If I am asked, “What is a woman?” I must reply, “I know, but when you ask me, I don’t.” As soon as we become analytical and definite about things, familiar objects tend to disappear. Under the microscope, human flesh seems to disintegrate into an unfamiliar arabesque of cells. This is why scientific investigation seems so often to be a debunking of popularly held notions, for when we examine things closely and carefully, we realize that the world is a lot less easily categorizable than we might imagine.
Attention has been drawn to the unsoundness of hard and fast distinctions between male and female, masculine and feminine, based upon a bifurcation of the innate and the acquired. In the past the physiologist and biologist were expected to tell us what a woman really is; that is to say, how she was made by nature. Then came the anthropologist and the historian, and later the psychologist and psychoanalyst, to tell us how she has been distorted by culture, as if there were some fundamental difference between what man is biologically and physically, and what he becomes through cultural or self-conditioning. This would argue a basic distinction between nature and culture, between natural and artificial, and between the biological and animal on the one hand, and the human on the other. I think that this is a distinction from which our culture is actually suffering, and one to be made only with great care, realizing that it is entirely for purposes of discussion.
We make distinctions between things in order to be able to talk about them. The human body is, after all, a unity; it goes continuously all the way from top to bottom. It has some interesting parts in it, and if I want to talk about those, I describe it in the digital system of language; I have to cut the body into bits. I have to say it has a head, a neck, and shoulders, and speak about these things almost as though they were parts of a machine, which as a matter of fact they are not. This is because we have to cut things up in order to digest them, in the same way that you get a cutup fryer in the store but you don’t get cutup fryers ready chopped out of eggs.
The differences, then, between what is masculine and what is feminine must be thought of from many points of view. There are things that are typically masculine and typically feminine, using the word “typically” in a very strict and special sense, since things that are typically masculine or typically feminine have no necessary connection with biologically identifiable males or females.
For example, in psychoanalytic symbolism all long things are male and all round things are female. Aggressiveness is typically male; passivity is typically female. But we are only speaking here in a kind of symbolism that is highly useful, so long as we don’t confuse it with actual individuals, and what they are supposed to be and how they are supposed to behave. I want, then, to draw attention to a strong tendency in the Anglo-Saxon subculture of the United States to identify all value with certain stereotypes of the male and to put down and devaluate certain stereotypes of the female. This is quite a different matter from exalting men and debasing women.
I want to talk about things, attitudes, and ways of thinking that are typically male or female rather than biologically male or female.
It seems that the human mind, whatever that is—I would prefer perhaps to say the human organism—is equipped with two modes of sensitivity, which I will compare respectively to the spotlight and the floodlight or to something like central and peripheral vision in the eye. According to our system of typical symbols, the spotlight, being a pinpoint sort of thing, will be male, and the floodlight, being diffused, will be female. This is interesting, since our culture puts these two kinds of knowing in a hierarchy of values whereby the spotlight is considered much more important than the floodlight.
To be specific, the spotlight mode of consciousness is what we call conscious attention. It is the kind of attention that we use when we read or when we notice things. For example, a husband can come home from a committee meeting and his wife will say, “Well, what was Mrs. Smith wearing?” And he will say, “I didn’t notice,” even though she happened to be sitting right opposite him at the conference table. He indeed saw, his eyes registered optically what the dress was, and what its color was, but it was not noticed.
All knowledge upon which science is based, and upon which the careful description, study, and organization of the world is based, depends on noticing, or “spotlight knowledge,” and it is characteristic of this that it focuses on certain areas of experience. To the degree that it illuminates those areas brightly and comprehends them, it ignores what lies outside.
Conversely, there is the method of knowing like the floodlight. This is a way of understanding that does not notice but somehow manages to take in a whole variety of things simultaneously. In other words, you can drive your car into town without even thinking about it, using that kind of knowledge. You regulate your breathing, the secretions of your glands, the circulation of your blood, and all the homeostatic balances of the organism by this kind of diffused sensitivity. It is a curious thing that there is really no scientific name for this mode of knowing. It has been called the preconscious, the subconscious, the unconscious, the superconscious, but these are all very vague terms, lacking in precision. Yet there is quite definitely underneath the spotlight kind of attention this diffused knowledge, or awareness of all that is going on, without which we should be completely and totally lost.
However, in a culture that underestimates the value of this mode of knowledge, the academic world does almost nothing to develop it. Lynn Whyte pointed out some years ago that the academic world values only three kinds of intelligence: mnemonic intelligence, that is, good memory; computational intelligence, being able to figure; and verbal intelligence, being able to read and write. It does not, he said, develop social intelligence or kinesthetic intelligence.
Social intelligence is something that is exceedingly difficult to teach by any system of verbal instruction; you have to get it by osmosis. But the scientific temper as we have known it undervalues that sort of knowledge, because of its vagueness and uncontrollability. Therefore, we tend instead to value conceptual knowledge, and through that we get a wholly conceptual orientation toward life.
I would like to discuss what seem to me to be four principle symptoms of this one-sided orientation. Firstly, there is a tendency for symbols to be valued more highly than what they represent. For example, money becomes much more important than wealth. In other words, the symbol, or notation, for goods becomes more valuable than the goods themselves, and the reporting of things that happen becomes more valuable than the events themselves. It is a byword in the academic world today that how you are recorded in the registrar’s office is much more important than anything you did by way of study, because it is your record that counts. If you present yourself in a government office and say, “Here I am,” they say you do not exist unless you produce a piece of paper such as a birth certificate to prove that you do exist, and in the same way a lot of people don’t feel that they are really alive unless they can read about it in the newspaper.
I believe that this is the basis of a great deal of juvenile delinquency. Because you can read all about it, you can be a hero and see that you really do exist, because the record of history has put you down as being really here. So in this sense, we come to what somebody has recently called pseudo-events: the arrangement of meetings, of parties, of all sorts of affairs simply for the purpose of being written about in the newspapers or shown on television.
I am not quite sure this symposium is a pseudo-event at the moment or not, but I want to point out that the style of evaluating things so that what is on the label is more important than what is in the bottle, that the skinny cover of one’s automobile is more important than what is under the hood—that whole feeling of the symbol having primacy over the what the symbol signifies—is the result of giving an excessive valuation to noticing. In this way it is characteristic of our culture that when you get a menu in a restaurant it is far more interesting to read it than actually to eat what it stands for. This is the difference between our menus and other people’s: a French menu just gives the bare name of the dish. But here we go on to say “garnished with crispy toasted slivers of fresh farmhouse potatoes”—a long, long mouthwatering description of something that may well turn up uncooked in rancid axle grease.
Secondly, we tend to notice things and ignore their contexts or backgrounds. Often with a group I draw a circle on the blackboard and ask, “What have I drawn?” In the vast majority of cases people will say I have drawn a circle or a ball or something like that; very few will ever suggest that I have drawn a wall with a hole in it, because again we tend to notice a small figure enclosed and to ignore the background. While this gives us enormous power of description, it also is a serious disadvantage for human survival in that it makes us blind to the environmental factors of all things and events. We regard what is inside the boundary of one’s skin as being much more important than what is outside. This is a familiar problem to architects, because they know that most of their clients think of a house in terms of a person rattling around in a space. But the architect sees the space and the person as an integrated unit and therefore does something more than just provide him with a cubic box to rattle around in; he wants the house related to all that that particular person does within the house, because he sees the house and the person as one activity, a single process.
When human beings do not notice this, and regard the earth that surrounds them, the hills, the forests, the vegetables, the birds, and the waters as a kind of grocery store where you simply expect things to be on the shelves to be exploited and plundered, they become unaware of the solid fact that the earth around them is an integral part of their own body. It is just as much you as your hands and your feet, and as soon as you neglect that, you begin to get deteriorated products in the soil, you begin to get problems of water shortage, air pollution, imbalances of insect life, epidemics, and God knows only what. This comes as an exaggeration of this typically masculine way of thinking, which notices the figure and ignores the ground.
The third thing is rather intimately related to that—a conception of the human personality as something inhabiting the body, so that each one of us senses himself as a center of consciousness in a bag of skin, confronting an alien world of more or less stupid mechanisms. The primitive science of the nineteenth century has become twentieth-century common sense, and thus it seems generally plausible that value, love, and intelligence exist only within man, within the human organism, and that therefore outside in the world of nature there is an impersonal, mechanical process that has absolutely nothing in common with human values. That estrangement is again a result of noticing only one-half of one’s own existence, to notice the half inside the skin and ignore the “better-half” outside.
A fourth way in which this kind of valuation appears in our culture, is that the male tends to become mistrustful of all within him that is feminine, and tends therefore to insist on his masculinity in extremely exaggerated ways and to identify with stereotypes of what it is to be a man, which are quite absurd.
You will notice in current magazines an advertisement sponsored by the United States Marine Corps. It shows enormous phallic rockets standing at Cape Canaveral and a boy in a helmet talking anxiously on the telephone, and the caption says, “What does it take to feel like a man?” Now I don’t want to discourage the Marine Corps, but that is not the way to go about it; you won’t get real men in the Marine Corps that way. If you want to get real men to join the Marine Corps, there is a very simple formula—I leave it to your imagination. But phallic rockets are going to attract a man who is afraid that he is not a male and therefore compensates by identifying himself with exaggerated male stereotypes. As a result of this we get the general feeling that there is something weak about feminine characteristics and the fear that it would be “sissy” for a man to incorporate within his personality elements of grace and charm. To be uncharming, to be gruff, grubby, and tough has been considered the quintessence of maleness.
I was recently reading an anecdote about that great pirate and admiral, Sir Francis Drake, entertaining a Spanish nobleman for dinner aboard ship. He had actually captured the Spanish nobleman and was negotiating for fat ransom, but he did it in a gentlemanly way. Here was this tough old sea captain entertaining at dinner, dressed in lavish silks, with gold plate on the table and a trio with violins and flutes. As a parting gift Sir Francis presented the Spaniard with several bottles of fine perfume. Imagine being entertained in such style aboard a United States aircraft carrier.
The person who has no reason to doubt his masculine potency can really afford feminine graciousness, but in this culture he may be thought homosexual or sissy because he does so. But this exaggerated worship of the male gives itself away.
These are four symptoms that show, in various ways, how something that we might call feminine in the typical sense is neglected, undeveloped, unused.
Let me repeat them: Firstly, the symbol has more value than the thing, and Logos more value than Eros.
Secondly, the seed is valued more than the soil and the word more valued than context.
Thirdly, the individual is more valued than the individual’s own extended body, which is his whole natural environment.
Fourthly, a special form of the symbol being more important than the fact, the symbols of maleness are confused with genuine maleness.
It is an ancient tradition that man is completed only by developing the feminine within himself. This underlies such forms of oriental self-development—Tantra in India and Taoism in China. Lao-tse, great philosopher of Taoism, in his classic, the Tao Te Ching, the book of the way and its power, says, “While being a male one should cleave to the female, and so doing one will become a universal channel and be possessed of a power that one will never call upon in vain.” Taoism is the whole art of completing the masculine by the feminine. He says elsewhere, “Man at his birth is supple and tender, but in death he is rigid and hard. Therefore suppleness and tenderness are the marks of life, but rigidity and hardness are the marks of death.” This is illustrated by the parable of the willow and the pine. Under the weight of snow the springy branches of the willow give way and the snow falls off them, but the pine stands there with tough strong branches, and as the weight of the snow increases they finally crack. Every engineer knows in building a bridge that it must sway in the wind and be flexible; a rigid bridge is a collapsed bridge. This is equally true of psychological and cultural rigidity, and thus symbolic overmaleness is profoundly weak and unsound.
It is not, then, without reason that in old theological writings the soul is always “she,” the anima, the ewig Weiblichkeit, the muse, the feminine source of inspiration. You don’t hear much about that today because souls are out of fashion. We think of the soul as some kind of anthropoid or maybe gynecoid spook, whereas the soul is precisely what I called our generalized sensitivity, our floodlight awareness, as distinct from our spotlight awareness. It is our innate, natural intelligence, completely structured like our bodies, which are at root a form of thinking, of unbelievably subtle intelligence. The academic fallacy is that what cannot be described in words is neither intelligent nor intelligible. Yet the neurologist is unable to figure out the complexity of the very brain with which he thinks, and such a man tends to become humble through realizing that he is more intelligent than he knows! He is more intelligent than he can explain himself as being, in flat contradiction to the erstwhile scientific fashion of considering rational intelligence more intelligent than subconscious intelligence.
To value and use this hidden feminine aspect is peculiarly important in the problem of bringing about constructive change in human behavior. If history has one monotonous lesson, it is this: that human behavior has never been changed by preaching. Violence, whether physical or moral, does not truly move the human being. Even so great an apostle of nonviolence as Gandhi was still a violent man, because his appeal was a serious and earnest call to duty. Why is it that nobody has yet tried to change human behavior by the force of enchantment? Would you, as a woman, get very far by saying to some man, “It is your duty to raise children and bring up a family; you must love me! Come on now, get to work!”
You go about it in an entirely different way, on the principle that you catch flies with honey. In the same way, educators, ministers, legislators, or whoever is interested in changing human conduct must realize that they need to go to charm school and to be like the musician Orpheus, who was supposed to tame the wild beasts and calm the winds by playing on his lyre. He is the archetypal symbol of the man who developed his feminine aspect and became a universal enchanter, commanding the obedience of the world because it just loved to follow. That is the secret power of the feminine. I don’t think I am “giving the show away” about the secret of feminine power. Nor am I trying to advocate a greater respect for, and use of, this power by warnings of doom—that we are going to be annihilated by atomic bombs, overpopulation, and ecologic imbalances if we don’t pay attention to this principle. The point is rather that it is a way of living that is a delight, not a duty. For it will never be worth surviving if we must survive, but only if continuing to live is an expression of joy.
From The Potential of Woman, edited by S. M. Farber & R. H. L. Wilson, 1963, New York: McGraw-Hill. Copyright renewed © 1991 by S. M. Farber & R. H. L. Wilson. Reprinted by permission of Katherine Neubauer and the S. M. Farber estate.