Hi Friend,

The experience startled me, evoking bigger questions about navigating these times. Just last week. 

After kayaking with a friend - let's call her Rose - on an exquisite autumn evening here in the Hudson Valley, we put our boats in the back of her pick up truck and rolled up to a local taco shop. We walked into the store laughing and hungry. She recognized one of the other customers - a construction worker with pretty blue eyes and an easy smile. She shared with him that we were just out kayaking. He met our enthusiasm with some serious put-downs, poo-pooing our kayaking as "not real kayaking" because we were at a "small" lake, not like the bigger lakes further north. In just a few moments the conversation escalated. We both brought our defenses up real fast, and he responded with further border-line insults. She switched her tactics to de-escalation. When he left with his take-out order, we both looked at each other. woah. What just happened?

"The manosphere is everywhere," she commented with a sigh.

It was one of those moments when I felt the edges of my own bubble: I actually don't run into the ‘manosphere’, or other forms of toxic masculinity, all that much.

Much of the time, I am mostly aware of how many great men are in my life. Friends. Family. Colleagues. Clients. Students. Mentors. Men who are kind and compassionate. Who lift me, and many other women up. Men who are primary caregivers - for aunties and mothers and kids and dogs and turtles and plants. Men who do the dishes and ferment foods and change diapers and value approaching life with a lot of gentleness and, well, you know, help life keep living. Who stand up to other men and who are willing to give their life-force in defense of Mamma Earth. Mwah. Thanks, guys.

I also have wonderful gender fluid and trans folx in my life. Who remind me of how important (even essential) is gender fluidity. How ridiculous are these binaries.

In the last ten months or so, I've had a number of experiences in my politically purple local ecosystem that have shown me the edges of the bubble that I've been fortunate enough to live in.  Not that my life has been without abuse from men, or super annoying folks or institutional betrayals or patriarchy. I do live in this world. I'm just lifting up that most of the time, I'm not trying to figure out how to navigate a toxic ‘male world’. Unlike many other women around the world (including in america) - and most of the last few dozen generations of European women. And unlike my friend Rose (who is my same age). She was much more familiar with - and skilled at navigating - this experience than was I. 

After that particular man left the taco shop, Rose added, "Of course, another challenge is all the women who support them."

I knew exactly what/whom  she was talking about. Maybe you do too. Those women can really elicit my own snark-streak.

I shudder at some of the versions of a poisoned patriarchy (carried out as much by women as by men) I see growing around me. Super big trucks with plastic testicles hanging off the back. Just in case you weren't sure about what the message is supposed to be. All those big guns flying off the shelves in rural communities. All those Halloween images/objects (made by some kind of non-biodegradable material) that depict witches --- not flying free, but who have been drowned/disappeared, with just the stocking feet sticking up out of some metaphorical grave.

(oh, but if my dragon could have her way with thee.....)

I am reminded, increasingly, of something that I did not have embodied experiences of growing up.

That for so much of European/western history, women were the property of men.

And that there's a lot of folks (and I don't think its just men) who still wonder if that whole women's suffrage thing was a good idea. (In case you haven't been tracking this trend, you might have noticed that a prominent NFL player recently gave a keynote address at a college graduation arguing that women should stay at home and be housewives... and here's an article detailing the current head of the department of defense support of a man who dares to call himself a Pastor but wants to take away women's suffrage.)

There's an easy-to-read book I adore and am honored to teach: Sally Roesch Wagner's Sisters in Spirit: Haudenosuanee influence on early American Feminists. In it, Sally, herself one of the first phd graduates in feminist studies (from UC Santa Cruz), traces how the women's suffrage movement in the United States was deeply inspired by the lived example of indigenous women - especially those from the Haudenosaunee Confederacy.

Now this history is super, super important. It's an epic example of the power and importance of Origin Stories, and of what can happen when you start to tell a different origin story. I could talk on and on about this. For this moment, though, I'm just giving you the super short version.

Sally's research highlights in punchy detail the stark difference between European/colonial/early American society and indigenous/especially Haudenosaunee Confederacy society. Again and again we see the extent to which the women in Western society were seen as subordinate to men. As were the children. And the elders. And our earth.

Reading that book many years ago was shocking - not just because of how different the two European and (Native) American cultures were from one another, but because of how much my European-American culture seems to have changed... in so many ways, we've become a tiny bit more akin to our indigenous neighbors (whilst almost never acknowledging or supporting them).

It wasn’t that long ago, either.

One of my clients, Holly, herself an impact investor, said to me recently that she notices a significant difference in how women in business conceive of their own possible financial success (and their ability to direct their own capital) who came of age after the 1970s - which is to say, after women were allowed to open a credit card and take out a business loan without a man co-signing it. When she first mentioned it, I just stared at her. My mother's generation wasn't allowed to open their own credit line? Are you kidding me?????

(Note: I'm speaking at Holly's upcoming wealth conference, which some of you might be interested in! It's gonna be at the San Francisco Presidio on Nov 5. If you want a ticket, lemme know, and I'll get you a discount code!)

My feminist fore-mothers fought really, really hard for me to have the life I have been able to live: I travel, love, read, write, pray and create in ways that are not especially determined by my gender. I angst about the language I use to name my connection to divine being-ness - my most common terms such as "divine feminine" are frought with human-messiness.Thus  I've been using phrases like "The Divine Feminine" for years, and while I don't really feeling like that 'fits', I never felt I couldn't play with gender as part of my mediocre attempts to name that which has no singular name.

A note on that word: Max Dashu recently helped me problematize the word "feminine" - it often is far too limiting a construct and it carries a lot of baggage with it. As she reminded me, so much of (patriarchal) academic, religious, and scholarly institutions continue to degrade and ignore language around the Goddess Herself.

Indeed, after this week's conversation on this, we have re-tilted our recent podcast with Max to refer to women's suppressed histories, instead of the 'suppressed feminine'. Oh, and thanks to those of you who told me how much you are already loving this episode!

So, there's a lot of old patriarchal B.S. about women and men that has been a part of Western/European/American culture for a really long time. And which is, right now, permeating more and more spaces that were, at least for a few decades, largely removed from it.

There's a pretty big backlash happening against all things feminist. Let's include in "feminism" material realities that support nurturing and care, such as access to nutrition benefits (food) and basic healthcare. A backlash that is also, simultaneously, another form of a continuation of domination patterns - as many people, including some of you, are all too aware of.

If the backlash is so big, does that mean "we" (feminists and the sons and daughters and granddaughters of feminists) have missed something?  Last I checked, the vision was for collective inclusion. That includes young white men. They are also somebody's baby.

Instead, we seem to have a lot of different types of atomization. Which is often one of the things that the right-wing Christian extremists are pointing to. Which just might be a sliver wherein I just might (maybe) find some common ground. Yeah: the level of atomization in our society can be really scary.

And: Freedom is not a competition.

Freedom - as modeled/expressed/actualized by the "brave" and "free" indigenous peoples of this continent long before Europeans came here- is not a zero-sum game. It is not a limited resource requiring atomization. Which is much more than I can say for material possessions.  Freedom is not a factor of more stuff. Or of one group’s ability to scare another group. That’s just manipulation. Way less cool.

The current rise/continuation of a particular form of patriarchy is, almost predictably, going to entail some kind of response that will be an expression of some variation of 'feminism' in which women, men, and gender-fluid folks say: woah. wait. stop. Not that. We don't like that. Stop all this back-tracking!

And I'm pretty sure that 'they' will ignore the no. That's been their pattern all along. Acting like "nos" don't matter when those 'nos' don't fit their worldview. It's already happening all across America: mayors say, 'we don't want your troops in our cities' and the president says, 'too bad’. He’s not exactly seeking consent. 

So I'm wondering: where is the feminism that got us to here going to go from here?

There’s at least two parts of this question. First: is there a way to reach people whom we have not reached? Who might be misunderstanding or feeling unduly threatened?

Second: Do we need to think about what "we" aren't - and perhaps have not been - hearing? What do "we" need to do differently...To get beyond the cycles of domination? To go deeper - and even way more integrated? Maybe there’s something that’s not just another surface ‘wave’ of feminism, but can get to the deeper patterns of ocean and shore line?

I do know that the way the feminist history has been told has largely ignored the histories that Sally was able to bring to greater consciousness: the relationship between women of European descent and women of indigenous cultures. And their men. Their chiefs and warriors and brothers and husbands. Men who held and continue to hold a lot of power. Power that came from within, not just power that was imposed.

The women's suffrage adopted a lot of important things.... but they also missed a lot. Not least the importance of including black women in what became a white women's movement.

There's a similar story about democracy writ large. Democracy comes from, in large part, indigenous cultures, especially the Haudenosaunee Confederacy. But huge parts - the vast majority of the Haudenosaunee Confederacy’s cosmovision - were left out of how the Founding Fathers were able to interpret what indigenous leaders were trying to tell them. They couldn't get past their own (patriarchical/Christian/Euro-centric/white) domination framework to see the bigger cosmovision.

So I've been getting curious about what it might look like to create something different in these times.  These days, I no longer assume that the 'rights' I've grown up with - even taken for granted - will remain unchallenged. Rights like voting. To be an unmarried, child-free woman and (mostly) not get hassled. To be openly queer. To run my own business. To not need a man to co-sign anything for me. Not when building more prisons has become something of national pasttime for national leadership. Not when 'drill baby drill’ has become an economic policy and people are getting disappeared. Again.

All of which has consequences. You might not "believe" in Science or God or Goddess - but I'm pretty sure that there still is a geo-physical reality and that reality is a reality of interconnectivity. You might have noticed that climate change is worsening. Our seasons - that basic metric of time - are changing.

Speaking of seasons and of change, this coming week is Sawhain. Maybe some of you will celebrate it as Halloween. I hope you have loads of fun. Fun is really important. I hope your daughters and sons and gender non-confirming little ones can be super expressive, in whatever way that means to them, and feel safe taking up a lot of space on these streets we all share.

I'll be doing some online 'mythcasting' (where I share a myth or two and then we get to explore it together) this Friday - one of my ways of having fun - and honoring Sawhain with some friends outside of Philly - if you are in the area, you are welcome to join us.

As part of that gathering, I'll be honoring my ancestors - which, this year, includes a lot more people, including spiritual/intellectual ancestors such as Sally Roesch Wagner, who passed away this past summer. I was fortunate enough to attend her funeral in Syracuse in person. It was remarkable. I am grateful I got to call her one of my teachers, however briefly.

And during this time when the veil is thin, I'm going to ask all of these ancestors some questions - about what kind of internal and relational stances might we need to ReMember and to ReEchant that pulsing loving life force. Who knows, maybe they will even have advice for how to respond to neighbors whom I find to be strange.

Maybe you will also be in that inquiry with your own ancestors, wherever these times of change are taking you.  Do let me know what shoes up for you.