In August of 1942, Walt Disney released the classic animated film, Bambi. When it was rereleased some years later, my mother took me on a rare outing to see it. I must have been around eight years old. Today it’s considered one of history’s most controversial films.

Some viewed it as a metaphor for the treatment of Jews by the Nazis. Hunters saw it as an anti-hunting insult to American sportsmen.  A writer for Audubon praised it for raising environmental consciousness and compared its impact to Uncle Tom’s Cabin’s impact on views of slavery. As a practical nurse who’d seen more than her share of life and death, my mother may have been bothered by the violence, but I suspect she told herself it was an essentially harmless children’s cartoon about the way life is.

I was horrified when Bambi’s mother was killed by hunters. To learn that mothers can die while their children are young. That some men enjoy killing animals. That people can carelessly destroy the homes of thousands of innocent animals. That magnificent, antlered stags are kings of the forest. I wondered where the queens were.

There was one lesson I never forgot. Remember Thumper’s shy innocence when he said his classic line: “If you can’t say somethin’ nice, don’t say nothin’ at all”? Thumper’s advice became my sacred mantra. Whenever I repeated it in his sweet voice my mother would chuckle. I reveled in her attention and approval.

I was taught by my parents, church, and school to be sweet, kind, gentle, forgiving. Nice. Good. But what my mother and I saw as virtue was, in reality, repression. Of my emotions. My voice. My souls’ truths. And my belief in my own worth.

Was I learning to be a nice girl or a good girl? And according to whose definition? The boy in my 7th grade class? Felix Salten, the author of Bambi? Thumper? Walt Disney? My mother? My father? My church?  Or the truths of my own soul? By denying our fear and anger my mother and I thought we were being spiritual and noble. In truth we were normalizing our culture’s obsessive drive for power and control and its dismissive attitudes toward women and individual responsibility.

Where love reigns, there is no will to power; and where the will to power is paramount, love is lacking. The one is but the shadow of the other. C.G. Jung. On the Psychology of the Unconscious, CW7, par. 78

I grew up wanting to be loved and worthy. I believed that the values of my family were the correct ones, and that obeying them was the way to happiness. But deep within, the Self knew I was wrong and warned me by way of a recurring dream. In it I couldn’t talk in a public situation because my mouth was full of sticky pebbles I couldn’t get rid of.

Now I know that the real reason I stifled my voice for so long was not due to noble intentions. It was fear. I’ve seen what happens to angry women who dare to speak up about injustice and abuse, and I’ve been afraid of being targeted. Not just by men, but also women. And most of all by the God-image I was raised to believe in: a god whose name is invoked by many religious authorities—not all, thank goodness—to justify repressive attitudes toward women. So when a friend suggested I write about misogyny, I was initially reluctant. But I decided to do it for myself and for all infected with the poison of misogyny.

We need to recognize our habitual ways of thinking about the masculine and feminine principles. We need to see that they exist in all of us. We need to stop defining them in terms of binary genders. To stop legislating how they should manifest in us according to double standards based on outdated gender stereotypes.

Carl Jung wrote:

Woman’s psychology is founded on the principle of Eros, the great binder and loosener, whereas from ancient times  the ruling principle ascribed to man is Logos.  The concept of Eros could be expressed in modern terms as psychic relatedness, and that of Logos as objective interest.” C.G. Jung, CW 10, par. 255

Logos is the principle of discrimination, in contrast to Eros, which is the principle of relatedness.  Eros brings things together, establishes cyanic relations between things, while the relations which Logos brings about are perhaps analogies or logical conclusions. It is typical that Logos relationships are devoid of emotional dynamics. C.G. Jung, Dream Analysis Notes o the Seminar Given in 1928-1930 (25 June, 1930), p. 700.

Logos and Eros are qualities of the left and right hemispheres, respectively, of our brains. This means that every single person, regardless of gender, contains all these traits, and many more. Next week I’ll suggest ways we can use them in service to healing the poison of misogyny. Meanwhile, I hope you’ll keep sharing your stories.

Jean Raffa’s The Bridge to Wholeness and Dream Theatres of the Soul are at Amazon. Healing the Sacred Divide can be found at Amazon and Larson Publications, Inc. Jean’s new Nautilus Award-winning The Soul’s Twins, is at  Amazon and Schiffer’s Red Feather Mind, Body, Spirit. Subscribe to her newsletter at www.jeanbenedictraffa.com.