Humans are shown to evolve from monkeys graphically through the male line. However, the early humans were mother societies as Maria Gimputas showed very clearly in her work. Once cattle and agriculture surplus could be extracted, a male ruling class emerged like the Kings and Lords who extracted all the surplus, sending women into slavery. Renaissance (especially Da Vinci with his master pieces like Monalisa and Last Supper) reasserted art and feminism back into the agenda, which has since progressed through impressionism and cubism. Modern women have escaped from drudgery of kitchen and house hold but women's sex as a commodity has pushed her from the feudal Lords into deep sea of body-shaming and sexuality as commodity. As products get sold through the divinity of woman's body, she shrinks back into her animal body, unable to become the social human that she is capable of becoming.
What a great read! And here's a piece that says essentially the same thing, by Anju Joy in her Unpopular Psychology Substack. She explains how pop psych celebrates women CEOs as the ultimate personifications of all feminist goals - yet doesn't have much to say about stay-at-home mums.
This is spot on. I have been thinking about this for years and have noticed trends that support your idea. I am going to apologize upfront because I am not a good writer, so please let me know if something I write does not come across clearly or make sense. I tend to be a macro thinker and experiencer and my intuitive senses notice things as anomalies and then speculate about the meaning of what I notice. If you are familiar at all with Iain McGilcrist his theories propose that the modern world as we know it has become the product of a right hemispheric brain bias. The neuroscience supports the theory that right hemispheric brain activity tends to be more aligned with the masculine. It tends toward predictability and efficiency and has little room for anything contrary to its own perceptions. We experience something, and our left hemisphere jumps right in and tries to interpret it for us. The research has shown that the right hemisphere if allowed to, has a more accurate interpretation of reality. The right hemisphere is more associated with creativity and intuition and is more associated with things natural to women. An example of how this shows up can be seen in architecture. In the pre-modern world, you see beauty as central to the construction of spaces. Grand Cathedrals with very inefficient motifs were seen as an extension of the human desire to connect the human to the felt experience of a place and how that stirs the inner senses(feminine). This can be seen all through Europe to this day. If you contrast that with the growth of the West and the Capitalistic spirit, you find buildings that feel like prisons. They are cold and efficient spaces that cater to the bottom line of profit. They are not meant to inspire any deeper sense of things at all. The deeper senses that people have are studied by marketers and are considered profit centers.
In the Christian spiritual traditions, you can see this. Besides the places of worship changing and becoming more masculine, you can see it in the tradition's disappearance of the Mother of Jesus. Mary used to play a very significant role in mediating the Christian experience. Intensely dogmatic hierarchies crush the feminine and more mystical side of the tradition and tend towards control of both the system and the narrative. Things like relics, the reality of angels, the actual presence of Christ in the communion elements etc, are virtually non-existent in the Protestant world.
The flat earth movement puzzled me until I read some of the content and watched some documentaries. In reality, it was more about pushing back on material science and moving toward a world where experience of things is more important than knowledge about things. After all, we don't experience the earth as round. We experience it as flat. Many people in that movement don't care about the science and don't take themselves that seriously.
If you take your point to be true, you can also see this in how our culture is railing against masculine hierarchy and blaming men for thriving in a system suited for them. To be at the top of these hierarchical systems is seen as a high achievement. Whatever your feeling about Jordan Peterson is, he has pointed this out repeatedly. I would propose that the abuse of power and the corrupting effect of power can be equally present in women. The system itself has that effect, and in a world where virtue and character are not encouraged, you will have people who are ill-prepared to handle power and the glory that comes with high positions.
The desire for equilibrium in perception and experience will continue to trend until we achieve some sort of balance between feminine and masculine sensibilities and we are able to celebrate both equally.
The folks talking about re-enchantment have their finger on this, in my opinion.
If you take this as true, things like you are noticing start to show up everywhere.
More people will be drawn to nature and the wild feminine. The occult with rise and a trend toward more Eastern spiritual traditions that will displace Western Christianity.
Pagan earth religions and witchcraft will grow in popularity. You are already seeing this with teen girls declaring themselves to be witches.
Anyway, I suppose I carried on too long here. I have noticed many other things on this topic, but I think I have already said more than I needed to. I am very excited to see how your new book emerges. I think I need to grab the first one today and start reading it.
Michael, this is a very good opening salvo! I would love to see further explorations like this one, and I'm glad you recognize that this conversation is more of an opening and not the close of a book. The scope here is huge.
Another way to frame the (very frustrating) insistence that men are the standard by which women are expected to behave, is that men were the only ones allowed to many jobs for decades or centuries (or as long as those jobs existed), so it's only natural that this embedded memory has led to scrutiny on any new entrants (EG, women).
Instead, we should start over and evaluate these career paths and expectations based on what's possible and practical, but starting over to do that isn't easy. We're sort of in the middle of this messy kludge, so even if everyone sort of agrees that we should change the way things are (which is far from the case), it's still a real challenge to begin changing this sort of system.
I don't know where I'm going with this exactly, other than to encourage you to keep thinking along these lines and sharing your thoughts so we can continue these thoughts.
If I look at this is a more literary perspective, I take Eowyn from Lord of the Rings as an example. The situation is Rohan is in crisis, a real threat has emerged and the king is not responding. His nephew and son refuse to deal with it and are out riding with their peeps doing what they can. The only one left to deal with problem is Eowyn. Gandalf comes and uses his power to heal Theoden and Eowyn is the only member of the royal house present. Theoden, restored now to his role as a man and King acts to defend his people, delegating to Eowryn the job of safeguarding them while he and his men serve as a defensive screen to the forces of Saruman.
When their victory is secure, she abandons the charge to act as monarch in her uncle's stead, in order to defeat the chief of the Ringwraths (no man can kill him) and deprive the host of Mordor of its leader (necessity drove her). The host is defeated and the wounded Eowyn cannot serve further (her service is no longer required). Injured, she finds a class A guy and decides to marry him. I do not recall whether she then had a bunch of kids, but I would not be surprised.
*Recall that God (Illuvatar) was driving events in the background.
I suspect your wife stayed home because she was sure of your relationship (that you wouldn't leave her for a younger woman). My wife did not have that option as her first husband left her. We married when her daughter was 9 and she continued to work full time, going to part time after a bout with cancer when her daughter was 17, and then retiring five years later when a buyout was made available.
Tonite, my trivia team won first place at our local tavern. It's me and four women, all scientists or engineers. All of them knitting while we are playing. Of the four, my wife is the only one who is married. Two of them have been married before (one twice) while the youngest one never married. All of them tell my wife she cannot complain about me as a husband. Funny, years ago the technicians I worked with at the lab said I couldn't complain about my wife (who was an engineer like me at work) because she was CAPABLE of logic, whereas they were not sure their spouses were. :)
The operators in Building 127, who included a couple of working-class philosophers had a mantra: Happy Wife, Happy Life. And it is so true. Men need women to manage them to achieve the best life for the marriage team (and eventually family). Women need men for their ability to suspend emotion and deal with the problem. For example, the pandemic was a stressful period. It was an external stressor and so in man's domain. It was my job to understand what was happening, synthesize the information available and provide guidance to my family.
The key is that men and women are two halves that need to be together to be whole.
This is incredibly powerful and that statement: "To be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man," Gives words to an angst I've had that I can now push back against.
Humans are shown to evolve from monkeys graphically through the male line. However, the early humans were mother societies as Maria Gimputas showed very clearly in her work. Once cattle and agriculture surplus could be extracted, a male ruling class emerged like the Kings and Lords who extracted all the surplus, sending women into slavery. Renaissance (especially Da Vinci with his master pieces like Monalisa and Last Supper) reasserted art and feminism back into the agenda, which has since progressed through impressionism and cubism. Modern women have escaped from drudgery of kitchen and house hold but women's sex as a commodity has pushed her from the feudal Lords into deep sea of body-shaming and sexuality as commodity. As products get sold through the divinity of woman's body, she shrinks back into her animal body, unable to become the social human that she is capable of becoming.
What a great read! And here's a piece that says essentially the same thing, by Anju Joy in her Unpopular Psychology Substack. She explains how pop psych celebrates women CEOs as the ultimate personifications of all feminist goals - yet doesn't have much to say about stay-at-home mums.
It's called Fault Feminism. https://unpopularpsychology.substack.com/p/faulty-feminism
This is spot on. I have been thinking about this for years and have noticed trends that support your idea. I am going to apologize upfront because I am not a good writer, so please let me know if something I write does not come across clearly or make sense. I tend to be a macro thinker and experiencer and my intuitive senses notice things as anomalies and then speculate about the meaning of what I notice. If you are familiar at all with Iain McGilcrist his theories propose that the modern world as we know it has become the product of a right hemispheric brain bias. The neuroscience supports the theory that right hemispheric brain activity tends to be more aligned with the masculine. It tends toward predictability and efficiency and has little room for anything contrary to its own perceptions. We experience something, and our left hemisphere jumps right in and tries to interpret it for us. The research has shown that the right hemisphere if allowed to, has a more accurate interpretation of reality. The right hemisphere is more associated with creativity and intuition and is more associated with things natural to women. An example of how this shows up can be seen in architecture. In the pre-modern world, you see beauty as central to the construction of spaces. Grand Cathedrals with very inefficient motifs were seen as an extension of the human desire to connect the human to the felt experience of a place and how that stirs the inner senses(feminine). This can be seen all through Europe to this day. If you contrast that with the growth of the West and the Capitalistic spirit, you find buildings that feel like prisons. They are cold and efficient spaces that cater to the bottom line of profit. They are not meant to inspire any deeper sense of things at all. The deeper senses that people have are studied by marketers and are considered profit centers.
In the Christian spiritual traditions, you can see this. Besides the places of worship changing and becoming more masculine, you can see it in the tradition's disappearance of the Mother of Jesus. Mary used to play a very significant role in mediating the Christian experience. Intensely dogmatic hierarchies crush the feminine and more mystical side of the tradition and tend towards control of both the system and the narrative. Things like relics, the reality of angels, the actual presence of Christ in the communion elements etc, are virtually non-existent in the Protestant world.
The flat earth movement puzzled me until I read some of the content and watched some documentaries. In reality, it was more about pushing back on material science and moving toward a world where experience of things is more important than knowledge about things. After all, we don't experience the earth as round. We experience it as flat. Many people in that movement don't care about the science and don't take themselves that seriously.
If you take your point to be true, you can also see this in how our culture is railing against masculine hierarchy and blaming men for thriving in a system suited for them. To be at the top of these hierarchical systems is seen as a high achievement. Whatever your feeling about Jordan Peterson is, he has pointed this out repeatedly. I would propose that the abuse of power and the corrupting effect of power can be equally present in women. The system itself has that effect, and in a world where virtue and character are not encouraged, you will have people who are ill-prepared to handle power and the glory that comes with high positions.
The desire for equilibrium in perception and experience will continue to trend until we achieve some sort of balance between feminine and masculine sensibilities and we are able to celebrate both equally.
The folks talking about re-enchantment have their finger on this, in my opinion.
If you take this as true, things like you are noticing start to show up everywhere.
More people will be drawn to nature and the wild feminine. The occult with rise and a trend toward more Eastern spiritual traditions that will displace Western Christianity.
Pagan earth religions and witchcraft will grow in popularity. You are already seeing this with teen girls declaring themselves to be witches.
Anyway, I suppose I carried on too long here. I have noticed many other things on this topic, but I think I have already said more than I needed to. I am very excited to see how your new book emerges. I think I need to grab the first one today and start reading it.
Michael, this is a very good opening salvo! I would love to see further explorations like this one, and I'm glad you recognize that this conversation is more of an opening and not the close of a book. The scope here is huge.
Another way to frame the (very frustrating) insistence that men are the standard by which women are expected to behave, is that men were the only ones allowed to many jobs for decades or centuries (or as long as those jobs existed), so it's only natural that this embedded memory has led to scrutiny on any new entrants (EG, women).
Instead, we should start over and evaluate these career paths and expectations based on what's possible and practical, but starting over to do that isn't easy. We're sort of in the middle of this messy kludge, so even if everyone sort of agrees that we should change the way things are (which is far from the case), it's still a real challenge to begin changing this sort of system.
I don't know where I'm going with this exactly, other than to encourage you to keep thinking along these lines and sharing your thoughts so we can continue these thoughts.
That's the best thing I have ever read. And trust me, I have read a lot. Congratulations!
If I look at this is a more literary perspective, I take Eowyn from Lord of the Rings as an example. The situation is Rohan is in crisis, a real threat has emerged and the king is not responding. His nephew and son refuse to deal with it and are out riding with their peeps doing what they can. The only one left to deal with problem is Eowyn. Gandalf comes and uses his power to heal Theoden and Eowyn is the only member of the royal house present. Theoden, restored now to his role as a man and King acts to defend his people, delegating to Eowryn the job of safeguarding them while he and his men serve as a defensive screen to the forces of Saruman.
When their victory is secure, she abandons the charge to act as monarch in her uncle's stead, in order to defeat the chief of the Ringwraths (no man can kill him) and deprive the host of Mordor of its leader (necessity drove her). The host is defeated and the wounded Eowyn cannot serve further (her service is no longer required). Injured, she finds a class A guy and decides to marry him. I do not recall whether she then had a bunch of kids, but I would not be surprised.
*Recall that God (Illuvatar) was driving events in the background.
I suspect your wife stayed home because she was sure of your relationship (that you wouldn't leave her for a younger woman). My wife did not have that option as her first husband left her. We married when her daughter was 9 and she continued to work full time, going to part time after a bout with cancer when her daughter was 17, and then retiring five years later when a buyout was made available.
Tonite, my trivia team won first place at our local tavern. It's me and four women, all scientists or engineers. All of them knitting while we are playing. Of the four, my wife is the only one who is married. Two of them have been married before (one twice) while the youngest one never married. All of them tell my wife she cannot complain about me as a husband. Funny, years ago the technicians I worked with at the lab said I couldn't complain about my wife (who was an engineer like me at work) because she was CAPABLE of logic, whereas they were not sure their spouses were. :)
The operators in Building 127, who included a couple of working-class philosophers had a mantra: Happy Wife, Happy Life. And it is so true. Men need women to manage them to achieve the best life for the marriage team (and eventually family). Women need men for their ability to suspend emotion and deal with the problem. For example, the pandemic was a stressful period. It was an external stressor and so in man's domain. It was my job to understand what was happening, synthesize the information available and provide guidance to my family.
The key is that men and women are two halves that need to be together to be whole.
This is incredibly powerful and that statement: "To be a successful woman you must be indistinguishable from a successful man," Gives words to an angst I've had that I can now push back against.