29. Me too?

What do you do when you’re snowed in? I eat all the food I’ve been squirreling away in the freezer and catch up on my favourite video podcasts. There’s a show I tune into regularly, which I won’t name, a one-on-one interview of often up to two hours. The host talks to the most interesting guests in a variety of fields—spirituality and personal growth, technology, fitness—the cream of the crop. I started off the day well, with Anita Moorjani talking about her healing journey through cancer. She, like I do, believes that we’re all Spirit, living in physical bodies, taking on challenges to advance not only our own lives, but our collective human evolution. So affirming! But the next episode was something else….

This one was a “inspirational” boot-camp guru. Apparently he has a huge following of (mostly) men, who pay to be whipped into shape, body and mind. At first he struck me as a self-possessed, well-composed, clear-thinking person. I was impressed by his commitment to help empower boys. But as he went along, I began to have doubts. My first warning sign was his repeated use of the phrase, “As a man….” When people set themselves apart by gender, or in other ways, it makes me wonder. I am very careful to monitor my own use of this kind of language, as it can reveal a mindset and world-view of separation. Even though we have our differences, and I find them highly interesting, I think I seek first to stand together with, not apart from. The distinction is important to me. Yes, I happen to be a woman, but I don’t consider it a hugely defining aspect of who I am. Call me a traitor to my sex, call me naïve, or worse, but I don’t necessarily believe that being female has made a huge difference to my life choices or experiences. I live in a woman’s body, but more importantly, I am other things first: sensitive, creative, musical, etc.

What the guru said in the following hour had me shaking my head in disbelief and sadness. The host brought up the Me Too movement, and the new era of feminism and identity politics. The guest asserted that men are being painted as the bad guy. “That’s all of us,” he said, and what we want is unity,  but “division is created when one side tries to gain power by being the victim.” Ironic how he revealed his true colours, by saying “side”, demonstrating the division he’d just referred to a moment earlier, and, oh yeah—blaming the victim.

I believe division is created when one person fails to see another as anything less than equal. And this can lead to violence—physical, emotional or energetic—when a kernel of instinctive aggression, which resides in us all, isn’t channeled in a healthy way. There are people out there, men and women, who commit terrible acts. But, no one can refute the statistics: men perpetrate more violence on women than vice versa. And women haven’t had the physical or social power to fight back. Until now. This is what Me Too is all about. And I can see that its time has come, to catalyze major cultural shifts.

But how about men’s violence against men? I’d venture to say that statistically this vastly outweighs violence against women. For this reason, I can get behind boot camps. That’s how to channel aggression in a healthy way. And I understand if it is more personally productive for the boot-camp guru to focus on educating men. That’s fine. I don’t mind that some women want women-only events either, but personally I don’t relate to this.

The boot-camp guru is part of a trend—one that I try to ignore, but it’s very alarming to me. There’s obviously a reason why his regressive ideas, and those of others in the neo-conservative men’s movement, are gaining traction. It’s the same reason we got Trump and Brexit. I believe it’s fear. We are searching for answers, because what was once safe and familiar and reliable is no longer relevant, which is confusing for a lot of us. Humanity is at a crossroads. We are reaching a critical mass for our next step in evolution, and those who are afraid are clinging to “tradition”.

The interview got worse, as the interviewee’s misogyny was revealed in no uncertain terms. “I Iost the power of my word with men,” he said, when he began letting women attend his events, because he was “trying to be agreeable”. He “dimmed his light”. He became more “feminine”. He didn’t like who he was becoming when he was training women. “It is in our nature to provide and protect and to posture, when even only one woman is present,” he says. He prides himself on being “alpha”, implying that it’s distasteful to be “beta”, and saying that men need to be leaders, and need rules to learn how to be men. How reductionistic and insulting. Not only is this blaming women for his weakness, but it’s shaming other men, those who embody less assertive traits, and those who follow their own inner compass. He said, with a smirk, when asked to comment on whether women should have the right to vote, “I’ll pass on that one.” Are you f*cking kidding me? Really?

I nearly choked on my Cheerios next when he said that women are natural consumers and men are producers. Um…what? Women make babies. Isn’t that kind of the ultimate in productivity? And apparently, girls learn how to be women from having blood in their panties. He said, pointing to his crotch, that when girls get their period, “it’s right there”, and for that reason, he extrapolated, boys need to be taught how to be men. What? Could his reasoning be any fuzzier? So the penis isn’t “right there” too? If girls learn all they need to simply from having periods, then men should learn all they need to from having wet dreams, right?

Boys AND girls, young people of all stripes, need guidance on how to navigate the changes in their bodies and brain chemistry. And we ALL need help learning how to get along in an increasingly complicated world.

At any rate, I am so very very tired of gender politics. YES, sex is a real thing. And by sex, I mean being male or female. Approximately half of all humans are born with male organs and hormones, and the other with female. There is a very small percentage of humans whose chromosomes are a little wonky and they have a mix of sexual traits. Some of these folks choose to call themselves “intersex”, and there are, I am sure, other terms I’m not aware of. But GENDER is most definitely a construct—one that has morphed out of the roles we naturally took back in prehistoric days— women as nurturers and gatherers, men as hunters and protectors — but I don’t believe these roles were always exclusive and sharply defined. Not even the animal world is predictable that way: there are all sorts of mammals and birds and insects who perform “non-traditional” roles.

More important is where we are NOW. We are no longer dwelling in caves. We have evolved, and are all a mix of traits, and we can be fluid and flexible. In the past, certain qualities were labeled “masculine” and “feminine”, but these terms are no longer relevant. I find the terms “yin” and “yang” much more helpful in this regard, Men might happen to be more aggressive than nurturing on the whole (more yang), and women vice versa (more yin), but it is indeed a rich and colourful spectrum. We all just different shades of human. And we have the right to express ourselves, respectfully, however the f*ck we want to!

I have to see all this cultural backlash as a predictable swing of the ol’ pendulum, but it’s tiresome. Why do we still take sides? Why do we still need labels? And although I am clearly irate about this, and disagree heartily with the boot-camp guru, I must still send this brother off with love. And in doing so I renew my commitment to the evolution of humanity, and to myself, to be as fully realized as I can, standing in my own power, without making anybody else responsible, or wrong, and celebrating all that is good about being alive.

28. What do I say when there’s too much, and nothing, to say?

I have been feeling ambivalent about blogging for some time now. Sometimes I feel like I have nothing to say. There’s just so much going on in the world that I am overwhelmed to the point of speechlessness. Every day when I walk, though, my head fills with ideas and words—most recently a long tirade about a misogynistic neo-conservative hero of the new men’s movement—but by the time I get back home, there’s a “To Do” list to tackle, and the words drain out of my head, my idea fizzles, and sitting down to write feels like more effort than I have time or energy for. I am sure there are thousands of writers out there who can relate.

Lately, I’ve been busy battling demons. It’s tough to share this, but I have been feeling shaky and vulnerable, not as robust and resourceful as I often do. It’s a bit of a mental health thingy. A bit of a confidence thingy. A bit of the ol’ PTSD coming back to bite me on the bum. I thought I had it licked. I thought I’d waved it “bye bye”. But no, it was lurking there in the shadows all the time.

I can’t even tell you exactly what set it off. But at some point in mid-December I had a weird health glitch, and I got triggered. This issue has been glitching on and off for almost 8 weeks now, and it has improved a lot. But, for a while there, it got to the point where I could not separate the issue itself from the panic it set off. Those of you who’ve had panic attacks may relate to what I mean. Before I started having them 8 years ago, I judged people who used the phrase “panic attack”, thinking, oh stop being so dramatic and just get over it! As if they were making the whole thing up. But no, I found out—it feels very very real, like you’re choking, like you’re fainting, about to die, even. It is VERY, VERY physical. It is debilitating, and affects every part of my life—physical, emotional, mental, social. I have had to work really really hard this past while, researching my health glitch, and more importantly, quelling the fear it has stirred up.

And now, on top of all this, it has come to the time of year when everyone dies on me. The months of February and March are when my mom, dad, best friend, another good friend, and husband died. I don’t think about it a lot ahead of time. I don’t dread February or March at all. I love celebrating my friends, and I love going through old photo albums and feeling so very grateful to have been blessed by their presence in my life. But perhaps my body still remembers the trauma, and that creates stress in ways I am not conscious of.

I hesitate even writing all this because the last thing I want is pity. But I do want to be real. I do have things to say, and I want to keep writing, even if it’s sporadic.

There are lots of good things happening for me. I am singing new songs, and loving a new person. I am blessed, but yes, even that creates stress. I will tell you more soon. I may have some ranting to do first, though. Stay tuned…