Supplemental Essay: The Hedonist and the Submissive

In the main essay I said: Taken together, the male Se Hedonist and the female Se Submissive represent passivity, immobility, and a lack of agenda or direction. [...] Healthy active Sexuality turns into unhealthy passive worship of the Terrible Mother and imprisonment by her.

I will try to describe profiles of the Hedonist and the Submissive demonstrating this aspect of their nature: The sense of being trapped or imprisoned in the bivalent.

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The Male Se Hedonist

The Faerie Queene

The Renaissance-era poet Edmund Spenser wrote a famous epic poem called The Faerie Queene (published 1590 and 1596) about chivalrous knights who quest, fight monsters and evil wizards, and generally exercise honor and noble virtues. Spenser's purpose was to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." The influence of The Faerie Queene subsequently shows up everywhere in Western culture from Shakespeare's plays to George Lucas's Star Wars film.[1]

According to Spenser, some of the greatest dangers to virtuous knights are powerful seductive women (Great Mother figures) who attempt to trap the knight in a "Bower of Bliss." In her survey of Western culture entitled Sexual Personae Camille Paglia devotes an early chapter to The Faerie Queene. Paglia describes Spenser as follows: "He shows the sex impulse as innately daemonic and barbaric, breeding witches and sorcerers of evil allure. Like the Odyssey, The Faerie Queene is a heroic epic in which the masculine must evade female traps or delays."[2]

Paglia describes Spenser's Great Mother figures as follows: "Their greatest power is in womblike closed spaces, in bedchambers, groves, and caves like the leafy grotto of Homer’s Calypso, where the male is captured, seduced, and infantilized. Spenser’s great word for such places is “bower,” both garden and burrow. Embowerment is one of The Faerie Queene’s primary processes, a psychological convolution of entrancement, turning the linearity of quest into the uroboros of solipsism. [...] Spenser’s femmes fatales tempt their male victims and paramours away from the pursuit of chivalric honor into “lewd sloth”—languid indolence and passivity [...] The Spenserian bower is our libidinous mother-born body, matriarchal property in perpetuity. The rule of The Faerie Queene is: keep moving and stay out of the shade. The penalty is embowerment, sterile self-thwarting, a limbo of lush pleasures but stultifying passivity."[3]

According to Spenser, sloth, indolence, and hedonism are the death of masculinity. Men need a mission or purpose in life, and hedonism diverts them from that mission into inactivity, castration, and death. In Spenser's world, masculinity requires constant distancing, self-discipline, and hardness of boundaries.

In a supplemental essay entitled "Devaluation and Objectification" (linked in the main essay), I described a psychological need on the part of men to differentiate themselves from their mother. Paglia says, "Man, repelled by his debt to a physical mother, created an alternate reality, a heterocosm to give him the illusion of freedom. [...] He must transform himself into an independent being, that is, a being free of her. If he does not, he will simply fall back into her. Reunion with the mother is a siren call haunting our imagination. Once there was bliss, and now there is struggle."[4]

Paglia adds, "Masculinity must fight off effeminacy day by day. Woman and nature stand ever ready to reduce the male to boy and infant."[5]

The Odyssey

As I said in the main essay, S-level pre-Christian societies viewed hedonism as a flaw that trapped people in lives of slovenliness, idleness, gluttony. The Se Champion aspired to be a hero and earn a place as a leader of men. One of the greatest dangers to that aspiration was entrapment in a life of inaction and passivity.

In the main essay I described some themes from The Odyssey that underlie the Se Champion and Si Redeemer; I also provided a supplemental essay demonstrating how The Odyssey represents a typical Jungian "hero's journey."

The one danger that threatens the characters of The Odyssey above all others is hedonism, inactivity, and entrapment by the Great Mother. To illustrate:

• After the storm that drives them astray, Odysseus' ships make their very first landfall in the land of the Lotus-eaters, where consumption of a narcotic drug entraps travelers and causes them to forget about returning home. When Odysseus' crews succumb to the lure of the Lotus plant, Odysseus is forced to chase them down and drag them back to the ships to resume the journey. In this instance, hedonism is literally a deadly trap.

• Odysseus and his men next land on the island of the Cyclopes and are trapped by the Cyclops Polyphemus. In this instance, Odysseus uses gluttony as a tool to defeat Polyphemus: He offers Polyphemus wine to make the latter drunk, and then blinds the Cyclops when he passes out.

• Odysseus and his crews next land in the land of the Laestrygonians, a tribe of man-eating giants. The gluttony of the giants again becomes a weapon used against mankind; Odysseus loses all but one of his ships there.

• After that, they land at the home of the sorceress Circe, who hosts Odysseus' crew to a feast and then turns them into swine to punish them for their gluttony. Odysseus is forced to subdue Circe in order to rescue his men. However, they remain there for another year partying; Odysseus becomes Circe's consort. At the end of the year, Odysseus' men must finally pull him away and remind him of the need to return home. Sex and food again serve as a distraction to the weary traveller.

• The song of the Sirens is yet another hedonistic dalliance, one that is too dangerous to indulge without special preparations: The crew apply wax earplugs so as not to hear the song; Odysseus has the crew bind him to the mast so that he alone may listen.

• Subsequently the remainder of Odysseus' crew is wiped out after eating sacred cattle kept by the sun god Helios, another gluttonous indulgence the brings death and destruction in its wake; Odysseus himself washes ashore on the island of Ogygia, where he is trapped by a beautiful Great Mother divinity named Calypso and forced to remain with her as her lover for 10 years. She offers him marriage and immortality in exchange for remaining with her permanently. It's a hedonist's paradise; but Odysseus wants to resume his journey home and is finally rescued from Calypso by Athena.

• Back home in Ithaca, a swarm of suitors have invaded his palace, imposed themselves on Queen Penelope, and are pressing her to marry one of them to replace Odysseus, presumed dead for the last 10 years. With the help of Athena, Odysseus determines that the suitors will need to be killed. Their sin is hedonism: They have been abusing the Queen's hospitality and partying for 10 years; they have resisted attempts by Prince Telemachus to drive them out of the palace and have even attempted to murder the Prince. Odysseus investigates the scene at the palace disguised as a beggar, but he himself even falls under the spell of the life there. Despite Athena's orders to slaughter the suitors Odysseus is daunted at the prospect of the fight and falls into lassitude and inaction. It's only a fortuitous accident (he is challenged to a fight by another beggar in attendance) that finally moves him to action.

In summary, the main challenge for the S-level pre-Christian hero is to moderate his appetites in order to avoid getting trapped in his bivalent state: Hedonism, inactivity, and abandonment of his heroic journey. 

The same could be said of Old Testament stories like that of Samson and Delilah. One could say that Samson is trapped, blinded, and imprisoned as punishment for abandonment of his hero's journey and dalliance with a woman from a different tribe. Delilah's shearing of Samson's hair symbolizes a Great Mother castration, robbing Samson of his strength and manhood. Samson's dalliance with Delilah is unheroic, and he is only able to regain his heroic luster through a great act of martyrdom. (In a subsequent twist on the Samson story, the Gospel of John in the New Testament describes how Judas Iscariot accused Jesus Christ of a similar hedonistic indulgence involving Mary and scented oils, causing a split between them and leading to both their deaths.)

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The Female Se Submissive

The Faerie Queene

I mentioned above that Camille Paglia analyzed Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queen and described the theme of virtuous knights entrapped or "embowered" by powerful seductive women (Great Mother figures), which I interpret as representative of the male Se Hedonist.

The female Se Submissive presents a similar theme: Passivity to the point of entrapment. I said in the main essay, an excess of one-sided femininity might result in an Se Submissive marked by meekness, resignation, indolence, depression, etc. The Submissive's idleness and fatalism represent infantilization and regression.

Women show up in The Faerie Queen in a variety of roles, demonstrating Renaissance ideas about positive (healthy) and negative (unhealthy/bivalent) femininity. For example, the women Belphoebe and Britomart are female knights: Foremost among the poem's characters, they are presented as honorable, chaste, and every bit as competent in combat as any of the men. Femininity is tempered by the incorporation of some traditionally masculine characteristics. The modern equivalent would be today's "girl-boss." 

By way of contrast, the female characters Florimell and Amoret are passive and ineffective to the extreme. In their case, passivity and absence of any kind of personal agency are presented as deficiencies that deform femininity into an unhealthy extreme. Florimell and Amoret are targeted by villains for rape or worse and end up running from one crisis to the next. 

In Sexual Personae, Camille Paglia describes Florimell as follows:

"In The Faerie Queene, helpless, retiring femininity is a spiritually deficient persona. Fleeing, ever-receding Florimell, brainwashed by the literary conventions of the love-game, is a caricature of hysterical vulnerability. Terrified by the sound of leaves, she runs even from admirers and rescuers. Spenser values courage and confrontation. Florimell’s timidity and irrational fear are a defect of will."[6]

In light of Florimell's shortcomings, Paglia analyzes the interplay between rapist and Florimell as follows: "As a state into which the virtuous characters may fall, lust is allegorically projected as a series of felons, cads, and sybarites who use force, fraud, or magic to have their way. The Spenserian rapist is a savage, churl, or knight who is not 'curteous' or 'gentle,' who has not, in other words, undergone the feminizing refinement of social life. [...] But on the other hand, weakness inspires attack. Vulnerability generates its own entrapments, creating a maelstrom of voracity around itself. Nature abhors a vacuum. Into the spiritual emptiness of pure femininity in Spenser rush a storm of masculine forces. Florimell, for example, is a professional victim. [...] Florimell’s narrow escapes from disaster are sheer melodrama [...] Feminine and unarmed, Florimell and Amoret are flagrant targets for attack." Paglia notes "Florimell's unmixed femininity" and compares it unfavorably to "the higher characters who internally subsume the chastened extremes of masculine and feminine."[7]

Jordan B. Peterson's 12 Rules

The Renaissance character of Florimell has her modern equivalent as well. In his book 12 Rules for Life, An Antidote to Chaos, Jordan B. Peterson talks about the need for both men and women to practice personal agency. In Rule 9, Dr. Peterson tells a story from his private practice of a female patient who repeatedly finds herself in compromising situations. As Dr. Peterson listens to her, he says that he could legitimately call her either a victim or the cause of her own misfortunes. He describes his own internal monologue as he listens to her.

"Miss S came to talk to me about her sexual experiences. When she recounted her trips to the single bars and their recurring aftermath, I thought a bunch of things at once. I thought, 'You're so vague and so non-existent. You're a denizen of chaos and the underworld. You are going ten different places at the same time. Anyone can take you by the hand and guide you down the road of their choosing.' After all, if you're not the leading man in your own drama, you're a bit player in someone else's--and you might well be assigned to play a dismal, lonely and tragic part. After Miss S recounted her story, we sat there. I thought, 'You have normal sexual desires. You're extremely lonely. You're unfulfilled sexually. You're afraid of men and ignorant of the world and know nothing of yourself. You wander around like an accident waiting to happen and the accident happens and that's your life.'"[8]

Dr. Peterson goes on to ponder the responses he might give her: "I thought, 'I could simplify Miss S's life. I could say that her suspicions of rape were fully justified, and that her doubt about the events was nothing but additional evidence of her thorough and long-term victimization.' [...] But I also thought, 'I could tell Miss S that she is a walking disaster. I could tell her that she wanders into a bar like a courtesan in a coma, that she is a danger to herself and others, that she needs to wake up, and that if she goes to singles bars and drinks too much and is taken home and has rough violent sex (or even tender caring sex), then what the hell does she expect?'"[9]

Naturally, the point isn't to indict Ms. S; nor is it to let her off the hook with facile justifications for her actions. Rather, Dr. Peterson's point is that as a psychologist he needs to withhold judgment and instead let Miss S figure out for herself what has happened. The development of personal agency requires that people work out their own narratives and make their own choices. Dr. Peterson explains: "The people I listen to need to talk, because that's how people think. People need to think. Otherwise they wander blindly into pits. When people think, they simulate the world, and plan how to act in it. If they do a good job of simulating, they can figure out what stupid things they shouldn't do. Then they can not do them. Then they don't have to suffer the consequences. That's the purpose of thinking."[10]

That sums up the predicament of the Submissive (and the Hedonist as well): They need to develop agency, a personal narrative, an agenda of their own that they can pursue rather than walking blindly through the world entrusting their fate to others, at the risk of their own destruction. 

Modern life offers us many freedoms. But the more freedoms that we enjoy, the more we are free to fall into traps. When that happens, it's not enough to proclaim our victimhood (as appropriate as that may be); we also need to examine the choices we ourselves make (or refuse to make) as we proceed through life. I'll discuss this idea at greater length in the section on Centroversion at the S level.

To sum up: In The Faerie Queene, Florimell's deficiency was "unmixed femininity," in other words, a lack of masculine characteristics to temper and balance out extremes of feminine timidity and vulnerability. In modern times, this equates to a lack of personal agency: Women are more free and empowered than ever before, but life still has traps for the unwary. We all need to take charge of our own fate, at a minimum.​

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Link: Return to Sensing (S)

~Posted January 1, 2025

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