We hear a lot these days about empowering women. Conferences, workshops, lectures abound on this hot topic. The trouble with the notion is that implies that women are powerless and that they must find the ways and means
- physical, psychological and political - to be all they can be.
For sure, there are many laws which protect the male’s right to external power. It is important that we all work to change such laws, but in most cases in Western society - which is all I am qualified to comment on - it is not the law of the land that holds women down and keeps them small (literally). Far more insidious are the multitude of social mores and cultural and religious customs and beliefs which exist to try to limit, directly and indirectly, women’s freedom and autonomy.
I was recently in LA and I had a conversation with a Hollywood insider about the pressures on women in the entertainment industry to be underweight. I had noticed that there are many women in the city who seemed to be even smaller than the proverbial size zero. It turns out there is actually a double zero and a negative zero size.
I was told that if an actress tries to maintain a ‘normal’ weight - which is viewed by the industry as overweight - she may be humiliated, often publicly, by male producers and directors in an attempt to force her to comply with their bizarre standards. It is almost as if these men instinctively understand that women who stand and live in their truth are a force to be reckoned with, and that they need to be shackled - physically (starving and teetering on six inch heels), emotionally (striving for acceptance), and intellectually (being ‘wrong’ in relation to the male ‘right’) - in order to be controllable, and ensure masculine primacy, dominance, and superiority.
But things are changing rapidly. We are beginning to see the way things have been done in the past will not be effective guides or models for future success. I have no doubt that imminent discoveries and innovations will prove that just about everything we have held to be true, is not. We, as people of the earth, stand on the brink of change we have not seen for millennia. We can fight it, or try to flee it, but we will not be able to prevent it. Change is coming.
When all people - women included - know who they truly are and stand in their authentic truth there is nothing left to fear. Standing stripped of all artifice and pretense, when the dust has cleared and all attachment to the past abandoned, we will be free and able to begin to create a new world where the masculine and feminine are equally valued and equally responsible for this ultimate act of creation.
Although it may have seemed radical, even crazy, at the time, Marianne Williamson wrote in the early 90’s of the innate and creative power of women in her book A Woman’s Worth. Williamson was one of a very few who could foresee the unique and crucial role woman must play in the creation of this new world. She rightly contends that the power of women is so deeply rooted in the very core of the feminine psyche that it does not need to be wrested from men as part of a sexual/political struggle. The power to live and create lies ever within:
“When a woman has owned her passionate nature, allowing love to flood her heart, her thoughts grow wild and fierce and beautiful. Her juices flow. Her heart expands. She has thrown off crutch and compromise. She has glimpsed the enchanted kingdom, the vast and magical realms of the Goddess within her. Here, all things are transformed. And there is a purpose to this: that the world might be mothered back to a great and glorious state. When a woman conceives her true self, a miracle occurs and life around her begins again.”
