What's the point of a
Movement that's stuck
Standing static
Knocking down the glass
Ceiling and building on an attic.
Len Pennie
History seems to bear out the notion that global movements tend to start going off the rails almost as soon as they gather speed. Much Irish blood over many many years was shed, for example, in pursuit of Irish independence, only for a newly freed Ireland to put itself in the hands of the Irish church, a regime almost as repressive as the British one it had just sloughed off. Ireland broke the ceiling that shut it off from daylight, and then proceeded to build on an attic.
The same could be said for communism: Karl Marx made the observation that Feudal societies tend to evolve into Capitalist ones, and then eventually resolve into Socialism. The movement is from power for the few to power for the people/ (Just for the record, it was not his aim for anyone to shuttle this process along. He was just saying.) But Communism as it developed (largely by a bunch of men) quickly turned into a hell scape of oligarchy where the people had next to no power.
Going further back, Christianity started off as a non-militant movement all about loving your neighbour as yourself, a sort of Peace, Love and Tie-Dye of its day. Its leader, this man named Yeshua, became a bit of a cult leader in his day, probably not something he really wanted to be and which eventually came up against the Roman Empire. Twenty years later, a well-educated Jew, by the name of Paul of Tarsus, who did not live in Israel, nor did he speak its language, somehow took charge of the Jesus movement and turned it into something entirely different: a sort of cross and guilt cult that evolved into the mainstream religion celebrated today. Love the Lord your God with all your heart transmuted into Amazing Grace.
You can probably see where this argument is going, but first let me say that I consider myself a feminist and have throughout my life stood up for women and tried to forge a way forward out of the patriarchy's hold on the last, say, five thousand years. I feel nothing but proud for the way women wrested themselves free from a global culture formed for and by men. When I was a teenager, I was told by a male teacher that I was really clever, head and shoulders above the rest, and if I worked hard, I might even one day become a secretary. Yep. I had never heard of feminism in my rural Scottish upbringing, but I hope the steam coming out of my ears gave my teacher something to think about. Because I never for once thought of slipping into some meagre career in service of the male hierarchy. I saw myself as a writer, and that's what I have become. The heroines in my fiction are strong, self-motivated people who give domineering men short shrift.
Now, I am 65. The women's movement has changed a lot during my lifetime. The first impulse of women on the way out of the patriarchy, was to take the "successful male" model for themselves. Anything you can do, I can do better, has sort of become the motto and rallying cry. So women traded in their aprons for busniess suits and showed the world that there actually was no fuzz in their brains (a fact that the American voter is very slow to appreciate!) They ran corporations and broke glass ceilings. And that was great. It was, except that this freedom they garnered wasn't really free. It had been built by and for the structures of the male psyche. The Lakotah word for a hermaphrodite means, literally, "wants to be woman." And this version of feminism you might call "wants to be man." But why would you? You're woman, with a whole different psyche, one that nurtures and draws others into that ancient and sacred symbol of the circle. It's a psyche much less likely to become toxic; it might save the world yet. But not along the track it is currently on. Anything you can do.....
It's hard. The idea of woman, which had been for so long in our evolution regarded as sacred in itself, the life-giver, the heartbeat of the earth, the wise woman, was brought under a new ceiling of shame. Man, as is his want, colonised woman, and from there took over leadership of everything our communal life depends upon: politics, economics, philosophy, the arts, the sciences, medicine. The medicine women, the elders of old, the weavers of stories, the healers and midwives were shunted off into the realm of the "old wive's tale."
If this all sounds anti-man, please believe me, it is not. I have a male partner and a son. As a heterosexual woman, I have a natural gravitational pull towards man. Of course, when I talk about "men," I don't mean every single instance. I mean what is generally so about the sex. It is generally so that men have been behind any war you can bring to mind. It has to do with their general territorialism. It is easier to train men to kill, because their brains have the ability to compartmentalise, to see the enemy in the "enemy box," dehumanised and a threat. The trajectory that leads away from the sacred circle runs along the lines of an ever tightening ego-circle. The way women are, they would be much more likely to connect with the enemy, to draw them in and negotiate.
So, individual men are not the problem. But the patriarchy is, and the women's movement hasn't always had its specs on when evaluating how much that mindset still plays out in our lives. Motherhood, for instance, the stay-at-home mum, is still regarded with derision, as though if women had anything going on in their brains, they would do something more productive. Women, after a century of fighting for their rights, are still taking men's names. Go figure. And these days, its the worst of male sexuality that the liberated female has brought to live in the attic. The anthropologist and mythicist the late Joseph Campbell talks about the role of the "vision quest" in more "primitive" societies to lift that male psyche out of the individual ego. As Campbell points out, there's nothing like that in the west. The normalizing of pornography in western culture is Exhibit A. In this thinking of the male ego, you can bypass a women's humanity and use her on a page or screen as an object of desire. She may have been horribly abused all her childhood. She may have been sex-trafficked. But for what that adolescent ego demands in the moment, she fits the bill.
I know, I will be counted an old un-liberated fuddy-duddy for thinking that feminism has gone off the rails. I know I will be told that any judgement against what a woman wants to do is a form of anti-feminism. I know this, because I have been told it. I am far from being a wise woman myself, but perhaps the young ears can hear and maybe consider that woman has so much more to offer than an other version of man. The wise women in Native American tribes formed the councils, out of which the "chiefs" were elected. It was a check and balance system. As DH Lawrence put it, it was those that were "hen sure" keeping an eye on those who were "cock sure." But the first act of the liberated "cock sure" was to make sure the hens were kept in the hen house. These days, a hen house with an attic.
Woman power is entirely different from ego power. The sacred circle is profoundly spiritual and wise and is capable of envisioning a whole new world. We don't need business suits. We need to break down the structure that holds these vehicles of detachment as prizes to be earned. We don't need the Gwyneth Paltrows of the world with her shelves of dildos and vibrators. Anything you can do, we can do...yes, but we can do it entirely differently. A shift needs to happen, an attic needs to be dismantled. I hope we can glimpse the vision of the wise woman in her sacred circle before she glides off the page. I hope we can run our fingers through the indentations she made in the sand, and reclaim the sky.