I was born too late to count as a Flower Child, and feminism has been on the rocks since the moral betrayal of white college-educated women in last year's election, so the following cry from the gut needs a lot more context than I have the time to write now, but I set this down as a start: We need the Goddess, and we need her bad.
To this point, I am loving this graphic, which I first saw a few weeks ago across a woman's ample bosom at open-mic night at Skunk Hollow Tavern:
And thank God(dess) for Wonder Woman's appearance in a theater near you this summer. Was a film ever needed more urgently? I loved seeing this WW-inspired street art in LA on a recent work trip:
But I am tired of women's power and leadership being something we have to buy a movie ticket – or a plane ticket to Germany – to see while letting the male power structure remain in tact and fierce. I can't stomach the women who will override their own better judgement to protect their Men in Charge, which includes the men who share their beds and the little men whose lunch boxes they fix every morning. (See: Why Hillary Clinton Was Right About White Women & Their Husbands) We've got so much more work to do than we realized.
Let me back up to say how much I love the Enlightenment, broadly speaking a theist ideology of the intrinsic and equal worth of all people from which we "freedom-loving" Americans (and I'm not being sarcastic) have all benefited from a centuries'-long rise in respect for individual rights, taking political form from the American Revolution to the Civil War to the Civil Rights era to today. For this long arc of history, I'm eternally grateful and committed to its furtherance. But as we get closer to actual equality, the forces of the old order asserting male dominance ~ particularly white male dominance ~ don't want to let go. (And, it seems, on average the more intimate one is with a white male, the less likely one is to challenge that order and join forces to usher in the next Enlightenment of Humanity, in which all people are truly valued equally.) Who is to blame for this?
The Big White Guy in the Sky. We all know Him, the one with the long white beard who sits us comfortingly on his knee when we get hurt and speaks in a stern low voice to correct us when we've been bad. Even the most devout atheists, I would argue, have a relationship with That Guy somewhere deep down. As much as we try to expand our spiritual imaginations, no matter how much yoga we do or science we practice, He's still got us all in His grip.
Nicole Krauss bit off a piece of this issue in tackling the question of whether women get to write with authority in this weekend's NYTimes Magazine. Her argument carries big authority with me, earned by her extraordinary power as a writer. It also resonates with me as I finish a first feature film in a year when women film directors lost ground in 2016, directing only 7% of the 250 top grossing films. If there is any place where a woman's authority must be strong and will be tested, it is in the making of a film, from start to finish. (I have SO MANY more thoughts on this topic for another post.)
And when I say He's still got us all in His grip, I include white men as victims of this archaic and destructive power structure. As the mother of three young white men in the making, I don't want them to surrender their full, distinctive and gorgeous humanity to the absurd miniaturization of the white male dominant gorilla model. (Thankfully, my very enlightened white male husband joins me in the mission to protect their full humanity, as we seek to help each other reclaim our own.)
Our problem is millennia in the making, so why did I expect we'd level this playing field in my life time? On a recent visit to the Getty Villa in Pacific Palisades to celebrate the completion of post-production on my film, I saw several statues that struck me. One was a pair of Egyptian portraits of the goddess Isis and her male counterpart (whose name I can't remember, ha!). They were displayed side-by-side, each with penetrating gazes that look straight into and through your innermost soul. Another pair of pre-Christian Roman statues depicted a Goddess and God, again I forget the names, again side-by-side, she his equal in body size and fortitude.
Maybe the curators at the Getty chose the equal footing of these displays to suit their contemporary audience, but I was captivated by the mere fact of female + male godheads. Even those who reject religion all together learned that Monotheism was "progress" over pagan religions, many of which upheld female god figures associated with Nature. So much has been written and studied on this subject, and it's not my goal to venture into an academically rigorous discourse on this. (I make movies because I have a short attention span and want to be entertained!)
But I want to put words to the very personal stake I feel in this historical development and why it infuriates me: Unity was not integration, it was domination. The domination of male over female. The domination of technology and culture over nature. With the promulgation of monotheism beyond the ancient world through empire and colonialism, the domination of white over brown.
As long as God has to be ONE, we will keep looking to One among us who was made in His Image, and despite our best efforts to broaden our minds, we all know what he looks like: Tom Brady.
Many in my closest circles escape this problem by rejecting all traditional religion and claiming atheist exemption from the mess; others who remain committed to lives rooted in relationship with the Divine solve it by modifying prayer books to adopt gender-inclusive language. My concern is that these choices can go both too far and not far enough.
Complicating the matter is the fact that we can't foresake belief in "the One" without foresaking also the intellectual foundation of our Enlightenment claim to the equal worth of all human beings. We must agree on a unifying essence that conveys equal worth to all, or else open the floodgates to (organized and disorganized) ideologies of racial and gender superiority that have justified measureless violence and dehumanization. Why is belief required? Because there isn't anything that fixes this value in the material circumstances of our existence. (Also, I love that the word "believe" comes from the same root as "beloved," in other words, to attach oneself to a beloved idea.) On the other end of the spectrum, the well-intended idea that a few keystrokes at the publishers can gender-neutralize prayerbooks (in the case of our tradition, the Jewish Siddur) is folly. How can we possibly wrap our heads around a gender-neutral unified godhead, when we haven't yet figured out how to let people chose which bathroom they want to use? (Please watch every episode of Transparent and Jill Soloway's brilliant talk on the Female Gaze)
And how unfair is it that just at the moment when we need a massive re-balancing of the gendered universe, secular society has decided that God is dead and fundamentalist religions are doubling down on the authoritarian He-God? How legit would it be (to use my 12-year old's parlance) if the Goddess decided to give a little Revelation action, say on Mount Ascutney up here in Vermont? A second Sinai, a new set of tablets, the missing half... For, like, all of human history, power struggles among peoples have played out in the heavens ~ "our god(s)" triumphing over "their god(s)," proving our more chosen lot over you. I'd love for the Goddess to have it out with the He-God, whack him off his smug butt and save the world, etc. but it's too late ~ no one dares believe that stuff any more. So we leave it to the Special Effects artists to give us Wonder Woman on the job and keep hope alive for a female president.
So, I too am in search of smaller gods. I feel divine grace and flow in my life. I'm striving to listen to voices, not just The Voice, that whisper truths to me. To allow angels peddling dreams to bring uncomfortable realities of my life to conscious mind upon waking. To trust the wisdom of my female body in delivering three new lives to the world, and for releasing two others who were not meant to be. To lean into my role as director with curiosity about how my instincts of leadership may differ from male colleagues. To place value on the work I do to nurture others, including raising children who happen to be little men, which is not recognized on IMDB or a pay stub, and to fight to hold space for the stirrings of my own imagination, the ethical compass of my particular soul, and my unique powers to create. Until She/They show up to prove how we are all equally welcome at the One Party, I'm seeking the Wonder Woman state of mind.
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