Misogyny is Projected Self-Loathing

No Matter Who Is Doing It

The Nesting Baskets of emotion

As many of my regular readers know, I’m just back from a total darkness retreat, a visit to the womb cave of the Great Mother, Earth, the gestational darkness that is the genesis of all of life. The creatrix.

Well, first, here’s what I’ve learned about my inner landscape over 3 decades of going on monastic, silent, plant-medicine, and now total-darkness retreats. My emotions are like a series of nesting baskets. The larger ones are more comfortable than the smaller ones that fit inside them. As I drop down, each emotion is more concentrated and difficult than the last. Retreats are about remaining still in difficult emotions rather than protecting them.

My biggest basket is anger, my happy place. For some, anger is the last, most avoided basket, but not for me. From irritation to annoyance to full-on furious rage, I feel powerful when I’m angry. All the other baskets fit into this one. Almost everything in the world, for that matter, fits into the anger basket. There’s just so much injustice.

After that, the next basket contains the spectrum of fears. Though smaller, this is also an enormous basket. Safety is my driving force because I grew up in domestic violence. I’ve gone to great lengths to secure my personal safety even though I know that safety is an illusion. There’s no such thing. I, or a loved one, could get a diagnosis tomorrow, or some other seemingly random-ass thing can knock your legs out from under you. We’re all going to die. So, I’ve spent much of my life chasing an illusion, like most of us.

After that comes despair and self-loathing, the what’s-the-use, and the I-wish-I-was-dead. The black slate of refusal-to-feel is filled with death thoughts. Though despair is terrible, it’s not the end.

My smallest basket, cramped and claustrophobic, is helplessness. After that, there’s only death. That’s what I’m helpless about. You can’t bargain with it, you can’t change it, and you absolutely don’t want to do it. For most of my life, I’d almost rather die than be in helplessness, which is rather ironic, so it’s the place I had to go whenever I really wanted to grow or change. I used to think that sucked. All those retreats put me in harm’s way of my greatest fear - lather, rinse, repeat.

When whatever retreat was about 60% done, the projection machine simply stopped, hahaha, or it broke, and I was free. Stillness. No grasping toward me or pushing away from me. Calm.

And… blink, blink, the stillness was full of love, or joy, or some other quality of the divine nature. This time, it was gratitude. Volcanic gratitude, an I-can’t-stop-crying gratitude. Yes, it was too beautiful to bear.

Of course, helplessness doesn’t resolve into power, or strength, or force, or even right action, as I thought it would. That was an impotent fantasy, rather like the one our warmongers are trapped in. Isn’t it amazing that helplessness resolves into gratitude rather than into the power to make things happen? Now, that shows the Divine Whatever has a sense of humor.

The first, and biggest gratitude, was for all the unanswered prayers that protected me from myself. It’s hard to imagine now, but there could come a time we are all kinda grateful for all the shitty things our MAGA and religious right have revealed to us… about us. I can see it coming down the road. Honestly, I live for the moment.

Projection is this outgoing flow of ego that superimposes a worldview upon reality and causes people to experience and commit atrocities. We take our negative and positive qualities and project them away from us, causing all kinds of unnecessary suffering.

For an example of positive projection causing suffering, just look at all the people who are convinced that Trump is sent by some god to save them. Or our worship of celebrity. Or, for most of us, falling in love. Then, when we are getting divorced, we take back our positive projections. “I thought you were so kind, but you’re just…”

The idea that there is a big Daddy God who wants men to be in charge is also a projection. The divine isn’t like that at all. The true believers of the Dominionist Project are all projecting their craziness onto the culture. The be-all-that-you-can-be war project, the profit-from-war shareholder project, and the maintain male power project are all the same. None of it is true. Take a look at the safety project, which is Zionism. Notice how investing in the projection actually makes you less safe? These are all dangerous projections, beliefs with consequences.

When projection stops, there’s an ebb tide, which is what retreats are for me. Stillness. Then, I can see reality. Turns out, the conjunctio oppositorum to helplessness is gratitude. My apologies to all you non-Jungians for the Alchemical Latin. It just means the opposites that have to be joined as one because they are really a spectrum.

Gratitude! I never imagined that. Shows what I don’t know.

When I first turned out the lights, I had an experience of my death boundary. I felt the darkness pressing on me, like an enormous cat that smells milk on a baby. Darkness was alive and wanted to smother me. It had such heft and fur, molded to my skin, stretched across my face, my nose, my mouth. I can’t breathe!

So, I let it have me. There was no point in trying to fortify the barrier that was my skin, a semi-permeable membrane at best. I relaxed, accepted that the darkness was heavy, and that it wanted IN.

And it resolved into peace. This whole experience lasted about 45 seconds, because I didn’t run from the horrible monster: Helplessness. After that, the darkness was my friend and teacher. More on that in another post. This one is about projection.

Let me just say, it was deep and beautiful, and I’m not ready to write too much about it yet. Maybe next time. Soon come. I’m still integrating. But one thing I saw was that my projection machine was only a personal version of the big, cultural projection machine that keeps us all from reality. And the mechanism, the way it works, is the same way it does in an individual. It’s good that it’s so simple. Please note, I did not say easy. I said simple.

We are so afraid of ourselves. Before I left, people told me over and over that they could never… We think we would lose our minds. Barring execution, what’s our worst punishment? Solitary confinement. In the dark.

But you only lose your false mind, that crazy, blithering, projection machine of opinions, which only has one purpose: protecting you from reality. Let that in for a moment, because it’s protecting you from love.

Yes, the craziness bubbles up and out from the deep insanity aquifers of our culture. The stories of why, who hurt me, and whatever I think is to blame for the whole human catastrophe. Yes. Let it run until the river of the psyche is clear. Why not? You don’t have to merge with it. You don’t have to get wet. You can let it flow by without touching it.

But say you do merge with it, and totally soaked, you believe you are that person? Also, no problem. Just as identifying with the characters in a movie is no problem. We can laugh and cry. When the movie is over, you know you were never that character.

So, I had a little snap the other day, when I saw that misogyny is self-loathing projected, because extremely fortified people still have tender emotions, they just hate them. It’s a sign of weakness in a culture of domination where no vulnerability is allowed. So the mechanism, the projector, pushes it away, outward onto women, en masse. It’s our job.

There are other projections about race, the terrors done in the name of whiteness, but today I’m talking about misogyny. Besides, there are better people than I to talk about race projections, Dr Stacey Patton for example.

People in power are telling young women that they can only be happy if they are submissive childbearers being taken care of by a daddy-husband. That’s because they really believe that men can only be happy in domination - of women, of working people, of each other, of the earth itself. But that’s a projection that is actually making them miserable. I can remember my father yelling at my prone mother, who was covering her head in anticipation of the next blow: Why do you make me do this?

Now, that’s a projection. According to him, her life would be a whole lot easier and better if she would just stop fighting him. Surrender.

But real surrender isn’t submission. It’s stillness.

Here’s the truth: under the projections, men really love us, and that’s the part they are terrified of the most. They fear they would be obliterated, annihilated. Poof! They would explode into postcoital shards of light and cease to exist. Back in the old days, men called orgasm le petit morte, and called out, “I die! I die!” And there is a grain of truth in every lie. The false part of their minds would die, just like that. It’s happened to me several times.

So, women (and anyone who doesn’t fit the strict gender binary) must be sacrificed, over and over, until the dominators are on their deathbeds, and finally, there is nothing left to gain. That’s the greatest gift of Death. There is nothing that can fix it, no cure that money can buy, no elixir that can turn back the clock and make them young again. That’s when they turn, weeping, and say: I’m so sorry.

Those were practically my eldest brother’s last words, spoken to his only daughter, his favorite child, to whom he had refused to speak for the previous 16 years over her accusing him of being an alcoholic when she was a teenager. “I’m so sorry.”

You’ll never guess what he died of. That’s right: alcoholism.

And the deathbed patriarchs want us to answer that confession with a tearful, I’m sorry, too, and I’ve always loved you, which my niece did. We are supposed to make the loss of their entire lives meaningful because in the end… they finally saw: only love matters. Wahaa! Redemption. And it’s a deeply poignant moment, the pinnacle of a lifetime, the point.

But here’s the thing. No one has to wait until they are dying to have that moment. We can die right now. In fact, politically, we are dying right now. Self-loathing is being projected onto the world in unnecessary suffering as big as the sky, but this is not who we are. The opposite of suffering is joy. Joy is my sky.

The value in doing something like a dark retreat, for me at least, is the opportunity to step out of aculturated thinking. Once you do that, it’s easy to see both the screen and the projector, that mechanism of mind which takes the undesirable and unworthy inside us and sends it away from the vulnerable self, onto women as “other.”

Women do this the same way that men do when we accept the role, when we alter ourselves for the male gaze, when we play along with self-loathing because we don’t look like Barbie, or we don’t fantasize about Ken, or we tell ourselves some overarching story about our submission being what some god wants because, maybe he, like a powerful husband or father, will finally love us, then protect us, or let us into his Heaven.

If the unraveling of my personal trauma has taught me anything, it’s that we must face our own terrible demise. Just stop projecting. Then, perhaps, all these wars can stop. The Dark Feminine will show us her other face, the creatrix. For how could the creator be anything other than the feminine who is in love with the masculine?

Both are inside each of us, longing for the resolution of duality, a kiss, then making love, followed by gestation and a birth. Can we tolerate the long months of darkness required for gestation in the womb cave? We are in that work now. Can we breathe through the travail that follows?

The good news is we do not have a choice. As Sylvia Plath said, in Metaphors, this is a train on a track, headed to a destination. What we need now is not an engineer, but a very good midwife.

Because the genie is out of the bottle and she’s not going back. All these young women who are being convinced right now that they can be loved by men if they become trad wives will wake up as surely as reality created middle age. And I, for one, will embrace them with a soft “Welcome home. You have always been divine. It’s you, not he, who gives birth to the world anew.”