A Feminine Future from Present Darkness
Originally posted on BlueSky, March 8th, 2025 for International Women's Day and expanded for Substack.
“….You cannot buy the revolution. You cannot make the revolution. You can only be the revolution. It is in your spirit, or it is nowhere.” – Ursula Le Guin
On March 8th, we recognize half of humanity. One can argue, quite correctly, that at least half of a year’s days should celebrate those 4 billion Beings. However, the single commemorative Earthen spin allows for concentrated attention. Directed focus, after all, is a human’s most valuable, and necessary, skill - and one in decreasing abundance. Thankfully, it takes very little time to consider the colossal role of women in the simultaneous comedy/tragedy of the human play. It takes even less time to realize how many pages of that script are lost, how many crucial players, forgotten. (That’s the tragedy part.)
Forgotten to human memory, perhaps, but not to collective memory. The comedy will be realized eventually - that all oppression imposed by masculine, egoic forces to our feminine halves in this long, and oft dark, production was nothing more than a stunting self-flagellation.
Those who live within the reincarnation paradigm fully understand that the individuated Soul has existed as both Men and Women, it’s many lessons and karmic debts ingrained deep within Being until all is resolved in resplendent enlightenment. Therefore, all alive at present have a stake in recognizing women today. If you’re a man in this life, it’s likely you were a woman in the last, and guaranteed you will be later. If you’re a woman today, you’ve chosen a very interesting time to be alive. Emphasis on choice, for there are no accidents in the cosmic game. Your presence, your voice is magnified on every March 8th, but needed always, especially now.
Women’s rights are under attack, yet again, and all have a duty to protect them. No one was unaffected by the overturning of Roe v. Wade because women’s health is human health, and that which affects half of us, affects all of us. There is no arguing about that, no denying it. It is known. It is known *particularly* by those who chose to allow “the states” to dictate women’s health, mandating that care of a sovereign human body is subject to arbitrary geographical lines. As is frequently said regarding decisions on the Right, “The cruelty is the point.”
“Well, that’s obvious and not very optimistic.” Correct. But what I hope to convey and perhaps instill in any reader is to look at what is not given limelight. In fact, what is lit in media is little more than shadow, and what media shadows is the light. An extreme effort of the few, via Project 2025, to send us back to darker days reveals a golden truth: Progress is/was being made, and equality is held in heart by the many.
A little over a century ago, women were given the right to vote in the US. Eighty years ago, women fueled the fires of industry, fashioning the bullets, bombs, and bombers which physically defeated Nazi Germany. And fifty years ago, women were allowed to own a credit card, and house, under their own name. In that time, and up to the present, I can provide the anecdote that I know more women with advanced degrees, with careers in science, medicine, and law, than I do men. From a personal perspective, the long tooth-and-claw fight for equality is working - one inch at a time. Is it pitiful that sole property rights are still a relatively new freedom? Yes. Is it disgusting that male politicians write laws for women based not on science, but misogyny masked as Biblical justification? Absolutely. But we must recognize the seismic, unseeable shifts in mind weighing against such absurdities.
When enough minds change, the world changes in response. There is plenty more work yet to do, make no mistake, but consider the vast strides made in general attitudes regarding equality. It is no longer inconceivable that women have thoughts of their own and are not merely extensions of their husbands. Women who forego motherhood and/or marriage are no longer social pariahs to the larger populace. Much like racism, sexism is a learned prejudice. Bigots, like viruses, still replicate mindlessly, but the vaccine to such a plague is awareness and education. Girls are encouraged to direct their focus on their passions, to become themselves and upon themselves, rely. Consider the messaging of large corporations; they advertise equality because it sells. It is not so much that they are influencing or encouraging progress, but instead, reacting to it.
In a 2023 ad, Heineken produced a simple 60 second “Social Swap” between Gary Neville and Jill Scott, two former English soccer players turned pundits. They each took control of the other’s social accounts and compared notes on the comments received on their respective observations. Predictably, Neville (as Scott) received sexist responses, and Scott (as Neville) received praise. The ad ends with Heineken saying, “Help us beat gender bias.” Traditionally, we might associate beer commercials catering to “traditional masculine” ideals, but here we have a message of equality. Heineken is reacting to the collective mind, one that values progress - and they hope to profit as a result.
It must be noted that this does work both ways. View mass messaging, particularly advertisements, as reflections of the collective conscious, not generators. Profit is ever the aim and if it were profitable to sell hate and regression, they would (and some do). Instead of Heineken ending their ad with, “This season, let’s keep football opinions about football.” In a darker world, it might read, “This season, let’s keep women’s opinions out of football.” Gauge your response were that real, as well as the presumed responses of your friends and family - if overwhelmingly negative, let that be a glimpse into greater mind of which we are all tuned into, and creating.
This is widescale example. At the local level, let us examine the home.
Generational progress is not always a tip-toe forward, but sometimes a bounding leap occurs. Millennials divorce less than previous generations and millennial fathers spend approximately 30% more time with their children than any other generation. These facts signal changes in gender role swaps between caretakers (fathers) and providers (mothers), as well as greater awareness of interpersonal connection within the family. In Jungian terms, we could say that there is a greater balance between the anima and animus between men and women, respectively. Not to mention, for young daughters, seeing their mother as a provider is wont to inspire greater education and ambition. Boys, too, are exposed to these messages not simply through ideological osmosis via media, but direct experience through mothers with careers and sisters side-by-side in higher education. Today, women are graduating college at higher rates than men, also a green flag for progress and consistent with a lone anecdote of knowing a bevy of powerful, highly educated women. Men are taking more caretaking duties, therefore are embracing more “feminine” roles (Though it is a personal hope that language will shift eventually and view anything done by a woman as feminine, and anything done by a man, masculine)
So with progress here and now, what is the problem?
A bold statement: American politics remain oppressive because the US has no spirit and loves only ego. Patriarchal domination is, quite simply, addictive and encouraged by the Church - the same Church that acts more as a mouthpiece for the Right than it does as a bastion of peace and love. Current Christianity serves as the cinder block chaining the collective American mind to the depths. The shameful, hollow teachings of American Christianity are more concerned with dogmatic groupthink than a personal connection to Source. Therefore, they are not spiritual institutions; they are performative, divisive, and superficial clubs. There are exceptions, always, and many faithful Christians are overshadowed and isolated by the increasing abandonment of spirit. But if that abdication were not generally true, we would not find ourselves in the bind of still justifying why politics has no entitlement to the exam room yet somehow is welcome upon the pulpit. In short, those with deeper connections to their center are more inclined to experience unity with all humans and oneness with all Beings. That is true spirit. That is the message of Christ (and every other prophet/enlightened one). If one’s actions are counter to cooperation, then they serve ego rather than spirit. Thankfully, that experience is never far from anyone. One simply needs the desire to feel it.
The grip of authority clenches tightly because it has everything to lose elsewise. The regime currently in power is a cornered beast, fighting hardest before its inevitable fall. It will get worse, and perhaps will choke us for years to come. But it will fall. It is a matter of time, intent, and a refusal to capitulate. It will require what the Right has mastered: Narrative and messaging.
While some corporations sell equality, so too do others fund division. There is a recent, mass proliferation of “manosphere,” “red-pill” ideas spouted by multi-millionaire grifters who grow rich by selling one great lie: that equality is code for oppression. This is nothing more than a way to inflate the ego into a false belief of superiority. Of course, when one attempts to be superior, it is because they feel inferior, and internal perceptions of inferiority create external, sadistic actions. I would personally posit that this is a misguided reaction to women thriving, women becoming whom they were always meant to be despite the great efforts of misogynists from past to present. Let it be stated plainly: The way forward is through cooperation, not competition.
“Women can’t be presidents; they’re too emotional!” has been a flimsy, no-effort excuse to justify executive patriarchal power for a while now. The result of such sexism is currently the most emotionally stunted national leader since Nero. Trump is a dedicated cheater, after all. We should expect and presume any future elections will be tampered with because of the aforementioned addiction to patriarchal dominance. Democracy is, by its definition, a cooperative system of governance. Now that our government is occupied by those who spit upon cooperation, what faith can any have that they will respect further shifts in the collective mind toward values of equality? Addictions are not given up without a fight. The goal must be then for a mass mobilization of future voters, with women at the forefront and voices so proud that the frothing mouths of MAGA men are not feared for their rabidity but mocked for their spittle.
If we zoom out from our absurd human play and petty power struggles to examine the planet itself, we will find that Gaia is naturally democratic. There is no absolute, concentrated power on Earth. There is chaos, there is discord, there is brutality in the plant, animal, and microbial scales - but it all serves a greater order. This is the womb from which all life springs, and the human being is the species birthed with the power of world-shaping will. Because you exist, you can surmise that the Earth delights in nurturing you, as any mother would. Nature is the stable engine by which we should model our human lives; to live under hierarchical, patriarchal authority is to live counter to our planet’s intent. It is unnatural and unsustainable, as is evident from our meddling in the balance of ecosystems and resultant climate change. The ego which plagues us is that which considers us separate from our world. Once separation begins, the impulse to continue slicing is difficult to resist. Separate far enough and we find ourselves denigrating our feminine halves and believing ourselves the superior species of Earth, rather than her appointed caretaker. Ego is such now that billionaires are racing to leave this paradise, preferring to thrust themselves into space, colonizing new, barren planets rather than contend with the wounds they’ve caused their mother. Which is to say, a refusal to reconcile with their own femininity by conquering and not cooperating.
Therefore, the demand of democracy and freedom is a demand for the natural order. Authority is illusory. The clouds do not hoard water. The rivers are not stagnant. Volcanoes return their minerals, and forests do not hold their breath. The sun, a literal shining archetype of masculinity, does not withhold its light. All is shared, all is given - thus, all is returned. A future revolution must keep this in mind; all possess both the masculine and feminine. Patriarchy will fall because those who propagate it cannot deny half of what they are, forever.
But as Le Guin so beautifully stated, that revolutionary spirit must be felt, embodied, made whole within the individual. To know true equality, we must release the ego’s hold upon the mind. Feminism, as I know it, is not a punitive ideology. Nowhere have I seen it stated that a feminine takeover with male imprisonment is the end goal. Whereas the beet red conservatives who sing the false virtues of female subservience out of fear that if given true freedom, true choice, women will choose to leave them in the past – the same past where the spirits of worthier women await, joined finally in the equal embrace of dust. What we do today matters not just tomorrow, but always. We need not be concerned with personal legacy, but collective unification for an equal world. Women will play their greatest role yet in the coming Acts, but can only do so with spirits full, with minds motivated. The foundation is stronger than what those at the top would have us believe. Centuries of progress are alive today. The grip of power and the assault on rights are foolish efforts to stop the momentum already underway. If anything, they are but catalysts.
This is not permanent. Nothing is, nothing lasts. Therefore, women, the attacks on your health and rights are meant to pound you into submission. Do not let it: be galvanized, not pulverized. Give nothing to those who give nothing in return and remember, your presence on this planet now is the gift that humanity needs. This too shall pass. When the regime falls, because it will, may it be a woman who takes the Oval Office, and finally shatters the glass.
“We live in Capitalism. Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art, and very often in the art of words.” – Ursula Le Guin