The Fear of Men

In my conversations with women, they commonly confess to be to carry or to have carried a fear of men. This was a curious and interesting for me since it differs from my personal experience.

I was never afraid of men. I never saw them as distant and foreign objects. I never felt I was at their mercy. In many ways, for me, men were easy to relate to since I saw a lot of my own natural dispositions and tendencies as well as my psychic orientation, reflected in them. The way I experienced reality and the world, was often most commonly reflected by men. It was their idealism and the romanticism. The drive to excel and master crafts. I admired the male genius because he reflected my own desire to totally realise mine. I wanted to realise it at all costs and even if it meant a sacrifice of the more domestic or safe aspects of life.

The image of the animus to visit my dream world was Goethe who is a kind of archetypal image of the genius in the Western consciousness. He would help me climb the mountain top from which I was to read my own poem. It goes beyond saying that an average man is not Leo Tolsoty or Percy Shelley, Vladimir Nabokov or D.H. Lawrence or Goethe. Among women, it was the Virginia Woolf and Emily Dickinson who reflected this aspect of myself. This general archetype was simply the image of animus that initiated me into the Other Sex.

I also had close male friends and overall pleasant interactions and experiences with men. Of course, I had much opportunity to see the evil side of men as well, but since I also had the plenty of positive experiences, it was very intuitive for me to recognise that it is a ‘case by case’ situation. Men were individuals, not an undifferentiated mass that all held the same opinions, perspectives, preferences or attitudes. He is not the unknown so there is nothing to fear.