29 Nov Transforming Sex and Class Oppression, Part 3: It’s Happening Now!
Welcome to part 3!
This post is the third in the transforming patterns of internalised sex and class training series. While the plan was for this to be the last post in this series, in the last 3 months, another one has come into being and I am planning to call that one, “Under My Wing”. Due to me not having as much capacity as I would like to write and share these, which means that I end up writing them up to a year after the event happened, I am planning to give less attention to smoothness of this one and to instead focus on pulling together the material and getting it out there.
The first post, “how post-its can support liberation” focused on my own process of unearthing a deeper awareness about the manifestations and impacts of sex and class training within me . The second, “sister solidarity and male allyship” outlined one method we experimented with, in our wider group, in an attempt to bring that same awareness more into collective holding. Following the learnings of the sister solidarity and male allyship agreements This third post follows our journey of bringing an even deeper awareness of the phenomenon of sex and class training into our collective. From here, the posts focus more specifically on sex training, given that it expands beyond only me and Eddy. To understand more about Eddy’s and my relationship and how we are orienting to holding this topic, which is the foundation of all of this work, please read post 1.
The necessity for another step
The sister solidarity experiment revealed a number of key pieces that led to me seeing the need to deepen the collective understanding and holding of this topic.
Based on the reflections and responses that the men had to the sister solidarity agreement, it was clear to me that they were not getting what it was about, some of them without any sense of how it connected to what was actually happening around them.
The women were still impacted by the men’s actions and fundamental lack of getting it, even with us running the experiment for a number of weeks.
There was some confusion among the women about the strategy, even while we overall were together in relation to the underlying impacts.
I was unwilling to continue to absorb the impacts from male training, to do these deep experiments in community, and to live together without co-holding this layer of the women’s experience with the men.
I wanted there to be a way for the women to share the impacts and gradually decompress and come into contact with our organic giving again in relation to men.
What to do about all this, how to bring women’s experience into more co-holding with the men, and even by some of the women, was a dilemma. The impact was particularly pronounced for me with Eddy because of the depth of co-holding we have overall, and therefore the experience of the pain in the gap with him was more pronounced. At this point the impacts I was carrying within me were so immense and built up, I was near, and sometimes actually, exploding with them. I asked Sabrina for support and we mapped what was happening in me, revealing more clearly the gnarly picture that I was carrying. Unfortunately I no longer have the actual picture of the mapping we did. However, I gave a presentation of the map to the group, which I want to share with you.
This presentation marked the beginning of the “It’s happening now” experiment.
Beginning the “It’s Happening Now” Experiment
The spectrum of other orientation
I marked out a spectrum. On one end of it is “the man orients to the woman, her needs, when she is complete, etc” on the other end of the spectrum is “man does what he wants regardless of the woman’s needs”.
An example of the right-hand side of the spectrum: I shared an experience of talking with Eddy about something shortly before I had done the mapping. I don’t remember what we were talking about, and the content doesn’t matter, “so you know,” he said, “I’m orienting to you and to when you are done”.
I was somewhat taken aback by this. I see that the experience of a male-trained person orienting towards me and what is actually arising in me, and to when I am done is actually quite rare to the point of being an almost alien experience. I don’t think I actually have that experience in my history, at least not to the extent that it shows up as a clear memory that I can lean on. So it was kind of hard for me to know how to orient.
An example at the other end of the spectrum: This, which I am more familiar with, is imposition of male needs over female needs. At the very far end of the spectrum, that can look like rape. However there are many more subtle and insidious ways in which this happens which are much more frequent. This can look like: men speaking first, women being spoken over, men speaking for a long time without tracking what’s happening in the group and what others’ needs might be, men primarily getting emotional and physical comfort from women, or men initiating physical contact without attuning to whether it is also wanted by the woman. And these are only a few examples.
Co-holding the impacts of male training
The primary challenge that I have discovered with co-holding the interaction between male and female training is in two parts. One part is the prevalence and often invisibility of the impacts of male training to the men.The other is the constancy of the impacts on women alongside the frequency with which we often doubt and question ourselves about our experience.
For example: Eddy, Luca and Fox are in the kitchen together, there is a loud jokey energy and my nervous system is piqued. I enjoy laughing and joking together, and there is something about the energy of this that to me feels disconnected, both within itself, and from the surrounding environment. Rather than being drawn to join it, I feel that I want more to avoid that space. When I bring this up at some later point, we uncover the reality that oftentimes for men, joking together in this way is actually about being able to interact on top of the more vulnerable layers that they are habituated not to share, so the disconnect I sensed was in some way accurate.
The impact of this is both relational, in that I experience some energy of being pushed away, and physical distance through me staying away, both of which arise through this subtle sensation of disconnect. And yet it’s so subtle, it’s hard to know what to do with it. What would I do, go and ask them to stop laughing? Finding an empowered way to orient to situations such as this when our primary mode in relation to male training is some degree of self-doubt, and it’s not even entirely clear what is going on, is a tall order. This is the kind of insidious ground where absorption and the ongoing whittling away of women’s goodwill in relation to men happens more and more over time.These are places where, for me, I can’t always pinpoint exactly what it is, but I sense that thing is happening.
The prevalence of self-doubt as a primary block
There are a number of reasons why women do not bring up impacts to men: firstly, in some situations, to greater extremes in different parts of the world, there is the possibility of actual violence or death; secondly, with the pervasive invisibility of the impacts of male training to men themselves, even though they too are hugely impacted in terms of life-connectedness, it simply can seems anything from suicidal to futile to try to share impacts with them, especially if we are not part of a network of women who are closely supporting one another in catalysing male and female liberation together; thirdly, self-doubt.
It is in this area of self-doubt that I actually have a lot of self-appreciation. Even though I may not know what the thing is that I am sensing, or may be quite jumbled inside about what I am trying to share, there is an imperative in me to bring this stuff forward and to try and find some way to hold it together. It’s as if there is a place in me that actually refuses to give up on the humanity of both myself and my brothers. I want us to be able to co-hold this phenomenon, and I will go to quite some lengths to try and find that together. For many women, however, this is not so available.
Here’s an example: when I pointed out to one of the women that she was spoken over several times by one of the men in the group she said “Oh, I thought so and then I see that I was actually judging myself when that happened, I tell myself that I don’t say things that are important.”
This example is a tiny part of what happens a lot. In these instances, the weight and self-suppressing nature of the self-judgements that come as a way of understanding what just happened, alongside the prevalence of the impacts from male-training themselves that happen is immense.
And, in addition, the women I have connected with, who come from many different continents and backgrounds, also have many other thoughts about these kinds of experiences that they do not share, such as “oh, this guy’s talking for a long time” or “It’s a man that spoke first again”.
Imagine that you’re sitting with a bunch of people, a man starts the conversation and you immediately have all this happening inside; “it’s a man starting again… does he think that going first is helping the group get going or something? Didn’t he see that X was about to speak? I can’t believe I’m thinking this about him, I should be listening and being with him, I can’t believe I always end up wrapped in my own thoughts, I’m such a bad listener” etc. While all of this is going on within us, it’s no wonder that many women don’t actually connect with something they want to say. The weight of it is so much that there’s barely any space to be able to actually articulate within ourselves what’s going on for us because the interaction of male and female training is constantly eroding our ability to connect with what we want for ourselves and to be able to say it and stand by it. So my self-appreciation is that having the strength to be able to actually articulate these things and share them within the group and with the men is actually a pretty huge thing.
When self-doubt is not an issue for any woman, we face another huge hurdle which looks like needing to fight, needing to show up and be stronger, to match the male-tained energy field that is not looking to integrate or see how we can go forwards together. The exhaustion of relating in this way is palpable, immense, and it is the lesser trodden path, both because of the energy and personal-power it takes, and because it is costly to relationships with men in a different way, since we are not going along and simply taking it.
Of course, there are likely other ways of orienting within this dynamic that I am either not aware of or not naming here, and the point is to surface the effort it takes to be in an actual flow of collaboration between those of us who received female training and those of us who received male training, unless the men present have done significant work to liberate from male training and the women present have found sufficient personal power and self-trust.
Where I want to go from here: It’s happening now
With the amorphous nature of all this and how it was playing out in our group, I saw that we first needed a path forwards that could support us to explore what was going on. It was clear to me that without the women having a path to say that we believed something was happening, and that was within capacity for us by bypassing the internal noise, it was unlikely that anything would move, since the men, for the most part, simply did not see it.
The solution I came up with was to say “It’s happening now” as soon as we experienced something happening with the men that was disconnecting or impactful for us, regardless of whether there was actually something happening.
This phrase, along with naming explicitly when we would say it, is an example of anchoring an agreement that is oriented toward interrupting a pattern.
What does anchoring an agreement mean!?
The training, or socialisation, that we each receive are aspects of the overall pattern of patriarchy playing out in our daily orientation to life. Within this, as Carol Gilligan writes in In a Human Voice, patriarchy rests “on a shaky psychological foundation, vulnerable to women knowing and men caring and contingent on everyone forgetting what they had once cared about and known.” These deep acts of forgetting, as a fundamental orientation to life which we inhabit through our respective training, serve to cut us off from one another and ourselves in different ways, and to create the kinds of situation I described above, self-doubt, and non-awareness. If we want to walk towards a world where there is easy and simple flow between those of us conditioned with male training and those of us conditioned with female training, we need to take significant diversions in a different direction in order for that to be possible. Since the habitual ways of being that we have are so deeply grooved, i.e. millenia of repetition, it takes significant energy to shift them. Anchoring agreements that interrupt and move in the direction we envision is vital if our attempts to shift the grooves are going to bear any fruit. If you are wondering here what on earth “anchoring an agreement” means, let’s look at the example of, for example, remembering to take a new medication. For some people, simply having the intention to remember to do it at a certain time each day may be enough. For many people, this likely wouldn’t result in taking it, the regular rhythms of life are too set and in flow in a certain way. If, however, you put the medication inside your muesli, it will be very hard to not see it and remember to take it – the agreement has been anchored into the very concrete reality and flow of your life; this is how we can interrupt established patterns and effectively introduce new ones.
The phrase “it’s happening now” in this instance was anchored to any thoughts or self-doubt, irritation, etc that we might have. Of course this requires a degree of self-awareness to be able to use this as an anchor, for our group it was enough, since we are experimenting in individual and collective liberation which requires a relatively high degree of self-awareness. For any of you who may be interested to experiment with an agreements like this and are in need of a more concrete anchor, some examples of this could be: sticking a note on the wall in front of the toilet asking youtube check in about any impacts you’ve not shared and what stopped you from doing so; an alarm on your phone every hour to check in with yourself about whether you’ve swallowed any irritation, and what the impact of this is on you; a group check-in at dinner where the women (or any other group that experiences systemic impacts of some kind) check-in about any instances of self-doubt, fear, etc, that prevented them from speaking up today, and what they didn’t say, if they are now able to find the courage to say it; collecting post-it notes (as I did in my first experiment), to either share with the people you are experiencing impacts from, or sharing in a support group – and these are only a few ways.
I also want to say again that our group has a high level of commitment to individual and collective liberation in relation to how we have internalised patriarchal ways of being. In other contexts, where this degree of commitment does not exist, I would recommend starting off with creating a support group, or close group of allies, comrades, liberation play-mates that you fully trust wants to explore this with you and are wholeheartedly willing to dive into the discomfort that comes from doing it. It is very delicate territory encased within a lot of sensitivity and trauma for all of us and in care for the gradual unfurling of your being and those you are engaging with, bringing together even a very small group that really wants to experiment can go very far in terms of you gradually building more strength to be able to take the experimentation further.
What if our interpretation is off…?
Back to the main-stream of meaning, of course, there may be times when our interpretation of what is happening could be off, and with the degree of self-doubts and the constancy of impacts, having anything more complex to say than “it’s happening now” weighted the probability in the direction of the same patterns continuing of nothing being said at all. Within the post-its experiment we had also been weighting the distribution of “who does the work” to translate what comes up internally in Eddy’s direction. This was because the intensity of impacts on me from his male and class training alongside the nature of the self-judgements and the history I carried within me, meant that if I also needed to do the work within me of translating what was coming up in me about it I would likely not find any capacity to share anything, and nothing would change. The principle here is about lowering the bar as much as necessary in order for flow of impact sharing to happen, while also having others in the group supporting the person receiving the impacts to be able to stay present and in choice, a task which was done by Miki in that first experiment, as she was supporting Eddy to be able to stay present and care for his own dignity while the impact sharing was unfolding.
A SIMPLE MECHANISM TO INTERRUPT PERSISTENT IMPACTS
I said to the group that the intention of the simple phrase “It’s happening now”, was both to lower the bar enough that there would be a high likelihood of the women using it, and to have a mechanism available to interrupt the pattern that matched the speed and frequency with which the impacts came. I said that it may mean that we are saying “it’s happening now…now… now…now” over and over again in a matter of minutes, and that is what would be needed in order for us to shift out of absorbing, decompress, and take steps towards a more empowered place.
From there, I saw that this next “it’s happening now” experiment was a finetuning and deepening of the sister solidarity experiment. Interrupting the flow of the status quo at the level of physical contact was one thing and it created a bit of a gap for the information carried in the women’s impacts to come through. However, the impacts happen on layers beyond physical contact that the sister solidarity agreements were unable to reach. So the new experiment would enable us to go deeper into that.
EMPOWERING THE WOMEN TO ACT
The experiment started having almost immediate effects with both Yaren and yanae saying “it’s happening now” in response to things that they never would say anything about before. The men also appreciated it after some initial digestion of what it was pointing at and what it meant. For example, when a man was the one to start the conversation at dinner and someone said “it’s happening now”, this soon became something that contained more a sense of solidarity about why it was important for us to shift that pattern. Here’s what Sabrina wrote about her experience:
When we were in Scotland together, we initiated an agreement about “it’s happening now” when one of the men would speak first or long or talk over another. It came from Eddy’s impacts from Emma and it was hugely inspiring when Emma brought it. After that I noticed myself growing more confidence around naming systemic patterns around male training through that. Earlier I would usually say nothing out of fear that it would be minimised or self-doubt that I’m imagining things. So there was a situation where I was together in a group with two men (Fox and Juri) and a woman (yanae) and somehow the conversation was only happening between the two men. I noticed tension coming up in me and I stretched a lot to say it in that moment. At first it was quite disruptive and there was some defensiveness in the men and I managed to stay vulnerable and true to myself and asked for support in co-holding that situation. Thankfully Fox stepped in then and supported our field to settle then. I remember trembling and being quite shaky from that whole interaction. And I could not have done it without the modelling of Emma.
The gifts
In relation to the three elements that I laid out in my presentation and where I wanted to experience some shift , the experiment was a huge success in its effectiveness and its simplicity. I saw that, at least in the moments of saying “it’s happening now”, it resulted in a momentary “breaking of a spell” of normal relational flow patterns and of all of us then getting more curious about whether some expression of male training was happening, and if it was, what it was that was happening in the undercurrents of it. The interruption of flow and the frequency of it brought to the surface the prevalence of the impacts, and delving deeper into the ones we did explore in more detail started to bring in more awareness for everyone about what was happening in these moments. The gifts that these discoveries brought from there started to break the spell of self-doubts and other internal noise, as it made more visible the importance of bringing feedback for the purpose of feeding our collective liberation.
The “It’s happening now” experiment brought into being another crack in the cement of preservation of patriarchal norms, specifically in relation to male and female training. This is a huge celebration for me, as I so deeply long for our collective liberation and the possibility of nurturing a culture that contains as little patriarchal patterning as is possible within our capacity to create.
I sign this off with gratitude for your companionship in following this journey. May these posts inspire you and continue to inspire you to find the strength and the passion to trust yourself and to take steps to challenge patriarchal norms within and around you in service to what your heart believes is possible.
Discover more from Emma Quayle - Embedding Nonviolence. Resourcing for Change.
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
No Comments