Digging Through the Dumpster: Finding that Trash is actually Gold

Ok. It's been a few days and I've been working on my list of adjectives that comes to mind when I think of "Feminine". For those not remembering, I had assigned myself the task of (1) listing all the adjectives I could think of, (2) then listing all their positive and negative expressions, and (3) listing why those attributes might be survival contributors. Afterall, if those are generalized feminine traits than they have been selected for biologically speaking and eventually culturally speaking. They serve a role -- what could those roles be?

For this exercise, I'm picturing a very primitive stone age society type of living. No ammenities -- no sunblock, no toasters, no ovens, no maids, no guns, no cars, no antibiotics, etc. In this world, those who survive do so because they are clever, tough, and make it work.

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This is one that I didn't think of in my initial tirade, but was reminded of it later that same day: Sympathy. Sympathy, empathy and compassion are all related and are used interchangably by some. I make a distinction. Empathy is feeling what another person feels; compassion is feeling along with another; and sympathy is extending our own feelings toward another generally for the purposes of consulation. All three are actually feminine traits, and since they are closely related I'm going to try lumping them into one category.

A positive expression of this emotion serves to create bonds, social bonds (hehehe) with others. Sympathy and compassion both help to sooth ruffled feathers in others, or to console the wounded - emotionally or otherwise. Empathy helps do the same by creating the awareness that what we feel, others feel, and vice verse.

The positive side has the pure survival skill of enabling the individual to work within a group, to cement relationships and clan status so that in times of danger they will remembered and protected. It enables a woman to raise children effectively, to negotiate with men well, to have friendships with other women.

The negative side has more to do with how those emotions are put to use. I can use sympathy to actually destroy someone, if I wanted to. If I feel threatened by someone who turns to me for sympathy, I can use that position to ego-wise strip that person to the bones. It's the foundation behind a lot of social manipulation, and women can use this tool in their arsonal with devastating effects.

This has the survival function of allowing a woman to recognize situations and use the emotions of others to our advantage. Getting rid of threats ensures our own objectives become more likely -- whether I am trying to put my own son on the throne or trying to oust a competitor for the limited protection or food available.

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Here's a huge one that's been pinged repeatedly: multi-tasker. This means simply having the capacity to manage multiple tasks simultaneously. In Allison's parlance, she uses "diffuse awareness" -- being aware of everything in the surroundings without being focused on any one thing.

Positively, this serves to help protect (did you see that grass move? is there a lion stalking there?), to populate the database (which berry bush that I can recall is ripe at this time of year?), to monitor (water boiling, child playing with dog, friend scraping hides ... everything good!), and to plan the day. Actually, I really like Elizabeth Barber's take in "Women's Work: the first 20,000 years" where she conjectures that women took on the role of spinning and weaving because those tasks were easily interupted. Think about it -- women have a radar going at all times. Problems cause pings, which need to be attended to. That means dropping everything being done right now to tend to that. When that ping is taken care of, the original is task is resumed as if it had not been interupted.

Why is that a survival skill specific to women, to the feminine mind? Men can do this too, to a limited degree, though it does improve with practice. I would argue that it's because women are the primary raisers and trainers and caretakes of children, but they still have duties to the tribe to do. If a woman became focuse on berry gathering and her radar went down so that she didn't even notice her kids were all eaten, she's not going to have too much luck getting her genes into the future. Men, conversely, don't generally take young children with them hunting. They aren't tending to toddlers while running down a herd of mammoth!

Negatively, this aspect becomes what can be described as scatterbrained, being unable to maintain any degree of concentration long enough to complete anything. The bread gets burned because they forgot they'd put it into the firepit, that sort of thing. Ultimately, this is bad management. Running a bad household is pretty unattractive, inefficient, and potentially wasting precious resources that aren't exactly limitless. This ineffectiveness can easily lead to putting the family in jepardy in the form of poor long term planning -- such as failing to recognize theren't not food or warm clothing for the winter. While in today's world this negative is hardly lifethreatening, but I can easily see it as being a large problem in more demanding world.

Hrm. So in what way can this negative expression be a survival tool? ... That's a harder one to supply. I do know that in women it's a learned skill. and if the tribe as a whole is effective enough to compensate AND the scatterbrain has some strong social skills, it can easily be overlooked as a powerful negative.

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Emotional. ... I'm wondering if this is tied back into the first one. Emotional awareness, living within an emotional world, means relating to others more easily, more readily. If the primary job of the feminine is the rearing, training and caretaking of the young, this makes total sense. Kids aren't exactly power houses of logic -- that's learned, and comes only as the brain develops. If women spend more of their time with each other and with kids, it makes sense to be immersed in emotions -- all the better to relate with.

That would be the positive use. And it's survival function is tied to the society, enabling the female to be integrated into the fabric of her culture such that she and her kids are cared for enough so that her kids survive to follow suit.

The problem in this comes I think with lack of maturity. Much of what I listed originally (instability, self-centered, insecure, etc) are often seen within women who haven't been challenged, who'se lives are 'easy' when compared to primitive stone age life. Good lord half the women I've seen on Montell would be kicked out of my tribe so fast it'll make your head spin. If that kind of behavior is tolerated, it becomes an acceptable tool to get what is needed.

And here is the negative side of it -- emotional blackmail, and other forms of emotional manipulation. Think of the kids who are acting out violently all in an effort to get some attention. Boot their ass out of the hut at nut, leaving them to fend in the darkness until they straighten out and fly right, and you'll see some behavior modification right quick. I see it all the time in horses -- young stallions raised with mares are perfectly well mannered, sequestered and isolated and those young stallions are unmanageable assholes.

At the least this negative does serve some survival role -- if it's fostered, allowed by the tribe, then it's acceptable and expected behavior. It becomes the means by which the individual earns their place in society, securing their right to food, shelter, protection and mates.

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Ok. I think I've been through enough of my list to see the trend. Almost all my problem with the concept of the Feminine comes from the negative expression of the emotional self, but now I can see just how integral it is and how it serves a key survival role. I don't know about other folks, but I'm a "why" kinda person. If I don't see the why, the what's makes no sense. The Why's give me perspective.

Given this exercise, I think that I've tried to distance myself from the emotional core of my nature because I mistook the negative expressions as 'normal', and they are not. Because of my rejection of this, my survival is actually at stake because I'm failing to integrate into the society. Instead, I stand outside of it because I lack the emotional awareness of myself to connect in a mature and healthy way. It's entirely self imposed, but it's run the entire length of my life. I've had one friend, if I was lucky, at any given point in my life. At my high school graduation, I got my diploma and walked off the field, feeling utterly no need to say a single thing to anyone. I left my place of employment after 7 years without saying too much to anyone, figuring no one would miss me anyway. A friend pinged me and mentioned it would have been nice for me to say goodbye at least, considering that I'd been working with these same people for 7 years. It never crossed my mind. Honestly! Now I feel bad, and I think back to high school. I went to school with some of those folks since second grade, when I moved into that school system. From second grade through twelfth, from age 8 through age 18, 10 years with the same kids, playing soccer, running track and cross-country, helping with homework, etc, and I didn't feel a part of the group enough to feel the need to say farewell to a single person.

Conversely, my brother cried at his graduation as he went from person to person, telling them how much he'd miss them, to wish them well on their life's journey, etc. I remember laughing at him because he laughed at me when he tried to shove onto me an emotionality and sentimentality that was utterly lacking. Projection. Now I think ... he's the better person. He's made himself part of the social group, and I'm the outsider. In a primitive society, I would have been left out in the cold to be eaten, freeze or starve.

My early childhood rejection of the Feminine within myself, the villification of all things 'weak' and 'frilly', has had some serious life consequences that I never really saw before now. I never really fully realized just what a large hole is here. No wonder the subconscious spat up this subject, the subject of reclaiming the majesty of the feminine, when I sat down to think about what it was I needed to chronical during this transition in my life!

What do I do about it?? I find myself mockingly asking "what am I supposed to do - go emote all over people now?" And that is exactly the tone of a rejection, the phraseology of villification. How can I do this constructively? Positively?

I'll have to think about it. I'm wondering if simply wearing the clothes I've snubbed (despite the deep down secret admiration for the look) is a good first step. I can't run out and buy a bunch of clothes, so that means I'll have to make some of the patterns I've been collecting. That'll also be a literally constructive act. I'm MAKING the clothing, consciously. It'll be interesting to see what that act does, internally speaking.

Onward.
-- Lioness (in training)

Reclaiming usually starts with dumpster diving

Had an interesting breakthrough today, and I suddenly also realized why I hadn't been inspired to write anything for this blog. It's because I was trying to focus on the wrong thing -- on the relationship between the masculine and the feminine. Why this title and topic sprang into my mind was because I needed explore my own relationship with the Feminine, my relationship with myself as a woman. Alison has done a good job with the hunter/gatherer thing, and I don't want to just reiterate her stuff (even if I do add new layers to it from time to time).

What I need to do is explore and own my own Feminine. All this came out today because I realized that my housemate was reflecting back to me for recognition all those things about women that I despise in myself. She's just who she is, and I most definitely do NOT despise her at all. What was aggitating me was rather that she was making it difficult for me to remain in intentional ignorance of all the things about myself that I've been flat out ignoring, denying and villifying since I was a wee thing. Hell, one of my earliest memories was that my dad was disappointed with me because I, his firstborn, was a girl. This is NOT his thinking, it's mine, and I gave it to him and made him carry it for decades before I finally realized that it wasn't my dad that was disappointed, it was me. I was disappointed with myself for having internal plumbing. For being a ... *sneer* girl.

How on earth am I going to 'reclaim the majesty of the feminine' if I'm actively villifying it?!? As long as I'm doing that, clearly I can't reclaim a damn thing. So now I have to dive into exactly what it is that I am turning my nose up at.

While vacuuming, I was doing an exercise in which I assigned myself the task of listing all the adjectives I could think of that described Woman. Here's a sample of the list:

Emotionally unstable.
Harpy/Bitchy/Nag.
Clingy.
Self-Centered.
Insecure.
Useless.
Illogical.

Can you see the jist of this list? It's entirely negative. There's not a single positive attribute within my mind that I can identify as 'feminine'. Soft? Euphamism for weak or flabby. Multitasking? Euphamism for scatterbrained. Good communicator? Euphamism for gossip.

Eeee! Not good!!! Even trying to summon up positives associated with motherhood is just as riddled with warped and unhealthy perceptions ranging from careless slut to broodmare to angry and/or tired all the time. No wonder I never wanted kids -- there was nothing positive in the least associated with the concept. NOTHING. So I pour all this denied affection out onto animals. It's only very recently that I've allowed myself to smile fondly at the antics of a kid being a kid in the grocery store (not the screaming and being a general shit sort of antics, but the playful running around enthusiasm for life sorts of antics). But if someone's there to witness this stupid smile, you can bet I'll swallow it completely and instead ignore the kid.

Ack. My throat is burning again. Definitely an area of high unexpressed emotion.

Now that I can see just how exceedingly unhealthy and negative my view of what it means to BE feminine, the challenge is how to turn this around. How to own it, and find the gifts within the negatives. For example, while it may be negative to be a Bitch, the gift of this is the strength and conviction to go after what you want. The positive of the Nag is that it keeps track of what needs to be done, so if the Nag and the Bitch joined forces the combo would go from complaining incessantly to keeping track of it and acting on it.

One observation that I had as I was cataloging all the things I've done to repress this side of me was the patterns that I've chosen to purchase over the years. Curious, I went to my pattern drawer. There are more than 2 dozen dress and skirt patterns, and one shirt pattern. No pants or slacks. Almost entirely dresses. I almost bought another dress pattern this past weekend. How many have I actually MADE? None. Going to my closet, I have the reverse. I have 1 dress and over 2 dozen pants. Hrm. Interesting. Yet another subconscious and unrecognized wishful expression of who I am beneath all the masks.

I have to admit I'm terrified that there really IS no 'majesty' at all to the feminine. That I'm just deluding myself with wishful thinking. The rational part of me recognizes this is a groundless fear, but I have to recognize it, own it. I'm also concerned that by embracing this side, I'll become everything that I hate, and by extension my husband will look at me and think 'uk, I really did marry just another woman'. I feel that this is the fear with the most bite to it.

I don't want to be emotionally unstable, or an illogical raging harpy, or devolve into a useless damsel who cries for help with everything all the time. Fortunately, I can feel there is tremendous strength within the Feminine, most definitely a powerful majesty, and I'm just too mired in the dark side of it to see clearly right now. I can't ignore where I'm standing and expect to reach for the bright shiney successfully. I have to deal with where I am so that I can move forward, move toward integrating the ugly shadow side with the light majestic side.

This will be my next self-assignment -- list all the attributes I can think of which I consider "feminine". For every attribute, list the positive and negative expressions. From there, list possible survival reasons why those attributes are present.

- Lioness (in training)