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𝗝𝗼𝗝𝗼'𝘀 𝗕𝗶𝘇𝗮𝗿𝗿𝗲 𝗔𝗱𝘃𝗲𝗻𝘁𝘂𝗿𝗲: 𝗦𝘁𝗼𝗻𝗲 𝗢𝗰𝗲𝗮𝗻

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The Gender Trinary: Hero, Maiden, Monster

I've talked about this before, but maybe it's worth doing so in a more comprehensive fashion.

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I should start by saying: this is not any kind of commentary on how the world really works.

It is an exploration of a symbolic paradigm that is meaningful to me, personally.  (A paradigm that was, to be sure, more meaningful to me when I was younger and angstier and less-well-integrated into my life.  But still meaningful.)  It tells you far more about my own neuroses than it does about any external reality.

I have found it noteworthy, in fact, how poorly the gender trinary paradigm ends up mapping onto the reality of my experience.  Feminism has made a hash of the Maiden role and its broader social salience, to no one’s surprise, but it’s the Hero role that really fails to sync up with the world around me.  It’s rooted in a vision of normative masculinity that just...doesn’t line up with what men actually do, or how men actually feel about themselves, at least within my field of vision.  Maybe that’s an artifact of my living in a rarefied nerd-bubble where no one really cares about the conventional masculine ideal.  Maybe it’s an artifact of modern society being different from earlier stages of society.  Maybe it was just an illusion to begin with, fostered by consuming too much genre media.  I dunno.  

In any event -- the point is that this concept-suite will probably break if you put any weight on it.  If you find yourself inclined to poke around at it with questions, I’m probably happy to field them, but don’t be surprised if they end up being grounded in “I found these ideas powerful when I was an alienated bookish teenager, and the resonance of it has never really gone away, as the resonances of such things generally don’t.”  

OK then.  Moving on.

What is the basic idea of the gender trinary?

There are three “genders” -- hero, maiden, and monster.  These correspond to the roles in a primordial, mythic passion-play narrative.  

As it is written:

The Monster, who is transgressive, lays a claim on the Maiden, who is desirable and pure.  The Hero contests this claim, defeats the Monster, and saves the Maiden.

Rama / Sita / Ravana is probably the best example of the pure, uncomplicated version of that story from “authentic” mythology.  Many gender-trinary-tangent myths either have a monster who isn’t remotely personlike in any way (Perseus / Andromeda / Cetus) or complicate the interaction to the point of near-unrecognizability (Gilgamesh / Shamhat / Enkidu).

Modern culture has provided us with a lot of very pure, very recognizable gender trinary instantiations.  Mario / Peach / Bowser and Link / Zelda / Ganon are absolutely textbook.  Modern culture has also provided us with a lot of trope deconstructions (Braid, Dr. Horrible).

Versions of this story with a focus on the Monster form the core of the gothic-romance trope suite.  Beauty and the Beast and The Phantom of the Opera are foundational texts.  

Are those roles really “genders,” though?

Well, to some extent.

The trinary paradigm is definitely an overlay on the male/female gender binary, not a replacement for it.  In particular, while the Hero role is undeniably masculine in its construction, and the Maiden role is similarly feminine -- even if you allow for female Heroes (which I do, absolutely) and male Maidens (which I do, kinda) -- the Monster role doesn’t really have its own parallel suite of gender tropes.  A Monster can embody either extreme masculinity or extreme femininity, in ways that work within those concept-suites rather than subverting them.  There are classic extremely-monster-y monsters who code as hyper-men (King Kong, Beast) and ones who code as hyper-women (vampy succubi etc.). Monsters can also certainly be androgynous, or display traits that are off-the-gender-spectrum entirely...but that tends to come across as ambiguously gendered or un-gendered rather than distinctively third-gendered.  This is particularly relevant when discussing romantic and sexual attraction, which tends to be plugged into a very low-level set of physical and behavioral cues in a way that isn’t amenable to being warped through high-level narrative abstraction.  Saying, e.g., that Adam is “bisexual” because he is attracted to both Lilith (Monster) and Eve (Maiden) feels pretty dumb.  

But genders come with gender roles.  And, to a large extent, the point of the trinary is to create (or make explicit) a set of three different gender roles that are all legible to each other, that all have their own distinct boundaries, and that all cohere internally.  There are important ways in which a hulking manly brute monster and a slinky witchy siren monster and a totally inhuman bug monster all expect to play the same role in the broader context of society, and all expect to engage with Heroes and with Maidens in basically similar ways.  Certainly, if you use social narrative as a guide, there are important ways in which all of those Monsters can expect to have similar standards of success and to be perceiving their own identities in similar ways. (Or so I posit.)  And once you’ve gotten that far, well, “gender” doesn’t seem like an inappropriate term.

Your mileage may vary. 

Aesthetics

This is basically a place for me to point out that there isn’t a single iconic image for any of these roles.

Heroes, in the full flower of their Heroic physicality, can run the gamut from lithe twinky bishounen to jacked Spartan hoplites with huge beards.  “Wispy pink-and-purple fairy princess” and “voluptuously sensual earth goddess” are both overwhelmingly Maiden looks.  

Monsters, as suggested earlier, get even more of a range than that.  Their appearance can exaggeratedly emphasize physical power (ogres) or exaggeratedly de-emphasize it (Jabba the Hutt).  They can possess extreme masculine beauty (Dracula), extreme masculine ugliness (Lord Voldemort), extreme feminine beauty (succubi), or extreme feminine ugliness (night hags).  The only real commonality to a “Monster look” is that it should be somehow wrong.  Ugliness is wrong by default; inhumanity is obviously wrong by default; beauty must be cast as somehow sickly or unwholesome.  You can have Monsters who don’t look particularly wrong (Dr. Horrible), but this makes them “less monstrous” in the way that physical traits can make someone “less masculine” or “less feminine.” 

Associated Concepts

Or: “What do these words mean, anyway?”  The part for which you’re all here.

Perhaps it is easiest to start by saying: the “point” of the Monster role (in some sense) is that it is unsocialized and transgressive, and what it gets for those costs is self-expression and freedom.  

Both the Hero and the Maiden are, essentially and necessarily, socialized roles.  To be a [successful] Hero or Maiden, you must be embedded in some kind of society; you must be bound to the ideals of that society; and the success of your gender performance is, in the end, a reflection of how well you can embody those ideals.  

(“Society” can mean a lot of different things here, and it doesn’t have to be particularly big or expansive or civilization-y.  In particular, when you’re talking about Heroes, a little mutually-reinforcing “band of brothers” is very definitely enough of a society to qualify.)  

The Hero role is obviously very related to the “male gender role,” although it’s not identical.  At its absolute most basic core, it is about having the competence to fight in defense of your society and your Maiden.  This radiates out to “competence,” in most senses of the term -- especially most pragmatic senses -- being a Hero power concept.  Heroes do useful things for others.  They fix the car, pay the bills, save lives on the operating table, etc.  

(Domestic labor isn’t particularly Hero-coded, because [for mostly dumb reasons] it doesn’t have tight narrative associations with competence.  Cooking and cleaning are not things that you do because you’re stepping up when others can’t.  But domestic labor also isn’t particularly Maiden-coded in this schema.  It’s not really anything-coded.)  

Competition is also very close to the heart of the Hero role.  Heroes compete with each other, with Monsters, and with the obstacles presented by the uncaring universe.  I assume this is a direct outgrowth of the competence thing; you continually test, and continually show off, your power by pitting it against forces that will resist.  

The Maiden role is, to be honest, the least-fleshed-out in abstract terms.  (Probably because I was never in any particular danger of being seen as, or of seeing myself as, a Maiden.)  It has a lot to do with love and sex, unsurprisingly -- in a standard Feminism 101 “Women are the Sex Class” kind of way, physical and emotional intimacy are part of the Maiden concept-sphere.  It has a lot to do with emotional and social power, with the ability to change what people are thinking and feeling by interacting with them.  

It has a lot to do with inherent legitimacy.  Maidens in good standing are always valid.  (Heroes must prove their validity, at least once, probably over and over; Monsters are always invalid.)  This gets tied up with a certain, uh, avatar-of-the-society’s-ideals-ness.  

One ramification of all this is that leadership is a Maiden thing.  Most forms of political and institutional leadership, at least, and also probably household leadership as well.  Maidens are the ones who contain the highest values of the society within themselves, and therefore the ones who are properly helming the ship of state, telling others what to do; they’re the ones who are good enough with people to wield command.  Often they act through Hero subordinates or champions.   

A Hero being in charge, in this schema, means that something is somehow off -- he’s probably dominated by his own ego and love of victory, rather than having the best interests of the society at heart.  

(Exceptions apply for fully Heroic sub-institutions like the military.  But those are “supposed” to be subject to some kind of higher Maiden-controlled authority.)  

Both the Hero role and the Maiden role come with a strong baked-in requirement of desirability.  Heroes and Maidens are supposed to be beautiful, outwardly and inwardly.  Occupying either role means that you are obliged to be appealing to members of the other role in a romantic/sexual sense, and to be appealing to the society-at-large in terms of embodying its ideals and meeting its needs.  Failing to appeal is...well, a failure. 

Monsters are driven by their own internal, asocial urges.  They act contrary to the ideals and the needs of their societies.  They are freed from the requirement to be desirable by being automatically anathemized.  

Needless to say, of course, it is possible for Monsters to appeal -- romantically/sexually (as in gothic romances) or even on a broader cultural level (if a Monster is faddishly fetishized, for example).  This is never [in the theoretical conceptual perfect-spherical-gender sense] because the Monster has fit itself into a template of desirability; it is because some other party has perceived the Monster’s idiosyncratic self-constructed identity, hidden or overt, and found it lovable.  It is [in theory] always sui generis and always the fruit of a unique, un-ritualized interaction.  

“Doesn’t fit into society” covers a lot of conceptual ground -- a lot more ground than “does fit into society.”  Monster-hood manifests in many very-divergent forms, because there are so many ways to be different and taboo.  

Alienation is pretty central to the role concept.  Normatively monster attitudes range from “grumpy and desirous of being left alone” to “omnicidally angry.”  

The role-syntonic (positive) Monster ways of being in love involve pedestalization, possessiveness, and focused obsession.  It is important to distinguish the loved one from everyone else.

The Monster role is neither particularly active nor particularly passive.  “Has a scheme to remake all reality and will stop at nothing to achieve it” is a very Monster deal.  So is “sits in a cave, contemplating its own strange thoughts, and will never interact with any part of the world unless disturbed.”  

The archetypical Monster is an egomaniacal monad, but for narrative purposes it’s possible for a Monster instead to be a foreigner -- to be beholden to the ideals and structures of a society, so long as it’s an alien one.

Gender Interactions in the Trinary Paradigm

It’s worth remembering that the quintessential gender trinary story is a struggle.  In a high conceptual sense, it’s a struggle in which all three roles are thrown together to find out which two of them will pair off.  

(In theory, I’m sure, you could end up with a balanced triad.  But I don’t think we have good stories about how that would work or what it would look like.  The dyadic nature of human reproduction has a lot of concept influence.)  

The most common pairing, of course, is Hero/Maiden.  The Monster is defeated -- we assume that its influence was generally a bad one, even if somewhere along the way it might have had some appeal -- and the pro-social lovers unite, bonded by their shared ideal. 

Maiden/Monster is an essentially psychological pairing in most cases, driven by deep interpersonal communication that supersedes social expectations.

Hero/Monster is the least common pairing.  Which is no surprise, because (as mentioned) Maiden is the role that’s associated with love and sex; the Hero and the Monster are fighting over the Maiden, in theory, and something weird has to happen to change that.  But there are a few well-established narratives here.  The often-bromantic-rather-than-romantic Gilgamesh/Enkidu story is one.  There’s also the version in which the Monster is made very feminine and the Hero shifts to the center of the love triangle.  This gets you a sort of gender-reversal of the Maiden/Monster pairing; the Maiden ends up being portrayed as shallow or bland, and the Monster provides a truer / spicier / more genuinely personal sort of love. 

Me: I watch squid game for the plot

*the mf plot*