2013b, lecture) noted that sixth- and fifth-century Athens (from 20,000 BC) marked a pivotal point, the beginning of the Judeo-Christian world and the end of the reign of the Great Mother—that is, the end of matriarchy in exchange for “sky gods.” Thompson (2013b) spoke of the rejection of the feminine principle whereby culture at large is “tearing her body apart to build the great city of Babylon” (2013b). The end of matriarchy begets the onset of civilization, growth, industry, money, and war. As a result, on the psychical levels, there is a split between body and mind, rationality and feeling. The thinking function rules as an instrument toward forward motion.
Complexes are woven throughout the Mother archetype; a thin line exists between this archetype and the Feminine archetype and principle. One of the unconscious splits in modern culture is the expectation that a woman is to leave her mother (become independent) and to be a mother (nurture others). Cowan noted that our culture is held by the Child archetype, denoting a woman’s highest power as creation of child, and greatest destruction is abortion; “for if the child is the primary divine figure, then to kill is not only infanticide, but deicide” (2002, p. 50). The Mother archetype and complex, in our broken, dueling expectations of them, blend quickly into the Terrible Mother archetype, which underlies our relation to the unpredictable yet nourishing Mother Earth.
Terrible Mother/Devouring Mother. “A configured form of the Great Mother has emerged from the primordial archetype. Now an order is discernable in the elements. She has three forms: the good, the terrible, and the good-bad mother” (Neumann, 1972, p. 21). One of the charges against the feminine—that Terrible Mother, that Devouring Mother—is that she, as Marie-Louise von Franz, a Jungian analyst, a friend to Jung, and an expert in fairytales, expounded, “possesses cunning, cruelty, wickedness, unfathomable depths of passion and the uncanny gloom of death, the smell of corpses and putrefaction in equal measure with the potentiality of new life and rebirth” (1980, p. 156). It is the projection of immense power and ineffable existential sway that terrifies a masculine-identified culture into needing to control such a monster. The current reactionary rhetoric regarding abortion speaks to this very complex.
A woman who aborts presents us with an image of the mother who has the godlike power to destroy each of us, who ejects us coldly from the womb, that safe, life-giving haven we think nature intended it to be. Such a godlike woman becomes a person of ultimate consequence. (Cowan, 2002, pp. 48-49)
Cowan explained one way the permutation of power and mother may give way to a complex, and morph into the Terrible Mother archetype:
If we expect “Mother” to be the source of abundant nourishment, the model of infinite sacrifice for the child’s well-being, and the fount of limitless love and devotion—all of which we do expect—then the mother who voluntarily aborts her child utterly destroys those expectations, destroys paradise. She is a monster, an abomination, an unnatural woman. (p. 48)
The Terrible Mother archetype is activated in real life as an instrument of politics; it is also rooted in myth. Tiamat, the mother who can also encompass the instrument of death, is the “most terrifying archetype that people can envision” (Thompson, 2013b). Neumann (1972) and Thompson (2013b) respectively bring up Gorgon (Medusa) and Clytemnestra as projections of the Terrible Mother. Kali, Inanna, and Sedna might even be worse. They lack the maternal aspect, in some cases malign or deny the need for men, and are creative and destructive at once. “The figure of Isis, however, combining features of the Terrible and of the Good Mother, corresponds to the archetype of the Great Mother and also discloses suggestions of the primordial archetype of the Feminine and of the uroboros” (Neumann, 1972, p. 22). The uroboros, or “tail devourer” represents sublimation and aptly represents the intolerable elements of the split-feminine and begins to speak to the dichotomies present between compensatory pornography use and conscious intimacy (“Uroboros,” 2010, pp. 935-937).
The uroboros is the one that devours, fertilizes, begets, slays, and brings itself, like the phoenix, to life again. It is hermaphroditic and the container of the opposites: poison and panacea, as well as basilisk and savior. As a sexual symbol, the uroboros in fertilizing itself is thus related to hierosgamos. (“Uroboros,” 2010, p. 936)
Neumann elucidated the concept of “uroboric incest,” by saying “the Great Mother takes the little child back into herself, and always over uroboric incest there stand the insignia of death, signifying final dissolution in union with the Mother” (1949/1989, p. 17). Jung’s experience of his mother notably informed his dualistic personalities one and two theorem. Jung “experienced his mother as dark and unpredictable,” “rooted in deep, invisible ground” (1961/1963, p. 30). Jung spoke to this dichotomous confusion:
There was an enormous difference between my mother’s two personalities. That was why as a child I often had anxiety dreams about her. By day she was a loving mother, but at night she seemed uncanny. Then she was like one of those seers who is at the same time a strange animal, like a priestess in a bear’s cave. Archaic and ruthless; ruthless as truth and nature. At such moments she was the embodiment of what I have called the “natural mind.” (p. 50)
Erel Shalit, a Jungian psychoanalyst, an author, and a lecturer, elucidated how the split idea of Mother translates into attachment-based neuroses, based in Jungian theory:
The neonate finds him- or herself at the crossroads of not-being-into-being (Shalit, 1994). The very proximity to not-life constitutes a threat, with a consequent fear of annihilation. This is symbolically repeated in the adult fear of being devoured by the unconscious, by the negative pole of the Great Mother archetype, by the dark and unknown, “the world of the dead” (Jung, 1968, p. 82). (2011, p. 65)
Shalit described the correlation between the mother, uroboros, and the child: “We find the lack of adequate aggression in the eternal child, of whatever chronological age, unable to detach from liebstod (love-death) in the embrace of original wholeness” (2002, p. 49). Cowan (2013) said of the impossible position of this archetype:
If the devouring Mother is labeled “negative,” for example, what place can there be for “her” in the life of a moral person? Devouring and mothering can be imagined only in their negativity. The “negative” Mother must be domesticated, taught to accept and nurture; in a word, become “positive.” This is one way moralism splits archetypes so that we think of them as inherently split, giving Ego the heroic job of “holding the opposites” together in some bearable tension. (Part I, Section 3, para. 7)
In contrast to the Devouring/Terrible Mother, there also exists a version of the Great Mother that we have culturally deified as true feminine, wherein all good projections get ascribed to a daimonic being, the Virgin Mary. Cowan noted of our shadow supposition:
The depth of our expectation of the mother as supremely self-sacrificing is embodied in the image of the Virgin Mary, a central image of “femininity” in our culture. In her, virginity is exalted because it makes divine motherhood possible; in her, motherhood is the essence of femaleness that makes biology into destiny. (2002, p. 49)
The split archetype of the Great and Terrible Mother holds the tension of aggressive expectations, violence, and vitriol with expectations of sacrifice and original love. Western, specifically American, culture is ruled by unconscious projection. One version of personification occurs in cultural images, including pornography. A complex can become intercalated into the world, as Neumann noted:
The ego can see and experience the archetypal constellations of the unconscious directly or indirectly—directly by perceiving them in their projection into the world. Modern man with his reflective consciousness speaks of a direct psychic experience when a content of the psyche, e.g., an archetype, appears in a dream, a vision or in the imagination. We call it an indirect psychic experience when an intrinsically psychic content is experienced as belonging to the outside world, e.g. a demon as the living spirit of a stone or a tree. (1972, pp. 21-22)
Virgin and puella. As an opposite pole to the mother, there exists a young girl archetype available in ways in which we interact with women, expect them to be, and portray them in pornography. Puella Aeterna means eternal girl in Latin. She is a woman who “remains too long in adolescent psychology . . . associated with strong attachment to the father” (Perera, 1981, p. 96). Puella emerges in pornography as the unconscious tie between desire and death colliding with our hunt for eternal youth. Sade gave us the “archetypal innocent, Justine,” whom he described as having a “virginal air, large blue eyes very soulful and appealing, a dazzling fair skin, a supple and resilient body . . . [a] charming creature whose naïve graces and delicate traits are beyond our power to describe” (Moore, 1990, p. 33). Western culture holds the tension that if we cannot control her, the terrible one—we must denigrate the feminine into a reductive, delicate creature. The tension between the tangible, available woman and the intangible, ethereal creature is constellated by our expectations of them. The delicate and youthful virgin fulfills our culture’s youth complex and ageless obsession. “Cultures of longer histories than ours accuse Americans of youth worship and of indulging the longest collective adolescence on the planet” (Cowan, 2002, p. 49). Thomas Moore, a psychotherapist and a prolific writer, pointed out that the origin of Justine is related to a society out of control:
Justine is not only a type of person or a figure active in a personality; she is a social syndrome. Sade inveighed against this puella he saw all around him in his chaotic society. Indeed, he was the victim of this style that parades its purity but is potentially violent and dangerous. (1990, p. 34)
Justine was constellated in Sade’s society, and is still in ours.
Victim. The etymology of victim, from the word sacrifice (“Victim,” 1966, p. 979), is rooted in the Latin word sacer, derived from sacred, “holy, secured against violation” (p. 781). “[Sacer] also means ‘forfeit,’ ‘accursed,’ and ‘criminal.’” Thus Cowan suggested the victim in its “set-apartness” is “both innocent and accursed” (2002, p. 88).
We are all victims, though some of us, in whom the inner victim figure is denied or projected, may not be aware of a deeper psychic resonance in those critically important moments when suffering is inflicted. We all suffer, randomly, or by some seemingly inscrutable design. We all have far less power to control our sense of well-being in an increasingly chaotic world that we would like. (p. 84)
Culturally, we relate to the victim then turn on her in anger. We want what is sacred inside ourselves—we expect to meet sacred—but act out against others. We relate to the victim because the world seems to be crumbling beneath us, in several ways: ecological, personal, social, and societal. “To the victim, the agent of victimization has the power to inflict suffering and pain, to deny justice, to cause death. And since the victim is, by definition, powerless, the primal emotion that always accompanies victimization is fear” (Cowan, 2002, p. 85). Victimization constellates culpability:
The image of the secular victim and the situations that create it turn negative attention toward the victim, usually in the form of blame. Since the meaning of victimhood cannot be divorced from the cultural value context in which it is experienced, the victim will always appear blameworthy and at fault in a culture that most highly values dominance, conquest, power, competition—just the things needed to victimize. (p. 86)
Again, a split occurs: “We demand either excessive responsibility of the victim . . . or expect him or her to be as helpless in trauma as a child” (Cowan, 2002, p. 92). The Victim/Sacer archetype easily morphs into the scapegoat figure, “the one singled out for the sins of many” (p. 88). Paradox lies heavy in the word and world of the victim from ancient times at an archetypal scale.
The victim thus unfolds as a complex weave of apparently contradictory meaning. It is an image simultaneously evoking collective emotions and ideas of fear, negativity, divine power, holiness, persecution, doubt, innocence, anguish, growth, sacrifice, condemnation. Thus the victim image may present itself in its secularity as ugly, fearful, and secretly despised, or the victim image may appear as sacred, beautiful, and desirable. (p. 88)
Dark earth feminine archetype. Demeter was the mother of earth who denied the planet growth and birth as revengeful mourning for her daughter Persephone. Hades abducted Peresphone into the underworld, and “everything lay withered and sucked at parched earth or dry breasts” (Estés, 1992, p. 366). Moore spoke of Artemis, the virgin huntress, her breasts as portrayed in statue as “nothing to do with nurturing” (1998, p. 20). Isis, queen of the west (denoting the underworld), was the “mother of stars” or night; “she could bring light out of death” and her tears created a flood (“Feminine sacrality,” 2005, p. 3021). Thompson (2013a, lecture) noted of Isis “the power of nature and the inundation of the flood, is sexual, both in its feminine and its masculine sense,” again pointing to a lost dualistic sense of both the integrative properties of masculine-feminine, but also the positive aspect of feminine and earth. Thompson (2013a) postulated that prehistorical feminine mythic figures had both beautiful and deadly features whose combination has now been displaced or turned purely sexual. Noting a
constellation that really is religious, unconscious, archetypal and goes back throughout thousands of years and that’s why it has such particular power . . . the goddess demoted from her chthonic energy of fertility begins to take on an energy of sexuality. (Thompson, 2013a)
With the feminine devaluation from the cosmic correlation, the feminine aspect becomes disrupted and out of balance, as “the goddess demoted from her chthonic energy begins to take on an energy of sexuality,” as a “compensatory response, where sexuality [now] begins to become loaded . . . and becomes . . . a weapon,” such as portrayed when Inanna, “Bitch Goddess,” who saw the onslaught of Capitalism noted “my vulva it is like a horn” (Thompson, 2013a). Not only have formerly comprehensive archetypes become sexualized, they have disappeared or been displaced by more singularly featured, maligned, or belittled archetypes.
Elements of Our Cultural Complex
Anima complex. Anima is Jung’s contrasexual term to denote the ideal female for a male. It is, again per his time and a cisgendered and male-centric position, outdated.
A man’s “positive anima” is a mythic Muse who allegedly inspires him to create art, music, politics, economic theory; but a woman’s “positive animus” only seems to give her access to something called “focused thinking” and a creative adaptation to the male world. (Cowan, 2013, Part I, Section 3, para. 18)
Again gender and principle are muddled in favor of the masculine. Man has an allowance to struggle heroically with his anima problem (Part I, Section 3, para. 13). The shadow of this complex informs pornography and is acted out in its consumption. Hillman, via Cowan, explained this repressed and loaded relationship wherein the man’s heroic, archetypal struggle with his anima becomes condensed into “mythologem” material. “The language of tough heroism then describes the process of anima integration by ‘conquest,’ reducing ‘her’ from personification (of soul, and life) to function (of relationship between conscious and unconscious)” (Part I, Section 3, para. 11). The masculine battle fought is symbolic of the male-female and masculine-feminine dichotomy we culturally convey between dark “feminine ‘other’” versus “masculine ego” (Part I, Section 3, para. 11). “The male ego in search of heroism creates the battle, and the battle creates the Hero, the mythic figure that inflates both the male ego to inhuman proportions and the ‘woman’ to an inhuman adversary of demonic proportions” (Part I, Section 3, para. 11). This yields an anima-excuse-complex, which is alive not only in porn, but also in real-life interactions between males and females, which suggests that males’ behavior and contemplation of the female/feminine is unavoidably caught up in his struggle with his anima, of which he cannot be held accountable.
This is one reason why women have to be convinced that they must “help” men control themselves, by not wearing sexually provocative clothing, for example. He cannot help but lose control if a woman provokes him, which he can explain as an “anima problem,” assigning responsibility for his behavior to her. He is a fallen angel, she is the devil’s handmaid. (Part I, Section 3, para. 13)
Females are taught at an early age, in various cultures in myriad ways, that their bodies and selves are to be hidden. It is no wonder that the literalized image emerged with such power and aggression, and is often concealed in the collective’s shadows. Women learn through passive and assertive social, familial, and cultural methods that the potency of their sexuality is shameful and overwhelming to men. A recent Atlantic Monthly article pointed to “latent [gendered] biases” that create and enforce dress codes at primary schools to foster “distraction-free learning zone[s] for [females’] male counterparts” (Zhou, 2015, para. 11). The U.S. county discussed in the article is one of many to “justify female-specific rules” that “place the onus on girls to prevent inappropriate reactions from their male classmates” (para. 11). Laura Bates, a feminist writer and the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, noted of this clear demarcation: “There’s a real culture being built up through some of these dress codes where girls are receiving very clear messages that male behavior, male entitlement to your body in public space is socially acceptable, but you will be punished” (as cited in Zhou, 2015). This is not dissimilar to the rape-culture reaction slogan that has become cauterized into society: She asked for it.
Woman and land. The feminine is syncretistically referred to as underworldly and terrifying, such that it is easier for our masculine principled world to digest a force that feels out of control and unpredictable. Feminine fertility was once symbolically allied to agriculture. Rites were held to benefit crops and make the sun rise. Spirits and symbols have previously held dichotomies of beauty and fear, good and evil; Jung (1961/1963) spoke of the Elgonyi tribe offering their spit on their hands to the sun every morning lest it would not rise (p. 267). Their and similar tribes held Creator symbols that embodied m’zuri, “beyond good and beautiful,” and were seen as evil and resourceful (p. 267). These quotidian tasks and their aligned complete archetypes are indicative of ritualistic energies that lie deep in our system, and that when compared to the current situation of the fear of feminine and the earth, signify a split. Like children, Western culture assumes omnipotence against earth and deny our human causality.
The split. The split constellated by our cultural complex is partially explained by our inability to hold the feminine as a whole creature, instead ascribing Great or Terrible aspects to her and punishing the feminine under the auspices of the inability to control or contain her. “But the difficulty with the placement of animus as an ‘inner’ figure in a woman or as a projection to the ‘outer’ world obscures the question of a deeper and more essential problem: What happens when an entire culture is ‘animus-possessed’?” (Cowan, 2013, Part I, Section 6, para. 5). “And yet: the restoration of powerful female figures, like Artemis or Gaia or Isis, seems more like rectification of an unintentional error than deep recognition of how grievous and destructive to the human soul has been the effect of their absence” (Para II, Section 5, para. 9). Our culture ignores archetypal symbolism that holds complexity or contains opposite tensions. “The patriarchical ego of both men and women, to earn its instinct-disciplining, striving, progressive, and heroic stance, has fled from the full-scale awe of the goddess” (Perera, 1981, p. 7). We flee from the awe and replace it with terror or fear of humiliation. Von Franz explained how our masculine-dominated society functions in conjunction with the feminine principle:
In comparison with the figure of the cosmic Hermes, it is striking that in the case of the goddess many more dark, even quite sinister, unfathomable aspects are emphasized along with the light aspects. To aspire to perfection is, as Jung has pointed out, more characteristic of the masculine Logos principle, while the feminine ideal is more that of completeness in which everything is simply held together in one unified whole. (1980, pp. 155-156)
Sullivan wrote of the importance of study through the purview of the feminine principle:
Therapeutic work of all theoretical persuasions has been significantly impaired by the dominant cultural imbalance between the masculine and feminine principles [as there exists] a severe cultural bias that denigrates nurturing, receptive, accommodating behavior and idealizes action, assertive, controlling behavior. (1989, p. 1)
In efforts to change the relationship to image and the self, Sullivan (1989) spoke of the unconscious’ disinterest in the authoritative delineations between gendered and personified thinking versus feeling, masculine versus feminine.
The unconscious is open to a relationship with us. If we will begin by trying to understand how the unconscious imagines male and female energy, it may shift its images in response to our interest. If we will be open to the unconscious, it will be open to us. (Sullivan, 1989, p. 2)
Witch and capitalism. As the feminine gets reduced to one-dimensional symbols that are then projected onto women, there is an aspect duly tied to our culture’s overidentification with the masculine principle. Silvia Federici (2004), an Italian American feminist scholar and activist, wrote that identifying, capturing, and burning purported witches was meant to tame and scare women into accepting a “new social-sexual contract” where women’s bodies, labor, sexuality, and reproduction were controlled by the state and transformed into economic resources (p. 97). “According to this new social-sexual contract, proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of reproduction and a communal good anyone could appropriate and use at will” (p. 97). Whereas land and woman were once tied symbolically, land and woman become literal equals: commodities. The matriarchal mythopoeic power of a women’s powerful sexuality as defined by Inanna, whose chant to Dumuzi “plow my vulva” (Wolkstein & Kramer, 1983, p. 37) gets diminished into pillaging by way of men’s rights to land or woman.
In the spirit of capitalism, forward motion, and patriarchy, a logos-ruled collective takes control, emphasizing empiricism and de-emphasizing anything reminiscent of the sinewy, confusing, and chaotic feminine. After the more egalitarian societies fell to early industrialism, women were cohesive in society, and were serfs until the 16th century (Federici, 2004, pp. 22-25). Though they lived amongst a sexiest society, women performed tasks such as spinning, washing, and harvesting, and did so in company of other women, creating a protective feminine core (pp. 25). The witch hunt produced a period when women became “servants of the male work force,” whose tasks were turned to more solitary duties of nurturing for the children, elderly, and household, making them completely dependent on a man’s income (p. 115). This is indicative of control becoming dominant perhaps as a way to digest something that was too chthonic and unpredictable—that is, both land and woman. Johnson blamed our loss of the feeling (again ascribed feminine) function to that of our “Western patriarchical culture” and stated, “there is little room for the feeling function in a society that worships rationality and abstraction as deeply as we do” (1994, pp. 5-6). Johnson noted that this power and domination have translated into a loss of respect for constructs that rely on the feeling function:
We build wonderful Boeing 747s and atomic generators, but we build very poor marriages and relationships. We stand in severe danger that our Brave New World of mechanical marvels may be overturned by the poor quality of the feeling function that has accompanied it. (1994, p. 7)
This is not just to the fault of men. Sylvia Brinton Perera, a Jungian analyst, held culture accountable by saying that women, by some functions of social evolution, have become “well adapted to a masculine-oriented society” (1981, p. 7), and as a result we
have repudiated our own full feminine instincts and energy patterns, just as the culture has maimed or derogated most of them. We need to return to and redeem what the patriarchy has often seen only as a dangerous threat called terrible other, dragon or witch. (p. 7)
The shift away from full-female acceptance has resulted in not simply a loss, but an aggressive replacement. Not only do we flee from awe, a culture built on violence and repression has “tried to slay her, or at least to dismember and thus depotentiate her” (Perera, 1981, p. 7). The word and industrial purpose behind capitalism speaks of its masculine tendencies as “aggression comes from ad gradior, [meaning] ‘I move forward’” (Shalit, 2002, p. 49). Patriarchal culture depotentiates not just women but the feminine function, by aligning itself only with the thinking function, as “its words are only of the mind, without body, without substance, intangible, and material—that is, supremely abstract and full of air” (Cowan, 2002, p. 26). It is no wonder our culture expresses so blatantly and visually our complexes (through video games, pornography, comics, and violent films) as:
Its language, which is common currency in our daily lives, is less able to portray our experience than visual mediums. . . . In an age when words are being processed faster than thought, the soul is starved for words that speak of us, for us, about us, and to us, that make audible and articulate statement of who we are and what we are about. (Cowan, 2002, p. 26)
Cowan referred to the overly abstracted and solely thinking function-focused language as mentalspeak, whose words “deny or minimize depth, complexity, and intensity of feeling. They serve to anesthetize the soul, dull the spirit, and keep the mind blank” (2002, p. 31). We overly identified with language abstracted, leaning on our intellectualism and forward motion as a culture, and act out in visual mediums that portray our culture complexes that we cannot endure thinking about. “The over-valuation we give to being ‘comfortable’ makes us more susceptible to disembodied mentalspeak exactly because it is comfortable speech and demands nothing of us” (p. 31). This split separates individuals and their culture from embodied experience, which is crucial to intimacy and sex as well as imaginal processes. The integration of both thinking and feeling functions, to masculine and feminine principles within oneself and within culture, is the only path to individuation and toward the sacred marriage. In the meantime, we can identify the split by noticing what we honor and what we devalue.
Punishment and power. There is an immutable quality to the feminine principle, literalized to females and tied to land, nature, and Mother Nature—and feared and controlled by masculine-oriented cultures. What is not met with light will be met in shadow. Sadism is one of the myriad ways in which the control is explored. Analyst Adolf Guggenbühl-Craig cited that sadism is “to be understood as an expression of the destructive side of people: an expression of the core, of the shadow, of the murderer within us. It is a specifically human trait to find joy in destruction” (1991, p. 98). Of sexuality and sadism, “destructiveness is a psychological phenomenon with which every living human being must come to terms. The joy of destroying, of obliteration, of torturing, etc., is also experienced within the sexual medium” (Guggenbühl-Craig, 1991, p. 98). The pornographic imagination is a literalizing, and thus reductionist, force:
If there is a telos in every symptom and if the symptom can be spotted in its literalism, exaggeration, and outrageousness, then the grand success of pornographers in our society points to a powerful need of the psyche for soulful pornography. (Moore, 1990, p. 114)
Holding these phenomena, death and sex, destruction and pleasure, fantasy and image, in one construct is the intolerable image, of which Hillman elucidated as “the more distressing images in dreams and fantasies” (1975a, p. 41). Pursuing and meeting the intolerable image with “archetypal psychology allows the image to work on us. Staying with the intolerable, the unusual, the alien. The images must be alien even while familiar, strangers even if lovers, uncanny although we rely on them” (Hillman, 1975a, p. 41).
Punishment of the Feminine Turned Outward (Violence and Sex)
The issue with sadism in a culture where we look past mythopoesis and meaning is that image infused with sadism becomes literalized and acted out in the cultural, and not just fantastical, forum. Catherine MacKinnon, a feminist, a scholar, a lawyer, a teacher, and an activist, said of the growing base of baseness in pornography:
More and more violence has become necessary to keep the progressively desensitized consumer aroused to the illusion that sex is (and he is) daring and dangerous. Making sex with the powerless “not allowed” is a way to keep “getting it” defined as an act of power, an assertion of hierarchy . . . show me an atrocity to women, I’ll show it to you eroticized in the pornography. (1984, p. 331)
Violent pornographic content seems to have the opposite effect of its illusions that sex is daring. Where there exists a split between real and fantasy, there also exists a split between sexual objectification proliferated through image, and real, live women. This creates two notable (of innumerable) consequences: either the acts are literalized and assumed to be standard sexual behavior, or women are considered to be ethereal and fragile in real life and only their pornographic counterparts contain the grotesque elements of a female body, however its portrayal includes an unrealistic cleaned up, waxed, oiled, emaciated version. Again, we punish women and yet portray them as perfection: the Mother who would never abort us, the Virgin who would allow us the access to the unscathed landscape, the woman who is numinous and obedient.
Conclusion
“Pop culture is how we dream collectively. And it’s how we share nightmares—communal, cathartic nightmares that allow us to conceive awful things at a safe remove. It matters. Even the silly stuff” (Poniewozik, 2015). It is important to follow the thread that our cultural and pop cultural images weave. In the next chapter I will review three categories of pornography and how they relate to the archetypes discussed herein.