A thousand pounds of cement, the reality is better than the fairy tale, and more reasons to refuse division
The artisan-poured cement countertop weighed a thousand pounds, one big slab waiting to be moved from the barn to it’s home in the kitchen. My son jumped in to help, as good friends do, and I rode along in the truck, windows down, expecting a 30-minute stop in the afternoon gloaming. It turned into four hours deep inside the problem: how to move the piece without breaking it, get it around tight corners without any peripheral damage to cabinets and floors and walls (or to humans). Three strapping young men, an elder man and two women (one me) working it with dollies, blocks, boards and a fair amount of geometry. Someone measured the doorframe. Someone found the angle that would clear the step. When the slab tipped, the young men took the weight into their backs and legs, and the older man knew exactly where to set a block so a lever would bite, the scamperers moved the boards. Respect and good humor traveled around the circle freely, and the slab moved inch by inch toward its new home.
The collaboration itself felt ancient, for a lot of reasons. One was the bodies were doing what they were most capable of, what was aligned. Not according to hierarchy, but to fit. This is how it’s been for most of human history. Women and men raised the barn and the children together and carried the farm through the winter. Their tasks differed and depended on each other, and everyone’s survival or thrival rested on everyone’s gifts. Real partnership.
This is how I experience the men and women in my community and family, too. How about you? Whatever the “out there” story of patriarchy is, in here, we love each other and work together. The tropes and transactions of gender aren’t really relevant. We meet each other as who we are.
I was speaking with a very elegant woman in her early forties over dinner, and she has real fire for the women she serves, women on the verge of personal breakthrough. On “empowerment journeys”. She described women in long marriages, carrying most of the daily load, who have lost touch with their sensuality and their wildness. They are ready to bolt. To blow up the lives they thought they had craved, in an all or nothing bid for wellbing. My friend thinks it can be different, that these women, and all of us, can become free without exploding the family unit. Her solution however seemed to leave the men standing outside the room. They appeared as the obstacle, or as providers who owed the women more. The women in her telling deserved access to every dimension of themselves while the men were handed a role with a fairy tale shape, the role of the chivalrous one who provides and protects. She wanted the prince and the liberation both, which is a bit of an incoherence, but not uncommon. But cherish, adore, respect I am fully onboard with, and I would like it to be mutual. The architecture that burdens the women is the same architecture that hollows out the husbands.
Patriarchy, as we live it, is an economic order at its root, a system of ranking that sends wealth and choice upward to a very few. It recruits ordinary men as its enforcers and pays them in thin currency, a little authority at home and a little standing over women, in exchange for sacrificing their tenderness, their grief, their need, their hours with their children, and often their bodies and their lives. The husband who comes home too spent to feel anything and the wife who has forgotten her own wildness are held in the same machine with half the self intact.
Feminist thinkers have been mapping this for decades. bell hooks, in The Will to Change, described the first act of violence patriarchy asks of boys as one turned inward, the cutting away of their own feeling life so they can qualify as men. The therapist Terrence Real followed that wound into his consulting room and found it living as depression men had no words for, acted out through rage, drink, overwork and silence. The sociologist Raewyn Connell showed that the idealized masculinity at the top of the ladder is one almost no man actually embodies, and that most men stay loyal anyway because of what she called the patriarchal dividend, the modest return on being ranked above women. Riane Eisler traced the whole arrangement back through prehistory as a dominator model and set beside it a partnership model, where linking takes the place of ranking. The most generous voices in this lineage held men inside the vision all along.
The distancing operation is political. A system built on ranking depends on people experiencing each other as categories, and every time a particular man dissolves into “men” in our speech, the ranking wins a small victory. Casting men as the enemy keeps the machine humming. Every hour women and men spend accusing each other is an hour its owners spend unexamined.
The tantric traditions I teach from name this split at its root. In Kashmir Shaivism, consciousness has two inseparable faces, Śiva as the light of awareness and Śakti as its power to feel, move and delight, and both live in every body. The Saundaryalaharī opens by saying that Śiva joined with Śakti can create the world, and apart from her he cannot even stir. Patriarchy tried to give Śiva to men and Śakti to women but that’s not how it is.
The tradition also names the bonds that keep us small. Māyīya mala is the perception of difference, the felt sense that the other is fundamentally separate from me, and kārma mala is the binding to action and its fruits, the ledger of who gave and who owes. The distancing operation and the transaction are ancient contractions of awareness. The practice that loosens them the active recognition of the divine in all things, including in myself and the person across the table.
The men I love and know live in a far larger range than the role allows. Their tender hearts are everywhere once you start looking. There is the man behind Sheffield Made Plants, who began with one struggling peace lily and now tends a jungle of more than two hundred, teaching strangers online to be good plant parents with such warmth and humor. His caretaking is the most natural work in the world for a man. David Whyte, whose poems offer a language for longing and heartbreak as the very ground of a courageous life. These men need touch, and they need to be seen, and they are capable of a devotion that stuns. Speaking of men only as the problem colludes with the economic order that shrank them, and it loses us our strongest allies in reshaping it.
The women I love carry their own thousand pounds. One friend just ran an ultramarathon, mile after mile on legs that kept choosing to continue. Another trains like a femme fatale, all discipline and edge, and every time I watch her work I think of the Flaming Lips and their Yoshimi, the black belt who battles the pink robots. Fierceness lives in women’s bodies as surely as tenderness lives in men’s, and the fairy tale of the protector has nowhere to put it. A woman this strong wants a partner who delights in her power and holds her when she is spent.
Picture Eisler’s partnership world fully alive: each person’s essence shining completely, from the bindu, the seed point of the soul, outward. Women fully in their wildness and their capacity. Men fully in their tenderness and their strength. Work shared according to gift. Wealth moving like water through a watershed, reaching every field. Marriages where two whole people meet, each carrying their own weight and delighted by the other’s.
The invitation reaches toward something tantra would call worship. Women and men adoring and revering each other, each making room for the other’s fierceness and the other’s tenderness. Being there when the other goes down, and being there when the other shines. Love of that kind moves freely, the way respect moved around the circle on Sunday, and in it Śiva and Śakti meet themselves across two bodies.
This world is closer than it looks. Work shoulder to shoulder with people you respect and you know it.
Let the tropes go, the prince and the provider, the damsel and the muse. They insult your magnificence. Every ideal frame, however lovely, insults the unique magnificence of the you that IS here, breathing and shining in this moment. Tantra calls the meeting with that one recognition. All it asks is presence.
When the slab finally settled onto its supports, we stood around it for a while, dusty and pleased, a small crew who had done together what none of us could have done alone. We pulled ripe plums off a nearby tree and talked story, before heading home in the dark, tired dogs and children, a few scrapes and bruises, but better for the Type 2 fun.
We are too good for this smallness, to precious for this blame.
Here is my pledge, and I offer it for you to take as well:
I see the real man or woman in front of me, the one with a history and a body and a soul shining from its own bindu. I will meet the world heart to heart, not in projection or generalization, wherever possible.
You’re not a category, a taxonomy, a thing, an object.
For more on this: Rethroning the Divine Masculine and Feminine in all Hearts.
Notes and links:
bell hooks, The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (Washington Square Press, 2004)
Terrence Real, I Don’t Want to Talk About It: Overcoming the Secret Legacy of Male Depression (Scribner, 1997). Real’s distinction between overt and covert depression, and his account of it surfacing as rage, workaholism, alcoholism and withdrawal, is the spine of the book. terryreal.com
Raewyn Connell, Gender and Power: Society, the Person and Sexual Politics (Stanford University Press, 1987), where the patriarchal dividend is introduced, and Masculinities (University of California Press, 1995; 2nd ed. 2005), which develops hegemonic masculinity and complicit masculinity. Free PDF of the chapter where the patriarchal dividend is laid out ("The Social Organization of Masculinity").
Riane Eisler, The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future (Harper & Row, 1987; anniversary edition 2022), where she coined the dominator and partnership models. rianeeisler.com and centerforpartnership.org
Sheffield Made Plants, houseplant YouTube channel (launched 2022, over 600,000 subscribers).
David Whyte, The House of Belonging (Many Rivers Press, 1996), which holds “Sweet Darkness” and “The Truelove,” and Consolations: The Solace, Nourishment and Underlying Meaning of Everyday Words.
The Flaming Lips, Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (Warner Bros., July 16, 2002). The title character is named for Yoshimi P-We of the Boredoms and OOIOO, who also performs on the record, after someone in the studio said her singing sounded like she was battling monsters, and Wayne Coyne added the pink.
