Feminine energy and the baby blanket

September 19th, 2008

Feminism in the ’90s

Embracing feminine energy … It sounded like a good idea.

My friend Gail was one of the organizers. About 25 women would sit around a large carpeted room and explore the force of story in their lives; we’d bask in the solstice magic of symbol; the leader would be wonderfully insightful.

We started out the morning warm and fuzzy as a baby blanket. But as the day wore on, I found myself wishing for a little more intellectual rigour – and a little less of Doris.

I’m not sure what trauma she suffered in her childhood. I felt obscurely sorry for someone who was obviously in such long-term psychic pain. At the same time, as she rocked herself and recounted nightmares, I could hear my mother’s voice saying tartly, “Come on, now. Get a hold of yourself.”

I suppose one of the reasons I didn’t respond too well to Doris was this sense that she didn’t like me either. I had been sitting beside her for a while, but when a latecomer arrived, Doris interposed her between my seat and hers saying, “Here. I need you beside me.”

Unfortunately, I was stuck in a little sub-group with her and two of her friends for much of the afternoon. If there was any feminine energy circulating, it was passing me by. Anything I said was bundled off in the baby blanket and suffocated on the spot.

The idea of ‘the feminine’ – a cluster of powers, characteristics, and ways of relating to the universe that has often been undervalued in western civilization – is an attractive and often fruitful one. But it poses the same dangers that any system of thought can pose: it’s too easy to be so enchanted with the pattern that you want to impose it on everything that moves. Whether you’re Brian Mulroney trying to impose a labour-negotiation model on the Meech Lake talks, or an environmentalist trying to impose purity on a messy world, you’re at risk for developing tunnel vision.

The other related danger about the whole idea of the feminine is that it is essentially part of a duality. It is what is not ‘masculine’ and it leads us to divvy up the world into two piles. If ‘logic’ is masculine, ‘’intuition’ is feminine. Changing the adjectives used to describe intuition from ‘sloppy and emotional’ to ‘powerful and creative’ may help celebrate it and change attitudes, but it still implies we exist as polarities, not as a whole.

It is as inconsequential to label certain qualities as ‘feminine’ and others as ‘masculine’ as it is to use ‘le’ and ‘la’ in French. We create an arbitrary grammar, an allocation of words that in themselves do not have gender, then end up matching the arbitrary grammar to real gender and acting as though this hybrid construct governed real men and real women.

That men and women differ is true in many biological ways; as a result there are many ways in which men and women differ psychologically. This biological-psychological link is a provocative and interesting field of study and contemplation.

But you can’t get too carried away by it. The differences between men and women are dwarfed on the one hand by our common humanity and, on the other, by the enormous differences among individuals.

I’m all for baby blankets. But I am a lot more like David than I am like Doris.

(I hope.)

From a journal entry, June 30, 1990

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