Transcending Gender: Finding a new way of relating

It had been a solid hour of searching the streets of San Francisco and I was getting a bit queasy by now. I wished I had just gone to that Greek place next to my hotel. But at that time I was confident that my intuition would guide me through the city of queers and quakes and ultimately serve me with the best Italian pizza I had ever tasted. For some reason, my mind was dead set on pizza but so far all I could find were Burgers joints, American Diners and Chinese fast food restaurants. I was really getting hungry, though, so I was about to give up on my search and go with the golden arches. As I thought of quitting, however, I noticed something in the corner of my eye. A sign on the window that read “Little Joe’s”. Sounded like another hamburger to me, but beneath it said those magical words: “Italian restaurant”. Woohoo! Pizza! Finally! Unfortunately, they didn’t have that wonderful flattened bread baked in a stone oven and filled with mozzarella cheese, fresh vegetables and lovely tuna fish. Sometimes we are looking to find something and we get something else. We get the unexpected, the wonderful serendipities of life. In this instance, I was fortunate to be treated to something far more fulfilling than any pizza could ever offer: the generosity and gallantry of a couple of rednecks.

That’s what they called themselves as they introduced themselves to me: Rednecks from Reno. A term, I later found out, used to describe the stereotype of a backwoods: dim witted and bigoted, whose idea of a gourmet meal is six-pack of beer, a bag of pork rinds and a can of Copenhagen. These four guys sat at the table next to mine and when they found out I was having dinner all by myself, they invited me to join them. They were anything but the tobacco chewing and spitting descendants from Neanderthals. Admittedly, there was some chewing and spitting of tobacco involved…but they didn’t have bad manners or showed any signs of closed mindedness. Instead, they were gallant, charming, fully authentic, and they treated me like a lady.

Where I’m from, we can pride ourselves on the equality of men and women in the work force, but you’re lucky if a guy holds the door for you. Equal rights at work have meant equal everything. You might think I’m generalizing here, but the truth is: To the Dutch, chivalry is as extinct as the Bengal Tiger!

And I can’t help but wonder: are we really emancipated? If emancipation is the process of setting oneself free, are we really? Could it be that in working towards equality of men and women, we fought for a certain freedom and lost something else in the meantime? Or rather, just created an entirely different doctrine?

Women of the 1980s fought for their rights to be equal, to break away from the traditional view that women belonged at home chained to the kitchen cabinets and taking care of the kids. Fighting against a male dominated culture, struggling their way up to the top positions in organizations, demanding equal payment and career opportunities.

These passionate, fearless and empowered women have paved the way for a younger generation of successful women, like myself. They have definitely earned our respect and we owe them a lot. Breaking through the glass ceilings hasn’t been an easy task. However, I do wonder whether we might have lost something valuable on the way. Could it be that in breaking free the “female” in us got rejected as much as the doctrine that focused on the superiority of the male? Confusing the (especially in the workforce) negatively ascribed meanings of what is “typical female” with the actual behavior. And by extension, might we have gotten a bit paranoid that being treated like a lady became synonym for being patronized and devalued by the “male chauvinist pig”?

In fighting the phallocentric nature of society back in those days, I think we can all agree that we did move away from something that wasn’t honoring women as individuals with their own dreams to fulfill. It was necessary to stick up for ourselves. Inequality was a fact of life and had to be confronted. But in turning away from such oppression through anger and rebellion, what were we moving towards? Did it lead us women to our Selves and our heart’s desires? I don’t think it fully did. In my opinion, the way this oppression has been confronted, left those who wanted to be on top to shy away from emotions and softness. Thinking perhaps that was the only way. That we had to be strong no matter what and turn away from “weakness”. Fighting fire with fire. Rather than showing the world that our qualities are our strengths, they became something else. Acting more “masculine”, the only way to be seen equal to a man. In that way, I am inclined to say it’s a lot more like masculinism. Why call it anything but that, because for some of the natural (and perhaps more female) tendencies of what culture has dubbed “feminine”, became taboo as a result of this movement. Killing the romanticism in both men and women.

Personally I love my qualities as a woman. I also love chivalry in a man, even though I can take care of myself. I consider myself lucky rather than a feminist, for not having to wear a bra. I love being financially independent, which doesn’t mean that I won’t fully indulge in the pleasure of having the guy pick up the dinner bill. I’ll graciously accept. And even though I consider myself a born leader in self actualizing the world, I love it when a man takes charge and sweeps me of my feet. When I celebrate my right to pursue my career goals and ambitions that stem from my heart’s desire, I fully embrace the fact that I was born a woman and all the qualities that naturally come with it. There’s both masculine and feminine in me. One does not negate the other. They’re not mutually exclusive. And one certainly isn’t stronger or weaker than the other.

Rather, they are behaviors that were labeled in such a way that it has created polarity and invited either-or thinking instead of both-and-and thinking. Whether you’re a man or a woman, when looking at it as just actions, they just become more or less appropriate given a certain context. Just like a doctor in the ER has to stay cool and distanced, this doctor would have a problem connecting if acted the same way in a love relationship. There’s a time and a place for everything.

Some of the feminists who cracked through the glass ceilings are now realizing they have boxed themselves in. They realize something is missing. Wondering whether there’s more to life, they’re looking for ways to synergize their femininity and masculinity. Transcending gender as it were, and becoming a human being regardless of gender. One of those feminists is Naomi Wolf. In 1991 she published a book called “The Beauty Myth”, in which she attacked the fashion and beauty industries for exploiting women. It was this book that helped launch a new wave of feminism in the early 1990s. A little over a decade later she wrote another book: “The Treehouse: Eccentric Wisdom From My Father on How to Live, Love and See”. In it she describes her midlife crisis and how she found her way back to the wisdom and poetry of her father. Something she had rejected for a long time, because she thought it was the opposite of what she stood for. There was no room for poetry in her life.

Her father, who she describes as a wild old visionary poet, believes that the heart’s creative wisdom has a more important message than anything else, and that our task in life is to realize that message. He rejects “-isms”, as he is convinced they create boxes in which we become confined. They’re like personal enclosures of an individual soul, or an entire nation or era. And he speaks of breaking out of the box, so as to unleash our inner creative wisdom, our soul, to the world. We are more than our labels, our identities or our gender. We’re not our indignities, our successes, our failures. Nor are we our bodies, our obsessions, our futures, and our culture. We’re more than that!

Naomi Wolf shares with us that all her adult life she had tried to use words to make change in the real world; She had believed in “us” and “them”: “the patriarchy”, “corporate collusion”, “the right”. Fighting for outcomes and getting caught up in the fire and flames of it. And then she asks the following question: “Was fighting my only reason for being? Was there a way to integrate politics and poetry, mind and soul – feminism and humanism – to make something larger than the sum of each principle?”

Moving beyond feminism and humanism, and into…transcending yet including gender? Being a woman, and at the same time more than that. Being a man, and at the same time more than that. What if we focused on the process of becoming aware of our Self, and the way to discover our own innate creative wisdom – regardless of gender? What if we were to unleash the process of self realization during which we integrate all (masculine and feminine) in search for totality of our Self? Now that’s something to think about…