There’s a discussion ongoing at The Happy Tutor’s here that’s worth checking out. I just posted the 26th comment (which I’m repeating here — with added links and other info). Go on over and add your 2 cents. You don’t have to be a blogger to participate. Just click on Comments and go from there.
I’m not going to able to catch up with all of the great points of this discussion, but at least I want to say that my Dad sounds like he was very much like Debbie’s. My life would be very different today if my Mom had passed away first.
And Robert Bly has tried to give men a sense of how they might create an archetype that works for them like the “crone” works for older women — some model that incorporates the male version of the most inspiring and humane human traits. [Robert Moore did some interesting work on that too.]
Some of us older women latched onto the crone vision because it concisely captured the fact that we don’t have to be disempowered and disenfranchised as we get older. As men get older, there’s lots of support to continue reinforcing their Alpha Male daydreams (viagra et al). Unless they suffer some great catastrophe, those kinds of men continue to feel a certain level of empowerment. So there doesn’t seem to be much of a reason for those men to think that they would be better off somehow if they let go of that vision of empowerment and tried the other version, the one that many (some?) women have discovered works for them.
I was thinking last night about what kind of world this might have been if men (in general) had not had the advantage of size and strength and the added alpha male fuel of testosterone. Suppose those male-associated qualities never existed. Suppose the world had remained deferential to the life-giving, nurturing [and cthonic] capacities of the female.
Camille Paglia speculates about this in her books, and I don’t totally disagree with her. We might not have built skyscrapers, but we probably would have fewer wars. (She uses the way men and women pee as a great metaphor for pretty much all gender differences. Think about it.)
If “women’s ways” dominated the development of human culture, we might not have gone to the moon or out into space, but we probably would have fewer homeless, starving people. Or maybe not. Maybe we would have had it all. Maybe we still can.