grendelkhan (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} grendelkhan) wrote,@ 2007-10-07 20:30:00 |
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on the animus and the anima.
I read a thought-provoking bit that I'd found to Carin, and she agreed to draw her male and female aspects if I'd write a post about the idea of that duality as it applies to me. There's a rather excellent drawing of male and (especially-)female versions of her sitting on the bed. (I'm constantly impressed by the art she does, and have to keep reminding myself not to tell her to draw this and that, as she's not my art-monkey.) In any case, thus follows my half.
Were I a more well-read fellow, I would get my quotes straight from the source... but as I'm embedded in this intellectually narrow circle-jerk which we call the internet, I get it all once removed from the source. So, I'll quote Chet Hawkins here.
I'm not advocating difference feminism here; pretty much the opposite. The idea isn't that there are male and female people which are fundamentally different and must work together for a society to function, but rather that the animus and anima within each person are fundamentally opposed but must create a synthesis for that individual to be healthy.
To be clear, I'm not using the words quite as Jung, or even Bly, did; when I write animus, I mean the masculine aspect of a person, male or female; when I write anima, I mean the feminine aspect of a person, male or female. (Jung apparently used the words to refer to the hidden half of a person--men had a hidden anima, women a hidden animus--but I may be getting this wrong.) And, of course, the very idea of what traits fall into each category is hopelessly mushy, dependent completely on one's culturally-based notions of masculinity and femininity. Someone raised in the Tchambuli culture, for example, would have a very different set of notions. I don't want to give the idea that I'm pretending to have access to some sort of universal truth, nor am I reifying these terms. They're just useful metaphors used to consider my own navel.
Enough ass-covering.
My animus consists of my competitive side, my enjoyment of physical exertion, of working up a good sweat and feeling strong and graceful. It's my appreciation of things gadgety and mechanical. When commenting, it's my urge to take apart a commenter with whom I disagree, or my satisfaction at constructing a good analogy. When reading, it's an appreciation of fantastic tales of magnificent scope and triumphant imagination. And it's my lust, of course.
My anima consists of my compassion and my appreciation for beauty. It's my occasional urge to do something nice for someone else, to get someone a present or to offer to cook for them. When commenting, it's my desire to keep reading until I can see where another person is coming from and add their perspective to my own. When reading, it's a desire to expand my understanding and broaden my frame of reference.
On a completely different scale, it struck me as especially powerful and beautiful that the human body, even when it seems to be in a steady state, is the product of competing engines of creation and destruction called anabolism and catabolism, respectively, each roaring along inside those tiny molecular foundries called cells. Take away half of the process, and the result is incompatible with life; it's only in balance, in synthesis, that we flourish.
I read a thought-provoking bit that I'd found to Carin, and she agreed to draw her male and female aspects if I'd write a post about the idea of that duality as it applies to me. There's a rather excellent drawing of male and (especially-)female versions of her sitting on the bed. (I'm constantly impressed by the art she does, and have to keep reminding myself not to tell her to draw this and that, as she's not my art-monkey.) In any case, thus follows my half.
Were I a more well-read fellow, I would get my quotes straight from the source... but as I'm embedded in this intellectually narrow circle-jerk which we call the internet, I get it all once removed from the source. So, I'll quote Chet Hawkins here.
I read Robert Bly's book Iron John (this was when that short-lived "men's movement" thing was starting up). I had read a lot of Bly's poetry as an undergraduate, so I read this book too. A lot of it seemed pretty silly to me, but there was one passage that struck me like a hammer to the forehead. What it said was, the Woman With the Golden Hair does not exist. What Bly meant by that was, a lot of men are looking for their anima -- the term Jung gave to the feminine side of a man's personality. But what a lot of men in a patriarchal culture do not understand is that the anima is part of them, and is not to be found in another person. This is because men in a patriarchal culture are taught precisely that they don't have an anima: that there is nothing feminine about them, or if there is, that it is a bad thing and must be suppressed. Unfortunately, what this means is that a lot of guys who are a bit of a mess (and who isn't, really?) tend to project their anima onto the women they see around them.This struck me as a particularly apt way of putting it. It also sounds like the sort of thing I'd probably heard of during my Women's Studies days, but which hadn't come up for a few years--so I get to figure it out anew.
I'm not advocating difference feminism here; pretty much the opposite. The idea isn't that there are male and female people which are fundamentally different and must work together for a society to function, but rather that the animus and anima within each person are fundamentally opposed but must create a synthesis for that individual to be healthy.
To be clear, I'm not using the words quite as Jung, or even Bly, did; when I write animus, I mean the masculine aspect of a person, male or female; when I write anima, I mean the feminine aspect of a person, male or female. (Jung apparently used the words to refer to the hidden half of a person--men had a hidden anima, women a hidden animus--but I may be getting this wrong.) And, of course, the very idea of what traits fall into each category is hopelessly mushy, dependent completely on one's culturally-based notions of masculinity and femininity. Someone raised in the Tchambuli culture, for example, would have a very different set of notions. I don't want to give the idea that I'm pretending to have access to some sort of universal truth, nor am I reifying these terms. They're just useful metaphors used to consider my own navel.
Enough ass-covering.
My animus consists of my competitive side, my enjoyment of physical exertion, of working up a good sweat and feeling strong and graceful. It's my appreciation of things gadgety and mechanical. When commenting, it's my urge to take apart a commenter with whom I disagree, or my satisfaction at constructing a good analogy. When reading, it's an appreciation of fantastic tales of magnificent scope and triumphant imagination. And it's my lust, of course.
My anima consists of my compassion and my appreciation for beauty. It's my occasional urge to do something nice for someone else, to get someone a present or to offer to cook for them. When commenting, it's my desire to keep reading until I can see where another person is coming from and add their perspective to my own. When reading, it's a desire to expand my understanding and broaden my frame of reference.
On a completely different scale, it struck me as especially powerful and beautiful that the human body, even when it seems to be in a steady state, is the product of competing engines of creation and destruction called anabolism and catabolism, respectively, each roaring along inside those tiny molecular foundries called cells. Take away half of the process, and the result is incompatible with life; it's only in balance, in synthesis, that we flourish.
