Gender Part One
I’m going to do a little bit of initial talking about: why even talk about
this? Why talk about maleness, femaleness, gender, all of these
things?
The intent in the initial discussion is to help clear away some of the
myths and some of the pain. When Nan Lu first asked that I be on this
panel and in this discussion, I noted a good bit of initial resistance. I
thought, Oh, Ok! So, let’s take a nice walk across a minefield, why
don’t we? Ok? That’s a nice Saturday morning sort of thing to do.
And then, the way I usually work with preparing for any kind of talk is
to start speaking to everybody in my vicinity about it. I say to the bus
driver, so what’s it like being male? Or I talk to the woman selling
bread at the farmer’s market, asking What have you learned about
being female and how has that changed as you’ve gotten older?
I’d notice what kinds of responses came back when discussions of
maleness and femaleness come up, and I’ll tell you, a lot of arms get
crossed, and a lot of pseudo-patient looks arrive on people’s faces:
that kind of look that people have while waiting to be insulted. It’s the
look that people have while checking carefully everything you say so
that they can refute you immediately, the moment you go over the
line and say something they disagree with, something that in some
way is subtly humiliating or imprisoning or any of the other ways that
discussions of gender have brought us a tremendous amount of pain.
That’s really what came up in my initial discussions with people, and it
helped me to understand why I had so much trepidation about getting
into any discussion of maleness and femaleness.
The other thing that came up was outright resistance to talk about it.
Which I thought, well yes, I understand that also. In order to
understand it and overcome it, I really had to go through a journey in
myself of looking at the various painful stories and myths about what
it means to be male, what it means to be female, that left me not even
wanting to discuss it -- and which, also, might be leaving you in that
space of, OK what’s going to come at us now?
So I’m thinking that the first thing we really need to do is look at the
pain and resistance already present when we say feminine, masculine,
male, female. What arises? And spend some time clearing away
some of the debris of culture and story until we come back to the
beginning and are like children again and can restart again from the
beginning.
My fantasy of my birth would have been that when I came forth from
the darkness of my mother’s womb into the light of this world, that a
joyous cry of welcome came up: It’s a human being! It’s a new soul
to love! Welcome!
I know it actually wasn’t like that. The first words that greeted my
ears were, It’s a girl. And for my brother, the first words were, It’s a
boy. How much of what we are seeing when we look at each other is
girl/boy, male/female first. And can we take the time to step back and
greet each other first with, It’s a human being! It’s a new soul to love.
My very strong suspicion is that its only in the context of being human
together, being whole together, being yin and yang dancing within
ourselves and between us together, that we’re going to be able to
speak of maleness and femaleness in a way that can be an exploration
of joy rather than a tearing apart, a shaming, a labeling, an
imprisoning. I’m going to invite us, in this discussion and for this
discussion, to be very open to this new way of being born in each
other’s awareness. It’s a human being, before male, before female.
Can I greet this human being first? Enjoy. And then in curiosity and
wonder, explore- it’s a boy, it’s a girl, it’s a woman, it’s a man.
My own gender history is somewhat fraught, as I think just about
everyone’s gender history is. I had a mother who was a feminist
fighter. I was very proud of her, growing up. She was a woman who
had a quick mouth, she was an attorney, she had a reply to ANY sexist
comment that anybody made. She was right there, ready to
say…bababababamp! Her words-they came so fast! As a child, I was
in complete awe and admiration of her ‘take no crap from men’
attitude. She fought battle after battle after battle for me to have the
right to consider myself the equal of any other human, male or female.
And I’m grateful for that. As the next generation, it’s now time for me
to take the next step forward, off of the battlefield of gender warfare,
into being whole and human together: men and women who love
themselves, and each other.
As my mother’s daughter, it was not easy for me to come to a place of
admitting that my favorite color is pink. It really is. And that I really
like wearing dresses and not trousers, particularly. I’m grateful
because it’s because my mother fought the battles for me to wear
trousers instead of dresses that I in fact feel so comfortable and so
free wearing dresses instead of trousers. She taught me early: learn
to cook, learn to sew, learn to type, never tell. It’s nice to be now able
to let the cat out of the bag about these things, and about pink. I
have the freedom to be what I actually am, which can only happen
once we’ve gotten out of the box to find out.
That’s why you’re not going to get from me any lists of words that are
“this is female” and “this is male”. Feminine- how to. Be more like
this and this and this, and if you have more than three in the other
column, you’re a failure. How many lists of characteristics of maleness
and femaleness have actually broken our hearts, growing up or later
than that? As we read down these lists and feel, I’m doomed. I’m
nothing like that. Well, maybe some of the time. I have to live on one
side of a page?
All of these lists of characteristics, they cause more male/female
illnesses than they heal. To know what it is to be female, you’ve got a
true source right here in your female body. To know what it is to be
male, you have an undisputed authority right here in your male body.
You don’t need the lists. We don’t need those words to give us the
foundation of the wisdom of what it means to be male and female
together.
Words will probably happen today. The words that are happening are
going to be fingers pointing at your body. It’s all about coming back to
not taking anything I say before taking the wisdom of your own body
and what it teaches you about male and female.
Now speaking of lists of words- Yin and Yang. I don’t know about you
guys, but I was sure in for a shock the first time I read about yin and
yang. It was not a happy experience. I think we have a lot of
unpacking to do not just of our Western cultural assumptions about
what it is to be male and to be female, but also a lot that we need to
unpack and divest of, around some really lousy translations and bad
lists that were quite misleading about yin and yang.
I remember at the age of 13, getting really interested in Daoism and
thinking this was very cool. I started to read more about Chinese
philosophy, and read a list about yin and yang. You’ve probably seen
this lists. Day is yang, and night is yin. Light is yang, and dark is yin.
Dry is yang, and wet is yin. Hot is yang and cold is yin. And then, at
a certain point on that list we came to: male is yang and female is yin.
Oh! I’m female, so I’m cold and wet and dark? I feel warm and dry
and light! Hmmmm. This is really something to think about now. And
then the list goes on and it gets worse. Because life is yang, and
death is yin. Positive is yang and negative is yin. Health is yang and
illness is yin.
I was beginning to feel very negative and ill myself, at this point,
about the whole thing and was really on a precipice here of what do I
do with this?
I know now that this is not good translation, this is not good
conceptualization, that this is the road to misunderstanding. I know
that now. But at the age of 13, it was actually fairly crushing. I have
spoken to enough women to know that it is fairly crushing to read
these lists in which everything you’d ever want to be is associated with
is yang and men, and everything you’re trying to avoid in life is over
there on the yin side. Especially when you get to those lists where
they say Good is yang and Evil is yin! I’m dark, wet, cold and evil
because I’m a woman. All this great medieval witch imagery is filling
my mind, it’s horrible! It was horrible! The pain. I don’t think we can
go anywhere worth going, until we can first clear some of the pain that
comes up from these lists.
Active and passive. Let’s just let me rant about one more of them.
The opposite of active is not passive any more than the opposite of hot
is room temperature, or any more than the opposite of up is ground
level. Any more than the opposite of male is neuter. Ok? The opposite
of active is integrative. Here we’ve got the yang- up and out, getting
a move on, bringing into creation, matter into energy- let’s go!
And here we have the yin, the integrative. Energy into matter, and
this is a power of its own right. Receptivity, one could say, but the
word receptivity and passivity, because of egregious, heinous levels of
sexism, often are elided into each other too much. Receptive has a
kind of (breathing in sound) quality, like the lungs breathing. They
don’t just go like: “OK sky. Stick it in! I’m ready.” Stomach, eating.
There’s a lot of peristaltic action that goes on. Women. They’ll draw
you in from across the room. That’s not passive. It’s just not up and
out. It’s down and in.
There’s a lot here also to be learned about how we have responded to
these difficult lists. I know that how I responded was to say, “If that’s
what it means to be a woman, in terms of yin and yang, is dark wet
evil witch; and if what it means to be a woman in Western culture is
lipstick and giggle, I’m out of here. I mean I’m obviously not a man,
but I’m not a woman either. I’m not like other women; I’m different,
and I’m gonna do my own thing. Heck with the whole female thing.
I’m on my own.”
I know a lot of women and a lot of men who basically, at some point,
went Gender Outlaw: fairly early, quietly, Gender Outlaw. This
happened because they knew inside themselves, from their own
experience and from their own bodies that the stories they were being
told were not true. Unfortunately, though, Gender Outlaw becomes
gender alienation: instead of coming together and saying from the
truth that we know in our bodies, “These stories are not so!”, and
clearing the stories, we each went off in our own separate ways,
saying, “I’m not like other women. I’m not like other men.”
I tried very hard, a while back, to do a workshop on Eastern and
Western perspectives on gender. One person signed up. In speaking
to different people about it, nobody wanted to come because “they
weren’t like other men.” Not one man was like other men. Ok? None
of them. None of the women were like other women, either. There
were all these people who are not like other men and women.
(sigh)
Ah, look at all the lonely people.
This state of gender alienation, which in its basis has something to do
with knowing the truth from my body (not from the labels, not what
they’re telling me) could become an incredible gift of healing, and not
of alienation. We need to understand our maleness and our
femaleness in the context of affirmation from other males, other
females. To be a man among men. To be a woman among women. In
all traditional cultures there is time for women to be among women,
and this is important time for the coming to know before words, before
labels, before description, how this feels: what I call the variable
commonality of femaleness.
Just so for men to be men among males, to learn in their bodies from
experience how it feels, before words and labels, before prescriptions
of behavior, the variable commonality of what it is to be male. There is
something very important that men give to other men, when they’re
willing to feel what that might be like, to be like other men-- or when
women are willing to feel what it might be like to be like other women
in some as yet unidentified way. When we come to it like children,
what might it be like? Let’s find out.
When we do not look to our own gender to feel, what is this maleness?
Yes, I’m male. Or have it affirmed in us, Yes, I’m female. We go
wandering off in our gender alienation. What we have is an epidemic.
What we HAVE, IS an epidemic. Look at any magazine. It’s
unbelievable. It’s an epidemic of needing to have our gender affirmed
by contrast. If we cannot have our gender affirmed by other women,
other men, then we have to have our gender affirmed by the opposite
gender.
When we need to have our femaleness affirmed by men, or when we
need to have our maleness affirmed by women, then it gets worse and
worse. I’m MALE, look how MALE! I’m female, look how female! Now
gender becomes a binary system of either/or that gets further and
further and further apart. To be female is to be all the way over on
one end of an extreme-- and don’t you wander or you’re not as
female and therefore not as attractive and wonderful and beautiful and
all these things. On the other end is this equally caricatured hideous
extreme of what it means to be male…it gets absurd.
When I was a kid there was this whole thing about how men look at
their nails like this and women look at their nails like this, I mean
come on! Do we also chip ice off the car differently, like, one does the
front and one does the back first? It’s crazy, crazy stuff! Absolutely
crazy. Madness.
If you look at the characters for yin and yang in Chinese, yin shows
the shady side of a hill. Yang shows the sunny side of a hill. It does
not show a hill ripped in half. OKay? What we’ve got going on in our
culture right now is a hill ripped in half: a binary male/femaleness, in
which to be female is to be anti-male. In which to be male is to be a
non-female. But this vision of wholeness, of being human, a whole
hill, a whole body first and foremost means that, yeah, so maybe
there’s a little bit of a bias in one direction. There it is: a bias.
I was born female with a female body, with characteristics that stem
from being in a female body. There are softnesses here that men
don’t have. There’s an inwardness that men don’t have—at least not
primarily and obviously. Because what man in this room doesn’t have
softness, if we’re honest? And what man in this room doesn’t have an
inwardness, a secret garden that does not show on the surface, if
we’re honest?
Yes, being female means there is something a little bit more
important, medically (and that’s why this is worth talking about) about
making sure that I am not hiding from my softness. Personally, I
know that I was, for years and years and years. It was simply too
terrifying. To be soft meant to be vulnerable; it meant to be
brutalized; it meant big trouble. Forget it, not me. It wasn’t until I
got pregnant and flooded with estrogen that I realized, first of all, that
my personality is not independent of my body, as I had assumed. All
of a sudden, walking across a dark parking lot was a very different
experience. Ohh! You know I used to be such a bad ass, and now I’m
asking, “Will you walk across that parking lot with me?”
Then came nursing. Being a nursing mother, ohh! I can’t even begin to
tell you, perhaps you know, how frightening and uncomfortable it was
to find so much tenderness inside of myself. I couldn’t stand it. I
couldn’t STAND it! To be so soft…
How can health involve denying and avoiding who I am? It can’t. Not
for women, not for men. We all need to know our softness. For
women especially, it’s a first priority. For men, you know what? It’s a
second priority, and that’s pretty high up.
Knowing my maleness, my ability to go forward: to be male, to have
an upward and outwardness, a forward thrust energy, and a sense of
extension. When it comes to two becoming one, the man is the one
who’s got to be willing to go the extra mile there. I mean somebody’s
gotta go the extra mile here, right? Hey, your place or mine? I’m
willing to go to your place. That’s heroic! Can I extend myself? Can I
step forward, extend myself, go into strange dark, wet territory,
boldly?
I am a female-- a whole hill, not half a hill,-- so I have a yang aspect,
and must own it, secondarily. Can those who are male, primarily, own
this part of themselves? Own this yangness? Own what it is to be in a
body that is more tempered by testosterone than estrogen and not be
terrified of it? Not be contorting it, holding it in, nor being flying off
unrooted... Being a man is entering into the question of, what is
yang? How do I be yang? How do I be honest and noble from my
body about the movements and urges that come through? And live
them bravely. Secondarily, kindly and softly.
For a woman living in this body, how can I live, kindly and softly, and
secondarily bravely as what I am, unafraid to be what I am? This is
health in maleness and femaleness. It’s not figuring out percentages
from a list. It’s being willing to be honest in your own body. Check,
are you afraid of your own softness? Are you afraid of your own
stepping forth? That’s where health or illness comes in. Not in the
lists. But right here.
I have a short story to tell about my son, who is definitely in the
throes of figuring this out as he socializes with other kids and hears
things like “pink is a girl color and blue is a boy color.” He came
home and asked me about that, you know. I mentioned to him that
back in the late 1800s, actually blue was the girl color and pink was
the boy color. Pink was considered stimulating. You would never give
that to a girl, who was supposed to be calm. Blue was considered so
calming; why would you ever give that color to a boy? They’re
supposed to be active.
I mentioned this to my son and I said, “We’re going to need to figure
this out,” because at school they’re even trying to figure out which
numbers were girl numbers and which numbers were boy numbers.
What I told my son— he’s 8 years old now, but what we’ve told him for
many years— is that our job as parents is to tell him stories from our
life experience, and his job as a child is to try and figure out what, if
any, truth there is in those stories. We make the stories available,
and he’s the one who’s got the job of looking with fresh eyes to say
what’s really happening here.
We’ve told him that there are many, many stories about gender, and
that it’s his job to check them out and let us know. We told him the
same thing about people with different color skin, different color hair,
different color eyes, and he takes this job very, very seriously.
He did come back with some data, about a year and a half ago about
people with different color skin and different kinds of eyes and hair. He
said “Mom, there’s no difference.”
I said, “Josh, are you sure? You need to know that when you go out
into the world there will be people who think there’s a lot of difference.
There will be people that you meet who think that there’s a huge
difference—that it really, really matters.”
And he said to me “Mom, I’m the kid around here, ok? I’m telling you
there’s no difference.”
At 8 years old he’s still working on it with male and female. For a
while he had this theory that boys made better airplane, rocket and
other sound effect noises. But then he met a girl named Axis who blew
them all away. So, he’s still searching on this one, keeping us honest.
And that’s really what I’m inviting you to do also. In this discussion, in
this conference and beyond, return to being a child—to be able to look
anew. Start with your own body, and with greeting other whole hills
that may be a little more shady or a little more sunny, but seeing the
whole hill in them. Feel the whole hill in yourself— sensing, living, and
moving with what happens from there.