honey and sting

I love confidence, and the innate dominance that comes from that confidence- not arrogance, or pride, or silly domineering games, but the quiet confidence of a martial artist, someone who knows how to use their body and feels their space and energy at a high level.

What a wonderful question!

Your post reminds me of some things I've been thinking about. I hope you'll forgive me as I free associate. Somewhere I read (and of course I'd love to remember where and read it again but can't) some essay about chivalry and how its essence was not how knights behave or how men treat women, but how those with power should treat those without it. At times chivalry has almost had the force of law because of the social necessity for righting power imbalances. On a utilitarian level, such a code imposed on those with power helps prevent bloody rebellions and on a moral level it, well, helps right injustices. So the rich have obligations toward the poor, the strong toward the weak, the healthy toward the sick. It still applies today, this essay claimed, but the designations of who has more power is amorphous and situational. In other times the obligation of men toward women was automatic because it was so automatic that men had more power. Today, a simple (but often labeled "chivalrous") decision such as who should open the door for whom can be determined by whose hands are not full. Still, when I'm struggling with various levers to move a landscaping boulder in my yard and the young viking from across the street trots over to move it for me, I am the recipient of his chivalry (his greater power is not only in sheer strength but also in the lesser amount of effort it takes him to accomplish the goal I have to work all afternoon on) and it well behooves me to accept his help graciously and not choose to be insulted by it.

Then on the subject of male as an archetype, I am so struck by how groups behave when under stress. I am amazed at how successfully the teachings of even a thin veneer of civilization get men to risk or even sacrifice themselves for women and children. Literally, "women and children first" get to get in the lifeboats. Part of that may be chivalrous - if seats in the lifeboats were determined by who can beat up their rivals the best, women and children would tend to lose out. (power vs. less power) But I think it's also related to the male willingness to fight and die in a war on behalf of families back home. (As a female veteran myself I am not denigrating women's willingness to do so, it's just that I'm talking about archetypes here.) In some way, the divine masculine seems to see itself as expendable in preference to others. Where no one would dispute the "maternal instinct's" power to cause a woman to make great sacrifices for a child, I think we may be downplaying the masculine sacrifice that goes for something even higher, something like "society in general" or "the continuation of the tribe." Women and children get in the lifeboats first not only because of chivalry but because of some awareness that they are the future of the race; the men, as horrible as it sounds, are more expendable.

My anthropology textbook from twenty years ago describes a situation in primates that I think back on often, when I ruminate on these things. Apparently the more harsh the environment a primate species lives in, the fewer males are part of the social unit. From a survival of the species point of view, fewer males are needed in a tribe compared to females, because a male can impregnate many females while a female has to wait all through at least gestation before she can reproduce again. If food is scarce, it's the males who are expendable. The extreme is (iirc) baboons, who live in a desert climate and have only the one male with a hareem of females. So while the males are expendable, the one you keep becomes conversely supremely important. Now this view may have changed by now; I notice these models change rather swiftly in anthropology.