In all species where there is a male and female, “except the bear and leopard,” Aristotle wrote, “the females are less spirited than the males. The females are softer and more mischievous.” Continuing, he asserts that, “Woman is more compassionate than man, more tearful, but at the same time more jealous, more apt to scold, more shameless, more prone to despondency, more deceptive. The male is more courageous and ready to help.”

There you have it, 2300 years ago: women are emotional, and, as he notes elsewhere, men are rational.

While Aristotle is often the whipping boy of feminists who accuse him of institutionalizing male supremacy in the Western philosophical canon, I don’t blame him. In a warrior culture in which might made right, males were stronger, which automatically meant better. Believing in the superiority of his culture—as we are all wont to do—Aristotle saw in it the expression of a natural order. The female, according to Aristotle, was an inferior derivative of the male for very straightforward and practical reasons. She wasn’t really fit for battle. So, in terms of the values of his times, I have no complaint with Aristotle. In fact, I find his view that male and female constitute strong and weak versions of one thing more potentially workable than the common idea that women and men are species from different planets.

This brings me to my point: Why is it that the emotional woman and rational man are still foundational to female and male identity? At this point in the twenty-first century, we espouse a belief in gender equity at the same time that we believe in fundamental differences between women and men that echo Aristotle. What makes for fascinating ancient history is a disaster in our contemporary culture. I’m not arguing that men and women are the same, or that they should be the same. Equity doesn’t mean equality in the sense of “sameness.” But the blanket categorization of male/female, men/women within a polarity of rational/emotional—which implicitly means “irrational”—is the problem. As we work to create a culture in which women and men are both responsible for caring and creating, aligning with either rationality or emotionality as core to one’s sense of maleness or femaleness is both misguided and self-defeating. This belief is hard to uproot in ourselves and in our culture, because for several thousand years at least, our philosophy, science, and psychology have asserted the truth of this fundamental difference. But is it actually true? A look at the evidence suggests that, ironically, the belief itself may lean toward the irrational.

The notion that women are the more emotional sex has burrowed into our individual and collective psyches for millennia. A 2001 Gallup poll of US adults found that an astounding ninety percent believed that the word “emotional” applied more often to women. As Habermas says, culture is made up of shared intersubjective agreements that form the core assumptions that we have about self, other, and reality. These agreements are not conscious, yet they are encoded in language, enacted in the way we inhabit our bodies, and shared through habit and custom. The word for extremely emotional, “hysterical,” comes from the Greek word for “womb.” If you think of a man who is “effeminate,” this term, too, suggests emotionality. [in Deutsche?] Who we are is shaped by these agreements, and we all agree that women are emotional.

I am taking the time and space to emphasize the depth of the polarization of reason/emotion along gender lines because this idea constructs our identities, our deeply felt sense of self. In our egalitarian niche, one would think that declaring women as emotional rather than rational would be absurd, yet rather than change this cultural belief, today women’s emotionality is often considered a sign of women’s unique strength. Amongst many progressives, particularly those who are spiritually minded, the ills of Modernity and scientific materialism (environmental destruction, resource depletion, human alienation and exploitation) are blamed on a so-called masculine leadership and a narrow-minded, bottom-line-oriented reason. Simultaneously, the belief that women possess greater “emotional intelligence” is often seen as the antidote, thus making emotion “more human” and valued than reason. Yet this flip in value of male-reason and female-emotion simply keeps the same polarity in place. At this point, whether viewed negatively as irrational or positively as more sensitive, the connection between female and emotional is deeply engrained in our social discourse and fully embodied in women themselves.

Now let’s establish some basics: females and males are physiologically different and have different hormonal profiles. The hypothalamus, which produces hormones, is slightly larger in males. After puberty, females cry more often than males do, between four and five times as much per month. Adult women—but not prepubescent girls—have more anxiety disorders, depression, and post-traumatic stress disorders than adult males. But what is the source of women’s greater emotionality? “Raging hormones” is often the answer: women’s menstrual cycle. Pre-Menstrual Syndrome (PMS) supposedly makes women more emotional and, therefore, irrational. Oddly enough, however, PMS doesn’t exist among women outside the West, although it’s not understood why. Moreover, researchers have not found easy correlations, let alone causal relationship, between women’s hormone cycles and their emotional responses. The reason that girls become more often depressed and anxious as they enter adolescence has more to do with their cognitive awareness of the overwhelming expectations of being a teen girl. As a researcher in the Netherlands in the 1990s concluded, “The general idea that women are more emotional than men tells us more about Western sex stereotypes than about women’s actual emotions.”

            This “general idea” is a source of women’s identity—believed by women themselves. In a study addressing the question whether women are more emotional than men, a group of US researchers asked male and female university students for one week to record their emotions related to their social interactions. Men and women reported no difference in their actual emotions at the time of the interactions: the range and frequency of feelings was the same. When asked to recall what happened at a later point, differences emerged. The young women saw themselves as more emotionally expressive and focused more on their emotional experience than the young men did—which may well have been so. We, as a culture, expect and allow women to be emotionally expressive in ways that it is frowned upon for men. The researchers suggested that the women’s self-concept, rooted in the cultural belief of women’s greater emotionality, effected the way that they recalled their experience. In other words, if girls grow up in a context in which women’s emotionality is what defines being a woman, then they will interpret their experience through this belief.

What about male hormones? How do they relate to our belief in the rational man? With all of the chest-thumping about testosterone, I find it particularly odd that culturally males are considered to be the more rational sex.. But when we think “emotional” and “hormones,” we don’t tend to conjure up a picture of a man even though testosterone is a hormone linked to aggression and dominance behaviors. The power of these shared agreements that culturally construct our identities is that they lead us not to see what would otherwise be obvious: men, clearly, are driven by emotion just as women are. It’s also important not to overgeneralize here, too: testosterone levels are not something that only males have, and are subject to enormous variation and responsive to different social contexts. Men who are responsible for taking care of children, for example, have significantly lower testosterone levels than men who are not. We don’t hear much about the women who, without medical intervention, have higher base levels of testosterone than the average male. The eagerness to prove that polar male-female differences exist and are biologically, rather than culturally, driven leads to sloppy research and to self-images that distort our own perceptions.

Our habit of seeing, expecting, and wanting to find differences that support the rational/emotional gender split too often guides the interpretation of very complicated brain research. “There’s…surprisingly little really convincing evidence that there’s a ‘male’ brain hardwired to be good at understanding the world, and a ‘female’ brain hardwired to understand people,” states neuroscientist Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender. “Our minds are exquisitely socially attuned, and surprisingly sensitive to gender stereotypes.” Even in experiments, when researchers “push gender into the psychological background, men and women’s behavior becomes remarkably similar,” Fine explains. “But when the environment makes gender salient, even subtly,…our thinking, our behavior, the way we perceive others and even our own selves becomes more consistent with gender stereotypes.”

            Neuroscientists like Fine and Pink Brain, Blue Brain author Lise Eliot warn that the enthusiastic mis-reporting about hardwired brain differences creates an environment that perpetuates the rational/emotional gender polarity. This ends up having implications for social policy and education—creating even more of a cultural context that perpetuates these differences. Recently a study with dramatic drawings of wiring differences but actually quite modest and ambiguous results was heralded as definitive proof of the “male” and “female” brain. Almost immediately, a former Forbes and Financial Times editor blogged that this added weight to arguments against quotas “for female participation in corporate management, in universities, and in fundamental science”—why reserve places for women who just don’t have the right stuff? Fine and Eliot note that we fail to notice the tremendous overlap between males and females on virtually every assessment. Moreover, within-sex differences (among males or among females) are often larger than the between-sex differences that compare males and females. At this point in our cultural development—2300 years after Aristotle—organizing our entire society around these categories, Fine argues, is as arbitrary as organizing around left-handed versus right-handed people. Their brains are wired differently, too.

            The polarity of rational man and emotional woman is so ubiquitous that it’s like water to fish. We swim in it. Now we have to figure out how to change the water in the fish tank while we are the fish. It’s daunting, but it’s also possible—if we realize how much we need to get beyond it. The male/female, reason/emotion polarity constructs both our culture and identities and limits what we can think and be. It obscures a whole range of experience from our perception, also making it difficult to see and support each other in ways that run counter to type. We need each other’s full humanity, not half of it. Habits of thinking and relating in terms of polarities are too primitive for the complexity of our lives. Developing our capacity for thinking beyond the binary and our awareness of the depth of self beyond the conditioned mind can change the reality in which we find ourselves. The integration of emotion and reason into higher forms of sensing, perceiving, and understanding point to a potential that we haven’t experienced before—to be humans, who happen to be rather male or female. We might then find ourselves outside the confines of polarity and in a fresh sea of possibility.

Some of the resources:

Aristotle: http://www.public.iastate.edu/~hist.380/aristotle.html

http://fap.sagepub.com/content/3/3/303.short “the general idea that women are more emotional than men tells us more about Western sex stereotypes than about women’s actual emotions.”

http://affective-science.org/pubs/1998/FBRobinetal98.pdf

http://tap.sagepub.com/content/12/1/79.abstract emotional dissonance re identity threat

http://curiosity.discovery.com/question/are-women-more-emotional-men

http://www.livescience.com/4085-emotional-wiring-men-women.html

gender differences in affective disorders http://www.womenshealthresearch.org/site/DocServer/Yonkers_presentation.pdf

US survey: women seen as more emotional http://people.howstuffworks.com/women1.htm

Adolescents—no clear picture of raging hormones

http://www.dana.org/Cerebrum/Default.aspx?id=39316

http://www.health.harvard.edu/blog-extra/the-adolescent-brain-beyond-raging-hormones

Stress response differences; females can regulate stress

http://www.jneurosci.org/content/30/2/431.full

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/games-primates-play/201203/gender-differences-in-responses-stress-it-boils-down-single-gene

http://www.scribd.com/doc/188920572/PNAS-2013-Ingalhalikar-1316909110

brain study

rebuttal: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/lise-eliot/media-hype-and-the-scienc_b_4458458.html

http://www.theguardian.com/science/2010/sep/10/gender-gap-myth-cordelia-fine

The Demise of the Heroic Leader

In Sleepwalkers, the fascinating history of the events that led Europe to war in 1914, historian Chris Clark asks an intriguing question: Was a crisis of masculinity an unconscious driving force behind the decisions that led to such a catastrophe? Clark observes that “invocations of fin-de-siècle manliness” were “ubiquitous” in the leaders’ rationalizations for their actions: the necessity of staying “stiff,” having “an unshakeable firmness of will,” seeing inaction as “self-castration,” and so forth. The pressure on elite patrician men was to embody a “harder and more abstinent” masculinity of “stamina, toughness, duty, and unstinting service.” This foundation of identity was inseparable from their motives as leaders. Not surprisingly, Clark’s question caused my ears to perk up. As someone interested in the intersection of gender and culture, I found his investigation intriguing—not just for understanding 1914 but for illuminating 2014.          .

Clark doesn’t believe that Europe is sleepwalking into war now—with the exception of Vladimir Putin. Thinking of Putin, the image that pops into mind is the ubiquitous one where he is riding a horse, barechested. His projection of state power seems intimately connected to his hypermasculine heroic image. This may be a mere posture—a kind of dominant male primate display—but his Wild West swagger suggests the actions he intends to take as a leader. His isn’t the only masculine posture on the world stage—think Obama, Holland, Netanyahu, Assad, and the black-hooded figures of ISIS. There seems to be something happening at the intersection of leadership and masculinity today that may be as problematic and dangerous as was 1914. In fact, looking globally and locally, we appear to be in the midst of a crisis in leadership and a crisis in masculinity simultaneously.

The Hero as Leader

Western notions of masculinity, heroism, and leadership have been deeply entwined since before the time that Homer told the story of the Odyssey. This is so obvious that it seems almost silly to point it out. Despite our increasing use of the word “hero” more generically these days, the term actually only refers to men. The difficulty that women have with being accepted as leaders and the trouble that leaders have with changing the perceptions of what leadership is and what leaders should do spring from the deep and often unconscious equation between maleness, heroism, and leadership. This should be no surprise. There’s even a common term “heroic leadership” to describe the super-performing man at the top of a command and control structure. Western cultures have been and are male dominant, which doesn’t necessarily mean that men dominate—although that could be true, too—but it does mean that most often men have been and are the leaders. Therefore, what we value in men tends to describe our ideas of what it means to be a leader. But what exactly are we buying into when we equate masculinity, leadership, and heroism?

I’d like to start at the beginning, with perhaps the first hero legend of the Western canon, Homer’s Odyssey. Forging a path that would be metaphorically trod by countless other men, Odysseus leaves his family to go to war, but cannot come back until he outwits an extraordinary array of forces aligned against him—his worth as a man and hero cannot be forged at home. Odysseus is an individual, whose test of his heroism focuses only on his strength, intelligence, and cunning. In fact, he ends up losing all of his men in the journey back to his native city of Ithaca and, shortly after he arrives home, he kills most of the marriageable men there. Only through the intervention of Athena does Odysseus escape being punished. While ancient Greece operated by different morals and mores than the contemporary West, the value placed on the lone hero whose greatness is marked by his single-minded success or achievement of his goals, regardless of the consequences, has persisted into the present. The entrepreneur or trader who risks other people’s money and livelihoods, the hotdog sports star who doesn’t actually play well on a team, or the classic comic book superhero who works alone at the edge of the law have a resonance with the original Odysseus.

Freud saw another classical Greek hero’s tale as a metaphorical blueprint for masculine development: Oedipus. Oedipus was abandoned as an infant when an oracle told the king, his father, that the boy would grow up to usurp him. Saved from death by exposure, Oedipus grows up unaware of his parentage and eventually comes back to his homeland. As the oracle predicted, he does kill his father—neither man knowing who the other is—and marrying his mother. When all of this is discovered, Oedipus blinds himself in repentance and his mother/wife hangs herself. This tragic story, Freud suggested, was the founding myth of Western culture, because it points to the depth of attachment between mother and son that has to be overcome in order to create the separation between women’s world of Love and men’s world of Work. This division between Love and Work, which Freud saw as two distinct domains of human endeavor, is the basic plan of modern civilization. For Freud, the hero’s giving up of his love and longing for his mother was necessary not only for the development of autonomy and the separate sense of self, but also for the development of the public world of politics and capital. Similar to Odysseus, Oedipus’s story comes out of profound separation and the rupture of deep relationship.

The picture that emerges is deeply familiar. The leader and hero share the same origin. He is an individual, and his individuality isolates him and is also the source of his undistracted capacity to pursue his goals. Masculine identity comes out of our notions of the heroic leader who is agentic, directive, creative, risk-taking, dominant, and autonomous. While the development of the autonomous individual is one of the important contributions of Western culture as a whole, the downside is, and has always been, obvious. Even from the days of the Greeks, the hero’s Achilles heel was hubris, arrogance, and a disregard for others. Today, the negative impact of the heroic leader has become a major impetus to rethink what we mean by leadership. The position of the heroic leader, at the top of the command structure, makes collaboration and cooperation difficult. Among postmodern progressives, classically masculine leadership—which is often seen as aloof, calculating, aggressive, narrowly rational, and ultimately disconnected—is viewed as the cause of most of the ills on our precious planet.

The answer that seems to be most prevalent is to turn toward women—both as leaders and as the source of a more feminine approach to leading. With the greater complexity and interrelatedness of the problems we are facing, women’s historic commitment to human relationship seems to offer a new way to be a leader. Men, therefore, are being encouraged to use feminine, meaning relational, capacities as leaders. New leadership certainly needs to emerge from the whole of our humanity, both in terms of engaging more women and diverse men as well as in paying attention to more humane values. However, these challenges and changes to the historic equation of maleness and leadership are kicking up a backlash. Not only is masculine leadership being denigrated, but masculinity as well. The heroic leader embodies what has been the aspirational masculine identity for many men in the West: to live powerfully for a purpose, to strive to transcend limitations, and to be rewarded and loved for doing so. Pulling the rug out from under heroic masculinity leaves young men adrift to seek more extreme ways to define and demonstrate their manhood.

What’s Up with Young Men?

In response to the self-appointed “Sharia Police” in Wuppertal, Germany, Speigel ONLINE commentator Roland Nelles asked: “Young men, what is up with you?” [“Junge Männer, was ist los mit euch?”] His question was bigger than this particular incident. From the black hooded ISIS extremists with knives to the bombing of a children’s camp in Norway to the frequent school shootings in the US, the hands on the weapons belong to young men. Young men with guns, knives, and nothing to lose are reshaping the boundaries of nation states and the terrain of politics. Seismic changes in the last fifty years have left many men, particularly those from lower/working class families, too few options, struggling with who they are and what they should do. Certainly very very few young men are resorting to violence. However, other assessments, such as school performance or productive employment, suggest that more than a few men are struggling. Citing U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics data, New York Times columnist Anand Giridharadas notes that “The percentage of adult men not in the labor force — meaning neither employed nor temporarily out of work and collecting unemployment benefits — now lurks at 30.8 percent, the highest level ever recorded.” I hear the question “what’s up with young men?” as a recognition of a crisis amongst men.

It’s neither surprising, nor a sign of weakness, that men are struggling with issues about their identity as males. The world has gone through enormous changes since 1968. Women are more self-sufficient and no longer need men to bear and raise children. The loss of low skilled jobs that one can actually live on and an increase in jobs that have been traditionally “women’s work” leave many young men without a way of creating a positive traditional male identity. As the Art of Manliness blog puts it, the 3-Ps that have been the traditional foundation of male identity, Protect, Procreate, Provide, are no longer as necessary. In the 2010 Shell Jugendstudie, a study of youth in Germany, boys said that they want to work and have wives at home, while girls reported that they are no longer are interested in traditional homemaking roles. Without access to the family and the father role, which philosopher and social theorist Jurgen Habermas saw as one of the most important drivers of social evolution, young men lose their connection to community life and to a positive aspect of being male.

David Courtwright, in Violent Land, explains that sociologists have noted across history and cultures that large numbers of young, single men correlate with violence and “social disorder.” Paradoxically, our societies have literally been built on the backs of these young men. They are the ones who died on our battlefields, suffocated in mines, fell from skyscrapers, and hacked through the jungles and across the prairies to find their fortunes. Most did not find much more than a short, rather brutal life. Social psychologist Ray Baumeister, in Is There Anything Good about Men?, explains that while men certainly dominate at the top of society, they also vastly outnumber women in “the worst outcomes society has to offer.” These young men take important risks, however, the cost is often an engagement with a level of disruption and violence that threatens them as well as others. Having families, and the responsibility for children, according to Courtwright, has been the key factor in bringing these men into a positive relationship with community life.

Lest anyone think I am urging men to assume their paternalistic, and patriarchal, role as the head of the family, I’m not. Not only are some men now resisting the responsibilities of that role, but the social constraints that supported men to stay with their families have loosened considerably. I am saying that this role has been a very historically significant and personally meaningful way that male identity has been shaped. And many men don’t have a ready alternative. According to Boys’ Day—Future Prospects for Boys, a 2013 report sponsored by the Bundesministerium für Familie, Senioren, Frauen und Jugend (State Ministry for Families, Seniors, Women, and Youth), most young men respect two rather archetypal masculine images: the man of power and the breadwinner. In a social reality in which too many young men see little opportunity to assume the breadwinner role, it’s not surprising that some men feel that they have little to lose and may end up embracing the “man of power” role in its most primitive form: domination.

The Threat of the Female

The Kurds have a battalion of female fighters who, apparently, are a particular threat to ISIS fighters. Why? Because if a jihadist is killed by a woman, he doesn’t go to heaven. Women are dangerous in most fundamentalist contexts because they have the power to pull men away from righteousness—or can even bar them from heaven’s rewards. In Islam, the burka and purdah keep men safe from the allure of women’s flesh. As David Brooks observed in The New York Times, in cultures where “spirit and the body are at war,” men tend to “oscillate between masochistic self-flagellation, when they think they have been sensual, and bouts of arrogant spiritual pride, when they convince themselves they have risen above the senses.” Notably, terabytes of porn were found on the computers in Osama bin-Laden’s lair. The war between spirit and body is being played out through domination: by oppression and enslavement of women and by decapitating and crucifying lesser men.

To be men means not being women. While this may seem to be self-evident and banal, I mean this in a particular way. Male identity usually is, or has been, created as an antithesis of the female and all she represents. Domination—or a sense of superiority– becomes an act of literal self defense. The ISIS jihadis are extremist but they are far from the only ones to be threatened by the female. You can see this in the rabid responses to Hillary Clinton, for example, or in the violent and degrading comments posted by men to women commentators on the internet or by the fact that calling a boy a “girl” may be the biggest insult. In a study reported by Michael Kimmel in 2000, pre-teen boys and girls were asked what they would do if they woke up the next day and were the opposite sex. Girls spoke about the new opportunities they would have while boys most often said they would kill themselves. This isn’t a rational response, and doesn’t even reflect the love that boys have for the women and girls in their lives. But it is a visceral response, an existential fear. The sense of opposition in the term “opposite sex” comes from males to females not usually the other way around.

Very recent research on boys’ development is beginning to explain how this happens. In cultures where only women nurture children and men are not present and part of the intimacy of daily life, boys end up in a confusing situation. At the tender toddler age, they begin to realize that, as boys, they are in a different category from their mothers. Who she is, they struggle to figure out with their preschool minds, is what I cannot be. Or else I, then, am not a boy, or won’t do “boy” in the right way. This precipitates a crisis. We can see this crisis in boys’ acting out, withdrawal, frenzied behaviour—much of what we feel is “natural” for boys. The preschooler mind is not very sophisticated, but their hearts are wide open: not being like mom means pulling away from the person who has been the entire world. In fact, Walter Ong observes that males tend to “code” the entire environment as female–engulfing, omnipresent, and something to push against. No wonder: boys go from mother’s home to a woman’s world of school. Surrounded, they escape outside, into superhero personas, to all-boy teams and games or into magical worlds within the hard, shiny surface of the computer. Without a nurturing and intimate relationship with a caring man or father, the human qualities and behaviours that boys deeply know in their mothers’ laps become off limits.

This is changing. More men are spending intimate time with their sons and more space is opening in culture for both males and females to express the full range of our humanity not just the half traditionally reserved for each gender. So many different factors contribute to a child’s gender identity—biology, parents, culture, schooling, friendships, mentorships, daily traumas and insults, as well as the big events that mark a life in unique ways. Boys hang on to their tenderness, often saving it for special people and moments. At adolescence, however, they are hit again with the pressure to conform to their culture’s codes and options for masculinity. As Niobe Way’s deft research in Deep Secrets: Boys’ Friendships and the Crisis of Connection shows so vividly, for many boys, this is a second crisis. This unconscious visceral response—the fear of being a girl—can drive young men, particularly those with narrow perspectives and few options, to extremes to prove they are not women. It’s a fear currently felt round the world.

Awakening from Sleepwalking

The wars and conflicts that have disrupted the dream of a world governed by the rule of law are challenging the capacity of progressive leaders to respond. Not simply out of the complexities of the situations, but also because different male identities seem to be at each other’s throats. Our crisis of leadership is also a crisis of masculinity—or masculinities. The different worldviews that leaders express are often grounded in different forms of gender identity. Too often, they don’t understand each other. When this lack of comprehension is compounded by the unconscious visceral need to protect one’s core identity through domination of all that is encoded as feminine, including weaker men, inferior races, blasphemous infidels, unruly Nature, or corrupting women, then our leaders are sleepwalkers.

As the world has grown closer, different worldviews and different masculinities rub against each other in the exercise of leadership. Needless to say, the medieval-minded jihadists who scoff at death in aiming for the utter destruction of infidels express a kind of rigid masculinity that always needs to be confirmed through domination. Putin, whose country is barely stable economically, postures as the invincible tribal warrior, taunting NATO’s impotence by violating another nation’s boundaries. Obama is in a tricky position: as a Black man, expressions of anger often trigger fear of the “dangerous Black man” in the white American imagination. His coolness and aloof cerebral manliness, based on rational rather than physical superiority, are often seen as inaction, arrogance, and weakness. In the US, the Right has kept up a steady but under-the-radar stream of commentary about Obama being homosexual. (According to similar sources, Hillary Clinton is also gay—probably based on the belief that she acts like a man. Angela Merkel’s “Mutti” [“Mom”] image may keep her safe from these strange projections.)

We also need to respond urgently to the crisis in masculinity that leaves too many males falling back into reactive and primitive forms of male identity. The German political scientist Peter Neumann believes that boys and young men become radical because they have no sense of what he calls the “Feeling of Being at Home.” How do we give them this sense of home so that they don’t feel themselves as enemies to their environment? Boys have a crying need for caring, intimate connections with men in early childhood. Intergenerational programming between fathers and grandfathers and boys, or providing “substitute” grandfathering, is one way to create spaces where this can happen. Also, the disproportionate effect on poorer men of the loss of industry and certain once-male occupations needs greater consideration. How can young men who have been marginalized find purpose and home? So much work needs to be done to brace against climate changes or to reinvigorate infrastructure. Public works projects that are not simply a handout but are valued society-building efforts could be a positive way to give poor and working class young men, and women, a new way to participate in building a future together.

The End of Heroic Leadership

Organizational pundits argue that the days of “heroic leadership” are numbered. No one person, in his armor on a mighty steed, can possibly hold all of the knowledge and nuance to respond to the shifting forces that most leaders must now manage. The command and control leadership of modernity with the heroic leader at the top was developed by men with the hope that they could control and impose order on—or, you could say, dominate—the messy, overwhelming environment to extract value. Modernity’s leaders in politics, science, and business raised the quality of life for many millions, but the technological interconnectedness that they gave rise to brings new complications. Action in one part of the system is felt in another.

The death of the heroic leader points to a shift away from leadership based in classical masculine tropes. Leaders like Angela Merkel, Hillary Clinton, and Barack Obama, despite their failures and shortcomings, often express a way of leading that is not caught up in masculine heroics. They, however, need to understand that many of their peers across the globe interpret their actions within a limited binary of dominant and subordinate, hero and vanquished, masculine and feminine. This perspective has to be a part of any calculus for action. Not necessarily to respond in kind, but to anticipate the likely response.

Heroic leadership is being shown the exit not simply because it is an old and increasingly problematic mode of male leadership. The systemic interactions in our organizations, communities, and world make it impossible to command and control our way forward. The capacities that we need to develop, as men and women, to lead empowered collectives are neither traditionally male nor female. They build on qualities of both genders: listening and taking bold action, intuition and analysis. And they call for new sensitivities for working together across differences that few men or women really have developed at this point. It will take us beyond a simple binary of feminine and masculine that ends up being so polarizing. Giving young men and women an aspirational identity toward leadership that brings forward the best of what humans, male and female, have expressed can mitigate against the dangerous defensive masculinity that is endangering the world. We have a chance in the way we speak about the new demands and practices of leadership to liberate leadership from a masculine bias both in terms of who leads and how.

When I watched Conchita Wurst sing her way to victory in the Eurovision competition in May 2014, I was thrilled. It wasn’t simply because her win was a triumph for transgender people everywhere (particularly given Putin’s gaybashing) but her unique masculine femininity (or vice versa) points us to a future in which the gender polarity that we feel is “normal” will no longer make sense. Conchita Wurst—the stage persona created by singer Thomas Neuwirth—breaks through drag queen conventions by sporting a full beard and no female prosthetics while wearing false eyelashes, big hair, and a sparkling gown. The transgender impulse challenges the very nature of male and female that has been the foundation of modern culture. It is an impulse toward a transcendence of biology that places a priority on freedom from the dualisms of modernity—masculine/feminine, mind/body, culture/nature—and thereby holds the potential for profound culture change.

Liberation from biology is not only happening among those who are transgender, but it’s also intrinsic to another cultural current: transhumanism. I don’t think it’s an accident that both are gaining momentum now. In fact, there are some fascinating similarities. Both encourage us to defy the limitations of our biology and re-invent what it means to be human. Both depend on technologies that are only coming on line now. Motivated by a drive for transcendence, which is often a spiritual goal, they seek to accomplish it through material means—surgery, implants, drugs, augmentation. Finally, different strains in these two movements envision a postgender future.

How much longer are we going to be able to depend on gender, and reproductive biology, to determine who we are as human beings? While it may be almost unthinkable to realize, identification with being a man or woman may become almost irrelevant to our lives, happiness, and creative contribution to life in the not-so-distant future. How will we ground ourselves and develop a deep sense of self-recognition, meaning, and purpose? I’d like to take a look at the postgender edges that are now emerging, and then contemplate how to develop our humanity so that we don’t become ghosts in a society of machines.

I Dream of Ramona

Postgender societies have been appearing in science fiction for decades. Ursula Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness, written in 1968, was one of the first—a “thought experiment” about a society in which people are “ambisexual,” taking on a specific gender once a month largely for procreation. In a recent series of posts on the science fiction/fantasy site Tor.com, author Alex Dally MacFarlane insists that “post-binary gender” needs to be an essential part of sci fi writing: “People who do not fit comfortably into the gender binary exist in our present, have existed in our past, and will exist in our futures.” In her posts, she notes how deeply gender is embedded in language and explores different approaches that authors have taken to break out of this binary. She asks: “How will languages change in the decades and centuries to come? How will we better express our gender systems—or, reaching far into the future, the gender systems of sentient life we might meet?”

MacFarlane argues that the gender binary is still the default in science fiction, but I would argue that this default is being undermined in surprising ways. Hollywood and the commercial gaming industry churn out images of males and females that are extremely differentiated and hypersexualized. So, the male cyborg is metal plated and muscle bound (the Terminator, Robocop, or Roy Batty from Blade Runner), while the females are often, to use a term from Blade Runner, the “basic pleasure model.” Despite the tendency for female action heroes to be, as Dr. Caroline Heldman says, merely “fighting fuck toys” (think: Lara Croft or Elektra), among the great sci fi heroes, sex doesn’t really matter. Male heroes (for example, Mad Max, Han Solo, Neo, Tony Stark, Jean-Luc Picard) exemplify classically male attributes: physical strength, rugged individualism, sharp intellect, inventiveness, leadership, bravery, power, and aggression. In the dystopian visions of the future that preoccupy our collective imagination, these male heroes are called on to defend and protect, put themselves in the line of fire, and rescue women and the world. They are, in essence, cowboys. But here’s where the tables turn postgender: the truly great female sci fi heroines—Ellen Ripley from Aliens, Sarah Connor from Terminator, and Catniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games—are also cowboys, cowboys with a bit more complexity. Not only are they courageous lone warrior/leaders, they are motivated by classically maternal concerns.

The trouble is that, despite the freedom that sci fi creators have to envision new worlds, really great female heroes are far too few. From Barbarella to the fembots, portrayals of women in science fiction and fantasy more often remind me of I Dream of Jeannie—the sexy, magic companion that fulfills her “master’s” every dream. The Escher Girls tumblr documents the almost comically absurd distortions and inappropriateness of female anime warriors leaping into battle with huge spherical bared breasts, flashing their naked buttocks. Too often visions of the future end up being a projection screen of immature fantasies that hypersexualize both sexes, but hold extreme gender differences in place.

Yet, there is a subversive element to this adolescent male fantasy world that undermines the gender binary that the often hypersexualized images themselves reinforce. Male teens adopting female avatars in gaming or on Second Life, and vice versa for female and male avatars, expands one’s “self” identification beyond the sex/gender with which one might personally and physically identify with. In Second Life, there is a great deal of conscious cross-gender exploration. So many males adopt female avatars that it’s led to the term G.I.R.L.—Guy In Real Life. A prime motivation appears to be sexual: cross-gender roleplaying allows one to explore different aspects of one’s sexuality. Even Ray Kurzweil, the dazzling prophet of our glorious technofuture and a director of engineering at Google, is experimenting with cross-gender virtual reality. He’s created “Ramona” as his virtual reality alter ego who fulfills his fantasy to be a female rock star. (Ramona also hosts chats on Kurzweil’s website.) These experiments with cross gender role playing in virtual reality spaces could lead to a postgender world in Real Life.

The Feminine Invasion of the Masculine Sphere

I’d like to escape from the sci fi warrior world and return to Planet Earth where the gender binary has been under siege since the start of the women’s liberation movement. While it is difficult for us to see clearly now, the changes in expectations for women have already begun to forge a postgender social world. As women stepped from the private feminine sphere of the home into the pubic masculine sphere of work (and politics and so forth), the stark opposition that held the gender binary in place began to soften. Once a new change becomes the norm, it’s almost impossible for us to imagine that life could ever have been another way. We forget that in the nineteenth century well-respected doctors argued that women’s wombs would atrophy if they engaged too much in intellectual pursuits. At this point, given that women have clearly proven their capability and competence across the board., such ideas seem ridiculous. Similarly, it took over one hundred years of agitation by radical women to secure “permission” to wear trousers in public. Women today take for granted that they can wear what had been male-only clothing for hundreds of years.

We don’t yet grant men parallel permission to wear what has been female clothing. This is why Conchita Wurst’s appearance is such a surprise. She isn’t simply cross dressing; she is doing so without giving up her beard or her actual body shape (that is, without full breasts and buttocks). While Conchita is evidence that this is beginning to change, the growing trend for young boys to wear female clothing—simply because they want to—is a larger step toward a postgender world. These boys are not necessarily gay, nor straight, but are asking for, and getting, permission to play with the full range of appearance and behavior that male and female have encompassed.

The liberation of women and men to explore and to be the entire range of human possibilities will only be further enhanced by new technologies. The biological difference between men and women in relation to human reproduction has been foundational to the creation of a gender divided culture. Advanced reproductive technologies will make the biological differences between the sexes less and less relevant. What will it mean to be biologically female when advance reproductive technologies enable healthy infants to grow outside a living womb? What will it mean to be a male when technology could even enable men to bear children? How will we envision our robot helpers who won’t ever actually be male or female, and how, in turn, will that affect how we see ourselves? Gender means nothing to robots. As we begin to replace parts of ourselves or perhaps have more options for our embodiment, would we continue to create ourselves as distinctly male and female? Why would we?

Keeping the “Trans” in Transgender

Recently, I read two different accounts of young adults who were in the midst of making the transition from one sex to another and then stopped. They stopped the process because they realized that becoming the supposedly opposite sex wasn’t what was driving them. One said that s/he didn’t want to go from one “box” to another. Reinstating a gender binary by switching from one side to the other misses the radical potential in the trans impulse.

While, clearly, some human beings feel that they are trapped in the “wrong” body, as a developmental psychologist, I wonder if this is may be an issue of cognitive development. Our culture emphasizes the gender binary, and at a certain level of cognitive development, our minds are capable of thinking only in binary terms. In this case, culture and mind may reinforce each other, leading a small but very real percentage of us to believe that the sex of the body that they have is not who they should be. If our culture would begin to see that gender and sex encompass a range, with “purely” masculine males and feminine females being the extremes of an entire range, then would there be less need or impulse toward sex reassignment? In other words, in the future, will most of us be “trans” in relation to the gender polarity we have now, and the “fringe” will be the masculine and feminine poles at either end of the spectrum?

The capacity for us to think “trans” rather than binary is a new and evolving one. The very structure of modern culture has been built on the binary distinction between two sexes with two genders: male/masculine and female/feminine. This is also the foundation of our identity—who we most deeply think we are. What becomes of us if we no longer have sex/gender as the foundation of our selves or our culture? How do we anchor ourselves in relationship and purpose if the sex of our bodies no longer hold a significant purpose that guides how we live our lives?

As I see it, we have two different paths to follow. The deconstruction of this polarized gender binary and questioning “woman” and “man” as monolithic categories follows an evolutionary logic. Eventually the polarity between male and female that currently has such a hold on our imaginations will cease. Life evolves toward diversity, and human life, even our sense of identity, grows toward greater differentiation. Our drive to individuate, to become unique individuals, is a movement toward differentiation. We can continue with this movement in relation to our gender identities and create a plethora of masculine/feminine/neutral ways to be human. I become a unique gender, which sets me apart. However, what then would bind us? Insecurity, fragmentation, and alienation could easily overcome us, leaving us increasingly separate and alienated from each other or from a core sense of self. How can one have a core if who we are is so malleable?

The other pathway, one that is emerging at the edge of culture now, would be to differentiate in the context of unity. Beyond and before our realization of separate or differing embodiment is the unity of consciousness that is the foundation of all creation.

The cultural momentum toward post-traditional forms of spirituality expresses the longing that individuals feel for a deeper foundation of self. The realization of Being that goes beyond the separate self provides a context for difference within wholeness. Difference can only truly be engaged with from a place of unity, as a shared human project. Rather than rooting our self in binary difference or in increasingly fragmented me-genders, our various expressions of humanity can find an anchor in the ground of nonseparation from which all differences arise. This depth that is prior to gender holds the potential to liberate us to create a postgender culture that is, literally, wholesome.

The Potential of We Beyond the Gender Binary

Sometimes, when watching Kirstie Simson dance with others in concert, a different possibility for women and men arises before my eyes. Unlike the swan-like princesses and dashing dark-clad heroes of classical ballet that so often play out the polarity of feminine and masculine, the whirl of colliding, sinking, rolling, lifting bodies in Simson’s work defies any expected pattern. Female dancers drive and pounce, males curl and receive, or vice versa in endless permutations of call and response. An energetic impulse leaps from one dancer to another, passing through the dancer’s body, compelling it into motion to touch and move on. The sense is of human beings liberated, simple and open, in spontaneous creation. I forget that I am watching women and men, female and male, and find myself surprised and amazed by the ongoing unfolding of possibility between these human beings. The current and currency between the dancers isn’t sexual, but a force that is clean, not in the sense of some kind of moral purity, but stripped bare and essential.

Simson’s strength and presence are always at the center—she’s formidable, nearly two meters tall, muscular, with big expressive hands. The London Times called her a “force of nature” for the unleashed power of her performances. One of the pioneers of Contact Improvisation, she has a rare capacity to create a fresh sense of potential between human beings—a new “We-space” that goes beyond the habits and expectations that we have for ourselves and each other as women and men.

For me, the new and growing interest in consciously creating “We-spaces” that open unforeseen potentials and capacities in our humanness is tremendously exciting, particularly for our sense of who we are, male and female. While Simson’s work hints at this through performance, there are many other experiments with the “intersubjective”—the living interior experience within a group—that also can, and will, lead to new ways of being women and men together. Through my own work, I’ve seen and experienced the potential of a new We for changing the entrenched patterns between women and men and laying the ground upon which we can dance a new humanity.

Unconscious Bias

Conscious of it or not, each of us is drenched in We-space. As Ken Wilber’s integral theory tells us, every society—or intentional collective of people—has a shared interior that we can call “culture.” That culture, or intersubjective, consists of the languages, customs, and assumptions that define reality and who we are within it. It is also the ground for our identities—our unconscious, pre-thought sense of “me.” Some speak about the intersubjective, or the cultural realm, as a value sphere. But I find that more confusing than helpful. When we think of values, we tend to think of a range of things such as personal qualities, like honesty, or political leanings, like being fiscally conservative, or lifestyle, like polyamory. The values that shape the intersubjective are much deeper—they form an invisible scaffolding that shapes our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. In a modern Western context, that invisible framework creates men and women who end up believing that they are Mars and Venus.

The depth of these divisions pops up when women head for Mars and men try to reach Venus. In 2012, three researchers at the University of North Carolina, New York University, and the University of Utah discovered that male executives who are in traditional marriages where their wives stay at home tend to be unconsciously hostile to women in the workplace. They also believe more strongly that a man’s role is to support his wife and family. Asking “whether a domestic traditionalist can also be an organizational egalitarian?” the researchers respond, “The answer we posit is ‘no.'” Yet, the issue of unconscious bias is a two-way street. Repeated studies and observations note that mothers who are taking care of kids tend to shun stay-at-home dads on the playground and at parental activities at school. These women, and the male executives, are gender traditionalists, which makes them unable to create a We-space that includes the other sex in any context that violates the gender division.

The fact that the gender binary in which women care and men build society is no longer simply assumed is already significant. There are men, with working wives, who support women at work. There are men who choose to be the primary caregiver to their children. Perhaps much will change as an older generation, more rooted in traditional gender expectations, passes on. According to a 2013 Pew Research Center survey, Millennial men and women are closer to parity on wages than any previous generation, which seems at first hopeful for the project of equality. But unfortunately this is largely due to a decline in young men’s wages. Millennial women, more often than men, also say that they are more focused on their careers than their male age-mates—which may have to do with young men’s increasing confusion about their place in society. There is still a sense in this survey, even in the questions themselves, that men and women are somehow pitted against each other in a zero sum game. In fact, these young women fully expect that when they have children, they will fall behind men in their careers, as happened in the previous two generations. As long as there is an underlying gendered division built into the fabric of society and our selves, women and men are going to find it difficult not to be at odds with each other. The intersubjective We-space created by such a division only perpetuates division—regardless of whether men or women seem to have the advantage.

A New We

I was clueless about the potential of intersubjectivity when I was first fired up to create a world built on gender equality. But even then, as a young activist in my twenties, I realized that simply trying to pass legislation to support equity, as challenging as that was (and still is), would not liberate women and men into something new. I next studied developmental psychology, wondering if we could raise children differently to create a more equal world. I came to realize that children were formed by the world that they found. The finger pointed back to myself: we, as adults who care about the future, hold the responsibility to create a new We that would allow the next generations to grow into a new way to be human, no longer divided from themselves and each other. But how?

Following an intuition that I had to go someplace in myself that was beyond what I already knew, I found myself in a spiritual community that developed a spiritual practice that was focused on breaking through to what we came to call a “Higher We”—a conscious intersubjective that was transpersonal, alive to a shared creative intelligence that animated the whole. Engaging in the “Higher We” meant that each of us had to consciously shift our identity away from the personal defenses, fears, ambitions, and habits that shaped us as individuals, including as women and men. Sitting together in a circle, our deepest attention and intention focused on the whole between and beyond the particular group we were part of. As a woman, I was confronted with tendencies that I hadn’t been aware of in myself, such as the fear of letting go, beyond what I know. At the brink, I would instinctively pull back. Men couldn’t rely on intellectual fireworks, abstraction, or dominate the conversation by interrupting and overtalking. For this other intelligence to manifest between and as us, we had to make ourselves available through an autonomous choice that placed all of our attention and care on a subtle, living process unfolding in the space between us. This choice was a simultaneous surrender and active response. Remarkably, the Higher We space that we discovered transformed the polarities that shape our assumptions about reality. Self and other, mind and body, unity and diversity, passive and active, autonomy and communion: all of these polarities that shape the modern mind lost their sense of opposition without losing the important differences held in the pair.

And what about the polarity of male and female, masculine and feminine? I can only say that my experience with this was limited but powerful. For a variety of reasons, including dynamics relating to power and gender with our spiritual teacher, we weren’t able to pursue this much beyond the realization that something radically different became possible by shifting one’s identity in this way. To go further would have meant a conscious, intensive, and persistent commitment to use the Higher We context that was our spiritual practice to transform our daily lives, habits, and selves. That commitment wasn’t there.

Dancing a New Humanity

But I haven’t let go of the potential I have seen. Recently, a dear spiritual colleague who I hadn’t seen in some years invited me to come to her weekend retreat for women in Portugal. Over the course of the weekend, I led the women to identify more and more with the deepest part of themselves that has no gender. Anchored in this expansive place, another possibility for being human, embodied as women, began to gain momentum. Liberation caught fire between us: being women was no longer a focus or preoccupation, which released a tremendous inspiration and opened a new sense of possibility for individuals and the group. At the end of the retreat, my friend invited the young men who had been serving the women’s retreat to join us in the last session. Coming in, as they later told us, they were anxious—often women’s events have created or deepened the sense of division between the women and men. But as soon as they entered this We-space, something in them fell away. A field of nonseparation and deep interest in others overtook the group, now consisting of women and men. The men said that they had never experienced no barriers between themselves and women in this way before. The door to a new world opened just a crack.

To me, that crack is everything. How can we widen it? Right now, the dynamics of this old gendered division seem toxic. Too many young men seem lost, confused about what young women want and feeling superfluous to them. Young women are determined, but too often they unconsciously hold back because they want to appear perfect or trade on attractiveness in ways that are ultimately undermining. Unwittingly, these are contemporary twists on deeply engrained gender patterns—he is motivated by being needed and valued by her and she is oriented toward others’ approval. Awakening to a Higher We enables us to discover a different motivation that unites rather than divides us. We defy expectations, and discover the joy and liberation of creating a new dance together.

http://www.daddyfiles.com/women-no-support-sahds/

http://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2009/oct/20/working-fathers-report-ehrc

http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/06/im-not-your-wife-a-new-study-points-to-a-hidden-form-of-sexism/258057/

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2013/12/11/on-pay-gap-millennial-women-near-parity-for-now/

In the middle of nothing—that is, nothing but sand stretching in every direction—there is a peculiar oasis. It has huge palm trees with thick rough trunks and wild leafy tops placed in a grid: six by six. No oasis anywhere in the desert has palm trees that grow in a grid like a Cartesian plane. But here at New York University (NYU)-Abu Dhabi, this oasis of sorts is both the center of a contemporary university campus and the perfect metaphor for the unique type of global education that the university offers. Is this the kind of global education that will bring together the next generation globally? I’m not sure.

I was visiting NYU-Abu Dhabi as a stopover to visit my mentor, Carol Gilligan, and her husband Jim, on the way home from a visit to India. The two contexts, side-by-side, present very different possibilities for global learning. Carol and Jim are both NYU faculty who were given the opportunity to spend a semester at the “East” campus…in Abu Dhabi. The contemporary sand-colored campus was just completed about six months ago, and it has far more space than students at the moment. The entire university has been fully funded by a sheik who wanted a world-class university set in an Islamic context. Young Muslims can study here, in an environment supportive of their religious customs. Plus the entire education is free and actually quite luxurious (students can have their own personal trainer, for instance). NYU handles the application process, and the competition for places is even more competitive than Harvard.

Only some 18% of the students are from the UAE, which makes the student body truly global. Some of the world’s best students from dozens of countries spend four years together here, developing friendships that could last a lifetime. Yet, as I heard from a young woman in one of Carol’s classes, the cultural diversity, which starts as an attractor to the students, can end up being difficult to live with. Even with what seems like very positive attitudes from the students, differences make us different, strange, and often uncomfortable with each other. From what I could see, which was limited, the students seem to be pretty much on their own to figure this out. The faculty is predominantly American, but also European, and generally seem to be extremely liberal—postmodern pluralists, you might say. From what I can tell, the faculty do what NYU faculty do—there is no censorship. So, for example, a prominent liberal rabbi gave a presentation on campus, at the suggestion of the faculty. I don’t know how many students, or how many Muslims, went to the event, but it’s there, right in front of them.

And the language on campus is English. Here is where my questions arise. The values of the university itself are secular Western with both its modernist belief in scientific objectivity and postmodern relativism that makes few, if any, value distinctions except for the value that everyone has a right to their own truth. Even as this postmodern belief has become increasingly unworkable in an age of civilizational conflict and terrorism, this is the dominant philosophical approach in the liberal academy at this time. (In fact, postmodern relativism is probably the reason why NYU and its faculty can be in the midst of massive oil wealth that has supported Islamic radicalization and feel that they are doing a good thing.) The investment of prestige and capital in creating the university and the city has a stabilizing effect in the region, but are the students getting an education that allows them to inquire into and question their own and each other’s values? Is that happening? Or are they being inculcated into a view of the world that is not really global, but from New York? Education like this is extremely seductive. But is it a subtle new form of Western hegemony—this time not through devouring resources at gunpoint, but through the attempt to change the categories and values of young people so they fit into a world of global capital covered in a veneer of pluralistic tolerance?

These questions probably became very much front and center for me because of the rest of my journey in India. I was part of a small team that is exploring the potential of new, consciousness-aware dialogue processes to embrace diversity in a context of prior unity. We met at the conference center of SIDH, the Society for Integrated Development in the Himalayas, which was founded by two of the participants in our dialogue. SIDH provided schools—up to 19 of them!—in the remote villages in the mountains that the government couldn’t reach. Today, they have three remaining schools, because the government is now providing education in most of the villages.

All of the Indians who participated were concerned about the effects of modernity on the deep, collective traditions that are now rapidly disappearing in India. One participant spoke very powerfully about how the villagers live from an awareness of the whole village and engage in life by putting the needs and concerns of the whole first. This is a quality and capacity that we moderns and postmoderns need to regain but from the individuated self-consciousness that now defines us in the West. Those of us from the West who participated in these dialogues are also concerned about the effects of modernity because, despite its benefits and advancements, it has become toxic not only to the planet but also to the human soul. The individuation and agency that has propelled human creativity has also led to deep alienation from ourselves, each other, and the world in which we live.

Developing an education within a fast-changing global reality may paradoxically involve teaching children from the villages to value their roots rather than pushing them to compete in the market. My new friends from SIDH spoke about their arrogance in approaching the villages with their ideas of what the villagers need to learn. The pull of the modern world, represented by the city, attracts so many young people from the villages. Attracted by the shiny objects of modernity and the promise of a better life, they leave the land behind them and too often find that they have made a mistake. Debt and low wages keep them from finding their way home. SIDH sometimes takes teens to the city to see the harsh reality of how those from the villages live. They also developed new curricula to teach the villagers using the plants, materials, and work of the village as the basis for learning. The educators’ response to global modernity’s intrusion into the integrity of village life was to build upon that integrity rather than offer an education abstracted from the life conditions that the kids are in. The leaders of SIDH are not hopeful about preserving this deep communal tradition—the juggernaut of modernity may be too strong. And as one of the SIDH leaders said repeatedly, “We can’t go back.”

Going forward, across civilizational divides, was the purpose of our meeting together in India. We share deep concerns about modernity—not just about its material impacts but in its loss of the bonds of human connection and the truth of nonseparation. The power of individualism needs grounding in the depth of human interrelatedness and a shared purpose of fostering life on this planet. For those of us from the West, this has been our spiritual practice—awakening to a Higher We of living nonseparation. For our friends from India, this depth of prior unity is not far away. Our dialogues together opened a deep space between us that enabled complex discussions about core principles that are the root of divisions between India and the West. While our time together was not all smooth, we ended with a shared inquiry that held a wholeness despite difference. To me, creating relational spaces that hold a capacity for unity and diversity is an imperative in our times. At the end of our three days together, there was a strong intention to find a way to continue.

How does this relate to global education? All education on the planet at this point has the fact of globalization as its context. Whether in a tiny village in India or in a world-class university in the Gulf desert, the homogenizing effect of modernity and the world economy of multinational capitalism has to be contended with because it produces such deep alienation. Is it possible to create means of communicating—through dialogue or education—that do not privilege Western ways of thinking and being yet do not deny them? This is our challenge. Can we all sit at the table and hold each other, eye-to-eye, in deep human regard while not backing away from the tensions between us? In fact, the world philosopher Jurgen Habermas argues that communication without domination is the challenge of our times. Domination can be brutal and overt or far more subtle. Even the demand that we all speak English distorts the capacity to comprehend each other and the opportunity for each to express him- or herself fully. Our ability to come together, to create wholeness without diminishing difference, may determine not only the quality of education that the next generations receive but also whether we pull together in a shared human project to enable life to thrive on this planet.

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If you would like to hear more about our first “One World Dialogue” in India, Thomas Steininger and I will be speaking about it for the Meridian University Integral Voices (free) series. Our topic is Integral We-Spaces: A New Context for Global Dialogue? It’s on Monday, June 15, 2015 from 10:00 a.m. – 11:00 a.m. PT. Click the link to register (scroll down the page to see the info) and get the dial in info.

Also my deep thanks to my colleagues in this venture: Mary Adams, Steve Brett, Sri Pingali, Thomas Steininger, and our friends and colleagues from India.

The day after my very first appearance on New York cable TV—it was the 80s, so cable was new and small—I got a message at my office at the National Organization for Women where I was VP. It was from a well-known Dr. Oz-type doctor who did health reports on one of the big TV networks. I had no idea who he was, but my colleagues were all excited, thinking that this could be a real break for us to reach a bigger audience. He had seen my appearance on the local cable program, where I was speaking about women’s rights and equality, and he wanted me to call him.

I was nervous, but I called the number at the TV network that he gave me. It was his private line and he picked up the phone himself. As soon as he recognized who I was, he interrupted me—telling me in the most, well, warm manner how impressed he was by me on the program.

“Thank you,” I said, feeling slightly uncomfortable. I began to speak about how important were the issues that I had been speaking about on the show.

He interrupted me. He loved my passion, he said. He was riveted watching me because I expressed such passion.

“Yes,” I began, “I am very passionate about these issues…”

He interrupted me, and began to explain how my passion made him feel. He loved my passion.

“My passion is for these issues,” I responded, starting to feel wary.

He made a little impatient sound. “It doesn’t matter,” he said curtly. “I’d like to see you in person; perhaps we could have dinner.”

Suddenly I had a sickening feeling—as if he had shoved his hand up under my skirt. I slammed down the phone. This guy had not the slightest interest in what I cared about or what I was talking about. It felt as though he related to my passion as a commodity that he wanted for himself. What I thought—or that I thought—meant nothing. To me, that meant I meant nothing to him except how I made him feel. I felt violated.

Obviously, that conversation made quite an impression on me, since I haven’t forgotten it and it happened a few decades ago. I so distinctly remember the shock I felt when I realized that he could care less about what I was saying but wanted my passion for himself. It wasn’t simply that he was hitting on me. I was used to that. But the horrible irony of speaking seriously about women’s rights and then being seen merely as some kind of conduit of heat or excitement really stunned me. For some dumb reason, I expected that if I was speaking about something significant, then what I say should be respected, or at least be the foundation for a conversation.

Was I wrong? Apparently, when it comes to conversation between women and men, I might be. At least according to some in the spiritual and Wilberian integral world. Since 2006, when Wilber published Integral Spirituality, his integral theory has included “masculine” and “feminine” as types of individual interiors—which is supposed to indicate a basic orientation to life that is persistent across levels of development. While many give lip service to “masculine doesn’t mean ‘man’ and feminine doesn’t mean ‘woman,’” pretty much of the time we use masculine to indicate things or aspects of self that are socially appropriate for men, and the same goes for the feminine. Wilber himself often uses man, male or masculine (or woman, female or feminine) interchangeably. Even though both women and men can and do express both (of course we do—they are, after all, human capacities and qualities), I am referring to the normative use of these terms in which men are supposed to be masculine and women, feminine. Masculine and feminine are often seen as representing a polarity, like opposite poles of a magnet that attract each other.

What happens to communication when this polarity is mapped onto living, breathing human beings, male and female? That is the domain of Wilber’s erstwhile friend and colleague, David Deida, who in his book, The Way of the Superior Man, helps those with masculine essences understand how to have a satisfying, passionate relationship with the feminine essence—primarily for those in relationship, but also for those who are on the lookout for one. Of course, this requires communication. What kind of communication is possible between individuals whose identities are rooted in ideas of masculine and feminine? From my view, using the masculine and feminine as the context of meaningful conversation between the sexes is as misguided as the TV doctor’s attempt to appropriate my passion. Inherently, it does not create the mutual respect needed for co-creative engagement between women and men.

I’ve written quite a bit questioning why evolutionary integralists so often gravitate toward the common (read: stereotypical) usage of “masculine” and “feminine.” To me, dividing fundamental human attributes in two and giving half to women and half to men as polar opposites is a throwback to a much earlier time. To put it more precisely than Freud, this makes your genitalia your personality. The sex act itself becomes the determinant of one’s core self: active/agentic or passive/receptive. Hormones, neurology, and brain function are all brought in to lend an air of biological determinism to these stereotypes. Of course, there are profound historical reasons, based in the differences between women’s and men’s biological roles in reproduction, that lay the ground for differences between men and women. But at this point in time, among those of us aspiring integralists, the idea that these polarities should govern interactions between women and men is a form of retro-modernism rather than an integrative, integral perspective. Moreover, upholding this polarity as fundamental to who we are as men and women makes sex and sexual attraction the subtext for all of our interactions.

The essence of the masculine and feminine polarity, then, is attraction: opposites attract, so we say. Magnetic poles, electric current, the workings of the atom are all examples of the force of polarity. Breaking the bonds forged from the polarities between atomic particles creates a nuclear explosion. “Sexual attraction,” explains David Deida, “is based on sexual polarity, which is the force of passion that arcs between masculine and feminine poles.” Or as he continues, “you always attract your sexual reciprocal,” so that in sexual passion “you need a ravisher and a ravishee,” or what he sees as the masculine and the feminine. While Deida says that we can change our role as ravisher or ravishee every day if we choose, “most men and women also have a more masculine or more feminine core,” respectively. So, if the way that we tend to think about ourselves as women and men is that we possess relatively immutable interiors that are (or should be) feminine and masculine, then the undercurrent of communication will be this polarity of sexual attraction. Sexuality is the subtext.

This has serious implications for communication between women and men. In a chapter entitled “Women Are Not Liars,” Deida explains that, in emotional situations, women cannot be held accountable for the truth of what they say: “The ‘truth’ of the feminine is whatever she is really feeling, in this present moment.” (Italics in original.) Given that women are defined as emotional by nature, that is, according to the polarity in which rationality is masculine and emotionality is feminine, I would imagine that it’s difficult to know exactly where to draw the line in terms of when to take what a woman says seriously and when to just “listen to her as you would the ocean, or the wind in the leaves.” Deida gives men a helpful guideline to figure this out:

The basic rule is this: Don’t believe the literal content of what your woman says unless love is flowing deeply and fully in the moment when she says it. And even then, know that she is probably talking about her current feelings, not necessarily about the subject of whatever she is talking about. Never base your plans on what your woman says she wants to do, unless she is in the full flow of love when she says it. And then, expect her to change her mind at any time when her feelings change.

The gist is that a man should never trust what “his” woman says, because it is only true as long as she feels it. He advises men to listen deeply (hearing her words like the babbling of a brook?) and try to distinguish between her “shifting moods [which can be discounted] and her sensitive wisdom,” which he never explains. Throughout the book, Deida explains that women’s moodiness or bitchiness is usually a signal to the man that she needs to experience his presence and strength or, in other words, he should schtupp her immediately—on the kitchen table, on the floor, take her down wherever she was standing. This is called “f***ing her open to God.” Deida’s roots in the Pick Up Artist community are showing: the subtext is conquest, constant conquest even in the context of a committed relationship. Apparently, real communication between men and women is basically a process of reinterpreting verbiage as a desire for submission—because women don’t mean what they say anyway and what’s really going on is getting it on with each other.

Putting aside the “date rape” overtones of Deida’s advice to men, the most damaging part to me is the view that one cannot expect rationality or accountability from women. The identification of the feminine, or women, with feeling and the non-rational raises questions for me about communication between the sexes. In Deida’s assumption that women in intimate settings should not be taken at their word, the interpretation of what women actually mean is left to the man. The woman is left wordless. I don’t doubt that many women struggle to articulate their experience and desires in relationship, particularly if men choose, as Deida suggests, to engage with women who are their “complementary opposite.” If an older, mature man then selects a woman who is younger and less developed, then being a superior man, or at least a man who is superior to “his” woman, is fairly guaranteed. Admittedly, too, women’s historical role in the emotional give-and-take of caretaking and lack of engagement with intellectual life has had an impact on contemporary women’s sense of being female. At the same time, men’s historical absence from the domestic space of care has left many nearly tone-deaf to the music of emotional intimacy. But not expecting women to say what they mean and mean what they say places women outside the expectations for adult discourse. It turns women into children.

The laundry list of opposites that are contained in the supposed masculine-feminine polarity—reason vs. emotion, active vs. passive, agentic vs. receptive—have a dangerous subtext of adult vs. child. We expect children to be emotionally driven (and later to develop reasoning capacities), to be passive and directed by their parents and teachers, and to receive guidance so that they can develop into independent agents who direct their own lives. In Deida’s polarity, women stay as children, whose spunk and wildness (read: childlikeness) drive his “newly evolving man” wild.

This is nothing but retromodernism. Modernity divided society into the masculine public sphere and the feminine private sphere, each inhabited by “opposites.” The gulf between these two polar opposites was as unbridgeable as the superiority of the masculine over the feminine was undeniable. The effect was disrespect. Men could have sympathy and protective feelings for their womenfolk, but not the kind of respect one reserves for an equal. But likewise, men’s unavailability and cluelessness about the delicate nature of relationship led to women feeling emotionally superior to men. Polarity is not partnership. Opposites attract, yes, but in a context in which the dynamic of dominance and subordination sparks passion. In such a social space, the subtext is always sexual, and men and women come from, and end up on, different planets.

Ultimately, communication between women and men who are embodying this opposition ends up being merely superficial. Even though these are deep grooves in our culture and consciousness, this opposition is not an expression of the depth of who we are. Deeper than our personality, sexuality or cultural role is our shared humanity—the truth that the entire range of qualities and capacities that have been divided by gender are all aspects of our selves. From the unity of the being that we share, and each accountable for the complexity of making meaning from our experience, a new capacity for communication can become possible between men and women. No longer opposites, the creative work of embracing and integrating differences reveals a new potential for being human together.

I wrote this piece for EnlightenNext Impuls Magazine (a German-language publication) for Issue 9 in 2013. We are now publishing a new quarterly magazine, in German, called evolve. www.evolve-magazin.de I write a feature on gender in each issue.

I don’t know what “equality” really means any more. It’s so strange that after fifty years of movement toward gender equality, so much has changed, and yet what we have now is not the social transformation that I hoped for. In fact, we’re far from it.

Maybe I’m being too idealistic to expect more. But I didn’t expect that equality would come to be defined, as I feel it largely has been, as the equal right to do whatever one wants to do, to fulfill one’s lusts however one desires, regardless of the effect on anyone else. Somehow, even the notion of equality has become a tool of the status quo that plays zero sum games with men’s vs. women’s dignity, self-respect, and autonomy. My original inspiration could best be described as “the more beautiful world that our hearts know is possible,” to quote the title of Charles Eisenstein’s latest book. My longing came from a vision that wasn’t a picture in the mind but a call from the heart for a wholeness within difference. In facing a mind-bogglingly complex world in which the compelling goal of equality has been reduced to a certain shameless, individual sameness of success and consumption, how do we work for a deeper equality that takes us beyond the status quo? How does deeper social transformation work?

The Neoliberal Take-over

My first question is: Could the systems that created the world-as-it-is ever transform into something new? The gender binary of masculine and feminine persons and public and private spheres were created together and complement each other. Capitalism grew up with this modernist division of the world and of our humanness. We cannot use the mechanisms of the legal, political, and economic systems that have been created out of these fundamental divisions to create something whole. The idea that we could just “add and stir” women into public life and change the world has been naïve. Not only has this not disrupted the values of the public world and what leadership should look like in politics, business, law, or even education, but it has devalued the private sphere of human intimacy and care.

Nor can deeper change come from women asserting the value of intimacy and care—even though most human beings would be bereft without it. Within the context of a market-driven economy, caretaking and intimacy literally have no value and so therefore those who do such “labor” are nearly voiceless and valueless. As middle- and upper-class women have vacated the home for work, the vacuum left behind has created a black market in low-paid care work: housecleaning, child care, cooking, elder care, and even sexual companionship. This work, that supports and grounds human relationship, is viewed as unskilled and left to workers, often immigrants and people of color, living with few rights on the margins of society.

Since the fall of the Berlin Wall, neoliberalism, the ideology that grants God-like agency and righteousness to market forces, has become the only “operating system” on the globe. And it has reached inside feminism, too. Emphasizing individual choice as “empowerment,” this feminism leaves capitalism untouched by not critiquing how our choices are shaped by the market. Neoliberal feminism, given a lot of space in media, holds up the banner of equality in business and political leadership, a la Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg’s message, Lean In, encouraging women to be part of the system not critical of it. But as poet and essayist Audre Lorde said so powerfully, “The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.”

Love & Vision

The memoirs of some early women’s liberation activists in 1960s America offer some clues. Their strategies were inspired but often quixotic: protesting at the Miss America contest, staging a “sit in” at the offices of a leading housewife magazine, Ladies Home Journal. Plus they engaged in consciousness raising: progressive young women, offended by how their male peers on the Left treated them, felt compelled to come together to speak about their experience as women and began to see and thing differently. One described how she stunned herself by leaping on a table at a chaotic anti-war protest meeting and spoke with a power she didn’t know she had. Others spoke of an awakening, a sense of illumination, that forever shifted their experience. And almost every one of them spoke of Love. Not the love between a man and a woman that they were taught to seek, but a Love that shattered all division and opened a door to a different possibility.

It may seem strange to speak about Love when feminists are so often seen as bitter antagonists in the gender war. But Love it was, at the beginning. These young women explored so much together, fought, discussed, and shined a light on the unspoken terrain of their experience—as girls, women, daughters, sisters, lovers, poor, working class, rich, straight, gay, white, black, Latina, Asian. None of these young women had a concrete plan for how the world could or should be. But they catalyzed a shift, not everywhere and in everyone, but enough that, as the title of Gail Collins’s book says, “everything changed.”

While everything may not have changed enough, the shift was dramatic—and the call for justice and equal respect for women spread rapidly across the globe. What actually happened? It’s not something that can be easily explained. But I suspect that it does start with this Love that enables us to sense that the world could be different. This Love is visionary, alive with potential, defying division. I don’t mean that one “sees” in the eye of one’s mind how the future could be, but that one knows that something new, whole, and human is right, true, and possible.

The Prevail Scenario

Historians tend to trace the origin of significant, epochal social transformation to material causes—conquest for resources, control over production, war—but the truth is that we don’t know. Would, for example, Christianity have become the religion of the West if so many women and slaves hadn’t leapt at Christ’s message of freedom that they heard from Paul? Their passion defied the Romans, setting a movement aflame that was unstoppable because it lit up human hearts with a possibility that we still have not realized. The Renaissance, which some historians believe was really initiated by about five hundred people, came on the heels of the brutal Inquisition. This rebirth of a classical reverence for human life inherently challenged the Church’s dogmatic invocation of God’s “wishes.” Was this another call from the heart?

As futurist Joel Garreau argues in Radical Evolution, one apparent lesson from history is “how heroic and profound ‘muddling through’ has been for the human race.” Within situations that are potentially destructive to the species, the bottom-up sum total of human responses leads to what he calls “the Prevail Scenario.” We prevail, in a positive sense, not simply survive. The human species’ capacity to prevail in affirming love and justice cannot be understood through a linear plotting of cause and effect. Nor does it miraculously solve everything, but somehow our capacity to side with Life and prevail enables some part of the human species to take a next step in an often-contradicting, complex, and confusing direction that we cannot fully see.

Going Beyond the Master’s Tools

Facing the complexity of a globalized economy that shapes and creates desire while dominating our political systems, we will never be able to plan social transformation through chains of cause and effect. We are outgunned in every way. We have to use different tools. The equality between the sexes that I hope for in my heart arises from a deep recognition of our unity, beyond all apparent separation, and interest in the creative power of our differences. I don’t know how, concretely, to go about making this our shared social, cultural reality. I can only aspire to live it, and very often that feels far beyond what I am capable of.

When I look closely at, say, my foremothers in the women’s movement, I can discern certain attributes that seem to be critical to living in the potential of our hearts’ longing. Many of these early pioneers seemed to feel and express an urgent desperation in relation to the larger social issues of the day: the Vietnam War, racial discrimination and violence, and their own inability to be taken seriously because they were female. Their interest in each other’s diverse experiences as women was like a powerful thirst. And then there was this Love: the soul-piercing, separation-defying openness to a potential that comes from a radical hope and encounter with others. These are not the master’s tools.

For me the question, to myself and to all of us, is: Do I dare to despair, dare to care, and dare to not know and be willing to do that together? When I see young women celebrating their empowerment and freedom through binge drinking and pole-dancing while reports of their anxiety, depression, and lack of self-confidence abound, I despair. When I watch videos of young feminists verbally abusing young men for attending a men’s rights lecture, I also despair. When I read the latest screeds from men’s rights activists trashing young women as “empty little narcissist[s]” who deserve to be raped, that’s cause for despair. And so is the anti-woman viciousness and cyber-stalking that has infected the internet like a virus. I find it hard to stay with and not blame or shame, to care about the very human desires and needs that are underneath these responses, and to urgently know that it has to change without knowing how. Can I trust enough in the intelligence of life itself to be a portal for a Love that is beyond my self and hope beyond the despair?

Dismantling the Master’s House

Part of me isn’t comfortable with the “softer” activism and change making that I am speaking about. It is so easy to reach for the master’s tools, because they are what we know. Yet this is a subtle kind of cynicism. It is a doubt in the intelligence that has created, far better than we arrogant individuals ever could, the living systems that we are part of and have tried to separate from and dominate.

At the same time, I feel an urgency about strengthening our collective capacity to come together, beyond what has historically divided us, in this Love where we are One and unique, which to me is equality. We have a powerful need for spaces in which to dismantle the oppressive structures within our societies and our selves by facing each other fully from a ground of unity. It is work at another dimension of reality, in consciousness itself, which is the fabric of our livingness, our awareness, and Love. Developing a greater sensitivity and openness to this dimension allows us to engage consciously in the creative potential for change that our foremothers stumbled upon and were carried by. It allows us to begin to bring into being that world our hearts know is possible.

http://www.acceler8or.com/2011/12/will-joel-garreau-jamais-cascio-prevail-along-with-the-rest-of-us/

http://jezebel.com/no-i-will-not-take-the-mens-rights-movement-seriously-1532799085

Gender, in a diverse global context, is an ongoing confrontation. The ways that we embody being male or female (or neither) vary remarkably from culture to culture, place to place. However, I find it very striking that it’s often very difficult to see this clearly. And if we do, it’s then very difficult not to have some kind of personal, emotional reaction to these differences—often some form of repulsion. Such responses are often particularly visceral because gender is entwined with the power and lure of sexuality. I’m not necessarily speaking about practices like Female Genital Mutilation, but the more subtle ways that our core identities frame our perceptions of what is normal, good, and right. A deep and unconscious attachment to our core gender identity easily can make us into subtle imperialists.

Our shared resistance, particularly in the West, to a deep and constructive confrontation with difference has led to all kinds of violence, gross and subtle. Encountering cultural difference along core dimensions of identity questions our sense of the fundamental “rightness” of who we are. Becoming one, integrated humanity depends on awakening to the subtle forms of separation that we inhabit as identity and assert as “right.” The joy and creative potential of meeting across cultures and civilizations only becomes possible as we liberate ourselves from the prisons of righteousness of our unexamined identities.

I’m in my twenties, living in Rome. I like to walk about in the early evening, which isn’t really something that young women do in Italy. Often, I go to the Piazza del Pantheon, where a lot of people hang out—the ice cream and coffee are particularly delicious there. The young men stand in close clusters, smoking almost in each other’s faces. Hair carefully worked into tousled curls that spill over into one eye, each young man stands with legs apart, slightly thrusting their hips at each other to emphasize their words. I “read” them: gay. They see me, alone at night, American, they read me: hooker.

While European colonialism was unthinkably brutal, resulting in the enslavement or death of hundreds of millions of human beings, there was another more subtle form of enslavement that has persisted into the present. It’s an enslavement of the mind, a reduction of human being into limited categories. The form of Western rationality that was imported with the colonizers tended toward these binary categories, such as man and woman, heterosexual and homosexual, Black and white. While this may be difficult for us Western rationalists to understand, within many cultures there was not a sharp division between man and woman, masculine and feminine. And race, moreover, did not exist as a supposedly definite biological category that enabled science to rationalize ethnocentrism. There were a variety of types of human embodiment that were valued and positively recognized that allowed for a range of expression of self and sexuality.

In many parts of the world, including Africa and among the indigenous tribes of North America, persons with male and female bodies were not viewed as opposites in a hierarchy in which males were dominant. In The Invention of Women, Oyéronké Oyewùmí argues that prior to the colonization of Africa, Yoruba society was not organized with gender as a category that determined what human beings could and could not do. After colonization, those who were designated female were no long able to hold leadership positions, have rights to property, or engage in other areas of economic power. The renown Native American writer and critic Paula Gunn Allen gives similar examples of the Cherokee and the Iroquois peoples, who, after colonization, took away traditional rights that females had, such as the power to wage war, the right to be involved in public decisions, the choice to marry or not. She describes these changes as vain attempts to appease the European settlers by mimicking them in order not to be sent off their land.

The lack of a binary, either-or, hierarchy also applies to sexuality. First, the categories homosexual and heterosexual didn’t exist. Similar to earlier periods in European history, sexual behaviors were acknowledged as same sex or not. But, and this is my second point, this didn’t result in the creation of a negative category of person. The term “Two-Spirit” has been recently coined to describe the existence of Native Americans who defy Western binary gender categories. Apparently, there is evidence that over 130 tribes acknowledged more than the two categories that we would call male and female. Often, the Two-Spirits were highly valued members of the tribe, with significant roles as seers, sources of luck, and spiritual guides. The existence of additional genders can be found in cultures as diverse as India and Polynesia, not to mention that same-sex encounters have been part of Western culture since the Greeks.

Walking along Broadway in New York City in the progressive Upper West Side, I am with my partner at the time, who is African American. We are in conversation, but not holding hands or touching. I notice, with alarm, that a white man is approaching me, but doesn’t appear to see that I am in his way. I move to the side to avoid getting bumped. I begin to notice something deeply disorienting: many of the white people that we pass on the street don’t seem to see me. It’s not about eye contact or the usual ways that we ignore or brush past each other on busy city streets. It’s deeper than that: I experience that I don’t exist for them. It’s as though where I am is an empty space. I feel strangely erased and suffocated, and mentioned my experience to my partner. He smiles slightly and looks at me side-eyed. “Yes,” he said, “that’s often the Black experience.”

Projection—the psychological defense mechanism—has been very common in the way we in the West have engaged with persons from other cultures. Blinded by these binary categories of thought, it is so easy to fail to see persons when they do not fit. In fact, the tendency is to make frightening assumptions about the “Other.” Whole continents of people were judged to be hypersexualized, subhuman animals by Western men and women who believed that they were not ruled by sexual desire or emotional passion. Interestingly, the characteristics that our forebears placed on persons from Africa, Asia, and the Americas seem to be outside the half of the binary that makes up the ideal Western man or woman. They are the shadow parts of our own gender identities that have obscured the humanity of much of the world.

The Victorian gender ideals of the rational man and the pure woman don’t just happen by themselves. To get young boys to cut off from their sensitive feelings and girls to dissociate from the power and desires of their bodies takes a whole culture. The process of gender identity development begins very early. Young children, around the age of two, are keen to understand what “boy” and “girl,” “mother” and “father,” mean, particularly in cultures where these differences are very evident. According to Harvard psychologist Jerome Kagan, the age of two is also when children begin to develop a moral sense. And they bring that moral sense to their developing gender identity: young children want to do “boy” or “girl” right. They are dependent on their parents and the cultural surround to show them and they have a sense that it is very important to get it right. For a variety of reasons for boys raised primarily by women without male support, there is an existential fear of crossing categories and losing oneself entirely. To do so is a source of fear and shame.

Our sense of ourselves as appropriately male or female, according to the codes of modernist Western culture, is bounded by shame. To be un-manned and “feminized” as a male or to be either a slut or overly masculine as a female is shameful. Shame is the painful awareness that one doesn’t measure up against the standards and values that one has learned as important. Given how fragile the gender binary is—because it says that half of all human qualities are not right for one to express—the ongoing potential for shame is very high. Shame is extremely painful, and most of us humans do everything we can to avoid it. Even if we have to blind ourselves to another’s humanity.

Few of us living in Europe—and reading this magazine—consciously embrace a Victorian-era gender identity in which men are men and women are women. So much has happened in the last fifty years to bring us closer together and to make us whole human beings, not just halves of a binary polarity. Yet our gender identities are rooted in a very old part of the self—from almost before we could talk—when our capacity for complexity and compassion was very limited. Underneath much of our sophistication, these deep-seated beliefs still can have a powerful hold, protected by an invisible wall of shame.

Decades after the overthrow of colonial rule, many find themselves still in a deep struggle between cultural authenticity and an internalized imperialist view of themselves as inferior. If we want to take part in authentic conversation with people who are reclaiming and revitalizing profoundly different ways of being human and living on this planet, certain assumptions that literally make us up and structure our sense of reality have to be suspended. We cannot get rid of those assumptions, but they can become transparent to us. The self-work that we have done, psychologically and spiritually, can now be brought into service for a larger purpose by giving us the inner freedom to step beyond the ways we subtly reinforce the colonial mindset. The same global forces responsible for climate change and species extinction are also causing the extinction of cultural diversity and precious forms of human consciousness on this planet. We don’t know what effect that will have.

We have much to learn from each other and much to do to create real meeting places on this planet that are spaces of creativity and renewal. As Oyewùmí writes, “In the West the challenge of feminism is how to proceed from the gender-saturated category of ‘women’ to the fullness of an unsexed humanity. For Yoruba obinrin [anatomical females], the challenge is obviously different because at certain levels in the society and in some spheres, the notion of an ‘unsexed humanity’ is neither a dream to aspire to nor a memory to be realized. It exists….” It exists, she says, under pressure from and in conflict with modernity’s imperialist ways of being. I would suggest that all of us, women and men, need to discover the “fullness of an unsexed humanity.” Only in meeting in the unsexed humanity that is our birthright can we discover how our differences can be brought to creative use in shaping an integral future.

The hope for a united, pluralistic German culture within a larger unity of Europe will, to a considerable degree, depend on how we think about who we are as women and men. Just look at the gender muddle stirred up by the Koeln New Year’s attacks. How do we not blame women for being “provocative” and simultaneously not stigmatize men from cultures in which, as one Muslim asylum seeker from Eritrea said, “if someone wants a lady he can just take her and he will not be punished”? We are living side by side with such vastly different beliefs about the right and appropriate ways for women and men to behave. These differences aren’t casual or mere irritations. They go to the living heart of who we are.

Right now, gender is a minefield. The progress toward gender equality has created great insecurity and frustration amongst men whose identities have been built on protecting and providing for their wives and children. Add to this fragile situation stressed migrant and refugee men from cultures where only prostitutes walk by themselves on the streets, smile and make eye contact with men, and show their arms and legs. The specter of the dark-skinned man raping a blue-eyed young woman—hinted at in a recent AfD poster—motivates both traditionalists and hooligans to assert their manhood and save their women. The gains women have made in the last fifty years toward autonomy and independence will be sorely put to the test in a climate in which it is felt to be less safe to walk the streets. All of this plays out against a continent-wide economic squeeze and the continued devastation in the Middle East that humiliates and isolates young Muslims, particularly men, as even those born on the Continent find it increasingly difficult to find a place here in terms of work or integration into society. The result, for a tiny but critical percentage, is the ultimate sacrifice as a suicide bomber with the ultimate reward of scores of heavenly virgins.

From all sides, there is an experience of disrespect—a disrespect that goes to the core of one’s sense of being truly a woman or really a man. In our secular society, do we have the capacity to grant respect across such a range of cultural expectations? Do the values that we espouse as the basis of Western culture meet our intrinsically human need for respect? Creating a culture in which we respect each other for the sake of respect would ground the soul of Europe. Can we develop and hold such a context so that a deeper human connection amongst us all can take root?

Could wearing a burka develop self-respect? For some time, I’ve been very curious about wearing one. Not simply a hijab, like the headscarf covered in gorgeous roses that the young intern in my doctor’s office sometimes wears. I’m interested in the full covering, with the small mesh window to see out of. My curiosity might also be offensive to Muslims who see the burka as an important aspect and expression of their faith. I’m not being casual or disrespectful. I actually wonder if these veiled women may have easier access to an inner containment and self-possession that we postmodern fashionistas have almost lost. For us “anything goes” Westerners, being covered head-to-toe strikes us as oppressive and as a limit on our freedom of choice. We also react to the very real limits that patriarchal Islamicists have put on women, which doesn’t just include the burka but also the horrors of forced marriage and honor killings. At the same time, many very intelligent Muslim women choose to veil themselves, in the West, by their own choice. Perhaps our ideas of freedom and repression are too simplistic within a diverse cultural landscape.

A dear friend of mine told me about a conversation she had with a young Muslim Londoner in full burka. My intrepid friend had dared to open up the question of freedom with her: did being veiled by religious custom limit her sense of personal freedom? The young woman was emphatic in her response: no. Instead, she argued strongly that young Western women are more enslaved by the constant need for male approval and affirmation of their “hotness.” She has a point. Are adolescent girls and young women in the West really expressing freedom in how they appear? On the other hand, being told to wear a full body covering like the burka, niqab or even the chador at puberty could easily lead young women to feel shame about their developing bodies. Why would one have to keep one’s body out of public view unless there was something bad or dangerous about it? (And dangerous to whom?) From the outside, women in burkas appear anonymous, devoid of personhood, a blank space in the sea of social interaction. Young European women, by contrast, seem to be free to use their dress as a form of self-expression. But what is the inner experience? I could imagine that the experience of being protected from prying eyes that judge women on appearance might be a deep relief—and could even be an empowering act of resistance against the social “meat market” that builds self-respect. The young woman in the burka has little respect for the freedom to dress as we please that we insist on. To her, it looks more like a deluded form of enslavement.

The value of freedom—freedom of choice—has a hypnotic power in the secular West. The feminist movement in the late twentieth century made freedom of choice the rallying cry of women’s liberation. But what are we choosing? Most choices are made within the status quo—and the status quo has changed since those of us who are post-50 adults rebelled against a traditionalism that masked barbarism. Today’s status quo is rooted in a materialist capitalism that cultivates our compulsions by reducing relationship to sensation—food, comfort, sex—and dulls our capacity for meaningful choice by busying us with inane options—shampoo, cheeses, cellphone contracts. Increasingly, human relationship is also offered as a commodity, just another choice for an hour or evening. Are these choices a sign of our freedom? Perhaps. We are free to do whatever tickles us, aren’t we? I suppose it depends on what is doing the tickling. Going along with the unconscious compulsions that cling to our core mammalian instincts isn’t what our capacity for choice was made for.

Nor is it freedom. Progressive media often fastens onto the fact that the most religiously fundamentalist nations clock the most hours spent watching porn—particularly the brutal and bizarre. I guess we are supposed to shake our heads or cluck our tongues at their hypocrisy. After the 9/11 attack, there was a news story that has stayed with me about a reporter who spoke to a neighbor of one of the jihadi pilots. The neighbor told the reporter that he vividly remembered the only conversation he had with the pilot. In typically American fashion, the neighbor had asked how this obviously Middle Eastern, and probably Muslim, man liked the freedom of being in the US. To the neighbor’s shock, the man responded with a derisive scowl and said, “I hate your freedom!” The police found stacks and stacks of porn DVDs in the jihadis’ apartment—porn that is completely forbidden in Islam. Why would this man hate the US when he was free to do as he pleased here? Porn “addiction” seems to be nearly an epidemic amongst militant male Islamicists. Binging on porn, feeling desperate and defiled because he is failing as a Muslim man, and then expressing righteous rage at the “source” of the defilement—the West—is a common pattern. Even though this jihadi’s hatred of our freedom may be a displacement of his responsibility for his self-defilement onto Western culture, he may recognize, perhaps more than we do, that there is neither freedom nor self-respect in the compulsive binge.

The freedom of choice that we have in the West is unlike anything else in the world. It has been hard-won in the developmental trajectory of humankind. Our capacity for rational choice developed through the struggle and effort to make choices free from the drives, impulses, emotions, and compulsions that our humanity is wrapped in. This capacity for choice becomes debased and loses its strength and power when it is only used in a marketplace that caters to the most unconscious, compulsive, and conditioned aspects of our selves. To continue to develop our capacity for choice so that we can bring more heart and intelligence, rather than fear and reactivity, into our engagement in the world is both a practice of spiritual freedom and a path toward self-respect.

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In a social context where one feels that one’s identity, as a man or a woman, is not respected, the freedom to be who one pleases isn’t a strong enough value to bind us together across our differences. Moreover, despite the postmodern laissez-faire belief in do-what-you-want, we have trouble truly respecting the humanity of those who are really different from ourselves—such as veiled women or nationalistic hooligans who assert their “superiority” as men through threats of violence. We are, on a social and geopolitical level, creating a situation of chronic disrespect. And as psychiatrist Dr. James Gilligan, author of Violence: Reflections on a National Epidemic, explains, “The purpose of violence is to force respect from other people.” Violence creates fear, he notes, which is “an ersatz, substitute for admiration.”

Even though gender identity is such a deep part of who we are, we have to look still deeper to find something to bind us together into one European soul. That “something,” I suggest, is dignity. Dignity is that essence of our humanity that calls us to respect another. We recognize it in the graceful bearing of a woman who has lost her only child and becomes a source of strength to others. Or we see it in the eyes of a David Steindl Rast who knows human frailty intimately and still expresses gratitude for life. It is a gift we offer to others, the fruit of serious spiritual practice grown at the intersection of the human and the mystery. Dignity arises from the conscious knowing that we are here, caught in the midst of forces that we cannot control, and yet the life we share is unbelievably precious. “You don’t have to commit yourself to a particular form of religious belief to believe that some things are sacred,” says Gilligan. There is “something about the human personality or the human soul or psyche, whatever you want to call it, that is sacred.” This sacredness doesn’t belong to any particular religion. It is our birthright as human beings, no matter who we are.

Gilligan quotes: http://lakesideconnect.com/anger-and-violence/a-matter-of-self-respect-shame-fear-and-violence/

https://www.psychotherapy.net/interview/gilligan-violence

Creation is the realm of Eros. No, I don’t mean eros as in erotic. There is a deeper meaning and experience of Eros that includes and goes beyond sexuality. This other, less known Eros comes from the Greeks, and emerged before the beautiful young god of erotic love that most of us are familiar with. Eros was the first deity to emerge from Chaos, coming into being simultaneously with the earth and the underworld. This Eros is often shown as neither male nor female. Creation couldn’t have happened without it. This Eros is the primordial creative impulse, the motive that drives all matter into its extraordinary manifestation as the Cosmos and all the lifeforms, including ourselves, that exist within it. That Eros, just like the erotic drive of sexuality, exists in all of us humans. Too often, we are not alert to the subtlety and depth of this impulse because the world we are in celebrates lust and sensation. Eros as the capricious god of the erotic blinds us to Eros as the creative movement within us. If we want to tap into our highest creative potential, I would suggest that we need to awaken to the creative power of Eros beyond the lure of the physically erotic. We need to liberate Eros from the bars and bedrooms to align with a love that can alter the course of our lives and of Life itself.

***

One of my favorite essays is “The Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” by the poet Audre Lorde. As a young woman, her words rang deeply true to me:

The erotic has often been misnamed by men and used against women. It has been made into the confused, the trivial, the psychotic, and plasticized sensation. For this reason, we have turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power and information, confusing it with the pornographic. But pornography is a direct denial of the power of the erotic, for it represents the suppression of true feeling. Pornography emphasizes sensation without feeling.

Growing up in the midst of the women’s rights movement, the question of sexual liberation was a big one. Over time, women historians would document the many mind-boggling ways that women’s sexuality was seen as a threat and kept under wraps. For most of us, however, we had no further to look than to our mothers or grandmothers to know the importance of sexual liberation. We experienced their deep fear of their own sexuality, the fear of being ostracized from what was called “polite company.” How many marriages made at the end of the Second World War were loveless and bloodless, kept in place by women who were afraid to rock the boat and men traumatized by war? So, we experimented, broke taboos, dressed in ways that shocked our mums, explored, and struggled to find what we were really looking for.

Sexuality was supposed to be a doorway to something. Sure, many of us found a degree of ease and joy in the skin we are in. Yet the constant pursuit of orgasm or love or intimacy through the press of flesh on flesh often created little more than deeper loneliness. “Sensation without feeling,” as Lorde points out, ends up depriving us of the deeper potential of Eros. Despite what it might seem at first, the other sex didn’t make out all that well, either. Constantly seeking a greater intensity to break through isolation, insecurity, and alienation only reinforces that isolation, insecurity, and alienation. Again, as Lorde notes, this is a “direct denial of the power of the erotic.”

The power of the erotic for Lorde exists in the joyous intimacy of connection with others, and most importantly, in a depth of connection with one’s self. “When I speak of the erotic, then,” she explains, “I speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered, the knowledge and use of which we are now reclaiming in our language, our history, our dancing, our loving, our work, our lives.” Writing in 1978, Lorde’s concerns were with women. Today, it’s clear that most men, too, lack connection with this lifeforce and find poor substitutes in a false sense of power or the need for control. The depth of inner resonance and aliveness that we can experience with others not only grounds our lives in a core sense of satisfaction but is also the source of new knowledge. Lorde, an activist for women’s rights, comes to new ways of understanding what needs to change in our culture and how we might connect to make those changes possible through what we learn from this deep erotic. “In touch with the erotic,” she says, “I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.” Eros is both a force of self-definition and a creative force for change.

***

In the spiritual community that I was part of for many years, we tracked three different levels of Eros. The powerful force of cosmic creation moves us human beings at the physical level, the mental level, and at the level of creative consciousness itself. Perhaps we will discover that there are more points of intersection, but at this point I am confident in these three. As human beings, creativity is our purpose. And each of these three levels of Eros gives us more capacity to create and to make change, at deeper levels. What we create will determine our fate, individually, collectively, and as a planet.

The first level of Eros relates directly to Audre Lorde’s power of the erotic within an intimate relationship. Rising out of our mammalian past, Eros in our bodies drives us to procreate and reproduce. Blind, urgent, it pushes forward the cosmic imperative to create new life. Miraculous and overwhelming, this is the most basic form of creativity that females of every species are responsible for. Over the tens of thousands of years of human existence, women have carried this miracle in their bodies, ensuring that life could continue. Generation after generation, in desert or jungle or fertile plains and mountains, human cultures have sought to tame Eros so that its urgent lustfulness wouldn’t tear apart the fragile bonds and social order by which humans tried to create stability in the face of the fragility of life and the unpredictability of nature.

Taming Eros as it pulses through the body when we humans reach sexual maturity has been a complex dance for every culture from the first tribes to today’s postindustrial, globalized nations. Incest taboos, the horrors of extreme practices of genital mutilation (for women and men), norms that promote monogamous marriage, and prohibiting sex between adults and children are all ways that human societies try to find some way to balance the compulsive desire for sex and its pleasures with the need to tame the wildness of a force that doesn’t care about anything but seeking its own release. Over the course of human history, males and females have played very different roles in developing this balance. Controlling women and curbing their sexuality has been the means by which many cultures tried to strike this balance. Men’s experience of the compulsion of Eros—its demand felt in the body—was often blamed on women. At a certain level of human development, where there is little self-awareness and self-control, the fear that females had this strange power over males led to different attempts to control women.

This actually leads to the second level of Eros: Eros as the capacity for creativity. While all human cultures are creative responses to life conditions, the liberation of the individual to be an agent of creativity only fully happened in the Modern Era, which began roughly in the 17^th century. The extraordinary flourishing of creativity in the Renaissance was an early sign of this new opening to Eros. At this level, Eros feels like the insistent desire to create…something. In the throes of Eros, we find ourselves in a flow or preoccupied with a puzzling question that we must solve. Hours pass like minutes: we lose ourselves not in the arms of a lover that will give birth to a child but lost in the love of something that wants to be born out of our hearts and minds. The liberating power of our own creativity resonates through our bodies with an erotic thrill.

Women and men have played far different roles in the emergence and development of creative agency. Much of this comes from two different trends evident in most societies: the need for women to bear and raise children and the greater physical freedom that men had because of their greater physical strength. Women, connected to children, needed stable living conditions whether in the rhythms of nomadic life, in the close circle of village life, or under the often despotic rule of empires. Men’s strength and mobility gave them access to new possibilities and power, which opened the door to creativity. In the Modern Era, men’s exploration, inquiry, aesthetics, and inventions developed the Western world as we know it, for good and for bad. Bold, unique, adventurous creativity in the arts, sciences, politics, and business has been left largely in men’s hands.

Women’s creative engagement has historically been wrapped up in self-invention as self-image through beauty and fashion or in feathering the family nest. In modernity, the world of bourgeois family life became women’s province. Women’s creativity became tied to the work of attracting a man. Women then, as now, felt our bodies as our selves, too much the measure of who we think we are. As Mary Wollstonecraft noted in the eighteenth century, “Taught from infancy that beauty is woman’s sceptre, the mind shapes itself to the body, and roaming round its gilt cage, only seeks to adorn its prison.” Of course the aspiration toward beauty is a transcendent ideal that illumines our humanity, but women’s fixation on appearance and sexuality has limited our expression of Eros to the physical level. This, combined with the fulfillment of having children, has kept women’s capacity to soar with creative Eros grounded in the physical.

The final level of Eros is really new to women and men: Eros at the level of consciousness, as an urgent longing for a union that goes beyond the physical. In human beings, Eros has become conscious and active–it is what distinguishes us from all other forms of life. Liberating this pure force of Eros, this creative potential of consciousness that also unites us, we can take on our shoulders the responsibility and capacity to create the very structures of consciousness that are the ground of who we are and can be.

I’m not referring to a co-creation of brainstorming or teamwork but a sharing of intelligence that comes alive at the edge of our capacity to intuit what our spiritual hearts long for and take a step into the unknown together. Here is where the whole becomes more than the sum of its parts, where the life experience and knowledge of the individual opens into a dynamic unfolding of shared possibility. Such a subtle experience of Eros at its most profound gives a rare and thrilling glimpse of a new way for us to live. We can live and create in alignment with the urgency to integrate, to come together, that drives the cosmos itself.

It’s something that never has happened before. Only now, as human beings have become so sophisticated, self-reflective, and individuated, can we even begin to discriminate and align with this force in consciousness so that we can begin to guide the unfolding future. (Yes, I mean it–this is enormous, and demands a purity of motivation that is ultimately challenging. Only then can we become fit vehicles for this creative intelligence to work through us.)

And it is particularly something that has never happened with or through women. In the thousands of years in which human culture has developed from foraging bands into technosophisticated globalization, women have not been the ones who have innovated the next breakthrough, put our lives on the line to stake new ground, or taken the risks that open up space in what was once unknown. We have not played a role in creating the new in culture. It’s not our fault. We were doing what needed to be done: bearing and raising children. Even after the noble struggle for equal rights in the 60s and 70s, we are still caught between the old pattern of seeking security to raise children and the open potential of shaping the future that we say we want.

***

Does that bother you? It bothers me, because women have so much to offer. This capacity of Eros to create, at the most primary level of consciousness itself, is what we women need to cultivate, develop, and express to create the new. What I am saying may be difficult to understand. But that is because the ability to do this is just emerging at the leading edge of human consciousness.

And my message might even be counterintuitive. In our postmodern spiritual world (which has been influenced by the feminist zeitgeist), women are seen as the new. The feminine–which emphasizes women’s traditional biological and nurturing role–is considered to be the solution to a world gone awry. Men are the problem; women are the answer. In defining women in this way, we reinstate the old, tying women to all of the qualities that we developed during millennia of being subordinate. That subordination–the attentiveness to other’s needs, the need to look good in other’s eyes, the fear of standing out on our own–has shaped the structures of our selves at the deepest levels. It is the feminine.

This what we need to free ourselves from. It calls us to liberate Eros from both domesticity and the trappings of sexuality as the most primary source of our creativity and fulfillment. It’s risky, as every deeply creative act is. In these times of chaos and uncertainty, we are being fed fear—of strangers, violence, economic catastrophe, and environmental destruction. All of these very real forces are causing tumult but, more importantly, they distract us from making change in our lives and our world as creative agents of Eros. “Recognizing the power of the erotic within our lives,” says Lorde, “can give us the energy to pursue genuine change within our world, rather than merely settling for a shift of characters in the same weary drama.” This is our challenge, to step outside the old script, grab onto Eros’s wing, and take flight into a world that we don’t know, can’t quite imagine, and yet desperately long for.

Dear Hillary,

We don’t know each other, although we have some contacts in common—my mentor, Carol Gilligan, and one of my co-authors on Mother Daughter Revolution, Marie Wilson. Of course, I say this to give myself a bit of legitimacy, because you are given advice from every corner—about as often as women are told to “smile” on the street—and why should you listen to me?

The personal and cultural dimensions of gender identity, intersected with class and race, have been my “beat,” so to speak. Identity and dignity are the passion drivers in this election. They call us to larger narratives and hopes for the future in which you, by virtue of your gender, race, and class, have played and are playing a dramatic, archetypal role. You seem to be a bit tone-deaf to the archetypal dimension of the campaign. You cannot paper over this with policies. It calls for something a bit different. Moreover, if you are elected, which I desperately hope, you will be likely to have nearly 50% of the voters against you. The issues surfacing in the campaign are not going to go away after November. In fact, they could get worse.

So, I am going to write a series of posts about this explosive—and potentially transformative—mess of gender, race, and class that is raging right now. I am going to use a lot of generalizations, because I am attempting to identify unconscious narratives that float under the surface. Perhaps it will be of use, and hopefully will shed light for others about some of the dynamics of the time we are in.

The big battleground states are in the Rust Belt, and this is no accident. I hail from Pittsburgh, where Mark Cuban, a billionaire reality TV rival to Trump, recently endorsed you. Look beyond the glittering buildings “dahntahn” or the beautiful riverside parks. This used to be coal and steel country: Eliza, the city’s blast furnace at J&L Steel, produced steel that was carried over the Hot Metal Bridge, built in 1887 and still used for car traffic. Pittsburgh is a beautiful city that survived the death of heavy industry and good union jobs. But there has been a huge cost to the working class and unskilled workers. All you have to do is go to the Southside to see the gap between the internet class and the original residents of the area.

For many millions upon millions of citizens, the American Dream is broken. This is a no-brainer. That doesn’t mean that America is not “great,” if you need to use that term, but that “greatness” needs to be radically redefined and sourced in something other than consumer values at home and military action abroad. Blame for the demise of the dream often lands with the boomer generation that came of age in prosperity and ended up hocking the future for Gen X and the Millennials. http://www.salon.com/2014/10/20/baby_boomers_ruined_america_why_blaming_millennials_is_misguided_and_annoying/ It’s true: in our wake, you have ballooning student loan debt, sky-high credit card debt, low-paying cashier/service jobs, and a disastrous housing collapse created by a predatory financial industry.

You and Bill are the poster kids of this phenomenon. But there is also another wrinkle to the story: Bill himself is a class traitor. And in the narrative of the white lower classes, you—as the big love of his life—are responsible.

When Nobel-Prize-winning author Toni Morrison famously called Bill “our first black president,” she was pointing to his class roots as white trash. (Yes, it’s a horrible term; more on that later.) As white trash, she said, Bill “was being treated like a black on the street, already guilty, already a perp.” While it’s “okay,” for the old established elites to amass fortunes and engage in crony capitalism (because that’s their class function), it is not okay for someone like Bill. Morrison observes: “The message [to Bill] was clear: ‘No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and—who knows?—maybe sentenced and jailed to boot.’”

So Bill obliged. And then some. Reagan started the war on the working class by selling a libertarian masculine ideal of self-reliance (government hand-outs are for losers, not for real men) and then destroying the unions and industries that their lives were based on. http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/15/opinion/15herbert.html?_r=0 However, few seem to remember Reagan’s role, because Bill Clinton took the ball and ran with it. Under the protective cover of his own class roots, he passed NAFTA, welfare reform, and stiff drug laws. From the outside looking in, he seems to have been handsomely rewarded.

I remember being appalled as Bill signed NAFTA surrounded by the smugly smiling money elites. Perhaps shifting to the right was necessary in the post-Reagan-Thatcher climate. But it was a sellout of a significant part of the Democratic base. More importantly to the 2016 election, Bill sold out his own people. He never went back to Arkansas, never took up the cause of the working classes and the poor, never gave back. Your family moved to a bedroom community to New York City (of all places!), in a fancy house, and Bill launched a glitzy Global Initiative that had him hob-nobbing with Saudia Arabian sheiks. Thanks a lot.

And as I said before, you, Hillary, are blamed. Why? Well, I draw on my experience with my own family. My mother was from hard-working immigrant stock. My father comes from white trash (perhaps the upper end of that eclectic and rowdy grouping), which fortunately taught me to take the rules and those who make them with a bit of salt. He believed that doing an honest day’s work was for chumps. If you are smart, you can beat the rat race. He drank. Schmoozing in a bar and playing softball were his true vocations. Scamming, “fibbing,” cheating at cards, and gambling were his life strategies. You do what you can get away with; being dumb is getting caught. No doubt he learned all this at his father’s knee. Nicknamed “Snakes,” Grandpap was quite a guy. On the payroll for the Democrats for getting out the vote (by giving street people booze, for instance), he had a cushy job where he didn’t need to do anything. He was, in his own milieu, very enterprising. Me: “Grandma, what was Grandpap doing when you first met?” She: “He was a bootlegger, a bookie, and owned a baseball team.” (Not a pro team, of course, but something local that you could gamble on.)

My mom was a hard-working, creative striver, dead set on getting out of the working class grind where her paycheck as a teen was pooled with her father’s and mother’s income to support the family. To my dad’s family, she “put on airs.” She thought she was better than they were. They hated it and disliked her.

You, too, put on airs, Hillary. They know that you think you are better than them. You are the higher class object of desire that a smart and charming white trash guy bent over backwards to please. It doesn’t matter if this is true or not. This is the narrative. Bill’s uncontrolled sexual impulses, his music and junk food, his “fibbing” and stretching the truth are trailer turf. I’m sure it’s not lost on the white trash segment that his sexual liaisons have pretty much all been with women with big hair, big boobs, big butts just like his mother. You may have landed him as a husband, but he chased tail all the way back home.

There has historically been a below-the-radar war between the white working class and white trash in America. The Ken Starr-Bill Clinton showdown was an archetypal clash of their different values: the (supposedly) honest, rule-abiding, church-going, industrious working class Ken and the sly, sneaky, charming, lying, philandering, white trash Bill. White trash sees the honest working class as stooges. The working class sees white trash as a threat to their dignity and hope for acceptance and mobility in American society. These two distinct demographics occupy the same low and often unstable rung on the economic ladder. Up until very recently, they only united against people of color because, for both, not being black was the only status they could find in our racist society.

But now, thanks to the neoliberal turn of your husband’s administration and those following, the proud working class has been felled. Their work is gone. And looking up at you and Bill on the world stage, it certainly seems that you don’t care. Too many working class people have dropped into the casual-labor, on-again-off-again, public-assistance-supported white trash. Crummy education and the horrible realization that there is no future for them in America have had a crushing toll on their health, sanity, and spirit, particularly for the men.

To add insult to injury, as white lower class men lost their economic dignity, 1970s feminism unleashed forces that destroyed their identity as protector and supporter of wife and family. Increasingly, women in this echelon have had less need for men. Who, then, are they supposed to be now?

So, step back, Hillary. You are in the midst of an archetypal battle embedded in narratives of the white lower classes. Unfortunately, you cannot merely take responsibility for what you have done and what you intend. You need to also take heed of what you represent, how you are unwittingly part of this archetypal narrative. From their victimized anger, you took one of their own and drove him through your class climbing to betray the people back home. They can feel your superiority. You two have robbed them and their children of a decent life and future. They’d expect this from a Bush or Cheney. But not from one of their own.

This may not speak to your reality at all, nor to your intent, but the narrative projected on to you that makes you an object of rage for so many uneducated white men will make it very hard for them to see you clearly. And as if this class struggle isn’t difficult enough, the additional projections about gender are blinding—and I will write more about that next.

What to do? You probably need a “come-to-Jesus” reckoning with the pain of these people who, however irrationally, see you as its cause. You have to deliver direct action to the problems they see. (Not: “We will pass the largest infrastructure bill since World War II.” But: “We will create X million jobs in construction and industry.”) Pittsburgh, as you saw, is thriving and creating a new economy that is crushing the people who once gave us coal and steel. Admit that the experiment and benefits of globalization have not worked as you had hoped and that you have learned from this. Walk into Trump country: listen, listen, listen to these people, let their anger touch your heart not your defenses. Ask them what they need and want. Policies can come later, now you need to address a much more basic need: their right to exist, be seen, and valued. Change the narrative that they know into a future that they can hope for.

Sincerely,

Elizabeth Debold