Justine Musk's Blog, page 7

this is not your happily ever after (…but that is totally fine)

I remember standing beside the man I was married to at the time as a woman said, “All this success! It’s like a fairy tale.”

She was talking about our life together. My life.

I didn’t want to disagree, even though signs of the end were already manifest: the good times slipping away beneath the criticism, the way his voice would turn cold before he stopped speaking to me. Are we in the fifth grade? I sometimes asked, trying to make light of it – his mother said that I took him too seriously, that I let him affect me too much, and maybe I did. But he was my husband. And I had yet to read a fairy tale in which the prince sweeps in on a white horse – or midnight-blue Porsche – and then gives you the silent treatment.

It wasn’t until years later – after the ugliness that marked the end of the relationship, the separation that shocked some and delighted others, the obscenely expensive lawyers, the neverending divorce, the emails I sent that I knew I would regret but felt too hurt and furious to care (and I was correct, I would regret them) — after the slow hard climb into my new existence – after our truce turned from hostile to uneasy to peaceful to the faint possibility of friendship – after I realized, with more than a little surprise, that when I encountered him at the preschool, or the hospital when one of our sons had minor surgery, I was enjoying his company again – it wasn’t until after all of this, that I learned the truth about fairy tales.

I only knew the Walt Disney versions. Beautiful girls suffered at the hands of wicked women and pined for the day their man would arrive, with his dragon-slaying heroism and magical kiss. These stories were fluff and romance. They were dangerous. They taught a girl to be deluded, trusting and passive, rewarded for her looks alone (and maybe a bent for emotional masochism).

But this is not how fairy tales started out.

Unless and until they are written down – or recorded in vivid, dancing Technicolor – stories are not static things. They shapeshift from one place or period or culture or social group to another, in order to code certain values and transmit a prevailing worldview.

And as Joan Gould points out in her book SPINNING STRAW INTO GOLD: “The more patriarchal and stratified the society, the more clearly the heroine is expected to rely on the hero to save her.”

Fairy tales were originally female tales, women’s work: handed down from mothers to daughters. In these versions, heroines were not pretty victims killing time and waiting for rescue. Sisters rescued brothers; daughters rescued fathers or lovers.

And when a heroine fell into a deep, enchanted sleep, she was about as passive as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Sleep was not her prison but her chrysalis. She assimilated her body’s newfound sexuality and made the inner journey from girl to woman….in her own time. Men might be eager to bed her, her parents might be ready to marry her off, and she might have no legal rights to speak of, but the one thing she could do was close her eyes and withdraw into some serious Me Time. Her body remained complete unto itself, sealed off and protected by a glass coffin, a forest of thorns, a ring of flame.

When she had matured – when the process of ripening had come to its natural end — she awoke to the Prince who was both her reward and the symbol of her adulthood.

(Note: he didn’t actually wake her up himself. He was in the right place at the right time, with a tendency to take all the credit.)

Fairy tales were not about true love. They were about transformation. They were about the growth in female consciousness that makes love possible.

No growth, no story.

Transformation, these tales make clear, doesn’t come easy. It involves suffering, struggle, sacrifice and pain: skills must be acquired, lessons learned, experience hardwon. Often there’s a period of wandering in the wilderness — the forest, the desert, the snowscape — alone. Without this, remarks Gould, “no real change is possible.”

You must lose the old life – or get forced out of it — if you are to come into the life that is waiting for you.

Walt Disney wasn’t interested in any of this. He took the spotlight off the heroine’s initiation into higher consciousness and put it, instead, on the hero’s heroics, as he battled the dragon and fought the witch for possession of the beautiful virgin. Suddenly a girl could be transformed into a woman with a single kiss. All she had to do was wait for The One who would bestow it, so that her real life may begin.

So many of us keep waiting.

But what if the prince is meant to be a metaphor? When you fight your way through painful experience, when you descend into your personal underground and come back up into the light, when you retreat from the world into a kind of slumber, a waking dream, to assimilate your truth and grow strong enough to carry it: what if the prize for all of this, for getting through to the other side, isn’t a man on a white horse with a feathered hat on his oversized head, but a more integrated sense of self, and a vision for your future that makes you come alive?

You learn that you are stronger for the broken places.

This doesn’t happen only once. Initiation comes for you again and again throughout a lifetime. The ground opens up; you eat the poisoned apple; you descend once more into the dark. You wander through some bleak internal landscape until finally there’s a crack in the clouds — there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in — and you turn your face to the sun. You rise to claim your reborn self, spiraling up a little more with every transformation.

You look into your prince’s face, and discover that it is your own.

You have opened your eyes.

this is not your happily ever after

I remember standing beside the man I was married to at the time while a woman was saying, “All this success! It’s like a fairy tale.”

She was talking about our life together; my life.

I didn’t want to disagree, even though signs of the end were already manifest, the good times slipping away beneath the criticism, the way his voice would turn cold before he stopped speaking to me. Are we in the fifth grade? I sometimes asked, trying to make light of it – his mother said that I took him too seriously, that I let him affect me too much, and maybe I did. But he was my husband. And I had yet to read a fairy tale in which the prince sweeps in on a white horse – or midnight-blue Porsche – and then gives you the silent treatment.

It wasn’t until years later – after the ugliness that marked the end of the relationship, the separation that shocked some and delighted others, the obscenely expensive lawyers, the neverending divorce, the emails I sent that I knew I would regret but felt too hurt and furious to care (and I was correct, I would regret them) — after the slow hard climb into my new existence – after our truce turned from hostile to uneasy to peaceful to the first possibility of friendship – after I realized, with more than a little surprise, that when I encountered him at the preschool, or the hospital when one of our sons had minor surgery, I was enjoying his company again – it wasn’t until after all of this, that I learned the truth about fairy tales.

I only knew the Walt Disney versions. Beautiful girls suffered at the hands of wicked women and pined for the day their man would arrive, with his dragon-slaying heroism and magical kiss. These stories were fluff and romance. They were dangerous. They taught a girl to be deluded, trusting and passive, rewarded for her looks alone (and maybe a bent for emotional masochism).

But this is not how fairy tales started out.

Unless and until they are written down – or recorded in vivid, dancing Technicolor – stories are not static things. They shapeshift from one place or period or culture or social group to another, revised and retold to code certain values and transmit a prevailing worldview.

And as Joan Gould points out in her book SPINNING STRAW INTO GOLD: “The more patriarchal and stratified the society, the more clearly the heroine is expected to rely on the hero to save her.”

Fairy tales were originally female tales. They were women’s work: handed down from mothers to daughters. In these versions, heroines were not pretty victims killing time and waiting for rescue. Sisters rescued brothers; daughters rescued fathers or lovers.

And when a heroine fell into a deep, enchanted sleep, she was about as passive as a caterpillar turning into a butterfly. Sleep was not her prison but her chrysalis. She assimilated her body’s newfound sexuality and made the inner journey from girl to woman….in her own time. Men might be eager to bed her, her parents might be ready to marry her off, and she might have no legal rights to speak of, but the one thing she could do was close her eyes and withdraw into some serious Me Time. Her body remained complete unto itself, sealed off and protected by a glass coffin, a forest of thorns, a ring of flame.

When she had matured – when the process of ripening had come to its natural end — she awoke to the Prince who was both her reward and the symbol of her adulthood.

(Note: he didn’t actually wake her up himself. He was in the right place in the right time, and had a tendency to take all the credit.)

Fairy tales were not about true love. They were about transformation. They were about the growth in female consciousness that makes love possible.

No growth, no story.

Transformation, these tales make clear, doesn’t come easy. It involves suffering, struggle, sacrifice and pain: skills must be acquired, lessons learned, experience hardwon. Often there’s a period of wandering in the wilderness — the forest, the desert, the snowscape — alone. Without this, remarks Gould, “no real change is possible.”

You must lose the old life – or get forced out of it — if you are to come into the life that is waiting for you.

Walt Disney wasn’t interested in any of this. He took the spotlight off the heroine’s initiation into higher consciousness and put it, instead, on the hero’s heroics, as he battled the dragon and fought the witch for possession of the beautiful virgin. Suddenly a girl could be transformed into a woman with a single kiss. All she had to do was wait for The One who would bestow it, so that her real life may begin.

So many of us keep waiting.

But what if the prince is meant to be a metaphor? When you fight your way through painful experience, when you descend into your personal underground and come back up into the light, when you retreat from the world into a kind of slumber, a waking dream, to assimilate your truth and grow strong enough to carry it: what if the prize for all of this, for getting through to the other side, isn’t a man on a white horse with a feathered hat on his oversized head, but a more integrated sense of self, and a vision for your future that makes you come alive?

And you learn that you are stronger for the broken places.

This doesn’t happen only once. Initiation comes for you again and again throughout a lifetime. The ground opens up beneath you; you eat the poisoned apple; you descend once more into the dark. You wander through some bleak internal landscape until finally there’s a crack in the clouds — there’s a crack in everything, that’s how the light gets in — and you turn your face into the sun. You rise into your reborn self, spiraling up a little more with every transformation.

You look into your prince’s face, and discover that it is your own.

You have finally opened your eyes.

service is an act of leadership: 7 reasons why ‘serving’ is different from ‘pleasing’

If your actions inspire others to dream more, learn more, do more and become more, you are a leader.

–John Quincy Adams

1.

Pleasing is something you do to get your own needs met: for approval, validation, control.

Serving is when you get outside of yourself and address the needs of someone else (even if they themselves are not aware of them).

Carol Pearson makes an interesting distinction between martyrdom and sacrifice. Martyrdom is a bargain you make in order to save yourself. Genuine sacrifice is higher and more evolved: it is intended to save others.

2.

Pleasing is obligatory. Pleasers often feel they have to be everything to everybody. Pleasing can be its own kind of addiction: people will do it even when they’re resentful, or tired, or on the verge of burnout. They’re looking outside themselves to fill a hollowness within, which is always a losing battle.

Service is freely chosen. Servers know you can’t serve everybody, and don’t try. They know who their people are and trust that others can find service elsewhere (from more capable and appropriate individuals). They also know their own value, and where the needs of the world intersect with what they offer.

3.

Pleasing diminishes the self. Pleasers give away pieces of their soul until it is almost gone. They don’t have a strong sense of where they end and others begin; they don’t know where to draw the bright line of No, or feel like they have the right. The world rushes in and invades them.

Service expands the self. It is done in harmony with your identity: it develops and strengthens your sense of who you are. Servers nurture strong, healthy boundaries that enable acts of compassion: they can open up to the pain and darkness of others without being overwhelmed by it.

4.

Pleasing comes at cost. On a deep level it feels hurtful to the pleasers. It leads to accumulated resentment, frustration, bottled anger. It creates a victim mentality (if sometimes cloaked with a sense of moral superiority).

Service is done in a spirit of joy, engagement and connection.

5.

Pleasers – whether they admit this or not – expect something in return. They keep score. They operate from a sense of scarcity (since there is a finite amount of self for them to offer up, a cake with only so many slices). They expect an even transaction: they trade their time, emotion and energy for love, attention, or some other form of reciprocity.

Servers live from a sense of enough. They have enough for themselves and enough for you. Their self-worth is not at stake. The service, in and of itself, carries its own reward. It comes with no chains attached, no hidden price tags. Servers practice self-care and self-respect; they know how to replenish themselves and prevent burnout.

6.

Pleasing ends up isolating you from others and from yourself. Because pleasers discount their own needs and suppress the wants, emotions and behaviors that might displease people, they get cut off from their own authenticity. Since they can’t present their true selves to people, they can’t connect from a genuine place. They feel unseen and unknown.

Service connects you to people. It plugs you in to something much bigger than yourself: the sacred circuit. The value that you create doesn’t disappear into a tidy transaction, but feeds into a stream of energy that influences others and circles back to nourish and sustain you (and allow you to create more value).

“The power,” as Seth Godin puts it in LINCHPIN, “lies in the creation of abundance. A trade leaves things as they were, with no external surplus. A gift always creates a surplus as it spreads.”

When a person receives that “creation of abundance”, it strengthens the bond between the giver and the receiver, and the receiver is obligated to pass it on.

And what is service – true service – if not a gift?

7.

Pleasing gives away your power. When you look to someone else for approval and validation, you are voluntarily placing yourself in a one-down position. The other person will then make you feel good or bad about yourself — depending, quite possibly, on little more than his or her mood at that moment.

In emotionally abusive relationships, the abuser manages to convince the partner that if only he/she can change the offending behavior – and become more pleasing – the relationship will return to the sunny days and swept-off-your-feet romance of the beginning. Yet somehow the partner never pleases enough, and the abuser remains in control of the relationship.

True service generates power because it is an act of leadership (there’s a phrase for this: servant leadership). It signals that the server has the wisdom and strength from which others may benefit. It also signals that the server is benevolent and caring. When an individual is both warm and powerful, we trust them enough to put our faith in them, and look to them to show the way.

get married + be submissive?

A dog is wiser than a woman; it does not bark at its master. – Russian Proverb

If you want to be grotesquely fascinated, check out this book of relationship advice that is on bestseller lists across Europe:

Get Married….And Be Submissive

This is not the kind of submissive involving handcuffs and paddles and black silk wrapped round your eyes. The author – who is a woman – states that

“we are not equal to men and to not recognise this is a guaranteed source of suffering”.



Therefore, ladies,

“you must submit to him. When you have to choose between what he likes and what you like, choose in his favour.”

And don’t forget that

“when your husband tells you something, you should listen as if it were God speaking”.

Because

“A woman bears ‘obedience’ written on her inside…The man, by contrast, carries the role of liberator and guide.”



For he shall liberate your inner June Cleaver:

“If you’re not an experienced cook or the perfect housewife, what’s the problem if he says so? Tell him he’s right, that it’s true, that you will learn….Women forget that they can’t have it all: working like a man and being at home like a woman. Power is not designed for women.”



But Justine, I can hear you saying, surely such a book was written in a spirit of irony! This is one person’s craven attempt for sensationalism, sales and attention!

Yet the author – a devout Catholic — comes off as quite earnest, claiming that her book resulted from letters she wrote over the years to female friends.

Closer to home, one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, Melissa Gorga, has come out with her own tome of marital wisdom called LOVE ITALIAN STYLE! The key to her apparently happy marriage is her head-over-heels submission to her husband. Melissa describes how he is, indeed, her liberator and guide:

“His style was to make corrections and to teach me from the beginning days of our marriage exactly how he envisioned our life together. Joe always says, “You got to teach someone to walk straight on the knife. If you slip, you’re going to get cut.” Even if something didn’t bother him that badly, he’d bring it up. He wanted to make sure that I knew, for example, if I ran out to CVS and he came home from work to an empty house, he didn’t like it. He’d call me and say, “I don’t care if you’re out all day long. But I don’t want to come home to an empty house.”

The routine of making dinner and keeping a clean house is how I stay grounded. It keeps me humble.

Someone might look at Joe and think, “Chauvinist pig.” He sounds like one sometimes! They might look at me and think, “Throwback.” The way I see it, Joe is cleaning up messes at work all day long—things you can’t wipe up with a sponge. That’s his job. It’s my job to clean up spilled milk. I just do it. There is simply no point to arguing about something that requires all of five seconds of my time and next to zero energy.

When gender roles are confused, sexual roles are, too. If he’s at the sink and then changing diapers, then who throws down in the bed? In our marriage, Joe is always the man, doing masculine things. I’m the woman, and I do the female things, including housework.”



Sam Owen, cited as a relationships coach and psychologist, says that the appeal of this kind of advice lies in a longing for the past. “We are a lost society when it comes to relationship roles within marriage. Due to a rapidly changing world, the desire for women and men to be seen as equal, and the drive towards having everything – children, a successful career and a happy spouse – husbands and wives are feeling confused about what their role is within the marriage and family unit, and this creates discord.”

He says: “If people are hankering for an old-fashioned marriage, it’s often because so much of it worked so well.”

I find this a curious statement. Let’s not forget that “old-fashioned marriages” took place in a world where divorce was taboo, job advertisements were divided into the His and Her sections (guess which list was longer and more lucrative), and a woman couldn’t rent an apartment or apply for a credit card or take out a bank loan without a male to co-sign.

In almost every state, men had the right to have sex with their wife at any time, whether she gave consent or not. She could not control when to have a child or how many children she would have (the pill had not been invented yet, and birth control was illegal in many places). Her husband, if he wanted, could keep her barefoot and pregnant.

Domestic abuse was a dirty secret.

Men worked and drank and smoked themselves into early graves.

It’s easy to hanker after the idea of an old-fashioned marriage. We are free to wax poetic, much like we can about unicorns; we can pretend that people married for true love and encountered nothing but happily ever afters.

And if women were presumed to lack the intellectual capacities of a man, and couldn’t or shouldn’t support themselves, it would make sense to encourage them to submit to their husbands’ superior judgment and greater worldliness and maturity. You would have no choice but to enter a parent-child kind of relationship, because the husband truly knows best.

The kind of genuine intimacy that is only possible between equals wouldn’t exist.

Which is what I think we all want, even if we’re also afraid of it or unsure of what it looks like. We want to see and be seen, love and be loved; we want to be accepted and recognized for who we are on the inside. We crave the kind of intimacy that power closes out. Polarized gender roles make it possible to function efficiently as a unit, but that doesn’t translate to an intimate relationship; it is, instead, an exchange of services (where one set is valued much more highly than the other).

When one partner must maintain power-over, neither partner is free to speak in an authentic voice. One person must use communication as a tool of control; the other must use it to accommodate, persuade, seduce, or manipulate.

Is this a recipe for happiness? Hell no. But it’s what we know, in a culture that didn’t respect women enough to give them the vote until less than a hundred years ago. And when people are confused, insecure, stressed-out or vulnerable, it’s our nature as human beings to seek what seems easy and best simply because it’s familiar. We are creatures who are not very comfortable with change.

To live in a world where women can uncouple sex and pregnancy is a radical change.

To live in a world where women as a group are attaining power – regardless of whether or not we were “designed for it” – is unprecedented, and freaking out a lot of people.

Emotional and sexual intimacy can be messy, tangled, difficult and volatile just to begin with, and we’re approaching it from a new level of possibility: partners freely choosing to be with you and to stay with you.

It ups the game. It raises the stakes. It demands that you show up more completely and more often, that you learn to speak your heart and also listen.

It demands that you risk more, and hurt when you have to so that you may grow. There is no shortcut we can take, no formula we can use, and the only paradigm we have is still very much in flux.

Which is why I think surrendered or submissive marriages are, in the end, a kind of cop-out.

Traditional gender roles are easy. Real intimacy is not.

Which doesn’t mean, by the way, that you can’t be submissive in bed if that’s what turns you on. Playing with power can be very sexy, if not always politically correct – the body wants what it wants. But when you have the ability and the freedom to say what you want, and what you don’t want, and act and be acted upon accordingly, there’s never any question as to who throws down in the bedroom. Which is probably why feminism makes for better sex.

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe in fairy tales.

I just think the real ones have yet to be written.

get married + be submissive (my ass)

A dog is wiser than a woman; it does not bark at its master. – Russian Proverb

If you want to be grotesquely fascinated, check out this book of relationship advice that is a bestseller in Europe:

Get Married….And Be Submissive

This is not the kind of submissive involving handcuffs and paddles and black silk wrapped round your eyes. The author – who is a woman – states that

“we are not equal to men and to not recognise this is a guaranteed source of suffering”.



Therefore, ladies,

“you must submit to him. When you have to choose between what he likes and what you like, choose in his favour.”

And don’t forget that

“when your husband tells you something, you should listen as if it were God speaking”.

Because

“A woman bears ‘obedience’ written on her inside…The man, by contrast, carries the role of liberator and guide.”



For he shall liberate your inner June Cleaver:

“If you’re not an experienced cook or the perfect housewife, what’s the problem if he says so? Tell him he’s right, that it’s true, that you will learn….Women forget that they can’t have it all: working like a man and being at home like a woman. Power is not designed for women.”



But Justine, I can hear you saying, surely such a book was written in a spirit of irony! This is one person’s craven attempt for sensationalism, sales and attention!

Yet the author – a devout Catholic — comes off as quite earnest, claiming that her book resulted from letters she wrote over the years to female friends.

Closer to home, one of the Real Housewives of New Jersey, Melissa Gorga, has come out with her own tome of marital wisdom called LOVE ITALIAN STYLE! The key to her apparently happy marriage is her head-over-heels submission to her husband. Melissa describes how he is, indeed, her liberator and guide:

“His style was to make corrections and to teach me from the beginning days of our marriage exactly how he envisioned our life together. Joe always says, “You got to teach someone to walk straight on the knife. If you slip, you’re going to get cut.” Even if something didn’t bother him that badly, he’d bring it up. He wanted to make sure that I knew, for example, if I ran out to CVS and he came home from work to an empty house, he didn’t like it. He’d call me and say, “I don’t care if you’re out all day long. But I don’t want to come home to an empty house.”

The routine of making dinner and keeping a clean house is how I stay grounded. It keeps me humble.

Someone might look at Joe and think, “Chauvinist pig.” He sounds like one sometimes! They might look at me and think, “Throwback.” The way I see it, Joe is cleaning up messes at work all day long—things you can’t wipe up with a sponge. That’s his job. It’s my job to clean up spilled milk. I just do it. There is simply no point to arguing about something that requires all of five seconds of my time and next to zero energy.

When gender roles are confused, sexual roles are, too. If he’s at the sink and then changing diapers, then who throws down in the bed? In our marriage, Joe is always the man, doing masculine things. I’m the woman, and I do the female things, including housework.”



Sam Owen, cited as a relationships coach and psychologist, says that the appeal of this kind of advice lies in a longing for the past. “We are a lost society when it comes to relationship roles within marriage. Due to a rapidly changing world, the desire for women and men to be seen as equal, and the drive towards having everything – children, a successful career and a happy spouse – husbands and wives are feeling confused about what their role is within the marriage and family unit, and this creates discord.”

He says: “If people are hankering for an old-fashioned marriage, it’s often because so much of it worked so well.”

I find this a curious statement. Let’s not forget that “old-fashioned marriages” took place in a world where divorce was taboo, job advertisements were divided into the His and Her sections (guess which list was longer and more lucrative), and a woman couldn’t rent an apartment or apply for a credit card or take out a bank loan without a male co-signer.

In almost every state, men had the right to have sex with their wife at any time, whether she gave consent or not. She could not control when to have a child or how many children she would have (since the pill had not been invented yet, and birth control was still illegal in many places). Her husband, if he wanted, could keep her barefoot and pregnant.

Domestic abuse was a dirty secret.

Men worked and drank and smoked themselves into early graves.

It’s easy to hanker after the idea of an old-fashioned marriage. We are free to wax poetic, much like we can about unicorns; we can pretend that people married for true love and encountered nothing but happily ever afters.

And if women were presumed to lack the intellectual capacities of a man, and couldn’t or shouldn’t support themselves, it would make sense to encourage them to submit to their husbands’ superior judgment and greater worldliness and maturity. You would have no choice but to enter a parent-child kind of relationship, because the husband truly knows best.

The kind of genuine intimacy that is only possible between equals wouldn’t exist.

Which is what I think we all want, even if we’re also afraid of it or unsure of what it looks like. We want to see and be seen, love and be loved; we want to be accepted and recognized for who we are on the inside. We crave the kind of intimacy that power closes out. Polarized gender roles make it possible to function efficiently as a unit, but that doesn’t translate to an intimate relationship; it is, instead, an exchange of services (where one set is valued much more highly than the other).

When one partner must maintain power-over, neither partner is free to speak in an authentic voice. One must use communication as a tool of control; the other must use it to accommodate, persuade, seduce, or manipulate.

Is this a recipe for happiness? Hell no. But it’s what we know, in a culture that didn’t respect women enough to give them the vote until less than a hundred years ago. And when we’re confused, insecure, stressed-out or vulnerable, it’s our nature as human beings to seek out what seems easy and best simply because it’s familiar. We are creatures who are not very comfortable with change.

To live in a world where women can uncouple sex and pregnancy is a radical change.

To live in a world where women as a group are attaining power – regardless of whether or not we were “designed for it” – is unprecedented, and freaking out a lot of people.

Add the fact that emotional and sexual intimacy can be messy, tangled, difficult and volatile just to begin with, and that we’re approaching it from a new level of possibility: partners freely choosing to be with us and to stay with us.

It ups the game. It raises the stakes. It demands that you show up more completely and more often, that you learn to speak your heart and also to listen.

It demands that you risk more, and hurt when you have to so that you may grow. There is no shortcut we can take, no formula we can use, and the only paradigm we have is still very much in flux.

Which is why I think these kind of surrendered or submissive marriages are, in the end, a total cop-out.

Traditional gender roles are easy. Real intimacy is not.

Which doesn’t mean, by the way, that you can’t be submissive in bed if that’s what turns you on. Playing with power can be very sexy, if not always politically correct – the body wants what it wants. But when you have the ability and the freedom to say what you want, and what you don’t want, and act and be acted upon accordingly, there’s never any question as to who “throws down in the bedroom”. Which is probably why feminism makes for better sex, in case you were curious.

Don’t get me wrong. I do believe in fairy tales.

I just think the real ones have yet to be written.

a wish for you in 2014

I once heard one person say about another:

She had a capacity for deep joy.



That struck me. In fact, I thought it was goddamn beautiful.

Could somebody say that about me, I wondered, and a thought rose in response:

Maybe not so much.

Even back then, I sensed a difference between happiness and joy.

Happiness is related to your circumstances. It ebbs and flows with the external forces of your life.

Joy goes deeper.

Joy is when you’re tapped into something that threatens to blow up your heart.

You have to be prepared to let it. You have to open yourself up to the dangerous bliss of love and connection and belonging. You have to open yourself up to a moment that you know will end soon and never come again.

To know joy is to know the loss of joy; to know the deep carved-out pain of loss. You can’t have one without the other.

Joy, then, is a straight-up act of courage.

I haven’t always been so courageous.

We’re a strange bunch, us humans; we will do ridiculous things to feel more alive even as we do our best to numb our feelings through (drink, drugs, sex, shopping, Internet, work, television, sugar, video games [insert preferred vice here]….)

We want to think positive and disown the icky crappy stuff; we act as if it’s our prerogative to feel good all the time. We consider ourselves failed and/or defective when we can’t manage to do this. But you can’t stomp out bits and chunks of your emotional life without killing off the rest. It’s an all-or-nothing kind of deal.

Every scar has a story to tell, a path to beauty and meaning.

The light and the dark define each other.

She had a capacity for deep joy means, to me, she could feel her feelings and not get run over by them. She could open herself to the world without being destroyed by it. She knew that when life sent her underground, she would find what she needed to rise, and her capacity for joy would get that much deeper and able to hold that much more. She was committed to a life of courage. In order to feel fully alive, she was prepared to allow herself to feel.

I wish you a fabulous 2014. May your year be filled with love and cake and cashmere and adventure and great sex and gratitude and bravery and coffee and books and movies and dogs and kindness and trips to the beach and shoes and, most of all, joy.

I wish you joy.

darling, it’s time to own it.

My favorite thing in my Facebook feed today was a text image from Madonna’s page:

DARLING,

JUST

FUCKING

OWN

IT.

(I want that on a t-shirt.)

When we talk about finding your voice, we’re talking about your ability to own it. Your voice is not just what you say and how you say it, but who you are.

Which is maybe why we’re so quick to imitate other people’s voices. If it worked for them, so our reasoning goes, then it should work for us, right? We can hide who we are behind who we think we’re supposed to be.

When you own it, you drop the act.

You come out of hiding.

Men and women hide for different reasons. There’s a psychologist named Carol Gilligan who did some fascinating work around voice, and what she concluded was this:

Boys learn to suppress their natural voice around the age of 5, when the first inklings of the be a man message take hold. Presented with the choice between power and warmth, they choose power. They shut down their sense of empathy, as well as their desire and ability to express emotion; they disown their feminine side, since be a man is also code for don’t be a pussy.



Girls learn to suppress their natural voice around the age of 12, when they start to learn what it takes to be a lady. Presented with the choice between power and warmth, they choose warmth. Because saying what they really think and knowing what they really know can lead to hurt feelings, disruption and conflict, they learn to discount the inner voice. They listen to other people instead. They disown their masculine side, since be a lady is also code for don’t be threatening or intimidating, and knowledge and power (since knowledge is power) are both.

To find your voice — to speak up as your true self – cuts against these dictates. No wonder we’re hesitant to do it. Showing passion and emotion – characteristics of any compelling voice – betrays the emotional life that, as a man, you’re not traditionally supposed to have. Say anything important with conviction, and you will rock the boat and piss some people off in a way that no good girl is traditionally supposed to do.

When you speak up, you make yourself vulnerable.

And we’re not a culture that likes to “do” vulnerability. We are a culture of self-help, positive-thinking, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps, slap-on-a-smile-and-get-on with-it individualists. (The fact that this isn’t working out so well for us – given how stressed out, addicted, depressed and debt-ridden we are as a people – would seem to be beside the point.)

We’re also a culture that mistakes vulnerability for weakness. But the definition of vulnerability is to open yourself up to the possibility of wounding; it’s about exposing your heart, not having a weak heart.

Vulnerability, then, is a high-risk endeavor. We don’t look on risk-takers as weak. We applaud them. (We also have names for them: like artists, or entrepreneurs.)

Courage, as Brene Brown points out

“is a heart word. The root of the word courage is cor – the Latin word for heart. In one of its earliest forms, the word courage meant ‘To speak one’s mind by telling all one’s heart.’ Over time, this definition has changed, and today, we typically associate courage with heroic and brave deeds. But in my opinion, this definition fails to recognize the inner strength and level of commitment required for us to actually speak honestly and openly about who we are and about our experiences — good and bad. Speaking from our hearts is what I think of as ‘ordinary courage.’”



When you fucking own it, you own all of who and what you are. The soft parts as well as the hard parts. The darkness as well as the light. You own your vulnerability – instead of letting it own you – and by refusing to disown any part of your story, you stand in strength. Instead of choosing between power and warmth, you combine them; you have the power to sway people through your ability to empathize with them, to unite through shared experience, to connect. (Think Martin Luther King Jr. Think Oprah.)

Own it.

Or as Madonna also likes to say:

Express yourself.

creativity + the moment that made me a feminist

I would rather be whole than good. — Jung

1

My son was five years old. He liked colors and textures and shine. He told me one morning, with a shy, sweet smile, that he would like to make drawings with glitter pens.

Soon I was cruising the aisles of a local toy store, checking out the kiddie arts and crafts.

Which were mostly packaged in pink.

My son was old enough to feel self-conscious about liking something girly, and I worried that his brothers would poke fun at him. I kept scanning the rows of merchandise, the jewelry-making kits and boxes of markers and crayons: where the hell were the boy glitter pens? Or, at the least, glitter pens in a unisex packaging?

And as I failed to find them – because they didn’t seem to exist – another question lifted its head from the corner of my brain:

Why did the packaging even matter?

I was prepared to admit that girls and boys are wired for different forms of play; I had, after all, watched one of my sons transform bananas into imaginary guns when he was a toddler and I wouldn’t allow toy guns in the house. The boy thing, as I tended to think of it, kicked in early. But this wasn’t about trucks or dolls. This was a shiny metallic ink used in art projects. Assigning it to one gender instead of the other seemed arbitrary.

Even so, why should I care? Why should a simple marketing decision have the power to dictate what my child could and could not play with?

The solution was easy enough: remove the pens from the incriminating package before giving them to my boy. But that didn’t change my sudden, vivid sense of the stigma of the feminine, and how it threatened to limit my sons. Glitter pens were all very well, but what about the other things my kids might feel compelled to turn away from because of that feminine tag?

Things like emotions.

And caring.

And empathy.

And self-expression.

There’s a movie called BOXING HELENA, in which a man with certain skills kidnaps the Helena in question, drugs her, and amputates her legs — and then, in a second surgery, her arms – in order to contain and control her. It’s disturbing as hell. Now I could see how this culture of blue and pink – of blue over pink – also threatened to perform a psychic amputation on my sons, chopping off whatever parts didn’t fit this very particular box with three very particular words emblazoned across the front:

BE A MAN.

And since you can’t talk about one box without talking about the other, I could also see its mate:

BE A LADY.

2

For a long time, off and on, I was involved with a writing workshop. On the designated Saturdays I would drive out from Bel Air to where the Pacific Coast Highway curves up along the coastline — blue sky over blue water — and make my way into the hills of Topanga. I sat on a deck with six or eight other writers and ate artisan bread smeared with fig jam. We would critique manuscripts, one after the other, as the day turned from cool to hot to cool again and the sun took its dying fall into the long yellow grass.

We talked a lot about going there. It wasn’t enough to string together pretty sentences, or know how to stage a scene, or understand the cause and effect of plot. You had to travel into the deeper places, the soul-places, that scare you and strip you raw. Because it was only when you showed your inner self that you showed us something we haven’t seen before (perhaps many times before). That work was original, because it was infused with the originality of you. That work was true, because it came from an honest place, and touched off the kind of vibe that went through the reader’s body.

When you went there, the writing came alive. It got juicy. It resonated.

It wasn’t until those conversations — and I saw the quantum leap in ability the writers made when they blasted through the levels of their own resistance – that I began to understand the relationship between creativity and authenticity.

Creative intelligence draws from the different parts of you, the various dimensions of your experience. Instead of trimming yourself to fit a pre-existing mold, you work to reclaim the lost and shadowy parts of yourself. The more of yourself you can access, the more powerful your work becomes, the more likely you are to connect with an audience.

When you create, you take what’s inside you and give it shape and substance in the world.

Other people can see who we are, what we stand for, and respond accordingly. Some will reject us – which is what makes creativity a high-risk endeavor – but others connect with who we are, instead of who we’re pretending to be.

Creativity makes it possible to connect and belong.

There is a difference between fitting in and belonging.

As researcher Brene Brown describes it in her book DARING GREATLY:

Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are…



We are hardwired for connection – it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The absence of love, belonging and connection always leads to suffering.



We are also hardwired to create. As Brene Brown points out, there is no such thing as an uncreative person. Creativity

lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.

That we are hardwired for both connection and creativity is not a coincidence. If connection gives meaning to our lives, it’s creativity that makes meaning possible.

But you can’t go there when you’re stuck inside the gender box.

When you’ve disowned your power (if you are a woman) or your vulnerability (if you are a man) in order to fit in. When you’re trapped in constant power plays between those who conquer and those who are conquered, life becomes a series of chess moves, a game (The Game) that has rules (The Rules) about who wins and who loses. Which would be fine, perhaps, if the evidence didn’t suggest that we are destroying ourselves in the process, whether it’s the soaring rates of addiction, depression and heart disease, the plundering of the planet, the exploitation of children, the global violence against girls and women, the…you get where I’m going with this.

This is why I’m a feminist. Certainly not because, as certain stereotypes would have it, I hate men (I don’t) or because I think women are superior (I don’t – although we are very damn cool), or because I don’t like to shave various body parts (laser hair removal, baby).

But I have learned to value the feminine, in myself, in other women, and in men; I believe that if feminine values were expressed alongside masculine values, and weighed as equally valuable, the world would be a better place. I believe that women have the right to step into power and men have the right to be seen for who they are instead of the money they make (or don’t). I believe that both genders have the right to pursue accomplishment and relationship. I believe that no one – and certainly no box, no pink or blue packaging – has the right to tell you who you are, or define your experience for you.

I have nothing against traditional masculinity/femininity in and of themselves – the world needs the warriors and the nurturers. But most of us fall somewhere in between: gender as a spectrum inside a shared humanity, rather than two fixed points eyeing each other across an abyss.

I believe in your right to remember who you are, and be all of what you are.

To create and connect.

After all, in the end, what else is there?

how my son made me a feminist

I would rather be whole than good. — Jung

1

My son was five years old. He liked colors and textures and shine. He told me one morning, with a shy, sweet smile, that he would like to make drawings with glitter pens.

Soon I was cruising the aisles of a local toy store, checking out the kiddie arts and crafts.

Which were mostly packaged in pink.

My son was old enough to feel self-conscious about liking something girly, and I worried that his brothers would poke fun at him. I kept scanning the rows of merchandise, the jewelry-making kits and boxes of markers and crayons: where the hell were the boy glitter pens? Or, at the least, glitter pens in a unisex packaging?

And as I failed to find them – because they didn’t seem to exist – another question lifted its head from the corner of my brain:

Why did the packaging even matter?

I was prepared to admit that girls and boys are wired for different forms of play; I had, after all, watched one of my sons transform bananas into imaginary guns when he was a toddler and I wouldn’t allow toy guns in the house. The boy thing, as I tended to think of it, kicked in early. But this wasn’t about trucks or dolls. This was a shiny metallic ink used in art projects. Assigning it to one gender instead of the other seemed arbitrary.

Even so, why should I care? Why should a simple marketing decision have the power to dictate what my child could and could not play with?

The solution was easy enough: remove the pens from the incriminating package before giving them to my boy. But that didn’t change my sudden, vivid sense of the stigma of the feminine, and how it threatened to limit my sons. Glitter pens were all very well, but what about the other things my kids might feel compelled to turn away from because of that feminine tag?

Things like emotions.

And caring.

And empathy.

And self-expression.

There’s a movie called BOXING HELENA, in which a man with certain skills kidnaps the Helena in question, drugs her, and amputates her legs — and then, in a second surgery, her arms – in order to contain and control her. It’s disturbing as hell. Now I could see how this culture of blue and pink – of blue over pink – also threatened to perform a psychic amputation on my sons, chopping off whatever parts didn’t fit this very particular box with three very particular words emblazoned across the front:

BE A MAN.

And since you can’t talk about one box without talking about the other, I could also see its mate:

BE A LADY.

2

For a long time, off and on, I was involved with a writing workshop. On the designated Saturdays I would drive out from Bel Air to where the Pacific Coast Highway curves up along the coastline — blue sky over blue water — and make my way into the hills of Topanga. I sat on a deck with six or eight other writers and ate artisan bread smeared with fig jam. We would critique manuscripts, one after the other, as the day turned from cool to hot to cool again and the sun took its dying fall into the long yellow grass.

We talked a lot about going there. It wasn’t enough to string together pretty sentences, or know how to stage a scene, or understand the cause and effect of plot. You had to travel into the deeper places, the soul-places, that scare you and strip you raw. Because it was only when you showed your inner self that you showed us something we haven’t seen before (perhaps many times before). That work was original, because it was infused with the originality of you. That work was true, because it came from an honest place, and touched off the kind of vibe that went through the reader’s body.

When you went there, the writing came alive. It got juicy. It resonated.

It wasn’t until those conversations — and I saw the quantum leap in ability the writers made when they blasted through the levels of their own resistance – that I began to understand the relationship between creativity and authenticity.

Creative intelligence draws from the different parts of you, the various dimensions of your experience. Instead of trimming yourself to fit a pre-existing mold, you work to reclaim the lost and shadowy parts of yourself. The more of yourself you can access, the more powerful your work becomes, the more likely you are to connect with an audience.

When you create, you take what’s inside you and give it shape and substance in the world.

Other people can see who we are, what we stand for, and respond accordingly. Some will reject us – which is what makes creativity a high-risk endeavor – but others connect with who we are, instead of who we’re pretending to be.

Creativity makes it possible to connect and belong.

There is a difference between fitting in and belonging.

As researcher Brene Brown describes it in her book DARING GREATLY:

Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are…



We are hardwired for connection – it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The absence of love, belonging and connection always leads to suffering.



We are also hardwired to create. As Brene Brown points out, there is no such thing as an uncreative person. Creativity

lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.

That we are hardwired for both connection and creativity is not a coincidence. If connection gives meaning to our lives, it’s creativity that makes meaning possible.

But you can’t go there when you’re stuck inside the gender box.

When you’ve disowned your power (if you are a woman) or your vulnerability (if you are a man) in order to fit in. When you’re trapped in constant power plays between those who conquer and those who are conquered, life becomes a series of chess moves, a game (The Game) that has rules (The Rules) about who wins and who loses. Which would be fine, perhaps, if the evidence didn’t suggest that we are destroying ourselves in the process, whether it’s the soaring rates of addiction, depression and heart disease, the plundering of the planet, the exploitation of children, the global violence against girls and women, the…you get where I’m going with this.

This is why I’m a feminist. Certainly not because, as certain stereotypes would have it, I hate men (I don’t) or because I think women are superior (I don’t – although we are very damn cool), or because I don’t like to shave various body parts (laser hair removal, baby).

But I have learned to value the feminine, in myself, in other women, and in men; I believe that if feminine values were expressed alongside masculine values, and weighed as equally valuable, the world would be a better place. I believe that women have the right to step into power and men have the right to be seen for who they are instead of the money they make (or don’t). I believe that both genders have the right to pursue accomplishment and relationship. I believe that no one – and certainly no box, no pink or blue packaging – has the right to tell you who you are, or define your experience for you.

I have nothing against traditional masculinity/femininity in and of themselves – the world needs the warriors and the nurturers. But most of us fall somewhere in between: gender as a spectrum inside a shared humanity, rather than two fixed points eyeing each other across an abyss.

I believe in your right to remember who you are, and be all of what you are.

To create and connect.

After all, in the end, what else is there?

creativity, authenticity + the moment that made me a feminist

I would rather be whole than good. — Jung

1

My son was five years old. He liked colors and textures and shine. He told me one morning, with a shy, sweet smile, that he would like to make drawings with glitter pens.

Soon I was cruising the aisles of a local toy store, checking out the kiddie arts and crafts.

Which were mostly packaged in pink.

My son was old enough to feel self-conscious about liking something girly, and I worried that his brothers would poke fun at him. I kept scanning the rows of merchandise, the jewelry-making kits and boxes of markers and crayons: where the hell were the boy glitter pens? Or, at the least, glitter pens in a unisex packaging?

And as I failed to find them – because they didn’t seem to exist – another question lifted its head from the corner of my brain:

Why did the packaging even matter?

I was prepared to admit that girls and boys are wired for different forms of play; I had, after all, watched one of my sons transform bananas into imaginary guns when he was a toddler and I wouldn’t allow toy guns in the house. The boy thing, as I tended to think of it, kicked in early. But this wasn’t about trucks or dolls. This was a shiny metallic ink used in art projects. Assigning it to one gender instead of the other seemed arbitrary.

Even so, why should I care? Why should a simple marketing decision have the power to dictate what my child could and could not play with?

The solution was easy enough: remove the pens from the incriminating package before giving them to my boy. But that didn’t change my sudden, vivid sense of the stigma of the feminine, and how it threatened to limit my sons. Glitter pens were all very well, but what about the other things my kids might feel compelled to turn away from because of that feminine tag?

Things like emotions.

And caring.

And empathy.

And self-expression.

There’s a movie called BOXING HELENA, in which a man with certain skills kidnaps the Helena in question, drugs her, and amputates her legs — and then, in a second surgery, her arms – in order to contain and control her. It’s disturbing as hell. Now I could see how this culture of blue and pink – of blue over pink – also threatened to perform a psychic amputation on my sons, chopping off whatever parts didn’t fit this very particular box with three very particular words emblazoned across the front:

BE A MAN.

And since you can’t talk about one box without talking about the other, I could also see its mate:

BE A LADY.

2

For a long time, off and on, I was involved with a writing workshop. On the designated Saturdays I would drive out from Bel Air to where the Pacific Coast Highway curves up along the coastline — blue sky over blue water — and make my way into the hills of Topanga. I sat on a deck with six or eight other writers and ate artisan bread smeared with fig jam. We would critique manuscripts, one after the other, as the day turned from cool to hot to cool again and the sun took its dying fall into the long yellow grass.

We talked a lot about going there. It wasn’t enough to string together pretty sentences, or know how to stage a scene, or understand the cause and effect of plot. You had to travel into the deeper places, the soul-places, that scare you and strip you raw. Because it was only when you showed your inner self that you showed us something we haven’t seen before (perhaps many times before). That work was original, because it was infused with the originality of you. That work was true, because it came from an honest place, and touched off the kind of vibe that went through the reader’s body.

When you went there, the writing came alive. It got juicy. It resonated.

It wasn’t until those conversations — and I saw the quantum leap in ability the writers made when they blasted through the levels of their own resistance – that I began to understand the relationship between creativity and authenticity.

Creative intelligence draws from the different parts of you, the various dimensions of your experience. Instead of trimming yourself to fit a pre-existing mold, you work to reclaim the lost and shadowy parts of yourself. The more of yourself you can access, the more powerful your work becomes, the more likely you are to connect with an audience.

When you create, you take what’s inside you and give it shape and substance in the world.

Other people can see who we are, what we stand for, and respond accordingly. Some will reject us – which is what makes creativity a high-risk endeavor – but others connect with who we are, instead of who we’re pretending to be.

Creativity makes it possible to connect and belong.

There is a difference between fitting in and belonging.

As researcher Brene Brown describes it in her book DARING GREATLY:

Fitting in is about assessing a situation and becoming who you need to be in order to be accepted. Belonging, on the other hand, doesn’t require us to change who we are; it requires us to be who we are…



We are hardwired for connection – it’s what gives purpose and meaning to our lives. The absence of love, belonging and connection always leads to suffering.



We are also hardwired to create. As Brene Brown points out, there is no such thing as an uncreative person. Creativity

lives within us until it’s expressed, neglected to death, or suffocated by resentment and fear.

That we are hardwired for both connection and creativity is not a coincidence. If connection gives meaning to our lives, it’s creativity that makes meaning possible.

But you can’t go there when you’re stuck inside the gender box.

When you’ve disowned your power (if you are a woman) or your vulnerability (if you are a man) in order to fit in. When you’re trapped in constant power plays between those who conquer and those who are conquered, life becomes a series of chess moves, a game (The Game) that has rules (The Rules) about who wins and who loses. Which would be fine, perhaps, if the evidence didn’t suggest that we are destroying ourselves in the process, whether it’s the soaring rates of addiction, depression and heart disease, the plundering of the planet, the exploitation of children, the global violence against girls and women, the…you get where I’m going with this.

This is why I’m a feminist. Certainly not because, as certain stereotypes would have it, I hate men (I don’t) or because I think women are superior (I don’t – although we are very damn cool), or because I don’t like to shave various body parts (laser hair removal, baby).

But I have learned to value the feminine, in myself, in other women, and in men; I believe that if feminine values were expressed alongside masculine values, and weighed as equally valuable, the world would be a better place. I believe that women have the right to step into power and men have the right to be seen for who they are instead of the money they make (or don’t). I believe that both genders have the right to pursue accomplishment and relationship. I believe that no one – and certainly no box, no pink or blue packaging – has the right to tell you who you are, or define your experience for you.

I have nothing against traditional masculinity/femininity in and of themselves – the world needs the warriors and the nurturers. But most of us fall somewhere in between: gender as a spectrum inside a shared humanity, rather than two fixed points eyeing each other across an abyss.

I believe in your right to remember who you are, and be all of what you are.

To create and connect.

After all, in the end, what else is there?