So, today we're talking gender. Sex. Duality. Polarities. Roles. Stereotypes. That sort of thing. But before that, a word about language. I have a certain word in mind:
'Mindfuck'. This is a word that Pale Green Vortex has shied away from using, despite it being uniquely descriptive of one of the recurrent themes on this fantastic blog. You see, we are fully tuned into the modern zeitgeist and, above all else, do not wish to offend or upset anybody. However, we have noted with a degree of surprise that Maria Sharapova, in her autobiography 'Unstoppable', uses the word. If it works for Maria, it's good enough for us as well. Be ready for it to appear with gay abandon from now on.
At this juncture, you may be wondering what Pale Green Vortex is doing reading about the life of a famous tennis player anyway, when surely we should be studying conspiracies, multi-dimensional consciousness, and all the other stuff that turns up on this site. Well folks, it goes back to the 'Russian girls take drugs' theme, which was explored some time back. What was Maria's take on the 'naughty meldonium girl' story? This was the curiosity which fuelled our rare amble into sporting autobiography.
We are left in no doubt that our favourite rich blonde considers the meldonium incident a bit of a put-up job, by people who don't like her very much. Her description of the affair is clear, her reasoning impeccable. 'They' knew she was taking this supplement, as she had been doing so for years, and it was a monitored substance for a year before the ban. 'Not a day went by when I did not wonder if someone was trying to do me in.' And again: 'The world Anti-Doping Authority grew concerned about meldonium not because it improves performance but because it was being taken by so many athletes from eastern Europe and Russia.' Thanks, Maria, we love you. Despite your screeching. And as an autobio of a certain intelligence, we recommend your book to our readers.
Part One
Anyhow, we were going to talk about gender, that kind of stuff. Let's go back to my childhood, when genderish things were, generally speaking, remarkably simple. Men were men, and women were women. Men did what men do, while women did what women did.
Men, in general, got a job and went out to work. Their task was to provide for the family. They made the big decisions, like where to live, what colour the walls should be, where to go on holiday. In the evening they went home to the meal which their devoted wife had prepared. For this, and for other services provided by his wife, the man probably expressed minimal gratitude. After dinner, he would set about 'relaxing'. Typical relaxation pursuits might include reading the newspaper, watching the black-and-white television, and maybe spending a bit of fun time with the children.
The woman, meanwhile, stayed at home. She bought groceries, cooked meals, cleaned and tidied the house, and looked after the children. In any spare time, she might visit a neighbour, for a chat and a cup of tea. She quite likely felt insufficiently appreciated by her husband, and many women from this time died quite young, having led tragically submissive and unfulfilled lives. Others, meanwhile, though appearing to be passive, really ran the roost. Those with the confidence and guile to do it and get away with it.
Even as a child, I was deeply unimpressed with this state of affairs. People tied tightly into rigidly stereotyped behaviour. No room for manoeuvre, no room for independence, individuality - or anything, really. Thus was created a society with uniformity and conformity its watchwords; a society with spirit, soul, and life-blood effectively wrung dry. Not exactly my cup of tea.
Change was required, that was it: change. Here we are, sixty years on. And all's changed! In our so-called modern western democracies, at least, the rigid stereotypes based upon gender have been in the process of crumbling for a while. In some quarters (cue: mainstream media, the main driver of cultural and social fashions and programmes) the rigid stereotypes are being replaced by - not just no gender stereotypes, but no gender roles at all. In particular, anything that men can do, women can do as well, whether it's becoming a builder or getting drunk and noisy on the train. It works the other way round a bit as well, but not so smoothly or completely.
It's a game of ping-pong, taking place within an arena of opposites. This is what mainstream programming does - all that it's capable of - bouncing trends between one pole and another. I suppose that it's a law of sorts: bounce from one unhealthy, or unbalanced, pole - that of rigid gender stereotypes - and you will inevitably end up in another unhealthy place. It is not possible to react from unhealth to health. Health requires a recalibration, a kind of transcendence of the duality of sickness altogether.
What I see being pushed is actually a form of non-sexuality. Or asexuality, more like. It is as if that strict gender stereotyping of the 1940s and 50s is seen as the only form that differentiation on the basis of sex can take. Gender, sexual duality, is therefore regarded as sick, something to be eradicated. Thus we arrive at a point where gender differentiation is considered unimportant, a mere detail. It's all fluid, man. There is no distinction between man and woman, really. We're all one. We're all the same.
Removing the tension between male and female cleans things up. There is a great collective sigh of relief. All those deep, complex, sometimes painful, emotions can be cast aside. People can relax, safe in the knowledge that nothing disturbing is going to happen, that nobody is going to upset them. No man is going to approach in the bar, say 'hello gorgeous', and get too close. The world is an increasingly sanitised place. It's sexuality for the facebook age: keep things on the surface, please.
Only one problem. There is a difference between men and women. It's quite a big difference; such a big difference that a certain tension, a felt frisson, is inevitable. While it's not quite the same as the primal dualism of masculine and feminine, it makes a reasonable proximation. It's the basis of creation, of how the universe is made up, of how it works. Remove that, and...….??!!
Part TwoI recently caught a minute or so of a woman on a screen. The topic she was talking about was consent between adults. She wished to define it. What constitutes 'consenting adults' and what constitutes violation and rape. She was not going to take any prisoners, this was immediately apparent. She was the type who would have a man lose his job and his reputation for daring to tell a female work colleague that she was looking good today.
I wondered what would make a woman devote a large chunk of her life to all this. Was it overflowing love and compassion for her sisters? I didn't think so. I didn't pay much attention to what she was saying: instead, I looked closely at her - who she was, or might be. I sensed no great compassion emanating from her being. She was hard, brusque, sharp. Aggressive in the way that people sometimes are who present themselves as rational beings. So what was it that was getting her mojo working?
It was later that it hit me. Surrender; fear; hatred; self-hatred. These were the words that unbidden came to me. How to weave them into a whole?
Surrender. I never gave much attention to surrender. And then kundalini turned up, and it became key. The books will tell you: to negotiate the influx of kundalini, the only realistic strategy is surrender. Give in to that force, that power, and you stand a chance of coming through it a better person. Resist, fight, attack, and there'll only ever be one winner.
For months I found surrender impossible. Clenching, clinching, flinching: these were my typical reactions as the energy tried to find its way up and through my body. Despite my years and decades of Buddhist meditation and other spiritual practices, I was unable to 'give up my ego' and allow kundalini her way. I was shocked at how little I was able to surrender. Things have improved somewhat since then.
'Surrender' is also an integral part of the fulfilled sexual response of a woman. So much so, that several authors I have read suggest that kundalini awakening is less problematic for female than for male, due to her biological and instinctive acquaintance with surrender. And, in another place, somebody muses whether a woman's kundalini awakening might be more complete than a man's, precisely because of this distinction: a man just can't do it in quite the same way.
'Surrender' is altogether different to submissiveness, which is the characteristic quality of the female stereotyping of decades past. Submissiveness is the fallen, distorted version of surrender, in the way that it is intended here. Submission leads to diminution of the individual, whereas surrender is an act of sublime creation, leading to the opposite.
Shiva and Shakti: the divine masculine and feminine 'principles'; the creators of the universe through their union, their sacred dance of unutterable joy. Shakti, paradoxically, both surrenders completely, and is the divine lady of creation, the creative, 'principle'. Through their sacred interplay does the world come into being.
Surrender: it's inbuilt to the physiology, and consequently the psychology, of the female. Check out how sex between woman and man works. And so we come full circle, to the lady on the screen...…
Part Three
The things is - it's not quite as easy as that. As I intimated earlier, sex cannot be reduced to calendars, carefully-phrased agreements. Sex and sexuality emanate, in good part, from the world of Dionysus, not that of Apollo. Dionysus the wild one, the spontaneous, the sometimes dirty, the 'can't control me'. It is as if a certain element in modern culture desperately wants to discard Dionysus, with his touch of danger and non rationality. Instead, sexuality is to be claimed as part of Apollo's world. Clear, rational, predictable, even. Safe. We can breathe a sigh of relief and get on with our lives.
It's a move which can only lead to trouble. In Greek mythology, each god or goddess has their own domain. Should this principle be followed, then matters go not too badly. But if someone messes with the natural order of things, or a goddess or god tries to usurp what is not rightfully theirs, then there is trouble. Big trouble.
This 'land grab' by Apollo denotes a fear, I suspect. A deep fear of the nonrational forces. An attempt to tame the wild, the deep, the unfathomable. This is the shadow of #MeToo. Not the real abuse, which does happen. But the shadow is the fear of surrender, of part of what is the innately feminine. It would appear to be based upon hatred of ones female self, ones female body and its female functioning. It's a sad realisation, how so much modern, right-on, women's rights stuff, while superficially lauding a woman's freedom, is in fact self-hatred, a rejection of the core of ones being, no less, the expression of a wound.
The lady on the screen. Showing her wound. Showing it to the masses. Showing it through 'reason', through apparent concern. Her wound. How much is socially-engineered, who knows? For sure, many women walk around with wounds that have been socially engineered, manufactured, viciously so, the victim oblivious to the real source of her anger and indignation. Terrible, really, this manipulation of women. Turning them against themselves, while they believe the opposite to be true. And so it goes.....
Images: Top: Marital bliss, 1950s style
Centre: Tantric Buddhist Yab Yum
Bottom: Shiva and Shakti Yab Yum
