Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 5

The Fourth Perspective: Feeling Like the Female Species

Classically, a woman’s autopoiesis has been entirely focused on the cycle of attraction, consummation and childbirth. With increased power over all of those, autopoiesis might be shifting its energetic activity to the new purpose we are giving it: that of attractiveness and individualism. What these factors of fear and attraction, supported by automatic chemical and cognitive reflexes, convey is a complex picture in which my own say into the motivations I deem “mine” is put to question.

Our look at the outside of our exterior has naturally brought us to inquire into what is happening inside our physical reality, and how we experience our changing body and behavior. This perspective, of seeing, or feeling into, the exterior reality of woman from the inside, illuminates the unseen 1^st-person experience of our visible 3^rd-person manifestation.

I never had much view on our experience of our bodies beyond the fact that as women we have always been burdened with our fertility, yet also found our purpose and identity in this; that I was privileged to be born into the first generation with a choice; and that consequently our relationship to our body is in flux. But again it was Simone De Beauvoir, although a little gloomy in her descriptions, who brought new depth to these issues. Reading her analysis of women’s anatomy, it is not hard to see that the hormonal patterns, dangers of childbirth, misery of miscarriage, and ever-present possibility of being overwhelmed by the physically stronger half of the species, cannot but have a profound impact on women’s chemical and cognitive processes, which are endlessly thrown off-balance, and equally endlessly trying to restore balance. She describes in detail the chemical processes, circulatory adjustments and hormonal cycles that cause physical and emotional instability for a woman as the price for her ability, by means of reproduction, to secure the stability of the human species. Added to this instability

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 4

The Third Perspective: Woman As A Species

Even today, I am not sure that we have fully let in the radical consequences of contraception for human beings, as half of the species suddenly has the freedom to divert her path away from this reproductive turmoil, putting an end to what De Beauvoir called “the abdication… of her individual abilities”.

Just as we can gain 3^rd-person access to our interior experience, so can we gain 3^rd-person access to our exterior manifestation. This perspective is where we look from the outside at the physical reality of a woman, capturing through biology or behavior her arising as a visible manifestation.

I did not realize the full importance of this perspective until Simone De Beauvoir, who has been experimenting with various perspectives in her writings, surprised me with a long analysis of female anatomy. She points out how through evolution, each higher species is less determined by sex but more individualized, with the human female being the (relatively) least sexed and most individualistically evolved mammal on earth. Yet, with the decrease in physical emphasis on sex and the human body becoming built less for sex and more for individual expression, mammal reproduction has become increasingly risky and difficult, thus rendering females subject to the demanding, destabilizing and at times life-threatening cycle of menstruation, childbirth and menopause.

For many thousands of years, human beings have had little objective knowledge about women’s anatomy, other than the fact that women spent most of their lives giving birth to and caring for babies, not always

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 3

“Mary Wollstonecraft revealed how women’s interior experience was determined by a forced structural typology that caused her to use her self-awareness exclusively to censor her own critical faculties. In understanding woman’s interior through the cage that was holding it captive, she started liberating the woman who did not dare allow herself to know she was caught.”

The Second Perspective: The Look Of Feeling A Woman

This perspective is the 3^rd-person view of the 1^st-person experience, or in Ken Wilber’s words: “The look of a feeling”. Our own direct internal experience is a 1^st-person perspective; by either removing ourselves one step from this, or gaining access to someone else’s direct experience, we can establish a 3^rd-person view of the 1^st-person experience, which enables us to detect the internality codes that govern an interior “I”. But we can take this one step further: by discovering these interior patterns or structures through access to an individual’s experience, we discover the deeper Kosmic patterns of existence, beyond this moment and locality, and this in turn helps us to read anyone’s interior experience.

As we saw earlier, in the earliest times of civilization there was little notion of a woman’s interior, and therefore we do not have much to go on. Gerda Lerner shows how in early patriarchy women were thought to have little interiority, and what interiority they had was considered devious because of its difference from men. Later, this provoked strongly paternalizing Church commentaries to keep those devious tendencies under control. The Enlightenment broke up the moral grip of the Church, but rather than relaxing these gender steriotypes, the great power shift in culture that resulted meant that the structures of gender types became strongly dichotomized and even more cemented in culture, but in a new way. A newly sophisticated contempt of women’s perceived lack of interiority emerged; woman was now a weak, feminine being with no will or intellect of her own.

Thankfully, the rise of individuality of that period also meant that

Who Is A Woman? In Search of Female Identity – Part 2

Four Perspectives

“For many years I supported the very reasonable idea that I was equal to men. But over the years, it became clear that this was not the whole picture. After years of denial, I had to admit that I still felt inadequate compared to men.”

The First Perspective: The Feeling Of Being A Woman

This perspective is the view of a woman’s interior experience, viewed from within. This is called a phenomenological perspective: it shows us the interior of a person as it arises. Ken Wilber says about this: “Mental objects exist in a mental space… whether they do or do not [also] exist in a sensori-physical space”. This means that mental objects do not depend on sensory proof like exterior phenomena do, but that phenomenology “brackets” phenomena (which nevertheless must be verifiable) and studies them as they arise, the way they arise. The experience can be felt, not seen, and its proof of existence is the feeling.

From the earliest times of civilization we have few direct accounts of human beings, and even fewer of women; women were not taught to read or write, and much less encouraged to speak out. Even when history started to be preserved and human beings started to record their individual existence, the basic structures of patriarchy meant that women were not part of the public sphere and had little access to that history. Most of the very rich accounts from medieval mystics were written by men; the great twelfth-century Hildegard von Bingen kept her visions silent for half her life for fear of being condemned as a heretic. Feminist historian Gerda Lerner, who meticulously researched the role of women in history, points out a widespread “internalization by women of their inferiority”.

With the arising of the Enlightenment women started getting access to education and some began to speak out. Eighteenth-century Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her brilliant, scathing commentaries on women’s carefully cultivated inability to reason. Yet even she did not write explicitly about a woman’s actual experience, although hers can be deducted from her impassioned writings.