Slaughtering the feminine

This is a rant. I’ve also been reading a lot of female Jungian psychoanalysts recently. Together, these two facts mean that this will likely be completely nonsensical to everyone, but I use this blog as a diary for my inner thoughts sometimes. I should perhaps also mention that the themes below, as part of a broader nexus of issues around the existential vacuum currently engulfing most of the planet, are the things I think about the most. This stuff is much more central to who I am than economics or even wellbeing. So don’t be surprised to see them here.  

I just finished watching Alita, Battle Angel. Don’t worry, I’m not about to say that it was profound. But it certainly had some symbols from our nascent new mythos. Finding a half dead symbol of the feminine in a junk yard, discarded from heaven—yeeeeaaaahhh.

On the new mythos: I have an intuition (haha, lol am I a scientist or a mystic?) that the psychic and cultural underpinnings of our species are changing radically and rapidly at the moment, which is coinciding with the emergence of a new mythology (though it isn’t coming fast enough). At the centre of this upheaval is a substantial restructuring of the masculine and feminine symbols. Peterson and other commentators on the current moment who suggest we should look backwards to texts like the Bible for answers to these issues are leading people into a dead end. It is precisely because those myths are no longer psychically relevant that people are experiencing existential vacuum.

In this context, the symbol in Alita that I thought most interesting was the scene at the end where she sheds a tear for her lost love (and more broadly for her femininity) and then cuts it in half as it falls with her monofilament blade. Yikes.

Let me do a very quick summary of the plot for those who haven’t seen it (the plot differs meaningfully from that of the manga and anime). I will focus on the things that matter for what I’m about to say; spoilers very minimal.

In the far future there is a glorious floating city in the clouds. It ejects its waste through a sphincter in its base onto the surface of earth. Around the resultant scrapheap has grown junktown. A cybernetic doctor, wandering this scrapheap looking for spare parts, discovers the head, brain, upper torso, and heart of a cybernetic teenage girl. He takes her home and gives her a body that he meant for his disabled daughter, now deceased, killed by a combat mech he built (farrrk, the symbols here, yeesh). Fast forward. It turns out that this girl, he calls her Alita, is the last of a cadre of cybernetic warriors from Mars called the Berserkers. She discovers a proper Berserker body on a crashed Martian spacecraft and the doctor reluctantly reunites her with it so that she might cleanse Junktown of villains. The kingpin of Junktown works for the overlord of the city in the Clouds, who is the real villain—the Martians fought a war with earth (largely successful) to try to kill him. He is immortal, apparently, with great dialogue: “I’ve found that the only way to enjoy immortality is to watch people die”.  Over the course of the film, Alita falls in love, in a very teenage way, with a boy, Hugo. He is a futuristic street urchin, assaulting cyborgs and dismantling their parts to sell to the kingpin, who puts them into the cyborg competitors in his sport, motorball, which is remarkably similar to Rollerball from the excellent film, Rollerball (Jon-a-than! Jon-a-than! Jon-a-than! Learn your pop culture history kids). The soft, torrential, juvenile, love of Alita is most crisply expressed when she offers to sell her literal heart (a one of kind piece of lost technology containing a miniaturised nuclear reactor) so that Hugo can get to heaven, I mean the city in the clouds. She later jokes that “that was a bit intense”. In the climax of the film, Alita slays the kingpin and his henchman and vows death upon the overlord, who threatens those she loves, including Hugo and the Doctor. Shortly afterwards, Hugo tries to run to heaven along pipes that carry it food, water, and parts, because he has a bounty on his head and so cannot remain in junktown. Alita tries to rescue him from the spinning razor blades that the overlord sends down the pipes but is ultimately unsuccessful (props to the American team for making this scene quite sensible in a non-Hollywood way and thereby surpassing, surprisingly, the rather bizarre original version, if I remembering it correctly). In the final scene, Alita is competing in the motorball finals to earn a trip to heaven, and this is where the tear-cutting scene takes place.

Okay, back to symbols, psychic ructions, and the new mythos. I think that right now we are slaughtering the feminine. You see this in our cultural output, our intellectual output, and in our politics, most loudly in the trans discourse. And mostly I think it’s fine, or necessary, or something like that. What has been denied women for the last 4000 odd years is agency, which is not a masculine trait, contra Peterson, Paglia, and others. It is a human need. However, to seize agency in the present cultural milieu it is necessary for women to discover their masculine (what Jungians call the feminine masculine). This includes hard-heartedness (which is not about being callous, like Thanos, but about steeling yourself so that you might do the brutal stuff that is sometimes necessary in life, like, funnily enough, Jon Snow, and not like, ironically, any of the female characters in Game of Thrones, who become callous), which is what the tear-cutting scene symbolises. It also includes things like the capacity for violence (c.f. Captain Marvel, Alita, Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, new Sabrina the Teenage Witch), and self-reliance and no-tears-emotional-stoicism (this is quite strong in the keep standing up scene in Captain Marvel and in Widow’s sacrifice in Avengers: Endgame).

I worry a lot though that the feminine won’t survive this period, that we are cutting too deep. The feminine side of men remains juvenile, in part because, I think, women are not really around to help men discover it (and men aren't helping women discover their masculine, which is actually symbolically played out really well in Alita - her father needs her to play his daughter, and she needs him to help her get the Beserker body; it's also then in the scene where she keeps Hugo alive using her heart), notably through more parenting (the most masculine women are the least likely to have kids), and through generosity (women won’t let you buy them dinner nowadays, let alone “take care of them”). Women, it seems to me, are growing fonder of softer men, but this mostly manifests as less machismo, because this provides the requisite room for the women to assert themselves. It does not manifest as more feminine qualities, unless you think limited ego-drive is feminine (I think perhaps that it is; this is not to say that women don’t have as much capacity for drive as men, rather that the drive is less likely to come intensely from ego). Machismo is a straightforwardly toxic psychological and cultural phenomenon. Good riddance. There is nothing helpful to humanity in letting men be excused for atrocious behaviour (like random blow-ups and short fuses) because its “men being men”. Machismo is the masculine side of the masculine perverted. Something that may have been necessary back when we were constantly at war (though it also started those wars), but no longer.

While I am worried about the feminine side in men, and I am much more worried about the feminine side in women. The emergence of the “little girl” and her “daddy” trope, most articulate in Lana Del Rey’s first album (which is also a very timely requiem for golden age America, which speaks to America’s current existential crisis), is, I suspect, a kind of psychic backlash to the culture-wide assault on “girly” femininity—which, incidentally, is exactly what Alita excises so quickly after her heart offering scene (it’s precisely the heart that is excised).

Relatedly, the femme-fatale is being eradicated from our culture. One of the only ones I have seen recently was Rebecca Ferguson’s character in Mission Impossible Fallout, which might as well be James Bond. This, again, doesn’t strike me as a huge problem, because the femme fatale is a persona that emerges when the only tool or route to power open to a woman is sexuality. The neat thing about Black Widow and what makes her progressive rather than just nerd porn is that she only plays the femme fatale and doesn’t inhabit it (Scarlet Johansson was such a bad casting call…)

Both girly femininity and the femma fatale are being replaced in headline culture with the “bad bitch” of the Marvel Cinematic Universe (constructive) and Game of Thrones (destructive), the cripplingly flawed female of Fleabag, Girls, and Killing Eve (a necessary exposition), and the “sisters doing it for themselves” character that is, I think and hope, the nascent new ideal (Spider Gwen, Sabrina, She-Ra, all the female heroes in the Airbender/Avatar series and…please show me more). What's striking is that care, support, softness, emotional sensitivity and other quintessential feminine tropes are finding expression so infrequently in these new archetypes, being only really found in the last few that I identified. Granted, it is hard to write complex characters that bear contradictory qualities just as they are being transmogrified. This is true of male characters as well (Bow in She-Ra is so great). I find it curious that the final stage of Tony Stark’s transformation from an image of toxic masculinity in Iron Man 1 to a symbol of the new masculinity in Endgame commences with him becoming a father (his transformation in general is kicked off by him discovering that he cares about other people in the first Avengers film, which then continues into his nervous breakdown in Iron Man 3).

The most profound and ahead of the curve of the new mythologists is Hayao Miyazaki, most especially, for me at least, in Nausicca (that film was like a religious experience for me—the final scene has been my desktop wallpaper for years) and Princess Monoke. Nausica is more straightforward in many ways. The world has been destroyed by an outdated masculinity that could not change (or resisted annihilation by annihilating everything else). It is symbolised in the film by the young soldier whose only solution to any problem is to shoot it. Nausica is the new feminine. She has masculine qualities. She is brave (femininity is risk averse, and this is sensible; bravery is about taking on irrational amounts of risk personally for the good of the group—it is the opposite of free-riding and modelled in the take-a-hit game; it is evolutionarily appropriate for men to be the brave ones because they can’t bear children). Incidentally, another brave character who smacks of the new feminine is Aloy/Elizabeth Sobek from Horizon: Zero Dawn, which is also a masterpiece of mythology (I suspect we will see more and more excellent mythology in video games). Nausica is not averse to violence, but she dislikes it. She has steeled herself to exist in a literally toxic world that would be emotionally overwhelming otherwise, but her femininity nurtures the new world growing in the ashes (this may be a new expression of motherhood; motherhood being, I think, the hardest problem for contemporary humanist-feminism, because child-rearing is a kind of slavery). Nausica’s femininity is in this nurturing quality, her emotional sensitivity to the other people of the valley of the wind, and what I currently call grace, for lack of a better word.

I am very uncomfortable with calling grace a feminine quality because it is so socialised, but that’s my intuition. I know a lot of feminists hate this notion that femininity has a body language because (among other things) then that body language is policed. I respect that. I am also sympathetic to related calls to “abolish gender”, but I worry, as you can probably tell from this post, that gender has roots in the psyche that would be destructive to pull out. Anyway, that’s a digression that I hope I never have to engage with. Back to grace. Grace is a bearing and an attitude, but it manifests physically. The masculine physical mode is power. Not strength; power. The ability to call the thunderclap. That’s what male athletes express in every movement, even those in graceful sports, like dance or, even more pointedly, gymnastics. Compare male gymnastics to female gymnastics, especially the exclusive domains like ring (male—all about the power) and bar (all about the grace). Gymnastics requires bucket-loads of strength from everybody, but the gender expectations are different, and I daresay this is deeper than just socialisation. Grace is the physical manifestation of the cultural role of the feminine just as power is the physical manifestation of the cultural role of masculinity. This can and is changing—just look at Kpop boys (strong, but not powerful) and the rise of women's contact sports (MMA, Rugby etc.).

I’m reaching too much with this grace business (this whole post is a reach but whatever), so let me get back to Miyazaki to finish this rant. Princess Mononoke is interesting in comparison to Nausica because it includes a vision of the new masculine but the two main female characters are depictions of femininity-in-transition. Ashitaka is brave, powerful, steeled for war, but also limited in ego, completely lacking in machismo, and sensitive enough to help San (Mononoke) back to her feminine when she’s going, for lack of a better word, a bit crazy. San is on the verge of becoming too callous because her masculine is consuming her feminine so that she can defend the forest. Lady Eboshi retains her grace and emotional sensitivity, and displays a traditionally masculine kind of generosity (the provider mode). I think she’s quite a good depiction of the new feminine. But her ambition is a pig-headed kind that is masculinity perverted. I feel like the “forest spirit” reflects in part the need for us to get back in touch with our natural rhythms somewhat in order to affect our necessary cultural transition, but I need to watch it again to convince myself that this isn’t a crackpot overreach.

Anyway, that’s the end of this brain dump.