Patriarchy in the West
The Western world has a peculiar disposition in relation to sexist patriarchal images in both mythology and contemporary pop culture. Instead of the typical scapegoat, the religious hierarchies of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, dominated for centuries by a central male power structure, I would like to focus instead on a recent film written and directed by Seth Rogen (the quintessential man-child of American culture, along with the exemplary staples Peter Griffin and Homer Simpson), This is The End, which illustrates this trend in a painfully un-comedic fashion.
Mythologist John David Ebert, in his book The New Media Invasion, has noted that in the present age of Western civilization, we are in grave danger of forgetting how “the Wonder Child’s struggles against the wisdom of the Elders.” And so it as with This is The End, where the only reference we have for male characters are anti-heroic adolescent 35-40 year olds who refuse to mature, aspiring only to be trapped in the infantile fantasies of smoking weed and playing video games all day.
The Kali-Yuga (Iron-Age) described by Indian scriptures is a time at the end of a long 500,000 plus year cycle. It depicts a world that is forgetful of the universal spiritual morals and ethics, and instead is only a dark, warped vision of earth as a sensory-based hell. This in turn directly effects men’s perception of women, and the worst transgression described by Yogis is the objectification of either sex, so that only the lust of the body is desired.
In This is the End, the intruding outsider (person of lower economic class, or critic) to the tribal undeveloped males of the inside Hollywood circle is dismembered — for only the illumined 2-D avatars of superimposed CGI Halos and the god as celebrity model can remain in this perverse mirror world. The only two females represented in the film lust after the coked out celebrity Michael Cera (Mindy Kaling), or freak out in an over-masculine pose of violence (Emma Watson). Again, only extremes without balance.
Satan, our arguably masculine intellect (and the deviant or lower aspects of mind), serves to reinforce and protect the ego in order to mask the divine wisdom of Sophia — our innermost feminine intuition and Soul. Unfortunately, despite the apocalypse and the rapture being a central theme in This is the End, these important esoteric symbols about the death of the mind to give life to the spirit are trivialized in favor of jokes about demon genitalia. It is not enough that these characters are self-deprecating and aware of their own infantilism. While I admit that some of the gags are funny, the humor ultimately comes from a place of growing pains.
The Reality Sandwich contributing editor David Metcalf has noted how this celebrity worship is not just confined to Hollywood. In his recent article, “Fandom & Fantasy: Exploring the Anomalous at Dragon Con,” he laments:
“It is disappointing that at such a large event, where people are drawn to explore the unanswerable mystery of life with such vigorous expressions of creativity, this mystery is cheapened by being framed against fantasy and fiction. Rather than using these media as tools for growth, such events warp reality and realign it to support the psychological and philosophical narcissism of fandom and celebrity culture. The alternative, sadly unexplored, would be to encourage and nurture a vital fascination with the real investigation of exceptional experiences and human potential.”
When culture worships corporate cyberpunk wonderkids like Steve Jobs, or stoner man-children in the cult of Seth Rogen, it serves to further cement the pantheon of the new Gods–Gnostic-like Archons who bear the gifts and infinite glitter of techno-gadgets, pharma drugs and technology, which have solidified our biology and over-active nervous system into the material world, trapping our body of Divine Light and consequently making us forgetful of our potentiality for human transcendence. The spiritual vision quest is not possible when one is constantly distracted and lost in the never-ending datastream of the 21st century info-media obsessed world.
The Divine Feminine in Comics
In general, the subject of women working in comics still seems to be quite underrepresented in both print and online publications. A recent study has shown that 40% of comic fans are women, contrary to the better-known source from DC’s 2011 survey, that purported only 7% of comics readers being female.
Laura Sneddon — a comics journalist and academic who writes for the mainstream UK press with a particular focus on women and feminism in comics — has been particularly influential to me in relation to this subject. One of her most recent pieces for the comics news blog The Beat, titled “Stripped: Melinda Gebbie – Lost Girls, Pornography & Censorship,” focuses on artist Melinda Gebbie, who illustrated Alan Moore’s controversial 10 year erotic graphic novel project Lost Girls.
In Sneddon’s article, I initially found myself struck by Gebbie’s sensitivity to the issue of feminism, as well as the outdated lust of the male gaze, all too present in the culture of comics. Gebbie boldly says:
“I just think that more things with female gaze involved with it are going to work their own good health results. The male gaze is more evident because there is a longer history of it…DC and Marvel are pigs. I will say that I think superheroes are an unfortunate sewage system of kudzu that’s taking over comics, lacking storyline, lacking heart, the same old stuff. I think it’s fine if guys like pictures of other guys in tights, that’s fine… or dogs in capes – although it was cute when Alan did it, but no. There’s no storyline there. It’s industrial effluent, and it just keeps on rolling on.”
The idea of gender compensation is another typical caveat of the corporate art world. One cannot be respected, as either gender, until all that is “other” in oneself is entirely destroyed. Men must be cold, hard, detached and calculating, and women the exact same. Females are not allowed to preserve the softer, nurturing, empathic qualities that develop in them naturally, especially in motherhood, for it is somehow perceived as a threat to the phallic towers of big business–and indeed it is. I would credit Fincher’s House of Cards with attempting to upset this standard. Journalist Zoey Barnes does not have to sacrifice her femininity in order to be successful in her political career, though the writing still falls into the familiar trappings of “the holy whore” archetype, which often feels entirely unnecessary.
Capitalistic influence on the culture of comics is no doubt synonymous with the patriarchy. However, burgeoning crowdfunding economic models such as Kickstarter and Indiegogo allow for forward thinking frameworks to support crowdfunding ventures that can evolve outdated models, instead favoring truly independent creators with organic, non-hierarchical structures that do not have bow down and cater to a male dominated culture industry. As Charles Eisenstein has pointed out in my previous interview with him here on RS, a gift based economic model re-invites the sacred in the act of exchange, and may have the potential to eventually replace capitalism itself.
But matriarchy, as recently discussed by Grant Morrison and Sneddon in relation to Wonder Woman, has also been shown to be just as potentially dangerous in the opposite extreme.
Each of us have both male and feminine energy within us. 21st century post-internet culture offers us a way to rise above the oft-cited animal/mammal symbols of males as dogs/pigs, and females as kittens, in order to move beyond these simplistic tough/soft metaphors in favor of identification with the non-dual divine human Spirit, the very core of our being. In the identification with the Spirit or higher Self within us, we are able to evolve the balance of both male and feminine energies, and in turn re-integrate ourselves as androgynous creative beings, just as the Shamans of traditional/aboriginal cultures (in addition to Morrison’s own Lord Fanny, a transgender shaman character from The Invisibles) are often depicted, especially in relation to their contribution in works of art.
Thus, by disabling corporate models through non-hierarchical crowd funding, we can allow a possibility for an a-typical vision of the sacred and divine feminine, as well as the depiction of the human as an eternal light/Spirit in contemporary art.
KALI-YUGA and Metaphysics in Comics
At the heart of the alchemical spiritual tradition lies the coincidentia oppositorum — the union of opposites that all of us unconsciously seek in the lifelong process of healing the soul in order to give birth to the Spirit. In my graphic novel trilogy KALI-YUGA, (on Kickstarter) a dark fantasy/sci-fi epic about a time traveling wizard named Abaraiis, this metaphor is additionally extended into the central tension between the active (masculine) magic wielding wizard character, and the peaceful wisdom of the passive (feminine) yogi archetype. Each remain equally valid in the comic, and are explored with as much depth as I can possibly conjure.
In KALI-YUGA, Queen Neriti is my own answer to the divine feminine in the visual arts. She is inspired in part by Moore’s magically proficient Promethea and, like Promethea, The Queen is no stranger to the metaphysical realms of the astral, causal and purely spiritual planes of existence. As Alan M Kazlev has previously noted, this model is consistently present across a variety of global spiritual traditions.
However, there is a dark, and for the Queen, painful Gnostic subtext in the book. Queen Neriti floats around her ship in a disembodied astral form, psychically surveying the universe for means of extending her mortality. This powerful disposition to the spiritual world allows her to look past the deception of power hungry Lizard Kings’ patriarchal domination of space in the year 3030, and so she instead befriends a sci-fi re-invention of McKenna’s fabled and sexless hyperdimensional DMT elves with a twist; the concept of the alien drug “DMZ” that the elves manufacture now includes the added promise of immortality and a cognitive intelligence extending beyond everything known to common mortals. When we first lay eyes upon the Queen (above) she is solidified in this elf manufactured bio-mechanic interface. Again, the Gnostic motif of the spirit trapped in the confines of biology.
It is my belief that our graphic novel trilogy KALI-YUGA allows for a fictional arena whose characters are not just material bodies masquerading on the world stage, but instead also highlights the metaphysical potential of the human form, as well as the visionary worlds that lie beyond death and the flimsy barrier of the mind-body complex. The answer to Western based Gnostic dualism is the Eastern organic non-dualism of Shankara and Lao-Tze–mystic visionaries who see that the spiritual world does not contain any of the false divisions typically associated with consciousness permanently stuck to the default mind/body orientation.
There is a very real part of each of us that transcends all gender and personality. This does not undermine the sociological importance of gender equality, but rather reinforces the strength that lies dormant in each sex, allowing for an added depth that looks deeper–into the ontological human predicament itself. Each of us remains as an eternal, super-sensory Spirit in the playful glimmer of a vast, kaleidoscopic universe. The future of storytelling and visionary art is the inevitable re-integration of these timeless and sacred spiritual truths, in order to bring balance to the issue of gender from the top down (spirit simultaneously emanating into and animating matter) model of the universe, rather than the bottom up (matter evolving into spirit).
