Misogyny, sexism, gynophobia

Julia Gillard

Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard became a global online sensation when she launched her now-famous attack on Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, accusing him of sexism and misogyny. The YouTube video has been viewed over 2 million times, and the speech reproduced on countless numbers of news portals and blogposts. Ms Gillard’s indignation was well justified, and her passionate anger was an inspiration to women all around the world who continue to suffer from being diminished and put down by men.

But why does this still happen, in a world where more than half of university graduates are women (in the West at least), and where most major countries have or have had women political leaders? How often do we find ourselves talking about ‘misandry’ - the equivalent fear or hatred of men on the part of women? (The word isn’t even in my spell-check.) Yet women “hold up half the sky” in the words of the Chinese proverb, and male and female, men and women complement and are indispensible to one another. Doesn’t it seem strange that such a fundamental distortion in the way we perceive and value one another should have arisen – and what does it mean?

On one level the answer lies in the continuing influence of patriarchy and the unequal power relations between men and women – still prevalent even in countries like Australia, the UK and the USA – and most commentators on the incident and its repercussions have focused on men’s unwillingness to accept women as equals in the domains of politics and business. But I want to dig a bit deeper: what are the roots of this condition, and what effect does it have on our consciousness and the way we relate to each other?

The Willendorf Venus

Anthropologists generally assume that most ancient cultures were matriarchal and matrilineal, so far as can be interpreted from the few artefacts that have survived from these far-off and pre-literate societies. Note that matriarchy shouldn’t be taken to be the mirror image of patriarchy: while the latter almost always involves an ideology of possession and domination by a ruling group, many would argue that ancient matriarchal or matrifocal societies were governed by a quintessentially feminine vision of inclusiveness. In any case, none of these societies survived, and we know of no cultures more recent than Minoan Crete which could possibly be called matriarchal. Ideologies and practices of dominance and possession seem everywhere to have accompanied the transition to a settled and agricultural way of life, with the emergence of formal power structures and of cultural transmission across generations.

Despite this, a veneration for the female principle in some form seems to have been a feature of almost all cultures, until very recently.

And this has typically involved several facets at least of the feminine:

Guan Yin

Mary

- the Compassionate, as represented by Guan Yin in Buddhism,
- the Mother, as represented by the Hindu deity Parvati or by Mary in Christianity
- the Sexual, as represented by Aphrodite in the Greek pantheon, or Mary Magdalene in Christianity. (Though it could well be argued that Magdalene stands for male repression of female sexuality.)

In the polytheistic cultures of Asian religions this tradition has continued to this day – though it has to be said that it doesn’t necessarily go with a better deal for women. (The spiritual tradition doesn’t serve to challenge patriarchal power structures, in other words.) However, the great religions of the West are all monotheistic, and, as I pointed out in last week’s post about Brazil, the three facets of the Christian God are all male – like the Prophet Muhammad, all the prophets and indeed the God of the Old Testament. In Catholic Christianity some space is made for the veneration of the female principle (in whatever ‘edited’ form this may be), but Protestantism swept this away as idolatry and superstition, a belief which has persisted into the post-religious and post-spiritual culture which dominates today in the English-speaking world. And this culture, unsurprisingly, remains male-dominated – with a dominance that’s no longer even tempered by any veneration of the female principle, or recognition of complementarity.

Hillary Clinton

Margaret Thatcher

It should go without saying that gender is irrelevant to a person’s suitability for high office, so women like Julia Gillard, Hillary Clinton and Margaret Thatcher have taken their rightful places in the political arena purely as a function of their abilities. Yet Margaret Thatcher, as the first female British Prime Minister, brought no feminine ‘inclusiveness’ or nurturing qualities to the post; despite her promise “where there is division, to bring harmony”, she was one of the most divisive figures in recent British history. As for Hillary Clinton, she operates in the service of an American foreign policy which continues to support Israeli aggression in Palestine and which uses drones to kill unarmed non-combatants in countries with which the US isn’t at war. Nothing very healing about that.

Norse Goddess Freya

Ultimately, it diminishes all of us to obliterate fundamental energetic and spiritual differences in the name of gender-blindness. If women politicians are no more than men with ovaries, they’re doing us all a disservice precisely by not bringing all of themselves into their work in the world. Life itself, and all forms of growth and development, come from the fusion of male and female in dynamic balance with one another, and what our wounded planet needs now is a much stronger emphasis on the feminine to balance the out-of-control and survival-threatening left-brain and male dominant culture which has ruled for the past many hundred years. It will take more than a handful of ‘ballsy’ women political leaders to bring that about.

“EVERYBODY IS A MAGUS”

              That’s what Brazilian writer Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist, The Pilgrimage, etc.) says. Many of us who have grown up in the English-speaking world would react thinking “Speak for yourself, mate” or “Well, he would say that if it helps to sell his books.”

We’ve been taught to see spirituality as either the property of the church – handed down from the Queen via the Archbishop of Canterbury if you live in the UK – or as a backward-looking fantasy belonging to a pre-scientific age. (By the way, it’s quite amusing to reflect, when you think of the vehemence with which people like Richard Dawkins and Christopher Hitchens attack the established Church, that these views are actually mirror images – two warring versions of the one true Faith.)

But of course Coelho wasn’t brought up either in Cambridge (Mass.) or Cambridge (UK), and what he says carries a quite different force in the context of Brazil, where a kind of spiritual pluralism reigns without parallel anywhere in the so-called ‘advanced’ world. Like the United States, Brazil is a complex multi-ethnic society with a very large minority descended from former African slaves: over 3 million were sent to work in the sugar cane plantations; far more than went to the United States. However, and even though slavery was only abolished in Brazil in 1888, the culture and spiritual practices that they brought with them have become part of the Brazilian mainstream in a way which absolutely never happened in the USA – and they have merged with 19^th-century European reincarnation-based traditions which have largely died out in their countries of origin. 

To simplify greatly, Brazilian ‘non-orthodox’ spirituality – i.e. apart from the various branches of the Christian Church – falls into three main streams: Spiritism, Umbanda and Candomblé.

Spiritism is practiced mostly by white Brazilians of European origin, and is largely based on the ideas of the French writer Allan Kardec (Hippolyte Léon Rivail) – much better known today in Brazil than in his homeland. It differs from the spiritualism practiced in Europe in the 19^th and early 20^th centuries in that it incorporates notions of Karma and of personal development. The quotation in the picture is a fair summary: “To be born, to die, to be reborn and to evolve throughout: that is the law.”

The other two traditions bring us back to the African inheritance, and in the case of Umbanda, also to indigenous (‘Indian’) practices. The picture at the head of this post represents a group of deities or entities from the Yoruba pantheon called orixâ, or Orisha, with whom almost any Brazilian would be thoroughly familiar. You could see them as  representing a number of what Jung called ‘archetypes’: characteristic forces which play a part in mythology and fiction across cultures.

Yemanja

For instance, there’s Ogun the Warrior, similar to Mars or Thor, Exú the Trickster, and perhaps most interesting of all, Yemanja, the Divine Mother.

Another aspect of the left-brain-dominant, one-size-fits-all approach to spirituality which characterizes ‘Anglo-Saxon’ culture is its extreme male-centeredness. It’s hardly an accident that the attacks on religion which I mentioned earlier all come from men, nor is the characteristically male combativeness with which they’re conducted. Meanwhile, the heads of the various established churches are also – of course – all male.  

While the Catholic Church, for all the appalling crimes against women’s sexuality and their bodies which it’s sanctioned, does at least incorporate a kind of Mother cult along with the worship of many female saints, Protestantism swept this all away as idolatry and superstition, so as to bestow upon us the benefits of modern capitalism. We’re left, if we believe in anything at all, with God as Father and Son only.

Now, you’d hardly expect the Christian Church, in Brazil or anywhere else, to cheerfully accept these African deities as part of the pantheon, and they certainly didn’t. At various times in Brazil’s history Candomblé and Umbanda (the latter is a kind of hybrid of European and African practices) have been persecuted, denigrated, or even proscribed by law. However, Brazil, unlike most other predominately Catholic countries, has been a secular state for well over a century, and the orixâ were able to survive periods of persecution by being ‘disguised’ as Christian saints, in a phenomenon known as syncretism. (This actually only emphasises the extent to which they’re cross-cultural archetypes.)

Yemanja

So that’s why Brazil today, besides having a thriving and rapidly growing economy (the B in BRICS, of course) has also the most diverse spiritual landscape of any major country: a place where a medical doctor might also be a spiritist medium, or where a doctoral thesis on past-life memories would be accepted without qualms by a major university. This is the matrix which formed Paulo Coelho, and where he had the experiences which led him to write the books which have made him world-famous. Meanwhile, we have produced … Harry Potter – CGI sorcery, magic as commodity or spectacle (even if the success of the books reflects a similar yearning for the numinous, the transcendent.)

So is Paulo Coelho right, or J.K.Rowling? – whose first post-H.P. book is an explosion of disgust and despair at a hypocritical and heartless world, by the way.  Is ‘magic’ the privilege of a Hogwarts-attending élite – interesting, isn’t it, how similar Hogwarts is to the public schools which our actual rulers went to? – or is it a property which we all have latent within us?

There’s no doubt how a Brazilian would answer this question.

“Your weakness is your strength”

These are the words of the great choreographer Pina Bausch, as quoted in her old friend Wim Wenders’ magnificent film. Several other great sayings of hers are quoted: “Dance, or we are lost” and “Show us what you yearn for” – but it’s not for the words that this film is so profoundly worth seeing.

Words can never capture the truth, they can only point to it, and worse than that, they need interpreting, so your interpretation may be different from mine. Anyway, words are not our fundamental reality or our deepest truth – which is why it’s so easy to tell lies. People can lie with their bodies too, but the body can be trained to tell the truth – and that was Pina Bausch’s life work.

And the moment one tries to describe the effect of the film in words one falls into paradox – like the title of this posting. Her dancers show us the vulnerability of desire and the strength of that vulnerability; how at our most physically powerful and triumphant we’re also terrifyingly weak and lost – how the knowledge that we’ll one day die casts a long and sorrowful shadow over all of us, the young and vigorous included.

One of the most remarkable aspects of the film is the extensive use of older dancers, in their 40s and 50s, even in their 60s – and we see the marks of time on these bodies not as a curse or a blemish, but as tokens of an inner beauty and dignity.

In fact, everyone we see in the film has a beauty and dignity which, although it’s our birthright, easily gets covered over with compromises, lies, evasions and self-deceptions – all of which Pina Bausch worked with her dancers to strip away, showing the naked, tragic, joyful essence of human-ness which lies beneath. It takes work to do this: sustained, concentrated, focused work, guided by a compassionate wisdom which is in all of us, but which itself takes work to uncover. This kind of wisdom isn’t taught in schools, unfortunately, but we can recognize it when we see it. And the person this film reveals to us was above all a great spiritual teacher.

As the film reminds us, focused, conscious and disciplined physical movement is one of the oldest and deepest forms of spiritual practice – whether we’re talking about Tai Chi, yoga, or more modern traditions such as Gabrielle Roth’s Five Rhythms. This is maybe the deepest paradox of all, that somehow we become most open to transcendence when we’re most embodied – wholly holy, one might say.

At a time when, as Marcus Anthony points out in a recent post, all-pervasive digital technology and ubiquitous gadgets are disconnecting all of us, and especially children, from self-presence and physical groundedness, this truth needs to be embodied, quite literally, in all programmes of education and personal development.

Go and see “Pina” if you possibly can (to further pick up Marcus’s point, technology enables us to view it in 3D and with fantastic high-definition sound), to be reminded that the fragility, vulnerability and need of the body is the gateway through which we must pass to experience all of life’s greatest gifts. Here's to you Pina, and to you Wim – and to all brave and beautiful dancers everywhere.