On Julian Assange, Naomi Wolf and Trivializing Rape
December 7, 2010
by Amy Siskind
|The following piece is featured at The Huffingon Post.
Dear Naomi Wolf,
Imagine our relief today upon reading your letter to Interpol defending Mr. Assange. Those Swedes just don’t understand. C’mon – what’s wrong with “using his body weight to hold her down in a sexual manner“? Or “deliberately molested…in a way designed to violate her sexual integrity.” She must have asked for it.
That’s why we are so fortunate to have women like you, Ms. Wolf, who ‘get it’. It’s so important that we maintain our culture of victim blaming here in the U.S. When women dress suggestively, drink alcohol, or show up at a party or bar, they are asking for it. We know that.
And I’m sure the men of University of Texas particularly appreciate your help. Especially after that recent, gratuitous study by the U.S. Department of Justice citing 1 in 4 college women will be the victim of sexual assault before they graduate. That’s why it was so awesome that your piece made fun of Julian Assagne’s victim. What better way to discourage young women from reporting attempted or successful rapes.
We are also grateful that you singled out that pesky little state of Rhode Island. Rapists hate Rhode Island, the first state to implement mandatory dating violence training for young adults.Yeah, RI Attorney General Patrick Lynch is a real buzz kill. He’s even one of the 75 participants (along with The New Agenda Foundation) tomorrow in all day radio show It’s Time to Talk Day designed to encourage greater public dialogue about domestic violence. Don’t those national organizations know that awareness will hurt rapists and abusers?
They just don’t get us like you do Ms. Wolf. We’re so glad to have a feminist on our side, phew – we thought they hated us. For now, let’s just keep this our secret.
Hugs,
The Rapists
TNA, I’m e-mailing this to The Common Ills. C.I. also called out Naomi Wolf’s hideous column http://thecommonills.blogspot......ot_07.html . And she pointed out that Wolf has a history on the rape issue. She avoided (as she documents in her own book) doing anything about a gang rape because she was afraid she would be called a “Lesbo.”
As she points out, Wolf’s done no investagion, heard nothing from the women but she’s ready to condemn them and mock them and what they went through. That’s not feminsm. I’m glad at least two sites are calling Naomi Wolf out. I hope there will be more. There’s no excuse for what Wolf did.
Naomi Wolf will do and say nothing at all that she thinks will keep men from wanting to fuck her. She is completely drunk on her own fear of aging and having to grow up. Watching her descend into a second childhood of age panic, sleepover parties, and spin the bottle has been one of the saddest things I’ve witnessed as a woman of the same general age group as Wolf.
Sweden has more rape case per capita than any other European country (20 times more than Italy). Just read up on the background of Assange “victims” and you will realize that Sweden is in the forefront of a new development: fascist feminism.
Fascist feminism! Wow, do we get a secret handshake and everything?
Jan, when only a fraction of rapists in most countries ever make it to the legal system, what does this say about Sweden?
Henrietta, thank you. Rape is like fleas — the one you see or hear about is nothing compared to the thousand you don’t. Sweden has yanked the covers on the whole ugly mess, at least more than most places. Kudos to them.
Janis, Henrietta, I agree rape is a serious crime, and I would not be surprised if Assange misbehaves towards women. But Sweden seems to have gone overboard with its attitude toward sex, hence the jokes doing the rounds in Sweden that you need a written agreement to engage in sex.
I can’t proof the two accusers have an agenda, but I invite you to take a look here:
http://rixstep.com/1/20101001,01.shtml
Secondly, you must agree this case is fishy. No charges have been filed yet Assange is put on the watch list of Interpol normally reserved for terrorists and mass murderers. This indicates political interference.
One of the accusers is a member of the Swedish Christian Democratic Party and has a history of political activism, including opposition in Cuba to Cuba’s government. And she is a “radical” feminist. If you add it all up, fascist feminism is not too far-fetched.
And Janis, I am not sure about your comment on Naomi’s sexuality, but I would not mind a sexual encounter with her – either of the recreational type of the “yab-yum” type – or with you for that matter
One solution to the rape problem is to be less uptight about it, and I think we can all agree that Swedes, and Westerners in general, are pretty uptight about sex.
I think these rape complaints are from quite awhile ago. He wasn’t picked up on the rape charges for a long time which shows world governments didn’t care if he was a rapist until he pissed them off on another level. He may or may not be guilty of the charges. He was picked up because he has made himself a nuisance to powerful men and old rape charges were the excuse. With all that he has done it is possible Assange hasn’t actually broken any law but having pissed off powerful men he will get what they feel is coming to him.
One solution to the rape problem is to be less uptight about it,
Let’s see what other crime that could apply to. How about:
- One solution to the murder problem is to be less uptight about it
- One solution to the torture problem is to be less uptight about it
- One solution to the burglary problem is to be less uptight about it
- One solution to the embezzlement problem is to be less uptight about it.
Jan, I think you have hit upon the perfect way to fight crime.
perhaps Assange is secretly meeting with high level government officials and this is a cover. In the meantime Naomi Wolf’s article rests on the same level of speculation but is twice as disturbing; something even more disturbing is Jan Krikke’s post. There’s my hierarchy.
Believe me Jan, you would mind one with me.
BTW, New Agenda webmaster types? Ban this motherfucker.
Way to go Naomi!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/.....94285.html
…you can follow Anna Ardin on Twitter, @annaardin. Crikey says that her last tweet translates as:
“CIA agent, rabid feminist / Muslim lover, a Christian fundamentalist, frigid & fatally in love with a man, can you be all that at the same time …”
Lawyer: Assange Accusers ‘Treated Like Perpetrators’
http://abcnews.go.com/US/opera.....d=12351428
One solution to the rape problem is to be less uptight about it…
My mistake. I meant to say “to be less uptigth about sex’.
Janis, you an do better than that. Explain why please.
My mistake. I meant to say “to be less uptigth about sex’.
Yeah, it’s easy to make that mistake when you think that “sex” and “rape” are interchangeable.
Jan Krikke,
I find your presence here nothing short of harassment. How dare you make a sexual innuendo to another commenter all while disagreeing with her!
Your commentary in this thread have been both weird and disturbing and your interest in hanging out at a feminist blog is suspect.
It’s minor about the sexual innuendo, really. It’s banhammer time, but really, I’ve been online since the early 80s, and this is typical run-of-the-mill shit for the reading-4chan-from-their-parents’-basement crowd. He’s just some 6 year old who runs into the room during his parents’ cocktail party, yells, “PEE PEE!” and runs out while congratulating himself on his daring.
Nevertheless, he needs to get gone. You can’t have a deep conversation about anything of note when you have to get up and keep the dog from piddling on the carpet every six seconds.
I didn’t mean to offend any of you but became curious by the rather strong attack on Naomi. Apologies to Janis for the sexual innuendo, an inappropriate response on my part.
I will be back one more time to share (with those interested) a paper written by an “apprentice” of Shulamith Firestone explaining the issue of sexuality and feminism much better than I can. Give me a day or so to track down that paper.
I haven’t found the paper yet, but will soon. Meanwhile, here is another interesting voice on the Assange/rape matter:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comm.....emima-khan
Here is the paper I mentioned. It explains how mankind went in the male/yang age about 5000 years ago (Confucius, Buddha, Jesus, etc.), is now entering a female/yin age (feminism), and will next enter an androgynous age. Females take on more characteristics of males and vice versa, also sexually.
The paper indirectly argues my point about people being “uptight” about sex — and illustrated by Henrietta’s comment above, where she expressed surprise of my “sexual innuendo” to Janis “while “disagreeing with her”. Is is a bit romantic and not very liberated to feel that full agreement with someone is a requirement for sexual attraction.
===============
The Sex Model of History: The Fall and Rise of the Female Principle
by Lawrence Taub
History — A Mystery of Sex, Age, and Caste
Every person has three “coordinates” completely or greatly determined the day he or she is born: their age, their sex, and their caste. (Caste is a social-economic grouping with its own value system, world view, and behavior.) History and the future, it seems, have the same three coordinates: the age, sex, and caste development of humanity as a whole, determined the “day” it was “born.” And, just as we can understand and predict a lot about a single person by knowing her age, sex, and caste, we can also understand and predict a lot about the human race by knowing its present stage of age, sex, and caste development.
In my book, Sex, Age, and the Last Caste, I write about three grand narratives of history, or macrohistories, which I call models: the Age Model, the Sex Model, and the Caste Model. Each model presents an overview of history and the future by presenting the successive stages of the particular type of development of the human race that the model deals with (age, sex, or caste). Each overview covers all of history — starting from the beginning of human life on earth — and extends through the present until about 100 years into the future.
The Age Model describes history and the future as going through stages of consciousness development that resemble the stages in the life of a single individual, as that person “ages.” Humanity, in other words, started out with the Birth Age, then went through the Infancy Age, the Childhood Age, etc. According to the Age Model, our human species right now is at the maturity or spiritual level of a 19-year-old. It is in the Late Adolescence Age. The Caste Model describes history and the future as evolving from age to age as explained by the Hindu caste philosophy of history. That philosophy, as I interpret it, is based on the idea that all people fall into one of four broad castes: the religious, or spiritual, caste; the warrior caste; the merchant caste; or the worker caste. (When we go from the philosophy to real everyday life, we see that every human being has features of all four castes, but that the features of one caste predominate. That’s the caste that individual can be said to fall into.) The Hindu philosophy states that human history evolves through successive ages, each of which is ruled by the four castes in turn in the above order.
So, according to the Caste Model, history started out with a very long Religious Age — the entire prehistoric period through the early historical period that saw the development of the five world religions (Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam). This was followed by the much shorter Warrior Age — the ancient and medieval periods (the ages overlap). Then came the even shorter Merchant Age — the period of entrepreneurial capitalism and industrialization. Then we have today’s very short Worker Age — communism and big corporate capitalism. And finally, we are now entering the last, very long, human age, the Spiritual Age, in which those of us still around will experience the beginnings of religious and spiritual capitalism, to be followed by anarchism. After that comes post-humanity, or super-humanity, which, I feel, is beyond the scope of human understanding, the Hindu caste philosophy, my book, and this paper.
In fact, in this paper I deal only with the third model, the Sex Model — because that is the model that directly tells the story of the repression of the female principle and its reassertion, the theme of this conference. (The Sex Model is presented in more detail in Chapter 2 of my book.) I think this model is very important because it shows that both the repression and reassertion of the female principle are not just superficial, accidental historical trends that all cultures chose to follow because of arbitrary cultural biases, or that they were simply the result of massive invasions by nomadic peoples with a misogynist bent. The Sex Model, on the contrary, leads us to believe that both the repression of the female principle as well as its recent reassertion are deeply “programmed” into history — by God, you might say, if you have a religious bent, or by the nature of the universe, if you prefer secular terminology.
The Sex Model borrows from the ancient Chinese sages the concepts of yin and yang to represent the female and male principles, respectively. These principles are absolutes, polarities; they do not exist as actual things or people. Men and women are both yin and yang, and so both male and female. But men generally lean toward the yang pole and women toward the yin pole. And the cultural rigidities that existed in the Yang Age — which I’ll get to in a moment — encouraged men to be even more yang than they actually are, and women to be even more yin.
The Sex Model states that the yin and the yang expressed themselves historically as a dialectic: Humanity first experienced a Yin Age, a female-principle-oriented age. Then we evolved through a Yang Age, a male-principle-oriented age, which was the antithesis of the Yin Age. The next age will be the Yin-Yang, Androgynous Age, during which humanity will integrate the two opposite sexual principles, and synthesize them in a balanced way. The Androgynous Age has already started and extends into the future — coinciding in time with the Adult Age of the Age Model and the Spiritual Age of the Caste Model. (Please see the Diagram.)
Attached and Detached
To understand this, we have to look at the yin and yang more closely and ask: “What is the basic difference between them?” I concluded that the basic difference is the degree of detachment we feel from our surroundings — from nature, other people, the environment in general, even from our own bodies. All other differences spring from that. The yin person, whether male or female, feels less detached, the yang person, man or woman, more detached.
All of us start out yin — both as individuals and humanity as a whole. We are attached to our surroundings. Then we become yang — we detach ourselves mentally from our surroundings. We start to feel like separate selves, separated from the environment, with our skins as the boundary between ourselves and the rest of the universe. Having separated our selves, we build an individual ego. Our mind becomes a window which looks out at everything from a distance, observing, being objective. The very yin person doesn’t go this far and remains basically subjective.
As a person becomes more yang, he or she perceives the world as consisting of “it’s,” of “dead matter,” as being full of things, objects, forces. The yin, still undetached person still feels one’s surroundings and nature as all alive, as subjects, living beings, or spirits — even the wind, mountains, rain, etc. Nothing is not alive. In Martin Buber’s vocabulary, the yin person has an “I-Thou” relation to the world, the yang person has an “I-It” relation.
The growing detachment a person feels as she or he grows yanger makes it natural and easy for her or him to separate things into disconnected parts. Whereas the yin character still tends to see everything as “holistically” comprising a single system of interrelated parts, the yang person sees it all divided into isolated objects — a fragmented rather than integrated world.
The ability of the yang person to divide into parts leads to classification and analysis: the detached mentality finds it easy to focus on things as separate, isolated objects, and so to classify, analyze, measure, to think rationally and scientifically. The yin person, of course, is less drawn to do these activities.
The yang person mainly acts, then, through the mind, which is the faculty that does all the observing, measuring, analyzing, dividing, and thinking. The yin person, meanwhile, is not busy developing these faculties, and keeps acting through and developing the emotions and feelings.
While the yang person is busily gaining the habit of observing and staying detached from the environment and other people, and is conquering, exploiting, and changing the world through science and reason, the yin person, still seeing the world as a single, living whole, actively participates in it with his or her emotions and feelings. The yin person adapts to and tries to live in harmony with nature and other people rather than to change them.
To repeat, yin precedes yang: an individual starts out yin, moves toward yanghood (or rather develops a coating of yangness over his or her basic yinness), and develops all the features that we associate with the male principle.
When Men Were Female
How did this yin-to-yang evolution unfold historically? The Yin Age, the first
sexual stage, covered prehistory. It began about 2 to 3 million years ago and lasted until about 4,000 BC. From what we know, deduce, or imagine, it was a period with a yin world view. The age was characterized by a strong attachment to the environment and little sense of separation from it. Prehistoric people, therefore, had a weak sense of individuality or ego — and so strongly feared ostracism by their group. They thus tended, in line with the female principle, to sacrifice self for the group, and to conform to its expectations rather than to fight heroically, in line with the male ideal, for individual ideals, high principles, or personal glory. Such notions as ideals, principles, and glory, hallmarks of the later yang Warrior Age, were still relatively undeveloped.
This world view expressed itself in animism, variations of which religion all prehistoric cultures seemed to share. Animism did not divide nature into living beings and non-living things, or “it’s,” as we do. Instead, it saw everything as alive and having a spirit. These spirits — totemic, ancestral, and natural spirits — had the vital power to will and do things which we moderns attribute only to what we think of as living beings.
Reflecting this yin holistic approach, Yin Age people did not much divide things into parts, either physically or socially. Physically, everything was considered part of nature, the whole, not separate or disconnected from the total environment. Socially, society was not much divided into parts, that is, classes. The class structure was very weak. Male supremacy, the sexual class system, was also much weaker than in later Yang, historical times.
The closeness to and strong identification with nature was also reflected, especially as agriculture developed toward the end of the Yin Age, in the cyclical view of time. Prehistorics observed the cycles in nature — the seasons, sunrise and sunset, the phases of the moon, menstruation, and the life cycle. So they experienced time this way: as an endless cycle of the same events. This cyclical view of time is preserved in Hinduism and Buddhism, which see events repeating themselves in endlessly repeated yugas and kalpas.
Consistent with this, although prehistorics knew nature more intimately than we generally do, they did not analyze, classify, and exactly measure things in the scientific way that we do. So they did not exactly measure time either. History, however, is the measurement of time, linearly — from past through present to future. Prehistoric people did not think in these historical terms, but mythologically. A myth recounts an event believed to have occurred, but timelessly — not at any particular, precisely measured date. It happened “once upon a time,” and in a sense continues to happen now and forever.
The relationship of Yin Age people to nature and the environment was emotional and subjective rather than rational, analytical, and objective. Since they saw nature as consisting only of living beings with souls rather than of soulless abstract forces, laws, and principles, they related to these beings emotionally, with love, hate, fear, awe, etc., the way we relate to other people and animals.
When Women Were Kings
Then, at the Dawn of History, about 4,000 BC, the big sex change occurred. We humans started the yang period of our life on Earth, which has continued until today. Since then, humanity has become increasingly yang. Increasingly people felt a strong sense of separation and detachment from nature and the environment. This produced greater individuality, stronger egos, and nonconformity when struggling for high beliefs and ideals, for God, and for glory.
The prevailing attitude became increasingly heroic. We see examples in the personalities and myths of the time: Abraham, Moses, Prometheus, Jesus, Buddha, Socrates. The Yang Age began, in fact, with the “Heroic Age,” exemplified by Homer’s heroes — Achilles, Ulysses, and the rest.
During this age the human race struggles against nature rather than lives in harmony with it. It changes, exploits, and conquers it. In short, the human attitude toward nature becomes inventive, creative, dynamic, and constructive, but also macho, supercilious, hostile, and destructive.
The religions of the age — the world religions of Zoroastrianism, Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, and Buddhism — reflect the growing trend toward maleness, especially the first four. Religions became increasingly based on worship of the Father and father-figures.
Society, reflecting the growing ability and desire to divide and classify, divided itself into a rigid and institutionalized class structure and male supremacist sexual structure. And, to say that the Yang Age began with the dawn of history means that the human race started thinking in terms of history. In the yangest parts of the world, mainly the West, humans replaced the yin, prehistoric cyclical-mythical view of time with the yang, historical-linear view. Increasingly they carefully and precisely measured time in terms of events occurring in precise years and dates.
The rise of the yang peaked with the development and world supremacy of science in modern times. The scientific spirit and world view, while ignoring or belittling all the female-yin attributes, emphasize all the male-yang ones: cool detachment, objective observation, classifying into categories, analyzing and measuring, rationally thinking out hypotheses and empirically testing them by experiment, eliciting abstract, objective laws of the universe and axioms, and applying them to “master” nature, “conquer” disease, and “use” this knowledge to create the comforts, conveniences, and efficiencies of modern high-tech life.
East-West Divide
We are now at the end of the Yang Age. We are reacting against it as part of the struggle to revive and reassert the yin elements that it repressed. As a result we tend to see the features of the Yang Age as collectively all bad. This is a good time to nip such thinking in the bud. The yangification of the human race was just as much positive, if not more so, as negative for the human spirit and the evolution of the universe. Second, the very idea of seeing something as all good or all bad, in black and white terms, is itself a feature of the Yang Age. Though it has roots in the Yin Age, Good vs. Bad thinking appears clearly for the first time in early religions of the Yang Age such as Zoroastrianism and Manicheanism, as well as in Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. It appears as God vs. the Devil. So paradoxically, at the very moment we hope to go beyond the Yang Age, by the very fact that we “devilize” it, we fall into the trap of a very negative type of Yang Age thinking.
Not only was the Yang Age not all negative, it was not all yang. The West became much yanger than the East. For example, the three main Western world religions — Judaism, Christianity, and Islam — are much more yang than the three main Eastern world religions, Hinduism, Hinayana Buddhism, and Mahayana Buddhism. Eastern cultures evolved in a yang direction like Western ones, but retained many yin characteristics from prehistory. In the East, yin and yang features coexisted with relatively equal force — although juxtaposed rather than integrated. As a result, the intense conflict between yin and yang and the strong repression of yin by yang that typified Western cultures was less pronounced in the East.
The more intense yangness of the West over the East is also exemplified by the fact that modern science, high tech, and materialist ideologies and lifestyles like capitalism and communism — extreme forms of the yang world view — developed foremost in the West rather than the East.
What happened, then, was a remarkable sexual symmetry. A male, yang pole of culture sprang up in Jerusalem, the orientation point of most of Western culture, while a female, yin pole sprang up in Varanasi (Benares), the orientation point of much of Eastern culture. The three main religions of the West and the three world religions of the East looked to these two holy cities, respectively. These two cities, Jerusalem in the West and Varanasi in the East, may be seen as the male and female poles of human culture.
In addition to developing more fully in the West than in the East (and in non-
Western cultures generally), the yang world view developed more among men than among women, more in the cities than in the country, and more in the upper classes than in the lower.
The Androgynous Future
What does the Sex Model tell us about the future, the Age of Androgyny? It tells us that it will be a synthesis, an integration on all levels of life — personal, social, political, economic, and religious — of our prehistoric yin-female roots with our historic male yangism. The synthesis will balance the female and male principles in an equilibrium that history has never before experienced, except perhaps in isolated societies and individuals.
As the following examples show, the global move toward androgyny has already started. We will continue to be aware of a growing reassertion of subjectivity, feelings, emotional hunches, and gut feelings in the West and among men, where the emphasis has been on the opposite. In the yinner East and among women, the trend will continue to be in the opposite direction — toward objectivity, coolness, analysis, detachment, and scientific achievement.
As noted, the yin principle sees everything as a whole, not as divided into parts. The movement toward holism has gained ground since the 1960s, and will strengthen. In the same yin-holistic spirit, the urge to live in harmony rather than in conflict with nature will continue to grow, along with the related ecology and environmental movements.
Consistent with this, the animal rights movement will be even more of a major political force. Feeling the spirit of Albert Schweitzer’s “reverence for life,” humans will know that we must “do the right thing” regarding other life forms simply because it’s the right thing to do. We will defend the rights of animals not through reason, nor through arguments that it is better for the economy, for human survival, for our health, nor even out of compassion — but because our growing yin-female sensitivity imbues us with the need to do so. We will eventually discard hunting, cruel “sports,” and probably meat-eating to be in touch and in harmony with ourselves. A spiritual imperative drives this movement, the same one that caused us to end cannibalism, slavery, and political tyranny.
As we saw, in tune with the yang, non-holistic tendency to divide into parts, the Yang Age divided society into rigid class and caste structures and the male-supremacist sexual structure. As the holistic spirit of the Androgynous Age spreads, it causes both the class structure and male supremacy to vanish. It makes society horizontal and whole.
The process of integrating East and West — the world’s yin side with its yang side — is underway and will intensify. Eastern religions, customs, attitudes, ideas, and practices will continue to spread Westward, while Western religions, ideologies, and customs will continue to go East. The latter include not only Christianity and Marxism, but also capitalism, democracy, the scientific spirit, and high technology. They also include subtler things, such as the Western habit of expressing opinions directly and from a position of equality — even if this means neglecting traditional politeness and deference to superiors.
Since the Sex Model explains this East-West integration in sexual terms, one may see it as a “sex act,” in which the female East and the male West are having cross-cultural “intercourse,” leading to the “birth” of a new world culture that combines the best (and worst?) of both “parental” cultures. The accompanying ecstasy will boost the human race up to a higher evolutionary stage.
Synthesis, Gays, God, and Total Time
In today’s Western-yang-dominated culture, the urge to analyze, to study parts of things in limitless detail, has the upper hand over the opposite, yin urge to synthesize, to be comprehensive and see the “big picture.” Specialists and experts rule the roost. Those who dip into all areas just enough to get a feel for the whole are told by specialists, jealously guarding their bit of over-cultivated turf, to “keep off.”
In the field of history, for instance, most historians have felt that all you could do with history was to analyze it. And so they study each country or category — French history, Japanese history, art history, science history — separately and relentlessly. Attempts to tie all the categories together in a comprehensive way, by means of macrohistory, for example, meet with skepticism and worse. This is especially true now that the Marxist economics-based class-struggle macrohistory is in official discredit.
But in coming androgynous times, in tune with the reasserted yin, holistic spirit, the urge to synthesize in big pictures will strengthen. We will synthesize as much as analyze. This Sex Model is an example; it’s totally synthetic history. Of course, too much synthesis can be as dangerous and vacuous as too much analysis. Airy, sweeping generalizers can cause as much trouble as heavily blinkered specializers. Too much yin is as bad as too much yang.
People ask, “Does androgyny mean that everyone will become gay?” Gays in a way are a physical embodiment of androgyny — they have the sexuality of one sex in the body of the other. But this does not mean that all gay people are necessarily androgynous on the spiritual level here in question. That depends on the individual. Gays are as individually different as straights — some more yin, others more yang. Androgyny therefore does not mean that everyone will become physically gay. But it does mean that gayness will no longer be oppressed and repressed. It is part of nature and the whole. A percentage of people in every culture are naturally gay, and the line between gay and straight in an individual can be quite fuzzy. The oppression of homosexuality was part of the overall suppression of nature and of the non-holistic thinking of the Yang Age. As said, as people androgynize, they live in tune with nature, rather than in conflict with it. They “naturally” live in harmony with that part of the whole which is gayness — in the world and in themselves.
In religion, humanity will replace the male-oriented, Father-God religious feeling with an androgynous sense of God. Even the established Father-God religions that will continue to exist — Judaism, Christianity, Islam — will androgynize their God.
And now it’s time to say a word about time. Since we will look at history synthetically as a totality, we will develop a new sense of time that corresponds to this view. In the Yin Age we had Cyclical Time. In the Yang Age we have historical-Linear Time. The Androgynous Age will be the time of Total Time: we will develop the ability to be so aware of past, present, and future as a single unity that we will see time as a totality.
Women on Stage and in the Wings
Feminism is the most basic trend of the Sex Model — the driving force behind the move toward the androgynous future. It changes the consciousness of women everywhere, even of women who think they have no affinity with it or claim not to be feminists. Without the changes in women’s consciousness that feminism spawned, men’s consciousness would stay in the old, yang mold, as would all of human society. Two results of this change of consciousness will be the growing political power of women and the change in the nature of male-female sex and love relationships over the next 50 to 100 years.
In the late 60s and early 70s, three women served as elected heads of state: Indira Gandhi in India, Mme. Bandaranaike in Sri Lanka, and Golda Meir in Israel. It was the first time in history that women had reached such high elected positions. Since then, many more have, in countries too numerous to mention. As the Androgynous Age proceeds, countries will increasingly turn to women for leadership. In the beginning of that age, women will probably outnumber men in top positions — a reaction to the long period of “yangocracy.” Women will be chosen for leadership especially in countries where one would least expect it, in the Islamic countries. (Not all women leaders will do great jobs. Some will fail miserably. But that simply enhances the sexual equality of androgyny. It proves that women can be as unsuccessful as leaders as men, and equally unpopular.)
Sex and Love: Too Yang To Really Be In Love
Finally, what does the Sex Model suggest will be the future of sex and love — especially between men and women — over the next 50 to 100 years.
Traditionally in the Yang Age, women and men have tended to behave differently sexually — with many exceptions, of course. Men have tended to be what is pejoratively called “promiscuous.” They go from one sex partner to another, never becoming too sexually attached to any particular one. Even while involved with or possessive of his partner, he will seldom be averse to having sex with another when possible. Women have tended to do the opposite. They practice “commitment.” Before having sex with a possible partner, women are not particularly attached to him. They take many men into consideration as a possible co-parent or life partner before taking the plunge. But after sex, women tend to get very attached to the sex partner of choice. It becomes very hard for her to separate from him, even when she realizes that she made “the wrong choice.” While attached, she will avoid sex with other males. Let me repeat, not all men or women follow these patterns. Not all are that yang or that yin, respectively. These are just the general tendencies.
As one can see, this pattern fits the yin and yang distinction well. Yang-leaning men are detached from their environment, in this case a series of sex partners. Yin-leaning women get very attached to their environment, in this case the sex partner with whom closeness has reached the point of physical “intimacy.”
“Intimacy” is probably not the right word. Intimacy seems to imply spiritual closeness — deep familiarity, mutual understanding, empathy, mutual acceptance, and a spiritual bond (“We are kindred souls.”) — like that between deep friends. The woman who has sex with a man, and simply feels “committed” to him because she is attached to him in a super-yin way, is probably no more intimate with him, in that spiritual sense, than the super-yang “promiscuous” man is with his various sex partners.
The difference in sensibility between yangish men and yinnish women leads to a difference between what men expect from a relationship and what women expect. So, no matter how romantic and passionate a relationship starts, the difference causes conflicts to arise, the romance and passion to wear off, and the relationship to deteriorate. Exceptions to this pattern seem few and far between.
But in the Androgynous Age, both sexes will integrate yin sexual attachment with yang sexual detachment. Men and women will have similar sexual styles and feelings. They will express through love-making a balance between the yin style (stronger feelings and emotional involvement) and the yang style (the desire for variety, spontaneity, fun, adventure, and plain lust). Unlike today’s normal yin or yang people, tomorrow’s androgynous people will not fly into jealous rages, shouting “betrayal” or “infidelity,” as soon as they hear that their partners have other deep or casual sex partners.
I suspect that all that will prevent any potential sex situation from becoming real will be bad timing, physical inability, and the normal case-by-case cautions: fear of getting sexually transmittable diseases, of unwanted pregnancies, of “fatal attraction” situations with emotionally unstable men or women, the desire to avoid hurting vulnerable second or third parties, and the desire to keep sexual overindulgence or addiction under control.
So, 21st century sexual styles will probably resemble today’s styles in forming friendships or in loving close relatives. No one normally has just one close friend or relative, but no one normally feels jealous or betrayed about a friend’s or relative’s other friends or relatives. Each such relationship is allowed to go its own organic way as far as it can. The reason lasting sexual bonds will come to resemble these friendship or family bonds is probably related to the fact that what enables a sexual relationship to last, even when romance and passion give way to everyday life and familiarity, is the friendship or feeling of intimacy between the partners.
Once women and men share a similar, androgynous feeling about relationships, they can relate more deeply. They can be intimate and committed in the true — not yin-biased — spiritual meanings of the terms. Love bonds will last longer, yet not be narrowly focused on one person. The minds and bodies of women and men will truly meet. The pioneers of the Androgynous Age will succeed therefore in reconciling the basic contradiction that couples face in the Yang Age: the urge to be deeply intimate with each other and the urge to have sex with a variety of people. In today’s Yang Age, few men or women reconcile this contradiction successfully.
The Androgynous Adult
Interestingly, the most adult countries of the world (according to the Age Model), the Scandinavian countries and the Netherlands, seem also to be the most advanced in all the above-discussed androgynous trends, including the latter two. Women there are in the forefront of political and social leadership, and men and women have become more alike in their sexual sensibilities there than anywhere else. The Age Model partly explains the reason for this. For it shows that the now-beginning Adult Age of the Age Model coincides in time with the Androgynous Age of the Sex Model. This implies that adulthood and androgyny go hand in hand.
I have found no better way to express and confirm this connection than the way Ken Wilber does here in his book, Up From Eden:
Conversely, the less evolved and intelligent a person is the more he or she displays stereotypical male or female characteristics defined by the animal body from which the self has not yet differentiated. Most developed personalities display a balance and integration of both masculine and feminine principles, and are thus mentally androgynous, whereas less developed individuals tend to display the stereotypical attitudes of their particular sex.
(ends)
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