Conversations: Volume 20 #1 January/February 2004

Editor,

With regard to your editorial in the last Bellowing Ark, I am in general agreement with you that the world could do with a lot more feminine wisdom. I could also argue that you are correct in identifying this problem with Western civilization over any others, but that once you get out of the mechanistic, analytical approach of the West, there are a lot of cultures that have a wisdom that is more like what you call feminine, but in those cultures are not associated with women in particular. I could argue that, but I won’t.

What I will argue against is the establishment of another polarity, positing female against male ways of thinking. Your point that Feminism erred in seeking to make “the Female into the Male” is one I happen to agree with, but I would also like to think that Feminism also awakened many men to the feminine sides of their own beings. What we need here is a to find the Golden Mean, the balance of harmony of our particulate selves, and apply them to the various problems that have been created by the over-valuing of purely masculine approach to the development of society.You state that “Intellectuality, logic, science” do not nurture. Please understand that my formal training is as a psychologist, in which I held firm to the exact opposite idea. It was once my goal to learn how to help people better by approaching human behavior from a logical, scientific perspective. While experience has made me more skeptical over how much we can progress in curing the myriad of problems, I still believe that science can show us how to be better parents, counselors, etc. On the other hand, we clearly need to have such science infused with the kind of compassion, sensitivity, and morals that may best be embodied in what we should call the feminine side of out natures.

Peace,

Ken Tokuno

***

Editor,

 “Feminism failed in its mission because feminism attempted to make the Female into Male...” Where’s the Dew Drop Inn? I need a drink, straight whiskey, three in a row. The second revolution of feminism (the 60’s and 70’s) was about coffee, not buying, making or serving it while men sat at the table and talked about revolution. It was about defining ourselves, and not being defined by the male culture: from Aristotle, to Acquinas, to Bacon and Freud—and beyond. What ho! Another whiskey please. No matter the classic texts of the second revolution, the mass media read us as it is wont to do: women want to be like men. Like you said, Robert, (have a whiskey on me) why would women want to define themselves through and by men when in the 60’s and 70’s and beyond, we were drowning in Vietnam, assassinations, race wars and environmental rape? We are still drowning.

But we did define ourselves in that way. Most women, bowing to the media, mis-read feminism (or never did the hard work of reading the texts). We, they, us—still define ourselves and our desires by what some men have deemed desirable: money, sex, power. Women forgot what we learned at twelve, at the menses, when blood firsts seeps:  control is a fantasy; change is all, nature is all. We are nature and part of its design; we are not its ruler. Not by war, rape or money. Attempt to rule nature, or others with power, and nature will bloat with disease.

If there is such a thing as female wisdom (which phrase, by the way, implies a classic dualism, pace Aristotle), than it’s still in hiding. Why come out of the cave when you don’t know you’re in a cave?  After all this logic and information, all this dulling whiskey, I need cold air, the grove of birch on the way home, black ice under my feet, the night sky, and the wisdom to understand “more than cool reason ever comprehends.”

Elaine Romaine

***

Editor,

In that feminine-side document, the Tao Te Ching, there appear the lines: “When you kill another/honor him with your tears/when the battle is won/treat it as a wake.” An admonition from a world we can barely grasp. For us to heed it would mean a total revolution in our thinking. It would certainly disturb our sleep. Which is the role of religion.

The world has become number, people objects. We are the dupes of our own categories. The Indians counted coup. Battle was personal, eye to eye. Modern military societies have “smart” bombs and carpet bombing from 20,000 feet. Nothing personal. Blake, with his ultra-sensitive antennae, felt what was coming.

Poetry is a humble attempt to restore the personal (not necessarily subjective) to the world. 10 million were killed in Europe 1914-18 because of some damn thing in the Balkans. Christmas, 1914, English and French troops mingled with the Germans in No Man’s Land, took pictures, swapped food and stories, sang carols, and, at first, aimed high when ordered back into the trenches. The politicians and generals wouldn’t stand for such behavior. It would have taken a total revolution in Western consciousness to have let the truce be. We’re no further along, except that we’ve improved our efficiency for impersonal killing.

The global economy and Western society still manufacture the Other, people as economic or military units, consumers to be manipulated and polled. We look at the land and see only opportunity. The tragedy is this is the one kind of ”reality” many people can relate to. Gary Snyder: “In a culture where the aesthetic experience is denied and atrophied, genuine religious ecstasy rare, intellectual pleasure scorned, it is only natural that sex should become the only personal epiphany of most people....”Along with self-help books, in order to still the mind and control the nameless fear cast by the shadow of the false self that society praises.

Politicians cannot be decent human beings if we apply a religious definition to the word decency. Their mandate is to appear decent, though. Western history, written by the victors, is the tale of the masculine side of the equation standing tall in the saddle and riding humankind.

Poetry, a “feminine” art, if you will, is one way of being in the struggle to maintain some kind of sanity.

Mike Dillon

Editor,

This is in response to your essay (November/December 2003) regarding the age old battle of the sexes. I’ve been active in the feminist movement (second wave) since 1967, and after much reading and observing, have come to the conclusion that male and female have little meaning, as defining terms or as predictions of behavior.

Of course individuals differ very much, but not on the basis of gender. And, naturally, how we raise our children determines how they will behave. Even today, parents and teachers do not treat boys and girls in the same way, although much progress has been made since I was growing up in the 1940s and 1950s.

It is progress if one believes in androgyny, as I do.

Males are not more logical or intellectual, although as a group males are larger than females, and thus, in a genderfree world, would constitute most of the fullbacks. A female is not more nurturing, despite having a womb, and having a doll thrust into her arms at an early age. (Boys who play with dolls are often taken to the child psychologist.)

Respectfully, I disagree with your statement that “Feminism failed in its mission because feminism attempted to make the Female into the Male, to twist and bend woman being into a poor imitation of man.” Both women and men can and should participate of counsel in the spiritual “balance of humankind.” To create two separate species does a d is service to young girls, who can be scientists and warm human beings, and does a great disservice to young boys, who have to worry at every moment whether they are Real Men.

 Sincerely,

Karen DeCrow

 Unchain the Power of Women as a Mighty Force for Revolution
     (the first in the discussion. Bellowing Ark May/June 2004 issue)