Toxic Femininity: The Shadow to the Great Mother

Photo by Adrian Snood, CC BY 2.0 , via Wikimedia Commons

We hear an awful lot about toxic masculinity these days. Anything that seems to even hint at strong masculine traits gets shouted down. Men are blamed for any and all aggression, and are told they need to be more in tune with their emotions and sensitive sides. It seems men can do no right, and women can do no wrong, but is that reality? Jungian archetypes have two sides. For every “Terrible Father” there is the “Great Father” which means for every “Great Mother” there is a “Terrible Mother”. What does that look like, toxic femininity, and why aren’t we talking about it?

This is obviously a topic with many layers, and since I do not wish to write a second thesis, and I’m specifically avoiding writing a dissertation, I am going to only dip a metaphorical toe. I’d like to look at this topic from a few different angles, albeit shallowly. For starters, let’s talk about the Jungian archetypes for the terrible mother. I never fully understood why Jung played such a big part in psychology, but as a writer I do appreciate his detailed dive into the archetypes presented to us through mythology and stories. Dale M. Kushner specifically explores the terrible mother archetypes in her Psychology Today article entitle “Mothers, Witches, and the Power of Archetypes”:

We know the bad mother as the queen in Snow White, as Cinderella’s stepmother, as Circe or Medusa, whose gaze turns us to stone. These figures stand for a reversal of positive mothering. Instead of providing food and comfort, they seduce and devour, harboring a secret malicious intent. They “eat up” our self-confidence or numb us with their betrayal.” (Kushner, 2016)

Kushner talks about the witch being Jung’s shadow figure for the mother. While the mother’s focus is outward, the witch focuses on herself. She is secretive, seductive, and dangerous. Instead of nurturing, the witch is harmful to others, usually for her own profit. Figures like Kali, the goddess of destruction, are often pointed to as the shadow, or the negative mother figure in Jungian archetypes — the positive mother figure obviously being the nurturing life-giver who cares for others and is dutifully compassionate. We see these mother shadows throughout plenty of myths and fairytales where the evil queen or the witch is involved in taking life instead of giving it, and is cruel instead of kind. While we chalk all of this up to make believe, there is an interesting underlying truth to the terrible mother figure.

The female serial killer, unlike male serial killers, tends to mimic this terrible mother archetype. Patricia Pearson allowed The Walrus to publish an excerpt of her book When She was Bad: How and Why Women Get Away with Murder. In the excerpt Pearson observes:

In 2015, psychologist Marissa Harrison and a group of women colleagues published a review of female serial killers that found they “tend to carry out their crimes over a longer period of time, have more victims . . . are frequently nurses or serve some other caretaker role.” They choose “victims who had little or no chance of fighting back.” The FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit may not have noticed it, but the phenomenon is hardly new.” (Pearson, 2021)

While we may consider the evil stepmother trope to be just the invention of fairy tales, the caregiver-turned-killer is actually quite real and is more often a woman than a man. Women usually kill for profit. Pearson talks about the Black Widow figure, which is a woman who kills her husbands for their money. While male serial killers tend to be aggressive and violent hunters, female serial killers usually gather their victims and kill them slowly over time, usually under the guise of giving care. It’s an interesting foil to the ideas of toxic masculinity and toxic femininity. Instead of a protective father who guards innocence and hunts to supply for his family, the male serial killer hunts and destroys innocence. Instead of a nurturing and compassionate mother who gathers her family close, the female serial killer is more often a supposed caregiver who kills those closest to her, mostly for profit or self gain.

The thing is, when you Google “toxic femininity” you get a bunch of articles that define toxic femininity as women giving too much of themselves to men, thus still blaming the “patriarchy” for why women act this way. I’m just not buying it, and neither is anyone else. Not when we have movies like Mean Girls and shows like Gossip Girl and even Sex and the City. Yes, these shows are all frivolous, but they do connect to something that’s very real: female bullies.

Talk with any woman and she can tell you how horrible women can be to one another, and that’s without having men involved. The trope of the catty woman holds truth, and just as the female serial killer prefers to kill quietly over longer periods of time, the toxic female doesn’t ask her enemies to fight her in the streets, but instead deals out character assassination and tries to ruin lives.

Men don’t play these games, probably because they prefer to just duke it out. That aggression is good for something. As much as the world hates male aggression, at least men confront an issue and find resolution. It’s that lack of aggression and avoidance of direct confrontation that leads women to backbiting, character assassination, and catty feuds. Toxic masculinity may be violence, but toxic femininity is poison.

I hate how popular Mean Girls has become because it’s the mean girls in the movie who are the ones most often quoted. The whole movie was based on a nonfiction book entitled Queen Bees and Wannabes by Rosalind Wiseman, written specifically for parents to help their teenage daughters navigate toxic femininity in high school. No patriarchy is making these teenage girls act this way, and blaming men for it is not going to solve the problem.

Does that mean that toxic femininity is nothing but gossipy women? I brought up extremes of toxicity, namely serial killers, but the more common every day toxic masculinity presents itself as violence towards women. Namely, abuse. Is there a female equivalent to this? As it so happens, yes. For starters, there is abuse. Yes, men can be physically abused by their girlfriends. To ignore this fact is to be rather biased in favor of women. Historically men have been taught never to hit a woman, so where does that leave men when a woman hits them? According to the Mankind Initiative website, “The Office for National Statistics figures show every year that one in the three victims of domestic abuse are male equating to 757,000 men (1.561m women)” (mankind.org.uk). Furthermore, men are much less likely to report physical abuse because of the stigma of being beaten up by a girl. This means that while there are male victims of physical abuse, they are more often than not completely ignored or hiding out of a sense of shame.

Still, it is true that statistically men abuse women more than women abuse men. However, this isn’t the only aspect of toxic femininity. I mentioned character assassination earlier. It is true that character assassination can be chalked up to just a bunch of gossipy women, that is, until we start talking about the #MeToo movement. Rumors are one thing in high school, but they can deal very real damage in adulthood. The #MeToo movement started out as exposing very real sexual harassment in Hollywood, but now the idea that we have to believe the accuser and that the accused is guilty until proven innocent has caused very real consequences for men who are indeed innocent. The most well known example of this is Mike Tunison. Karlyn Borysenko in her Forbes article “The Dark Side of #MeToo: What Happens When Men Are Falsely Accused” describes Tunison as, “… a successful freelance writer. He worked for the Washington Post, had a book published by HarperCollins, and was the editor of a successful website. Today he works on the janitorial staff at a Dave & Buster’s.” (Borysenko, 2020).  Tunison in his own New York Post article “Being wrongly #MeToo’d has ruined my life” talks about how he lost everything because an ex-girlfriend added his name to the Sh-tty Media Men list. One accusation, and Tunison went from freelance writer to janitor. That’s a little more than just “gossipy women”; that’s toxic. 

Because I am female and thus removed from the receiving end of toxic femininity from intimate partners, I asked for some input from friends. The list includes gaslighting, emotional manipulation, belittling, nagging, attack on self esteem, lying about pregnancy, lying about rape, crying, jealousy, false accusations, the list goes on and on, but it paints a fairly clear picture; men aren’t the only ones who can be toxic in a relationship. 

Getting back to Jung, you may not believe in the collective unconscious, but Jung’s basic archetypes that all humans struggle with feels pretty accurate. Dr. Saul McLeod in his article “Carl Jung” published by Simply Psychology introduces these baseline archetypes rather well. Dr. McLeod explains that according to Jung all humans struggle with the persona, the anima/animus, the shadow, and the self. The persona is the public mask everyone wears. McLeod says, “It conceals our real self and Jung describes it as the “conformity” archetype.” (McLeod, 2018). The anima/animus are the elements of the opposite sex presented in everyone. Apparently, Jung believed that men and women influenced each other, much as  a husband and wife take on each other’s behaviors simply from years of living together. There is the self, which is just who we are, where we feel most connected. Then there is the shadow, which according to McLeod is “the animal side of our personality (like the id in Freud). It is the source of both our creative and destructive energies. In line with evolutionary theory, it may be that Jung’s archetypes reflect predispositions that once had survival value.” (McLeod, 2018). Jung believed that we all struggle with destructive tendencies, that the shadow is present in everyone. Maybe that’s why people find serial killers so fascinating?

We talk about male aggression as if it’s a negative, but without that drive we wouldn’t have the hero. Jung’s hero is the bold man who faces darkness against all odds, who defends the innocent and fights tyrants. Every fictional hero you can think of who is good, and just, and usually brash, is a reflection of Jung’s hero archetype. They are the positive side of male aggression. They rescue the damsels. Aggression, when channeled correctly, can be positive. That drive to help those in need doesn’t have to be condescending; it can be a positive drive to help. When we talk about toxic masculinity we seem to clump everything that is masculine together under “toxic” and forget that there are positives to these attributes.

We read and watch familiar archetypes all the time, and in many ways we tend to compare ourselves and others to the fictional characters we enjoy. If we realized the toxic masculinity is just the shadow, the destructive side of the masculine, we have to recognize that femininity also has a shadow, a destructive side. These are both obvious when we examine the extremes of society. The toxic femininity in Mean Girls is really just the destructive side of the female need to gather loved ones close. Cliques are families gone wrong. False accusations and emotional manipulation are all just a perversion of female emotional aptitude for evil instead of good. We have to stop blaming these destructive shadow tendencies on men, when really it’s just toxic femininity.

I warned at the start of this article that this was going to be just an overview of what could be considered toxic femininity. In researching this topic I discovered that many people have encountered some form of toxic femininity and that no one seems to have strong enough terms to describe their experiences, everything from being isolated from families and friends, to being a child from a previous marriage who is kept away from their father by the new step mom. Emotional manipulation, lies, and false accusations can go beyond just “mean girls” or being “a bitch” and yet we don’t really label the more destructive female actions the way we label toxic masculinity. Some of this can be chalked up to underestimating women. Just because female toxicity isn’t directly violent doesn’t mean that it doesn’t have dire consequences. This is a topic that I would like to explore more, both to research and to discuss with others to gain more perspective.

I will add that, as a Christian, the whole concept dovetails nicely into my world view. Men and women are both fallen creatures so naturally they would both have a toxic side, a perversion of what was intended. Men and women both have their positive, and negative traits. It is unbalanced to focus on only male negative traits and female positive traits, while ignoring the duality of human nature in both. Instead of ignoring that both sexes have their shadows, we need to start recognizing the destructive side of femininity, and the constructive side of masculinity, and build a deeper appreciation for both femininity and masculinity.