Will American Iconography Shift from Dominatrix to Mediatrix?

The Appearance of the Dominatrix as a Modern Cultural Phenomena

With the erosion of women’s empowerment in the past 10-15 years, we have seen the rise in popular culture and the media of a dark compensatory figure:  the feminine dominatrix.  The dominatrix is sheer power and manipulation, and has nothing whatever to do with humanly related values of love and feeling.  “Her” appearance is, I believe, a direct response by the collective psyche to the phenomenon of the “Girlie-Girl” culture that has developed since the 1990s.  (See Rachael Combe’s article, “Little Girls Gone Wild” in Redbook magazine.  See also Peggy Orenstein’s book, “Cinderella Ate My Daughter:  Dispatches from the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.”  See also Rachel Simmons’ book “The Curse of the Good Girl:  Raising Authentic Girls with Courage and Confidence.”)  The “Girlie-Girl” culture that has brought about the steady disempowerment of the feminine has stirred up and brought forth the appearance of this dark, threatening figure in modern cultural life that is the girly-girl’s direct opposite.  But the “Girlie-Girl” culture is not the only reason that the dominatrix has appeared of late.

The conjuring up of the dominatrix in modern cultural life also reflects the male-dominated culture’s fears regarding the so-called “feminine” medial powers:  the functions of feeling, relationship, analogical thinking, mediality, and intuition.  These functions, however, are not the sole prerogative of female persons.  These powers belong to humanity.  To the solar consciousness of our masculine and patriarchal culture, however, these so-called “feminine” powers are seen as an irrational, incalculable threat to the dominance of the masculine rational order of things.  They are murky and ambiguous, and, therefore suspect.

Rejected, denigrated, and repressed, these “feminine” mediatrix powers have turned violent and ugly. Potentiated “feminine” energies that might have been realized as mediatrix have instead appeared in the dark form of the dominatrix in modern cultural phenomena.  And, just as the individual psyche tries to balance itself with compensating images in dreams, the collective psyche also tries to balance itself.  Thus, we see a flood of images of the dominatrix in modern cultural life.  It is a compensatory attempt on the part of the collective psyche as it tries to balance the disempowerment of the feminine with the grotesque, super-sized empowerment of the feminine in a dark and negative guise.  The violent swing towards a power-driven femininity, modeled on the masculine patriarchal dominant, is NOT (and ought not to be) the alternative to the “girlie-girl” phenomenon.  The notion of feminine empowerment needs to be reframed, and certainly it needs to be refined away from both the abyssal depths of the dominatrix model of feminine power and the insipidity and effete stupidity of the "girlie-girl”.

From the days of Women’s Lib in the ‘60s and ‘70s we have done an about-face in the advancement of women’s empowerment.  History is filled with the devaluation and abuse of women, but it is arguable that never in the history of this country have female persons suffered from such abysmal devaluation and abuse as now.  

A Case In Point:  the World of Competition Dance

The competition dance world stands upon two pillars:  ego and profit.  The competition dance industry feeds on youthful egos with their desire for fame, recognition, and prizes.  The producers of competitions and the auxiliary industries involved in making the competition dance world go ‘round make an enormous amount of money.  There are approximately 200 competitive dance production companies across the U.S. and Canada.  I cannot find any data about the size of the industry (which would be quite illuminating, I’m sure) in monetary terms, but the competitive dance industry has no oversight body or standards.  (Source:  Wikipedia).  What disturbs me, and what seems to me to be the intractable problem with all of this is that there has arisen in the past two decades or so a collusion between ever-expanding, unfettered marketing interests and the images and activities that disempower and denigrate women and girls.  There is a direct correlation between the erosion of girls’ self-esteem and the profit driven empires of the media and dance competitions.  A true sense of self-esteem is not based on idols (“American” or otherwise).  

So bereft are we of any true valuation of our female children that we (apparently) see no problem in pimping them for profit, for that is what dance competitions are doing.  Displaying nearly naked 9 or 10-year-old girls up on stage performing their “Beyonce moves” like a 21-year-old, with their scantily-clad buttocks directed towards the faces of the judges and audience, is nothing short of revolting, as is the approving crescendo of screams, whistles, hoots, and applause arising from an audience of their parents and peers.  It is beyond belief.  What in the world are the parents and grandparents of these children thinking of when they allow these, their most precious gifts, to be so egregiously used for the profit of marketers and an entire intertwined industry of dance studios, costume conglomerates, and competition producers?   Do they seriously think that these competitions are an exercise in developing their female child’s self-esteem?  If that were the case, then we should have “self-esteem” all over the place, but we don’t.  What we have is a tragedy of unintended consequences.

Dance studios are not the devil.  Dance studio owners are not the devil.  They are also not the primary profiteers from dance competitions.  Yet they are intertwined with the major profiteers, and their livelihoods depend on “dancing with the devil”, so to speak.  As long as the sluttiest performing lines win the top prizes at dance competitions, most dance studios will continue to feature choreography that is un-nuanced, inappropriate, and degrading.   There are studios in my experience (thank God) that have chosen to draw the line when it comes to allowing inappropriate material, hiring mature choreographers who tend to use more discrimination.  There are others, unfortunately, that have chosen not to draw the line and who choose a less discerning approach, taking a liaises faire hands-off attitude towards what are frequently immature choreographers with less-refined sensibilities trying to “show their stuff”.  (Any notion of dance as an art form went by the door long ago.)  Young girls, dressed up as dominatrices, rubbing their bodies up against a scantily-clad young man decked out in chains in a baby crib does not, in my book, qualify as “self-esteem building” for either sex.  Yet, this was a featured competitive choreography by the senior line from one studio of my acquaintance.

The Tragedy of Unintended Consequences

These undiscriminating folks are not “evil” people.  They have been swept up in a mass mindset and a mass culture that serves up images that are unworthy of developing young people.  There is a flood of unintended consequences accruing from all of this.  I’m sure the folks in charge see the current direction of things as simply the manifestations of youth and the mainstream culture.  That is unfortunate, because there are more salutary choices that could be made.  The students are not horrible, awful wretches.  They are sweet; they are bright; they are beautiful.  It is sad to see the waste of their potential caused by a lack of discernment from their mentors.  The older girls are merely following the model of the culture; the younger girls are merely modeling the older girls they would like to be.

As someone has said, referring to the rise of the girly-girl culture, “It all started with beauty pageants.”  We have younger and younger girls taught that their entire value is linked to and dependent upon their outward appearance and their sex appeal.  We now have all manner of adult products marketed directly to children:  stiletto heels, push-up bras, adult make-up and coifs, breast-feeding dolls, and, oh yes, hip-hop classes and competition dance choreographies, all of which serve to prematurely sexualize young girls and place the wrong emphasis on the already sexualized older girls.

Then, of course, there’s the internet . . .  I won’t even try to address the problems there which collude with the other dynamisms within the culture.  This fall, one of the new TV shows already being hyped is “The Playboy Club” on NBC!  Apparently, those men unwilling to change, unwilling to mature still require their bimbos.  How far we have marched backwards from the days of Women’s Liberation!  It’s not just a matter of individual young girls being lost, as disturbing as that is.  (And I have seen that happen.)  It is a matter of our entire western civilization going — quite literally in the case of booty-shaking choreographies — ass backwards.  I have personally seen the unintended consequences when the girlie-girl and the dominatrix take a hold of a teenager.  This is not an idle, intellectual discussion.  It has real-life consequences.

The message is clear:  in order to be popular, in order to be adequate, in order to win prizes at dance competitions, you must aspire to be as raunchy a sex object as possible.  It is a perfidious message that is being directed towards girls and places them, I feel, in jeopardy for becoming undiscerning, intellectually and emotionally stunted at the least and objects of abuse, predation, or teen pregnancy at worst.  The full weight and thrust of the culture — not just dance competitions — is pushing this message.  It is a message that is promulgated by a vast web of marketing conglomerates.  Girls, who have no immunity to the spirit of the age with all of its marketing, are an easy mark for randy boys, who feel entitled and no doubt see the sexualization of younger and younger girls as a boon.  As Peggy Orenstein writes, “. . . the more a girl is exposed to girly-girl culture, the more vulnerable she is to depression, eating disorders, distorted body image, and risky sexual behaviors.”  (Cinderella Ate My Daughter:  Dispatches From the Front Lines of the New Girlie-Girl Culture.  Harper Collins.  New York, 2011.)

Michelle Obama’s and Oprah Winfrey’s efforts notwithstanding, how is it possible to sever the collusion between the marketers, the immature masculine, and the fears of patriarchy that produce such junk and render our young women powerless, thereby ensuring — just as surely as night follows day — the rise of the dominatrix?  That is something for which I have no answer.  The all-pervasive power of the market place will continue, I fear, to churn out its muck into which our young people and civilization will slowly sink.  Until the huge profits dwindle, we will continue to see this stuff.  In my estimation, the purveyors of this trash are only slightly less noxious and dangerous than human traffickers, arms dealers, and drug cartels in the degree of misery and incalculable consequences.  You think that is an outlandish exaggeration?  I can guarantee that for the woman who has seen her daughter and then her granddaughters caught up in the consequences of the culture of the girlie-girl/dominatrix, it is no exaggeration.  Nor is it an exaggeration for the mother of a girl who, made vulnerable by the current ethos, has been lured into the trap of a predatory pedophile or sold into slavery.

As long as we have the pole of the “girlie-girl” culture (a hugely profitable marketing phenomenon constructed by the dominant patriarchal culture) we will continue to see the opposite pole:  the dominatrix.  This set of twins, bimbo and dominatrix, will forever be linked, and the profit-makers will make sure that we will continue to see-saw between one and then the other as long as possible — all for their profit.  The vacuous, ego-centric narcissism of the bimbo will forever be shadowed by the conniving, powerful manipulator dominatrix.  Are these two iconic forms of femininity the only forms that inspire the rigor of the male partner and the patriarchy?  Presented with only two polar-opposite choices, where are the folks in the middle?  Where is the human measure of the via media?  More importantly, where is the other feminine figure — the mediatrix figure?  Will she emerge?  Has she emerged somewhere?  Is she manifesting somewhere as a cultural icon?  We do, in fact, have some clues.  There are signs that this archetype is becoming more conscious.

Hints of the Appearance of the Mediatrix

There are, however, images of a different figure that have appeared in the media:  the medial personality and the mediatrix.  Isn’t it interesting that the very word “media” is the primary area and the most appropriate avenue for research into an important aspect of incipient consciousness and the psychological dynamisms of our time?  The symbols of society, the products, metaphors and images which manifest the upwelling of medial consciousness are all around us.  The mediatrix is all around us.  “She” is the message.  That certainly puts a different and ironic twist on Marshal McLuhan’s (1964) words, “the medium is the message”.  I submit that the medium personality may be what the Self wants us to focus on at this time.

The Catholic Church, of course, has had the highly spiritualized pole of the mediatrix in the figure of the Virgin Mary for centuries.  It has been an unofficially held doctrine since apostolic times.  However in 1950, Pope Pius XII declared the Assumption of Mary the official doctrine of the Catholic Church, “very much to the astonishment of all rationalists” as Carl Jung says (p.96, “Answer to Job”).  Carl Jung has written extensively about this 1950 event as one of the most significant psychological events of our time.  I would like to quote extensively from that work, because it speaks to my topic, the possibility of the shift from the dominatrix to the mediatrix in modern culture.

Jung writes:

“Like Sophia [the wisdom of Yahweh] she [Mary] is a Mediatrix who leads the way to God and assures man of immortality.  Her Assumption is therefore the prototype of man’s bodily resurrection.  As the bride of God and Queen of Heaven she holds the place of the Old Testament Sophia.

“Remarkable indeed are the unusual precautions which surround the making of Mary:  immaculate conception, extirpation of the taint of sin, everlasting virginity . . .  The inevitable consequence of all these elaborate protective measures is something that has not been sufficiently taken into account in the dogmatic evaluation of the Incarnation:  her freedom from original sin sets Mary apart from mankind in general, whose common characteristic is original sin and therefore the need of redemption.   . . .  By having these special measures applied to her [in the 1950 doctrine of the Assumption] Mary is elevated to the status of a goddess and consequently loses something of her humanity:  she will not conceive her child in sin, like all other mothers, and therefore he will never be a human being, but a god.  To my knowledge at least, no one has ever perceived that this queers the pitch for a genuine Incarnation of God, or rather, that the Incarnation was only partially consummated.  Both mother and son are not real human beings at all, but gods.

“This arrangement, though it had the effect of exalting Mary’s personality in the masculine sense by bringing it closer to the perfection of Christ, was at the same time injurious to the feminine principle of imperfection or completenesss.  . . .  Thus the more the feminine ideal is bent in the direction of the masculine, the more the woman loses her power to compensate the masculine striving for perfection; and a typically masculine, ideal state arises which, as we shall see, is threatened with an enantiodromia. . . We have not, therefore, by any means heard the last of it.”  (p.36-37, “Answer to Job”)

I repeat Jung’s statement, “We have not, therefore, by any means heard the last of it.”   To which I add five exclamation points [!!!!!].  And, so here we are.   The question is:  can the celestial virgin be brought down from the heavens without having to descend to the hell of the dominatrix first?  Probably not.  In fact, it is arguable that perhaps this is indeed what we are witnessing in the appearance of the dominatrix in recent cultural life.

Jung continues:

“Whatever man’s wholeness , or the self, may mean per se, empirically it is an image of the goal of life spontaneously produced by the unconscious, irrespective of the wishes and fears of the conscious mind.  It stands for the goal of the total man, for the realization of his wholeness and individuality with or without the consent of his will.  The dynamic of this process is instinct, which ensures that everything which belongs to an individual’s life shall enter into it, whether he consents or not, or is conscious of what is happening to him or not.  Obviously, it makes a great deal of difference subjectively whether he knows what he is living out, whether he understands what he is doing, and whether he accepts responsibility for what he proposed to do or has done.”  (p.97, “Answer to Job”)

“The conscious realization of what is hidden and kept secret certainly confronts us with an insoluble conflict:  at least this is how it appears to the conscious mind.  But the symbols that rise up out of the unconscious in dreams [and, I submit, in contemporary media] show it rather as a confrontation of opposites, and the images of the goal represent their successful reconciliation.  Something empirically demonstrable comes to our aid from the depths of our unconscious nature.  It is the task of the conscious mind to understand these hints. [bold, mine]  If this does not happen, the process of individuation will nevertheless continue.  The only difference is that we become its victims and are dragged along by fate towards that inescapable goal which we might have reached walking upright, if only we had taken the trouble and been patient enough to understand in time the meaning of the numina that cross our path.”  (p.98, “Answer to Job”)  

This is precisely why I am writing this article:  we must understand the phenomena that appear in modern cultural life.  I submit that we might understand the phenomena of the appearance of the dominatrix as the enantiodromia — or as one manifestation of the enantiodromia that Jung expected and of which he said, “We have not, therefore, by any means heard the last of it.” 

Jung continues:

“This involves man in a new responsibility.  He can no longer wriggle out of it on the plea of his littleness and nothingness, for the dark God has slipped the atom bomb and chemical weapons into his hands and given him the power to empty out the apocalyptic vials of wrath on his fellow creatures.” (p.99, “Answer to Job”).  Might I add that in, addition to the atom bomb and chemical weapons, humankind now also has the tools and methods of terrorism and the potential confusions and calamities that we are exposed to from our now vastly more interconnected world.

“But anyone who has followed with attention the visions of Mary which have been increasing in number over the last few decades, and has taken their psychological significance into account, might have known what was brewing.  The fact, especially, that it was largely children who had the visions might have given pause for thought, for in such cases the collective unconscious is always at work.”  (p.99, “Answer to Job”)

Interestingly, ABC now has come out with a summertime series called, “Beyond Belief”, which just last night (July 13, 2011) reported on the resurgence of sightings of the Virgin Mary in the US!   How about that:  the Mediatrix par excellence featured on TV!  This is not a coincidence; or rather, it is a highly significant coincidence — a bit of synchronicity to which we ought to pay attention.  In the past six months, we have seen the dominatrix, Mary’s extreme opposite, appear in a major new film, “The Black Swan”.   Please read my article in the online journal (“Elements”) of the Minnesota Jung Association, published this month (July 2011). (Link to "The Black Swan: A Three-Part Analysis of the Film" )  The enantiodromia is at hand.  Movies, TV shows, and video games are replete with visions of the woman from hell.  And “she” is balanced in the movies and TV shows with the girly-girl bimbos on the one hand and the reported sightings of the celestial virgin on the other.

Besides the ABC series “Beyond Belief” which focuses on medial experience, there are other medial personifications who have started to appear in the media.  We have the medial, humanly-related figure of Hermione in the Harry Potter series.  She represents the young (immature) condition of the feminine wizard archetype.   Television series such as “Medium” (on NBC) and “Ghost Whisperer” (on CBS) attested to an emerging consciousness of the archetype of mediality that is pushing upwards from the unconscious.  But, probably because we are predominantly an extraverted nation, these figures seem to be extraverted versions of intuitive powers rather than an introverted version of intuitive powers that sees things psychologically.  Unfortunately, most Americans are not much good at seeing things psychologically.  Nevertheless, the appearance of these figures is an encouraging sign that the collective psyche (and perhaps, too, the personal psyche of individuals) is attempting to balance things; for the mediatrix, the medial woman, the feminine wizard archetype, represents the wholeness of completion rather than the idealized perfection of rational, masculine solar consciousness.

The recognition of the dynamics of the dominatrix/mediatrix is not without very real social and individual consequence, as I hope I have demonstrated through the examples taken from the world of competitive dance.  This is not an intellectual exercise.  It matters that we understand the dimensions of the problem raised by the girlie-girl/dominatrix culture and its possible human resolution hinted at by the rise of the mediatrix.  Will the American icon shift from dominatrix to mediatrix?  I don’t know, but the feminine middle-ground of wholeness reached by a relationship between conscious and unconscious seems to me to be our best bet.