The Dissatisfied Woman

[Photo Credit: Gayatri Malhotra for Unsplash]

I remember, in the late 1970s and early ‘80s, when women took to the streets to "Take Back the Night." The worldwide marches and rallies were a fierce demonstration of courage and defiance, a strength-in-numbers display of the power of women to claim their right to safety within a culture of pervasive violence against women, especially sexual assault and domestic abuse.

In the early days, men were specifically excluded from those events. I winced at the time, to think that men couldn't be seen as women's allies. But I remembered, too, when White supporters of the Civil Rights Movement in the States were asked to stay home. For the Movement to succeed, it had to be African-Americans marching and protesting on their own behalf, not under the apparent tutelage of White supporters. So, I got it.

Then, in Canada, in 1989, a young man we might now call an incel, an "involuntary celibate," entered Ecole Polytechnique, an engineering school in Montreal, separated the women from the men, and opened fire on the women, killing fourteen and wounding at least as many more before taking his own life. In his suicide note, he blamed women, and feminists in particular, for ruining his life by taking opportunities away from him.

The outpouring of public grief and the social turbulence stirred up by the massacre were unprecedented. Debates raged around gun control, gender equality, and violence against women. But most of all, the spectre was raised of systemic misogyny that, in a patriarchal world, gave women little chance to stand up to the forces set in place to hold them down. Some of my women friends barred my participation in conversations about these things, so stigmatized were men by being privileged beneficiaries of such a system. For a time, we were voted off the island, all of us.

What I learned through those difficult days, when even a well-intentioned comment could be met with an icy silence, was that, like it says in the Book of Ecclesiastes, to everything there is a season, a time speak out, and a time to shut up. It was definitely a time to shut up. That lesson has remained with me, not only about issues surrounding gender equality, but wherever the struggle is not mine to resolve, where my only viable option is to stand at a respectful remove and hold a space for when dialogue becomes possible again.

I was startled to feel that old defence mechanism clanking to life again as I read Alanna Kaivalya's "The Way of the Satisfied Woman: Reclaiming Feminine Power." The book is narrow in its focus, written for cis-gendered women who want to rediscover their inner feminine, especially those archetypal traits of intuition and emotion. But the backdrop is vast, including the whole, dark history of patriarchy and its male-dominated structures that are still divisively operative in the modern world, preventing women from living into their authentic selves.

I was reading the book because its publisher thought it might fit well with my podcast's "exploration of the soulful terrain on the far side of conventional religion." They weren't wrong, but I felt like an interloper. The book wasn't written for me. In fact, I was part of the problem, at least by association. So, as questions arose within me, challenging some of the author's assumptions, I found myself taking a step back, biting my tongue, and shutting up.

Was the author not running the risk, I would have wanted to ask, of actually setting the women's movement back by highlighting only the softer aspects of femininity and not the fierce, unsettling aspects? Did she really want to say that it is a woman's right to be "cherished," a word I identify with the worst of patriarchal stereotyping? And as much as, yes, we are both wounded and healed in relationship, was she altogether comfortable saying that the "satisfied woman" ultimately needs a man in order to reclaim her power?

Our conversation for The Mystic Cave went well. Alanna is articulate and animated and she brings a background in mythology and depth psychology to her present field of study. The book is being well received and a community of women is gathering around her to live into the insights she offers. So, really, who am I to quibble? What is the way of the satisfied woman? I wouldn't presume to know.

To listen to my conversation with Alanna Kaivalya for The Mystic Cave, please click on the Play button below. To learn about her work, follow the More Info button to the show notes.