Great piece. Profound food for thought. Feels to me like the attraction is because Brunhilde is the polar opposite of the ‘blancmange beings’ (male and female) that todays world works so hard to cultivate. A woman with balls. (I like the metaphor of a woman with balls - though I don’t believe that anyone who has testicles, or who ever had testicles, can be a woman). I was listening the other day to psychologist Gabor Mate talking about how the most common regret near the end of life is people having not lived the life they wanted to live, but one others wanted them to live. (I suppose often one that they THOUGHT others wanted them to live). That is the heart of everything. Sadly the values, vision and angst of many young ‘feminists’ today doesn’t come out of their own hearts but out of what political manipulators have told them to think and feel. They think they are Brunhildes but they are not. Perhaps with time.
There is nothing particularly northern European or “white” about the assertive and downright chaotic female archetypes, both positive and negative. Every single thing described here exists in Indian culture, for example, including women voluntarily jumping on the funeral pyres of their husbands or lovers to prove some point. There are “ugra” versions of every Hindu goddess, that represents her chaotic aspects, and they have all always been worshipped in India. In fact, I think you are mischaracterizing the various types of divine female archetypes by calling them all psycho, BPD, bitch-energy or whatever. There is actual substance to the “wild” sounding stories that you have missed out on by lumping it all together.
I wish some of the old school pulp fantasy writers like Robert. E Howard could have seen some of the stuff in this sphere. This way of interpreting history and mythology really reminds me of him.
Also reading this oddly made me want to read Jane Eyre. This Norse stuff sounds like the exact opposite of the British Christian conception of ideal womanhood.
Over thought and ludicrous conclusions. Black women in America have basically castrated all black men, hispanic women have murdering cocaine cartel queens, asian women crave men of authority and wealth as much as any others. Human nature is universal and unchanging. The gods are capricious.
I can’t believe people are actually celebrating this baseless garbage… Women are so easy to see through that it’s unreal!
Brunhilde wasn’t a “crazy BPD psycho bitch”… She was a woman with the courage and feistyness of a man. Actual “crazy BPD psycho bitches” are actually extremely neurotic, extremely promiscuous, and extremely socially susceptible to the point where they usually mimic those around them. The exact qualities you attribute to slaves. Choosing death before slavery is not a “crazy BPD psycho bitch” trait.
I suppose what surprises me most is that this surprises you. After all, Brunhilde is expressing *male* values, and a woman exemplifying male values is a great way to shame every man into doing the same. Every man who's ever thought "why can't a woman be more like a man" should be able to relate. As can every son whose mother ever told him to "man up".
So Brunhilde joins the pantheon of women acting umm… problematically for a civilization. Pandora. Eve. Brunhilde. Y’all get this female behavior, documented across cultures and millennia, is why the West rose before suffrage, has been declining since, and why, with late-stage feminism it is circling the drain, right?
Some thoughts on the topic of 'boyfriend stabbing': I got essentially the same image search results as you did for 'woman stabs boyfriend' - but I also did image searches for 'woman shoots boyfriend', 'woman poisons boyfriend', and 'woman kills boyfriend'. Interestingly, the results for the latter three were more diverse, with hispanic, asian, indian, and indecipherably mixed women all making an appearance. More interestingly, the white women who did appear were on average older and strikingly less attractive than the boyfriend stabbers - it was the first thing I noticed. What mean?
Ha, I feel called out. When I got my DNA results back from Ancestry, I joked that "it's like an alt-right nutjob's wet dream"... nothing but Northern European barbarians lol. The furthest *south* it shows my ancestors being from is Germany.
And I am 100% the type of bitch you're describing in this article.
I originally saw the Met telecast of the opera "Siegfried" when I was 4 years old. As a teenager, I came across the VHS tape from that 1990 telecast and my reaction was, "I remember this show, and it was so bizarre that for the last ten years, I literally thought that I dreamed it and it wasn't a real thing."
Teenage me was so into this that I grew up to be a costume designer for operas in NYC, and I also got really into witchcraft. To this day, my second-most automatic way of writing by hand after cursive isn't block printing, it's *runes*. Saying that Wagner's operas were an influence on me is a massive understatement.
One thing I never made the connection with until I read this though is the parallels between Brunhilde's personality and the way men have always found me so "intimidating" that at age 37 I'm unmarried and childfree by choice (because I keep rejecting people and leaving relationships), and I'm having a wildly passionate experience with my business partner for a subversive art project. In pre-lockdown NYC, I was described as both "the Queen of New York" and everyone's favorite brazen harlot who doesn't give a fuck. One time a man spurned me emotionally after we slept together, and I beat the shit out of him in a public park. Not only did I NOT get arrested for this, but people supported my decision. Many people have told me I would make an excellent dominatrix.
When I was younger, I was so out of hand that my mom would warn guys about me (LOL) and my dad was really proud of the fact that I was traveling the world and had no trouble dumping guys who couldn't keep up with me. Over and over, he joked about how I must get it from my Celtic and Viking ancestors. There was no pressure to just settle down with a nice but boring guy... instead there were jokes about how men were afraid of me and also most of them were way less cool than me. When extended family members asked why I wasn't married or even in a serious relationship despite looking really pretty, my parents had trouble explaining politely that I thought most men were losers and was really happy being single and sowing my wild oats in NYC.
After reading this I'm like, "yeah... if I was genetically bred to be like this, that would actually explain a lot." No regrets whatsoever for being the psycho BPD Valkyrie type. I say all the time that my life up to this point has for the most part been better than most people's. It was much, much worse during the lockdowns, but even that lead to a spiritual awakening and rebirth that I wouldn't want to be living without.
Sorry if you covered this in your other essay as I've only just discovered your Substack but I wonder if you could reframe the story of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon in this light?
The version we get today mostly comes from the POV of Aeschylus, whose plays were often subversions of the "mainstream" Archaic Greek view of his time. One might argue that in the original telling, King Agamemnon's unnatural sacrifice of their daughter to kick off a global conflict throws the entire world order out of whack and it's up to Spartan-princess-and-Mycenaean-queen Clytemnestra to restore it with her uncompromising fury, a worthy mate, and a righteous murder.
And she would have gotten away with it too were it not for her ungrateful kids from the previous marriage! Never saw the parallels between Orestes and Amleth(Hamlet) until I read this article. Well done!
dude i have many sisters. this is so true. fiery redheads, willfull as hell. it may be an overabundace of life energy. I am told, exciting. better to have a warrior woman on your side when it counts than a simpering ninny. They will do things, that you would not believe. if i were to write them, no one would buy it. I will keep them to myself. do not want people to be fore warned, now do we?
I will now use this to justify my attraction to “toxic” women
Great piece. Profound food for thought. Feels to me like the attraction is because Brunhilde is the polar opposite of the ‘blancmange beings’ (male and female) that todays world works so hard to cultivate. A woman with balls. (I like the metaphor of a woman with balls - though I don’t believe that anyone who has testicles, or who ever had testicles, can be a woman). I was listening the other day to psychologist Gabor Mate talking about how the most common regret near the end of life is people having not lived the life they wanted to live, but one others wanted them to live. (I suppose often one that they THOUGHT others wanted them to live). That is the heart of everything. Sadly the values, vision and angst of many young ‘feminists’ today doesn’t come out of their own hearts but out of what political manipulators have told them to think and feel. They think they are Brunhildes but they are not. Perhaps with time.
There is nothing particularly northern European or “white” about the assertive and downright chaotic female archetypes, both positive and negative. Every single thing described here exists in Indian culture, for example, including women voluntarily jumping on the funeral pyres of their husbands or lovers to prove some point. There are “ugra” versions of every Hindu goddess, that represents her chaotic aspects, and they have all always been worshipped in India. In fact, I think you are mischaracterizing the various types of divine female archetypes by calling them all psycho, BPD, bitch-energy or whatever. There is actual substance to the “wild” sounding stories that you have missed out on by lumping it all together.
I wish some of the old school pulp fantasy writers like Robert. E Howard could have seen some of the stuff in this sphere. This way of interpreting history and mythology really reminds me of him.
Also reading this oddly made me want to read Jane Eyre. This Norse stuff sounds like the exact opposite of the British Christian conception of ideal womanhood.
Over thought and ludicrous conclusions. Black women in America have basically castrated all black men, hispanic women have murdering cocaine cartel queens, asian women crave men of authority and wealth as much as any others. Human nature is universal and unchanging. The gods are capricious.
I can’t believe people are actually celebrating this baseless garbage… Women are so easy to see through that it’s unreal!
Brunhilde wasn’t a “crazy BPD psycho bitch”… She was a woman with the courage and feistyness of a man. Actual “crazy BPD psycho bitches” are actually extremely neurotic, extremely promiscuous, and extremely socially susceptible to the point where they usually mimic those around them. The exact qualities you attribute to slaves. Choosing death before slavery is not a “crazy BPD psycho bitch” trait.
I suppose what surprises me most is that this surprises you. After all, Brunhilde is expressing *male* values, and a woman exemplifying male values is a great way to shame every man into doing the same. Every man who's ever thought "why can't a woman be more like a man" should be able to relate. As can every son whose mother ever told him to "man up".
So Brunhilde joins the pantheon of women acting umm… problematically for a civilization. Pandora. Eve. Brunhilde. Y’all get this female behavior, documented across cultures and millennia, is why the West rose before suffrage, has been declining since, and why, with late-stage feminism it is circling the drain, right?
Hell hath no fury as a woman scorned ..
Some thoughts on the topic of 'boyfriend stabbing': I got essentially the same image search results as you did for 'woman stabs boyfriend' - but I also did image searches for 'woman shoots boyfriend', 'woman poisons boyfriend', and 'woman kills boyfriend'. Interestingly, the results for the latter three were more diverse, with hispanic, asian, indian, and indecipherably mixed women all making an appearance. More interestingly, the white women who did appear were on average older and strikingly less attractive than the boyfriend stabbers - it was the first thing I noticed. What mean?
Ha, I feel called out. When I got my DNA results back from Ancestry, I joked that "it's like an alt-right nutjob's wet dream"... nothing but Northern European barbarians lol. The furthest *south* it shows my ancestors being from is Germany.
And I am 100% the type of bitch you're describing in this article.
I originally saw the Met telecast of the opera "Siegfried" when I was 4 years old. As a teenager, I came across the VHS tape from that 1990 telecast and my reaction was, "I remember this show, and it was so bizarre that for the last ten years, I literally thought that I dreamed it and it wasn't a real thing."
Teenage me was so into this that I grew up to be a costume designer for operas in NYC, and I also got really into witchcraft. To this day, my second-most automatic way of writing by hand after cursive isn't block printing, it's *runes*. Saying that Wagner's operas were an influence on me is a massive understatement.
One thing I never made the connection with until I read this though is the parallels between Brunhilde's personality and the way men have always found me so "intimidating" that at age 37 I'm unmarried and childfree by choice (because I keep rejecting people and leaving relationships), and I'm having a wildly passionate experience with my business partner for a subversive art project. In pre-lockdown NYC, I was described as both "the Queen of New York" and everyone's favorite brazen harlot who doesn't give a fuck. One time a man spurned me emotionally after we slept together, and I beat the shit out of him in a public park. Not only did I NOT get arrested for this, but people supported my decision. Many people have told me I would make an excellent dominatrix.
When I was younger, I was so out of hand that my mom would warn guys about me (LOL) and my dad was really proud of the fact that I was traveling the world and had no trouble dumping guys who couldn't keep up with me. Over and over, he joked about how I must get it from my Celtic and Viking ancestors. There was no pressure to just settle down with a nice but boring guy... instead there were jokes about how men were afraid of me and also most of them were way less cool than me. When extended family members asked why I wasn't married or even in a serious relationship despite looking really pretty, my parents had trouble explaining politely that I thought most men were losers and was really happy being single and sowing my wild oats in NYC.
After reading this I'm like, "yeah... if I was genetically bred to be like this, that would actually explain a lot." No regrets whatsoever for being the psycho BPD Valkyrie type. I say all the time that my life up to this point has for the most part been better than most people's. It was much, much worse during the lockdowns, but even that lead to a spiritual awakening and rebirth that I wouldn't want to be living without.
Sorry if you covered this in your other essay as I've only just discovered your Substack but I wonder if you could reframe the story of Clytemnestra and Agamemnon in this light?
The version we get today mostly comes from the POV of Aeschylus, whose plays were often subversions of the "mainstream" Archaic Greek view of his time. One might argue that in the original telling, King Agamemnon's unnatural sacrifice of their daughter to kick off a global conflict throws the entire world order out of whack and it's up to Spartan-princess-and-Mycenaean-queen Clytemnestra to restore it with her uncompromising fury, a worthy mate, and a righteous murder.
And she would have gotten away with it too were it not for her ungrateful kids from the previous marriage! Never saw the parallels between Orestes and Amleth(Hamlet) until I read this article. Well done!
dude i have many sisters. this is so true. fiery redheads, willfull as hell. it may be an overabundace of life energy. I am told, exciting. better to have a warrior woman on your side when it counts than a simpering ninny. They will do things, that you would not believe. if i were to write them, no one would buy it. I will keep them to myself. do not want people to be fore warned, now do we?
The Discord invite link states it's "invalid or expired." Can you send a new one?