Subjugation, Endurance, and Modern Pathology
To ask whether women are “closer” to modern suffering is not to appeal to mysticism, biological essentialism, or romantic claims about feminine wisdom. It is to pose a historical question that modern thought has rarely been able to ask without distortion: who has been required to live without metaphysical consolation for the longest duration, with the least authority, and under the greatest burden of unacknowledged obligation?
This question already betrays its difficulty. It must be asked through conceptual tools forged largely by men, within intellectual traditions that arose precisely to distance thought from the body, from blood, from dependency, from time. And yet the question itself points elsewhere—to lives lived not above history, but inside it.
The answer unsettles modern narratives of progress. Women have not merely been excluded from metaphysical authority; they have been historically positioned as those who must bear the consequences of metaphysical systems without participating in their articulation or legitimation. What philosophy rendered intelligible, theology sanctified, and law stabilized, women were required to endure—often without voice, without status, and without symbolic repair. This asymmetry did not vanish with modernity. It intensified, internalized, and reappeared as resentment, depression, dissociation, and addiction.
The issue, then, is not feminine essence, but historical exposure: what happens to those long trained in endurance when metaphysical justification collapses, but obligation persists
For most of Western history, metaphysics functioned as more than speculative inquiry. It organized reality in such a way that suffering appeared necessary rather than arbitrary. Pain could be interpreted as meaningful, loss as redemptive, hierarchy as ontologically grounded rather than violently imposed. This work was not neutral. It was undertaken largely by men, from positions increasingly removed from bodily contingency.
Within this framework, women’s subjugation was rarely experienced as metaphysical scandal. It was absorbed into the structure of being itself.
From Aristotle’s characterization of woman as a deficient or “misbegotten” male in Generation of Animals, through medieval theological associations of femininity with flesh, temptation, and disorder, women were positioned closer to necessity than freedom, closer to nature than reason, closer to body than mind. This placement was not merely conceptual. It attached itself to women’s blood—to menstruation, childbirth, miscarriage, and postpartum bleeding—as recurring signs that life itself resisted transcendence.
Menstrual blood functioned as a decisive metaphysical marker. It was excess, leakage, matter out of place. Philosophy rarely touched it directly; theology and medicine absorbed it into narratives of impurity, danger, and defect. What returned cyclically, involuntarily, could not be elevated into eternity. What could not be transcended was devalued.
This was not simply symbolic degradation. It organized social reality. Menstruating women were excluded from ritual, marked as unstable or unreliable, associated with decay. Blood became the visible sign of women’s ontological placement. In this sense, women carried in their bodies what metaphysics could not integrate without destabilizing itself.
Their endurance was not heroic or chosen. It was structurally required. Suffering had a place. Endurance had a rationale.
Modernity narrates the collapse of these metaphysical hierarchies as emancipation. God withdraws. Natural order is neutralized. Equality is proclaimed. But this narrative conceals a decisive transformation. Metaphysics did not merely justify hierarchy; it contained resentment by explaining why suffering had to be borne.
When metaphysical justification collapses, suffering does not disappear. It becomes bare.
Women enter modernity not simply as newly liberated subjects, but as persons already habituated to endurance—now stripped of the symbolic frameworks that once named their suffering as necessary, sacrificial, or meaningful. Blood still returns. Reproductive vulnerability persists. Bodily exposure continues. But these realities are no longer symbolized; they are medicalized, privatized, and psychologized.
What emerges is not liberation alone, but a distinctive modern affect: resentment without address.
Here Nietzsche remains useful, even if insufficient. He understood resentment as the affect of those denied power and saw that modern egalitarian rhetoric could mask new forms of domination. But his analysis remained largely within a masculine horizon: resentment as accusation, inversion, moral revolt.
Much of women’s resentment has never taken this form.
Historically trained to endure rather than to accuse, women often experience resentment not as outward judgment but as inward collapse. Modern society tells women they are free and equal while continuing to rely on their unpaid care, emotional labor, bodily exposure, reproductive risk, and moral responsibility without corresponding authority. Menstruation and fertility remain sites of regulation and shame, even as their metaphysical meaning is denied.
The contradiction does not produce revolt. It produces depression, self-blame, quiet rage, compulsive relief-seeking. Resentment, unable to rise toward God, fate, or recognized authority, sinks into the body. It becomes addiction, exhaustion, anxiety. These are not private failures. They are historical residues.
Women’s bodies have always been regulated and instrumentalized. In premodern worlds, this regulation was metaphysical. In modernity, it is medical, aesthetic, administrative. The symbolic frame collapses, but the bodily demand remains.
Menstruation is not merely biological. It is a recurring encounter with involuntary bleeding, exposure, and time. In a culture oriented toward control, optimization, and productivity, monthly bleeding becomes something to hide, manage, or suppress. Blood becomes unspeakable.
When suffering cannot be symbolized, the body speaks.
Julia Kristeva names this with precision: depression as loss without language, abjection as the collapse of symbolic boundaries when blood, fluids, and decay cannot be integrated into meaning. Addiction, in this register, is not rebellion but containment—a way to quiet vigilance, to narrow the world, to survive exposure.
Sexual violence must be understood historically rather than exceptionally. For centuries, women’s bodies—bleeding, fertile, penetrable—were accessible to conquest, entitlement, and correction. Law treated rape as property violation; theology absorbed it into providence; philosophy subsumed it under natural order.
The world did not rupture.
What women endured was not only violence, but the knowledge that the world could absorb it without scandal. Modernity removes the metaphysical scaffolding that once explained this exposure, but it does not inherit its consequences. Rights replace meaning; protection replaces recognition. The body remembers what metaphysics enforced.
The Jungian women—Marion Woodman, Esther Harding, Marie-Louise von Franz—do not offer redemption. They offer recognition. They attend to blood, cycles, decay, repetition—not as sources of mystical authority, but as places where meaning fails and endurance begins.
They understand that when symbolic life collapses, wisdom does not shine. It bleeds. It waits. It persists.
Here Mary Magdalene resonates—not as a historical character to be reconstructed, but as a voice that survives repression. She is not authority; she is witness. She speaks from the place metaphysics never wanted to hear: from grief, from devotion without power, from fidelity without guarantee. That voice continues to pass through women because the conditions that required it have not disappeared.
The Epistle of James names an ethic uncannily suited to this condition: “Let endurance (hypomonē) have its full effect.” This is not triumph. It is fidelity under exposure. Obligation without assurance. Responsibility without promise.
Women have lived this ethic long before it was named—not because of special insight, but because history required it. Blood returned. Care was demanded. Explanation failed. Life continued.
Women do not carry a secret truth inaccessible to men. They carry a long memory of what civilization demanded and refused to see. They are witnesses—not to metaphysical wisdom, but to what remains when metaphysics collapses without repair.
Addiction does not redeem this condition. It reveals its cost.
And the voice that speaks here—never neutral, never complete—can only speak imperfectly, because it speaks from a body in time. That imperfection is not a flaw. It is the mark of truth lived rather than explained.
Brenton L. Delp MFT
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