Laurens Buijs
Amsterdam Gender Theory Research Team
I have been so inspired by my work into the role of androgyny in human beings that I want to explore this topic further in the coming years. All men are also feminine, and all women are also masculine: every human being has an androgynous core. But there is no room for this in our patriarchal society, which leads to all kinds of imbalance (see AGTRT-BA9). In my view, this insight has such great social and scientific relevance that I will continue to research and write more about it in the coming years.
In AGTRT-BA1, I describe how more and more scientific disciplines – evolutionary biology, primatology, biological anthropology, cultural anthropology, archaeology, sociology, psychology – are rediscovering the secret of the androgynous core of humanity. I also anticipate in that piece how we might make a society that makes room for our thoroughly androgynous core.
Learn more about the androgynous core of humans:
What we can learn about masculinity and femininity from hunters and gatherers
Homo sapiens eventually emerged as men became increasingly feminine and women increasingly masculine over the past hundreds of thousands of years. That development fostered exceptional forms of cooperation not seen in other primates, and ensured our survival on the Savannah and beyond (see also AGTRT-BA2).
I also describe in my article last year that we have only lived in a patriarchal culture for 12,000 years (see also AGTRT-BA3), which has split masculinity and femininity from each other and placed them in a hierarchy. Men were suddenly only masculine, and women only feminine.
Men and women suddenly needed each other to be complete, and moreover, masculinity was suddenly worth more than femininity. Those assumptions about gender and sexuality still form the basis of our current culture, which is why sociologists still call our culture patriarchal and heteronormative (see AGTRT-BA9).
The “fission” of masculinity and femininity caused by patriarchy (see AGTRT-BA4) was certainly not all bad. This split was somewhere also necessary to make a new form of society possible: the clan gave way to the nuclear family as the basic form of social organization.
The advent of the patriarchal core system and the resulting system of heteronormativity during the emergence of agrarian society certainly had a function; it was, in a sense, an innovation. But the price for this innovation was high: patriarchy is an intrinsically violent system that suppresses our androgynous nature.
After 12,000 years, the patriarchal and heteronormative system has no added value. In today’s globalized world, this system only gets in our way. For our survival in the anthropocene, it is essential that we rediscover our androgynous core and re-integrate masculinity and femininity, at all levels. This is exactly why I want to do more research.
Learn more about man’s split psyche, and how it can be healed:
How patriarchy has split our psyche, and how we can repair the damage
Among other things, I will better elaborate on how the fission of our androgynous core permeates our social and political systems, and how this fission leads to more and more destruction. I also want to put the magnifying glass on the psyche: how does the patriarchal cleavage of the masculine and feminine affect our consciousness, what goes wrong there, and how can this be repaired with shadow work (see AGTRT-BA7)? And finally, I will study how fission dulls our endlessly creative and multifaceted sexuality.
I will continue to give a major role to homosexuality and homophobia in my research. This remains for me the ideal “case study” to study what happens when masculinity and femininity become unbalanced, and what it takes to restore the balance. Understanding more about homosexuality and homophobia also gives more insight into what a world beyond the normative patriarchy can look like. If I have learned anything from my dear friend and mentor Gert Hekma, it is this.
I want to look not only at the problems, but also at solutions. What can we do to heal the cleavage at the societal level? What can we do to integrate our split psyche on a personal level? And how can we reinstate our sexuality in our romantic and sexual relationships? How do we build a full-fledged alternative to monogamous and heteronormative sexuality, and how do we ensure that we can once again fully enjoy what love and sex have to offer us humans?
I also want to describe how a proper understanding of androgyny is a solution to the stalemate in the increasingly polarized debate on gender and sexuality, in which a thoroughly progressive wokeness is increasingly pitted against an ugly conservative conservatism. I also want to substantiate that androgyny is really something quite different and a much more fruitful concept than non-binarity (see AGTRT-BA8). The debate on gender and sexuality very urgently needs new oxygen.
It sounds like a big and massive project, and it is. In addition, I continue to be in business, so it won’t be a rush job either. I am going to work on this quietly, step by step, over the next few years. And of course, I’m not going to do everything by myself. My network is teeming with wonderful and creative people working on the same themes, and we will join forces.
Read more about the problems with non-binary, and why we can’t just get rid of the distinction between male and female:
Gender neutrality as an aberration: why emancipation cannot exist without masculinity and femininity
We live in the latter days of 12,000 years of patriarchal oppression. We live in late patriarchy. This is the time to give the patriarchy the final push toward completion. This is the time to lay the foundation for a society beyond patriarchy.
After 12,000 years of oppression, it really is enough. Enough is enough. The feminist and queer advocates have done the legwork; it is up to our generation to finish the job. Humanity is androgynous through and through; let us fully embrace that essential insight again and organize our society from that insight as well.
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