Daniel dear - I could opine in many directions - some in agreement with you and some in disagreement- but I shall choose to state what I believe is the deepest core of our “problem”: we Americans are utterly alienated from Earth. Neither most women nor most men have any close relationship to Nature - hence, the gender distortions, neuroses, personality disorders and numerous other problems exhibited reflect this tragedy. In my view, it is THE tragedy, and all other explanations are shallow. The word “human” is derived from humus = EARTH. I beg you to please consider this fact more and Freudian psychology less.
More time spent grounding ourselves in Nature and the wondrous beauty of the natural world would help heal a ton of problems. Thank you for listening and for exploring our human dilemmas.
Heady stuff. My first thought is to question the conspiracy you describe to create a population that is "young, uneducated, defenseless, and hence incapable of resistance. Women will become mothers when young, making it impossible for them to develop political consciousness."
I just don't think that people are that smart or can actually plan something so softly diabolical. I continue to agree that the real fear is that "nobody is in control," as Terrance McKenna used to say.
I'm much more bent towards unconscious, possibly evolutionary, mythological, archetypal forces swirling our world into the Kali Yuga or whatever the f*k is going on. It's useful and intellectually satisfying to try to understand it and theorize about it. So very masculine, as you say.
That brings me to the feminine thing. I think there's a really interesting point that you are making.
"Pandey argues that women’s conversational norms tend to be structured around emotional safety, relational cohesion, and status preservation. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of intellectual rigor and truth-seeking."
I already stated my point on truth-seeking. Folly. But I'm sure this is true to some extent. But in no way does this sound like it's our problem. Much to the opposite. If we, the masculine dominant, could come to see that relational, supportive, and collaborative strategies were ultimately healthier and longer lasting than competitive ones, maybe that's all we need as a species.
There's no fault in the Tao. Yin and Yang are just the forces of duality that build and devour one another. We're all playing out something beyond our understanding.
If we have any agency at all, it's to withdraw our attention from the competitive drive that has built our economies. The pull towards bloody conflict and technologically shiny objects.
What if we invested our attention into collaboration, relational cohesion, and mutually supportive economic strategies?
this link to Anuradha Pandey is utterly fascinating and putting words to something I've experienced a gazillion times. I have long wondered why, on any given week, I have about 3-4 calls scheduled with men with whom I "make sense of the world." My calls with my treasured female friends do include such things, but they're definitely towards the bottom of the list, after all of the personal stuff. I am not complaining - for me, it is a very well-balanced existence, where all of my needs (personal and intellectual) are met. I don't want to go 900 rounds about the global supply chain and cognitive paralysis with all of my bffs. But it is weird and noteworthy, how bizarrely lopsided it is. I have actually felt pretty bad about that, for quite a long time, in a weird way. Like I'm betraying women. But it's real. Thank you for pointing me to this.
I agree, and I believe it goes back to our childhood conditioning. In adolescence I became aware that the girls in my circle would spend the weekends at the skate ramp, watching boys do the interesting thing. The girls’ hobbies became working on their tan in order to get approval from the guys (who were naturally tan becuz they were doing fun shit without shirts on) (this was 1980s Venice Beach, for cultural context). I was an outlier because I was interested in art, self-realization, & our global predicament.
However I would argue (& feel strongly) that this was cultural conditioning (rooted in class & patriarchy, above all else), not innate femininity. I am extremely wary about essentializeing these behaviors.
There are, of course, archetypal masculine & feminine ways of being, but I took issue with Daniel’s proposal that materialism is rooted in the feminine principle. While I look to Daniel as a wise & expansive thinker whose voice feels especially helpful in this time of spiritual morass, I found myself put off by that assertion. Cmon, Daniel, you’re too smart for that!
Yes! I definitely know it was cultural conditioning because there was pretty much a one-week period where I went from being an aspiring astronaut (who'd attended Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, no less) to, well, the opposite of that. I almost remember the moment it happened, in a Home Ec class. I'm not sure what precipitated the realization, but I definitely discovered that I needed to shift gears.
Yes, exactly, and I would say it is the demands of patriarchy that we are trying to modify ourselves to, when we turn away from being “thinkers” towards being “lookers” or find demure supporting roles
In terms of human reproduction, you might consider being a little less worried about “tradwives” as that is an individual choice that women are always free to make and more worried about the disturbing and rapid acceptance of transhumanist-inspired designer babies and baby factories. These are being promoted under the mantle of reproductive freedom. Last year the New Yorker published an article called “The Future of Fertility" describing how corporations may have the opportunity to create and grow human eggs in the laboratory using a process using In-vitro gametogenesis, the next scientific development step after In-vitro fertilization. It discussed the possibility that human eggs could eventually be generated simply from a blood sample. The author noted that “analysts valued the global I.V.F. market at more than twenty-three billion dollars.” The article hinted at artificial wombs as a possibility being contemplated, whereby humans would be grown in corporate settings for wealthy patrons who could afford such services. Interestingly, Sam Altman is in the thick of the projects described in the article.
Manufacturing human beings is as dystopian as it gets. Basically, we’re talking about eugenics and designer babies with the New Yorker’s obscure and overly complex description acting as a kind of cheering section. These scientist entrepreneurs, along with other genetic modification “projects” would like to fully appropriate and control human biology for profit if they could (fortunately, at the moment, federal law prohibits the actual patenting of humans). Interestingly, Sam Altman is in the thick of these projects. I am rather amazed that there are not more feminists who are outraged by the attempt of technology to appropriate this primal, natural and (some would say) sacred means of human reproduction.
I like the notion of bio-politics and hope you will keep developing it.
I predict that if the techno-boyz manage to pull this off that they will also have to create androids to cook, have sex with, go to when they feel the need for emotional resonance and nurturing and support, and able to be on call 24-7-365 times eighteen raising kids despite the almost total disregard for these skills in a money economy. Oh, I forgot. These are Androids. As Peter Thiel has no use for women, and Elon Musk has no actual use for fellow humans of either gender in anything close to a sustained way, I think they would be right at home without the messiness and uncertainty of human life.
I've been reading up, but it was all predicted by The Stepford Wives, which should be required watching by everyone with a brain. It's Jules Verne level prophetic.
"The result is a stifling of critical thought, leaving debate to male-only arenas," . . .
I literally LOL'd when I read that because the image it conjured was so accurate. Respect in "bro-culture" seems to come from a mix of how well you can roll in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dojo and your facility in online debates.
I think it is fair to say that Progressivism as currently perceived codes feminine. I think a lot of this has to do with the use of particular types of language: performative sounding "woke" (I hate that term) buzzwords, and what James Carville calls "NPR speak" or "faculty lounge speak." Right or wrong, I feel a lot of men--who could otherwise be sympathetic to a lot of progressive/leftists ideas--are allergic to this kind of communication. However, I also get the sense that this is shifting as well . . .
I feel like "NPR Speak" played a large part in creating the rogansphere. We have this collective adolescent bloc rebelling against mom/teacher. It's ridiculous because it's literally reasonable adults vs man children. Most Americans vote like it's a middle school popularity contest.
They say "Hey there, maybe you should stop eating the glue because it's not good for you, mmkay?" and the response is "You're not the boss of me!" and they double-down on their glue eating. Flashback to 2003 when Bill O'Reilly angrily stormed out of an interview with NPR's Terry Gross after she asked for clarification on a few of his Fox News comments.
I’m just not sure we can overcome Trumpite fascism by becoming more “manly”, hard-headed and analytical. I’m sure it sounds naive, but I think focusing on kindness, and really trying to walk in your enemy’s shoes and try to understand what’s going on in their heads will be more productive. The bioengineering of the strange and in someways pitiful tech-lords will fail I am sure. I think there’s still trickster gods moving among us, and they’ll take care of those clowns.
Yikes and congrats on courageously putting all this out there. My prediction is that when you have had time to create more distance from it you will observe places in which you need to prune away obfuscations and puerile, half-baked truths, such as that women's relational communications style and their tendency to halt abstract conversations in order to rescue someone who seems wounded inexorably lead to squishiness and a lack of intellectual rigor. I can think of any number of reasons for women, a class of historically abused persons with significant PTSD would want to conduct some healing action when they communicate with one another. Does your analysis include mixed gender dialogues? If so, I suspect you'd find significant differences. And ditto a lot of other stuff about the topics of conversation within all-female circles. Apples to Oranges, I'd say. There is also the fact that at least some of what women are currently preoccupied with stems from a reactive effort to restore balance to a way of seeing and being in the word heavily weighted toward stereotypically male perspectives and concerns. And then there is the fact that so-called gender ascriptions are suspect across the board, as there are men interested in child development, mutually satisfying sex, cooking, decorating, consenseus building, etc. etc. and women who excel at math and engineerings and could never see themselves raising kids. Get a grip. But it really was brave to put this out there, just don't mistake it for Gospel, please.
You handled that really well! I agree completely. Also, I think women with strong polarity have to be more aware they may be mistaking condescension or stifling of opinion, for wholehearted agreement. I find myself avoiding polarized men and women.
Potty training is surplus repression? Do we want ‘free’ people wandering around having sex with anything they want and shitting everywhere. Yes trad-wives are choosing that path because they want to, seeing that feminism has led them astray. I do agree that materialism has led to a feminization of culture, to our peril. How do you suggest to reinstate the righteous pattern-al, Our Father who art in Heaven?
Thank you for addressing this issue. I stopped identifying as a Progressive about a decade ago for precisely this reason. (I’m an “independent” now, not right wing.)
Brilliant, Daniel. You're identifying something that blunts and dulls human discourse. I'm not sure the term "feminization" is apt, though I totally grok your effort to maintain respect for womankind while speaking of their perceived influence. This is what Maliler, in his clumsy, boorish but, for me, winning way, wanted us to work on. I see no one else trying to do this. Please keep it up.
Daniel, this hurt my heart to read. I think there needs to be more sensitivity around why (some) people who have been socialized as female in misogynist cultures may experience muted or less powerful speaking at different points in their life. Like, that’s a worthy question for us to ponder for a long long time.
Excellent point! The assumption that women who become mothers, particularly at a young age (what is young these days?), are therefore stunted in the development of political consciousness floored me because it felt so false. But when I think back to the girls who got pregnant in my high school before graduation, and also before abortions were legal (and that loss is another painful subject), it seems to be true. I was 25 when my first was born and I had already developed a political consciousness but then it was heightened. I graduated high school in 1970. And those surely were the days!
Your comment brings up an important issue that would benefit us to ponder for sure. Not only males.
Food for thought, indeed! Thank you Daniel for an essay that has me thinking along new lines at first reading, for which I am grateful. I don't yet know if I "agree" or "disagree" with parts of your premise - as someone else mentioned, I could do both if I broke the essay down into parts, but somehow agreeing vs. disagreeing seems irrelevant. The important thing is to think about these ideas and to allow them to give rise to other insights. Reading this, I was reminded of the book "The Coddling of the American Mind" a book I really liked by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.
And this passage in your essay really stood out for me: "Women’s social discourse often becomes a rehashing of personal reports and emotional processing." For many years I have been part of a women's group that often leaves me feeling frustrated and hungry for deeper areas of focus during our time together, and this passage describes what I am experiencing. I keep thinking (and saying) that we could be using our time to create a group field of self-inquiry and discovery that fosters creative exploration and brings new understandings into our experience, but instead we seem to be continually taking turns hashing over personal experiences and their emotional ramifications. (To be clear, it is not debate that I crave either - I crave thoughtful, open-ended conversation with spiritual depth.)
I have to add that I think debate (surely more on the masculine pole in it's conception) is also a problematical approach, as I think people tend to go into debate with a lot of pre-formed ideas which get in the way of "beginner's mind", of receiving anything new. Cannot conversation be intellectually rigorous without the implications of needing to be "right" and win the argument? I think that the combative approach to engagement leads to black and white thinking and snuffs out the transformative potential of creativity.
When I read the passage about women’s social discourse, I had to stop a moment and think about it. Is that true for me? And in general, yeah it is. At the same time, my women friends and I do engage a lot around esoteric subjects and ponder how to make the best use of what we know (so far) for transformation. These are the conversations I love the best. Still, I am grateful for my friends, mostly women, who kept me going recently, and for the past several months dealing with heavy family stuff. Their support in that way kept me sane(ish) and present (mostly), and made it possible for me to have some peaceful moments where I felt whole enough to be a net gain energy-wise for the whole. If that makes sense.
Starting a couple of months ago, I’ve been engaging in two private messenger groups where we use the audio option for most of our communication. I really love it! All genders. Our conversations are stimulating. And what we often focus on is transformation, integration of All Species into our awareness, something that I am a real stickler on, that I bring with me wherever I show up, so that it becomes second nature, which it needs to be. There’s a balance of ways of perceiving, being, and expressing in these groups, not limited to gender, but rather masculine and feminine energy, both of which we all have to one degree or another regardless of our physical bodies.
How these groups came together was a marvel of synchronicities. Which many, including myself and those I know well, are experiencing more frequently - and also more are becoming aware of when they occur. Which I feel is key. Awareness. Because experiencing how it works is the only way we will know how to engage it.
"...regress the U.S. back to some bizarre amalgam of 1930s Germany meets 1850s Colonialist slave-holding America..." = NAILED IT! It is stunning of the overall passive nature of our collective society just letting this unfold.
For me some muddled thinking here . Ideas simplified to the extent they seem hyperbolic. Like: “Women will become mothers when young, making it impossible for them to develop political consciousness.” Because being a mother is antithetical to full consciousness? Come again homie ?
There is indeed a phenomenon when smart women go to a baby shower say , or a book club, and things are weirdly dull and consensus based because culturally they are encouraged not to rock the boat. All-women gatherings are very unusual for women now and maybe some of the uptight attitude is do to lack of familiarity. But it does seem the stronger the patriarchal vibe , the more conformity is enforced among the women .
All interesting though …
For me where you seem behind the times is when talking about the right wing capture of stuff , etc. The left wing/ right wing paradigm seems from another era somehow
Daniel dear - I could opine in many directions - some in agreement with you and some in disagreement- but I shall choose to state what I believe is the deepest core of our “problem”: we Americans are utterly alienated from Earth. Neither most women nor most men have any close relationship to Nature - hence, the gender distortions, neuroses, personality disorders and numerous other problems exhibited reflect this tragedy. In my view, it is THE tragedy, and all other explanations are shallow. The word “human” is derived from humus = EARTH. I beg you to please consider this fact more and Freudian psychology less.
More time spent grounding ourselves in Nature and the wondrous beauty of the natural world would help heal a ton of problems. Thank you for listening and for exploring our human dilemmas.
But aren’t most humans in the same position now? Alienation is nearly universal. But we Americans are uniquely schizophrenic about it.
Heady stuff. My first thought is to question the conspiracy you describe to create a population that is "young, uneducated, defenseless, and hence incapable of resistance. Women will become mothers when young, making it impossible for them to develop political consciousness."
I just don't think that people are that smart or can actually plan something so softly diabolical. I continue to agree that the real fear is that "nobody is in control," as Terrance McKenna used to say.
I'm much more bent towards unconscious, possibly evolutionary, mythological, archetypal forces swirling our world into the Kali Yuga or whatever the f*k is going on. It's useful and intellectually satisfying to try to understand it and theorize about it. So very masculine, as you say.
That brings me to the feminine thing. I think there's a really interesting point that you are making.
"Pandey argues that women’s conversational norms tend to be structured around emotional safety, relational cohesion, and status preservation. Unfortunately, this comes at the expense of intellectual rigor and truth-seeking."
I already stated my point on truth-seeking. Folly. But I'm sure this is true to some extent. But in no way does this sound like it's our problem. Much to the opposite. If we, the masculine dominant, could come to see that relational, supportive, and collaborative strategies were ultimately healthier and longer lasting than competitive ones, maybe that's all we need as a species.
There's no fault in the Tao. Yin and Yang are just the forces of duality that build and devour one another. We're all playing out something beyond our understanding.
If we have any agency at all, it's to withdraw our attention from the competitive drive that has built our economies. The pull towards bloody conflict and technologically shiny objects.
What if we invested our attention into collaboration, relational cohesion, and mutually supportive economic strategies?
this link to Anuradha Pandey is utterly fascinating and putting words to something I've experienced a gazillion times. I have long wondered why, on any given week, I have about 3-4 calls scheduled with men with whom I "make sense of the world." My calls with my treasured female friends do include such things, but they're definitely towards the bottom of the list, after all of the personal stuff. I am not complaining - for me, it is a very well-balanced existence, where all of my needs (personal and intellectual) are met. I don't want to go 900 rounds about the global supply chain and cognitive paralysis with all of my bffs. But it is weird and noteworthy, how bizarrely lopsided it is. I have actually felt pretty bad about that, for quite a long time, in a weird way. Like I'm betraying women. But it's real. Thank you for pointing me to this.
I agree, and I believe it goes back to our childhood conditioning. In adolescence I became aware that the girls in my circle would spend the weekends at the skate ramp, watching boys do the interesting thing. The girls’ hobbies became working on their tan in order to get approval from the guys (who were naturally tan becuz they were doing fun shit without shirts on) (this was 1980s Venice Beach, for cultural context). I was an outlier because I was interested in art, self-realization, & our global predicament.
However I would argue (& feel strongly) that this was cultural conditioning (rooted in class & patriarchy, above all else), not innate femininity. I am extremely wary about essentializeing these behaviors.
There are, of course, archetypal masculine & feminine ways of being, but I took issue with Daniel’s proposal that materialism is rooted in the feminine principle. While I look to Daniel as a wise & expansive thinker whose voice feels especially helpful in this time of spiritual morass, I found myself put off by that assertion. Cmon, Daniel, you’re too smart for that!
Yes! I definitely know it was cultural conditioning because there was pretty much a one-week period where I went from being an aspiring astronaut (who'd attended Space Camp in Huntsville, Alabama, no less) to, well, the opposite of that. I almost remember the moment it happened, in a Home Ec class. I'm not sure what precipitated the realization, but I definitely discovered that I needed to shift gears.
Yes, exactly, and I would say it is the demands of patriarchy that we are trying to modify ourselves to, when we turn away from being “thinkers” towards being “lookers” or find demure supporting roles
Totally!!
In terms of human reproduction, you might consider being a little less worried about “tradwives” as that is an individual choice that women are always free to make and more worried about the disturbing and rapid acceptance of transhumanist-inspired designer babies and baby factories. These are being promoted under the mantle of reproductive freedom. Last year the New Yorker published an article called “The Future of Fertility" describing how corporations may have the opportunity to create and grow human eggs in the laboratory using a process using In-vitro gametogenesis, the next scientific development step after In-vitro fertilization. It discussed the possibility that human eggs could eventually be generated simply from a blood sample. The author noted that “analysts valued the global I.V.F. market at more than twenty-three billion dollars.” The article hinted at artificial wombs as a possibility being contemplated, whereby humans would be grown in corporate settings for wealthy patrons who could afford such services. Interestingly, Sam Altman is in the thick of the projects described in the article.
Manufacturing human beings is as dystopian as it gets. Basically, we’re talking about eugenics and designer babies with the New Yorker’s obscure and overly complex description acting as a kind of cheering section. These scientist entrepreneurs, along with other genetic modification “projects” would like to fully appropriate and control human biology for profit if they could (fortunately, at the moment, federal law prohibits the actual patenting of humans). Interestingly, Sam Altman is in the thick of these projects. I am rather amazed that there are not more feminists who are outraged by the attempt of technology to appropriate this primal, natural and (some would say) sacred means of human reproduction.
I like the notion of bio-politics and hope you will keep developing it.
Yuck and yikes. I agree, between the nightmare you describe and (swallows hard) trad-wives, I'll take trad-wives.
I predict that if the techno-boyz manage to pull this off that they will also have to create androids to cook, have sex with, go to when they feel the need for emotional resonance and nurturing and support, and able to be on call 24-7-365 times eighteen raising kids despite the almost total disregard for these skills in a money economy. Oh, I forgot. These are Androids. As Peter Thiel has no use for women, and Elon Musk has no actual use for fellow humans of either gender in anything close to a sustained way, I think they would be right at home without the messiness and uncertainty of human life.
Thanks for your comment. Looks like we're already there:
https://www.realbotix.com/robots#product1
I've been reading up, but it was all predicted by The Stepford Wives, which should be required watching by everyone with a brain. It's Jules Verne level prophetic.
For a current take, try streaming this year’s Companion—equal parts sci fi, horror, and dark comedy…
Yes - surprised how I liked it as the ads seemed cra - super Freudian also for you Daniel.
Sorry typo about Altman. Coffee!
"The result is a stifling of critical thought, leaving debate to male-only arenas," . . .
I literally LOL'd when I read that because the image it conjured was so accurate. Respect in "bro-culture" seems to come from a mix of how well you can roll in a Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu dojo and your facility in online debates.
I think it is fair to say that Progressivism as currently perceived codes feminine. I think a lot of this has to do with the use of particular types of language: performative sounding "woke" (I hate that term) buzzwords, and what James Carville calls "NPR speak" or "faculty lounge speak." Right or wrong, I feel a lot of men--who could otherwise be sympathetic to a lot of progressive/leftists ideas--are allergic to this kind of communication. However, I also get the sense that this is shifting as well . . .
I feel like "NPR Speak" played a large part in creating the rogansphere. We have this collective adolescent bloc rebelling against mom/teacher. It's ridiculous because it's literally reasonable adults vs man children. Most Americans vote like it's a middle school popularity contest.
They say "Hey there, maybe you should stop eating the glue because it's not good for you, mmkay?" and the response is "You're not the boss of me!" and they double-down on their glue eating. Flashback to 2003 when Bill O'Reilly angrily stormed out of an interview with NPR's Terry Gross after she asked for clarification on a few of his Fox News comments.
I agree . . . the Brogansphere is definitely an adolescent masculinity.
I’m just not sure we can overcome Trumpite fascism by becoming more “manly”, hard-headed and analytical. I’m sure it sounds naive, but I think focusing on kindness, and really trying to walk in your enemy’s shoes and try to understand what’s going on in their heads will be more productive. The bioengineering of the strange and in someways pitiful tech-lords will fail I am sure. I think there’s still trickster gods moving among us, and they’ll take care of those clowns.
Yikes and congrats on courageously putting all this out there. My prediction is that when you have had time to create more distance from it you will observe places in which you need to prune away obfuscations and puerile, half-baked truths, such as that women's relational communications style and their tendency to halt abstract conversations in order to rescue someone who seems wounded inexorably lead to squishiness and a lack of intellectual rigor. I can think of any number of reasons for women, a class of historically abused persons with significant PTSD would want to conduct some healing action when they communicate with one another. Does your analysis include mixed gender dialogues? If so, I suspect you'd find significant differences. And ditto a lot of other stuff about the topics of conversation within all-female circles. Apples to Oranges, I'd say. There is also the fact that at least some of what women are currently preoccupied with stems from a reactive effort to restore balance to a way of seeing and being in the word heavily weighted toward stereotypically male perspectives and concerns. And then there is the fact that so-called gender ascriptions are suspect across the board, as there are men interested in child development, mutually satisfying sex, cooking, decorating, consenseus building, etc. etc. and women who excel at math and engineerings and could never see themselves raising kids. Get a grip. But it really was brave to put this out there, just don't mistake it for Gospel, please.
You handled that really well! I agree completely. Also, I think women with strong polarity have to be more aware they may be mistaking condescension or stifling of opinion, for wholehearted agreement. I find myself avoiding polarized men and women.
Potty training is surplus repression? Do we want ‘free’ people wandering around having sex with anything they want and shitting everywhere. Yes trad-wives are choosing that path because they want to, seeing that feminism has led them astray. I do agree that materialism has led to a feminization of culture, to our peril. How do you suggest to reinstate the righteous pattern-al, Our Father who art in Heaven?
Thank you for addressing this issue. I stopped identifying as a Progressive about a decade ago for precisely this reason. (I’m an “independent” now, not right wing.)
Yes and No. Similar to most binary inspired polemics, too simplistic. Contemplations on the cloud of unknowing perhaps?
Brilliant, Daniel. You're identifying something that blunts and dulls human discourse. I'm not sure the term "feminization" is apt, though I totally grok your effort to maintain respect for womankind while speaking of their perceived influence. This is what Maliler, in his clumsy, boorish but, for me, winning way, wanted us to work on. I see no one else trying to do this. Please keep it up.
Daniel, this hurt my heart to read. I think there needs to be more sensitivity around why (some) people who have been socialized as female in misogynist cultures may experience muted or less powerful speaking at different points in their life. Like, that’s a worthy question for us to ponder for a long long time.
Excellent point! The assumption that women who become mothers, particularly at a young age (what is young these days?), are therefore stunted in the development of political consciousness floored me because it felt so false. But when I think back to the girls who got pregnant in my high school before graduation, and also before abortions were legal (and that loss is another painful subject), it seems to be true. I was 25 when my first was born and I had already developed a political consciousness but then it was heightened. I graduated high school in 1970. And those surely were the days!
Your comment brings up an important issue that would benefit us to ponder for sure. Not only males.
Food for thought, indeed! Thank you Daniel for an essay that has me thinking along new lines at first reading, for which I am grateful. I don't yet know if I "agree" or "disagree" with parts of your premise - as someone else mentioned, I could do both if I broke the essay down into parts, but somehow agreeing vs. disagreeing seems irrelevant. The important thing is to think about these ideas and to allow them to give rise to other insights. Reading this, I was reminded of the book "The Coddling of the American Mind" a book I really liked by Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff.
And this passage in your essay really stood out for me: "Women’s social discourse often becomes a rehashing of personal reports and emotional processing." For many years I have been part of a women's group that often leaves me feeling frustrated and hungry for deeper areas of focus during our time together, and this passage describes what I am experiencing. I keep thinking (and saying) that we could be using our time to create a group field of self-inquiry and discovery that fosters creative exploration and brings new understandings into our experience, but instead we seem to be continually taking turns hashing over personal experiences and their emotional ramifications. (To be clear, it is not debate that I crave either - I crave thoughtful, open-ended conversation with spiritual depth.)
I have to add that I think debate (surely more on the masculine pole in it's conception) is also a problematical approach, as I think people tend to go into debate with a lot of pre-formed ideas which get in the way of "beginner's mind", of receiving anything new. Cannot conversation be intellectually rigorous without the implications of needing to be "right" and win the argument? I think that the combative approach to engagement leads to black and white thinking and snuffs out the transformative potential of creativity.
When I read the passage about women’s social discourse, I had to stop a moment and think about it. Is that true for me? And in general, yeah it is. At the same time, my women friends and I do engage a lot around esoteric subjects and ponder how to make the best use of what we know (so far) for transformation. These are the conversations I love the best. Still, I am grateful for my friends, mostly women, who kept me going recently, and for the past several months dealing with heavy family stuff. Their support in that way kept me sane(ish) and present (mostly), and made it possible for me to have some peaceful moments where I felt whole enough to be a net gain energy-wise for the whole. If that makes sense.
Starting a couple of months ago, I’ve been engaging in two private messenger groups where we use the audio option for most of our communication. I really love it! All genders. Our conversations are stimulating. And what we often focus on is transformation, integration of All Species into our awareness, something that I am a real stickler on, that I bring with me wherever I show up, so that it becomes second nature, which it needs to be. There’s a balance of ways of perceiving, being, and expressing in these groups, not limited to gender, but rather masculine and feminine energy, both of which we all have to one degree or another regardless of our physical bodies.
How these groups came together was a marvel of synchronicities. Which many, including myself and those I know well, are experiencing more frequently - and also more are becoming aware of when they occur. Which I feel is key. Awareness. Because experiencing how it works is the only way we will know how to engage it.
"...regress the U.S. back to some bizarre amalgam of 1930s Germany meets 1850s Colonialist slave-holding America..." = NAILED IT! It is stunning of the overall passive nature of our collective society just letting this unfold.
On one hand duh and the other hand hang on …
For me some muddled thinking here . Ideas simplified to the extent they seem hyperbolic. Like: “Women will become mothers when young, making it impossible for them to develop political consciousness.” Because being a mother is antithetical to full consciousness? Come again homie ?
There is indeed a phenomenon when smart women go to a baby shower say , or a book club, and things are weirdly dull and consensus based because culturally they are encouraged not to rock the boat. All-women gatherings are very unusual for women now and maybe some of the uptight attitude is do to lack of familiarity. But it does seem the stronger the patriarchal vibe , the more conformity is enforced among the women .
All interesting though …
For me where you seem behind the times is when talking about the right wing capture of stuff , etc. The left wing/ right wing paradigm seems from another era somehow