Genderism, Sexism and Adulthood (neighbor post)

{note: I meant to do another Life-Dance check-in for this post but, as is the convention of the blog Lifedancelog.motime.com in which I started this practice, I find its often worthwhile to treat some issue in one of the five venues of Indvidual-Personhood (Family-Member, Neighbor, Citizen-of-the-World, Soul, and Individual) separately, even though the idea is to never dissociate them. To wit I have decided to make this post only a "neighbor" post and hopefully follow it with posts in each of the other venues before another synthesizing Life-Dance Post proper.}

Neighbor Post: Gender and Sex

I suppose the biggest neighborly gesture I've made since I got back from England (this itself is a long story involving a series of very unfortunate events, some of which I might go into in other parts in future check-ins) was the remarks I made at the meeting on sexism at my neighborhood of Twin Oaks intentional community. I came in somewhat late but was in time for a fishbowl discussion in which people were supposed to talk about personal experiences of sexism here at Twin Oaks. {A fish bowl discussion is one in which a few people in the middle of the room stage a conversation and are gradually replaced by members of their audience who want to have their say on the issue.}

I should say that this meeting had a facilitator, whom I know, though I am not sure what exactly was behind this person's choice of meeting structure. I have always been very much aware of the inherently non-neutral role of facilitation however, even though facilitators claim to be only neutrally serving "the Group". I mention this as this issue came up for me at the very end of the meeting.

Anyway, in the midst of what seemed to me a lot of score-keeping regarding differentials of respect, attention, local groups and institutions, etc for male-identified and female-identified people, I saw fit to get into the fishbowl (as usual in such circumstances, it would have been too excruciating for me, once I was there at all, not to say my say) and confessed to finding both male and female-identified people equally frustrating since such identity uniforms, besides being inherently competitive (competition is one of the things Twin Oakers are trying to transcend according to the Twin Oaks bylaws) such uniforms have the property of inhibiting the full expression of anyones authentic individual-personhood. I said that this was just as much a problem of people who switch gender-stereotypes (persons with testicles and penises identifying as "women" and persons without them identifying as "men") as it is with those who identify along more traditional lines...

I am glad I spoke as much as I did but, as this issue for me is much more involved then the above implies, I wish I had been able to elaborate more, and I find I can't resist taking the opportunity of this check-in to do so.

Basically my idea about "Manhood" has been that a "Man" is simply an "Adult Male Human Being". This seems uncontroversial, but the key word here for me was "Adult".

For me an "adult" is someone who has a primary interest in there being a better future in this world we live in. The idea is simply that as a person becomes physically able to reproduce themselves, that aspect of the personality that is concerned with the future; with the world in which potential children, and children's children etc, would live in (I call this part of us the "inner adult") wants to become prominent in the personality, and that when this concern becomes primary in a male then that male becomes a Man, that is an "Adult Male". In the same way, when the same transition happens to a female, that female becomes an Adult Female or "Woman".

Put so simply to myself, it was immediately obvious that this transition to adulthood was actually something which is extremely rare, and that, in a sick culture such as our own, something happens (and something else doesn't happen) usually in adolescence, which leads to some kind of inner estrangement from this adult, long-term view, so that the emegrent inner adult is either starved altogether or fed on some kind of "junk-food".

By "starving" the inner adult, I mean ignoring altogether the responsibility to take such a long view, (the taking of which involves spending ones adult life, trying to find out and put into practice that which would make a better future for posterity). Often the repression and neglect of this impulse is rationalized by pointing to the seeming hopelessness of creating such a better longterm future, so that a willfully myopic warping and narrowing of  temporal vision seems justified.  Such an behaviour, is not much more than a demomstration of fear, demoralization, and a general misunderstanding of what is at issue; it is an abdication of the right and responcibility to live fully, and without such fullness of life there can be no real meaning and hence no real joy. Moreover, such an abdication merely recapitulates the vary attitudes of our ancestors that both diminished their own lives and led to the diminished world we now live in.  

Just as often as such myopic pseudo-realism is employed to avoid the challenge of adulthood, a kind of (hyperoptic?) pseudo-spiritual or pseudo-religious displacement  is used to the same end. This sort of cop-out  is employed by artfully devaluing and shifting attention away from the "merely mundane" future completely, and so overfeeding what could be called the "Inner Elder" at the Inner Adult's expense. To be sure, the Inne Elder; the part of ourselves which acknowledges "ultimate things" and is aware of the need for inner growth and transformation, needs to be "fed" just as well as the inner adult, but far from such feeding of the "soul" being contradictory to the needs of adulthood, these aspects of our selves are mutually dependant on each other, so that Adulthood that is not "soulfull" is not real adulthood and "spirituality" that is abandons the responcibilities of adulthood is not healthy spirituality at all...  In neither the pseudo-realistic nor the psuedo-religious discounting of the future of this world does one sense anything implying the need for any real resistance to the inertia of whatever happens to be the current way of "life". On the contrary, both points of view are obviously contrived so as to rubber stamp the inner and outer status quo and so seem to me equally symptoms of immaturity, unconsciousness, and confusion.

There is also the trick of simply feeding the Inner Adult "junk-food" in the sense of participation in politics in the various established senses of that word.  These kinds of politics are both established and permitted precisely because they are manifestations of, rather than challenges to, the dominant culture of apartness, and as such cannot in their very nature really lead to a more healthy and sustainable future. It is not that I deem it quite impossible that such things as voting in elections or joining some factional political group can be engaged in in such a way that the behavior might play some tactical part, though only as a necessary evil, in an overall strategy that would lead to Healthy Culture. The fact is that, as things are, I see no evidence that such a thing actually ever happens, and this makes me see such behavior as equally pseudo-adult in nature; more like sports, and other childish rehearsals for war (the ultimate in future-degrading behavior) then anything involving Goodwill and real adulthood.

This kind of pseudo-adulthood is, so far as I can tell, pretty ubiqitous, even in progressive movements, including the intentional community movement that I myself am a part of. Myopia is alive and well here also, sometimes accompanied by a kind of complaceny and self-rightousness which makes it even more adverse to the kind of inwardly and outwardly open attitude that is consistant with adulthood. Such an attitude is neccessary because a good faith experiment in being apart of a better future (and this is true of a good faith attempt at anything really) must obviously remain fully open to the negative feedback that alone can tell it the degree to which it is deviating from its end. Nor can any status quo be suffered to remain that inhibits or distorts such feedback or that is too institutionally and psyhologically inert and inflexible to be able to respond to it appropriately when it is recieved.
 

There are many ways, subtle and unsuble, to igore all of this, and many more ways to pretend that such concientious, good faith adulthood is happening when it is not. Individually the repression of feedback usually involves habitual use "Anesthesia" and distractions of various kinds; things that drown out and numb the prickings of the inner adult. Collectively this can manifest as the collusive aviodace open face to face communication, or more often, in the collusive structuring and managing of conversations (community meetings for example) so that they touch on anything but that which is the real problem, thus using the illusion of feedback and goodfaith to actually avoid the reality of these things. 
 

Given all of this, I would have to say that I don't really consider myself to have met any Men (or Women either) in the course of my life so far; just stunted adolescents at best, even in so-called "progressive" movements. It begins to seem obvious to me that humankind has generally speaking not yet collectively "grown up" at all.
 

However, the paradoxical thing about this conception of Men and Women as gendered adults is that, once the inner adult is really primary in the personality, Gender itself is seen as just another identity-uniform, (like that of race, and often enough, religion), that itself facilitates the kind of competition, self-betrayal, and power-over tendencies that threaten the collective and individual future. Such adult persons are therefore likely to be the first to see and agree that gender roles need to be replaced with an identity politics that emphasizes, what is shared rather then what is not, including shared and common responsibilities as well as "rights". In other words it is the True Men and True Women who, because they are true "Adults", will be the First to respond to the necessity of transcending gender-uniforms altogether in the affirmation of something like the "us and us" identity-politics of what I am calling Individual-Personhood. From this point of view, Manhood and Womanhood might be seen as brief phases of identity and thus as part of a natural transition from that of the adolescent male or female to that of the adult Individual-Person; a stage of the transition that most people have not reached at all.

 Ultimately however, although there is definately something to all of the above, such a conclusion would still reify the abstraction of gender roles in a way that could exclude or confuse, for example, individuals born with both sets of sexual organs. In such a case, gendered thinking would seem to require some kind of choice, as though genitals of either this or that kind were somehow necessary to be an Adult. Since the door to Individual-Personhood is really Adulthood, and since this Adulthood is completely independent of ones genitalia, (independent really even of whether one has any functioning genitalia at all; since I am quite sure that promptings of the inner adult kick-in at a certain age regardless of this), it makes more sense really, that the transition from adolescence to adulthood not be seen to essentially involve conceptions of gender at all, however much they do need to involve some understanding of the healing and responsible use of  ones specific genitalia, and sexual energy in general (among many other things).

I want to be clear here that, though the Adulthood I am speaking of is an absolutely necessary aspect of individual-personhood, I do not mean to imply that a healthy individual-person must be functioning exclusively from that place anymore than healthy eyes must always be rigidly fixed on the horizon. On the contrary, for proper seeing the eyes must be free to focus on the near and the far; on the near in relation to the far and vis versa. They must also be free to blink; and in dreaming, to turn inward. In the same way the healthy functioning of an individual-person implies not only a healthy inner adult (mind or thinking-function), but a healthy inner child ((heart/emotions), inner animal (body/sensations), and inner elder (soul/intuition) as well, so that the general dynamic is one in which considerations of the future are coordinated with those of the past, present, and eternity as well. Healthy Individual-Persons can be very "childlike" for example, but this behavior is "childlike" rather than "childish" precisely because it ornaments and augments the persons healthy adult function rather than detracting from it.

Continuing such a metaphore, one can say that the healthy individual is like a relatively "happy" family in which the inner child, (heart/emotions) inner animal (body/sensations), inner elder (soul, intuition) and the inner adult (mind, thinking) are all being fed as well as possible and are involved in each others healing so that to neglect one member is to harm the whole. Those focusing on the future to the exclusion of (rather then in coordination with) the past, present, and eternity are demonstrating, not healthy adulthood, but some version of the kind of Hyperopsis I alluded to earlier.

And, of course, as always, its necessary to apply good sense and life-logic to this whole understanding. The "healthy individual-person" is a kind of ideal type after all. I should probably have written "the healing individual-person" or even just "those who are conscious of their individual-personhood", since those ways of saying it seem to make more room for the truth that, since we all suffer (probably almost constantly, though in varying degrees of intensity), from the stunting and alienating imprint of the default culture of apartness and fear that we were all "initiated" into, being an "healthy individual-person" means being aware of being "sick" or "wounded" individual-person" as well, and so being willing and able to acknowledge our sick imprinting and, when they happen, the  lapses in integrity  that derive from that. This willingness and ability is a part of that coming-together of "soulfulness" and "adulthood" that I alluded to earlier, and is in fact, a major part of the work of  inner and outer healing as an individual-person, which has nothing at all to do with keeping ups some kind of image of perfection or "righteousness".

Anyway, I couldn't say all of that at the meeting I went to, so I had to be content to limit what I said to what I related at the beginning of this check-in. Still, I think my even saying that little was pretty challenging to probably most of the people there, though, as usual, it doesn't seem to have been enough to counter the prevailing trend toward what seems to me to be essentially immature and childish (however understandable) factional identity-politics. It even seems likely that a "men's group", such as there have been here in the past will evolve out of the meeting so as to be "equal" to the women's groups that exist here. I would not have anything against such groups if they functioned as crutches are supposed to function; namely as tools to eventually be transcended as those using them gradually learn to stand and walk upright as each individual-persons in their own right, but that does not seem to be the intention at all.  Besides, as I have already suggested, it would be better to call any such group devoted to human maturity an "Adult Group", which could certainly be "coed", though individuals might occasionally divide along "genital" (rather then "gendered") lines, to talk about genital-specific things such as prostate cancer, yeast infections, pregnancy etc...though even here I don't see any reason to keep such information separate from individuals with different genitalia, sharing such knowledge and concerns without regard to gender could only enhance general understanding and compassion anyway, so far as I can see. After all, no individual with prostate cancer, morning sickness, or hot flashes responds to it in exactly the same way anyway, and approaching such events with gendered prejudice seems to me more likely to obscure (or lead to the repression of) important individually relevant details rather than to there expression.

In general, my attendance at meetings here has not been so good as I would like, though I try to befriend (listen to, support, and challenge) my neighborhood in other ways. As I said above, neighborliness is only one aspect of Individual-personhood, and it would not do to focus on it to the exclusion of other responsibilities except perhaps in a special emergency or as a response to a strong inner-consensus/inspiration that such a focus is imperative in a specific situation. Still, I think I there is room for challenging myself right now to find out some more regular and conscious way to be a Friend and good neighbor in my neighborhood (though this might get me in more trouble) and am making a few experiments in this direction, even though I don't think I'm doing too bad right now under the present circumstances.

Welcome and Thanks,

I-P