Inner Work and Gender Justice ~ Page 3
Elizabeth: There are all sorts of judgments that get bandied back and
forth. We need to recognize that these are themes that go on, that men
by their very nature like to have more space than women, and need to
heal themselves by drawing into themselves on a fairly regular
basis.Women need connection. It’s part of being a woman. There’s
nothing wrong with us that we need that. And there’s nothing wrong
with men for needing what they need. Recognizing that takes away the
whole blame thing.
Aaron: We’ve begun to realize that a lot of the conflicts that go on
in one-to-one, personal relationships are not personal. That’s the
importance of learning about these gender differences and gender
values. Then we begin to see, "Oh, that’s not something she’s doing
against me personally. She’s behaving in a way that’s very consistent
in our culture." That’s why we keep coming back to groups, to get at
the larger issues. Couples in our groups gain more understanding about
the differences, and that tends to raise less blame. Then there’s more
opportunity to negotiate.
We aren’t suggesting that guys are just the way they are, love them or
leave them, or that women are just like that and you just have to live
through it. We are saying that a woman’s whole training in life is to
develop her sense of identity through her relationship with others. A
man’s whole training in life is to develop his whole sense of identity
through separating from others, through being the lone hero, the
independent guy who can solve the problem on his own. That’s how he
gets his sense of accomplishment. A woman gets her sense of
accomplishment by having created a collaboration with the children,
women, the church and their social network. Women weave the social
fabric together. They get their sense of satisfaction from having done
that. When we understand this, then we say that neither men nor women
are wrong for being like that.
Historically, from the beginning of time, we’ve had different
mandates. Men had to go out and hunt. That’s a solitary sort of thing.
It’s done with just a few other men, traveling far from camp for long
periods of time. Moving in silence and stealth. Women had millions of
years of evolution as gatherers, where they talked to one another.
Plants wouldn’t run away when you talked. Women did child care. There
was a lot of face-to-face contact, a lot of socializing. Of course we
have a different society, but those old tunes are still being hummed
by the DNA. A part of us still dances to those old tunes.
A part of us also has the social conditioning, when men are encouraged
to make the touchdown, to be the hero. They’ve got to be on top of it,
whether it’s in the bedroom, the board room, or the playing field.
It’s through their performance that they’re going to be loved. That
comes back to the one-to-one relationship. The woman says, "Why don't
you tell me you love me?" The man says, "Well, I mowed the lawn. I
fixed the screen door. I worked 10 hours of overtime this week, so we
could take a vacation this summer. You didn’t say anything about those
things I did, you just took them for granted." What he was doing in
all those things, from a male point of view, was saying, "I love you.
I’m doing those things because I care about you, I care about us
having enough money to do the things we want to do." That may be the
way a man expresses his live, instead of with flowers and verse.
But a woman may say, "The way I know I’m loved is through verbal
acknowledgments, touch, or something like that." Men need to
understand that. They need to cross over the cultural gulf, and let
her know in language that she can understand, that she’s loved.
One of the things we hear a lot of in our councils is that both women
and men feel that the important things that they bring to the
relationship are not seen.
Elizabeth: The theme of invisibility comes up a lot. Women feel
invisible in different arenas. In the workplace. We hear the theme
over and over again that women don’t feel that men respond to their
opinions or give them value and merit for what they contribute. One
story we hear a lot is of the woman who suggests an idea and is
ignored. Ten minutes later a man says the same thing, and everyone
says, "Great idea!"
At the same time, men feel invisible at home, that their contribution
to the relationship is not recognized or valued, or even seen.
In our councils we have enough time to work a lot and get down into
this stuff, and we can actually begin to negotiate back and forth.
That’s the real core of the work. The guy says, "I really have to
retreat when we have an argument." The woman says, "We really need to
talk about it." How do you reconcile the seemingly opposing currents
between women and men? I think that’s the trickiest part of the work,
and where the diplomacy comes in. Basically you negotiate compromise
and taking turns. One of the things that we’ve worked out is that
women give men the opportunity to go into retreat, but men make an
agreement that they will come back after an agreed-upon length of time
and respond with the woman’s need to deal with the issue and come to
some resolution.
Aaron: Then women will respect that when a man says
he can’t deal with it right now, that he really means that. Maybe he’s
just too overwhelmed with the other stresses of his life. Maybe he
doesn’t feel as secure in relationship and emotional issues as the
woman does. It often takes a man longer to get in touch with what he
feels, because we’ve been trained for a lifetime to disassociate from
our emotional bodies. It’s like our feelings are at the bottom of a
dark well. When a woman asks him how he feels about something, she
drops a bucket into that deep well and starts cranking it back up. It
may be Tuesday before he knows what it was that he was feeling in that
argument on Sunday. When women say "you’re avoiding," or "you never
deal with the issues," that’s pathologizing a normal feeling. When a
man says that a woman is a nag, a shrew, or a process junkie, he is
pathologizing the female mode of feeling.
When we can understand one another’s differences, a woman can say,
"OK, go to your cave. But the deal is, when you’ve regrouped, you
don’t go out of your cave and slip out to have one with the boys.
You’ll come and talk to me." He says, "OK." Her feeling is that she
will not follow him into the cave. It’s very dangerous for a woman to
follow a man into the cave. What’s when a lot of the domestic violence
happens. When a man feels up against the wall.
Bert: Part of the gender conflict may arise from our myths about
gender. You talk about Aphrodite as a goddess of the sun. "Solar fire
infuses a woman's being and enable her to bring herself forth into the
world, while retaining her femininity, her sensuality, and her grace."
You discuss male gods of the earth. In our culture, we are so used to
"Mother Earth, Father Sky." You say "It is possible to extend our
world view and see both genders expressed in all elemental and natural
forces. This style of imagination breeds partnership. The alternative
is to continue to divide the universe, allocating one domain to the
female gender, and the other to the male. This now-outmoded style of
imagination breeds war." Can you elaborate?
Elizabeth: What we have come to believe is that the earth is female
and the sky is male. We’ve completely divided up our natural world
into these gender qualities. What happens from that is that men can’t
identify with Mother Earth. They can't feel that sense of connection
with all of what we associate with Mother Earth, which is generativity,
nurturing, home, a sense of connection of the body. All of those
things are interpreted as being female. For a man to identify with
those qualities, he’s always faced with coming to imagine them as
feminine. That presents a problem for men, because they’re not given a
way to discover what might be a male mode of generativity, a male mode
of nurturance, a male way of being embodied.
By the same token, we have imagined the sky as being male. When women
imagine themselves as becoming assertive, aggressive, fierce and
powerful in the daylight world, powerful with a lot of physical
vitality, even the kind of spiritual consciousness that is associated
with the sun and the swirl of energy, then in order for women to get
in touch with those qualities they have to imagine themselves as being
in touch with their masculinity. We think it’s much healthier for
women to discover what is the feminine form, the feminine quality, of
the sun.
How can women come into the workplace, get in touch with their focused
and goal-oriented power in the world, manifesting power, power to make
money, power to be successful, in a way that is not necessarily
getting in touch with their masculine? We think of this as being part
of how men and women are intrinsically different, that women will have
a different style of coming into the world and into the workplace.
It’s much healthier for women to discover the feminine sword of power.
This is something we don’t really know a lot about.
And by the same token, there might be a particular, masculine mode of
creating a home, parenting, getting in touch with your spirituality
and self-reflective mode of being.
Aaron: We’ve divorced ourselves from a lot of the old myths, in which
we imagine the world and consciousness as a much more rich and
variegated, polytheistic world. This has been one of the shadow sides
of monotheism. The foundational myths of Western culture are also the
foundational myths for gender war. Women divorced from their power in
the world, and men divorced from their bodies and their capacity to
nurture. Old man God is in the sky and looks over the earth. Sometimes
he’s a nice guy and takes care of his people, and at other times he’s
really pissed off and he creates war. He doesn’t have a relationship
with the feminine. She’s down there on the earth somewhere, under his
dominion.
The point I’m trying to make here is that when we talk about myths,
we’re not just talking about fantasy. We’re talking about the
foundational metaphors that literally organize human behavior and give
us our psychology and philosophy, and the way in which we imagine
ourselves as women and men. If we’re going to change our gender roles,
and change the dynamic between women and men, we have to look at the
foundation. That’s why we come back to mythology.
So when men imagine themselves as like this sky god, which is the
primary image of sacred masculinity in our culture, we think, "Gee, I
have to be like the sun. Always the same."As we talk about in the
book, in many ancient cultures men were not imagined as the sun but as
the moon. Osiris. Thoth. Chandra and Soma from East India. The
Sumerian Inanna. Osiris was the Nile river. He was cyclical, like the
moon, ebbing and flowing every year, re-greening the earth. As I think
of myself as a man, as a moon, which in our Western culture is the
domain of women, I can say to myself, "Gee, I don’t have to be the
same all the time."
Now we think it’s not masculine if I can’t "get it up." I always have
to be positive and optimistic and get the job done and be the same
every day, like the sun. If I see that I ebb and flow, some days I’m
ready for that activities, but on other days I’m on the wane, going
into myself. Some days I’m completely dark. I just want to be alone,
away from the world. Then I shift again, and I come back into being in
the world. My sexuality is like that. Male sexuality is much more like
the moon than the sun. It rises and falls, If we think that it can
only rise, when it falls we feel lesser than a man
That’s why working with the metaphors and the mythologies, our deeper
imagination, is really very important. We’re sometimes ridiculed for
that, by the concrete, literal-thinking world. But it deeply affects
how we think about ourselves. Now that I’ve embraced this idea of
inner masculinity, I don’t think I’m a wimp, a geek, a sissy or a
jerk, somehow lesser than a man, when I feel vulnerable or soft, or
dark. I see that I’m cyclical. I’m on and I’m off.
By the same token, as Liz was starting to say, when women imagine
themselves as only being connected with the earth, it’s lovely in
certain ways but in other ways it’s a trap. Camille Paglia talks in
her book Sexual Personae about the Dionysian swamp of nature that
women are sucked down into. She doesn’t understand that the solar
value is also a feminine value. She’s still in a dichotomous place.
But she’s got this right, that women can be drawn down into this
swamp. Claiming your achievement in the world is not through claiming
your masculinity per se, but through claiming the solar goddess.
Elizabeth: The solar goddess. I like the idea of feminine fire, this
fierce femininity. It’s difficult to talk about because we have so
little idea of what this could mean. What could it mean for a woman to
come into the workplace with a strong femininity, and still being in
her power? Most of us have come to see these as mutually exclusive.
Women have thought they have had to divorce themselves from their
femininity and become more like men in order to be more powerful in
the world. They have to put on the same kind of male coat of armor
that men have had to wear. I’m suggesting another possibility, that we
could be forcefully feminine, that we could be feminine but direct
that energy outward, rather than just keeping in inward in an earthy
way. The solar gives us something that is almost like mythological
permission or inspiration to imagine ourselves as shining light. We
have a lot to discover about what, exactly, that would look like.
Bert: You’re bringing up something that Bernetta and I have been
looking for for over a year, and we haven’t found it yet. We have an
image of the masculine archetype of the king. What is the queen? The
queen is not must a feminine king, like Elizabeth I chopping off a lot
of heads. What is queen energy?
Aaron: I think it involves the feminine fire that Liz has been talking
about. And feminine authority.
Elizabeth: Yes, female authority, but I think we’re changing our
notions of both male and female authority. I’m not sure exactly what
you mean when you say we know what king energy is. My understanding is
that we’re beginning to change our notions of what authority is,
altogether. It incorporates, for example, for both men and women, the
capacity to undertake the underworld journey. In our culture, this is
not considered to be strong. The capacity to express emotion is
considered weak. To fall apart. To allow yourself to descend into
feeling, and then to come back up again.
I think a female queen and a male king would have the capacity to
express many different people, many different forms. That’s why I’m
particularly fond of the goddess Inanna from the Sumerian culture.
She’s the queen of heaven and earth. She descends into the underworld,
so that her power is not restrictive. I think that’s what we need in
this time. What is demanded of us as men and women, to have the
freedom to be multidimensional.
The queen and the king have a partnership. There’s room for both. We
have the opportunity to go down into the underworld, meet death, meet
grief, meet vulnerability, and then come back and bring the gifts of
those things back into the world. So the qualities of the cyclical
nature, that Aaron was talking about for men, and the cyclical nature
of the menstrual cycle, that those powers, which we don’t think of as
"power" in our culture, can be brought into our concept of authority.
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