Why Men Need Feminism, Too
By: Yael Wolfe
Tags: Feminism, Women, Men, Equality, Culture

Why Men Need Feminism, Too

We were meant to empower — not overpower — one another.

Photo by Nik Shuliahin on Unsplash

There is an old story in Celtic mythology about the Holy Grail. This chalice was the prize sought by every knight and every king. In the legends, it was guarded by a man called the Fisher King who was either elderly and ailing or suffering from a spear wound that hadn’t killed him, yet had taken from him all quality of life. His kingdom had turned into a Wasteland.

This is one of my favorite stories because its appearance and subsequent popularity in the Western mythological canon defines the moment that the people of those lands began to embrace patriarchy, and perhaps more importantly, when they came to understand that the imbalance of the new system was ultimately damaging to their people.

The story is, at its heart, about the balance of male and female or, more accurately, the Sacred Masculine and Sacred Feminine. The Holy Grail represents, of course, the feminine principle — the receptive, intuitive aspect. The Fisher King represents the masculine aspect that has been damaged by the imbalance of the patriarchy.

The story is, at its heart, about the balance of male and female or, more accurately, the Sacred Masculine and the Sacred Feminine.

The knights and kings who search so desperately for the grail show us how much the feminine principle was missed in that part of the world after the patriarchy took hold. Don’t misunderstand when those stories describe the kings, like Arthur, who wanted the grail as a means to secure their hold on their lands. This is symbolic of an ancient Celtic tradition in which the king would “marry” the goddess of the land — his power was only given to him by her “approval” of his stewardship of her land and her people. So long as he stood by his promise, she would allow him to remain in power and ensure that his lands were fertile.

The mad search for the Holy Grail in the myths that emerged from the Celtic lands after Christianity had taken hold show us the people there remembered — and longed for — the lost feminine. It illuminates the yearning that the men, in particular, had for the loss of the feminine principle, and how much that loss had devastated their own lands, lives, and very souls.

The cost of the patriarchy

Accolade by Edmund Blair Leighton (public domain)

It’s easy to recognize that living in a culture that only values the masculine principle is incredibly damaging to those who aren’t born as men or who don’t identify as male. But the truth is, a patriarchal system deeply damages men, too.

As author, psychologist, and mythologist Sharon Blackie, Ph.D., wrote in If Women Rose Rooted, the masculine principle “cannot flourish in isolation, when the feminine principle which both balances and nourishes it is taken away.”

The wound of the Fisher King illustrates the damage the patriarchy inflicts on men. According to Jungian analyst Robert Johnson, “it is a wound intimately connected with his feeling function and [it] affects every sense of value in his psychological structure. This is the price we have paid for the cool, precise, rational, and scientific world we have won at so high a cost.”

The wound of the Fisher King illustrates the damage the patriarchy inflicts on men.

How does this manifest in the world? There are countless illustrations from men being more likely to become alcoholics to men suffering from a higher rate of suicide than women. We can’t even fully explore this subject through studies because, just like women who are prevented from participating accurately in studies about sex due to pressure to conform to cultural biases, men, too, are bound by their own set of cultural biases that stand in the way of allowing them to fully share their experiences for the benefit of medical and social studies.

We also know that men are held to impossible standards, just as women are. The beauty, fitness, and diet industries have started tapping into a market that they’ve barely dipped their toes in, making men almost as insecure about their appearances as the women they’ve always targeted. Our culture still teaches men that their identity is strongly tied to their careers and earning potential, putting enormous pressure on them to professionally and economically perform. And we still shame men for expressing feminine qualities or for not being masculine enough.

These are some of the circumstances that create this archetypal figure of the wounded Fisher King whose lands have fallen into ruin.

What ails us?

In the stories about the Holy Grail, there is often a question that must be asked in order to obtain the grail. The question is: What ails thee?

In one story, Percival, the epitome of patriarchal definitions of masculinity — strong, rational, aggressive — does not think to ask this question, a question that demonstrates the feminine principles of love and compassion.

There’s a reason we must ask this question. This question is like an invocation, asking the lost feminine to rise up again. It’s an acknowledgement of the power of the feminine principle and its worth in our world.

The men in our world must ask this question to help retrieve the lost feminine — that which has been lost to the world around us, and that which has been lost within each man.

This question is like an invocation, asking the lost feminine to rise up again.

Every man deserves to ask and be asked this question. Every man deserves to be seen and nurtured by the feminine principle. Every man deserves to call out for this missing piece of our world until it is retrieved and restored for the good of us all.

“What ails us,” Blackie asserts, “is the dominance of the dry, wounded, merciless, over-extended masculine. What ails us is the loss and violation of the feminine.”

We need each other

It saddens me when I see niche groups of feminists using their platform to denounce masculinity and men, in general. It is deeply and poignantly understandable to me how this can happen — many women have endured so much inequity and even trauma at the hands of men that sometimes, part of the healing process requires us to go through a period of deep rage and even hatred of the “perpetrators,” even though such generalized responses are neither fair nor ultimately productive.

Ideally, those feminists who find themselves hating men and the masculine principle will move out of this stage as they heal and find ways to empower themselves. Because the problem is not men — the problem is the patriarchy. The problem is that we value the masculine and have no value for the feminine. The problem is, we are living in a deep imbalance and we cannot thrive or even survive without each other.

…the problem is not men — the problem is the patriarchy.

I don’t identify with feminists who argue for a matriarchal society. Then we’ll just find ourselves with the same problem — in a deep imbalance, in which the women in our mythology will become the injured sovereigns guarding their wasted queendoms, while people desperately search for the Holy Spear (the symbol of the masculine, while the chalice symbolizes the feminine). That is not the way, either.

Blackie says that masculinity becomes toxic without the balance of the feminine aspect. Further, the “feminine which is not balanced by the masculine principle can manifest itself in an excess of emotion and neediness, a tendency to manipulation, an over-focus on relationships, and a refusal to apply reason to a situation.”

Ultimately, she says, “we need both kinds of qualities in ourselves and in the world, and we need them in appropriate balance.”

Why can’t we get there?

We know so much of this both rationally and intuitively (yes, perceived through masculine and feminine energies), and yet we are still deeply entrenched in the patriarchy. An unapologetic misogynist (not to mention racist) stands at the helm of our country. The majority of the men who are finally being called to task for sexual assault deny their accusers’ account of events, or liken the #MeToo movement to McCarthyism. Further, our institutions are built on the foundation of the patriarchy — our government, our economy, our healthcare system.

Those that benefit the most from the patriarchy are, of course, those who have the most power, and they are not interested in balance. Their only goal is to keep their power.

Maybe there is some comfort in the fact that this imbalance — like all imbalances — will eventually turn everything into a Wasteland. We can already see this process with the natural world that is quite literally becoming just that.

Maybe one day, enough people will get so tired of limping through this wasteland that our collective power will finally be enough to call back the feminine, to face the Fisher King, retrieve the Holy Grail, and finally heal him and his kingdom.

But we can only do this together — masculine and feminine balanced as they were always meant to be.

© Yael Wolfe 2020

Author’s note: Though in many ways, this article is specifically talking about men and women, ultimately it goes far beyond gender and encompasses the Sacred Masculine and the Sacred Feminine. Each one of us, regardless of our gender, has these energies inside us and it’s just as important to learn to balance those parts of ourselves as it is to empower women and set all of us free from this patriarchal system.