Is it really all about gender?

A ponder

I engage with several far-right bloggers to condition my mind to think outside my liberal bias. I want to be whole and wise, not righteous.

James Howard Kunstler

is one of them. Like

Curtis Yarvin

, he rankles me down to my bones. Once upon a time, I recommended his book, A World Made by Hand, to everyone as it rendered a fictional future, after the collapse, that resonated with me. His book, The Long Emergency, is a classic. Now he rails floridly about libtards.

I had the same feeling with Jordan Peterson when I encountered him and spent a week in a cabin refuting him on paper - no, pixels. I used to enjoy freewheeling Russell Brand, especially after he wrote about his 12-step sobriety, and was curious enough to engage critically with Candace Owens. I hear Joe Rogan was pretty progressive until… until… until what?

What do all these people have in common? Is it the vaccine wars? Is it being skewered in a tender spot by critics to the left of them?

Or is it that they are … dare I say… men?

Don’t worry beloved men in my life. It’s not about you. It’s about a social disease called the patriarchy.

Today a NYTimes guest essay by Anna Peterson, a professor of religion at the University Florida, caught my attention. She wrote of the chilling effect of Ron DeSantis’s anti-woke crackdown. She said: “Before Mr. DeSantis began targeting higher education…. We had open, complex discussions without fearing for our careers” and used this example:

In a conversation in one of my classes, female students expressed the fear that catcalling provoked, and their male peers responded thoughtfully, reflecting on their own behavior — a learning experience for everyone. Today that conversation would, I fear, violate a Florida law that prohibits teaching male students that they must feel guilt for the actions of other men.

I can taste misogyny in what they are dishing up. It’s foul. It makes my skin crawl. It’s a flashing red light at this intersection in our democracy.

In the 60s, Clairol coo-ed “Gentlemen prefer blondes” to sell their products. Do men now or still or again prefer trad-wives. Have they always, secretly?

Wondering whether people do still prefer traditional marriage, I did the obvious high-integrity thing. I Googled it.

The Survey Center on American Life delved into this question recently.

“Most Americans see marriage as a positive, but new research findings show a massive gender divide. Fifty-eight percent of men and 53 percent of women agree that men who get married and have children are better off than those who do not. However, when it comes to women benefiting from marriage and parenthood, there was far less agreement. About half of men (49 percent) and less than one-third (32 percent) of women believe that women who get married and have children live fuller, happier lives.”

“A 2015 study found that 69 percent of divorces were initiated by women. A more recent survey that asked divorced men and women who initiated the divorce found an astonishing gender gap. Among straight women, 66 percent say they made the decision to end their marriages while only 39 percent of divorced men said the same. A Pew study finds that men are also more likely than women to remarry after a marriage ends.”

An aside about the patriarchy and me

“Patriarchy” and “feminism” were just far away words from a world I thought I left behind by living a very non-traditional life. For a time, it seemed we were free, but the gender roles of the 50s were deeper than lifestyle. By the time they took the reins, I could neither see nor believe they wormed their way into my life.

My long partnership with the man who birthed Your Money or Your Life with me was exciting, adventuresome, and I learned so much about the worlds he inhabited: engineering, dirt biking, mechanics, critical thinking and renegade financial analyst. Living with him was also the most painful, confusing part of my life. In terms of spiritual growth, it was also, ultimately, the most powerful. If I had not had an equal number of years post his death as I had with him, I might have just celebrated the good parts and hid what I had buried the graveyard of shame - my bowels. (Later, a cancer grew and encased the pain to protect me from it, but that’s another story.)

Ironically, the first Trump administration surfaced, to be healed, the story of those years of my life. Now, finally, I am mostly free of being skewered by hard emotions from his betrayals and meanness. Harder to face has been the shame at the collapse of my will. Thank God #MeToo revealed how it wasn’t my personal weakness but the part of the patriarchy that cut out women’s tongues, that had them cling because they believed they could not survive without a man.

I spent years confused, as so many people who love narcissists are, by how much I loved him and how much it hurt and how much I learned and how much I allowed myself to be diminished and denied my truth. It was all of the above and until I could rejoice in the complexity of it, the full enchilada, I was trapped, still, in the struggle to accept me/him/it/then/now. This is the alchemy of aging.

At the same time, Your Money or Your Life was a marriage of his piercing insight and my social emotional intelligence. Without my skill and love of words, writing and communication it would not have blossomed into a best-selling book. Without his systematic program to deprogram our relationship with money, the book would have had no grit. It was a marriage of our shared passion to challenge societal norms, in this case consumerism. It was our desire to awaken people from the slumber of work and spend - and to liberate the lives of whoever chose to take advantage of the teaching. We were idealists - and at the same time jaundiced about human folly. We were laser focused. We agreed with Upton Sinclair, ““It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends upon his not understanding it!” (notice that “man” back then meant men and women). We, and the people who shared our mission, were an unstoppable team.

Trad-wife cos-play

I was raised to be a leader. I was also raised to be a Mrs. so-and-so. I watched my brilliant mother conform to trad-wife demands. I watched her slip out of her roles once the children were old enough and then blossom intellectually once my father was gone.

I remember realizing that I would need to set aside my sass, curiosity and love of learning at some point, find a great husband and support him. I was in the laundry room in the basement of our house in Manhasset, Long Island, my father’s woodworking shop to my left and my brother’s dark room behind me. I must have been 12. I was holding a memoir I’d written for my 8th grade class - mostly in my mother’s witty voice, and fully color illustrated. Looking at the memoir, bound in ribbon, and the washer dryer, the trad-wife program took me into its bosom. It was like a perfectly timed societal gene triggered by puberty.

I vividly remember my mother, when I was in the Mary-Janes and a Peter Pan collar, phase, probably 7, spitting on her handkerchief to wipe my face before going in to visit my Grandma. “You can tolerate anything.” she said, “if you hide yourself deep inside where no one can touch you.” This was her strategy. This was one of the few pieces of life advice she gave me, beyond cross your legs and, strangely, “When rape is inevitable, relax.”

As soon as I lost my virginity at 17, I lost some aspect of my intelligence and direction in life. I wanted nothing more than to be pregnant and follow my 37 year old folksinger love to Texas. I was adrift when I arrived at Brown University, after having been the top of my class and President of every club I joined.

When I “shacked up” with my best friend from college and future husband, I dropped out of graduate school and, to my utter horror, found myself with a trad-wife desire to live through him.

No wonder I was ripe for re-partnering with a dominator and develop myself in the context of his interests and skills.

Am I sorry I learned motorcycle mechanics from him, and built a motorcycle from a box of parts? No. Am I sorry I then rebuilt the engine in my car and was able, for years, to work on engines (until they became computers)? No. Am I sorry for our 3 year “back-to-the-land” survival school? No. Am I sorry for the fantastic sex, even with his addiction to seduction of other women? No (but hard to arrive at that no). Am I sorry for our matched (though cynical) sense of humor? No (I miss it in fact). Am I sorry I developed a jaded attitude about the the rules of society? No. Am I sorry I got an education about money, finance, and self-reliance? No. Am I sorry about anything associated with Your Money or Your Life, from our first seminar in 1980 until this very day? Not on your life! This was the great adventure we shared.

But I’ve been devastated by those lost years with a man with little emotional intelligence or kindness towards the parts of me he could not tolerate. He hated weakness of any kind, and was frustrated with the bipolar depressions that took me to the underworld every two years like clockwork; he told me to just get up, shake it off, and when I couldn’t, he simply waited it out. I developed the same stoicism about his unpredictable anger. I should have left, but I could not break free. This mortified me. I’ve pondered whether some destiny brought us together, and had us tolerate our differences, to birth Your Money or Your Life. Was it worth it? I still don’t know, because I can’t know what those years would have been like otherwise.

With his death, who I’d been before we met was reborn, and in these 30 years I’ve grown straight up like a tree that had once been bent by the wind.

In contemplating a memoir, I thought of one way to tell this story, titled Hillary, Jackie, Eleanor and me. Get it? Would there have been the glorious Universal Declaration of Human Rights if Eleanor hadn’t married FDR? If Jackie or Hillary had demanded a divorce right in the middle of their husband’s presidencies, what would have happened?

No wonder I became furious when the abuser in chief was elected in 2016. It ignited the buried story of the past with Joe, the one I never wanted anyone to know about. Not even myself. I’ve written my way out of this in the 4 years between DJT’s reigns (thank you Ann Randolph). I’ve had to own those years with Joe and my life shaped by him while retaining my love for him and for the work we did together. It’s been the hardest labor of my life.

Patriarchy unbound

I need not enumerate the ways women have fought for our rights for a hundred years or more. I need not explain why the Handmaid’s Tale series was a phenomenal hit since the first episode in 2017. Or #MeToo went viral in 2017.

Misogyny did not go away. We just found our voice and our power. And now… well, I need not enumerate how men, empowered by Trump, are going after women’s’ freedoms.

LGBTQIA+ and women’s rights

All gender expressions that don’t mimic or kowtow to patriarchal norms are under threat. This is why women and those who identify as LGBTQIA+ have a common cause.

It’s Pride month now. Time to celebrate love, creativity and joy - and time to see how all our fates are entwined with this “return of the Trad-wife” culture.

None of us will go back.

Not women into loss of identity with a man. Not men into hyper masculinity. Not trans or gay or nonbinary or questioning into the hiding. Gender in all its aspects is once again a battle line in the culture wars. This is political and cultural, but it’s also deep soul work. All the “isms” are in us by virtue of living in this culture.

Coming of Aging has taught me that liberation comes from confronting - with compassion - all the ways I have embodied ageism - and seeking ways to restore love as best I can. It’s humbling work, but not weak or diminishing work. It is healing and freeing, and sends me into political work while understanding how entangled we all are.

“Othering” is one term for gender antipathy. It is the time to overcome the hate in our hearts towards all the isms. To face the painful facts of the ways we’ve harmed others through our cult-ural addiction to power-over (whatever age, ability, race or gender expression) and make amends. Undoing these isms is the work of a lifetime, not just a workshop.

To build a just society, we need to celebrate difference, and thank our lucky stars for, yes, diversity, equity and inclusion. DEI isn’t only a set of laws or practices, it is the moral code and the brilliance of a unique “we the people” country. Diversity - how beautiful the gifts of every culture, every gender expression, every introvert or extrovert, every liberal or conservative. Equity - how valuable the gifts of every human, whatever status they have in a hierarchy of proper relations. Inclusion - opening our hearts to everybody we meet; isn’t this the work of being a Christian, Jew or Muslim? Or Jain, Buddhist, follower of the Bahai faith? How far we are, but we can’t abandon our North Star because we can barely see it.

Valerie Kaur calls this Revolutionary Love.

"Revolutionary Love is the call of our times.
It is to look upon the face of anyone and say:
You are a part of me I do not yet know."

We can change laws, but unchanged minds will lay in wait to recapture the flag. Didn’t Christ say something about that as well. New wine in old skins. Big work ahead, on every level.

I’ve long thought that we are a wet-behind-the-ears society that thinks it’s the cat’s pajamas. We do not have the maturity to use our technology wisely. AI isn’t as fearful as the mentality of those who use it to their advantage. The whole set up of unrestrained capitalism and domination is killing us, and we can’t seem to stop.

If we see how gender justice is tied into a democratic society we can build a more powerful counter-force to this unrestrained, hungry-ghost national government.

Back to Coming of Aging

Everything I’ve written in Coming of Aging comes out of this soul effort to get over the barrier reef of internalized ageism (and all the isms ticking away in the background) and out into the vast sea of being an elder, putting aside my childish ways.

We elders, whatever gender, know we have a job: to be a voice of maturity, to place human conflicts in a larger frame, to answer questions, to mind the grandchildren so the parents can flourish. Instead, we are silenced, trivialize, medicated, and warehoused.

I see this time as an opportunity for presence and even nobility, a stage of life beyond domination by egoic demands. I’m not there. But I’m facing every trigger, every catastrophizing, every antipathy as a way to plumb the depths of myself - shadow and light - and come out with a little less mud on my soul.