Grace Under Pressure: “o and l”

By guest blogger Mary Swanson

I’ve lived in Vermont for 7 years now & ever since I got here,  I’ve been thinking about gender relationships.  Because when I tried to talk to guys, they’d immediately tell me they were married or literally pull their wife/ girlfriend over to place between us.  I am not exaggerating.  At first I thought my energy was too intense, coming from San Francisco & I consciously made my aura smaller & lowered my voice.

Eventually, I had it explained to me that “men don’t talk to women unless they’re having sex with them.”   So… if a man talks with a woman, everyone assumes they’re having sex.

At social gatherings the men talk with men, the women busy themselves with whatever needs cooking, tending or cleaning.  Women don’t ever draw attention to themselves. They are expected to be self-effacing.

Vermont. 2011.  Not the Stone Age, not Afghanistan, not Saudia Arabia.  Vermont, USA.  21st Century.

I’ve also noticed that there is a huge “volunteer” community here:  hospice, feeding the poor, sheltering abused women, caring for the elderly, second hand stores, etc etc etc.  All run by women.  If you are a women past child-bearing, you volunteer.  All the really important work:  caring for the young, the elderly, the dying… is done by women who don’t get paid a penny for it.

As I watch “Arab Spring” continue to transform the mid-east, I’m also watching the women who demonstrate for equal rights being jeered at, groped and told to get back in the kitchen.  Women journalists were sexually attacked.  (Huffington Post)

The brazen Patriarchal domination of women in the name of god terrifies me. Women in Burqas terrify me.  Men thinking they are god and women are not, terrify me.

The Goddess Movement doesn’t seem to have reached the east coast much less the mid-east.  Women don’t seem to know that they are Sacred.  The most horrible part of it all is that each individual women thinks SHE is just not good enough, smart enough, talented enough to hold her head up in public.  When I try to get a conversation going about the bigger cultural picture they look at me like I have two heads.

I haven’t met any women here in Vermont who see anything wrong with not trusting other women. Unless they’re related by blood, women don’t trust each other.  They feel they are in competition with other women for ‘their man.’

Not for one second do I believe that this is the natural order of gender relations.  Human beings could not have always behaved this way or the human species would have died out long ago.  The idea that there is only one god, and that one god is a man, is a fairly recent invention.  The subjugation of women has not always been the norm.

Which brings me back to the symbols of o and l. The Circle and The Line.  The Yin and The Yang.  Yoni and Lingam. Female and Male.  Gathering Together and Thrusting Forward.   Assertiveness and Receptivity.  You get the idea.

When men and women separate themselves along gender lines, men are pushed more towards being totally Yang (i) and woman towards being totally Yin (o).  How could anything sustainable be created by separating these two principles?

I’m wondering if we, as a species, are evolving at all.  I mean, of course men are going to dominate if the only thing that’s valued is the quickest distance between two points.  The line takes it every time.  And we’d never get anywhere if we just go in circles all the time.  But I don’t think separation is getting us anywhere.

In You Just Don’t Understand, Deborah Tannen reports that men communicate to establish independence and women communicate to establish connection.  It’s been shown in other studies that men tend to socialize & establish power relationships in hierarchal structures; women by finding common ground and shared experiences.

“Both women and men could benefit from learning each other’s styles. Many women could learn from men to accept some conflict and difference without seeing it as a threat to intimacy, and many men could learn from women to accept interdependence without seeing it as a threat to their freedom.” (p. 294 Tannen)

Really, don’t we understand that no matter which gender we identify with, we are all, each one, male and female?  Sometimes we need to include the group, sometimes we go it alone.  Sometimes we need competition, other times we need consensus.

Keeping the genders so separate is creating an awful imbalance.

I wonder, if we actually could balance the male/female in ourselves & in our societies, if the Earth would come back into balance?

Here’s a song that kind of says it all, Bing Crosby – Mighty Lak’ a Rose 1945

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