Man, Woman, angel, demon, beast. Part Two

Thus Begins Part Two.
Looking back at my previous post, missing from both misogynist approaches to the female nature, valuing the male above all, and misandrist approaches to the male nature, valuing the female above all, is the appreciation of nuanced readings of human nature.

A basic Modern Western tendency is to, in ideology, deny nature. This is because it offends us. Nature offends our ideals, our ideas of what should be. The world as we think it should be.

This is essential in any progressive worldview, a progressive and optimistic ideal of the world as it should be, according to our own high ideals.

But here, you murder the world. The world does not exist, as it does in our ideal ideas, it exists as it is, and this disappoints and wounds us. So we have to evolve it, make it better.

We struggle, therefore, to remake the world according to our idealized vision. But who is to say that our ideal of how the world should be really is as the world should be. After all, it existed for millions of years without our approval.

We do not realize that we are not gods, nor goddesses. It is possible that in much of what we see, that seems as less than ideal, there may actually be good reasons for being.

Someone once said that “Feminism is the proposition that women are human beings.”

No one denies a woman’s innate humanity, historically and currently. A few extreme screeds by a few rapidly woman hating misogynists aside, in general throughout history the blindingly obvious facts of a woman’s humanity have been noticed.

There are man hating misandrists who hold the inverse opinion, that the masculine is diseased, inhuman, bestial.

What both misandrists and misogynists deny is the critical positive aspect of each other’s unique humanity. We are all human, and many aspects of our sexual and gender identity often are negative. There are a negative aspects of masculinity that, for example, are overweening in a lust for power, brutal domination, and control, in the same way there is a negative femininity that is overweening in its vegetative (to quote Simone) settling and narrow vision of all from the perspective of home, hearth, birthing, or aspects that cloying and manipulative in their lust for control.

There is also a positive masculinity, and a positive femininity, that can be, and should be, complementary to each other and have built much of what is good, beautiful, and sound in human nature.

Is it not possible that the negative aspects of each gender and sex creates a dynamic tension in interacting with the negative and positive aspects of the other?

It is possible that both the feminists and misogynists, the misandrists and the anti-feminists, are right? Utterly correct; but only in half of the equation.

Is it not true that many manifestations of female behavior are typically shallow, short sighted, manipulative, narrow and particular, and frankly stupid. But on the same token, is it not true that many manifestations of female behavior are compassionate, gentle, nurturing, wise, and enlightened?

If many aspects of male behavior are domineering, cruel, narrow minded, short sighted, shallow, and violent, it remains true that many aspects of male behavior are enlightened, forward thinking, just, ordered, and focused. Our virtues are inverses of our vices, often.

What men see as moral and just, many women may see as rigid, and hierarchical. What women see as moral and ethical, many men see as flagrantly amoral and capricious.

Society, and at its “higher” form Civilization, is more complex than a narrow reading of history is concerned.

It is possible that the balance between male and female, with a predominance of typically male ways of seeing and doing, but not denying the validity and rightness of female ways, generated a dynamic tension in our history that enabled civilization to occur, emerge, develop, while at the same time limiting the destructive potential in this.

This is the whole yarn that if women ruled the world we would still live in grass huts. Some women bristle at this suggestion, I’ve heard some women agree with it. And say this is a good thing. And hence we arrive at an impasse.

Where in definite periods of history one principle or the other sought an advantage, it usually led to a hyper-development of some sort, at the expense of other possibilities.

Ideology views these periods as normative, missing a more nuanced vision of history. Western history has experienced a short (300) year burst of a particularly concentrated patriarchal regime, a sort of post-Elizabethan backlash against a nascent feminism in the age of the Renaissance, Queen Elizabeth and Shakespeare. in some ways this backlash led civilization to heights it was incapable of before.

But in other ways this murdered other possibilities, and was at the expense of many other good things, at the expense of damn near poisoning half the planet and enslaving huge numbers of humanity at an early stage.

While a more decidedly matriarchal bent could have accomplished some other things, it also would have been equally problematic, but simply in different ways, leading to other problems. Problems that modern conservative anti-feminists think they notice now, but really haven’t in full.

The point is that there appears to be a positive and negative type of masculinity, and positive and negative type of femininity. A good father and an evil father, a good mother and an evil mother.

It is possible to argue that feminism emerged out of discontent with the state of middle class and upper middle class male/female relations and roles.

It emerged in people with legitimate grievances and complaints but who were, initially, often myopic to extremes due to their class and privileges. Privileges they may deny, cover up, or acknowledge out of guilt. This myopia exists to the degree that such people rarely reflect upon the vast differences between their privileges (and early feminists were quite privileged) and their disadvantages (which they protested) with those of their more humble sisters from the working and lower classes.

When middle class white women wanted the “right” to work, my grandmothers had been working women for generations and simply wanted the right not to work, the right to be able to not have to go out and get the bacon, to rest. The right to only be a house wife. My great grandmothers didn’t have this right.

Where some white women, in particular middle and upper middle class, state that they were decidedly dominated by their men in many ways, at a certain point of history (and to some degree, this was a recent matter, simply read Shakespeare, women and men often had much different balances of power than in moralistic Victorian Anglo-American polite society) some of my female ancestors were henpecking, beating with brooms and physical slaps, dominating some of my distant male ancestors. Notoriously. One often did so in drunken fits, so the family history goes, and in some cases this was accompanied by somewhat scandalous caravanning around town thereafter.

Interestingly when I once explained the power dynamics in some of my ancestors’ relationships to a friend, who is quite intelligent, extremely educated, and very sensitive, she found herself pleasantly surprised at how “equal” their gender dynamics were. Her background, white, socially upper middle class, and educated at Smith.

I found myself amusingly shocked at how she could construe my description of the constant henpecking interspersed with verbal and physical violence and other manifestations of domination, on the part of some of my female ancestors, as gender balance and equality.
There was some equality, a great great grandpa would get drunk and her back as she beat him over the head with a broom. Often these fights were give it as good as you get it back. But no, this is not positive gender equality, some of my female ancestors simply half castrated some of my male ancestors.

The humor in such points to the insufficiently explicit degree of my articulation in these things, but also to certain fundamental biases and perceptions in the minds of women and men. We men and women sometimes see the world in very different ways. But the dynamics of our lives historically have sometimes been much more complex than we would imagine today.

Beyond stereotype, beyond family history, are things much more complex, showing that under general stereotypes of unremitting male dominance are far more nuanced things.

The balance of power and control between men and women has shifted and varied from generation to generation, our readings of other generation’s history is often just myth.

Has there ever been perfect equality, no. And indeed, how could there be? Perfect equality demands perfect uniformity of our conditions. No one is equal in every way, hence dynamism. Things are dynamic, there are strengths and compensating weaknesses, that sometimes are adversarial, and sometimes are complementary.

In any relationship one principle or another will always have some slight degree of ascendency, at least. This leads to a dynamic tension. The real nature of which tendency, in which context, had a dominant sway is far more complex and nuanced than one may possibly imagine.

As for myself, I have no faith in our society that the gender wars will cease. I only hope to find a faith in individuals who will, or can, arrive at more enlightened understandings of masculinity and femininity, of male needs and female needs, male priorities and female priorities, and conduct ourselves on a higher plane.

What I consider to be enlightened is simply what is in accord with our inner natures, no matter how politically incorrect.

Most people today are divorced from their inner natures, most people cannot even sit still with themselves for an hour, without needing constant social stimulation. Divorced from nature and the earth at large, and divorced from understanding our deepest selves, we often act without thought or reflection.

Difficult, and painful as this may be, we are very different, but we are also very much the same. There is no contradiction in this – we are also human in our commonalities. And we are two separate faces of the same coin, the same material, the same species, struck with different faces.

Thus often with different roles, some of these roles right and proper to us are survival mechanisms without which humanity could not have survived, and would not survived.

Some are quite subtle, and getting rid of some may have negative consequences on the human project, the project of civilization, that will take centuries to fully manifest much less than be understood.

With our growing power over the gene and the atom, the inability of men and women to meet on a higher plane, and engage both our innate differences (which are vast) and our innate commonalities (which also are vast) will destroy one or the other or horribly mutilate other.

If we cannot learn to truly love each other for who and what we are, and to accept ourselves as who and what we are, and not as we would like each other to be, then our grandchildren may curse our names unto eternity, on a world ruined and deprived of beauty.

Some may read this and think my words are contradictory, or glib. Perhaps they just lack reading comprehension and the ability to understand context and nuances.

Such people are respectfully requested to re-read what I wrote with some greater comprehension. There are far too many critics in the world, and far too few people either capable of understanding, or willing to understand.

The capacity is often a willingness to understand, it requires a will and decision to meet something on its own terms and grapple with it, or to impose one’s own mold on it.
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