Pansexuality

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pansexuality

 

Pansexuality

Couple kissing in front of a pansexual flag
Etymology	Ancient Greek: πᾶν, romanized: pan, meaning "all"
Definition	Sexual or romantic attraction to people regardless of gender
Classification	Sexual identity
Parent category	Bisexuality
Other terms
Associated terms	Polysexual, queer, heteroflexibility
Flag
Flag name	Pansexual pride flag
Meaning	Pink, yellow and blue respectively representing attraction to women, non-binary people and men

Sexual orientation

Pansexuality is sexual, romantic, or emotional attraction towards people of all genders, or regardless of their sex or gender identity. Pansexual people might refer to themselves as gender-blind, asserting that gender and sex are not determining factors in their romantic or sexual attraction to others.

Pansexuality is sometimes considered a sexual orientation in its own right or, at other times, as a branch of bisexuality (since attraction to all genders falls under the category of attraction to more than one gender) to indicate an alternative sexual identity. While pansexual people are open to relationships with people who do not identify as strictly men or women, and pansexuality therefore explicitly rejects the gender binary in terms of the chosen etymology, this is by no means a feature which is exclusive to pansexuality and can also be found in broad definitions of homosexuality, bisexuality and the asexual spectrum.

History of the term

Pansexuality is also sometimes called omnisexuality. Omnisexuality may be used to describe those "attracted to people of all genders across the gender spectrum", and pansexuality may be used to describe the same people, or those attracted to people "regardless of gender". The prefix pan- comes from the Ancient Greek πᾶν (pan), meaning "all, every".

Early individuals who displayed pansexual tendencies include John Wilmot and Friedrich Schiller. Although later attributed to Shulamith Firestone, the hybrid words pansexual and pansexualism were first attested in 1914 (spelled pan-sexualism), coined by opponents of Sigmund Freud to denote the idea "that the sex instinct plays the primary part in all human activity, mental and physical". The term was translated to German as Pansexualismus in Freud's work Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego.

The word pansexual is attested as a term for a variety of attraction, alongside omnisexual (coming from the Latin omnis, "all") and the earlier bisexual, by the 1970s. Bi Any Other Name states that "pansexual people have been actively involved in the bisexual community since the 1970s." The term pansexuality emerged as a term for a sexual identity or sexual orientation in the 1990s, "to describe desires that already existed for many people". Social psychologist Nikki Hayfield states that the term saw early use in BDSM communities.

In 2010, the pansexual flag was posted on a Tumblr blog to represent the pansexual community. It was designed by Jasper Varney. The colors are intended to represent attraction and gender spectrum, with cyan for attraction to men, pink for attraction to women, and yellow for attraction to non-binary people.

Variations on pansexual are beginning to appear in surveys, e.g., panqueer, which combines pansexual with queer, has been used by participants in a study on non-medical impacts of COVID-19.

Comparison to bisexuality and other sexual identities

Definitions

A literal dictionary definition of bisexuality, due to the prefix bi-, is sexual or romantic attraction to two sexes (males and females), or to two genders (men and women). Pansexuality, however, composed with the prefix pan-, is the sexual attraction to a person of any sex or gender. Using these definitions, pansexuality is defined differently by explicitly including people who are intersex or outside the gender binary.

Volume 2 of Cavendish's Sex and Society states that "although the term's literal meaning can be interpreted as 'attracted to everything,' people who identify as pansexual do not usually include paraphilias, such as bestiality, pedophilia, and necrophilia, in their definition" and that they "stress that the term pansexuality describes only consensual adult sexual behaviors."

The definition of pansexuality can encourage the belief that it is the only sexual identity that covers individuals who do not cleanly fit into the categories of male or man, or female or woman. However, bisexual-identified people and scholars may object to the notion that bisexuality means sexual attraction to only two genders, arguing that since bisexual is not simply about attraction to two sexes and encompasses attraction to different genders as well, it includes attraction to more than two genders. Gender is considered more complex than the state of one's sex, as gender includes genetic, hormonal, environmental and social factors. Furthermore, the term bisexual is sometimes defined as the romantic or sexual attraction to multiple genders. The Bisexual Resource Center, for example, defines bisexuality as "an umbrella term for people who recognize and honor their potential for sexual and emotional attraction to more than one gender", while the American Institute of Bisexuality states that the term bisexual "is an open and inclusive term for many kinds of people with same-sex and different-sex attractions" and that "the scientific classification bisexual only addresses the physical, biological sex of the people involved, not the gender-presentation."

Scholar Shiri Eisner states that terms such as pansexual, omnisexual, polysexual, queer, etc. are being used in place of the term bisexual because "bisexuality, it's been claimed, is a gender binary, and therefore oppressive, word" and that "the great debate is being perpetuated and developed by bisexual-identified transgender and genderqueer people on the one hand, and non-bi-identified transgender and genderqueer people on the other." Eisner argues that "the allegations of binarism have little to do with bisexuality's actual attributes or bisexual people's behavior in real life" and that the allegations are a political method to keep the bisexual and transgender movements separated, because of those who believe that bisexuality ignores or erases the visibility of transgender and genderqueer people.

The American Institute of Bisexuality argues that "terms like pansexual, polysexual, omnisexual, and ambisexual also describe a person with homosexual and heterosexual attractions, and therefore people with those labels are also bisexual" and that "by replacing the prefix bi – (two, both) with pan- (all), poly- (many), omni- (all), ambi- (both, and implying ambiguity in this case), people who adopt these labels seek to clearly express the fact that gender does not factor into their own sexuality", but "this does not mean, however, that people who identify as bisexual are fixated on gender." The institute believes that the idea that identifying as bisexual reinforces a false gender binary "has its roots in the anti-science, anti-Enlightenment philosophy that has ironically found a home within many Queer Studies departments at universities across the Anglophone world," and that, "while it is true that our society's language and terminology do not necessarily reflect the full spectrum of human gender diversity, that is hardly the fault of people who choose to identify as bi. ... The Latin prefix bi- does indeed indicate two or both, however the 'both' indicated in the word bisexual are merely homosexual (lit. same sex) and heterosexual (lit. different sex)." The institute argues that heterosexuality and homosexuality, by contrast, "are defined by the boundary of two sexes/genders. Given those fundamental facts, any criticism of bisexuality as reinforcing a gender binary is misplaced. Over time, our society's concept of human sex and gender may well change."

Umbrella term

Social psychologist Corey Flanders said the "bisexual umbrella" is a term used to describe a range of sexual identities and communities that express attraction to multiple genders, often grouping together those who identify as bisexual, pansexual, queer, and fluid, as well as other identities. The term faces issues of balancing inclusivity with cohesiveness where, on one hand, the term can bring together many disparate identities and gather their experiences, and on the other, it can lead to too many sub-groupings and exclude those who identify with more than one sexual identity.

The term pansexuality is sometimes used interchangeably with bisexuality, and, similarly, people who identify as bisexual may "feel that gender, biological sex, and sexual orientation should not be a focal point in potential [romantic/sexual] relationships." Additionally, pansexuality is often used in conjunction with bisexuality, which can pose difficulties in studying differences and similarities in experiences between those who identify as pansexual and those who identify as bisexual and not pansexual. In one study analyzing sexual identities described as alternative terms for bisexual or bi-self labels, "half of all bisexual and bisexual-identified respondents also chose alternative self-labels such as queer, pansexual, pansensual, polyfidelitous, ambisexual, polysexual, or personalized identities such as byke or biphilic." In a 2017 study, identifying as pansexual was found to be "most appealing to nonheterosexual women and noncisgender individuals." Polysexuality is similar to pansexuality in definition, meaning "encompassing more than one sexuality", but not necessarily encompassing all sexualities. This is distinct from polyamory, which means more than one intimate relationship at the same time with the knowledge and consent of everyone involved.

Sexual fluidity is different from gender fluidity. Sexual fluidity is a concept that describes how a person's sexual identity may shift, and can shift at any time. The American Institute of Bisexuality stated that the term fluid "expresses the fact that the balance of a person's homosexual and heterosexual attractions exists in a state of flux and changes over time."

Eisner states that "the idea of bisexuality as an umbrella term can emphasize a multiplicity of identities, forms of desire, lived experiences, and politics," and "resist a single standard" of defining bisexual-umbrella identities and communities, including pansexuality and pansexuals. Eisner also says that only those who want to be included under the bisexual umbrella should be included. The term plurisexualities is used by social psychologist Nikki Hayfield over bisexuality as an umbrella term "to capture additional identities relating to attraction to multiple genders", while also referring to specific identities like bisexual, asexual, and pansexual.

In contrast to the idea of a bisexual umbrella, scholars Christopher Belous and Melissa Bauman propose that pansexuality might be considered more of an umbrella term than bisexuality, arguing that because pansexuality is often defined more broadly than bisexuality, bisexuality may exist under the umbrella of "pansexual orientations". They noted that more research is necessary to clarify which of the two terms might be more appropriate as an umbrella term. Scholar Emily Prior questions the use of bisexuality as an umbrella term, noting that "the empirical evidence just isn't there" to determine whether bisexuality can effectively act as an umbrella term. Social psychologist Joye Swan argues that including other orientations under the bisexual umbrella contributes to bisexual invisibility, invisibility for other sexualities, and presumes that "all or most bisexual people agree with being categorized" under the bisexual umbrella.

Demographics

A 2016 Harris Poll survey of 2,000 US adults commissioned by GLAAD found that among 18-34 year-olds, about two percent self-identify as pansexual and approximately one percent in all other age groups. In 2017, 14% of a sample of 12,000 LGBTQ youth between 13 and 17 years of age declared themselves pansexual in a Human Rights Campaign/University of Connecticut survey.

According to the National Center for Transgender Equality, 25% of American transgender people identify as bisexual. A 2017 study published in the Journal of Bisexuality found that when bisexuals and pansexuals described gender and defined bisexuality, "there were no differences in how pansexual and bisexual people ... discussed sex or gender", and that the findings "do not support the stereotype that bisexual people endorse a binary view of gender while pansexual people do not." One New Zealand 2019 study of a nationally representative group of bisexual and pansexual participants found that younger, gender-diverse, and Maori people were more likely to self-identify as pansexual compared to bisexual. Educational psychologist Barbara Gormley states that "bi+ people may embody more than one gender/sex as well as romantically love more than one gender/sex; therefore, we [bi+ people] have no reference point in a binary-gendered universe." The 2021 IPSOS survey found that the United States was the country with the highest percentage of pansexual individuals.

Pansexual & Panromantic Days

There are two main LGBT awareness periods for pansexual and panromantic people. One of them is the annual Pansexual & Panromantic Awareness Day (24 May), first celebrated in 2015, to promote awareness of and celebrate pansexual and panromantic identities. Another one is the Pansexual Pride Day, celebrated every December 8th.

Androgyny

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Androgyny 

Androgyny is the possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics. Androgyny may be expressed with regard to biological sex, gender identity, or gender expression.

When androgyny refers to mixed biological sex characteristics in humans, it often refers to intersex people, who are born with congenital variations that complicate assigning their sex at birth. In comparison, hermaphroditism is the possession of both male and female reproductive organs.

Regarding gender identity, androgynous individuals may identify with non-binary identities. Others may identify as transgender. As a form of gender expression, androgyny has fluctuated in popularity in different cultures and throughout history. Physically, an androgynous appearance may be achieved through personal grooming, fashion, or hormone treatment.

Androgyny in those who are assigned female at birth is suggested to contribute to positive mental health, although individual factors such as education and marital status may affect this.

Etymology

The term derives from Ancient Greek: ἀνδρόγυνος, from ἀνήρ, stem ἀνδρ- (anér, andro-, meaning man) and γυνή (gunē, gyné, meaning woman) through the Latin: androgynus.

History

See also: Sexuality in ancient Rome § Hermaphroditism and androgyny

Androgyny is attested from earliest history and across world cultures. In ancient Sumer, androgynous and intersex men were heavily involved in the cult of Inanna. A set of priests known as gala worked in Inanna's temples, where they performed elegies and lamentations. Gala took female names, spoke in the eme-sal dialect, which was traditionally reserved for women, and appear to have engaged in sexual acts with men. In later Mesopotamian cultures, kurgarrū and assinnu were servants of the goddess Ishtar (Inanna's East Semitic equivalent), who dressed in female clothing and performed war dances in Ishtar's temples. Several Akkadian proverbs seem to suggest that they may have also engaged in sexual activity with men. Gwendolyn Leick, an anthropologist known for her writings on Mesopotamia, has compared these individuals to the contemporary Indian hijra. In one Akkadian hymn, Ishtar is described as transforming men into women. The 2nd century CE Mishnah, a foundational text of Rabbinic Judaism, mentions the term androgynos 32 times. In one mention, Rabbi Meir describes the androgynos as "a creation of its own type, which the sages could not decide whether is male or female".

The ancient Greek myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, two divinities who fused into a single immortal – provided a frame of reference used in Western culture for centuries. Androgyny and homosexuality are seen in Plato's Symposium in a myth that, according to Plato, Aristophanes tells the audience, possibly with a comic intention. People used to be spherical creatures, with two bodies attached back to back who cartwheeled around. There were three sexes: the male-male people who descended from the sun, the female-female people who descended from the earth, and the male-female people who came from the moon. This last pairing represented the androgynous couple. These sphere people tried to take over the gods and failed. Zeus then decided to cut them in half and had Apollo repair the resulting cut surfaces, leaving the navel as a reminder to not defy the gods again. If they did, he would cleave them in two again to hop around on one leg. This is one of the earlier written references to androgyny - and the only case in classical greek texts that female homosexuality (lesbianism) is ever mentioned. Other early references to androgyny include astronomy, where androgyn was a name given to planets that were sometimes warm and sometimes cold.

Philosophers such as Philo of Alexandria, and early Christian leaders such as Origen and Gregory of Nyssa, continued to promote the idea of androgyny as humans' original and perfect state during late antiquity." In medieval Europe, the concept of androgyny played an important role in both Christian theological debate and Alchemical theory. Influential Theologians such as John of Damascus and John Scotus Eriugena continued to promote the pre-fall androgyny proposed by the early Church Fathers, while other clergy expounded and debated the proper view and treatment of contemporary hermaphrodites.

Modern history

Western esotericism's embrace of androgyny continued into the modern period. A 1550 anthology of Alchemical thought, De Alchemia, included the influential Rosary of the Philosophers, which depicts the sacred marriage of the masculine principle (Sol) with the feminine principle (Luna) producing the "Divine Androgyne," a representation of Alchemical Hermetic beliefs in dualism, transformation, and the transcendental perfection of the union of opposites.

The symbolism and meaning of androgyny was a central preoccupation of the German mystic Jakob Böhme and the Swedish philosopher Emanuel Swedenborg. The philosophical concept of the "Universal Androgyne" (or "Universal Hermaphrodite") – a perfect merging of the sexes that predated the current corrupted world and/or was the utopia of the next – is also important in some strains of Rosicrucianism and in philosophical traditions such as Swedenborgianism and Theosophy. Twentieth century architect Claude Fayette Bragdon expressed the concept mathematically as a magic square, using it as building block in many of his most noted buildings.

In the mid-1700s, the macaronis of Georgian-era England were a wealthy subculture of young men, known for androgynous gender expression. Their unusually large wigs, lavish fashion, and sentimental behavior prompted backlash from conservative generations of the time. In 1770, the Oxford Dictionary declared, "There is indeed a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up among us. It is called a macaroni." An example is portrait artist Richard Cosway, referred to as "the Macaroni artist."

Psychological

In psychological study, various measures have been used to characterize gender, such as the Bem Sex Role Inventory and the Personal Attributes Questionnaire.

Masculine traits are categorized as agentic and instrumental, dealing with assertiveness and analytical skill. Feminine traits are categorized as communal and expressive, dealing with empathy and subjectivity. Androgynous individuals exhibit behavior that extends beyond what is normally associated with their given sex. Due to the possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics, androgynous individuals have access to a wider array of psychological competencies in regards to emotional regulation, communication styles, and situational adaptability. Androgynous individuals have also been associated with higher levels of creativity and mental health.

Bem Sex-Role Inventory

The Bem Sex-Role Inventory (BSRI) was constructed by the early leading proponent of androgyny, Sandra Bem (1977). The BSRI is one of the most widely used gender measures. Based on an individual's responses to the items in the BSRI, they are classified as having one of four gender role orientations: masculine, feminine, androgynous, or undifferentiated. Bem understood that both masculine and feminine characteristics could be expressed by anyone and it would determine those gender role orientations.

An androgynous person is an individual who has a high degree of both feminine (expressive) and masculine (instrumental) traits. A feminine individual is ranked high on feminine (expressive) traits and ranked low on masculine (instrumental) traits. A masculine individual is ranked high on instrumental traits and ranked low on expressive traits. An undifferentiated person is low on both feminine and masculine traits.

According to Sandra Bem, androgynous individuals are more flexible and more mentally healthy than either masculine or feminine individuals; undifferentiated individuals are less competent. More recent research has debunked this idea, at least to some extent, and Bem herself has found weaknesses in her original pioneering work. Now she prefers to work with gender schema theory.

One study found that masculine and androgynous individuals had higher expectations for being able to control the outcomes of their academic efforts than feminine or undifferentiated individuals.

Personal Attributes Questionnaire

The Personal Attributes Questionnaire (PAQ) was developed in the 70s by Janet Spence, Robert Helmreich, and Joy Stapp. This test asked subjects to complete a survey consisting of three sets of scales relating to masculinity, femininity, and masculinity-femininity. These scales had sets of adjectives commonly associated with males, females, and both. These descriptors were chosen based on typical characteristics as rated by a population of undergrad students. Similar to the BSRI, the PAQ labeled androgynous individuals as people who ranked highly in both the areas of masculinity and femininity. However, Spence and Helmreich considered androgyny to be a descriptor of high levels of masculinity and femininity as opposed to a category in and of itself.

Biological sex

See also: Sex differences in humans

Historically, the word androgynous was applied to humans with a mixture of male and female sex characteristics, and was sometimes used synonymously with the term hermaphrodite. In some disciplines, such as botany, androgynous and hermaphroditic are still used interchangeably.

When androgyny is used to refer to physical traits, it often refers to a person whose biological sex is difficult to discern at a glance because of their mixture of male and female characteristics. Because androgyny encompasses additional meanings related to gender identity and gender expression that are distinct from biological sex, today the word androgynous is rarely used to formally describe mixed biological sex characteristics in humans. In modern English, the word intersex is used to more precisely describe individuals with mixed or ambiguous sex characteristics. However, both intersex and non-intersex people can exhibit a mixture of male and female sex traits such as hormone levels, type of internal and external genitalia, and the appearance of secondary sex characteristics.

Gender identity

An individual's gender identity, a personal sense of one's own gender, may be described as androgynous if they feel that they have both masculine and feminine aspects. The word androgyne can refer to a person who does not fit neatly into one of the typical masculine or feminine gender roles of their society, or to a person whose gender is a mixture of male and female, not necessarily half-and-half. Many androgynous individuals identify as being mentally or emotionally both masculine and feminine. They may also identify as "gender-neutral", "genderqueer", or "non-binary". A person who is androgynous may engage freely in what is seen as masculine or feminine behaviors as well as tasks. They may have a balanced identity that includes the virtues of both men and women and may disassociate the task with what gender they may be socially or physically assigned to. People who identify as androgynous typically disregard which traits are culturally constructed specifically for males and females within a society, and rather focus on what behavior is most effective within the situational circumstance.

Some non-Western cultures recognize additional androgynous gender identities, called third genders.

Gender expression

Louise Brooks exemplified the flapper. Flappers challenged traditional gender roles, had boyish hair cuts, and androgynous figures.

Gender expression that includes a mixture of masculine and feminine characteristics can be described as androgynous. The categories of masculine and feminine in gender expression are socially constructed, and rely on shared conceptions of clothing, behavior, communication style, and other aspects of presentation. In some cultures, androgynous gender expression has been celebrated, while in others, androgynous expression has been limited or suppressed. To say that a culture or relationship is androgynous is to say that it lacks rigid gender roles, or has blurred lines between gender roles.

The word genderqueer is often used by androgynous individuals to refer to themselves, but the terms genderqueer and androgynous are neither equivalent nor interchangeable. Genderqueer, by virtue of its ties with queer culture, carries sociopolitical connotations that androgyny does not carry. For these reasons, some androgynes may find the label genderqueer inaccurate, inapplicable, or offensive. Androgyneity is considered by some to be a viable alternative to androgyn for differentiating internal (psychological) factors from external (visual) factors.

An alternative to androgyny is gender-role transcendence: the view that individual competence should be conceptualized on a personal basis rather than on the basis of masculinity, femininity, or androgyny.

In agenderism, the division of people into women and men (in the psychical sense), is considered erroneous and artificial. Agendered individuals are those who reject gender labeling in conception of self-identity and other matters. They see their subjectivity through the term person instead of woman or man. According to E. O. Wright, genderless people can have traits, behaviors and dispositions that correspond to what is currently viewed as feminine and masculine, and the mix of these would vary across persons. Nevertheless, it doesn't suggest that everyone would be androgynous in their identities and practices in the absence of gendered relations. What disappears in the idea of genderlessness is any expectation that some characteristics and dispositions are strictly attributed to a person of any biological sex.

Contemporary trends

Main article: Androgyny in fashion

 

Coco Chanel wearing a sailor's jersey and trousers. 1928

Throughout most of twentieth century Western history, social rules have restricted people's dress according to gender. Trousers were traditionally a male form of dress, frowned upon for women. However, during the 1800s, female spies were introduced and Vivandières wore a certain uniform with a dress over trousers. Women activists during that time would also decide to wear trousers, for example Luisa Capetillo, a women's rights activist and the first woman in Puerto Rico to wear trousers in public.

Yves Saint Laurent, the tuxedo suit "Le Smoking", created in 1966

In the 1900s, starting around World War I traditional gender roles blurred and fashion pioneers such as Paul Poiret and Coco Chanel introduced trousers to women's fashion. The "flapper style" for women of this era included trousers and a chic bob, which gave women an androgynous look. Coco Chanel, who had a love for wearing trousers herself, created trouser designs for women such as beach pajamas and horse-riding attire. During the 1930s, glamorous actresses such as Marlene Dietrich fascinated and shocked many with their strong desire to wear trousers and adopt the androgynous style. Dietrich is remembered as one of the first actresses to wear trousers in a premiere.

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s, the women's liberation movement is likely to have contributed to ideas and influenced fashion designers, such as Yves Saint Laurent. Yves Saint Laurent designed the Le Smoking suit and introduced it in 1966, while Helmut Newton’s erotized androgynous photographs of the suit made it iconic and a classic.

Elvis Presley introduced an androgynous style in rock'n'roll. His pretty face and use of eye makeup often made people think he was a rather "effeminate guy", When the Rolling Stones played London's Hyde Park in 1969, Mick Jagger wore a white "man's dress" designed by Michael Fish. Fish was the most fashionable shirt-maker in London, the inventor of the Kipper tie, and a principal taste-maker of the Peacock revolution in men's fashion. His creation for Mick Jagger was considered to be the epitome of the swinging 60s.

Pop stars Boy George (pictured) and Annie Lennox appeared on the front cover of Smash Hits magazine in December 1983 with the headline "Which one is the boy?", followed by the cover of Newsweek in January 1984 to mark a second British Invasion.

In 1972, David Bowie presented his alter ego Ziggy Stardust, a character that was a symbol of sexual ambiguity when he launched the album The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and Spiders from Mars. Marc Bolan, the other pioneer of glam rock, performed on the BBC’s Top of the Pops in 1971 wearing glitter and satins, with The Independent stating his appearance "permitted a generation of teeny-boppers to begin playing with the idea of androgyny". The 1973 West End musical The Rocky Horror Show also depicted sexual fluidity.

Continuing into the 1980s, the rise of avant-garde fashion designers like Yohji Yamamoto, challenged the social constructs around gender. They reinvigorated androgyny in fashion, addressing gender issues. This was also reflected within pop culture icons during the 1980s, such as Annie Lennox and Boy George.

X Japan founder Yoshiki is often labelled androgynous, known for having worn lace dresses and acting effeminate during performances

Power dressing for women became even more prominent within the 1980s which was previously only something done by men in order to look structured and powerful. However, during the 1980s this began to take a turn as women were entering jobs with equal roles to the men. In the article “The Menswear Phenomenon” by Kathleen Beckett written for Vogue in 1984 the concept of power dressing is explored as women entered these jobs they had no choice but to tailor their wardrobes accordingly, eventually leading the ascension of power dressing as a popular style for women. Women begin to find through fashion they can incite men to pay more attention to the seduction of their mental prowess rather, than the physical attraction of their appearance. This influence in the fashion world quickly makes its way to the world of film, with movies like "Working Girl" using power dressing women as their main subject matter.

Androgynous fashion made its most powerful in the 1980s debut through the work of Yohji Yamamoto and Rei Kawakubo, who brought in a distinct Japanese style that adopted distinctively gender ambiguous theme. These two designers consider themselves to very much a part of the avant-garde, reinvigorating Japanism. Following a more anti-fashion approach and deconstructing garments, in order to move away from the more mundane aspects of current Western fashion. This would end up leading a change in Western fashion in the 1980s that would lead on for more gender friendly garment construction. This is because designers like Yamamoto believe that the idea of androgyny should be celebrated, as it is an unbiased way for an individual to identify with one's self and that fashion is purely a catalyst for this.

Also during the 1980s, Grace Jones, a singer and fashion model, gender-thwarted appearance in the 1980s, which startled the public. Her androgynous style inspired many and she became an androgynous style icon for modern celebrities.

In 2016, Louis Vuitton revealed that Jaden Smith would star in their womenswear campaign. Because of events like this, gender fluidity in fashion is being vigorously discussed in the media, with the concept being articulated by Lady Gaga, Ruby Rose, and in Tom Hooper's film The Danish Girl. Jaden Smith and other young individuals, have inspired the movement with his appeal for clothes to be non-gender specific, meaning that men can wear skirts and women can wear boxer shorts if they so wish.

South Korean pop star G-Dragon is often noted for his androgynous looks

Androgyny has been gaining more prominence in popular culture in the early 21st century. Both the fashion industry and pop culture have accepted and even popularised the "androgynous" look, with several current celebrities being hailed as creative trendsetters.

The rise of the metrosexual in the first decade of the 2000s has also been described as a related phenomenon associated with this trend. Traditional gender stereotypes have been challenged and reset in recent years dating back to the 1960s, the hippie movement and flower power. Artists in film such as Leonardo DiCaprio sported the "skinny" look in the 1990s, a departure from traditional masculinity which resulted in a fad known as "Leo Mania". Musical stars such as Brett Anderson of the British band Suede, Marilyn Manson and the band Placebo have used clothing and makeup to create an androgyny culture throughout the 1990s and the first decade of the 2000s.

While the 1990s unrolled and fashion developed an affinity for unisex clothes there was a rise of designers who favored that look, like Helmut Lang, Giorgio Armani and Pierre Cardin. Men in catalogues started wearing jewellery, make up, visual kei, designer stubble. These styles have become a significant mainstream trend of the 21st century, both in the western world and in Asia. Japanese and Korean cultures have featured the androgynous look as a positive attribute in society, as depicted in both K-pop, J-pop, in anime and manga, as well as the fashion industry.

Symbols and iconography

In the ancient and medieval worlds, androgynous people and/or hermaphrodites were represented in art by the caduceus, a wand of transformative power in ancient Greco-Roman mythology. The caduceus was created by Tiresias and represents his transformation into a woman by Juno in punishment for striking at mating snakes. The caduceus was later carried by Hermes/Mercury and was the basis for the astronomical symbol for the planet Mercury and the botanical sign for hermaphrodite. That sign is now sometimes used for transgender people.

Another common androgyny icon in the medieval and early modern period was the Rebis, a conjoined male and female figure, often with solar and lunar motifs. Still another symbol was what is today called sun cross, which united the cross (or saltire) symbol for male with the circle for female. This sign is now the astronomical symbol for the planet Earth.

Collective unconscious

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Collective unconscious (German: kollektives Unbewusstes) refers to the unconscious mind and shared mental concepts. It is generally associated with idealism and was coined by Carl Jung. According to Jung, the human collective unconscious is populated by instincts, as well as by archetypes: ancient primal symbols such as The Great Mother, the Wise Old Man, the Shadow, the Tower, Water, and the Tree of Life. Jung considered the collective unconscious to underpin and surround the unconscious mind, distinguishing it from the personal unconscious of Freudian psychoanalysis. He believed that the concept of the collective unconscious helps to explain why similar themes occur in mythologies around the world. He argued that the collective unconscious had a profound influence on the lives of individuals, who lived out its symbols and clothed them in meaning through their experiences. The psychotherapeutic practice of analytical psychology revolves around examining the patient's relationship to the collective unconscious.

Psychiatrist and Jungian analyst Lionel Corbett argues that the contemporary terms "autonomous psyche" or "objective psyche" are more commonly used today in the practice of depth psychology rather than the traditional term of the "collective unconscious". Critics of the collective unconscious concept have called it unscientific and fatalistic, or otherwise very difficult to test scientifically (due to the mystical aspect of the collective unconscious). Proponents suggest that it is borne out by findings of psychology, neuroscience, and anthropology.

Basic explanation

The term "collective unconscious" first appeared in Jung's 1916 essay, "The Structure of the Unconscious". This essay distinguishes between the "personal", Freudian unconscious, filled with sexual fantasies and repressed images, and the "collective" unconscious encompassing the soul of humanity at large.

In "The Significance of Constitution and Heredity in Psychology" (November 1929), Jung wrote:

And the essential thing, psychologically, is that in dreams, fantasies, and other exceptional states of mind the most far-fetched mythological motifs and symbols can appear autochthonously at any time, often, apparently, as the result of particular influences, traditions, and excitations working on the individual, but more often without any sign of them. These "primordial images" or "archetypes," as I have called them, belong to the basic stock of the unconscious psyche and cannot be explained as personal acquisitions. Together they make up that psychic stratum which has been called the collective unconscious.
The existence of the collective unconscious means that individual consciousness is anything but a tabula rasa and is not immune to predetermining influences. On the contrary, it is in the highest degree influenced by inherited presuppositions, quite apart from the unavoidable influences exerted upon it by the environment. The collective unconscious comprises in itself the psychic life of our ancestors right back to the earliest beginnings. It is the matrix of all conscious psychic occurrences, and hence it exerts an influence that compromises the freedom of consciousness in the highest degree, since it is continually striving to lead all conscious processes back into the old paths.

On October 19, 1936, Jung delivered a lecture "The Concept of the Collective Unconscious" to the Abernethian Society at St. Bartholomew's Hospital in London. He said:

My thesis then, is as follows: in addition to our immediate consciousness, which is of a thoroughly personal nature and which we believe to be the only empirical psyche (even if we tack on the personal unconscious as an appendix), there exists a second psychic system of a collective, universal, and impersonal nature which is identical in all individuals. This collective unconscious does not develop individually but is inherited. It consists of pre-existent forms, the archetypes, which can only become conscious secondarily and which give definite form to certain psychic contents.

Jung linked the collective unconscious to "what Freud called 'archaic remnants' – mental forms whose presence cannot be explained by anything in the individual's own life and which seem to be aboriginal, innate, and inherited shapes of the human mind". He credited Freud for developing his "primal horde" theory in Totem and Taboo and continued further with the idea of an archaic ancestor maintaining its influence in the minds of present-day humans. Every human being, he wrote, "however high his conscious development, is still an archaic man at the deeper levels of his psyche."

As modern humans go through their process of individuation, moving out of the collective unconscious into mature selves, they establish a persona—which can be understood simply as that small portion of the collective psyche which they embody, perform, and identify with.

The collective unconscious exerts overwhelming influence on the minds of individuals. These effects of course vary widely, however, since they involve virtually every emotion and situation. At times, the collective unconscious can terrify, but it can also heal.

Archetypes

In an early definition of the term, Jung writes: "Archetypes are typical modes of apprehension, and wherever we meet with uniform and regularly recurring modes of apprehension we are dealing with an archetype, no matter whether its mythological character is recognized or not." He traces the term back to Philo, Irenaeus, and the Corpus Hermeticum, which associate archetypes with divinity and the creation of the world, and notes the close relationship of Platonic ideas.

These archetypes dwell in a world beyond the chronology of a human lifespan, developing on an evolutionary timescale. Regarding the animus and anima, the male principle within the woman and the female principle within the man, Jung writes:

They evidently live and function in the deeper layers of the unconscious, especially in that phylogenetic substratum which I have called the collective unconscious. This localization explains a good deal of their strangeness: they bring into our ephemeral consciousness an unknown psychic life belonging to a remote past. It is the mind of our unknown ancestors, their way of thinking and feeling, their way of experiencing life and the world, gods, and men. The existence of these archaic strata is presumably the source of man's belief in reincarnations and in memories of "previous experiences". Just as the human body is a museum, so to speak, of its phylogenetic history, so too is the psyche.

Jung also described archetypes as imprints of momentous or frequently recurring situations in the lengthy human past.

A complete list of archetypes cannot be made, nor can differences between archetypes be absolutely delineated. For example, the Eagle is a common archetype that may have a multiplicity of interpretations. It could mean the soul leaving the mortal body and connecting with the heavenly spheres, or it may mean that someone is sexually impotent, in that they have had their spiritual ego body engaged. In spite of this difficulty, Jungian analyst June Singer suggests a partial list of well-studied archetypes, listed in pairs of opposites:

Ego	Shadow
Sacred Progenitor	Tyrannical Progenitor
Old Wise Man	Trickster
Animus	Anima
Meaning	Absurdity
Centrality	Diffusion
Order	Chaos
Opposition	Conjunction
Time	Eternity
Sacred	Profane
Light	Darkness
Transformation	Fixity

Jung made reference to contents of this category of the unconscious psyche as being similar to Levy-Bruhl's use of collective representations or "représentations collectives", Mythological "motifs", Hubert and Mauss's "categories of the imagination", and Adolf Bastian's "primordial thoughts". He also called archetypes "dominants" because of their profound influence on mental life.

Instincts

Jung's exposition of the collective unconscious builds on the classic issue in psychology and biology regarding nature versus nurture. If we accept that nature, or heredity, has some influence on the individual psyche, we must examine the question of how this influence takes hold in the real world.

On exactly one night in its entire lifetime, the yucca moth discovers pollen in the opened flowers of the yucca plant, forms some into a pellet, and then transports this pellet, with one of its eggs, to the pistil of another yucca plant. This activity cannot be "learned"; it makes more sense to describe the yucca moth as experiencing intuition about how to act. Archetypes and instincts coexist in the collective unconscious as interdependent opposites, Jung would later clarify. Whereas for most animals intuitive understandings completely intertwine with instinct, in humans the archetypes have become a separate register of mental phenomena.

Humans experience five main types of instinct, wrote Jung: hunger, sexuality, activity, reflection, and creativity. These instincts, listed in order of increasing abstraction, elicit and constrain human behavior, but also leave room for freedom in their implementation and especially in their interplay. Even a simple hungry feeling can lead to many different responses, including metaphorical sublimation. These instincts could be compared to the "drives" discussed in psychoanalysis and other domains of psychology. Several readers of Jung have observed that in his treatment of the collective unconscious, Jung suggests an unusual mixture of primordial, "lower" forces, and spiritual, "higher" forces.

Exploration

Moře (Sea), Eduard Tomek [cs], 1971

Jung believed that proof of the existence of a collective unconscious, and insight into its nature, could be gleaned primarily from dreams and from active imagination, a waking exploration of fantasy.

Jung considered that 'the shadow' and the anima and animus differ from the other archetypes in the fact that their content is more directly related to the individual's personal situation'. These archetypes, a special focus of Jung's work, become autonomous personalities within an individual psyche. Jung encouraged direct conscious dialogue of the patients with these personalities within. While the shadow usually personifies the personal unconscious, the anima or the Wise Old Man can act as representatives of the collective unconscious.

Jung suggested that parapsychology, alchemy, and occult religious ideas could contribute understanding of the collective unconscious. Based on his interpretation of synchronicity and extra-sensory perception, Jung argued that psychic activity transcended the brain. In alchemy, Jung found that plain water, or seawater, corresponded to his concept of the collective unconscious.

In humans, the psyche mediates between the primal force of the collective unconscious and the experience of consciousness or dream. Therefore, symbols may require interpretation before they can be understood as archetypes. Jung writes:

We have only to disregard the dependence of dream language on environment and substitute "eagle" for "aeroplane," "dragon" for "automobile" or "train," "snake-bite" for "injection," and so forth, in order to arrive at the more universal and more fundamental language of mythology. This give us access to the primordial images that underlie all thinking and have a considerable influence even on our scientific ideas.

A single archetype can manifest in many different ways. Regarding the Mother archetype, Jung suggests that not only can it apply to mothers, grandmothers, stepmothers, mothers-in-law, and mothers in mythology, but to various concepts, places, objects, and animals:

Other symbols of the mother in a figurative sense appear in things representing the goal of our longing for redemption, such as Paradise, the Kingdom of God, the Heavenly Jerusalem. Many things arousing devotion or feelings of awe, as for instance the Church, university, city or country, heaven, earth, the woods, the sea or any still waters, matter even, the underworld and the moon, can be mother-symbols. The archetype is often associated with things and places standing for fertility and fruitfulness: the cornucopia, a ploughed field, a garden. It can be attached to a rock, a cave, a tree, a spring, a deep well, or to various vessels such as the baptismal font, or to vessel-shaped flowers like the rose or the lotus. Because of the protection it implies, the magic circle or mandala can be a form of mother archetype. Hollow objects such as ovens or cooking vessels are associated with the mother archetype, and, of course, the uterus, yoni, and anything of a like shape. Added to this list there are many animals, such as the cow, hare, and helpful animals in general.

Care must be taken, however, to determine the meaning of a symbol through further investigation; one cannot simply decode a dream by assuming these meanings are constant. Archetypal explanations work best when an already-known mythological narrative can clearly help to explain the confusing experience of an individual.

Evidence

In his clinical psychiatry practice, Jung identified mythological elements which seemed to recur in the minds of his patients—above and beyond the usual complexes which could be explained in terms of their personal lives. The most obvious patterns applied to the patient's parents: "Nobody knows better than the psychotherapist that the mythologizing of the parents is often pursued far into adulthood and is given up only with the greatest resistance."

Jung cited recurring themes as evidence of the existence of psychic elements shared among all humans. For example: "The snake-motif was certainly not an individual acquisition of the dreamer, for snake-dreams are very common even among city-dwellers who have probably never seen a real snake." Still better evidence, he felt, came when patients described complex images and narratives with obscure mythological parallels. Jung's leading example of this phenomenon was a paranoid-schizophrenic patient who could see the sun's dangling phallus, whose motion caused wind to blow on earth. Jung found a direct analogue of this idea in the "Mithras Liturgy", from the Greek Magical Papyri of Ancient Egypt—only just translated into German—which also discussed a phallic tube, hanging from the sun, and causing wind to blow on earth. He concluded that the patient's vision and the ancient Liturgy arose from the same source in the collective unconscious.

Going beyond the individual mind, Jung believed that "the whole of mythology could be taken as a sort of projection of the collective unconscious". Therefore, psychologists could learn about the collective unconscious by studying religions and spiritual practices of all cultures, as well as belief systems like astrology.

Criticism of Jung's evidence

Popperian critic Ray Scott Percival disputes some of Jung's examples and argues that his strongest claims are not falsifiable. Percival takes especial issue with Jung's claim that major scientific discoveries emanate from the collective unconscious and not from unpredictable or innovative work done by scientists. Percival charges Jung with excessive determinism and writes: "He could not countenance the possibility that people sometimes create ideas that cannot be predicted, even in principle." Regarding the claim that all humans exhibit certain patterns of mind, Percival argues that these common patterns could be explained by common environments (i.e. by shared nurture, not nature). Because all people have families, encounter plants and animals, and experience night and day, it should come as no surprise that they develop basic mental structures around these phenomena.

This latter example has been the subject of contentious debate, and Jung critic Richard Noll has argued against its authenticity.

Ethology and biology

Animals all have some innate psychological concepts which guide their mental development. The concept of imprinting in ethology is one well-studied example, dealing most famously with the Mother constructs of newborn animals. The many predetermined scripts for animal behavior are called innate releasing mechanisms.

Proponents of the collective unconscious theory in neuroscience suggest that mental commonalities in humans originate especially from the subcortical area of the brain: specifically, the thalamus and limbic system. These centrally located structures link the brain to the rest of the nervous system and are said to control vital processes including emotions and long-term memory .

Archetype research

A more common experimental approach investigates the unique effects of archetypal images. An influential study of this type, by Rosen, Smith, Huston, & Gonzalez in 1991, found that people could better remember symbols paired with words representing their archetypal meaning. Using data from the Archive for Research in Archetypal Symbolism and a jury of evaluators, Rosen et al. developed an "Archetypal Symbol Inventory" listing symbols and one-word connotations. Many of these connotations were obscure to laypeople. For example, a picture of a diamond represented "self"; a square represented "Earth". They found that even when subjects did not consciously associate the word with the symbol, they were better able to remember the pairing of the symbol with its chosen word. Brown & Hannigan replicated this result in 2013, and expanded the study slightly to include tests in English and in Spanish of people who spoke both languages.

Maloney (1999) asked people questions about their feelings to variations on images featuring the same archetype: some positive, some negative, and some non-anthropomorphic. He found that although the images did not elicit significantly different responses to questions about whether they were "interesting" or "pleasant", but did provoke highly significant differences in response to the statement: "If I were to keep this image with me forever, I would be". Maloney suggested that this question led the respondents to process the archetypal images on a deeper level, which strongly reflected their positive or negative valence.

Ultimately, although Jung referred to the collective unconscious as an empirical concept, based on evidence, its elusive nature does create a barrier to traditional experimental research. June Singer writes:

But the collective unconscious lies beyond the conceptual limitations of individual human consciousness, and thus cannot possibly be encompassed by them. We cannot, therefore, make controlled experiments to prove the existence of the collective unconscious, for the psyche of man, holistically conceived, cannot be brought under laboratory conditions without doing violence to its nature. ... In this respect, psychology may be compared to astronomy, the phenomena of which also cannot be enclosed within a controlled setting. The heavenly bodies must be observed where they exist in the natural universe, under their own conditions, rather than under conditions we might propose to set for them.

Application to psychotherapy

Psychotherapy based on analytical psychology would seek to analyze the relationship between a person's individual consciousness and the deeper common structures which underlie them. Personal experiences both activate archetypes in the mind and give them meaning and substance for individual. At the same time, archetypes covertly organize human experience and memory, their powerful effects becoming apparent only indirectly and in retrospect. Understanding the power of the collective unconscious can help an individual to navigate through life.

In the interpretation of analytical psychologist Mary Williams, a patient who understands the impact of the archetype can help to dissociate the underlying symbol from the real person who embodies the symbol for the patient. In this way, the patient no longer uncritically transfers their feelings about the archetype onto people in everyday life, and as a result, can develop healthier and more personal relationships.

Practitioners of analytic psychotherapy, Jung cautioned, could become so fascinated with manifestations of the collective unconscious that they facilitated their appearance at the expense of their patient's well-being. Individuals with schizophrenia, it is said, fully identify with the collective unconscious, lacking a functioning ego to help them deal with actual difficulties of life.

Application to politics and society

Elements from the collective unconscious can manifest among groups of people, who by definition all share a connection to these elements. Groups of people can become especially receptive to specific symbols due to the historical situation they find themselves in. The common importance of the collective unconscious makes people ripe for political manipulation, especially in the era of mass politics. Jung compared mass movements to mass psychoses, comparable to demonic possession in which people uncritically channel unconscious symbolism through the social dynamic of the mob and the leader.

Although civilization leads people to disavow their links with the mythological world of uncivilized societies, Jung argued that aspects of the primitive unconscious would nevertheless reassert themselves in the form of superstitions, everyday practices, and unquestioned traditions such as the Christmas tree.

Based on empirical inquiry, Jung felt that all humans, regardless of racial and geographic differences, share the same collective pool of instincts and images, though these manifest differently due to the moulding influence of culture. However, above and in addition to the primordial collective unconscious, people within a certain culture may share additional bodies of primal collective ideas.

Jung called the UFO phenomenon a "living myth", a legend in the process of consolidation. Belief in a messianic encounter with UFOs demonstrated the point, Jung argued, that even if a rationalistic modern ideology repressed the images of the collective unconscious, its fundamental aspects would inevitably resurface. The circular shape of the flying saucer confirms its symbolic connection to repressed but psychically necessary ideas of divinity.

The universal applicability of archetypes has not escaped the attention of marketing specialists, who observe that branding can resonate with consumers through appeal to archetypes of the collective unconscious.

Distinction from related concepts

Jung contrasted the collective unconscious with the personal unconscious, the unique aspects of an individual study which Jung says constitute the focus of Sigmund Freud and Alfred Adler. Psychotherapy patients, it seemed to Jung, often described fantasies and dreams which repeated elements from ancient mythology. These elements appeared even in patients who were probably not exposed to the original story. For example, mythology offers many examples of the "dual mother" narrative, according to which a child has a biological mother and a divine mother. Therefore, argues Jung, Freudian psychoanalysis would neglect important sources for unconscious ideas, in the case of a patient with neurosis around a dual-mother image.

This divergence over the nature of the unconscious has been cited as a key aspect of Jung's famous split from Sigmund Freud and his school of psychoanalysis. Some commentators have rejected Jung's characterization of Freud, observing that in texts such as Totem and Taboo (1913) Freud directly addresses the interface between the unconscious and society at large. Jung himself said that Freud had discovered a collective archetype, the Oedipus complex, but that it "was the first archetype Freud discovered, the first and only one".

Probably none of my empirical concepts has been met with so much misunderstanding as the idea of the collective unconscious.

Jung, October 19, 1936

Jung also distinguished the collective unconscious and collective consciousness, between which lay "an almost unbridgeable gulf over which the subject finds himself suspended". According to Jung, collective consciousness (meaning something along the lines of consensus reality) offered only generalizations, simplistic ideas, and the fashionable ideologies of the age. This tension between collective unconscious and collective consciousness corresponds roughly to the "everlasting cosmic tug of war between good and evil" and has worsened in the time of the mass man.

Organized religion, exemplified by the Catholic Church, lies more with the collective consciousness; but, through its all-encompassing dogma it channels and molds the images which inevitably pass from the collective unconscious into the minds of people. (Conversely, religious critics including Martin Buber accused Jung of wrongly placing psychology above transcendental factors in explaining human experience.)

Minimal and maximal interpretations

In a minimalist interpretation of what would then appear as "Jung's much misunderstood idea of the collective unconscious", his idea was "simply that certain structures and predispositions of the unconscious are common to all of us ... [on] an inherited, species-specific, genetic basis". Thus "one could as easily speak of the 'collective arm' – meaning the basic pattern of bones and muscles which all human arms share in common."

Others point out however that "there does seem to be a basic ambiguity in Jung's various descriptions of the Collective Unconscious. Sometimes he seems to regard the predisposition to experience certain images as understandable in terms of some genetic model" – as with the collective arm. However, Jung was "also at pains to stress the numinous quality of these experiences, and there can be no doubt that he was attracted to the idea that the archetypes afford evidence of some communion with some divine or world mind', and perhaps 'his popularity as a thinker derives precisely from this" – the maximal interpretation.

Marie-Louise von Franz accepted that "it is naturally very tempting to identify the hypothesis of the collective unconscious historically and regressively with the ancient idea of an all-extensive world-soul." New Age writer Sherry Healy goes further, claiming that Jung himself "dared to suggest that the human mind could link to ideas and motivations called the collective unconscious ... a body of unconscious energy that lives forever." This is the idea of monopsychism.