Popular Culture Review Vol. 28, No. 2, Summer 2017 | Page 81

embryos are inherently female anyway, they just require an extra hormone at the right developmental stage to make them male. We simply deny them that.” This is a security measure to prevent the dinosaurs from multiplying in the scenario that they escape the island and reach the mainland. However, this revelation can be considered in an alternate light when considering that the entirety of Jurassic Park’s administration is male. Subsequently, Jurassic Park can be viewed as a patriarchal society whose entire economy is based on the monetization of femininity. Patriarchal social structures are characterized by male privilege, with males maintaining primary or exclusive access to positions of authority (Johnson 6; 165), characteristics that Jurassic Park embodies. In this society, only males such as Wu and Hammond occupy roles of power or control; as Jurassic Park’s owner and CEO, Hammond especially serves as the society’s most influential figure. In contrast, the entirety of Isla Nublar’s female population is literally caged for the purpose of amusement. There is further subtext to be derived from the dinosaurs’ inability to breed through the application of a psychoanalytic concept known as womb envy. Womb envy is a theory in feminist psychology that suggests men feel an anxiety towards women that is derived from envy towards the female reproductive system. Originally coined by psychoanalyst Karen Horney, womb envy is a universal concept, as “Anthropological studies show many cultural practices [are] designed to compensate men in fantasy because they cannot bear children in reality” (Ende et al. 167). While early hunter-gatherer or foraging societies demonstrated equality between sexes, much of modern society is predominantly patriarchal, particularly Western societies that ascribe to Abrahamic religions. In these monotheistic religions, “the womb is described in the scriptures as merely the property of the male God, who appropriates the woman’s role in childbirth” (170). Subsequently, Western societies where these religions are popular established male authority over women’s reproductive rights. Additionally, the anxiety that men feel due to womb envy commonly manifests as femiphobia. The debasement and depreciation that men display towards women serve as a psychological defense against womb envy, as contempt is a socially accepted form of male emotion (Bayne 153). The male narcissism described above is a direct product of patriarchal social systems: Men seem to have envied the fact that the “inferior” sex, placed on earth to serve them, has the exclusive ability to bring forth life. [Patriarchal religions] encouraged men to have a grandiose self-image. This grandiose self-image appears to have been threatened by women's 76