SITE
MAP
THIS VOIDED WOMANHOOD
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I wrote this with women in mind, thinking it would be best for us to be prepared when asking men to come along in this shift in our gendered way of understanding one another; prepared not only to find the way in the filling/knitting out of human definition (from our previous woman state of voided-ness) but also to be on the watch for some not necessarily anticipated shifts within ourselves. If the men do take us up on deep gender realignments.
I do mean to put the responsibility on women, with and without the willing help of men, to keep in motion the rethinking, re naming, re being - and to keep warning ourselves that it won’t be easy, nor without some brokenheartedness. But then, we have that already.
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“(Rilke) asks whether, since women have done the work of ‘loving’ for centuries, it might not be time for men to take on their share of this work. ‘We have been spoiled by easy enjoyment like all dilettanti and stand in the odor of mastery. But what if we were to despise our successes, what if we were to start from the very outset to learn the work of love, which has always been done for us? What if we were to go ahead and become beginners, now that much is changing?’”
MAKES FOR AN UNEASY MALESELF
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I’m aware this decoupling from the oldstories is a most difficult & dangerous crossing as the path here leads into/through the not yet known. And heaven knows, we humans love the certainty of well-signed, trodden paths.
I am aware of, and also have some worry over the sense of loss many of us feel, particularly the loss felt around male identity - as “solids” once stood upon or defined against are dissolving. I know we are not often at our best when uncertain about who we are.
But then, that's what's ahead of us now. Isn't it? Learning to stand on fluid ground. And as I say, that fluidness is understood as a welcome opportunity by many of us.
This Womanchange underway, it’s forcing change in men. Makes for an uneasy MaleSelf.
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“I had multiple false starts because there was so much I resisted: I could take feminism in only bit by bit. Maybe there was only so much I could take in because it meant recognizing that I had been taken in. You can feel stupid for not having seen things more clearly before. You have to give up on a version of yourself as well as a version of events...
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And maybe we need to remember how hard it is to acknowledge that a world is not accommodating you because of the body you have. I didn’t want feminism to be everywhere, as I didn’t want to encounter these limits; I wanted there to be places to go where I could just leave my body behind.”
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“If all goes well, the baby will make it out alive, and so will you. Nonetheless, you will have touched death along the way. You will have realized that death will do you too, without fail and without mercy. It will do you even if you don’t believe it will do you, and it will do you in its own way… People say women forget about the pain of labor…. But that isn’t quite right – after all, what does it mean for pain to be ‘memorable’? You’re either in pain or you’re not. And it isn’t the pain that one forgets. It’s the touching death part.”
Our search for bedrock inthose ancestors that solace, this brief solace of being,
of being part of a whole.
So fluid, so possible, and too, there’s solace in our sparking stitch.
In the let of one another in,
we trigger the necessary deep
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“All human life on the planet is born of woman. The one unifying, incontrovertible experience shared by all women and men is that months-long period we spent unfolding inside a woman’s body. Because young humans remain dependent upon nurture for a much longer period than other mammals,and because of the division of labor long established in human groups,...
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where women not only bear and suckle but are assigned almost total responsibility for children, most of us first know both love and disappointment, power and tenderness, in the person of a woman. We carry the imprint of this experience for life, even into our dying.”
Loyal to that past we hold in these bodies.
Our crossing tenaciousradiant forward into this connectivity, these altered meanings.
And still,