The last couple of months have been a bit of a whirlwind of writing and then editing and promoting my essay series, Asymmetrical Re-worlding, on Medusa Rising, alongside plenty of fatigue, procrastination and mind-numbing distractions to pass the time. Chronic illness and nervous system dysfunction make life particularly complicated. I can be amazingly productive for a while, but then will crash and perhaps take weeks/months/years to get back to a somewhat normal (for me) functional state again.
But as I have gained a few new followers I thought I’d jot down some further thoughts about what I wrote in that long piece, and a bit more about myself, because I’m feeling thoughtful and nostalgic.
In my very first post on this blog, way back in 2016, I said that illness, in its strange way, has been a gift, which ‘allows me to spend time working on my own development, to read much and widely, and to pursue creative and spiritual work. It has led me to follow a certain winding and wonderful path, and for that I am grateful.’ I explained how living with chronic illness means that I live on the edge of society looking in, which gives me a unique perspective—very limited in some ways, but actually so far outside of the realm of the ‘normal’ that I see the world differently to most people.
I also said that the blog would have an emphasis on ‘the feminine’—a word I would not choose to use nowadays, because it is so misunderstood (though I reluctantly made use of a capitalised ‘The Feminine’ in my essay, which I hope I made clear was based on the material embodiment of sex, not on the stereotypes of gender—the ‘female principle’, not some airy-fairy, frilly ‘femininity’).
I have changed a great deal since I wrote that first post here. No doubt I’d want to alter some of what I wrote back then, because as it happens 2016 turned out to be a big turning point, as a few months after launching my blog I was thrust into a sudden confrontation with the problem of transgenderism (which I wrote about at length in Finding the Bedrock in 2023). It’s a thorny issue, but my stance is hardline, because it is based on compassion and a respect for natural limits. What we do to the Earth we do to ourselves; what we do to ourselves we do to the Earth.
Though the (hilarious) irony of transgender ideology, which is a backlash against the gains that women have made (and a dangerous denial of embodiment as our very human natures are colonised by biotechnologies, amongst other things) is that it has spawned a re-emergence of radical (materialist) feminism, which is sending out Medusan, snaky tentacles everywhere. It certainly was the catalyst that prompted me to begin reading more feminist literature in search of the kind of sense-making that only women (and some non-sexist and ecologically-minded men) can provide.
My thinking has developed in expansive ways since then, though of course I am, and will always be, merely a student of feminism. Circumstances mean that I feel unable to walk my talk as I would like, and imposter syndrome visits occasionally. But if reading and synthesising insights and feelings in writing and art is all I can do (however sporadically), then it is what I will do, and it will be enough.
When I first began drafting what became Asymmetrical Re-worlding I had initially titled the document play, because that is what it felt like I was doing. I was deep in the flow of creative, interconnected, nourishing, witchy thought and writing, and though progress each day was slow (my fatigued bodymind doesn’t work all that efficiently), the piece had a direction all of its own. I just had to have the patience to follow it to its eventual conclusion.
Of course, after writing an essay like that the usual thing happens—I discover yet more references and quotes I could have added, and I begin to follow other lines of inquiry that I wasn’t able to pursue.
One consideration is the crucial challenge and often lifelong process of coming to feminist consciousness: becoming ‘woman-identified’—meaning prioritising women and girls/children, and de-centring men. It’s obvious that the ‘postfeminists’ I was refuting in my essay series are still very much male-identified. ‘In complicity women embody patriarchal definitions of the feminine self; in co-optation women embody patriarchal definitions of the normative self (i.e., man’s)’, says Catherine Keller. ‘Both produce “male-identified” women, but in the first instance through complementarity, in the second through imitation’. (1) Postfeminists are doing the former, being the complicit complement to patriarchal men. Feminists aim to do neither. We are Virgin: one-in-ourselves. (2) (And no, that doesn’t mean we prize independence over interdependence, or that we can’t have relationships with worthy men.)
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| From PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, by Glenys Livingstone |
It seems that real living, strong and independent women had first to be physically destroyed and subdued before the men of the new bourgeois class could create a new romantic ideal of womanhood. An ideal in which the frail, submissive sentimental woman, one dependent on the man as ‘breadwinner and protector’, woman as the epitome of the world of feelings rather than of reason, plays the main role. As Sheila Rowbotham remarks, throughout the nineteenth century and even until today this romantic ideal of womanhood has been the ‘desired space’ for men’s longings and still largely determines the man-woman relationship. This ideal of womanhood was the necessary complement to the strong, enterprising, bourgeois white man who began to conquer and colonize the world for the sake of capital accumulation. (3)
As Carolyn Merchant writes in The Death of Nature, ‘female economic dependence [was] brought about in the seventeenth-century transition from subsistence to capitalist modes of production’. (4) The new economic order had ‘at its ideological core … the concepts of passivity and control’, which meant that ‘middle- and upper-class women would gradually lose their roles as active partners in economic life, becoming passive dependents in [the spheres of] both production and reproduction’. (5)
This construction of the submissive, sentimental and passive woman is, of course, a fantasy, a projection of the male mind that cannot define itself except in opposition to what it is not. Once women were socialised away from strength to frailty, independence to dependence, and knowledge to ignorance, they were much easier to control and to be the mirror to Man that men required them to be. ‘[T]he rise of man was based on the descent of woman.’ (6) Women went from being an essential ‘economic resource for their families’ subsistence to a psychic resource for their husbands’. (7, my emphasis) (And take note: this was the ideal of womanhood for the bourgeoisie, not the working class whose women always had to work and couldn’t afford to be delicate and sentimental. Not to mention women in non-western cultures who usually did, and still do, the majority of farming work. Mere housewives they are not.)
It’s especially heartening that Mies essentially draws the same conclusion that I do in terms of what is required of men within a totally new conception of culture:
The present sexual division of labour [has] to change. Men and women alike would have to share responsibility for the production and maintenance of life in its broadest sense: to care for children, the aged, the sick, to look after the household, to provide emotional support would not be the task of women alone but that of men too. (8)
The male/female polarity that is propagandised by the postfeminists, neo-conservatives, and some new ageists cannot be maintained in the ‘economy of Life’, in which care for needs would take priority, as this must replace the unsustainable ‘economy of capitalism’. In such an economy, based on subsistence,
men would have less time for destructive activities, such as war games and so on. If men had to share full responsibility for maintaining life they would eventually also have to change their identity. The present upsurge of an aggressive, militarized, Rambo-image of masculinity would become obsolete, and this would be of the greatest benefit to women and children. Because as long as maleness is identified with Ramboism and machoism, women and children will be the first — but only the first — victims of men's wars against women, nature and other peoples. (9)
The male identity can be quite a flimsy thing under patriarchy, so brittle that the least challenge to it precipitates fits of rage. This is because it is based on opposition, on dualism. Patriarchal Man is merely not-woman and not-Nature. He is empty of genuine selfhood. But I hope I made it clear in Asymmetrical Re-worlding that this is a socialised identity, not an innate one, and therefore it can be changed. To claim that men are naturally dominant is offensive to men, just as it is misogynistic and offensive to women to claim that we are naturally submissive. As Glenys Livingstone puts it:
"Masculinity" and "femininity" are largely cultural developments—developed over time by story, belief systems, even the foods each sex have been allowed to eat in some cultures, the activities they each have been allowed, so that certain styles, physical and psychic, have been bred into and out of maleness and femaleness to suit the mindframe. "Maleness" and "femaleness" on the other hand may be something quite different and more like a physical kaleidoscope … (10)
What also strikes me is that these categories of dominant man and submissive woman are so rigid we could define them as a form of fundamentalism, and fundamentalism—like all patriarchal manifestations—is about control. But that’s just it—we’re not in control—and nor does such a polarity even make sense within the creative multiplicity of Life and the Cosmos. Livingstone again:
"Wholeness" does not have to be understood in terms of a "feminine" plus "masculine" equation, and nor does it serve us. The Universe was not necessarily formed by "female" plus "male" energy, as is often loosely asserted even by those whose work could otherwise be considered helpful to gaining wholeness. This dualism is not essential to the Creativity of the Universe. Creativity required such qualities as are stereotypically associated with "male" energy, long before the advent of the male, and even before the advent of the biosphere—the first cell. The so-called masculine attributes didn't suddenly appear in the Creativity of the Cosmos when the male appeared. Differentiation for instance is a quality innate to all being, and is primordial. The advent of gender and meiotic sex was an enormous leap for Cosmogenesis, enhancing the Cosmic project of Creativity, a major catalyst and immensely alluring one as far as I and many are concerned but it is not required for “wholeness". (11)
The ‘female metaphor’, as Livingstone terms it, and as I have conceived of it via the asymmetry of the inyo in my essay series, is ‘a complete and whole unity of Creativity’. (12)
Here are a couple of screenshots from a lecture by Dutch primatologist Carel van Schaik on the invention of gender inequality. As you can see, the overlap of the distribution of differences between women and men can change based on socialisation, i.e. cultural conditioning (which, as I said at the beginning of Part 5 of Asymmetrical Re-worlding, is that powerful that it can even determine how women experience the pain of childbirth!). Less gendered socialisation and expectations means greater overlap, which should mean better relationships between women and men because we are no longer split away from each other into different mentalities and modes of (dis)embodiment. We could relate more intimately with the greater commonality of our humanness, while also enjoying our bodily sexual differences and diverse personalities. The second screenshot also points out a number of fallacies that we need to be wary of if we’re not to fall into certain conceptual traps.
We, as humans, are so malleable (and even other species can change in quite radical ways if circumstances warrant it). Ultimately, there is no formula for life. It’s a process that has so many variables and wild possibilities that much of it remains beyond our understanding. This doesn’t mean that the universe is merely chaos lacking any sense of order, but simply that it is so much bigger than us wee humans. We need to have a lot more respect for what we do not know, and for the wealth of possibilities within Earthly limitations.
I used to think there was some kind of overarching Truth, but in fact there is an entire ecosystem of interwoven, interacting truths, that overlap and sometimes even contradict each other, because everything is contextual and continually changing. These truths are not always easy or pleasant; sometimes they ask a lot of us. ‘Truth is harder to bear than ignorance, and so ignorance is valued more—also because the status quo depends on it’, said Andrea Dworkin. ‘[B]ut love depends on self-knowledge, and self-knowledge depends on being able to bear the truth.’ (13)
As Sarah Blaffer Hrdy says in her brilliant book Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, which overturns so much of what we tend to think about females and motherhood:
For millions of years male reproductive success has depended upon viewing females as individuals to be coerced, defended, and constrained. Changing such ancient attitudes does not come easily to men …
Long socialized for subordinate roles, women may be more inclined to look at the world from more than one perspective, male as well as female, dominant as well as subordinate. For those accustomed to the perquisites of patriarchy, however, it would less often be useful to see the world from the point of view of those female subordinates whose reproductive potential they sought to coopt for their own ends. And few men—without guidance and extra effort—seem eager to do so. (14)
Women, with our potential for double-consciousness, can see both sides: the malestream world, and our own deeply held women’s knowing; men tend to only see their own side of things, which is a very limited perspective, and they need to make the effort to develop new ways of seeing, new values, if they are to evolve into the nonpatriarchal men they have the promise to be.
It’s not up to women to refrain from participation in the patriarchal system and to withdraw into the ‘beneficent paternalism’ (15) of the postfeminist fantasy of the domestic realm—to give up our rightful freedom as human beings to be ‘protected’ by men. It’s actually up to men to withdraw from their own system, to become traitors to it, and to become more like us, so that women and children no longer require ‘protection’, and to enable a totally new way of life to come into being. Men have to evolve. They need new identities.
I am immensely proud of what I wrote in Asymmetrical Re-worlding. It was never just a response to postfeminism, but also an exploration of ideas I’ve been researching and pondering for several years.
I agree with what Iain McGilchrist says in this conversation with Dougald Hine—that the world is not a problem that can be solved; it’s a predicament with no solution. We must just live through what is coming. But that doesn’t mean there aren’t things we can do. Yet as Mies says, ‘women will not eternally be the Trummerfrauen (the women who clear up the ruins after the patriarchal wars)’. Instead, men ‘must give up their involvement in destructive commodity production for the sake of accumulation and begin to share women's work for the preservation of life’. (16) We expect much more of men, and will not continue to let them get away with the perpetuation of dominance culture.
Will the needed change happen? Perhaps not. But if we don’t at least imagine it, and start talking about it, and believing in the actualisation of gynocentric possibilities, then we truly are doomed.
We’re all complicit in civilisation. I love books and music and art supplies, and don’t want to be without them, and I will at some point probably be dependent on medication. If the collapse occurs in my lifetime, I will die because of it. But I live with these contradictions, and to some extent welcome them. Life is, can be, beautiful despite the horrors. I’m not going to just bow down to falsities merely because it is easier than facing the many truths, complexities and wonders of human life on this planet we call home. I will forever be learning and expanding my understanding, which requires thinking, because that’s what humans are supposed to do, and what too few people are really doing with any depth these days.
Thought—reasoning, which is so much more than just abstract, rational thinking, including experience, intuition, imagination, memory and more—is not out of step with our embodiment. It’s integral to who we are as humans. ‘Thought: the brain’s bone’, as Robert Bringhurst says in his poem ‘A Quadratic Equation’. (17) Or, as Paula Gunn Allen writes, ‘It is as the old ones have told: the name of the Female Principle is “Thought,” and she is more fundamental and varied than time and space.’ (18)
She is everything, and She is lusciously fertile.
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| From Man Against Being: Body Horror and the Death of Life, by aurora linnea |
References
1. Catherine Keller, From a Broken Web: Separation, Sexism and Self (Beacon Press: Boston, 1986), p. 16
2. Monica Sjöö & Barbara Mor, The Great Cosmic Mother: Rediscovering the Religion of the Earth, HarperOne: San Francisco, 1987/1991, p. 158
3. Maria Mies, ‘White Man’s Dilemma: His Search for What He Has Destroyed’, in Maria Mies and Vandana Shiva, Ecofeminism, Bloomsbury: London, 1993/2014, p. 134-5
4. Carolyn Merchant, The Death of Nature: Women, Ecology, and the Scientific Revolution, 40th anniversary edition, HarperOne, 1980/2020, p. 196 (ebook page number)
5. Merchant, p. 180 (ebook page number)
6. Mies, ‘Self-Determination: The End of a Utopia?’, Ecofeminism, p. 223
7. Merchant, p. 186 (ebook page number)
8. Mies, ‘Liberating the Consumer’, Ecofeminism, p. 257
9. Mies, ‘Liberating the Consumer’, Ecofeminism, p. 257
10. Glenys Livingstone, PaGaian Cosmology: Re-inventing Earth-based Goddess Religion, iUniverse, Inc.: New York, 2005, 2008, p. 61
11. Livingstone, p. 60
12. Livingstone, p. 60
13. Andrea Dworkin, Intercourse, Twentieth Anniversary Edition, Basic Books: New York, 1987/2006, p. 63
14. Sarah Blaffer Hrdy, Mother Nature: Maternal Instincts and How They Shape the Human Species, Ballantine Books: New York, 1999, p. 497
15. Jane Clare Jones, ‘Feminism, Liberal Individualism, and Collective Political Action’, THE RADICAL NOTION, Issue Eight (Autumn/Winter 2022), p. 122-3 – available here: https://theradicalnotion.org/
16. Mies, ‘The Need for a New Vision: the Subsistence Perspective’, Ecofeminism, p. 321
17. Robert Bringhurst, Selected Poems, Jonathan Cape: London, 2010, p. 6
18. Jane Caputi, Gossips, Gorgons & Crones: The Fates of the Earth, Bear & Company, Santa Fe, 1993, p. xx
