How Feminism F`d Up

It was an accident. But it happened.

And, as Einstein wisely mused:

"The same level of thinking that created the problem, will not solve the problem."

So what I have on offer today, is a different level of thinking on this very old problem. If we had actually been tackling this issue the right way, then we would have solved the problem already. But we haven't. We have been to the moon and back several times since we started trying to solve inequality. So let's accept our reality, shall we? We missed something along the way. We are gonna need to find a better question on this.

Word of advice on what you are about to read - you might want to do it in place where you can close the door. There is a short video that is key to this.

For a framework - When I speak of Masculine and Feminine Energies, I am speaking of polarity, of yin and yang, of the fact that light and dark do not exist without each other. Of water and fire that were meant to balance each other. When these polarities are out of balance, the world simultaneously drowns and burns down.

Hmmmmmmmm....... That's what is happening, isn't it?

As I said in my article on Exposing Corporate Wellness...

If you truly want part of the deep, world changing answer to equality, you will find it here.

I am going to spend two minutes setting you up for this. So please take a breath, (in through the nose, and out through the mouth, and then do it again, relaxing your jaw as you let the pressure of this world fall out of your mouth and out of your body via your breath)

What you are about to feel, see and hear, is a big part of the answer that we are all desperately looking for - and you know this - or you did once, a long time ago. You really just need to remember. Or, as story tellers and wise women say, you just need to ra-member.

Much of the answer we are looking for, when we hopelessly tackle equality, feminism and diversity, is in the story of "Moana." You will soon believe me on that. They didn't make that movie for kids, they made it for the inner children of the confused adults, that are parents of the kids that still know and understand Moana.

I use story and archetypes in all of my work. They diffuse triggers inside our psyches, they speak to a different part of us, an older, knowing part of us that has never been wounded - because it cannot be wounded. Story unlocks what we forgot we knew. It slips underneath the outrage landmines and offensive bear traps and shows us the truth, when we are not triggered, our capacity to be honest about the truth, comes back online. For a split second, soon, you will feel the truth in this article before you even consciously understand it.

The story goes like this. At the beginning of time, when there was only water, Te Fiti, a feminine god, shared her creative, life giving heart with the world. Creating islands, trees, and balance for everyone. She had a powerful heart, (a green stone with a spiral in it) which is where her power was stored. Power-thirsty creatures and gods wanted it. One day, a bungling masculine demi-god, Maui (a shapeshifter,) stole her heart.

The paradise island where he found it, started to crumble as soon as he removed it. The whole thing turned into a black charcoal. As he escaped and landed back on the ocean, a firey, lava-ish feminine monster (Te ka), rose out of the sea and tried to kill him, to get the heart for herself. She strikes Maui out of the sky and his magical hook, and the Heart of Te Fiti, are lost to the ocean. Maui is never seen again...

Enter Moana, a little girl that the sea calls to her destiny.

The ocean gives her the Heart of Te Fiti, when she is just a toddler. Her grandmother keeps it safe over all the years that her father, who is afraid of the ocean, tries to keep Moana from the call in her heart.

(If you're into it, breath in through the nose and out through the mouth again. This is the 'Water Breath' in the Elemental Breaths that I use in a lot of my workshops. The water breath is a feminine breath, it helps move grief, the collective feminine is full of grief that has not been moved.)

Eventually Moana makes it out, over the reef, which is forbidden, and sets off to find Maui and force him to help her restore the heart of Te Fiti. Maui is a cocky SOB. He tries to lose Moana after she finds him, but the ocean won't let him get away with it. They face typical archetype adversities together - enough to knock some sense into the bungling masculine demi-god. He finally admits that he only stole the heart to give to the humans, so that they would love him. You see, he was rejected by his parents and spent his whole life as an insecure people pleasing demi-god.

Hurt people, hurt people.

(everyone seems to have claimed that saying so we will go with "anonymous")

Eventually they make it to "Te Ka" and get past her. Moana walks up the mountain island that was once Te Fiti, to restore her heart to her - but Te Fiti is not there. (this is feminism arriving and realizing they have not brought the answer to the right place.) All that remains is the outline of a woman's body, at the bottom of the lake. This is the shell of what's left of the vision that "Feminism" started out with.

Moana turns around to look at Te Ka, firey, raging bitch that she is... and here, my friends, lies the answer we have all been seeking.

Maui was feminism gone wrong, Te ka was the result. It was women being forced to move into an imbalance of masculine energy. We figured that the world didn't need us to have our hearts of creation. It was only trouble, we had been controlled, diminished, burned at the stake, and raped for it, for 1000s of years, so it couldn't possibly be of anymore use to us. So our innate masculine energy moved in to save us, and took the best of us away, with intent to sell for self-worth.

And up rose Te Ka.

Try to see yourself in every archetype here. You are part Maui, you are part Te Fiti, you are most certainly, Moana. We all know what it's like to be Te Ka, to have our best stolen from us, or to have abandoned ourselves at some point. And please notice the apologetic masculine taking a last ditch effort to help the feminine, sacrificing himself for the greater good, so we can heal. AND THEN, notice that the healthy and healed feminine saves him from the raging, wounded and lost feminine at the last minute, by showing her what she is actually missing. You must watch this...

Did you cry? I always do.

Cultures and civilizations that have embodied all of these archetypes for centuries. Can you feel your Moana? Moana is the combination of Elsa and Anna archtypes, she integrated them into one. You can do it too.

Maybe be Moana today, whether you are a man or woman, or neither. If you don't know what the hell you are, that's fine, I hardly know myself these days. What I do know for sure, is that we all have Moana inside us. Let her speak to you. Restore the heart to the place you didn't realize it was taken from. Look out over our collective failings and know that our relief is not at the end of our current warpath on inequality. (Newton's 3rd says: To every action in the universe there is an equal and opposite re-action.) Fight inequality, and you get slapped in the face and/or, you strengthen it. Put a system in place to try to reject it, and all you will do is redirect it - it will just come up between the cracks in a worse place. Diet's don't work and neither do 'systems', so let's stop fighting Newton's Third Law, okay? (I say that a lot, I know)

Women are still required to wear high heels while serving drinks and meals in a restaurant. High heels in any physical work environment damage joints and spines. We may as well put shackles on them, because on a physiological level, that's what they are. We have not gotten nearly as far as we think we have. We have failed under the camouflage of believing we have made 'progress'. There is no long lasting change or progress as long as girls still have to dress a certain way to serve tables. Men don't have to. Same thing with all the drama in the professional sports world and the demands placed on women right now. We can't succeed in this until we admit that we have failed. It was a good effort, but lacked strategy.

Know that the answer is behind us. Know that the healing is what brings back the magic of the receptive, flexible, creative feminine. Masculine energy is capable of transferring, Feminine energy is capable of transformation. Let your inner Moana restore your feminine power back to you. We all have both. Masculine and feminine. The degree of each, within our unique souls and biology, is what determines how we identify these days. It really doesn't need to be complicated. It's only complex. That it ever needed to be this complicated, is beyond me.

I am in a monogamous relationship, but we are both poly-minded. Our poly-ness created a free space where we chose each other and have no interest in anything else. We found a polarity match. And in that context, I am most definitely feminine AF. So dudes that are embody a health masculine energy, that open doors for me, that build me water barrels, that change my kitchen faucet, that insist on buying me dinner cause I'm a single mom that lost all her work in 2020, and help me hang my art on my walls, turn me on. The freedom of just 'being' that I have gifted to my femininity, is the best gift I've ever given to myself. The space that my level of femininity creates for his masculine nature of 'doing' and 'providing' turns him on. It creates polarity. For other people with different balances inside themselves, this would not work for them. A woman that is embodies more masculine qualities can be just as happy with a man that embodies a lot of feminine energies. It still creates the polarity we all crave. That's why two women, or two men, of different polarities in a relationship, can work. It's why in one stage of life someone can be 'gay' or 'lesbian' and a few years later, after exploration and personal growth, they suddenly aren't. Or vice versa, as seems to happen a lot these days. Polarity is what we are all looking for. And when you change the language, you bypass the triggers.

So you do you. What's your balance? What makes you feel amazingly balanced inside? That's where your polarity belongs. If you are a feminist, then let these questions settle. Can you feel how this language gives you relief? How the fight stops? The feeling of letting it go and just being what you are? It's incredible, right?

Take this philosophy into the company boardroom and into the wage gap, and you'll stop arguing about how more women need to be in leadership. You will ask different questions and you WILL get easier and better answers. We need more feminine energy in leadership. When that is understood, there are automatically more women incorporated into leadership teams, without need rules to make it that way.

Do you have a lot of men in charge? Do some of them embody a feminine energy that balances the masculine in the rest of them? Then you probably have a good team. Are they all masculine AF? They you might need some women on the team - women that are very feminine - to balance things out, so that you don't burn the company down. Too many feminine woman on the team? You'll drown your profits in feelings and intuition. So ya might need a dude, or a more masculine woman.

Get what I am saying? EQUALITY IS AUTOMATIC WHEN POLARITY IS CREATED AND WHEN THE BALANCE OF FEMININE AND MASCULINE QUALITIES IS PURSUED.

QUALITIES

Did that sink in? Take the egotistical "E" out of it and everything changes. Then we start talking about Equilibrium.

When you use the language of qualities, of the feminine and masculine, and relate them to varying degrees between the sexes, and you build a team based on polarity and balancing qualities, then there is no more man vs woman. "Tit for Tat" just ends. The war is over.

It changes the whole freaking conversation.

PHEW. I'm tired now.

In the heartbreaking, beautiful, tragic, bittersweet, devastating journey of the need to balance and heal the wounded masculine and the wounded feminine energies of this world, we f`d up. Let's just deal with it now.

Recap: The rejected and wounded masculine tried to take the most powerful magic of the feminine away from women, and give it to humanity for its discretionary use. Fail. It screwed biological women over in unfathomable ways. But he was broken, so he did it in a broken way. Which broke more things. What happened left the feminine without her essence, forcing her to try to take back what was her (quality) without her heart leading the way - so she had resort to the fire, heat and aggression of the unbalance masculine, that was left inside her.

As women in our society, we were forced to fight for our equality by embodying a masculine energy. It was never going to work for long. It was only ever a survival strategy. We moved into masculine (doing) energy roles so we had the energy to come up for air. We had to forsake our innate "being" energy. So we became the raging bitch, the crazy girl, the depressed girl, anxiety girl, unreasonable girl, the 'how does she do it?' girl. We had no choice. Our heart was gone. So we suffered. Working full time outside the home and then more than full time, in the home. Our receptive feminine nature had been violated too many times, it was not safe to fight for our rights in that energy. The only ladder up and out was built by masculine energy, so we had to embody it. We lied to ourselves, and we failed ourselves. And then we beat up the few women that did mange to make it back to themselves. It's not our fault, it was our response to the world we were living in. However, we can't stay in that response or we'll suffocate completely.

If we had ra-membered to return to our true nature, to honour the feminine energies that our biology was designed to hold, we would have been okay. But we didn't. And so we are not okay. We are left holding both bags. We assumed masculine roles in a masculine way - and actually - that could have been okay.......... if we hadn't had any children............... suddenly we were doing both jobs, it started slowly killing us from the inside out, and no one told us it wasn't meant to be this way.

In years, in moments, to shift into our masculine side, to use that energy to get something done, has always been normal. But to deny our receptive, creative, intuitive nature, to survive, and to forget to go back to it after they let us vote, was a catastrophic fail. And when we are not present and grounded in our innate qualities, the masculine gets lost and finds itself in all kinds of toxic places it was never meant to be: We used the energy to climb the corporate ladder, we called ourselves momprenuers, we kicked ass during the day and forgot how to just rest and be, when we got home. So our static masculine state started wounding the biological masculine that we came home to. They didn't know where to go with their "doing" energy, we had lost our receptive nature. So they went fishing, they found a woman who was receptive, they found a job where their masculine energy was needed. They got lost too.

And then we got resentful. So they called us a cold bitch. Or a raging bitch. (That usually depends on what your biology does with your loneliness.) If it tucks it away in your liver, you'll rage. If it lands in your kidneys, you'll have bladder infections and cry a lot.

Is this enough now? Have I cracked it open? Can you see it? Can you see how obvious and easy the answer is? Can you feel in your deepest parts that it doesn't even matter whose fault it was - because the only way out is together - to seek our balance and polarity to heal? Understanding Masculine and Feminine Qualities and recognizing them and appreciating them, in whatever biological form they come in, is the way out.

THAT, is the way your company can navigate these things, that's your strategy. You're welcome ;)

To close this for now, here is one of those many things that I seem to know for sure: as long as we need to point a finger of blame, as long as we have not gone inside and found all the same conflict within ourselves, we will never get anywhere.

The Chicken and Egg problem is a gift from the universe. We won't know the answer until we don't need it anymore - once the negotiation has been forgotten, it's over.

Sonia

PS. Yes, you can hire me to speak about this... and then I can help you and the team put a strategy together for this. I'm just a DM, and a no-obligation discovery call, away.

PPX. I wrote a follow up to this, it's called "Equality is so 1980s"

#equality #feminism #diversity #polarity #consciousleadership