Hi all,
Wow! This is so cool. So many good points and good responses. Thanks, Elizabeth, for getting this particular ball rolling.
Those of you that know me by now, also know that I'm a very firm believer in the complementarity of the sexes (the Yin and the Yang as forming a circle) and in the potential of any human being, male or female, to develop in any direction. I'm very much a humanist, even though, in my particular case, that humanism is flavoured with a sprinkle of feminism and a dash of evolutionary psychology.
As I stated in my original post, here (and I'll repeat it just so it's clear),
women are not superior in the physical sense nor in the social sense nor even in the cultural sense (I think it can be shown that there exist sufficient examples to the contrary so that we can admit that one sex doesn't necessarily trump the other in any of these senses). By the same token, neither are men superior to women in any of these senses (despite the lopsided value our own society assigns to traditional gender roles and with the possible biologically-driven exception of physical strength).
In almost every culture in the world (including our own), women are associated with, and connected to, a "matrix of creation"--the womb, the earth, and culture itself--and this includes agriculture (the men may have been out hunting--or, more likely, ogling the nubile girls down at the local watering hole--but it was the women who gathered). I find it telling that the word "history" itself is a cognate of the word "uterus," both from from a Greek root, meaning "womb" (and this is why I bristle when I see radical feminists talking about "herstory"--it's a very inelegant pleonasm).
I still think it's this connection to life and to the affirmation of life (as embodied in the link between mother and child, both during pregnancy and in the course of a child's first year) that gives women a distinctive egde in the kind of role they can eventually come to play in the humanization of society. By humanization, I mean a focus on what could properly be called "consensus care"--the fostering of a physical and mental environment that would lead to the full flowering of every human being's potential; a focus on social justice rather than legal justice (again, it's telling that, at least in this corner of the world, most grassroots community organizations dedicated to the eradication of poverty, hunger, and lack of education are set up and run by women); a focus on preventative and alternative health care practices rather than aggressive, penetrative, and invasive "remedies" (again, women are in the vanguard, here); a focus on a sustainable, long-term, human-oriented economics rather than a cold, calculated, profit-maximizing, life-denying economics; a focus on a spirituality of connectedness rather than on calcified dogmas surrounding some "wholly other" (yes, again, women are at the forefront, here, too); and, finally, a focus on the development of the beauty and wonder of the inner experience of human beings--both male and female--rather than on the ritualized and formally permissible outer expressions of that humanity.
I'm not saying that what we have now is bad (though a big part of me wants to); no, I'm saying that what we have now is
too much of it. Too much of sky, and not enough of earth; too much of dryness, and not enough of wetness; too much of up, and not enough of down; too much of right, and not enough of left; too much of mountaintops, and not enough of caves; too much of blinding light, and not enough of soothing darkness; too much of noise, and not enough of silence; too much of fighting, and not enough of holding hands; too much of screaming, and not enough of singing; too much of fear, and not enough of love; too much of compartmentalization, and not enough of wholeness; too much of Yang, and not enough of Yin. In the end, too much of maleness, and not enough of femaleness. Don't get me wrong: we need (or, we will express, regardless of our needs) all of the above. But methinks the pendulum has swung as far as it can go in the direction of "the natural superiority of men" without our now being on the edge of some dangerous precipice. As things now stand, women are naturally superior because (again, all generalizations taken into account), the "way of women" stands a better chance of redressing the balance than anything men seem able (or unable) to come up with.
Yes, I know that men and women are just different, not inferior or superior to one another. And, no, I'm not an essentialist, despite everything I've written above. I don't believe that testosterone (or a double-X chromosome or what have you) are the only determinants in the possibility of anyone--male or female--achieving their full human potential (or being capable of the most despicable horrors, for that matter). In the end, I do believe, like Drs. Green and Money stated way back in the 70's, that the only real difference between men and women is that men produce sperm whereas women menstruate, ovulate, gestate, and lactate. My contention is that the experience of gestation, above all others, gives women (generally--and I'll never tire of repeating this) an inherent advantage when it comes to "emotional" or "compassionate" intelligence. Again, let me be clear: this type of "intelligence" has nothing whatsoever to do with reason or intellectual capacities. The brightest people I personally know are women (and, yes, some of the most compassionate ones I know are men... but what that says to me is that men are capable of taking a page from "the book of women" in pretty much the same way that women are capable of taking a page from "the book of men," to wit: Margaret Thatcher).
Anyway, the subject's pooped me out. Ultimately, I will always deal with another human being--man or woman--on the basis of that person's "personhood," not just on his or her sex. But, for me, I'll try to find a way to exist, to be in the world, that is nurturing and fostering. And, so far, most (not all) of my role models in this regard are women. And I'll take that as my cue to see some kind of personal meaning in the fact that I still attribute a natural superiority to women.
Again, this is a great thread. All your responses are not only welcome but very much appreciated. Thanks to all.
Love,
CJ
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