A wise man once told me that the man is the head, while the woman is the neck.  And a woman has the power to turn the head of the man in any direction she chooses.

While I love Beyoncé and am enamored of her talent, her beauty, and ability to take creative risks I have a little bit of an issue with the fact her most recent album sparked such a debate once again about “feminisim”.  While you will find 1,980,000 results if you Google Beyoncé + Feminism (seriously) that stake claims on every side of the debate imaginable, I’m just downright tired of talking about it.

Why can we not get past this?

Before we can even discuss this we must admit that there is a double edge sword for any woman who chooses the entertainment industry as her craft.  They can’t win.  While this industry has certain rules the majority of those rules do NOT apply for other women in other industries at large.

So let’s begin.

If you’re a fan of Beyoncé, whether you are black or white (because it really shouldn’t matter!) then you most likely have heard her song and watched the video of Run The World (Girls).  I’ll admit it’s a powerful video and one of my favorites.

But even the famed Mrs. Carter salutes her “man” at the end of the video. Is it possible to be a feminist and salute your man?

Maybe we should be talking about this instead?  Maybe just maybe we could finally get a handle on what it means to be feminine and what it means to be a woman.

I can’t remember the feminist who was quoted, but what she said hit me like a ton of bricks. It was something along the lines of: “I didn’t fight the feminist battle for 30 years so a woman could act like a man in some corporate board room.”

She went on to say that she wanted EVERYTHING to change so as to better reflect the more than half the population that is female: the shape of buildings, our modes of transportation, our pastimes, our culture overall.

Which ultimately brings up the question of what economic system would we be operating under if women had an equal say from the very start of the United States; Western history?

It’s a staggering concept.

But, modern feminism is evil because it has ultimately made women (and men) unhappy. American women over the last 35 years have steadily become less and less happy, as they have made more and more money relative to men.  Women used to be a lot happier than men despite the fact that they made much less money than men.

The sex gap in happiness (in women’s favor) has declined in the past 35 years as the sex gap in pay (in men’s favor) narrowed.  Now women make as much as, sometimes even more than, men do.  As a result, today women are just as unhappy, or even more unhappy than, men are!

Not only that,our children are suffering. Maybe Mars Needs Moms needs to be revisited too?

Perhaps, the difficulty for many of today’s career women is that in order to compete with men, we’ve morphed into them. 

We’ve worked ourselves half to death in order to conquer the career ladder, yet in the process we’ve trampled our core femininity into the ground.  We must stop competing with men, competition is totally destructive.

According to a Mintel report, 39 per cent of the adult population is single – that is 19 million people – and this is expected to rise to 41 per cent by 2011.

Clearly, men and women are increasingly out of sync, and the key could be in learning to re-balance ourselves as women and reclaim our essential softness.

Women in the 80s learned that they could attract male attention by participating in wet t-shirt contests, and by the new millennium femininity meant flashing one’s bare breasts for the TV crews of Girls Gone Wild. Today women display their feminine assets by making out with other chicks for the entertainment of guys, showing as much flesh as possible when they go out, and grinding into guys’ junk every chance they get. Yet many men argue that this aggressive form of sexuality is anything but feminine!

For women, the problem with this approach is that it is not getting us what we want, beyond short-term sexual validation from the male. By aggressively displaying our biological difference, we’ve gone from 0 to 60 mph without any of the art, or “wiles” our great grandmothers used to draw men in, both physically and emotionally.

We should be teaching our girls that it’s no real achievement to give a guy wood. But, to engage his curiosity and pique his interest, and to encourage that interest over time to comprise emotional investment is far more difficult.

Maybe we need to revisit the idea of the original sin?

Well, guess what—the original sin was not about sex and Eve was not the first to fall, nor even Adam. Why has this myth persisted through the centuries? Because there are seen and unseen forces rampant throughout history whose very existence depends on keeping the people ignorant of the Light within:their Christ potential and the path of the Buddhas and Yogis.

Eve was not necessarily created second and she certainly was not a second class citizen. No, the concept of her coming from Adam has more to do with Spirit coming first, represented by Adam, then the Matter plane or mater, Eve, is infused with the Light of Alpha or Adam; creating a place and physical temple to live in.

There were two trees visible to Adam and Eve. They were the Tree of Life and the Tree of Knowledge or the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil.  The Tree of Life was real, more real than anything physical because the physical can perish. Not so the Tree of Knowledge. It was Adam and Eve’s direct connection to God and their God Self above, the Mighty I AM Presence.

Since both were brand new souls on planet Earth, Adam having the stronger Alpha tie to Spirit might have felt a little more comfortable in his etheric, semi-physical skin. Eve, embodying the Mother flame was tethered a little more to the matter plane, therefore susceptible to the curiosity of all that the matter plane has to offer.

Today however, because man has a more natural affinity for the etheric planes, by divorcing himself from Spirit, he is more adrift. Woman, more at ease with the spiritual nature of the matter plane, the divine feminine and the spiritual essence of the Mother flame; is more inclined to the Spiritual Path and needs to hold the vision for man of his true spiritual nature.

However, if we drag his attention downward to the lower chakras by our dress, actions and consciousness, then we’re all going to be on this planet a lot longer than need be.

Without knowing the cause behind the effect it is only natural to assume that sex is somehow connected to the “fall”.

Eve and woman have carried this burden of false condemnation long enough.  Perhaps, it is time to become whole and realize the Divine Feminine in all. And maybe that’s what Beyoncé is really trying to say.

True, femininity is about an internal experience with your self.

Sex is only a natural consequence of evolving on this planet.

In nearly every culture on earth, femininity and masculinity are opposites. They exist on a continuum, and there is considerable variation in the natural population. No straight man wants to be perceived as effeminate, and no straight woman can bear the thought of coming across as manly.

However, research does show that prenatal hormones influence brain development, which will influence behavior. Female fetuses exposed to higher levels of testosterone in utero are more likely to exhibit masculine behaviors from birth, and the reverse is also true.

As always, nature plays a role.

Sure, most women are indeed very feminine at their core, but just because you’re a woman doesn’t mean you show up as feminine. This is not an insult.

This is a call to you to let who you really are show up for real, before your life passes you by.

We are all either more masculine or feminine at our core, and when this is suppressed, either by choice or through conditioning (usually a combination of both) we become dead human beings. Think of people waiting on the seats on the subway in the morning.

As the common argument goes: “as long as I am a woman, I am feminine!” Being a woman and being feminine apparently go hand-in-hand.

That’s like saying that starting a business means it will succeed, or because it’s an orange, it must be sweet.

Femininity is about an internal experience with your self and clothes are about the external appearance. 

Your clothes can be a tool to remind you of it; a way of tapping into the essence of who you are. 

But, this has nothing to do with showing cleavage, for example, as there is nothing less sexy than enforced femininity. Femininity is all about being relaxed with yourself.

Most women are more than happy to get dressed up, buy clothes that are on trend but clothes they don’t need, and wear bucket-loads of make up. This is not femininity. This is a trigger, and ‘cue’ or a ‘sign’ of femininity. And, it definitely has enormous value.

However, there’s a problem when this becomes the only idea of femininity.

Being feminine doesn’t mean being weak and dependent. It means embracing your identity as a woman (black or white).

The appearance of femininity is meaningless without the inner experience of it.

It is true that, in all human societies, men largely control all the money, politics, and prestige.  They do, because they have to, in order to impress women.  Women don’t control these resources, because they don’t have to.

So, what do women control?  Men.

Live and Learn. We All Do.

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