The Cosmic Titty Archetype

"We're women, we have titties, we were born to nurture the entire race. It's our highest, most divine calling. All that bullshit, and the worst part is that there's a small part of something true in it that's been mutilated. It's a toxic mimic of real priestessing, this comsic-tittying."
Tara, The Hobo Stripper.


"You Aint Shit"

Amanda was the main supervisor on the floor and Robert was late again. Again. He pulled a no-call-no-show two days before, was two hours late the next, and tonight he was late again. The first time, he walked in staring at his feet and nervously adjusted his weight while the male supervisor chewed him out and told him it was his last warning.
"Yes sir," he responded respectfully.

Tonight, he held his head high and strolled right into the office and told Amanda he had arrived and asked for his assignment without an ounce of apology. Amanda stood up and told him to wait right there as he started to walk to his folder. She told him he was getting written up and reminded him that he had been warned the night before. I sat at the computer listening to the scene unfold behind me. Amanda's voice cracked with uncertainty and I could hear her struggling to feel comfortable with her authority over him.

We worked at a call-center and outside of the interior office, over thirty people were working busily in little cubicles, calling people all over the country to raise money for different human rights organizations. Amanda was in control for the night and she had already snuffed out an argument between callers and was now trying to stand tall in front of this aggressively rude man.

Robert walked up to her and stood less than eight inches away from her face. Amanda looked startled and I stood up from my desk, ready to protect her. Robert started his shit, "Why are you doing this to me? Why are you being so mean to me?"

"What?" Amanda started to retort and then stopped, obviously confused by his accusation. I knew what was happening immediately. He was pulling the pity card, playing her for a Cosmic Titty as if she was his mother and he was a sad little boy about to be spanked for stealing a cookie. He was appealing to the woman in her.

She buckled. "I'm not. I'm sorry. I'm not trying to be mean."

Hell no, I thought as I walked over and stood to Amanda's right, looking him directly in the eye. I was Amanda's assistant for the night and felt obligated to defend her.

"Robert, no one is being mean to you. She isn't your mommy. This is work and you were told if you were late again, you would be sent home. That's what's happening."

Robert's eyes glazed with hatred. This wasn't the first time we got into it. He knew my game and I knew his. He smirked and stiffened his back, ready to fight until the last breath. He was such a mean bastard. He was a real piece of work. He had been written up twice before for harassing women in the break room, for asking them to rub his back and telling them they looked good.

"I wasn't talking to you," he said defiantly.

"You're going home, Robert. Those are the rules. You're going to be an adult about this, aren't you?" I said firmly, nodding slowly to subliminally reinforce my authority, a trick I learned from Tara for handling men who wanted to act like little boys.

"You can't send me home, bitch. You ain't shit."

Brilliant. There was the real Robert. No more little boy pleas for titty comfort and kindness.

"Fine. Now get your things and leave or I'm calling the police."

He turned toward Amanda, trying one last time to get her sympathy.

"Why you letting her do this shit? You're my girl. I need hours. I need money for my son."

Amanda must have felt better with me beside her. "You're going home, Robert. I'm sorry."

Ok, I thought, we can play good cop/ bad cop. I'll be the bitch.
"Get your shit and go."

Robert was fuming. He spit at my shoe and turned around to leave, pushing a stack of folders off of a table with a noisy crash before he left. Everyone turned to look. Robert walked out and I sighed with relief.

"What just happened?" Amanda asked, staring at the door like a stunned animal, shaking her head slowly. "What a mindfuck!"

It was a mindfuck. That's exactly what it was. It was conscious and it usually worked for him. By triggering the mother response, Robert had learned to take advantage of lots of naive women who had been conditioned their whole lives to be sweet talking yeses.

It's what I call the "Cosmic Titty Archetype." How many times have my guy friends come to me to talk about their problems? How many times have I heard them say, "I love talking to you. I can't talk to my other friends like this."

My cousin, recently back from Iraq, explained that he made a very good female friend in Fallujah that he visited every night because he "just needed a woman to talk to."

How many strange men on long bus rides started conversations with me by asking me for the time only to later bombard me with details of their relationship problems and dark soulmatter? You see, lots of men understand women as "nurturers" that exist simply to perform emotional maintenance for them. Like hungry cartoon characters that see their prey turn into big savory drumsticks, men see a woman and she transforms into a big rotating titty in the sky, ever-providing the sweet life-sustaining milk that will nurture them in their endless search for ego and self-assertion. The problem is, all resources are limited and some guys can suck you dry. The problem is, sometimes women need nurturing and sometimes we are too tired to wipe noses and be emotional wet-nurses. Sometimes we want an adult interaction based on mutual support and inspiration, not one built upon our conditioned desire to mother, to save, to be sick with the Stockholm syndrome until our whole lives are swept away with the dust we clean out of other people's hearts.

If you look around, it's happening everywhere. Although it's usually a gendered phenomenon, it doesn't have to be. It starts with the child's inability to understand the personhood of its primary caretaker. The child, in its helpless state, cannot imagine the worries and concerns of the caretaker and therefore survives off of a certain selfishness which takes the caretaker for granted. Since gendered division of labor in our society (and throughout most of the world) leaves this role solely to women, the children learn that she is the one to be taken for granted, she is the one to which we go to get our needs met.


The Cosmic Titty in Love


In Bread and the Wafer, Anais Nin writes of a woman looking at her lover after he has confessed to her a traumatizing memory from his childhood. She writes of Lillian, the lover, "By her attitude she did not become one with him in this return to his past self. What she overtly extended to him was one who seemed done with her child self and who would replace the harsh mother, extend the muff and the warm naked hands.

She became, at that instant, indelibly fixed in his eyes not as another child with possibly equal needs, but as the stronger one in the possession of the power to dispense to all his needs."

The woman finds that "after he has laid his head down and found comfort on her immeasurable bosom, she had nowhere to lay her head, nowhere to find her comfort."

Lillian's male lover didn't meet the child in Lillian. He didn't hear her childhood stories. She assumed her role before he had a chance to see her in any other way. She dared only to conform to the model of the time which said that women should comfort and nurture and never demand equality of space and emotional connection.

The Cosmic Titty gives and gives and rarely receives. She lets men go on and on with uninteresting details in casual conversations while sitting on buses or enjoying a beer at a bar because she is afraid to be rude and she doesn't want to face the unpleasantness of asking them to leave her alone. She mindlessly sits, trying to avoid his hungry eyes by looking out the window, but he just keeps talking and her muscles tighten as she realizes she's been completely railroaded. The Cosmic Titty is there to listen, to take it all in so that she can somehow transmutate his pain into power. This transmutation is an ancient one, one done typically by shamans and priestesses, but in a society driven on objectification and inequality, it is no wonder that it has developed into a dynamic of abuse. This abuse takes shape in so many ways. It's abuse to refuse to acknowledge the needs of another person, whether those needs are a mere desire to share their own pain or they simply want their privacy respected by not having to constantly feel obligated to engage in unwanted conversations of an inappropriate intimacy level (i.e. men sharing too many personal details on the bus.)

Relationships with Cosmic Titty suckers will be deceptively comfortable at times. It feels good to feel needed and giving someone comfort and assurance can be very fulfilling. There is a difference between normal dynamics of give and take. Not all interactions of emotional economy have to be plagued with asymmetry. The problem is most clear when the person who takes on the role of nurturer suddenly needs nurturing. My mother tended to my father's emotional needs for years and when her mother died, she needed to be cared for, but my father was emotionally bankrupt. The binary was never leveled, the grace was never returned to her.


Paintings, Privacy, Power

Privacy is power. The more people think they know about you, the more power they have to influence you, to condemn and control you, to call you by name. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it can quickly become dangerous if you aren't given the same access to knowledge in order to boost your own power.

The same man that asks me for the time while I'm waiting for a bus will very often take my polite answer as an invitation to talk more. He will ask me invasive questions like, "where are you going?" and "what's your name?" and other things he would never imagine asking another man. Beyond the proven fact that men (more often than women) misinterpret kindness as sexual interest, this man has been thoroughly taught that women have no rights to their privacy. This belief is reinforced by an abundance of images which circulate in the collective unconscious: paintings of women laying naked and open next to fully clothed men (Manet's Luncheon in the Grass), women in movies being interrogated by men as if their personal business should naturally be known by everyone (The Breakfast Club), sex scenes in movies and pornography where the women have their ecstasy exposed and possessed by the viewer by merit of the sounds of their moans and screams while the men remain silent and in control, women like our mothers who spent all of their time with us and had little time for themselves.

Privacy is power and the Cosmic Titty Sucker, like the child, will grab and ask and need to know.


The Bitch Muscle

A guy at a bar buys me a drink and his strange grin immediately unsettles me. He's sitting with another guy I kind of know, so I feel safe in accepting the beer and bullshitting with him for a few minutes. Before I walk away, I offer to buy the next round, but he refuses. I thank him and leave. I feel strange. He looked at me with the body-sweeping stare, the one that sizes you up completely while you're in mid-sentence and the man has no shame in letting you see what he's doing. I wonder what the other guy is telling him. I realize I didn't get his name and that he will now know mine and this makes me uncomfortable. I see other people I know, so I shake it off and continue with my night.

At last call I'm standing at the bar and I feel a hand slide slowly over the small of my back My body tenses. I turn around and there he is- that guy from earlier, standing there smiling down on me with the creepiest shit eating grin I've ever seen. I push him away. He's baffled. He doesn't know what to think. He's done nothing wrong. In his mind, buying a drink for a woman gives him complete access to her body.

He says my name. "Davka, are you ok?"

There's so much implicit in his question. He assumes a familiarity he isn't entitled to. He says my name as if knowing it has given him a right to touch me. He asks me if I am ok as if I have the problem and his touching a complete stranger in an intimate area wasn't a violation. I lose my power. I feel gross. I walk out and go home to feel humiliated, less about him touching me and more about my own lack of strength, my strange inability to speak my rights and boundaries clearly.

From whence comes this complete lack of power? Why didn't I tell him not to touch me? Why did I sit there and listen to that guy in the waiting room tell me all about his marital problems although it was dripping with desperate need and it made me completely uncomfortable?

There's something about humiliation and violation which sends your aura awry with dark colors and concentric half-circles. You revert to some pre-rational stage of victimhood where you become a child who doesn't have the brain development necessary to understand that what's happening isn't her fault, that she doesn't deserve it and therefore doesn't have to accept it.

To be a bitch feels unnatural and unfeminine. It goes against everything we've been taught to be. But when you start to use your bitch muscle, it grows and grows and sooner or later the fear disappears and the woman emerges with her boundaries clearly defined.

The guy from the bar showed up at the coffee shop smiling like we shared some big secret between us. He sat down next to me and said hello and again called me by name. I ignored him. He asked me what I was reading. I tell him plainly that I don't like him, that he gives me the heebie jeebies. He looks crushed.

"Yeah. I have social anxiety problems. I come off as very awkward."

The mother in me sees his sad eyes and she feels responsible. She wants to reassure him, to kiss his wounds and make it all better.

"Oh," I say, thinking maybe he isn't so bad, maybe I'm being unfair. "Everyone has problems with that."

"Yeah, especially with romantic relationships." He says as his eyes glide down my neck and over my chest. There we go, I think. Give them an inch and they take a mile.

"This isn't romantic." I tell him, realizing where he's trying to take me.
"I know. I'm just saying. I have problems."

"Yeah you sure do," I say, gathering my things off the table. "What's your name?"

He brightens. "Bryan," he says.

"Well Bryan, you should get a therapist."

I leave and he sits, sipping his drink, looking for some other women to talk to. I know his name. He doesn't get it and I don't need him to.









for more on the Cosmic Titty Archetype, read here.

Disclaimer: Davka doesn't think all men are like this. Just an ever-shrinking majority.