Inner Work and Gender Justice ~ Page 4

Aaron: I feel that there can be no real kingdom without the queen, and there can be no real queendom without the king. Ultimately that authority and that power becomes balanced. In most of our myths it’s in concert. The one enhances the other. When the powers are separated from one another, we don’t feel very powerful. Men and women in same-sex groups have a sense of empowerment, and certainly that’s important. But I don’t think it comes into its fullness, in any sense of the word, until it comes into partnership. Because sameness does not provoke us in the same way that otherness does. You’ll notice in the book that we don’t use the term "opposite sex" any more. Because we don’t think that the differences are necessarily in opposition to one another. This is another way in which metaphors are powerful. The "other" invokes the sense that because you are "other" you may have some great mystery, some great gift, something deeper. The "other" tends to draw us closer than does the idea of "opposite."

Because the queen is different from the king, her very "otherness" provokes a transformation. That’s why we fear the "other" so much. Because the "other" has the power to transform us. It draws us into the unknown. It draws us into a different kind of journey, where we have less control. We feel less control when we’re with the other sex. There’s a lot of risk involved. There’s a risk of loss. But in order to transform spiritually and psychologically, we need to take that risk.

That’s why the images of the king and queen are used a lot in the old language of alchemy. The alchemists worked together as husband and wife to make the Philosopher’s Stone and the Elixir of Life. It seems to Elizabeth and me that the reason it’s so ultimately challenging for men and women to come together is that out of strife, out of fire of conflict, out of the fire of working through our differences and staying with our face in the fire, staying connected with one another and dealing with these issues, that the soul-making process is accelerated and deepened. It becomes more rich and complete.

When we come incapacitated, when we can't stay the course of the male-female journey, it falls apart, something gets lost along the way. That’s why we see so much malice and squabbling in the women's movement and the men’s movement. There’s a failure to develop the full king and queen. A failure to develop the adult, mature power. Kings and queens don’t squabble. They have a parental sort of wisdom, a leadership, a compassion, a capacity to hod the fabric of the entire community. That comes from moving out of this adolescent phase of rights and trying to dominate one another, shout at one another, and into a more mature phase of dialectic and interchange, a soul-making process where we can deepen one another and support one another. Then we’ll have a healthier kingdom.

Elizabeth: I’m still thinking about your question, about what the female queen is. It’s an intriguing question that’s provoking a lot of thought in me. I think it’s a hard question for women, because we’re searching for that right now. What would it be like to be completely empowered as a woman? Uniquely feminine and standing in a female body, and being a vehicle for generations of what [Jungian therapist] Naomi Lowinsky calls in Stories of the Motherline that inherited body of wisdom that comes down from generations of women. [Ms. Lowinsky describes the "motherline" as the "embodied experience of the female mysteries" -ed.] The king holds and transmits the fatherline to the kingdom. The queen holds the motherline and transmits the motherline and her queenly wisdom it down to her queendom.

Bernetta: It seems like her role would be in empowering other people, and giving them her blessing.

Aaron: That’s one of the main criteria when you look at a person who’s in a position of leadership. Are they blessing and empowering everyone around them? If the leaders of the men’s movement or the women’s movement are not doing that, then we can see they’re not really manifesting their king or queen energy.

Bert: Our ability to manifest king or queen energy depends on our own sense of beauty and power. Elizabeth suggested in your book that our need to control the person of the other gender comes from our loss of our sense of deep beauty and power as men and women. She said, "The challenge in the coming days of the seminar was to learn how to access their own beauty and power in the presence of other people." This led to mutual empowerment. Can you elaborate on that?

Elizabeth: It’s much easier for women to feel powerful when they’re with other women. If you remember the week-long wilderness retreat we write about in our book, after the women went off by themselves there was an argument about coming back, because we had this wonderful experience about feeling good about our bodies, feeling empowered, strong and vital.

There’s this fear that we can’t bring that beauty and power into our relationships with men, that somehow it will get lost. That’s the challenge, to be able to hold that in the presence of the other sex. Can we bring our sense of authenticity, our wildness, our being-ness, our sense of self-esteem, can we bring the gift of what we discover in our same-sex group back into our dialog with men and bless each other?

Aaron: Often in men’s groups I hear men say, when they’re in the middle of a conversation and talking about the truth of their experience, "God, I could never tell this in front of a woman. I could never speak the truth of my experience to a woman." That’s a very poignant point when that comes up. They’re not saying, "Get the women,", or "let’s have power over women." He’s just talking about how he’s been hurt, how he’s confused, the struggles he’s having in his life and how misunderstood he feels. We find it helpful when that starts to happen in same-sex groups. It feels safe, and we never want to abandon that.

In addition to that, we encourage some women and some men, when they start to feel strong enough on their own gender ground, to meet with one another.

It’s important to recognize one caution we throw in. They should not try to do it when they’re not ready for it. Some women really need to just be with women. A lot of men just need to be with men. This was especially true in the early days of the men’s movement. Women had been gathering for the last 20 or 30 years to talk about these issues, and it’s only been 5 or 7 years that men have been gathering together to reexamine their roles. The dialog isn’t balanced yet. Just as there are 50 women’s books for every men’s book, we know a lot more about women's issues than we know about men’s issues. A lot of men need more time to be with their brothers and get a sense of where they stand as men, and what their feelings really are, so they can articulate them to women. They shouldn’t come into these mixed-gender conferences naively.

That’s why we think it’s also important for these conferences to be facilitated. We’ve talked to a lot of people around the country who had good will, and tried to get together and do it, some with good results and others with pretty poor results.

Elizabeth and I have had the opportunity to do hundreds of these gatherings, for as little as an hour or for a week, with thousands of women and men. We carry some of that collective experience in our bodies and in our psyches, and we can host that conversation. There are others who are doing this kind of work and have this experience. One of the things we try to do is train a lot of other people. We offer trainings a couple times a year where people who want to host this kind of work can come and get more than they can just get in the book.

Certainly these groups can happen without facilitators, and people can get a lot of good guidelines from the book on how to host the group. But we think that people shouldn’t do this naively. People really have to come together step by step. There has to be a real sense of justice and balance.

Elizabeth: We were here at a humanistic psychology conference up here, on Olympia, a couple of years ago. We were working with a gender community, and there was a lot of bad feeling. If the leaders have a lot of prejudice against the other sex, that will come out. If the leaders are not balanced, and not equally giving concern, care and voice to both sides, then what happens is that that manifests in the group.

Aaron: This happened at that particular conference. A couple of angry women were leading it. It was supposed to be a gender conference, but in fact it was a "let’s get angry at the men" conference. The men were very conciliatory. It was not very beneficial to men or women, and it did not feel very good.

It’s really important that the facilitators have worked through some of the material, and can stand in this place that you might call between the king and the queen. Holding court and making sure that both sides have an equal opportunity to speak, and being considerate, recognizing that everybody at the council has intrinsic worth. That men and women are equally brilliant, often in differently ways.

But to the degree that it’s even possible to quantify our pain, men and women are equally suffering, and are equally powerful in creating change. Whenever we come to the table with that premise, there’s a real hope for movement. But whenever we come to the table with the attitude that whet we’re really going to do is get the men to come around to our feminist position, then it’s just another gender battle.

Bert: In the group you wrote about in your book, Gloria needed to hear the men state their accountability for the ways in which they have wounded women. The men had a similar need. Thus far, both sides had avoided taking much responsibility for their parts in the war. At that point you asked each group to ponder the question, "What do you contribute to the war between women and men and, furthermore, what weapons are you willing to lay down in order to make peace?"

Elizabeth: That’s a good question. That’s a place we hope to get to in our conferences and seminars. It’s a process to get there, because if one group is willing to do this but the other isn’t, there’s the possibility of taking too much on, and being shamed. It’s really something that has to be done bilaterally. We encourage men and women to walk into this together. One of the most human things that happens is when men and women are willing to admit how it is that they have created the gender war, and to take responsibility. For a woman, that’s a very big step, because women have been locked into the role of the innocent victim. We’ve been told that this has been done to us by the patriarchy, that the culture has done this to women, that women are the oppressed class. So it’s difficult for women to take that step.

It’s also getting very difficult for men, because they're getting blamed for everything. It’s hard for men to take some responsibility, without thinking that they’re going to have to take it all.

Aaron: In any situation, whether it’s a violence situation, a custody dispute, a conflict in interpersonal relationships, or a work-related conflict, whenever one gender is being held accountable, that situation is always shaming, always detrimental. That’s why we have such resistance to being held accountable. Because most of the demands for accountability are unilateral. It’s women demanding that men apologize for destroying the earth, or men demanding that women be held accountable for the way in which they steal children away in unfair divorce hearings, or the way in which they manipulate men with their sexuality.

Any time those demands are made, it’s shaming. When we acquiesce to those demands, which many men do, it breaks our spirit. There are a lot of feminist men, and although I respect their chivalry and their desire to care for women, in our councils we find that a lot of them are really ashamed of being a man. They’re very ashamed of their masculinity and apologetic to women. They can’t stand on their masculine ground and say it’s beautiful and wondrous, that it’s a mystical, magical, spiritual, incredible thing to be a male.

A lot of women acquiesce to a dominating man. We call them co-dependent. Or their whole concern is about how to keep the man from being angry and making sure that his needs are being taken care of. A lot of these women are meek and depressed, not standing on their ground. It’s fantastic, erotic and powerful to be a woman. The dynamism, the great intrinsic beauty and potency of the feminine; they cannot stand on that ground.

But when we come together and are equally accountable for what we’ve done to one another, enormous healing comes out of that kind of conversation. We hear women stand up and say "Yes, I’ve manipulated men with my sexuality." "Yes, I’ve ripped men off financially because my feminist principles told me that men have all the power, and I should get it any way I can." "Yes, I slept my way into a job." "Yes, I lied in a court hearing, my ex-husband is actually a great father. I said he had abused the child when he hadn’t."

The men get up and say, "Yes, I’ve said I loved women when all I really wanted to do is get into their pants." "I've battered my ex-wife." "I undercut a woman in the workplace, who was completely qualified, because I couldn’t stand the idea of a woman being my equal."

These kinds of things come out. When they do, a lot of the people in the room are weeping. Not because they’re ashamed, but because there’s so much relief in the atmosphere when they finally hear one another admit that they’ve been perpetrating this war on one another. Out of that we just find hearts open up. The room fills with love. Community seems to flow from it. But you can’t get there until you’ve told what Elizabeth and I call the "whole truth." You can’t get to this accountability until you’ve worked through all the other aggregations of feelings we’re talking about.

Elizabeth: It’s the last step of the process. You have to have an opportunity to express your anger and your hurt, and spend some time with your own gender group. Those are all necessary steps to take, so you can have enough self-esteem to hold onto your self-esteem and admit that you’ve screwed up sometimes.

It's a very interesting thing to notice that women’s weapons are very different from men’s. That’s another aspect of the difference between male and female cultures. The ways that women and men make gender war are quite different. They have different styles of expressing cruelty, manipulation or dominance. That’s something it’s important for men and women to have an opportunity to talk about separately. To discover these things, and see how we do them. Discovering what the secret, the shadow is, that we hold inside of us. Cleaning out our own houses.




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