The Jezebel Archetype: “Evil Women” And Their Sexuality

Welive in a world that is only now recently beginning to approach the shores of self-awareness, and awareness of what certain flaws and their mismanagement has wrought.

But what hides behind that hard-earned balance is a ton of issues swept under the rug due to of how uncomfortable they are to tackle. And there is nothing more infuriating than unspoken, and yet especially tense and unresolved dynamics in the world.

One such remaining issue is the natural balance and equality between the sexes being interrupted, and its peace disturbed, by male perception, of not just femininity, but of its connection to female sexuality.

The surface-level status quo achieved today holds until any kind of gender-related issue arises. Then the world suddenly explodes again, with every unaddressed internal discord revealed and coming back to the surface, bringing back with it all the baggage that’s been affecting both sexes, revealing ultimately, that these dynamics haven’t been put to rest, because the core of the issue has never been acknowledged and dealt with.

Despite day-to-day life not containing these elements, because everyone is doing their best to contain them and focus on everyday affairs, when we reach through the cracks, and in the only mediums of self-expression: fiction and other works, then the meanders of what people really think show up. We can glimpse the source of the problem, outlining itself and revealing itself to us.

The mother of this trend is a story we likely were all introduced to, whether indirectly like I was, or directly, through the biblical tale of Jezebel. Which, despite being old, and disconnected from people’s day to day life, is one of the earliest instances of the female archetype that men see when they look at women

Think of it as the ghost of the issue, one of the oldest recordings we have of this issue.

The connective thread between today’s problems and this earlier instance is the pure discomfort at bold displays of feminine power. Which, through the eyes of the beholder, are also intricately connected to sexuality. Its crux is the relation between how a person’s comfort in life allows them to assert their own power, which subsequently opens up space for their sexuality to blossom as well, then it’s about how they come to be perceived — by the opposite sex.

Growing up, my introduction to this biblical figure was through the pungently propagandist rendition of the Jehovah’s, through a children’s book meant to nicely indoctrinate what we believed to be the empty-headed, malleable minds children.

Except people and their previously established world dynamics never counted on the fact that we all originally come pre-packaged with a personality, and aren’t, therefore, as malleable as believed — the great bane of all parents who never wanted kids, but could never get the kids they did have to just “obey”, in an “out of sight, out of mind fashion”.

Therefore other parties raised with the same tale, predictably had only slight variations of the exact same response to this horridly sexist rendition: outrage, annoyance, feeling attacked, and noticed the exact same things and arrived at the exact same conclusions.

But whether in the writings of the original biblical tale, or in the revealing illustration of this book intended for children, it portrays a tug of war between two ideas: a woman that is powerful, and who shows it through opulence, but whose displays are so troublesome to the beholder, that they are made out to be twisted and grotesque because of how these traits are perceived.

Except whoever tried to sell this message, made a fatal mistake: to me, this portrayal of Jezebel made her look striking. Majestic, almost. I genuinely didn’t fully remember the twisted aspects of her features. This attempt at propaganda had a reverse effect: I was automatically drawn to her precisely because of what was vilified in her. To me, vilifying her for her beauty and sexuality was ludicrous, and as the author tried to vilify her, I mentally flocked to her support.

The final message revealing itself through this attempt at slander, is that what that propagandist tales want to pass off as vulgar excess of opulence (the dark side of adornments, which intend to beautify), is in fact a statement of power and an assertion of superiority.

this woman was beautiful and charming because that is how people think of women; that’s how they want to portray them, and what they emphasise the most, which is both skewed, and at times a tad dehumanising. But what’s important is that it imbues with power, because it implies that the beholden has the ability to influence the beholder through that perceived charm. Charming and alluring, in a way that is almost dangerous because of what that beauty can do.

When she was approached by so-called holy men and dimmed sinful, I immediately took her side and turned against these “men of God”: how could they be “of God” when they singled her out simply because her sexuality is one of the elements of who she is, that she does not hide, that she displays with pride instead of shame? Sex remains one of the most primary element of humanity, and vilifying it to me is ludicrous. It’s a profound, misaligned mistake.

To have made that mistake meant that these men were wrong. The Bible was wrong. Because if this was the type of propaganda they liked to spread, instead of genuine illumination, then they were the worst kind of source to be exposed to — and the people who had been propagating this message for centuries were responsible for the repression of human sexuality, and especially female sexuality, both which are a reprehensible crime.

I have to hand it to this Jehovah’s children book, that within this simple illustration, they managed to convey a world of undertones, and capture the original problematic currents in the most implicit way possible, right there in the strokes of the drawing.

Because she is powerful, Jezebel is uncontrollable in the sense that she won’t fold to religious propaganda. She does not fold to the religious current, and continues her own pursuits regardless of what others want.

And because of it, she is able to fully come into her own femininity and not repress it. All of these aspects clash together and incur the “holy wrath” of people who possess neither of these things: no personal power, and no strong sense of self or mastery over themselves. They give themselves over to religious edicts who control their sense of selves for them, so they do not have to master it themselves. Piety, in this sense, becomes the antithesis of personal power.

And that is one of the element that comes to vilify personal power, and the sexual autonomy that comes from it, in the Jezebel archetype.

This tale is ultimately relevant because of how old it is. Because as far back as the glory days of the Mediterranean, in times forgotten by modern day intrigue, the same problems and the same patterns were there.

More concrete examples steeped into modern tales include fictional instances. I mention fiction, because it’s where authors can express their vision in a way that is unbridled by reality’s consequences — and most importantly, where the characters they write aren’t burdened by the realistic reactions they’d have in the real world. Real women would never behave the way male authors write them, because real women have nothing to do with what men imagine of women. Because of it, real life examples never turn out to look the way male writers make them look in fiction, and therefore don’t reflect the process they’re getting at very well — in the real world, these types of interactions would lead to some kind of offense being committed.

For instance, this dynamic is made explicit in Paul Verhoeven’s film Basic Instinct (1992). Here, men’s fear of female sexuality and the potential of it and what it can do, as well as the dysfunctions they develop over that fear, are made apparent.

This would-be memorable scene, for the impact it left on its target audience, is coming straight from the imaginarium of masculinity, with little connection to actual reality, and everything to do with what goes on inside their own mind, in the way that, it portrays a female archetype that uses sexual feminine attributes to control the male archetypes around her: as detectives, these male characters are supposedly in their element in all male environments (read: safe, because in control of the situation). Then enters an element from the opposite sex, represented purely by that character’s sexuality, and who uses that single element, the only one they can perceive (and care to perceive), to control the situation (direct the flow of the interview), throw the male characters off her scent and murder men during intercourse.

This isn’t a female archetype that is just openly sexual, but the she’s also portrayed as coming at men intending to wield sex as a tool to control, manipulate, and on top of it hurt them.

It isn’t just about female sexuality anymore, or about genitals (as it’s often been in history), it’s about the influence it can exert on onlookers, and the acute awareness coming from this sudden state of defencelessness.

è Human beings were ultimately hard-wired to be predatory, if purely for the sake of survival in the natural world. Something that puts us in an undefended position, is something that opens the door to potential harm. Because of it, female sexuality to male onlookers isn’t just something that can be experienced as desirable, but ultimately something that’s especially experienced as dangerous.

And the heart of this archetype is that men feel powerless to stop what comes from this raw femininity. The way itself that Tramell’s character displays herself as a sexual being points at this: in the real women, most women have different and varied priorities, and only a minority of them care to put their sexuality on display. The detectives, most of whom give the impression of being impoverished men with slow-going sex lives, are disarmed by her assertiveness. They don’t resist her, because in truth, not only they can’t, they also don’t want to. They can’t because they are powerless to it.

That’s best shown in the male protagonist, who can only descend into the world she “presents” to him — again, realistically, no real woman would naturally care to do this in the real world, hence why this can only happen in fiction — this entire scenario is the kind one daydreams about, that contains all the potential of everything we fear and everything we want, but that has no connection whatsoever to what is going on in the real world.

He is also powerless to stop this influence, and that’s what the heart of the story wants to get at; he is sucked into that world like a satellite pulled in by the gravity of a much denser celestial body. In the end, the idea is that this volatile character gets away with not just “murder”, but in truth with an attack against what is seen as men’s weak point.

We further see this pattern surface in A Song of Ice and Fire, off of which HBO’s TV adaptation Game of Thrones was based — which, as most of us know, exists in a global climate of violence against femininity.

“[…] a prophecy is like a treacherous woman. She takes your member in her mouth, and you moan with the pleasure of it and think, how sweet, how fine, how good this is . . . and then her teeth snap shut and your moans turn to screams.” AFFC, Samwell V

Aside from the usual implied violence that exists in the heart of the author, and which splatters onto everything he does in the books, we see here, implied between the lines, the same pattern and tendency of being at the mercy of women due to own’s own weaknesses — the idea of it keeps coming back in metaphors like these, that most other people’s mind wouldn’t constantly jump to. This quote also ought to be taken in context of the whole book series, which holds this dichotomy at its heart.

In truth, what a woman’s sexuality is or does has precious little to do with what this throng of male authors conceptualize of it. So the threat that men believe women pose isn’t based on reality, it’s based on their own insecurities.

But the idea expressed here, is that men have no control over the impact that female sexuality has on them — because they lack the self-mastery to generate enough internal power to meet this other force on an equal standing. They themselves have no mastery over their own sexuality, so they are at the mercy of its opposite.

As these two counterparts come into contact with each other, the self-mastery, and overt ownership of female sexuality throws a vivid light on the lack of male self-mastery. As the two contrast each other, it alerts the weaker of the two of the potential of being taken advantage of and exploited in this underdeveloped state.

It highlights, in short, that men feel at the mercy of women. And while one element is evolved enough to have developed its own “gravitational” centre — its own strength, which translates into autonomy, independence and power — the other element is weak, and possesses no self-based “gravitational” centre that would allow it to remain undisturbed or unperturbed at the sight of something with the potential to disrupt it. That translates into men being easily swayed by female sexuality, and its potential impact it can have on the beholder — in this case, heterosexual men.

And the likelihood of being swept away by this other force leads to and pushes one to compensate for those weak point. And the type of self-defence that arises from it, is a cop-out. It’s a way to make up for one’s weakness instead of acknowledging it and evolving with it — and that’s indeed the problem here: the idea that self-defence is needed, rather than self-examination.

It’s a cop-out because it propels men to externalize the issue and displace it onto the “provocateur”, rather than understand it’s about what it highlights of the “provokee”. As such, it becomes a matter of shooting the messenger, for what the provocateur points at by virtue of being. From there comes the offense and attacks. While the issue isn’t women, it still ends up being blamed on them, because blame is applied in an effort to quell the distress of knowing how powerless men feel while in the vicinity of this force.

The perceived possibility of being exploited makes one feel unsafe and endangered, in a way that is preoccupied with survival on a very basic level. This is still a form of survival instinct: the moment where you are about to relax into a state of vulnerability, which is ultimately a defenceless state in which you can’t actively protect yourself from harm, the sudden awareness of that defencelessness propels you to think of all the ways you could be harmed, to ensure you’re ward off against it.

Nobody wants to highlight that they have an area of themselves they fear could lead to being exploited if exposed, which is what leads to this automatic, first instinct: cover it up and displace it.

These scenarios — women turning into oppressive sorceresses, women using sexual activities to murder or hurt men — ultimately are born of the relationship that men have with themselves and their own masculinity.

These insecurities are enough to create dysfunctional ways of interacting with women. They are what creates the violence against women that has been so pervasive throughout history. At the root cause of male violence, is insecurities, impotence and lack of evolution, and misguided attempts to compensate for it.

In these pieces of fiction, A Song of Ice and Fire and Basic Instinct especially, the full extent and truth of female sexuality, as is seen by men, is put on display; women are portrayed as the superior sex, while male insecurity gravitates around it in an envious state of powerlessness, unable to generate its own forcefield. When a weaker element meets a stronger one, the weaker one is swallowed; and that is something that men, suddenly self-conscious of their own weaker side, become aware of, and have been fearing since the dawn of time, as far back as the Jezebel biblical tale went.

“The women are the strong ones, truly.”― George R.R. Martin, A Feast for Crows

The real problem with Jezebel, nor with Tramell’s character, was not her at all, in the end, or the overall archetype both of these female figures allude to: it was how people around her approached her. Under the slanders, we are looking at a female ruler being deposed, not just because of religious ideals, but because people around her felt too disturbed by her. We are looking at a woman that can only be written as a murderess, because what else would beautiful women be doing besides luring men into having intercourse, their most vulnerable position, to then murder them? The lack of logic and the degree of delusion is astonishing.

All these examples perpetrate an image of life concepts, notably of sexuality, and how femininity is perceived, that twists the reality and the inherent truth of these concepts, thereby invalidating the natural experience people have of them, to attempts to propel them into and skew them to the wrong path.

And this archetype is ultimately the same everywhere and across time, because it represents the same kind of vision that onlookers have of the subject, whether it’s incarnated in an age-old biblical tale, or in a present-day Hollywood motion picture. with the uncontrollable fear of feminine power that cannot be bend to the distorted visions of men, just like it wouldn’t bend to religious propaganda. We see in this archetype every single facet of femininity, and female sexuality, and even more so, we see all the violent overzealous responses they provoke, from the heart of history all the way to today.

No one is outright about it because people with issues do not want to give themselves and their schemes away. That is because when you move to remove a threat posed against yourself, announcing it loud and clear to the world means opening up opportunities for somebody to stop you from doing that — something that is obviously unwishable to you, as you have an agenda. That is what I call the fear of being caught, or the fear of being found out.

The most infuriating thing in all this, is that stories packing these type of messages, are spread around the world unchecked. That this tale, and the story it refers to exists, is already a sign that something is wrong with the world — that the world isn’t in the proper axis it needs to be in. Stories packing these type of messages, are spread around the world unchecked, and when you arrive into this life, you are already splattered with unwelcomed, and twisted interpretations of life concepts, whose meanings you are actually meant to devise on your own, based on your own feelings and experience of those things, and not based on distorted and skewed worldviews.

We do not check the level of personal issues a writer has, and how much it has seeped into their stories have before publication, and that was especially relevant in the re-telling of historical events, that ultimately took on the most fictional turn because of how incredibly biased the rendition was. And while we shouldn’t censor on that basis, there is one thing that needs to be made clear whenever something like this is published — that it’s nothing but the biased perception of someone who is clearly out of touch with the reality of what they talk about.

As ultimately, this kind of content litters the world, and gives a voice to the wrong people; rather than featuring perspectives that build the world up, we feature the short-sighted, polluted perspectives of the unevolved, and cram them down people’s throats.

In the case of religious teachings, the world up until had very little say in whether they would be exposed to them. And in the case of fiction, the more a story becomes available to the public, and is pushed to wider audiences, the more difficult it becomes to avoid it. Leaving the rest of the world to debate, debunk and decry the content decades after the facts, until it is beyond abundantly clear what type of inaccuracies these stories propagates.

It is, finally, particularly toxic to newcomers in this world, because as children, we arrive fresh-faced and ignorant of the dynamics of the worlds we are born into. We are meant to discover the world through our own experience of it. And the societies we so obliviously step into contain elements that can be nefarious to our development, as people have already lived before us and already managed to make a mess of it, and the awareness of it only hits us when it is too late, and we’re already exposed to that element. And that is the whole problem.

In the end, what all these stories highlight isn’t feminine nature, but a male-centric image of masculinity itself, and its reactions to what it sees and encounters. It is the perspective projected onto the perceived object, rather than being a reflection of the beholder himself, that doesn’t ask for other’s opinion on the subject, and runs with these delusions as if they were the ultimate truths. It reveals the on-goings of the masculine psyche, and a tale of the internal struggles that masculinity has been victimised by, and been victimising others over, since times immemorial. It shows the struggle to evolve, and the choice to avoid that evolution, in favour of scapegoating, shooting the messenger, and the attacks that came from the low place of non-acknowledgement.