Tonic Masculinity & Feminine Wiles

on Rob Brezsny, Robert Malone and Rob (of universe c137)

Last week, as every week, I was reading Rob Brezsny’s Free Will Astrology, a blend of ancient and contemporary wisdom traditions that weave together the personal, the political, and the metaphysical. Right up my alley. When I went to post a comment, I found that I’d been banned for the next 100 years. Since it happened to be the day before my subscription renewed, this was at least good timing.

On the same day, Robert Malone revoked and refunded the remainder of my annual subscription so I couldn’t post there. In Robert’s case, he invoked the “Asshole Rule” (in his words) of three strikes and he cuts you out of his life. I had qualified by doing two episodes and one interview saying that his $25M defamation suit against the Breggins was an act of intimidation. This has given me less cognitive dissonance between what Robert says, with which I generally agree, and what Robert does, with his lawsuit and one foot still in the DoD-NIH door.

In Rob Brezsny'’s case, I had to trace back to the last comment I posted since the ban had deleted all signs of my existence. Then I remembered his essay Aspiring to Express Sublime Feminine Intelligence. I’d written that I hoped he would take it as constructive criticism that I didn’t think men should tell women what feminine intelligence was. Apparently not!

His post began by asking, “What are the qualities of people who embody sublime feminine intelligence, as I aspire to do?” Some I agreed with, and some felt to me like liberal tropes, like:

• They are lovers of equality; activists committed to social and economic justice; in service to people who are from disadvantaged backgrounds; excited to protect and preserve the health of the natural world; passionate about diminishing militarism, plutocracy, bigotry, misogyny, and racism. 

I feel that every time someone has to come out and state that they believe in equality, there’s always an under-the-breath “unlike you people.” It’s a contradiction in terms because the statement implies the moral inferiority of the listener, who needs to be schooled. Otherwise, why make the point?

I was just walking around my daughter’s home in Oakland, CA where every third house has a Black Lives Matter sign, and the ones between have Ukrainian flags with Ukrainian Lives Matter, or rainbow signs declaring that love is love with a list of aphorisms to follow. But what I observed was that no one I passed smiled back or said hello. My daughter said she’d given up on eye contact a couple years after moving there—the rejection was just too hard to take. What does it mean to plant affirmations on your lawn and then snub the people in front of your face?

Rob writes of the sublimely feminine:

• They consider the needs of as many people as possible, not just the needs of their immediate community and network of allies. 

Is this what smart women do? Really? Or do they consider the needs of their kids? How many people’s needs are you capable of fulfilling, Rob? He continues:

• They proceed as if loving and caring for animals and plants and the earth is a prime test of our spiritual intentions.

This is certainly true of the World Economic Forum, but not of the mothers I know who could care less about any ‘prime test of our spiritual intentions’. He goes on:

• They are not fundamentalists and authoritarians who believe that only their truths are true. They are willing to consider the value of alternate points of view. They are open to the perspective that everyone has a piece of the truth, but no one has the entire truth. 

• They aspire to regard everyone as a potential teacher.

He admonishes women to “be extra bold and brave as you say what you genuinely think and feel and mean. If you're a man, foster your skills at listening to women and nonbinary people. Give them abundant space and welcome to speak their truths.” Well, I guess unless they’re critical of you.

Rob’s list contains what he regards as generically good qualities, ones to which men like him should aspire—while nonbinary persons already have a head start. But there’s nothing in his list that’s inherently feminine. How could there be, if men should aspire to it and nonbinary people are it? To him, being female is just a state of mind, one which men may do better than women. About which they can certainly know more than women, from their own experience of it. So along with being authorities on everything else, men can also be the authority on what it means to be a woman.

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As the author of myself, the only topic on which I am the supreme authority, I have to call bullshit. As a woman and, most importantly, as a mother, I don’t think the same way as any man out there. And it’s not that I think emotionally; I’m the most analytical and methodical person I know. But my rationality, a traditionally masculine quality, is informed by the exclusively feminine experience of gestating, birthing, nursing and nurturing babies. There’s a wisdom in my body that can’t be fooled into thinking trivial things like profit margins and male egos are important. I could fake it but, deep down, I know better.

My intellectual focus is in the masculine realms of economics, geopolitics and theology but my perspective in all those areas is as a mother, and how I can make this world into the one I want my daughters to live in. I don’t have any use for philosophical musings that have no practical application. Yet I think that each of these realms is interconnected. As the Tao te Ching says:

If there is radiance in the spirit, it will abound in the family. 
If there is radiance in the family, it will abound in the community.  
If there is radiance in the community, it will grow in the nation. 
If there is radiance in the nation, the universe will flourish.

The word radiance, I’m informed by Wordfoolery, was coined by Shakespeare in All’s Well That Ends Well. Helena says, ‘Twere all one, That I should love a bright particular star and think to wed it, he is so above me: In his bright radiance and collateral light. As we admire the excellent phrase ‘collateral light’ with radiance being one of 1700 words Shakespeare may have added to the English language, keep in mind from my previous post that the Fuegians had a 60% greater vocabulary than Shakespeare when Darwin called them the lowest grade of human that could be found. Imagine what Shakespeare could have done with all those shades of meaning! Or a less-smitten Helena!

I think that the radiance of the Tao is the maternal hearth. In a TikTok my daughter showed me, a woman said that she used to see it as a burden that whenever she was in a bad mood, so was everyone in the family. And then she recognized the power in it. So now she sees her ability to change the whole tenor of the house by radiating her own calm and confidence. By taking responsibility for herself and taking care of herself, she lets everyone bask in the collateral light.

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As a mother, I see the purpose of any society, any species, as raising the next generation to take responsibility for themselves, for each other, for you, and for their own. We can measure how well our economic system serves this purpose. You may say we don’t need to, we know it’s failing, but we really do. Metrics are the masculine proof points in service to the feminine goal of enabling families.

There are many notable women who’ve come into prominence calibrating the failures of the Covid vaccine. Yet it’s men who have the big platforms, on which the women do guest posts. In economics and journalism it’s the same, sometimes with couples in a dynamic that’s more or less equal—but usually less for the woman in terms of recognition, interviews, and audience.

There are a few female commentators who have very in-your-face masculine styles and predominately male audiences. There are men, Rob and Charles Eisenstein chief among them (a telling figure of speech, eh?) who have very intuitive feminine styles and mixed audiences with more women than men. All these people teach new things and write in ways that are informative, refreshing and original, with brilliant posts of intuitive insight. But it seems like men are more readily seen as thought leaders.

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A decade ago I read a study that looked at the dynamics of mixed-gender groups. What it found was that when women voiced an idea, a proposal or a solution, it was most often passed over without follow-up. It’s not that it was shot down or argued, the discussion just went on as if it hadn’t happened.

This validated my experience in group after group, from churches and Bible studies to Granges and book groups, and even groups I organized. The expectation is that women are collaborative and conciliatory, meaning that they defer to others, make sure everyone is heard, are supportive and inclusive, and don’t push to get ahead. Women were sought for leadership positions, as long as they saw it as administrative and didn’t want to lead anywhere.

I once developed a problem solving process, so that ideas could succeed or fail by how they met a group-determined criteria, while respecting people and their intentions, especially their willingness to do the work to make the solution happen. To me, this is key: ideas are competitive but people are not. If we confuse equality by extending it to ideas rather than people, we muddy our thinking by having no benchmarks to define the problem or measure success.

I’ve thought that if I could find a man to take my ideas and run with them, I would gladly go back to writing poetry. But I’ve come to realize that it’s not just my ideas but my voice that I think the world needs in it. And it needs my thought leadership as a woman, speaking as a woman. As I wrote on Tessa Lena’s comments:

If there's a lesson for me in all of this in-fighting, it's to really and truly give up on the idea that there's some prestigious man out there who's going to recognize the genius of what I'm saying and launch me into having an audience. What I'm saying will be heard when the time is ripe for it and not a moment sooner. Thanks be to the great choreographer!

I look at you, Jessica Rose, Margaret Anna Alice and Meryl Nass (four who are top of mind) and see women without ego searching for what's true. In the same way that you four have science, my own superpower is logic, the Mr. Spock of spirituality, economics, raising children, human nature, domesticity, geopolitics. We think of rationality as the domain of men (especially economics). And so the twisted logic of the systems empowering the parasites goes unchallenged by women. Anyway, I just wanted to send that message to you, sister to sister. Logic may be the master's tool, but it can also dismantle the master's house.

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A new reader called Rob (of universe c137) posted a link to a lecture called The Alphabet versus the Goddess. The premise of Leonard Shlain’s book by that title is that the illiterate Dark Ages were a time when Christian worship of Mary, courtly romanticism, and chivalry gave women political and religious status. But right-handed writing and linear reading overdeveloped the masculine left side of the brain. So the Renaissance was the time of witch hunts and attacks on images and Mary. He sees the computer with two-handed typing and the image-processing we do on screens to be ushering in an equilibrium between the masculine and the feminine. In a sense, it’s like going back to visual/ oral story-telling—the world has never been so feminized, he states.

I wonder, though, if there was a division of labor in the Renaissance, meaning that the men who wielded the pens didn’t do any. With servants and slaves doing the real work involving hammers, shovels and trowels, perhaps emasculated men needed to destroy feminine expertise in medicine and the arts so they could take them over.

The world of images doesn’t actually feminize us in the active realms of caring for children, maintaining a house, cooking, cleaning, talking, listening. It infantilizes both men and women into passive consumers. Leonard Shlain cites an interesting study that showed that men and women of all cultures, whether right or left-handed, automatically hold an infant on the left side—corresponding to the feminine right side of the brain. This is so intuitively true to me that I can’t imagine holding a baby, even with both arms, with the head to the right. So I think he’s on to something.

But I think that rather than men being feminized, we’ve all been neutered by computers. My newlywed daughter and her husband had a rough start to their marriage with flooding in their basement apartment on New Year’s Eve. After a frantic day of close calls, emergencies, and high tension, they finally got it under control and decided to brave the storm to meet their friends here, rather than be glum in a moldy wet apartment. On the way Veronica suggested that they each name a time during that day when the other person was a hero.

What she named was his genius in figuring out how to attach the wet vac to the sump pump so it got the water out of the house and into a drain. He’s a mechanical engineer and is great at problem solving. He named her noticing someone else in the checkout line with a sump AND a hose, realizing it would be useless otherwise, and getting directions to the last one left on the shelf. But I think she was a hero coming up with the hero game. She’s a bereavement counselor and is great at people solving, or at least soothing.

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Rob Brezsny ends his episode on Feminine Intelligence with 35 ways that men can be feminists, written by Pamela Clark. These were great ideas but not dissimilar to a 1950’s Catholic pamphlet I found from my parents’ era on how to be a good husband. Some of those haven’t aged as well, like ‘Don’t get angry if dinner is late,’ but the majority were timeless. I gave it to my daughter, for kicks, before her wedding.

It would be more helpful, I believe, for Rob to be defining masculinity as he believes it should be, as he strives to embody it. I suspect it might have some in common with what I’m calling Tonic Masculinity as opposed to Toxic. But maybe not. I don’t think we need feminist men or men who are psychologically like women. And I don’t think we need men to speak for us or tell us what feminine intelligence is, as if we’re not smart enough figure it out or articulate enough to speak for ourselves.

As a woman, I want men in the world who are different than me, who both complement, by bringing out the best, and compliment, by admiring what is utterly foreign. Appreciation is the ultimate aphrodisiac, especially when it sees the particulars and doesn’t project its own ideal. There’s a beneficial and admiring manliness that makes me happy to have been born a woman. I wouldn’t trade it for a tribe of women, although I want the tribe too.

So while praising women made in his image of perfection, I feel that Rob needs to bring his prodigious imagination to the men who would be their complement, the yang to the yin or whichever way that goes. If feminine intelligence is sublime, maybe masculine wisdom should be grounded, in the good soil of making things work.

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In terms of making things work, here are three to follow up—

Wokeness vs. the Void on Kehinde Andrews & Candace Owens:

Russell Brand has a vigorous debate with Candace Owens where they jest, they joust, they hold hands and they redesign the system on a yellow pad. Russell's next interview, Kehinde Andrews, calls Candace contradictory, wrapped around a bubble, an empty void, like talking down a hole, belongs on a plantation, crazy ideas, dangerous nonsense, irrational, ridiculously delusional, and a black face on white racism. Who's right? I present their positions and solutions, and then show how we could enable Kehindeville, Russelltopia and Candaceland, along with my own system of community reciprocity.

The Festival as Crisis on Sarah Chayes:

I examine the crisis as a time when all the rules are suspended, as Charles Eisenstein defines the festival. What emerges is our true nature—not greed but kindness and heroism. What this indicates is that we don't need to change people, but only to be 'soft enablers' of a system that gives us permission to be who we are. Responding to Russell Brand's interview of Sarah, I look at the personal crisis as a time when social roles drop away, and the true person struggles out. In the 'banter decanter,' Russell tells Jen that "When work stops, reality starts" and that kids are what he wishes for her. I look at how that choice is discouraged by the overpopulation narrative, and suggest that we should question any time we agree with Bill Gates.

What Emerges from the Emergency on Luke Kemp:

Responding to Russell's interview of Luke Kemp on Emergency Powers, I suggest that 100 generations of a system serving the ejaculations of men could be ending. I examine the four sources of power and their absence of the feminine representing home and family. I take a closer look at two examples Luke gives from history--Greek democracy and the Weimar Republic. The purpose of government is defined with a report card on the bipartisan pandemic administration. Russell is spanked for using patriarchal language but forgiven for doing it in the heat of his flirting bromance. And I end with a recommendation to "stay with the stuckness."

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