I've learned something invaluable while working through the resentments that I have toward only 5 of the many people in my life. I've even only done one of them and this was realized. I was blabbering away at lunch today and this statement fell out of my mouth. My conversation partner commented on it and I suddenly realized what I had actually said. I had to run home and write it down! Ready for it??
What we resent in others are actually aspects of ourselves that we don't yet have the courage to own.
You want to know where you are hiding from yourself? Do this exercise, and be open to the truth of the above statement. It will transform those people from folks that we resent into folks that we can emulate as guides while learning to claim and own those aspects they have illustrated to us.
It's actually quite liberating to see this. I'm now extremely eager to work through the other 4!
- Lioness (in training)
Saturday, April 16, 2011
Starting Down the Rabbit Hole
It's often been said that, despite appearances, many women in Western culture tend to disregard or ignore their own wants and needs in favor of the wants and needs of those around them. In all reality, I'd imagine this trait is ingrained within Woman from an evolutionary standpoint. I mean how else is she going to raise kids and see to the needs of an entire tribe if she's not inherently at some level willing to put the needs of others ahead of her own? At some point, however, her own must be tended to. I think therein lies the challenge that many women face, of which I am no exception. The problem though is that this precept is one that has as many foundational underpinnings as any other relationship with the Self, and finding our own personal connection to this is our own challenge. This post is me trying to explore this concept in a way that opens doors for future or deeper exploration. It's a model, one that I've found helpful even though the process demands that I be willing to listen to the emotional surges which are my guideposts. Here goes...
Precept: I shouldn't have any personal wants or desires for myself.
Problem: I have a very hard time even recognizing, let alone articulating, any deeper wants beyond "I want dinner" or "I want to do this today". Without giving any recoginition and thereby conscious validity to deeper wants, they find hidden or even destructive ways of being satisfied.
Digging around in this problem, I felt an emotional reaction when I revealed something that I wanted which had to be darn near dragged out of me. That reaction was an extreme discomfort to being vulnerable, to being open to rejection. Now I've done a few posts on receptivity and vulnerability and how these relate to what men respond to within the Feminine, and in those posts I admitted that I had a problem with this facet of myself. I didn't quite realize just how large that problem was until I felt as if I were naked at Grand Central Station after finally admitting to something important to me that I didn't even know was in there.
Alison Armstrong uses the example of women being afraid to need something of their own because if those needs are rejected then she's left alone to be eaten by lions. That a woman's placing others before herself is a primal condition. Remembering this, I wondered if perhaps my own relationship with this aspect of the feminine was that same thing.
Anyone remember those logic problem of if A then B, if B then C so therefore A then C? I tried that to see if there was some emotional response. If want then rejection, if rejection then death, therefore want equals death.
As I typed those words, I paid very close attention to how I felt about them, to how I emotionally reacted to them. For 'if want then rejection' I definitely felt a response, so I'm taking that to mean correct. For the rest of it, nothing. The primal and emotional minds were both unmoved by the words, so those aren't correct for me. I went back to the drawing board, changed out a few words and came up with: If want then rejection, if rejection then alone, therefore want equals alone. Now THAT got an emotional response, and a rather strong one. This is the right track for me.
Using my emotional awareness as a guide, the idea of being alone is the one that needed to be explored. What came out was "if I am alone, then I'm alone with myself" and that statement literally had tears coursing down my face. Clearly I have a problem with that idea.
My first thought was to ask "What's wrong with me that this is the case?" I think it's a very basic response that women have, the tendency toward negative re-enforcement, and it's one I've talked about before. This question though also invites a downward spiral of self-blame, recrimination and rejection. I'm trying to accept who I am, good and bad, pretty and ugly. Acceptance and blame are counter-productive, so this question has to be thrown out the window.
Since I'm not really good at that sort of thing, I turned to my husband for a positive way of addressing this problem. True to form, he had an excellent suggestion: "What is it about myself that I'm afraid to be with?" I knew this was on the right track because even just typing the question had my chest burning. You see, this question isn't looking for blame. This question is opening doors, inviting me to look at myself. It should be noted that the previous question had zero emotional impact -- my emotional self can handle the blame game, but the open exploration game caused a surge of almost panic.
Besides this one question, there are a great many more than could be asked, but because this one had such a powerful reaction I started there. Other questions include those of the relationship between my own self-worth and the feeling that I deserve or don't deserve to be happy and therefore don't recognize my wants; taking a look at whether or not I place value judgements such as 'legitimate or not' on desires before they are even consciously recognized. Of course, once all these are considered, I need to go back and find out if my non-recognition of my own heart even related to the idea of "What is it about myself that I'm afraid to be with?" What if want and alone are actually unrelated, and the upwelling of emotion is triggered by 'alone' and unphased by 'want'? But the question highlighted above is where I'm starting for now.
While I won't be posting all the gorey searching, I will share the most useful tool that I used to dig around in myself for this intensely honest and frankly painful but oh-so-liberating inner exploration. That tool was to look at my own resentments towards other people. The initial response to this question was an interior innocent batting of the eyes and a "but I don't resent anyone" denial. Blatantly untrue, but this is the face that social conditioning likes to wear, the face that my ego self likes to pretend is true. Alas, it is not. I wrote down the names of 5 people in my life that sprang to mind, and then spent about 20 minutes just writing about them. Since this is for me, I cut loose. It started out with really nice verbage, couching all the perceiving wrongs with innocous wording. Eventually, something broke and out poured all this genuine emotion.
Now, the absolute hardest part of this process but CRUCIAL is to just let it flow. My social conditioning was trying desperately to put the brakes on this process because it was 'bad' and I was admitting to myself for the first time just how 'bad' I was. Folks, resentment is a poison, and like poison it has to be purged if healing is to take place. Letting it fester in the deepest part of myself while I pretended to be all goodness and light and forgiving was only killing me, leaving them utterly unaffected. Even afterward, when I had filled page after page with a level of rage I had NO idea was even there, those folks are still unaffected and yet I feel so much lighter, freer. I can now see them in my mind's eye and finally there is no inner lip curl at the sight of them. I am free to finally see them.
What came to me during this process is that I chose the symbol of the Lioness far more appropriately than I could have imagined. Why? A Lioness is, above all, true to herself. She knows who she is, and accepts it. There's no "a lioness should be this" in her thinking. She just IS. She is a killer, and is fine with that -- indeed, relies on it to feed her sisters/mother/aunts/cubs. She is also a caretaker, a loving and loyal member of her family. Good and "bad", she just is. I'm starting to realize that in order to fully embrace the Feminine, I have to be just like her, I have to embrace all that I Am without judgement (tricky tricky!). Here goes: I get angry at people. Phew!! You'll just have to trust me when I say that finally admitting to that was like pulling out teeth. Ultimately, since I want to be majestic and powerful and feminine, I first have to know all that I am so that I can accept who I am. Eventually, I'll be able to drop the (in training), but I'm far from there yet. Until then, I remain a striving
- Lioness (in training)
Precept: I shouldn't have any personal wants or desires for myself.
Problem: I have a very hard time even recognizing, let alone articulating, any deeper wants beyond "I want dinner" or "I want to do this today". Without giving any recoginition and thereby conscious validity to deeper wants, they find hidden or even destructive ways of being satisfied.
Digging around in this problem, I felt an emotional reaction when I revealed something that I wanted which had to be darn near dragged out of me. That reaction was an extreme discomfort to being vulnerable, to being open to rejection. Now I've done a few posts on receptivity and vulnerability and how these relate to what men respond to within the Feminine, and in those posts I admitted that I had a problem with this facet of myself. I didn't quite realize just how large that problem was until I felt as if I were naked at Grand Central Station after finally admitting to something important to me that I didn't even know was in there.
Alison Armstrong uses the example of women being afraid to need something of their own because if those needs are rejected then she's left alone to be eaten by lions. That a woman's placing others before herself is a primal condition. Remembering this, I wondered if perhaps my own relationship with this aspect of the feminine was that same thing.
Anyone remember those logic problem of if A then B, if B then C so therefore A then C? I tried that to see if there was some emotional response. If want then rejection, if rejection then death, therefore want equals death.
As I typed those words, I paid very close attention to how I felt about them, to how I emotionally reacted to them. For 'if want then rejection' I definitely felt a response, so I'm taking that to mean correct. For the rest of it, nothing. The primal and emotional minds were both unmoved by the words, so those aren't correct for me. I went back to the drawing board, changed out a few words and came up with: If want then rejection, if rejection then alone, therefore want equals alone. Now THAT got an emotional response, and a rather strong one. This is the right track for me.
Using my emotional awareness as a guide, the idea of being alone is the one that needed to be explored. What came out was "if I am alone, then I'm alone with myself" and that statement literally had tears coursing down my face. Clearly I have a problem with that idea.
My first thought was to ask "What's wrong with me that this is the case?" I think it's a very basic response that women have, the tendency toward negative re-enforcement, and it's one I've talked about before. This question though also invites a downward spiral of self-blame, recrimination and rejection. I'm trying to accept who I am, good and bad, pretty and ugly. Acceptance and blame are counter-productive, so this question has to be thrown out the window.
Since I'm not really good at that sort of thing, I turned to my husband for a positive way of addressing this problem. True to form, he had an excellent suggestion: "What is it about myself that I'm afraid to be with?" I knew this was on the right track because even just typing the question had my chest burning. You see, this question isn't looking for blame. This question is opening doors, inviting me to look at myself. It should be noted that the previous question had zero emotional impact -- my emotional self can handle the blame game, but the open exploration game caused a surge of almost panic.
Besides this one question, there are a great many more than could be asked, but because this one had such a powerful reaction I started there. Other questions include those of the relationship between my own self-worth and the feeling that I deserve or don't deserve to be happy and therefore don't recognize my wants; taking a look at whether or not I place value judgements such as 'legitimate or not' on desires before they are even consciously recognized. Of course, once all these are considered, I need to go back and find out if my non-recognition of my own heart even related to the idea of "What is it about myself that I'm afraid to be with?" What if want and alone are actually unrelated, and the upwelling of emotion is triggered by 'alone' and unphased by 'want'? But the question highlighted above is where I'm starting for now.
While I won't be posting all the gorey searching, I will share the most useful tool that I used to dig around in myself for this intensely honest and frankly painful but oh-so-liberating inner exploration. That tool was to look at my own resentments towards other people. The initial response to this question was an interior innocent batting of the eyes and a "but I don't resent anyone" denial. Blatantly untrue, but this is the face that social conditioning likes to wear, the face that my ego self likes to pretend is true. Alas, it is not. I wrote down the names of 5 people in my life that sprang to mind, and then spent about 20 minutes just writing about them. Since this is for me, I cut loose. It started out with really nice verbage, couching all the perceiving wrongs with innocous wording. Eventually, something broke and out poured all this genuine emotion.
Now, the absolute hardest part of this process but CRUCIAL is to just let it flow. My social conditioning was trying desperately to put the brakes on this process because it was 'bad' and I was admitting to myself for the first time just how 'bad' I was. Folks, resentment is a poison, and like poison it has to be purged if healing is to take place. Letting it fester in the deepest part of myself while I pretended to be all goodness and light and forgiving was only killing me, leaving them utterly unaffected. Even afterward, when I had filled page after page with a level of rage I had NO idea was even there, those folks are still unaffected and yet I feel so much lighter, freer. I can now see them in my mind's eye and finally there is no inner lip curl at the sight of them. I am free to finally see them.
What came to me during this process is that I chose the symbol of the Lioness far more appropriately than I could have imagined. Why? A Lioness is, above all, true to herself. She knows who she is, and accepts it. There's no "a lioness should be this" in her thinking. She just IS. She is a killer, and is fine with that -- indeed, relies on it to feed her sisters/mother/aunts/cubs. She is also a caretaker, a loving and loyal member of her family. Good and "bad", she just is. I'm starting to realize that in order to fully embrace the Feminine, I have to be just like her, I have to embrace all that I Am without judgement (tricky tricky!). Here goes: I get angry at people. Phew!! You'll just have to trust me when I say that finally admitting to that was like pulling out teeth. Ultimately, since I want to be majestic and powerful and feminine, I first have to know all that I am so that I can accept who I am. Eventually, I'll be able to drop the (in training), but I'm far from there yet. Until then, I remain a striving
- Lioness (in training)
Thursday, April 7, 2011
The Threshold Western Woman Really Stands On
I have to admit, yesterday's blog post has me all kinds of excited today. I hear from various quarters a lot of lamentation of what we collectively 'lost' with the feminist movement, but if I change my perspective and instead look at this shift in paradigms as a cultural maturation of the Western Woman, then we haven't "lost" a damn thing. What we have done is throw the baby out with the bathwater in some cases because archetypally the Western Woman was in essence a sheltered and pampered child (have you seen 'the real housewives of the OC'?? holy moley, that's a collection of spoiled and pampered children!). Like a teen who rebels and rejects everything their parents tried to teach them, the Western Woman tried on a few facets of life which before had been denied to her.
The key to success for this collective process is to not go backwards by demanding to be treated like a child again, which is what I'm starting to see in some women. As I see it, this entire energetic leap that Western Woman undertook is invaluable to the maturation of our entire species. Without honest and genuine maturity, wisdom is flat impossible. And if there's one thing we need it's wisdom!
Okay. I think I'm starting to get too abstract for the average person and I think this perspective is too important to lose people. In order to understand this post and the concepts I'm working with, you have to mentally zoom out, like a camera lens has the capacity to zoom in or out so that it can focus on just one thing or include a great many things in the picture. There is no single woman who embodies the Western Woman. I am A Western Woman, just one manifestation out of millions. My life span will likely be between 80 and 95 years, yet the process I'm speaking about has already spanned multiple centuries. Again, zooming in too close to see just myself means that I can no longer see the bigger picture. I think I myself am actually fairly mature so then what am I talking about? What do I mean by the maturation of the Western Woman yet I'm talking about events that have spanned hundreds of years? That is the big picture, and I am just one piece.
Have you ever seen those pictures which are themselves composed of hundreds of smaller pictures? Zooming in allows you see that one picture, but zooming out allows you to see that all those tiny individual pictures combine to create, for example, the Mona Lisa? It's called a photo mosaic.
I personally, individually, am just one photo within the massive photo mosaic that is Western Woman. My own tiny little picture will change as I change, but it's too small to really have that much effect on the composite image of the Western Woman. In order to change this image, it will take millions of women several generations to really change that big picture. So yes, you and I can be very mature and yet we're still a part of this larger image, and that image is of a young woman just learning about who she really is, and isn't.
In order to relate to this, I have to correlate her to my own growth and maturation process. This helps me to make that massive composite image something small enough, personal enough, that I can work with it and understand it. In the teen years, what is happening is that the individual is breaking away from the parental figures in order to learn about who they are. This is the time for experimenting with new hairstyles, different friends, etc. Eventually, if all goes well, the individual will find that sense of individuality that they are looking for, that they NEED. The 20th century was all about this phase of maturation for that Western Woman. She threw out everything she had been taught to value because she needed to find the value in those things for herself, in her own way, on her own terms. Only then can she really and honestly see the value in them! She also needed to work through a lot of anger and resentment at Western Man for trying to protect her from the trials of adulthood -- just as a teen sneers at her parents and chafes at the controls and restrictions. Eventually though, with experience and wisdom, the teens comes to understand what was really going on and comes to terms with things. I think that's where Western Woman is at this point, at the early stages of coming to terms with Herself more honestly, with her Man, and everything in between.
Looking back a few posts, I talked about the power of the Feminine being the force of Civilization itself, of woman as the civilizer of man, of an empowered woman as the inspiration source that allows men to become their empowered aspect. If my theory is correct and that Western Woman is herself finally ready to step into her role as a mature woman, though of course there are some growing pains and learning which has to happen first, what does this say about our culture? About our civilization? Indeed, about our entire species, about humanity as a whole? See, the Western Woman concept that I am just one tiny little piece of is herself just one image within the photo masaic of Humanity!
So if Western Woman is working toward stepping into her Empowered, Adult, Mature self, how will this change the world? How will her wisdom and strength of character affect those around her? Inspire those around her? I actually think that the heralding of the Energetic Age and the passing of the Fossil Age, as Caroline Myss talks about in a September 2008 Sacred Contracts radio show, is a direct result of this process!
I so want to be a part of that! I won't live long enough to see it in its full glory, but I am one who is making it happen. The more women who can see how their lives and their hardships and the lessons they've learned and passed on to their daughters will help shape this future, the less likely we will be tempted to retreat back into a known path of comfort. If we do that, if Western Woman collapses in her bid for maturity, the entirety of humanity will take a huge step backwards in terms of potential. It could take another couple of millenia or more to get the momentum back to try this again. I'm not sure the planet will have the patience with us for that.
I personally find this image and this guantlet of challenge to be exceedingly inspiring and empowering. I wanted to try to share this excitement with you, this vision of what the threshold that we collectively stand on really is and means. It's an awesome time to be alive!
- Lioness (in training)
The key to success for this collective process is to not go backwards by demanding to be treated like a child again, which is what I'm starting to see in some women. As I see it, this entire energetic leap that Western Woman undertook is invaluable to the maturation of our entire species. Without honest and genuine maturity, wisdom is flat impossible. And if there's one thing we need it's wisdom!
Okay. I think I'm starting to get too abstract for the average person and I think this perspective is too important to lose people. In order to understand this post and the concepts I'm working with, you have to mentally zoom out, like a camera lens has the capacity to zoom in or out so that it can focus on just one thing or include a great many things in the picture. There is no single woman who embodies the Western Woman. I am A Western Woman, just one manifestation out of millions. My life span will likely be between 80 and 95 years, yet the process I'm speaking about has already spanned multiple centuries. Again, zooming in too close to see just myself means that I can no longer see the bigger picture. I think I myself am actually fairly mature so then what am I talking about? What do I mean by the maturation of the Western Woman yet I'm talking about events that have spanned hundreds of years? That is the big picture, and I am just one piece.
Have you ever seen those pictures which are themselves composed of hundreds of smaller pictures? Zooming in allows you see that one picture, but zooming out allows you to see that all those tiny individual pictures combine to create, for example, the Mona Lisa? It's called a photo mosaic.
I personally, individually, am just one photo within the massive photo mosaic that is Western Woman. My own tiny little picture will change as I change, but it's too small to really have that much effect on the composite image of the Western Woman. In order to change this image, it will take millions of women several generations to really change that big picture. So yes, you and I can be very mature and yet we're still a part of this larger image, and that image is of a young woman just learning about who she really is, and isn't.
In order to relate to this, I have to correlate her to my own growth and maturation process. This helps me to make that massive composite image something small enough, personal enough, that I can work with it and understand it. In the teen years, what is happening is that the individual is breaking away from the parental figures in order to learn about who they are. This is the time for experimenting with new hairstyles, different friends, etc. Eventually, if all goes well, the individual will find that sense of individuality that they are looking for, that they NEED. The 20th century was all about this phase of maturation for that Western Woman. She threw out everything she had been taught to value because she needed to find the value in those things for herself, in her own way, on her own terms. Only then can she really and honestly see the value in them! She also needed to work through a lot of anger and resentment at Western Man for trying to protect her from the trials of adulthood -- just as a teen sneers at her parents and chafes at the controls and restrictions. Eventually though, with experience and wisdom, the teens comes to understand what was really going on and comes to terms with things. I think that's where Western Woman is at this point, at the early stages of coming to terms with Herself more honestly, with her Man, and everything in between.
Looking back a few posts, I talked about the power of the Feminine being the force of Civilization itself, of woman as the civilizer of man, of an empowered woman as the inspiration source that allows men to become their empowered aspect. If my theory is correct and that Western Woman is herself finally ready to step into her role as a mature woman, though of course there are some growing pains and learning which has to happen first, what does this say about our culture? About our civilization? Indeed, about our entire species, about humanity as a whole? See, the Western Woman concept that I am just one tiny little piece of is herself just one image within the photo masaic of Humanity!
So if Western Woman is working toward stepping into her Empowered, Adult, Mature self, how will this change the world? How will her wisdom and strength of character affect those around her? Inspire those around her? I actually think that the heralding of the Energetic Age and the passing of the Fossil Age, as Caroline Myss talks about in a September 2008 Sacred Contracts radio show, is a direct result of this process!
I so want to be a part of that! I won't live long enough to see it in its full glory, but I am one who is making it happen. The more women who can see how their lives and their hardships and the lessons they've learned and passed on to their daughters will help shape this future, the less likely we will be tempted to retreat back into a known path of comfort. If we do that, if Western Woman collapses in her bid for maturity, the entirety of humanity will take a huge step backwards in terms of potential. It could take another couple of millenia or more to get the momentum back to try this again. I'm not sure the planet will have the patience with us for that.
I personally find this image and this guantlet of challenge to be exceedingly inspiring and empowering. I wanted to try to share this excitement with you, this vision of what the threshold that we collectively stand on really is and means. It's an awesome time to be alive!
- Lioness (in training)
Wednesday, April 6, 2011
What is the Liberated Woman?
I've been listening to the backlog of Caroline Myss' Hay House radio show called Sacred Contracts. If you are not familiar with either her work or the Jungian concept of archetypes then I'd highly recommend investigating both of those.
The topic of her October 14th 2008 show was on the archetype of the Liberated Woman and her supposition that this archetype is actually a myth. She was inquiring exactly what we were liberated from. Overall, a good show. Her definition of what this archetype represents is what I think is fairly typical for what the modern woman thinks she should be: one who "has it all" -- supports herself, doesn't need a man, is a strong individual who is completely independant, yet somehow has and raises kids successfully. Since her idea of the Liberated Woman is quite exactly what I describe as the lioness with a false mane, this show got me to thinking.
What I particularly love about her is that she does what I do -- ties everything into a historical perspective. Afterall, in order to understand the complete picture one must first SEE the complete picture and this includes the history behind how and why we got to where we are. While she did do this to a small degree, she didn't explore it overly much. She was looking more at what we lost by demanding 'liberation' than in what was being rebelled against.
What exactly did women want to be liberated from? In order to answer this question, we have to go back a few hundred years and understand why women started to demand equal treatment under the law, to demand the right to vote and thus participate in and therefore influence the world in which they lived more directly. This then became a demand for work opportunties, most especially after WWII as I've already talked about, and then it became a demand for 'equal' treatment in the work place.
After looking at the things that women were actually asking, I realized that what she was REALLY wanting was nothing less or more than "treat me like an adult". As a collective, Women were asking to stop being treated like little kids who didn't know their own mind, who weren't even potentially sophisticated enough to grasp the magnitude and complexity of the adult world. Look at the objections of the time of the Suffragette Movements and you'll see statements which pretty much baldly state that men didn't consider women either smart enough or emotionally capable of handling the responsibility voting would bring with it. Indeed, through the previous centuries, women were by and large handled just like kids with the exception that women were interchangeable while a man's kids were not. You can see it in the laws, the social attitudes, and the expectations.
So if the root idea behind the original Liberated Woman was simply 'it's time I be allowed to grow up', where did this other 'need to have it ALL' idea enter the picture? When did she forget that she wanted to finish maturing and instead attempted to cut men out of her life as extraneous baggage? The transition can be seen in the 40s through the 80s. As always, it was a long slow building process.
The absolute irony is that by trying to be so strong and independent and "I don't need a man ever", that's actually a pretty immature stance. It's identicle to the sheltered teen who leaves home for very first time ever to go to college only to end up doing crazy stupid stuff.
I recall watching a movie called "Bounty Hunter" with Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler. In it, the woman is complaining that the man isn't mature enough for her. In her tirade, the character all but stomped her foot in a childish temper tantrum. In that moment, I could see the frustration and eye-rolling tolerance toward women than a huge number of men have. She WANTS to be mature, demands it of others, but has no idea what that really means. Archetypally, she's in college, first time away from home, doing crazy stupid stuff yet thinking she's being mature and adult.
I see the last century or half century as growing pains in the maturation process of the feminine. At some point though that first time college student has to realize 'whoa! what am I doing?' and from there true maturity begins. The first step is always taking personal responsibility for our actions. Here are the things that women in western society have gained in the last century alone:
The Liberated Women was freed from the puera eternis (eternal little girl) notion and granted the right to grow up. We've had our growing pains and I think we're starting to settle back into ourselves. I can see the trend starting. What we collectively have to do is make sure that we don't go backwards because that's the pattern we know. If we do that, we're doomed to repeat all this over again at some point.
I am not an eternal little girl looking for a daddy figure to take care of me! I am a Woman. I roar. I am fierce. I am intelligent and opinionated, caring and compassionate. I take responsibility for my life and my actions, but I am not alone. I have a Partner, who will hunt the deer and protect the campfire so that I can tend the homestead, gather berries and see to the social bonds of our group. I can't do it all. I don't WANT to do his job and mine.
I think that the majesty of the feminine is rooting here: confidence and maturity.
- Lioness (in training)
The topic of her October 14th 2008 show was on the archetype of the Liberated Woman and her supposition that this archetype is actually a myth. She was inquiring exactly what we were liberated from. Overall, a good show. Her definition of what this archetype represents is what I think is fairly typical for what the modern woman thinks she should be: one who "has it all" -- supports herself, doesn't need a man, is a strong individual who is completely independant, yet somehow has and raises kids successfully. Since her idea of the Liberated Woman is quite exactly what I describe as the lioness with a false mane, this show got me to thinking.
What I particularly love about her is that she does what I do -- ties everything into a historical perspective. Afterall, in order to understand the complete picture one must first SEE the complete picture and this includes the history behind how and why we got to where we are. While she did do this to a small degree, she didn't explore it overly much. She was looking more at what we lost by demanding 'liberation' than in what was being rebelled against.
What exactly did women want to be liberated from? In order to answer this question, we have to go back a few hundred years and understand why women started to demand equal treatment under the law, to demand the right to vote and thus participate in and therefore influence the world in which they lived more directly. This then became a demand for work opportunties, most especially after WWII as I've already talked about, and then it became a demand for 'equal' treatment in the work place.
After looking at the things that women were actually asking, I realized that what she was REALLY wanting was nothing less or more than "treat me like an adult". As a collective, Women were asking to stop being treated like little kids who didn't know their own mind, who weren't even potentially sophisticated enough to grasp the magnitude and complexity of the adult world. Look at the objections of the time of the Suffragette Movements and you'll see statements which pretty much baldly state that men didn't consider women either smart enough or emotionally capable of handling the responsibility voting would bring with it. Indeed, through the previous centuries, women were by and large handled just like kids with the exception that women were interchangeable while a man's kids were not. You can see it in the laws, the social attitudes, and the expectations.
So if the root idea behind the original Liberated Woman was simply 'it's time I be allowed to grow up', where did this other 'need to have it ALL' idea enter the picture? When did she forget that she wanted to finish maturing and instead attempted to cut men out of her life as extraneous baggage? The transition can be seen in the 40s through the 80s. As always, it was a long slow building process.
The absolute irony is that by trying to be so strong and independent and "I don't need a man ever", that's actually a pretty immature stance. It's identicle to the sheltered teen who leaves home for very first time ever to go to college only to end up doing crazy stupid stuff.
I recall watching a movie called "Bounty Hunter" with Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler. In it, the woman is complaining that the man isn't mature enough for her. In her tirade, the character all but stomped her foot in a childish temper tantrum. In that moment, I could see the frustration and eye-rolling tolerance toward women than a huge number of men have. She WANTS to be mature, demands it of others, but has no idea what that really means. Archetypally, she's in college, first time away from home, doing crazy stupid stuff yet thinking she's being mature and adult.
I see the last century or half century as growing pains in the maturation process of the feminine. At some point though that first time college student has to realize 'whoa! what am I doing?' and from there true maturity begins. The first step is always taking personal responsibility for our actions. Here are the things that women in western society have gained in the last century alone:
- We can own our own property.
- Our worth is no longer based on what we bring into the marriage contract.
- We have equal protection under the law, even if the abuser is our husband.
- We have the right to work without having sexuality used as a bargaining tool.
- We have an equal say in the running of our democratic republic.
- We can do more with our lives than attach ourselves to a man and have kids, if we so choose.
The Liberated Women was freed from the puera eternis (eternal little girl) notion and granted the right to grow up. We've had our growing pains and I think we're starting to settle back into ourselves. I can see the trend starting. What we collectively have to do is make sure that we don't go backwards because that's the pattern we know. If we do that, we're doomed to repeat all this over again at some point.
I am not an eternal little girl looking for a daddy figure to take care of me! I am a Woman. I roar. I am fierce. I am intelligent and opinionated, caring and compassionate. I take responsibility for my life and my actions, but I am not alone. I have a Partner, who will hunt the deer and protect the campfire so that I can tend the homestead, gather berries and see to the social bonds of our group. I can't do it all. I don't WANT to do his job and mine.
I think that the majesty of the feminine is rooting here: confidence and maturity.
- Lioness (in training)
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)