Feminine (cont'd)

In the previous post on intersubjective paths I said it will take a lot of women to achieve this. I want to unpack that a little. And a very odd analogy to begin with.

From MTV's Road Rules/Real World Challenge. It's one of these reality survivor-like shows where the teams vote people out after physical-mental obstacles/competitions. In this scenario they separated the teams by sexes.

So the immediate question both teams had to deal with was how to decide who gets voted off. So the men made a choice based on fairness/justice (as per Masculine energy). Depending on the individual performance within the team game, points were kept on each individual, ranked lowest to highest. The men just decided to vote off whatever man got the lowest score. No questions asked, no feelings hurt.

And it gave the men a decided advantage in the early stages of the competition.

The women meanwhile, not so surprisingly, did not decide who to vote off based on who got the lowest score. Cliques, sometimes pretty brutal, backstabbing, and some very bizzare choices (choosing a friend over stronger players), etc. So the women were caught in some drama from the beginning, no team morale, lost often.

But then an interesting thing happened towards the end. After the women were whittled down to a small tight group they beat the men across the board. They achieved a flow and a momentum the men, who though they had no difficulties throughout did not cohere in the same way, could not stop.

The we, when in a flow is much stronger than the individual--and this is not to say the individuals are nothing but pieces of a We which is a Super-I.

The Feminine, if it can get beyond the drama, constant self-reflection, and sizing each women up and yourself relative to them, cutting down any who start to go above the rest of the group, keeping everybody on the same plane (dark side of heterarchy/thanatos).

Women are given the choice in our society between becoming very masculine in terms of job/careers (aka ball buster women), (depending on class-beauty) trophy wives-status objects, angry feminist stereotype (pathological postmodern relativist), and the psychodramas of teenage girls, cliques, and meaninglessness of that path. The other trend is a more traditional conservative wife-mother role: which actually of those choices is by far the best, though really limited.

And of course that's stereotyping, many women make individual choices of beauty and truth and goodness. I'm just talking in a large scale systematic way.

Only a more intersubjective post-postmodern path is going to offer a new creative way forward--that at its best incorporates the best elements of the previous (women's liberation and feminity, etc.). [Of course feminine doesn't mean necessarily women, just for convenience].

The Feminine can embrace and create a power the Masculine can not. It also has a facility with subtleties of emotion the Masculine can not. A fusion of the two energies would suggest something of the Masculine "beginning"--following the game analogy--no drama, good camaraderie, set an open space with a Feminine "middle/end"--deeper embrace, freed more individualist-agentic Masculine tendency (even within spirituality) and a communal momentum. An even deeper loss of ego, than just a spiritual detached one.