I Dream of a World Beyond Feminism

I grew up in a family where my dad was the only man, sharing his life with four women - my mom, my grandma, myself and my sister. He never seemed phased by the skewed demographics in our family, on the contrary. He often used to say (and still does) that ‘strong men have girls’ and that he’d fervently hoped for daughters when he found out he’d be a father. Now both myself and my sister have daughters in turn and my dad couldn’t be a prouder grandpa.

For a long time I didn’t realise how strange his stance was in a world where most guys wished for sons and would be (more or less overtly) disappointed if their newborn turned out to be a girl. I didn’t realise how unusual my father’s parenting philosophy was when he kept urging me and my sister to study hard as a path to growing up ‘standing on our own two feet’ and earning a living with ‘our thinking, not our bodies’. I wasn’t aware how far from mainstream culture he was when he talked about our brains being our biggest asset and about his dream that his daughters would become financially independent from any man. I did not see how revolutionary his way of thinking was in 80’s Communist Romania - a time when, with abortion banned, women didn’t have agency over their own bodies, let alone their destinies. And I did not realise how exceptional it was that I never saw my dad drunk or hitting my mom in a country where alcohol was glorified in songs and violence against women and children was considered the norm to the point where we have proverbs such as: “a woman without a good beating is like a house without a good sweeping” or “where momma hits, you grow” (yes, this is a culture where women and men are equally likely to hit their kids).

Later I understood that my father, having suffered through a childhood with an abusive father and an abused mother, had been one of those guys who, in many ways, chose the opposite path from the one modelled for him through his upbringing. He would not drink, he’d lift up his girls and make sure they were never victims of any man. Yet he could not teach what he’d never learned - true balance. By vouching to never be the victim, one stands the risk of becoming the aggressor. A strong woman out of touch with her femininity might end up being a stereotypical male in a woman’s body - or at least that has been my experience.

For many years, I mostly saw the downsides (all while reaping the benefits) of this upbringing and was very critical of my father. I did grow up to stand on my own two feet, to the point where I couldn’t tolerate leaning on anybody, nor asking for help even when I really needed it. As a young girl, I sincerely wished I’d been born a boy - I just felt being female was a nuisance. I tended to get along better with the boys because they seemed so much more straightforward in their thinking, while girls’ complicated ways, intense emotions, shifting alliances and friendships, and preoccupations with appearance were quite alien to me. As a teenager I was direct and bossy to the point of intimidating any guy who dared approach me and later tended to be the decision maker (and often main bread-winner) in every relationship I had.

I didn’t know how to be a real partner. Nor did I know much about what it really meant to be a woman. I wasn’t concerned with many of the traditional feminine interests or occupations - food was for survival and I seemed hopeless when it came to cooking or anything that required any sort of craft. My hands were clumsy in all respects, except for holding a pen or typing - go-to activities for one who lived in her head. I’d choose practical clothes that covered my body - with an emphasis on ‘covered’. Not because I consciously felt insecure about my body (although in hindsight I realise how critical of it I really was), but because it always felt safer to be seen as a brain, not as a woman. If I was smart and competent I didn’t need to be pretty. If I was at the front of the room talking, I wanted people to hear what I had to say instead of assessing my appearance or, God forbid, finding me attractive.

I’d grow up to be an archetypal feminist. I never put myself in positions of vulnerability towards men. I’d never drink too much at parties (often not at all) and most of the time I would end up the only sober person in the room, marvelling at my friends’ transformation after a few glasses and deploring the lapses of control that happened when people ‘let loose’. I for one would never ‘let loose’. And, in many ways, I felt that made me ‘un-messable with’.

Make no mistake, I had my share of hurt from simply being female in the world.

I’ll never forget the random grown man who suddenly put his hand in my jacket and grabbed me roughly on the street as I walking home from school in 7th grade. And, around the same time, the guy who attacked me as I was climbing the stairs inside our apartment building. I’d had the inspiration to not go into the elevator with a stranger, as my grandma had always advised, yet he still followed me, put his hands around my throat and whispered in my ear: ‘If you scream, I’ll kill you’. I screamed with all I had because wise grandma’s words kept ringing in my ears - ‘if you’re ever attacked, never be quiet. Scream your heart out!’. That advice and a dose of pure luck saved me from likely becoming one more data point in rape statistics. For a long time afterwards I thought to myself - ‘Why? There was nothing about me that was inviting. I was a school girl with a huge backpack, a heavy winter jacket and an anodyne woollen cap pulled low over my head, up to my eyebrows.’ I’d followed the norm - “make sure you’re not seen as ‘asking for it’” - and that hadn’t protected me. I still wonder what kind of a sick world this is in which grandmothers have to coach their granddaughters for the likely situation they’d be attacked by men just walking on the street and girls choose to wear ugly caps hoping that will make them invisible …

Yet my quintessentially feminist upbringing did serve me well in many other ways.

I always fully believed gender was no impediment for whatever ambitions I had because that’s what I’d been taught. I never felt marginalised at school or at work. I was never abused by men who knew me. I always owned my voice and wasn’t afraid to speak up. I never got touched by boys against my will and, looking back, I was virtually blind to any such things happening to girls around me (although sadly I do believe they happened). Later, I had male managers who treated me respectfully, who were generous mentors and who encouraged me to grow, with never a hint of sexual impropriety. I spent hundreds of days of my life as a facilitator working with thousands of people - often in remote locations where groups would spend two of three days for a learning program. I was never the subject to any improper advances from male participants - I’m pretty sure now that my policy of never drinking on the night between workshops had something to do with that.

I had my share of misogyny, although most of the time I never thought of it that way and treated men’s sexist comments as challenges to beat them at their own game. That attitude was as much the result of naïveté and lack of awareness around what misogyny meant or looked like and blind faith in my right to be equal to any man. Like the time in high school when I was one of a couple of girls in my town’s team for a national mathematics competition. The coordinating teacher, whom I hadn’t met before, was notorious for his dismal treatment of girls and for putting them down as not smart enough. We were away from home for the contest and got to spend time as a group in the evenings. Of course I got the ‘dismiss the girl’ treatment on the first night. I remember acting unfazed and throwing back some bold witty remarks at him, with no concern that he was a man in his 40s and I was 15, to the point where he raised his eyebrows and said: “you think like a boy!”. Had I been more aware of what was really playing out, I would have been furious and probably intimidated. Being completely oblivious though meant I just felt the satisfaction to have shut that guy’s mouth and won my right to be treated fairly by him and the other boys on the team for the rest of that trip. Later, as a facilitator, I worked with all-male groups in rooms rife with jokes and misogynistic comments and somehow avoided taking them personally - like the time a guy working in the auto industry asked me if I could reverse park and I took it as a friendly challenge, inviting him outside for a demonstration in the break. Luckily I was a decent driver. Once again competence trumped gender - or so I (naively) told myself. I didn’t even wonder whether any of my male fellow-facilitators were ever asked by participants if they could reverse-park.

I always found that my refusal to be triggered saved me from what might have become tense situations. I purposefully never thought of my participants through the lens of gender, but thought of them as humans with their own issues and background stories that often I’d have no idea about. Interestingly, the most supremely aggressive misogynistic attack in my 15 years career came from a woman participant - member of a group of doctors taking part in a ‘presentation skills’ course. I was in my mid twenties, still green as a facilitator. We were in the first 10 minutes of a workshop - I’d just invited the group to introduce themselves. The whole group seemed reluctant, tense, almost hostile, and I had no idea why. When her turn came, this woman, in her late 50s, looked at me over the top of her glasses and said: “So, babe, do you facilitate on your back too?”. I remember the wave of shame that came upon me and the immediate reframing thought - ‘What might be happening in this woman’s life that poisons her so? This can’t have anything to do with me, there’s a story here I don’t know but need to find out’. In a moment of inspiration I replied: “Actually, m’am, I love my job so much that I probably could facilitate in any position - even doing the splits between two chairs”. I remember the moment of surprise and the collective burst of laughter. All hostility was gone from the room. I then proceeded to call for a break and ask the group what was happening. I acknowledged they didn’t seem to want to be there and I had no desire nor power to hold them prisoners for two days. I invited them to sign the attendance sheet their company required and they would be free to go with no repercussions, but also expressed my openness to accompany them in learning together, if there was any value in that for them. Only then did they collectively open up and shared how the internal communication around that development program had gone: their boss, who was toxic and dictatorial, had told the whole team they were crap at presenting in public and had let them know the company had hired an external expert to teach them and they’d better improve. Attendance was compulsory. The ‘external expert’ was I - a young woman who could easily have been a daughter to any on that group. These people had felt humiliated by their boss and took it out on me. Once the context was out in the open, I shared that my stance towards them was one of respect, not imposition. I acknowledged their experience and my intention to support them if there was anything they needed supporting with. They all decided to stay and we proceeded with the course. They ended up creating presentations around topics they were passionate about. There was a lot of laughter and at times a lot of emotion. The woman who had attacked me stood up in front of the whole group speaking about her cancer and, in tears, about her decision to make the most of her one precious life. I found out she had just recovered from a mastectomy and, after that brush with death, she vouched to take no abuse from anybody. Yet she felt trapped in her job and stuck with an abusive boss. Her anger at being sent to this course and robbed of two days of her life was greater than any of her colleagues’. I felt nothing but compassion for her. This was an abused woman abusing women.

Years went by, with therapy, healing and much wisening up (never ending journey). I came to own more of my feminine energy. I came to embrace myself as more than a brain. Made peace with my body. Learnt to reach out and be vulnerable. Discovered that strong boundaries and compassion for others can co-exist. When I met the man who would become my life partner and the father of my daughter, he didn’t fit my typical pattern of conflict-avoidant men. He in fact was one of the most intense people I had ever met. A guy with strong passions and very much in touch with his feelings, who wasn’t afraid to speak his mind and would not be bossed around. Yet a guy who took a fully egalitarian stance in relationships and didn’t fit the ‘bloke’ stereotype either. He celebrated having a daughter, changed her diapers, gave her baths, read her stories. A guy who cooked for his family, cleaned the house side by side with his wife every week and thought nothing of taking care of our two year old by himself for weeks on end, while I’d travel abroad to study for my masters’ degree. He was also a guy who had his own dreams and aspirations and who didn’t really see the point of ‘masculine’ versus ‘feminine’ roles. An advocate for women, who can’t stand the word ‘feminism’ and is triggered by the idea of collective male guilt.

Very importantly for me and consequential for our relationship, he is a guy who has been raised without a father figure and whose deepest wounds have come not from the violent men of his past, but from violent women. He’s lived through and survived the darkest side of feminine power and reacts to its shadow every time. I had rarely heard about female abuse survivors before and his life story deeply humbled me when I first learnt it and still does to this day. It also made him the most confronting mirror of my own un-owned dark feminine energy.

The past ten years of my life with him, alongside becoming the mother of a daughter who obstinately refuses fitting into gender boxes - a girl who always wears dresses and adores playing soccer with the boys; who loves unicorns and says her favourite colour is black; who’ll play ‘house’ and ‘cooking’ and, in the next minute, will build a rocket-ship - have made me reflect on what it really is to be a woman and what we need from our men and from each-other. The past few weeks and all the heartbreaking news about women’s suffering, the countless stories of abuse I’ve read from women I have never met and from women I know well - all of them have made me go back to my own experience of coming at femininity from a very ‘masculine’ place and then loving a man who was deeply traumatised by a woman, in all of the same ways that countless girls and women have suffered at the hands of men.

I do feel women’s anger at the abuse they are constantly suffering is justified. I strongly advocate for changing the patriarchal society that has been suppressing feminine energy in the world - from the way we treat our girls and women to the way we treat Mother Earth. I also believe, perhaps in slight contradiction to the current wave of feminine anger - that anger itself is but a first step and there are dangers in getting stuck in it. Anger rarely breeds genuine dialogue. It is a powerful and valuable spark to fuel courage and give voice to the voiceless, but it cannot remain the prevailing emotion if we’re looking for long-lasting transformation. I might be wrong (and I fully acknowledge and own my inherent subjectivity and fallibility) but I feel that lately Feminism has almost become synonym with Anger and a perpetual cry of revolt. Women who have deeply suffered in shame are owning their voices and using them to shame their abusers. I absolutely agree that the status quo needs shifting, yet I have never seen shame work as an effective tool for social change.

I admit that I dream of a world beyond Feminism and secretly wish for a world of Humanism.

I wish I had some intelligent answers, but after all my reflection I only find myself coming up with more questions.

What is the next step in our evolution as humans, beyond the polarity of masculine and feminine? What kinds of conversations do we need to have, beyond anger, blame and shame? Is is possible for women to have a voice without shouting? Is it possible for men to learn something about their own darkness without hiding behind a wall of arrogance, righteousness and dismissiveness, yet also without needing to feel guilty for the very fact of being men?

I wonder what might happen if every woman and man I know reached out to someone in their circle, whose story they don’t know very well, and just invited them to share it. How did you become who you are? What do you believe in? What are you afraid of in this world? What do you feel you need to protect yourself against? What makes you who you are - where does your identity come from? What’s it like for you to be a … man/woman/non-binary? What’s your best dream for yourself and those you love? We might not always like the stories we hear. We might often not agree with the political, social or cultural views of people we share space with. Yet I believe we absolutely need to listen without intending to agree - merely intending to understand.

I dream of ongoing, systemic mixed gender dialogue groups. Groups where men and women can share their experience of living as members of their gender. I sometimes dream even beyond that - groups of men, women and people who don’t find themselves represented in the first two sharing their experiences of having an identity in the world. I’d love that dialogue to happen in our schools, where much of the inter-gender poison starts. I’d love it to happen in families, if we take the time to really listen to the people we love.

I believe violence and abuse, although statistically associated mostly with men in the world, are at their core genderless. I think they are, fundamentally, forces of destruction perpetrated by humans against one another, with gender or race as one of the overarching paradigms determining who abuses whom and how. I believe what we truly need as a society goes well beyond educating men and empowering women - although these are essential steps. I believe we need an education around being a conscious human being - with and for each other and for the other beings we share this finite planet with.

I do believe a rising tide lifts all boats. And I wonder how we can collectively create the rising tide of consciousness that lifts all of us towards a more humane world.

Photo Credits: lexie janney on Unsplash