Concerning the Origins of Misogyny
Jocasta’s urge for her son, Oedipus, revolves itself in self-hate.
So the story, in a nutshell, goes: as boys progress towards individuation, they must separate from their mothers in order to develop a sense of Self. This separation instills a desire for the Mother, for now the young boy contains a Lack of Wholeness, he is an isolated being, alone, alienated, scared, and he craves re-union with the Whole, re-union with the Mother. This desire for the Mother must be blocked, and it is the Father that does so, the Law, the Incest Taboo, the Symbolic Realm. To both repress the urge, and symbolically achieve, the re-union with the Mother, Wholeness, the young boy identifies with the Father, the Law, the Symbolic Realm, and internalizes the Father as Super Ego. The trite Oedipus-Complex, what a delight! Let us all join hands and be Oedipalized!
Because re-union with the Mother is necessary for Wholeness, both the young boy’s dependence on the Mother for Wholeness, as well his expulsion from the Mother/Wholeness, causes fear in the young boy. This fear causes anxiety and resentment towards the Mother for her denying the boy Wholeness. This resentment for the Mother is the origin of misogyny, or so the story goes.
In this all too common tale, fear at being an individual, fear of expulsion from the Garden of Eden, fear of Being is the root of all evil. In this cheap tale, embedded in the mythos of contemporary politics and cultural studies, the male is fragile because he is frightened of his individuality, and thus resents his individuality.
In this all too common tale, misogyny originates internally in the young boy. In this all too common tale, the single consuming drive for re-union with the Mother, the psychological Object, must be repressed, according to the Father, to the Law, because, after all, the Father has been Oedipalized as well, and his wife is simply a Sublimated Mother; because in this all too common tale, Sublimation, the transformation of the desire for the Mother into more socially acceptable desires and behaviors, must occur, and it is the Father that demands it. Such that, when misogyny, the resentment towards the Mother for the boy’s separation and blocking of re-union, arises, it is the Father to blame, the Law that demands the separation and denies the re-union to protect the Father’s interest, namely his socially legitimate desire for his Wife.
Misogyny originates in the Child, because of the selfish, possessive Father, or so the story, in a nutshell, goes, that all too common tale.
However, in this tediously trite story the Father is always-already an Oedipalized entity. We could ask, and should ask: What happens if the Father is not an always-already Oedipalized entity? What story arises if we don’t Oedipalize? Or if new flows of desire in the Oedipal Triangle can be mapped, what if we Laius-ize or Jocasta-zie individuals rather than Oedipalize them?
Before continuing, I would like to establish two points, the first is that the Oedipus Triangle is not a process of Individualization that occurs merely in childhood, but rather, I hold, is a moment-by-moment Subject construction throughout the entire lifespan on a person, such that the three positions of the triangle, Oedipus (child), Jocasta (mother), and Laius (father), are flows that a Subject enacts simultaneously, continually. It should also be noted that the “positions” are not sexed, though often times they are gendered, such that the Mother position becomes female and Father becomes male.
If we ask what story unfolds by de-emphasizing Oedipus and emphasizing, let us say, Jocasta, our answer may be a story where it is seen that Sublimation doesn’t benefit the Father’s interests, it benefits the Mother’s. Sublimation frees the Mother from having to worry about the Child’s desire for re-unification, for if Sublimation, the redirecting of certain unification urges, does not occur, the desire to re-unify into Wholeness, could and would occur. In this situation the Child would be the Mother, in body and self. The Mother’s body would be the Child’s body, and all subjective claims to the Mother’s body and Self would be subjective claims of the Child. There could be no Mother subject. This existential threat is of utmost concern to Mother.
The Law of Sublimation benefits the Mother for it allows occupants of this position to make exclusive claims to their body and Self. In this way the Father, as a dweller in the Symbolic Order, is coerced into becoming a signifier for the Real, ie. the Mother position in the Oedipal Triangle. The Symbolic order doesn’t cut one off from the Real; the Real reifies into the Symbolic. The Real flows with active agency solidifying into the Symbolic. The Real, the Mother-positions, colonizes the Father-position, for the psychological benefit of the Mother-position.
In the Oedipal-now-Jocastal Triangle the Mother’s desire for the Father is the desire for the Real to move out of the Real into the Symbolic, because the Mother fears dwelling, unsignified, in the Real. The Mother-position becomes the Symbolic, the Law, the Taboo, by colonizing the subject that will then be constructed as the Father-position. In this way the Mother-position can create and retain its subjecthood, its individuated Self, but only through an imperializing of the Father position.
Yet, like the Oedipus story, the Mother fears the child’s reunification, for it means loss of Subject, yet too simultaneously desires the unification with the individual child so as to retain a Wholeness. It is this tenstion that creates a situation in which the Mother is Jocasta-ized, the Mother desires the Child, but needs the Father (Laius) to expel the Child (as we find in the play Oedipus Rex).
However, if the Father (Signifier) is made absent (Laius’s death), the Mother’s desire for the Child is unhindered, and the Mother’s attraction to the Child-position causes a reunion, and the two positions (Mother, Child) collapse, and the Mother’s individuated subjectivity vanishes (back into the Real).
In this mapping of the triangle’s Jocasta desire flow, the Mother, to retain Subjectivity, must exploit the Father position, to colonize and force the Father to become a Symbol, to become Symbolic, to become the Law and the enforcer of Sublimation. The Mother invests into the Father because the Mother cannot dwell in the Real, the Mother cannot dwell in It-self. The Mother fears Real-ness, for it is Subject-less, a sort of Death or Stasis, and this fear causes an a priori self-resentment in the Self as that Self comes into Being. This resentment at Self, is self-engendered, and is always-already present in the Mother-position. As such, the Mother in the triangle becomes always-already engendered with misogyny, self-hate toward the gendered female Mother-position.
This self-engendered misogyny is then projected onto, rather into the Father; the Mother’s misogyny-laden reification into the Father as Symbolic hollows out the Father position to become merely a function of the Mother position, turning the Father into a Subject-less, abstraction, whose role is to be a mere symbol of the Real. The Mother position can become a Subject at the expsense of the Subject-less Father position. Once the Father becomes the Symbolic Order, the Law of Sublimation, the Taboo enforcer, then the Child’s desires for the Mother can be blocked and made immoral. Again, these are not “sexed” components, they are “positions” in the triangle (desire flows), but with that caveat, it is certainly understood that these “positions” are often times gendered in societies.
In this story we can see that misogyny invades the Child due to the Mother’s self-resentment, which is projected onto the Father, transforming the Father into a function of the Mother position. The Real wishes to escape its flows,to escape its Subjectlessness into the Father-as-Symbol, in doing so the Mother can become a Subject, and retain its Subjecthood, and retain its Subjecthood “clean,” that is without its inherent self-resentment, because the self-resentment has been transformed/transferred into the Father. Once the Father is imbued with the Mother’s resentment, then the Child identifies with the Father, internalizing the Mother’s self-resentment via the technology of the Father. Such that the Child position works to create itself in the mode of the Father position, namely as an empty vessel, a tool, a cog for the self-resentment of the Real.
