At the risk of sounding sexist (God help me!), I think it might have to do with a difference in masculine and feminine psychology. Men have to fight the dragon and all that, whereas women seem to have to accept or endure more. Anyway, something like that, don’t you think?
I'm just not sure if this dynamic is innate. It is definitely supported by culture . . . and perhaps even created by culture. I suspect it has a great deal to do with the "Patriarchal Mindset" . . . which, among many other things, strikes me as an attempt by men to aggressively seize the "rights" to ego psychology for themselves, but not for women (or anyone else they deem other). What I mean is that the patriarchy claims that men, in effect, have an ego separate from the Self/unconscious . . . whereas women are thought to have an ego still bound to and confused with the unconscious (I completely disagree with this, by the way).
So, when we look at the dragon/monster slaying myths, what we are seeing (in my opinion) is not a male or masculine rite of passage. More fundamentally, we are seeing the dramatization of the ego's severance from the unconscious. From this act on, the patriarchal ego becomes increasingly dissociated from the the unconscious and begins to fall in love with its own imagined power and supremacy.
My reasoning behind the claim that this is not male-specific, is that, obviously, men and women both share this construction of ego psychology. Women
don't have submerged or partially developed egos. But part of the patriarchal construction of gender is to imprison women by chaining them to the unconscious like a dog might be chained to a tree (The Goddess Tree, perhaps?).
This act not only subordinates women to men, but it allows patriarchal men to have a kind of "controlled relationship" to the unconscious . . . through the chained woman. His sex drive (confused terribly with his power drive) continues to draw him to the woman, where he can not only sate his sexual desires, but also touch the unconscious briefly through her. He then becomes dependent on the woman (and by extension, the Feminine) for his contact with the unconscious . . . which is the ultimate source of libido renewal and recycling.
We can logically extrapolate from this proposed paradigm that the myth of the man who wants to make a deeper, ego-sacrificing communion with the unconscious/Self must first learn how to unchain the woman/Feminine from the role of "gateway" (was it Tertullian or Origen who referred to women as the "Devil's Gateway"?). This freeing of the Feminine allows it to rise up to equal status with the masculine. But this act usually requires the battle with and defeat of the patriarchal shadow, who is the archetypal jailer of the Feminine.
Also, there is an umbilically linked complication to this freeing process (which is where men really stumble): the freed woman/Feminine no longer acts as the gateway to the unconscious. The man then has to become his own gateway. But what happens typically (and this would be called "anima-obsession or possession" in Jungian terms) is that the man cannot envision himself as such a gateway; he cannot see communion with the unconscious as possible without the woman/Feminine. So he rushes to free her . . . only to immediately imprison her again (this time with his "love"). Or else, he frees her, but then she disappears or "dies", and he is left depressed and bereft in a puddle, not knowing what he can do for himself, merely longing for her return one day.
In this sense, the anima-obsessed man has begun valuing the Feminine, but cannot throw off the patriarchal mindset . . . and so he can't progress any farther.
But this would seem to give a psychological reason for the preponderance of myths and fairytales that involve the male hero rescuing the imprisoned princess from some sort of monster.
But from a woman's perspective, the battle against patriarchalism, the battle for consciousness is fought from a different perspective. There she is, imprisoned. What is she to do? Well, she might fantasize of a Prince Charming coming to rescue her . . . but that ends up being a patrairachal myth. It keeps her in the position of object, of will-less creature, of raw material. As it turns out, Prince Charming is an element of the very patrairachal force that imprisons her.
So, to get beyond that, she has to seek out the "anti-Prince Charming". She has to find the masculine that has been lost and largely destroyed by patriarchal consciousness. Sometimes, this dark masculine or shadow-animus is associated with her imprisonment (as in "Beauty and the Beast" . . . or King Kong). But her quest is to find the humanness in this shadow . . . to make an act of differentiation between the the imprisoning patriarchal masculine and the
imprisoned patriarchal masculine (somewhere, buried in the animus is a masculinity just as imprisoned as she is).
So we see a lot of beasts, ogres, gnomes, and animal or part animal bridegrooms in women's individuation myths and dreams. It isn't that the woman need to learn to love the patriarchy (I'm reminded of the subtitle of Dr. Strangelove: "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb") . . . it's that she needs to delve into the shadow of the patriarchy to rediscover the lost masculine, the masculine that has been buried and wounded by the patriarchy as much as she has. There she finds her twin, and in healing him, forgiving him, or lifting him up, she redeems the animus . . . allowing him to become what I sometimes refer to as the "True Masculine". That is, the Masculine that is not opposed to the Feminine or its power.
This True Masculine was an element of the Goddess religions in which it was represented by the Goddess's consort. He is the vegetation god, the prototype of the godman who dies and is reborn like the sown seed. He does not connect to nature through the feminine, but directly. He is a "natural" thing, functioning by nature's principles . . . unlike the ego, which is non-corporeal and abstract.
But what is interesting (and maybe worth reiterating) is that the act of redeeming the animus is done, typically, through an act of conscious differentiation. In myths and fairytales we sometimes see this as sorting impossible numbers of beans or peas, as in Cinderella or the myth of Psyche and Eros (where the heroines must rely on some assistance from their unconscious . . . as this differentiating intelligence is just being born out of the Other). But this differentiation might also be simply an innate ability of the heroine to recognize the good in an animus figure who appears monstrous and evil on the outside.
Not to overly complicate this, but I think it's also worth noting that many women's individuation stories portray the heroine's jailer as a devouring mother figure or wicked stepmother (ususally in these the father has died or "lost his soul" and first wife and lovelessly remarried). This dark mother figure is every bit as patriarchal as the demonic male jailer . . . and it is a sad "truth" that most of the patriarchal conditioning women receive is handed down to them from their mothers or from other women.
My apologies for meandering here, I had to think through this . . . but I believe this analysis above is pretty sound. What do you think, Rohche (and anyone else, for that matter)? Does any of this seem plausible to you?
Also, Maria, if you read this, I think you will have some reflections to add.
Yours,
Matt
