Balancing Sex, Gender & Feminine Energy

At the time of writing, professional Play-Doh-faced Mr Burns impersonator David Cameron was taking time out from his busy schedule of stealing candy from babies and tipping people out of wheelchairs to publicly come out as 'not a feminist'.

With his trademark blend of bodacious condescension and baffling idiocy (it would be funny if it wasn't, y'know, killing people…), when asked whether he would describe himself as a feminist, British Prime Minister Scameron refused to be label himself. Well, actors never like to be typecast do they? It just limits their range…

In her article on the 'shock-horror-stop-the-press-a-Tory-is-a-chauvanist' revelation, The Guardian's Rhiannon Lucy Coslett refers to what she sees as a current "fourth wave" of feminism (the first three being the Suffragettes, Germaine Greer and co in the '70s, and Riot-Grrrl-through-to-Girl-Power movement of the '90s) and proposes that Ed Millipede may be better suited to the task of dealing with the pesky problem of women.

Well, the way I see it, a fourth wave of feminism is thinking too small. As Marilyn Monroe said, "Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition"

What I would rather see is a reclaiming of the Divine Feminine energy that sits at the centre of the Pillars of Creation alongside the Divine Masculine. We live in a world where the Masculine rules all; with the Yang, Martian, left-brained energy running a muck without its polar opposite, the Yin, Venusian, right-brained Feminine in full power to balance it out. So the task of women AND MEN is not to focus SOLELY on microcosmic issues such as discrimination, equal pay and sexist advertising, but to reconnect with and HONOUR the sacred and powerful Goddess energy that is so crucial to creating harmony on our planet. Thankfully there are many wonderful people and organisations moving us towards a great cosmic re-balancing of the Masculine/Feminine polarity. Here are some of my favourites:


RUSSELL BRAND

Yes, I thought I'd subvert any assumptions you might have that this is purely about women by starting off with a man.

Recently Russell Brand has come forward as a passionate advocate of tools for connecting with the great cosmic source that transcends the material and lifts humanity to a place of unified consciousness.

He's been interviewing quantum physicists at meditation conventions, blowing Jeremy Paxman's mind with metaphysical truths, and generally trying to promote tools for connecting with Divine Source, arguing that the future of humanity depends on it.

I love this compilation of some of his best metaphysical moments, pretty much all on mainstream media and reaching the masses.

MARA FREEMAN 
Based in the magical depths of West Wales, Mara runs the Avalon Mysteries School, which she describes as a University of the Soul designed to promote connection with ourselves and interconnection with all beings.

She uses meditation, ancient rituals, inner journeying and Celtic Druidic teachings to help her students reach personal knowledge and divine unity. Part of her work also involves travelling to sacred Celtic sites and connecting with Mother Earth, the root and foundation of the Feminine.

JADE BEALL
Tuscon-based photographer Jade has been hitting the headlines with her Beautiful Body Project, designed to change our societies' notions of beauty and what makes for beautiful women. She describes it as a movement of women rising up to transform body image in mass media, and she is changing the lives of individuals while she's at it, with her Facebook page overflowing in praise and thanks from beautiful women and men all over the world.

As well as taking stunning, un-airbrushed photographs of mothers for the first book in a series, Jade also runs powerful West African-inspired dance classes and, from looking at the videos, it seems that there's some major sacred primordial energy going on in Arizona!

 Now if only she'd move to Waltham Forest……

RORI RAYE 
This womb-an has absolutely changed not only my approach to relationships but my approach to life. Coach Rori Raye does some remarkable work with women to help them reconnect with their feminine energy.

She believes that women have lost touch with that energy and are making a huge mistake by bringing masculine energy to their relationships. Again, she talks about the masculine/feminine polarity and provides tools for women to live into their powerful feminine energy so that they leave space for their other halves to provide the masculine energy in a partnership.

Some of her work will be challenging to women who are firmly attached to controlling their relationships, but for those women who want a magical relationship with a masculine energy partner, I can personally testify that her work is astounding in its results.

THE RED TENT MOVEMENT 
Inspired by Anita Diamant's book The Red Tent, a fictional account of the biblical story of Dinah, the Red Tent Movement is an international organisation promoting the use of Red Tent Temples.

The Red Tent is a place for women to meet, retreat, mentor each other, spend time in sisterhood, and celebrate all stages of womanhood, from the first period, through struggles with oestrogen and other pesky hormones, all the way into menopause and beyond. There are a growing number of Red Tent meetings all over the world including the UK, although it seems that there is yet to be one founded here in London - any takers??

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So I hope you now feel inspired to acknowledge and honour your Divine Feminine Self, whatever your biological gender, and go forth and spread it out into the world! Do let me know about other individuals and movements out there promoting this work, as well as movements that are working with connection to the Divine Masculine. Both sides of the coin need to be healed to create balance and harmony in the universe, and it all starts with us!

"What we have forgotten... is that nothing new can be created without the sacred power of the feminine coming into the centre of the outer world starting from the inner world..." Larry Merculieff

It's All Getting A Bit Rapey Around Here

I don't know if you've noticed but things seem to be getting a bit rapey of late.

What with highly publicised stories of the ongoing Julian Assange case, various statements by Republican shitheads, sorry, candidates on the subject of abortion leading to mind-boggling quotes claiming that women can't get pregnant if they are "legitimately" raped PLUS awesome catchphrases like "spastic tubes", and the current hoo-ha in this country surrounding Jimmy Savile, I've been feeling a stirring in the underbelly of the Feminine on the subject of sex.

There's a lot to try an unpack here and it won't fit into one session, so I'm going to focus on one immediate train of thought for now and revisit other issues later.

Let me tell you a story.

A true story told to me by one of my close friends. I'll call her Carol because, for some strange reason, that was the first pseudonym that popped into my head.

A couple of nights ago, Carol went on what she claimed was "not a date" with…… Rufus. I call him Rufus because it rhymes with "dufus", not because he's posh. He used to be a soldier, which makes him even less posh and even more of a dufus.

Anywaaaay…

Somehow Carol (after a couple of drinks and up for a bit of fun following some previous man-o-drama) ends up at Rufus's place and consensually having sex with him.

The minute it starts is the minute she realises that this is FULL-ON BAD TIMES.

Alarms are going off, she's not having a good time, she's creeped out by him and she wants to get out of there tout fucking suite.

Fortunately (??) it's all over in about 10 minutes.

"OK", she thinks. "That was shit, but now it's over and I can sleep". About half an hour later, while Carol is just about drifting off to sleep, Rufus squashes his considerable body weight on top of her and starts going again. When I say "going", I mean he stuck his cock in her and started shagging her without any warning. No attempt at foreplay. Not even checking that she was wet. Which she wasn't. And that HUUUURRRRTTS. All in all, it was "bad sexual etiquette" on his part, as George Galloway would say (I'll cum back to that……)

So Carol feigns sleep for as long as is plausible before giving in and attempting to give some direction (i.e. don't just randomly poke your fingers in me - it hurts) with no discernible response from Rufus who, once again, went from start to finish in roughly 10-15 minutes. Meanwhile, she moved her face whenever he tried to kiss/slobber her, made no noises that signified pleasure, and even kicked him when she was feeling actual physical pain. That exact same scenario happened two more times before Carol finally got out of there.

I've had similar experiences before and would bet money that a vast majority of women in the world have too.

The finer details of "when does it become RAPE" come up here. As do the responsibilities of the individual men and women involved in the scenario.

Having heard Carol's story, it's quite easy for me to think "Well, you could have left after the first time - there were night buses!" or "You could have said 'stop, I don't like it'"

BUT

I've also been the woman in the midst of sexual Grey Area, both in a relationship and as a spur-of-the-moment one night fling.

There's other stuff going on at the woman's end (no pun intended) More on that at a later date…

As I said, this a huge topic to unpack and I'm just one womb-an trying to express my personal feelings about this stuff.

What I DO know is that no amount of Tory MPs spouting carefully scripted statements about what the BBC should do about the (DEAD) Jimmy Savile, or media outrage at how George Galloway defended Julian Assange's actions will take away from the very personal experience of a woman involved in a bad sexual experience.

How I feel as a woman is that it is vital that all women tell their stories. Not as way to blame anyone else and not to be a victim, but to finally OWN ourselves as keepers of the Feminine.

The next step, it seems to me, is for us all to educate ourselves and do significant personal work that means that, if a man starts shagging us when we don't want him to, we can step into our own power and make it stop.

Bodyformed For Who?

Or should that be "whom"? Wannabe grammar fascist that I am, I'm still unsure on that whole who/whom thing. Anywaaaay……

Major kudos to Bodyform for this awesome response to a Facebooker expressing his disgruntlement at how the media's portrayal of periods (sorry, gross and yucky "women's issues") have affected him in a negative way.



How telling that the (mocked) footage of Bodyform's focus groups show us the faces of men traumatised by the reality of a period (aka "the blood coursing from our uteri like a crimson landslide" - more kudos) despite the obvious fact that "sanitary" towel adverts should (by necessity) be focused at women.

Aaaah…… "sanitary"………

So let's all (men and women) keep ourselves sane by avoiding the gory details of periods, shall we?

…………………………………OR WE COULD…………………………………

Rebirth

So FYI (all you many readers) it has just become apparent that I need to blog more frequently due to the fact that I realise that there needs to be a whole load more feminine energy in this world.

Feminine energy is not about gender (heaven knows I've met enough feminine energy men that fancied me but wouldn't put out), but I feel that the focus of our "civilisation" has been masculine energy for far too long (again, not a gender thing - every fucking "woman" in the cabinet has basically been a man in skirt)

It's not just a case of gender equality anymore.

This is about balancing out fundamental energetic forces that can potentially change everything.

So

The title of my blog has officially changed

from "Memoirs Of A Love-Sick Feminist"

to

"Memoirs Of A Recovering Feminist"

More
Soon
Cum

Eve vs Lilith

...I let him take my hand
And everything I knew for one embrace
Then I was erased
Quickly was replaced
With a girl called Mediocrity
And is it only me
Or does it seem to be
That a man wants an Eve not a Lilith...?
©Dinah Judith

One of my main areas of interest lately when considering gender relations and female identity/my identity as a female, concerns the myth of Woman in the Torah ('Old Testament' to some...), particularly the fascinating story of Lilith.

In Genesis there are two separate accounts of G-d creating humans, both featuring the creation of a woman. In those two stories, the woman is created in two different ways.

In the first account, woman is created in the same fashion as man i.e. from the dust. In the second account, the one better known in popular culture, woman is created from man's rib.

The Midrash (being a rabbinic commentary on the Torah that essentially tries to fill in the gaps) reasons that the two contradictory stories must mean that there were two women:

Lilith (1st)

Eve (2nd)

Now, according to the Midrash, Lilith considered herself as Adam's equal and they fell out when she refused to 'lie beneath him'... She wanted to be on top, basically... So Adam complains to G-d, and G-d says to Lilith (not an actual quote, here...), "Do what Adam says or I'll throw you across the Red Sea". Lilith says, "Well, fuck that - throw me across the Red Sea" (again, not a direct quote...)

This little story explains why, in Genesis, G-d then creates Woman (again) from Man's rib and then we get Eve: created from Man and therefore ultimately willing to do what she's told (except when it comes to the forbidden fruit, but that's probably another post...)

In the meantime, Lilith is quite literally demonized in the Midrash and the Zohar, with all sorts of stories arising of her eating babies and flying through the night like a screech owl. Descriptions of her being a harlot who stands in dark ally ways wearing red lipstick, and giving birth to the children created by men's masturbatory and 'nocturnal emissions' (wet dreams to the rest of us) mean that Lilith is the ultimate representation of patriarchy's fear and hostility towards female sexuality.

Perhaps that's why I like her so much...

I also read a very interesting article about how Genesis was used as propaganda by a monotheistic cult who were quite deliberately trying to get rid of a female Mother Goddess group.

So it seems that the patriarchal fear of female sexuality has led to quite a large conspiracy within Western culture...

This a new area of research for me and my musings on it are in their early stages, but I find it fascinating and plan to write a serious academic work on the subject.

But... what's the point, I hear some cry...?

Well, for me, some of the point is that both of my major relationships have partly ended because I'm a Lilith and not an Eve.

Despite her transgression with the fruit, Eve represents a sort of earth mother quality: relatively wholesome, willing to submit to Adam and have 2.4 children, a mortgage and a Volvo... Bâiller is an Eve...

Whereas Lilith...

Lilith knows the full-force of her sexuality and is willing to use it to her advantage; Lilith will give you the best head you've had in your life and then walk away, knowing you'll follow her; Lilith doesn't need to have a child strapped to her hip to know that she's a woman; Lilith sings 'fuck you, I won't do what you tell me...'

But are all Liliths destined to spend eternity alone on the other side of the Red Sea, living as a spinster in a house full of cats?

Or are there men in world who can step up to the challenge of loving a Lilith?

I certainly fucking hope so...

Glory Box

I was listening to a radio show about Mary Wollstencraft the other day; a sort of biography punctuated with analysis of her writing in regards to the rights of women.

One of the guests described the contradictions within Wollstencraft's work, in that Mary believed strongly in the rights of women to be educated (beyond the superficial realms of sewing, etiquette and so on) and therefore seemed to be what we would think of as a feminist, and yet she made huge sacrifices for the man she loved and went so far as to travel to Scandinavia in an attempt to rescue his financial affairs. The guest described Mary as believing that, gender-wise, a woman is a true equal within society and should benefit from the same privileges as man without question. BUT that She instinctively becomes a Woman when she is in love.

And this is what I wonder right now: perhaps we as human beings are truly equal regardless of gender, but when we are in love (or just plain lust if you believe that love is an emotional side-effect of a biological urge) we are distilled to the base instincts of our sex.

If one takes that proposition as a starting point, one can then see the structure of society as relating to those terms. Man penetrates, Woman receives. The creation of new life is due to the ejaculation of Man rather than Woman (how different would gender relations be if fertilisation was dependent on the orgasm of the female, or even both male AND female...?!)

So here I am, a love-sick feminist: a human being who genuinely believes in the equality of all creatures, who is so desperately in love that she cannot help but offer herself freely and unconditionally to the object of her affection.

Maybe this is a contradiction in the world of the critical feminist.

Or maybe it is a symptom of the human condition - that all logic, reason, analysis and theoretical musings fly out of the window...

...when we are in love...

Desperation

During my infirm, recovering from a torn ligament in the foot, I've been watching an awful lot of DVDs. The aforementioned infirm is hopefully approaching an end, but I still have to rest a lot and I've been wading through, amongst other things, the third series of Desperate Housewives.

I got the first series through Freecycle. Claviers and I watched it together and got hooked - good telly. Then the second series came courtesy of LoveFilm - and we abandoned it half-way through...

Yes. Sometimes. A television series comes along. And it just... disappoints.... you...

You must understand that that was said in the Mary Alice voiceover in my head - that fucking voiceover on Desperate Housewives... I could accept it at first but she started to take the piss in the second series with her formulaic beyond-the-grave-wisdom and smug intonation...

Anyway, I picked up the third series in the library on the grounds that...

* I need entertainment

* It's £1

* Maybe Claviers was the problem - his massive cynicism brought many a potentially enjoyable experience into disillusion...

But now it's become a feminist issue.

The women in Desperate Housewives are superficial, frivolous, clingy, manipulative, bitchy, whiny, and constantly obsessing about the men in their lives. It's really fucking irritating.

Now. Granted...

I obsess about a certain Monsieur... Ridiculously so to the point where I'm losing sleep...

Is this what women actually are?

These slick, Hollywood representations of us. Desperate Housewives... is that what we just biologically ARE? Are we hard-wired towards certain modes of behaviour? Or have we been socially pre-programmed to conform to that model?

Nature vs Nurture

Chicken vs Egg

In a sense I guess it doesn't really matter, not least because we'll never actually know for certain. It's similar to the God debate. How can one ever prove the unknowable?

Of course, the men in Desperate Housewives (who, by the way, I have more and more empathy with. Poor bastards...) regularly turn out to be the Prince Charming; accepting the superficial, frivolous, clingy, manipulative, bitchy, whiny, self-obsessed women for who they are.

Myths

Fairy Tales

We're all raised on them.

And we all hope they'll come true...