IT MAY BE impossible to fully articulate how the denial of sex differences has altered our world. It is a phenomenon that is sometimes too big for us to see. However, this brilliant excerpt from Knowing Woman: A Feminine Psychology by the Jungian analyst Irene Claremont de Castillejo gets at the ineffable nature of this sweeping change:

There can be little doubt that with rare exceptions the masculine of woman is inferior in quality to that of a man. It is apt to be less original and less flexible. She tends to be impressed by organisation and theories which she frequently carries to excess because her masculine power to focus runs away with her. She then becomes hidebound by regulations and obsessed by detail. She is much less likely to be willing to make exceptions than a man, as the masculine side which runs away with her is wholly impersonal and disregards the human need of any particular man or woman.

But the same sort of thing applies to the feminine within man. It is less vital and dynamic than that of a woman. The feminine in women is not solely passive and receptive. It is also ruthless in its service of life, or rather those particular lives which personally concern her.She is as ruthless as nature. There are no lengths to which a woman will not go to foster the welfare of her immediate family or those she loves. The feminine of man on the other hand is soft and gentle, lacking the ruthless service of life every bit as much as the masculine of woman lacks originality and flexibility.…

As man and woman have, throughout the ages, walked on either side of the river of life, there have always been bridges which have enabled them to meet. Mutual understanding may have been at a minimum but we have always been able to trust that devotion, passion and sexuality would throw bridges across the stream over and over again.

Today it is as though the banks were crumbling, narrowing the river bed until it can be jumped across. Already I see in my mind’s eye the sands from either side mingling and mounting slowly till they form a terra-firma on which anyone can walk in easy companionship. But if this should happen, the dynamic river would have ceased to flow, dammed up by the mingling sands. Separation is the keynote of relating the opposites in life. Perhaps the greatest paradox in man’s psyche is our longing for union, for peace, for solutions, though experience has taught us that it is our conflicts and our failures
which are in fact our points of growth.

                                                                              — Comments —

John E. writes:

A few days ago I read this excerpt as quoted in The Woman Racket by Steve Moxon (which I am reading upon your recommendation, and enjoying it). I also shared the excerpt with my wife, and we both found it to be a very good and helpful description. Moxon elaborates on de Castillejo’s words, and also shows good insight. He says, “What [de Castillejo’s] book is about, in essence, is that men and women don’t know themselves, and still less do they know each other; but the complementarity of the sexes works so that both the partners can better know themselves through the other. Their mutual sexual attraction serves to bring them closer to then allow a mutual indirect self-discovery.”

Somewhat unrelatedly, I have been pleasantly surprised by Moxon’s book, with which I am about halfway finished. I feared that it would be typical MRA fare, embittered and jaded against women; instead, thus far I have found it to be mainly a dispassionate and persuasive argument against what I see as the lynchpin of feminism – the idea of particular oppression of women. If folks would familiarize themselves with the facts he presents, it seems that it would go a long way in helping to clear up the air of feminist ideologies.

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