Feminine Fallacy: The Paradox Of Power.

The question of feminine energy has taken on paradigmatic relevance, becoming the object of a narrative which, though laden with good intentions, has wound itself into a spiral of discursive extremism and ontological reductionism. Modern feminism—especially in its mainstream discursive frame, where the emancipatory claim coagulates into a uniform rhetorical code rather than a differential analysis—has, in seeking to reclaim feminine energy and emancipate female subjectivity, ended up dissecting that energy unilaterally, stifling the complexities of masculinity and relegating it to a subordinate, if not openly demonized, role.

This dynamic manifests a collective projection of feminine vulnerability onto a male subject conceived as oppressor (however often he may be such— luckily, in recent years, the awareness of this fact has been normalized), an entity to be exorcised in order to liberate repressed feminine energy. Feminism, in this articulation, takes the form of a cathartic narrative in which the male is configured as the object of anxiety, a symbol of patriarchy to be dismantled in order to allow the emergence of the true feminine essence. Yet such a process of splitting does not lead to authentic liberation, but rather to the creation of a simulacrum of power erected on fragile and contradictory foundations.

The attempt to eliminate the phallus, conceived as the archetype of masculine dominance, results in an epistemological paradox: while proclaiming the need to deconstruct patriarchal narratives, one risks unwittingly adopting the very same logics of domination. The obsession with the self-affirmation of feminine energy, relegating the masculine to a negative alterity, leads to an appropriation of the language and strategies originally characteristic of masculinity.

In this context, the feminine appears as an entity which, in attempting to free itself from the chains of oppression, moves in parallel toward a fallacious dimension, seeking to emulate the traits of the masculine without grasping its archetypal level: here, the “masculine” refers not to an anatomical datum or a historically determined social power, but to its psychic function as structuring force, principle of order and delimitation.

This dynamic of mortifying the masculine, which seems to arise from the need to legitimize feminine energy, brings forth an anthropomorphic representation of gendered subjectivity: the male is reduced to a demonized archetype, stripped of his intrinsic complexity and turned into a fetish of oppression. Conversely, the feminine—though seeking to claim its autonomy—reduces itself to an essential figure, a principle of purity exempt from ambivalences, a kind of gendered eschatology unable to grasp the richness and nuances of human experience.

Within this logic, the coexistence of gendered energies is not only ignored but actively denied, in the name of an ideal of feminine purity that cannot—and must not—be conceived apart from its interaction with the masculine dimension. The tension between the two forces thus becomes a discursive battleground in which self-affirmation and negation chase one another, while true emancipation eludes such conflict, slipping away from a reductive dialectic that denies the complexity of human relational fabric.

Modern feminism, in its extremist form, positions itself as the custodian of an ideology which, though claiming the right to self-affirmation, ends up perpetuating a narrative of domination, reflecting a psychic projection of unresolved anxieties and conflicts. The quest for a symbiosis between feminine and masculine must therefore be grounded in mutual recognition of differences and in valuing diverse experiences, rather than in a struggle for the superiority of one sphere over the other.

Another critical aspect of extremist feminism lies in its tendency to perpetuate a victim-centred: those forms of discourse that take the victim–perpetrator pair as the dominant interpretive matrix of gender end up reiterating a representation of female subjectivity as essentially subordinate and oppressed, thus paradoxically doubling the very symbolic structure they claim to dissolve. The historical reality of patriarchal domination is not here denied or minimized: patriarchy constitutes the genealogical horizon within which feminism itself becomes thinkable. The crucial point, however, concerns what happens when the narrative of oppression, from a heuristic matrix, is recoded into an ontological regime. In this torsion, oppression is no longer a historically situated event, but the substance that defines what a woman is; no longer a contingency, but an essence. It is in this semantic saturation that the victim-role loses its status as a critical category and becomes a totalizing identity code, incapable of articulating differences, asymmetries, mutations, and plural positionalities, yet capable of producing a performative discursive regime in which the victim is not a symptom to be read but a metaphysics of gender. In this way, the ontologization of oppression does not unmask power: it reinstates it in another form. Any essentialization of the victim, when it assumes foundational value, does not demystify violence but preserves its structure: it reproduces it under the guise of an ethics.

Thus, the identity saturation of the victim does not open toward liberation but produces the very opposite effect: it tends to transform suffering into a normative principle. The risk is that critique loses its heuristic force and becomes a device for legitimizing resentful self-affirmation at the expense of care for relational bonds: no longer a space of reciprocal recognition but a field for the accumulation of moral credit. A sisterhood built exclusively upon the shared trauma of oppression reveals itself, then, as intrinsically fragile: it does not allow one to move beyond the wound, but only to reiterate it as foundation.

And it is precisely in this shift—from critique to wound as “ontological title”—that the ground of polarization is laid.

The crucial point, then, is not the identification of the agent of oppression nor their anthropological or sociological placement; it is rather the ontological reconfiguration produced when a historical disposition of power is elevated to an identity principle. Patriarchy, in this perspective, is neither a transcendent subject nor a localizable guilt, but a discursive topology which, once assumed as essence, shapes the very conditions of possibility for the female subject. Here oppression ceases to be a contingent determination and becomes the transcendental condition for the recognizability of the feminine: no longer a descriptive category but a normative structure that precedes and captures experience. The question, therefore, is not the “who” of oppression, but the “how” of the discursive operator transforming a historical event into ontological substance.

This is what is at stake: once identity is hypostatized within the paradigm of oppression, it can only reproduce, in increasingly subtle forms, that very binary logic from which it claims to emancipate itself.

The dichotomy between feminine and masculine conceived as polarized energies is not only ontologically problematic but translates into a discursive praxis that hinders the very possibility of a constructive relational syntax between the genders.

The forces of yin and yang offer a model for reconsidering modern feminism and its social implications. In the logic of these forces, what is at stake is not the idea of two energies originally feminine or masculine—this is already a culturally Western, modernly sexualized translation of the polarities. Yin–yang does not indicate gender essences but a principle of co-modulation: each pole is thinkable only insofar as it varies in relation to the other. And it is precisely this grammar of reciprocal-without-identity that makes it possible to reopen the discourse on contemporary feminism beyond the victim/perpetrator opposition: not two substances confronting one another, but a field of intensities in transformation. Our society, as a living organism, draws its vitality from the balance of these forces, where neither must dominate but must coexist in a dance of reciprocal interrelations.

The psychoanalytic and anthropomorphic analysis of the mortification of the masculine in favor of the exaltation of the feminine highlights the absolute need to rethink modern feminism as a movement embracing the complexity of gender relations. Only through an authentic coexistence of energies—a dialectic unafraid to confront the ambivalences of each side—can we aspire to an integrated humanity capable of overcoming contradictions and valuing the plurality of experiences without falling into simplistic extremism.

Feminine energy, intrinsically associated with qualities such as intuition, creativity, and resilience, finds itself reduced to a purely instrumental role in feminist rhetoric, becoming a kind of archetype set against masculine rationality. Such polarization not only impoverishes philosophical debate but culminates in negating the complexity of gender identity, reducing dialogue to rigid, stereotyped categories.

In the contemporary context, there has been a growing awareness of the male figure as a symbol of oppression, embodying dynamics of control that manifest in forms of violence and domination, as in the case of femicides. This representation of the masculine as oppressor, though legitimate and necessary in addressing real social problems, risks being reductive if not framed within a broader discourse. The issue does not lie in being “phallic” or physically possessing a phallus, but in its eminently dynamic nature—its capacity to adhere to and dis-adhere from psychological, cultural, and communal models which are never fixed but instead reflect a retroactive freedom: not a “power” preceding the act but a continuum of micro-performances that create the sensation of an origin which, in reality, never existed. This freedom, far from being an expression of domination or a mere emanation of sovereignty, reveals itself instead as a complex, deeply historical social construction—a densely worked surface, a semiotic architecture binding together norms, imaginaries, postures, expectations: a fluid, gradual, modular field of forces in which the masculine relates to the feminine not through binary opposition but through ongoing negotiation, oscillation, and partial interpenetration—according to diagrams that may be simultaneously oppressive and liberating.

In this sense, the very idea of “masculine” ceases to function as a substantive attribute, as a static identity-content, and becomes instead a vector, an orientation, a performative regime of translation operating always in the intermediate space between what has already been culturally codified and what may still be displaced, undone, reinvented.

The “masculine” is not a being; is a doing. It is a way of positioning oneself in discourse, desire, memory; it is a grammar of positioning viewed retroactively through its own traces. And it is in this displacement that space opens for the unexpected, for friction, because freedom is never the subject’s transparency to itself but the unforeseen curvature of its own symbolic montage: a freedom which does not coincide with power but instead decomposes it, traverses it, and renders it intermittent, like desire or identity when it ceases to believe itself metal and recognizes itself as liquid.

And perhaps it is precisely there, in that liquidity, that the space of possession does not activate, but that of relation. Not of the phallus as sign, but of the fallible as condition. Not of authority, but of possibility. Where masculinity is not measured by an organ but by its capacity to let itself be transformed by what exceeds it. Where being masculine means also—and above all—having the possibility of being traversed, destabilized, and modified by the feminine, so as not to remain enclosed in the defensive enclosure of a power taken as natural. Masculinity thus becomes an open process, an act of permanent negotiation with the other, with alterity, with the heterogeneous.

The effects of such freedom are not univocal. They may produce new forms of oppression—certainly—but they may also, simultaneously, open new forms of emancipation, precisely insofar as what we believed stable returns to reveal itself as what it has always been: a construct, a productive fiction, a relational technology, a territory in which the task is no longer to preserve an identity but to continually invent the very way one authorizes oneself to exist.

The dynamic of freedom thus becomes central to the dialogue between yin and yang, where masculine and feminine do not cancel one another but confront, challenge, and complete each other, reflecting a continuous movement toward authenticity. Within this context, modern feminism—despite its expressions of radicalism and conflict—assumes critical relevance.

Feminism must not be seen exclusively as a reaction against masculine oppression but as a claim for the necessity of a social rebalancing in which both principles may occupy distinct yet equal “places” within the community. The challenge, then, does not consist in denying the differences between masculine and feminine, nor in overturning their natures, but in recognizing and valuing their complementarity. Society needs both forces, each with its intrinsic value and its capacity to contribute to collective well-being. The two “places” must not only coexist but must also hold equal weight within the social structure, so that the collective narrative is not governed by a principle of domination but by an authentic and productive alliance.

In addressing the issue of the masculine as a symbol of oppression, it is imperative to consider the phenomenon in terms of relational dynamics, where the recognition of pain and injustices suffered becomes the basis for constructive dialogue. True liberation, therefore, is not realized by attempting to annihilate one principle in favor of the other, but by pursuing a dynamic equilibrium allowing for the integration of experiences, in which both principles can evolve within a context of respect and reciprocity. While it is essential to recognize and address the forms of oppression that the masculine may represent, it is equally crucial not to fall into the trap of demonizing one gender at the expense of the other. The true essence of freedom lies in the coexistence of diverse energies, in the acknowledgment of their interdependence, and in building a society in which both “places” are equal within the social fabric. Only in this way can we aspire to a vital synergy capable of embracing the complexity of human existence in all its facets.