Over the last year I have been rethinking feminism (Why Feminism Must Die, Where Have All Our Mother’s Gone?) Apart from my own blogs, I have had conversations and debates on Facebook and, as is typical when a subject strikes a chord, I have been drawn to reading and exploring this further. I am heading far down the rabbit hole of challenging the current stance on feminism, how I feel it is depicted and actioned today.
Before I continue, I would like to reiterate firmly that I am deeply grateful for the passion, commitment and sacrifices that my societal sisters and brothers have made to create the changes for women over the last century or so. What I am exploring now is not in anyway to devalue those actions but instead a look at what our next steps could be to support a healthy, balanced and productive society.
The main thrust of antagonism towards my investigations seems to be the belief that feminism fundamentally stands for equality and choice and why would I want to deny those key and vital opportunities to anyone? In truth I wouldn’t.
But I think they are too simplistic and create loop holes in our world that allow people to make decisions without informed choice and without responsible choice. And that’s when choice can be bad….
In no way would I want to strip anyone of their right to choose, but I certainly would like to fire up our energy to make sure that the choices we are making are healthy and vibrant. And isn’t that subjective? Aren’t some people’s healthy choices going to be unhealthy for others?
Actually I wonder, I really wonder if we look at our deep, innate, human selves. Would our choices be that different? Working from our primal senses, are our base lines not all quite similar? Safety… community… love? How we perceive and realise those elements are hugely influenced by the media and our peers, why one person thinks a hospital birth is safer than a home birth; why another wants to stick rigidly to a contained circle of friends and yet others to explore the world; and how some can judge various types of love to be wrong – sexual, gender, parental etc.
Whilst recently reading the work of Michael Gurian, an advocate of ‘womanism’ as our next step, I appreciated his use of neuroscience to support his theories. Science, as with anything, has its own limitations and is not, in my mind, the be all and the end all of an argument. However, what I valued in this case was how it validated what I am sensing in myself. How the science of our bodies is giving us a message about all these ‘choices’ we are making today; the science is the play out of our hormones and how they create these baseline drives and emotions that we share as a human race.
Neuroscience also looks at the biological differences between men and women. The reality is that we can never be equal, because, quite frankly, we are too different. We can be respectful, honouring, trusting, supportive and open with our opposite gender but demanding equality when we instinctively react and process differently is too hard to define. What we need is an understanding of those differences, not just the will to ignore them. That is what will move us forward; for women to understand why men respond and work in certain ways and for men to understand women equally. There is where our equality will lie.
And, it is not just understanding our opposite gender that is important, but also our own. Imagine if all women realised their base line nature for nurture and mothering? If we grasped quite how integral that is to our spirit. That is not to demand that all women stay at home and mother but instead for women to honour that part of themselves and fulfil it in a way that suits them. This is when choice starts to become informed, when we comprehend quite how deeply our reactions and needs are defined by nature and that denying them serves no one. Honouring them brings us all forward together.
So do I think there are issues with our current stance on feminism? Most definitely, do I wish to take us back to feeling suppressed, unheard and disrespected? Of course not. I would love, instead, that we spend some time exploring what being a man and a woman really means…..
I think that could change the world.