A Deeper Feminism

I will fight to the end for a woman’s right to choose, for equal pay and rights in the workplace. I think we need to go a bit farther in providing families with adequate time off from work to care for a loved one and most of all, I think we need to protect women from rape and domestic violence.

But I don’t think that goes far enough. Last night I was reading We Are The Ones We Have Been Waiting For by Alice Walker and she told this story about the Swa people of the Amazon:

They tell us that in their society men and women are considered equal but very different. Man, they say, has a destructive nature: it is his job therefore to cut down trees when firewood or canoes are needed. His job also to hunt down and kill animals when there  is need for more protein. His job to make war, when that becomes a necessity. The woman’s nature is thought to be nurturing and conserving. Therefore, her role is to care for the home and garden, the domesticated animals and the children. She inspires the men. But perhaps her most important duty is to tell the men when to stop.

It is the woman who says: Stop. We have enough firewood and canoes, don’t cut down any more trees. Stop. We have enough meat; don’t kill any more animals. Stop. This war is stupid and using up too many of our resources. Stop. Perkins says that when the Swa are brought to this culture they observe that it is almost completely masculine. That the men have cut down so many trees and built so many excessively tall buildings that the forest itself is dying; they have built roads without end and killed animals without number. When, ask the Swa, are the women going to say Stop?

Indeed. When are the women, and the Feminie within women and men, going to say Stop?

I don’t use this to idealize the Swa culture. I’m happy that in ours, gender roles have become a bit more fluid. But I agree with the Swa when they say our culture has become almost completely masculine. And its not just Republicans. Look at how the NYT portrayed the Democratic Party victory in 2006:

Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

The passage from Walker’s book reminded me of the work of Riane Eisler, who is best known for The Chalice and the Blade. In this book Eisler posits that we are living in a “dominator” (blade) society since the end of the Neolotic agrarian age and that prior to that time, archeology shows a more “partnership” (chalice) model for most cultures.

Original chalice cultures worshiped the goddess and celebrated birth as the central symbolic demonstration of their spirituality. For the blade cultures, “the central mythical image… is no longer the birth of the young god. It is his crucifixion and death.” She says,

The underlying problem is not men as a sex. The root of the problem lies in a social system in which the power of the blade is idealized – in which both men and women are taught to equate true masculinity with violence and dominance and to see men who do not conform to this ideal as too soft or effeminate.

Eisler also draws on the research of psychologist David Winter, who in looking at historical patterns was able to demonstrate that “more repressive attitudes toward women are predictors of periods of aggressive warfare.” She sounds her ultimate warning this way,

For be they religious or secular, modern or ancient, Eastern or Western, the basic commonality of totalitarian leaders and would-be leaders is their faith in the power of the lethal Blade as the instrument of our deliverance. A dominator future is therefore, sooner or later, almost certainly also a future of global nuclear war – and the end of all of humanity’s problems and aspirations.

It is indeed time to shout STOP to all this madness. But then what?

Eisler is addressing this with her work captured on the website The Partnership Way. I think she is making a very bold statement that it is in our very personal relationships, where domination and heirarchy are taught early on, that the change needs to happen.

Here’s an excerpt from her writing titled Spare the Rod:

When children experience violence, or observe violence against their mothers, they learn it’s acceptable- even moral-to use force to impose one’s will on others. Indeed, the only way they can make sense of violence coming from those who are supposed to love them is that it must be moral.

Terrorism and chronic warfare are responses to life in societies in which the only perceived choices are dominating or being dominated. These violent responses are characteristic of cultures where this view of relations is learned early on through traditions of coercion, abuse, and violence in parentchild and gender relations.

It’s not coincidental that throughout history the most violently despotic and warlike societies have been those in which violence, or the threat of violence, is used to maintain domination of parent over child and man over woman. It’s not coincidental that the 9/11 terrorists came from cultures where women and children are terrorized into submission. Nor is it coincidental that Afghanistan under the Taliban in many ways resembled the European Middle Ages- when witchburnings, public drawings and quarterings, despotic rulers, brutal violence against children, and male violence against women were considered moral and normal. Neither is it coincidental that, in the U.S. today, those pushing “crusades” against “evil enemies” oppose equal rights for women and advocate harshly punitive childrearing.

I belive that it is in taking on these issues that we can take feminism to a deeper level; by shouting STOP to all the madness and begin talking about how we can change the lessons many of us learn too early about domination and violence into lessons of partnership and caring.  

 

69 comments

Skip to comment form

  1. Photo Sharing and Video Hosting at Photobucket

    the madness!!!

    • kj on December 3, 2007 at 02:28

    who hasn’t looked to her own history (herstory!) to see just what happened to us, when, and why. Why have we become the second class sex, as far as I know, worldwide, for this long.

    A new joining, not a patriarchy, not a matriarchy, as both systems have great flaws, but an entirely new model is the subject of great interest to me. I’ve attempted to work the idea in poems over the last couple of years. More work is needed. Everywhere. Obviously.

    Thanks for this. Perfect timing, I think, for here.  ðŸ™‚

  2. So I’m thinking, how did those women STOP the men from warring?  What was the mechanism they used?

    Obviously they must have had some clout in the community to begin with, that the men would listen to them in the first place.

    I think in our present society once again too many folks are not taking on this responsibility.  ‘Cause you’re right, we are more fluid in our society today and men are definitely in the category of “stoppers” as well here in America.

    Read a novel by sci-fi author Sherri Tepper called Gibbons Decline and Fall.  Here’s a blurb about it:

    A wave of fundamentalism is sweeping across the globe as the millennium approaches, and a power-hungry presidential candidate sees his ticket to success in making an example out of a teenage girl who abandoned her infant in a Dumpster. Taking the girl’s case is Carolyn Crespin, a former attorney, who left her job for a quiet family life. Now she must call upon five friends from college, who took a vow to always stand together. But their success might depend on the assistance of Sophy, the enigmatic sixth friend, whom they all believed dead

    Won’t go into the whole plot line, but the “mysterious” Sophie comes from a place where women take seriously the role of “stopping.”  She teaches the other women how to do this and as well calls out women in America who are not taking on this role.

    Everyone has power, if only the power of their sheer existence.  It takes courage to use that power in ways that threaten our own safe lives.  I guess my question is what the mechanism of that power would be for women and men today in our culture.

    To be sure, the home is a center of power and on the individual level there is much that can be done.

    But on a community level there also must be many places of power — schools, libraries, youth centers, any place where people gather.  I’d imagine there are men and women out there already fighting the good fight in these places of power.

    It scares me that we may be too late.  But I’m the type to go down fighting in any event.  :-p

    • Edger on December 3, 2007 at 03:00

    Walker’s metaphor is perfect: “the central mythical image… is no longer the birth of the young god. It is his crucifixion and death.”

    I don’t meant to make light of it, and you probably know that,  but George Carlin said much the same thing, I think, with:

    If there is a god, it has to be a man. No woman could or would fuck things up like this!

    And that may have something to do with that …in the Moral Life of Children, that one huge difference between moral and immoral children is that the moral ones did not see an ‘us’ and ‘them’ but only an ‘us’.

    i.e. The Partnership Way.

    Makes perfect sense to me.

  3. that Riane Eisler blogged a couple of times at dkos, Booman Tribune and MLW. She put up a couple of diaries at all three places that didn’t get a lot of attention from what I could see. I actually got to have a bit of a conversation with her, which was thrilling since she’s been sort of a hero of mine. The book “The Chalice and the Blade” had a HUGE imact on my life.

    I’ve always wondered if we could get her to come here for a discussion at docudharma. I think she’d fit right in!

  4. Essentially I feel we are all ‘fearing’ the potential for the demise of humanity as we know it. And I feel we just may be. Mother nature sure seems to be giving up on us.

    But who is she giving up on? I would argue ‘man’ more than ‘woman’. The destruction she has suffered has been at the hands of men and in a relatively small time frame.

    Women, being earth based and nuturing would have instinctively abated any behavior that would have put our very earth in harms way.

    So I have come to my own conclusion. I am putting my faith not in the hands of mankind but in mother earth. I may not be here to see how she rights how she was wronged but hopefully my children or their children or a new blade of grass growing from scorched earth will be. And that’s really it. What will be will be.

    Man has had his chance and he has ruined whatever he has touched

  5. people that today are involved in struggles and need your help and ours.

    Look for alternative press articles discussing local activists, give them a larger voice.  Find what is appealing about them, their life story, their personal outlook, their actions…

    Then write about them in a way that frames the issues you are concerned with and describes and provides courses of action for the reader.

    This is a model that should be used again and again by the netroots.

    One post from anyone here can spark the next movement.

  6. …very.

    I love this stuff, though on some level I have a hard time getting anything this concrete out of prehistory; I think a lot of people trip there, which is why I tend to like the reclaiming thing of “this is a working story” and going straight to power-over or power-with.

    Thank you for the Eisler links. And Tepper is great 🙂

  7. Poem for South African Women

    by June Jordan

    Our own shadows disappear as the feet of thousands

    by the tens of thousands pound the fallow land

    into new dust that

    rising like a marvelous pollen will be

    fertile

    even as the first woman whispering

    imagination to the trees around her made

    for righteous fruit

    from such deliberate defense of life

    as no other still

    will claim inferior to any other safety

    in the world

    The whispers too they

    intimate to the inmost ear of every spirit

    now aroused they

    carousing in ferocious affirmation

    of all peaceable and loving amplitude

    sound a certainly unbounded heat

    from a baptismal smoke where yes

    there will be fire

    And the babies cease alarm as mothers

    raising arms

    and heart high as the stars so far unseen

    nevertheless hurl into the universe

    a moving force

    irreversible as light years

    traveling to the open eye

    And who will join this standing up

    and the ones who stood without sweet company

    will sing and sing

    back into the mountains and

    if necessary

    even under the sea:

    we are the ones we have been waiting for.

    The last line also inspired the song “We Are The Ones” by “Sweet Honey In The Rock.”

  8. Balance of opposites. Sorry I missed this at it’s start. I have been reading a lot of ancient mythology recently.  Which is steeped with this. Our culture is so warlike and masculine, that even our concepts of how to counteract all this testosterone, enables it. It becomes a power struggle in which we are required to fight on the the male’s strengths and positioning.

    Somehow female strengths, both physical and mental are considered weaker and are often overlooked, or dismissed as not logical, nor practical nor as essential. How is the male part of the equation stopped when it gets this whacked? All the goddesses are needed, not just Artemis. Raw power is in itself a yang thing so I believe this is a good subject and a challenging one. My namesake online kept the killer male at bay with stories, I would love to hear stories about deeper feminism.            

Comments have been disabled.