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April 12 - April 14, 2024
But I think it’s deeper, that if you feel like you’re good enough, you’ll be safe from judgment, loved.”
“So, what is sitting on my chest exactly?” I asked. “Whatever tells you that you’re not.”
our tradition and culture have decreed that women are inferior in all ways: physically, spiritually, and morally. This social mythology has kept us desperate to prove our basic goodness and worthiness.
Women—the instigator for the fall of men—are at a notable disadvantage as a result: We are compelled to prove our virtue, our moral perfection. But we will never be able to prove our virtue, as the word itself is out of reach for women: Its etymology is Latin (vir), for man.
culture is contagious: We pass it on to each other like a virus. It permeates everything. No one wholly invents themselves.
We have been trained for goodness. Men, meanwhile, have been trained for power.
When we overlimit ourselves, we become complicit in denying ourselves a full existence. We force ourselves to lead narrow lives. We fear crossing a line we can’t see. We don’t want to be perceived as wanting too much, or being too much; we equate “self-control” with worthiness.
We are so consumed with the doing—and the not doing—that we have forgotten how to be.
We are so fixated on an authority “out there,” we’re missing the miracles inside, all the moments that illuminate our connection to something bigger within ourselves.
We too often forget that balance is the goal—fulfillment and restraint, eating and excreting, “light” and “dark,” “good” and “bad,” masculine and feminine.
Perfect goodness, as an absolute state, is not achievable;
to be alive requires participation in some harm—after all, we must kill plants and animals to sustain life. We are not pawns in a battle between the dark and the light. We are human, a bridge between matte...
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“Are you programmed? Or are you self-determined?”
One of the mechanisms of the patriarchy was to force adherence to a vertical family structure. Because strong, even primary bonds between women had persisted over time in communal-living cultures, the push toward vertical family structures was intended to shift women from interdependence among each other to dependence on men.
In marriage’s earliest incarnations, women connected families, concentrated assets and status, and produced children; effectively, women were owned by their
husbands, purchased through marriage or sold into the arrangement.[*3]
Of the 282 mandates Hammurabi codified, 73 revolve around marriage and sex and almost exclusively delimit women.
One of Judaism’s distinguishing features is its sacred books: It was the first religion where laws and rituals were written down,
God made deals almost exclusively with men—and confirmed women’s role as property.[*4]
Genesis, the Bible’s creation story, is a retelling of a Sumerian myth from 2500 B.C. that includes the goddess (i.e., the Divine Mother), a tree, and a serpent. In the original, the serpent, in its skin-shedding, represents death begetting new life, not evil, and there is no eviction from paradise. But in the Old Testament version many of us hold sacred (scholars believe Genesis was written between 950 and 500 B.C.), God the Father replaces the goddess as the lone creator, and a woman becomes the symbol of sin and the cause of man’s fall. Meanwhile, the snake, a symbol of the fertility
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it’s easy to find textual evidence of Jesus’s feminism. Yet early church fathers conveniently ignored this, eventually creating a canon that ensured the second-class status of women.
The Bible is the product of a centuries-long game of Telephone, edited by men according to their
preferences. This might sound silly and obvious, but when I realized that, I felt a door had been wrenched open in my mind. What has been lost? And what did we get wrong?
We feel embarrassed we want money at all. We don’t know if we deserve it. And because we’ve been urged to spend rather than save, we’ve missed out on the opportunity to accrue wealth,
Dependence on a spouse for money is terrifying,
To avoid the body is a disavowal of the beauty of our humanness, the creative matter of life, and arguably the reason we’re here: to experience the world through our senses, to be fully in ourselves.
The promise of this map is that we will learn how to relate to each other as people with bodies, rather than as people with very specific body parts: We will become fully human.
Perhaps we may learn how to initiate our children into sexuality without submitting them to a traumatic start; perhaps we may teach responsibility and joy, so they assume the power for their own experience (and nothing more).
May the former serve as the mechanism by which we can experience the world, not from a place of fear and white-knuckled restraint, but in full-body surrender, open to mystery, magic, and pleasure.
Even such epithets as ‘bastard’ and ‘son of a bitch’ do not condemn the man but place the blame on a woman—his mother!”
While angry women are deemed “unhinged,” it continues to be culturally appropriate for men to get their anger out, expressing aggression all over the place:
