From our point of view, Jukes’s most telling statement is: “Men’s struggles with their misogyny and its emotional consequences are responsible for most acts of male creativity, from the most sublime to the most destructive, in that this struggle involves extremes of emotion, from intense hatred to passionate idealization”.12 While not a book about art, Why Men Hate Women grounds the psychobiographical studies of male creative endeavors such as those studied here in long ignored developmental realities. While degrees of sublimation and destructiveness may be debatable from one artist to another, all adhere to the same dynamic of misogynistic mistrust first arising in interaction with mother. Each artist has a wish to correct for the conflict and emotional pain arising from having to keep defenses in operation long after their initial function has passed. His creativity betokens a wish to “restore” and “repair” lost harmonies in relations with mother but, alas, it partakes more or less destructively of the very distortions he would like to correct. Jukes shows that creativity begins in infancy with defensive ego-splitting, much as Fair-bairn saw it: “splitting, for the infant, represents a creative—almost biological—attempt to deal with ... aggressive impulses”. By aggressive, he refers to reactions to the mother who is seen as “bad”, even terrifying under certain relational circumstances that “arouse his fear and hatred”. Jukes believes that all men are affected to some degree by fear and hatred of their mothers, a statement in need of careful consideration. He asserts that all men (presumably even the “securely attached”) are unconsciously powered by fear and decide “never again to allow a woman such power over him”. This is the “root of misogyny” in adult male behavior towards females.13 While insisting upon more carefully calibrated empirical determinations, many attachment theorists would tend to agree. Further, there is room for agreement that a spectrum of creativity extends from the very outset of life, with its attachment engendered ego defenses, into developmental elaborations of defenses and into their reparative symbolic transformations in various forms of creativity.
Jukes’s remarks are especially astute with respect to Don Juanism in which “compulsive womanizing enables [a man] to express his love for a woman and his hatred for them at the same time, although he is only aware of the love”. Don Juan’s reparative urges are faulty because they are “out of concern for himself and his own destruction”, feeling the pain of “not being the object of his mother’s desire and of his sadistic, destructively envious feelings towards her”.14 But Jukes only terms the split mother “princess” and “witch”, not using the more precise attachment classification of mothers and their infants and children in the anxious avoidant mode under which Don Juanism later develops. While it can be said that Don Juanism comes of tantalizing mothering that withholds affection after having overstimulated it, offering both too little and too much, it gains most clarity within the framework of Crittenden’s A 5-6 (isolated, promiscuous) // C 5-6 (punitive/ seductive) categories. However approximate when it comes to actual lives, this more exacting classification actually helps us to understand the range and variety of adaptive defenses seen in men. By considering Crittenden’s full circle of adaptations from integrated (secure) to anti-integrated (psychopathological), and asking about the proportions of men likely to be found in each defensive category, we might not be quite so pessimistic as Jukes who may be overly influenced by his dangerously femiphobic male clients.
Still, he leaves us with a sobering question, illustrated by the misogynistic fantasy-leader artists under discussion: to what extent are males afflicted, however latently and unawares, with anxiety, fear and aversion to women? Is the problem of defensive ambivalence, sometimes leading to violence against women, growing in magnitude, or do we just see it more clearly and are less willing to accept it as normal? How far does it actually extend in the affairs of men and women, and for how many is it seriously disabling? Various estimates have been published, for instance that in a 1993 survey 51 per cent of Canadian women said they had experienced at least one incident of physical or sexual assault since the age of 16.15 However, feminist indictments of male sexual coercion and violence tend to emphasize highly publicized cases of crimes in which multiple lives are taken without seriously enquiring into what developmental factors might account for them. It is wrong to assume that all men are capable of such horrors, and attachment theory explains why not.
Naturally the most flagrant violators attract study. Peter Fonagy’s “Perpetrators of Violence Against Women: An Attachment Theory perspective” (1999) proposes that the approximately 12 per cent of men with a lifetime incidence of seriously violent acts towards women are to be understood not only as products of misogynistic social incentives, or even as having witnessed aggression between parents, but as products of personal attachment histories. Fonegy shows that the most physically violent men are those who fail to “mentalize” attachments, that is, they seek physical proximity to women without being able to think or feel about the relationships. Being insensitive to all that goes on in the mental world, and fearing abandonment, they use force to control the physical lives of their women (as they attempted with their mothers before them). These men, who cannot “represent” inner states and are crudely punitive, would most likely have been classified “D”, or disordered, in the attachment assessment scheme proposed by Mary Main and her col-leagues.16 The extremely confused, probably abused, disorganized infant and child does not know what defensive strategy to attempt, and cannot form a self image. Without an organized inner life, this child has no coherent “self’, so cannot even call on avoidant or ambivalent strategies to assist in managing relationships. Fearing abandonment, he throws himself into physical assault upon the woman’s body only to ask forgiveness and another chance. The artists studied here were certainly not such offenders, but they provide the fantasy ambience for those who are. The risk is that fantasies launched through art are taken too literally as encouragements to socially undesirable behaviour.
Clearly such disorganized and violent men are incapable of constructive creativity as they cannot “mentalize” or form coherent representations of relationships. They would be the hard core of Jukes’s clientele, but without conforming to even the primitive defensive levels of creativity of which he speaks. Our subjects are of a quite different order, being well within the range of men who can identify and represent feelings, however distressing they may be. Each was emotionally impaired, lacking the resources and resilience to overcome early traumatic relations with their mothers. Finding means to control adverse moods became urgent. Each was sexually over-stimulated and driven into defensive postures from which they hoped artistic creativity would deliver them. By so successfully translating their hidden battles to be free of developmental pain into the imagery of art they became celebrated fantasy leaders who caught and conveyed the urgency of impaired relations between men and women in our society.
But communication of suffering and reparative urges were mainly submerged by the implicit instruction, “be a sexual hero like me”, seen especially in Picasso. Picasso was a liberationism promoting a sexually liberated entourage that has continued to grow. Hugh Hefner’s “Playboy philosophy”, an attack on sexual repression, is a prime example. Balthus and Belmer were less promotional figures, their imagery being seen as more personally perverse than Picasso’s, while Cornell comes across as an ascetic rather than a sexual activist. That all should be misogynistic and in different ways perverse is nothing new in art, but the intensity and clever originality of their imaging misogyny and tortured sexuality is new. Missing is public awareness of how this imagery arises from suffering rather than from pleasurable sexual variations.