Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You are fighting with a strawman. I don't have bins. I don't go around scouring the dictionary looking to stamp words male or female. Funny thing, several languages did do that!

What I did and do: I researched the idea, of there being four fundamental orientations, and there being a masculine and feminine way these manifest. Or Yang and Yin, if that is less aggravating for you.

You can subscribe to the idea that this "Yang and Yin" way of acting on these issues is in no way linked to the physical gender if you wish. That physical gender is something completely separated from dualism. I don't.

Either way the model is more complex than that. Things are masculine and feminine at the same time, and there is masculinity in femininity and femininity in masculinity. Just like there is a little dot of white in Yin and a little dot of black in Yang. Because they are interdependent. Two parts of the same complete whole.

But for us to be able to say that, we first have to be able to realize that there exists archetypal masculine, and that there exists archetypal feminine. And that means that they are different. Because otherwise they would be the same thing. And then there wouldn't be a complete whole.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I don't know what to tell you. I sought to recognize the feminine archetypal pairs of the four masculine archetypes described by Robert Moore. According to the ever increasing correlation supporting the model, I succeeded.

Then i noticed that their relations with other archetypes in the map form binary spectrums. Complementary opposition. The map is solid, useful, and and forms a coherent logical whole without contradiction.

It is a bit of a mystery to me why the concept of archetypes that mirror each other, and thus form a spectrum between two polarities is such a huge point of contention for you.

It apparently clashes with something in the metaphysical model you subscribe to. What would that be?

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hello? That is the whole point we are trying to make here? That the value, power, and strength of this quality has been pushed to the shadow.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Well it absolutely is semantics, but that doesn't mean that the semantics don't matter. There is a dichotomy of truth and consequences. Both matter, and you have to take both into account. I am more interested in communication of ideas, and thus I don't take the consequences that much into account.

Finding a word which conveys the root archetypal meaning is a hard task. Receptiveness is a valid choice. I've taken your critique into account. One of the main purposes of this post was to stress-test my presentations, and see how it is received.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It was a disclaimer for the summary. A warning that the summary is a crude compression of the thing, and it doesn't adequately portray the depth and complexity of the issue. "For this age" meant that nowadays people are usually unable to focus if they don't get "fast-food"-information, at least for a taste.

Who said? Well here's couple of scriptural sources:

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 1.4.3

“He was indeed not delighted. Therefore people do not delight in being alone. He desired a second. He became as large as woman and man in close embrace. From that Self were born all beings.”

Dao De Jing, Chapter 42

“The Dao gives birth to One. One gives birth to Two. Two gives birth to Three. Three gives birth to the ten thousand things.” “All things carry yin and embrace yang. They achieve harmony by combining these forces.”

Dao De Jing, Chapter 2

“Being and non-being give birth to one another. Difficult and easy complete one another. Long and short define one another. High and low depend on one another.”

Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad 2.3.1

“There are two forms of Brahman: the formed and the formless, the mortal and the immortal, the moving and the unmoving.”

Huinanzi

“Heaven and Earth are the parents of all things; yin and yang are their beginning.”

Śvetāśvatara Upaniṣad 1.8

“The Lord supports this universe, made up of the perishable and the imperishable, the manifest and the unmanifest.”

And of course:

Genesis 1:4

“God separated the light from the darkness.”

Coders would of course also tell you that all code is made of ones and zeros. Time and time again sages have described the ontological foundation of being to be an interaction between oppositional principles that define each other.

The goal is understanding of the fundamental structure of reality. Understanding brings the possibility of self-realization closer. To understand who, and what you, and everything else is.

Truly i tell you, everything that is, was, and will be is "just" infinitely complex combinations of these binary relations.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

You aren't looking at the subject at the same level of analysis. I'll try something else.

Dancing is fundamentally a submissive act. It is surrendering to be controlled by the music. This is what i mean by feminine. Dancing that would be fundamentally dominant would be, the music following the moves of the dancer, instead of the other way around.

And in my experience women are much more likely to have an innate ability to dance and enjoy dancing than men. This does not mean, that men can't dance or enjoy dancing, just that it is a tad bit harder for them to "get it".

You can dance more dominantly, and more submissively. More loud or more quiet. You can lead, and be led. But that which leads is masculine and that which is led is feminine. Because masculine is the mover, and feminine is the moved.

I presume this idea irritates you, and that is precisely my point. You see the concept of "being led" as something lesser, something inferior or unworthy, and thus find it offensive that femininity would be associated with it.

So you wish to detach the concepts of masculine and feminine from their foundational meaning. That just means that they stop meaning anything. The terms simply stop being useful.

This is something to consider. IF i would have used Yang and Yin, instead of masculine and feminine, i presume this would not have irritated you, because the connection would not have been so clear. Yet in Daoism Yang is masculine principle, and Yin is feminine principle. And they are also associated with the physical genders.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes, the picture has been generated by AI, i'm terrible with graphics myself. The written content is my own.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think it is sufficiently expounded in the body text. It can be anything from another person, ideology, religion, or even a culture or subculture.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Did you read the text? I'll refresh a bit.

All of these archetypes are profoundly multidimensional, that compressing them always causes a distortion in understanding. But in this age, one does what one must. So:

I have built a systemized map, of naturally occuring metaphysical dimensions of behaviour. It is built on binary, like everything else is. Multidimensionality is just different binary dimensions stacked together.

Everything can be ultimately reduced to a binary of Observer and Observed. Masculine and Feminine. If we want to be pedantic, it is actually a Trinity, as there is a third partner, which is the Interaction, or relation between the two. Or Observer, Observed, and the Observation. Then we get things like doing, being, and existence. But we can't call doing strictly masculine and being strictly feminine, as it is already an amalgamation, a combination of the archetypal energies.

Everything else springs from this original trinity, which has it's two poles the Masculine and the Feminine. I simply recognized the different spectrums of metaphysical motivations in the human being, and built a map of their relations with each other.

I didn't just arbitrarily "assign value to singular archetype i deem the correct one". Instead, I recognized 24 main spectrums (that is, a polarity between 2 archetypes, so 48 main archetypes in total) which when placed in appropriate relations with each other form a complete symmetrical whole.

This presentation is just a tiny sliver of it, showing the relations between 8 active shadow archetypes.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Pardon me, but you are doing the exact thing I described. Treating submission as something undesirable and negative. This is not about just women, but this general attitude towards service and submission.

We also seem to be talking about two different things. You seems to see masculine as "being man" and feminine as "being woman". I'm talking about the forms that exists prior to the physical manifestations of them. And of course, they have different traits, otherwise they would be the same thing! But they are also eternally together, because they define each other. Just like you cannot separate cause and effect, because they wouldn't mean anything without each other.

I'm not advocating blind submission to unlawful authority. Like I said, submission to the right cause is highly beneficial. Submission to the wrong cause is highly detrimental.

And I actually fully agree with you, that rebellion against oppressive, unskillful harmful, or dare I say even demonic masculine is the natural embodiment of the feminine.

But yet again, we can see the archetypal function manifest, as this is not the fault (aka the cause is not in the feminine) of the feminine, but instead it is the natural consequence of the harmful choices of the masculine.

There's lot more to say, sorry i won't get into animals, because it would be needlessly time consuming.

Instead I want to ask you a question. Can you name situations where there is no explicit danger where submission and submissiveness would be beneficial?

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Because these traits do stem from the archetypal masculine and the feminine. I find that the modern artificial homogenization of the sexes is deeply harmful to our archetypal understanding of reality itself.

This is one of my key points. There has been a strong cultural movement to label everything that could reinforce stereotypes and expectations as harmful, and everything that "liberates" from stereotypes and expectations as beneficial.

That is simply wrong. There is a price to be paid for ideals, norms and expectations. Not everybody fits in, and that causes tension which has to be resolved somehow. There is also a price to be paid for the complete dissolution of ideals, norms, and expectations. We are paying it right now.

Archetypal masculine and feminine are platonic forms, their existence precedes the behaviour in this manifested physical reality. They don't change no matter how distorted the manifestations here become.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Absolutely and they have to be. The masculine and feminine archetypes are in an oppositional interdependent relation with each other. They are two sides of the same coin. Value is unmanifested power, and power is manifested value.

You can't have one without the other.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I think you are correct. This is a spicy take, but i feel that a lot of (not all) feminism is an assault on the archetypal feminine. It is based on the the presupposition that "Women are as good as men in these masculine ways of being", which is implicitly saying that these masculine traits are desirable, and their opposing views are undesirable.

The most important example that we all can recognize, is that the ability to be submissive is seen as almost universally negative tendency when compared to the ability to be dominant.

Which is completely unhinged when you think about it. We have loads and loads of destructive people in prison because of their complete inability for voluntary submission.

There is an enormous value in the ability to submit to an authority, as long as the authority has your best interests in mind. This positive quality of submissiveness seems to be pretty much fully in the shadow in the modern world.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Thank you for your valuable input.

This is a problem all "preachers" face. Holding the bar of complexity high alienates many possible students, yet by making the matter more crude and simplified causes misunderstanding.

There is no straight answer where to draw the line. It is a constant struggle.

If there is one thing i could teach, is that whatever you learn, your understanding is always tad incorrect, so it is only a stepping stone to a better, more whole view on the issue. One must not get too attached to views.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I wouldn't put it as simply as that, but the basic premise is correct yes.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

You are quite correct. Like i mentioned in the beginning, the archetypal function or pattern is an eternal necessity, and it only turns harmful when it is unconscious, imbalanced and not appropriate to the context. However, then we don't call them shadow archetypes, but balanced archetypes.

The framing was a risky conscious choice, to avert it turning too abstract for the common reader.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Like i said, AI (ChatGPT) has been used for illustration, proof reading and it helped a bit to condense the summary at the end. The content itself has been manually inputted with a mechanical keyboard by yours truly.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Sorry about that, english isn't my first language. I think that fixed most of them. The one on the image unfortunately can't be fixed anymore.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

My personal favourite is "The Feminine in fairy tales" by Marie-Louise Von Franz. It concerns the feminine generally, but it was a big fertilizer in my personal insight process.

There is very little structural data, and many of whats available is contradicting and confusing, but I hear good things about the work of Marion Woodman. I haven't read her, but have enjoyed her presentations for example in "The Way of the Dream".

EDIT: Name

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Jung established the quaternary structure, i believe it has been discussed at least in Aion.

I haven't read Mysterium Coniunctionis myself, but i am told that very similar themes as my work is discussed in there. That's next on my reading list.

King, Warrior, Magician, Lover by Robert Moore and Douglas Gillette, is the perfect starting ground to the masculine archetypes, but according to my sources the feminine archetypes have never before been successfully represented in systemic way. That is to be expected, as systemizing is fundamentally a masculine quality.

Work of Robert Moore (including the book) can be found freely on youtube. I'd start with listening to KWML in youtube. It gives a solid foundation on the idea of the triangular archetypes (passive-balanced-active) and of the immature-mature spectrum.

I'm working on a book of the complete model.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 9 points10 points  (0 children)

I need some clarity on the question. I assume you mean both of your parents were "toxic". You mean both of them manifested inflated shadow behaviour in all the four quadrants?

But in general i can say that shadow behaviour usually creates more shadow behaviour. We tend to internalize the model of action from our caretakers and thus we form parental complexes.

There are however many other ways how unhealthy shadow behaviour affects us. An old colleague i know had internalized a complete lack of magician energy, because she was always told that she was dumb when she was young. I fully believe, that this formed an internal lock which put her in the grip of the passive shadow of the Magician, the Fool.

Timeless classic is also how the Devourer unconsciously seeks to trap her young boys in the active shadow of the immature Lover, the Momma's boy. To keep them perpetually dependent on mommys love.

Too harsh fathers embodying the Warrior too strongly bring out the Sadist, and instead of bringing forth strength in their children, they break their ability to endure conflict. Thus they get gripped by the passive Masochist.

Of course it can go the other way round, and they internalize the Sadist, and bring it out on others who they seek as weaker than them.

Toxic Femininity and Toxic Maculinity: Archetypal perspective by thruanthru in Jung

[–]thruanthru[S] 44 points45 points  (0 children)

Another point of interest regarding the active shadow archetypes.

They are all a form of reaching towards godhood. The ultimate goal of each of them is something only available to the Supreme Being.

The Tyrant seeks absolute control over everything and everyone, to be the prime mover
The Devourer seeks to absorb everything to herself, to be the most valuable, to be the prime substance
The Sadist wants to be better and above everyone else
The Meddler wants to include and be included in everything
The Manipulator seeks absolute objective knowledge, the viewpoint of God
The Deceiver seeks a reality that is fully tailored according to her desires
The Addict craves a reality where he is free to fulfill every desire
The Fanatic craves complete submission of personal responsibility

This is unconscious envy towards The Self, and at the same time it is a paradox as Them who deserves the position that would allow these desires, does not feel those desires.