A General Orientation to Gender in the Society(40 slides)

creatively compiled by dr. michael farnworth

A Personal Journal is necessary if you are to engage the lessons in such a way to initiate growth and insight.

The most important ideas will come to you as you interact with the ideas from the lessons, book and

movie.

Your reactions, thoughts, introspections and feelings will be your guides through the materials so I hope you

take them seriously.

When can you throw a rock into a pond and not make any ripples?

When it is frozen…

Let that riddle be the metaphor for this learning experience.

“Each world, whilst it is attended to, is real after its own fashion; only the reality lapses with the attention.”

William James, The Perception Of Reality

Traditions

• What influence does our cultures’ traditions have upon our behavior and what is the foundation of our beliefs and values?

• Where do they come from?

This will be a process that will attempt to take traditions to task.

It will attempt to strip the assumptions we have about our culture apart from the things we say we believe.

The culture has changed over the years and in some ways has gotten better (1st order change).

In other ways, nothing has changed if the philosophical assumptions and traditions remain intact.

2nd order change is needed and that kind of change is deep, profound and of the heart.

The culture takes centuries to change and we don’t have that kind of time.

The power of culture

• “We don’t know who discovered water, but we know it wasn’t a fish.”

• Many times we remain blind to our most common conditions, environments and surroundings.

The danger...

• “The danger is that real life problems are dismissed while philosophical and theoretical systems are treated as real.”

Edward T. Hall Beyond Culture, p.39

The insidious nature of intellectualism...

• We constantly construct our realities via our thinking and intellectual skills while ignoring the wounding and abusive nature of our lives.

• Many of us seem satisfied if we can comprehend something even if our own lives are in direct contradiction of.

Intellectual inbreeding...

• It almost seems at times, that we are guilty of an inbred seductive intellectualism that only pays attention to those things we already believe to be true even when there is ample evidence to the contrary.

For example...

• We say that men and women are created equal and that one gender is not inherently superior to the other.

• But, we live in a culture that is based upon male superiority and dominance and we have absorbed the values of it.

• To the extent that not profound change has take place of late.

Whites don’t have race.

Men don’t have gender.

Heterosexuals don’t have sexual orientation.

“I heard my voice, as though it belonged to someone else, hollow in the empty room, detached, say: “nigger, what you standing up there crying for?”

I saw tears slick on his cheeks in the yellow light.

Then I heard myself say what I have heard them say so many times, “it’s not right. It’s just not right.”

Then the on rush of revulsion, the momentary flash of blind hatred Against the whites who were somehow responsible for all of this, the old bewilderment of wondering, “why do they do it? Why do they keep us like this? What are they gaining? What evil has taken them?” (The Negroes say, “What sickness has taken them?”)

My revulsion turned to grief that my own people could give the hate stare, could shrivel men's souls, could deprive Humans of rights they unhesitatingly accord their livestock.”

John Howard Griffin, Black Like Me, (p 67)

Our powerlessness...

• Unless we awaken from the cultural trance we are born into we will remain a victim to the invisible chains that bind us to that way of seeing reality.

• Only by study, pondering, and leaving the system do we become aware of it.

No group of people are immune to the slumber of our culture

• Since you and I have grown up in this western industrialized culture we call the United States means that we have already be socialized into its values and embraced its reality as sacred and as the ultimate expression of human progression.

A culture founded upon appearances:

• We live in a culture where it is deemed more important to seem rather than to be.

• A dress for success mentality is supported by a behave for success morality.

• Little value is placed upon the heart and motivation that under girds human thought and action.

• Our culture is two faced and speaks with forked tongue.

True learning is difficult...

• This presentation will attempt to share the paradigms of this culture in an attempt to awaken from them.

• This may cause you discomfort and your comfort zone

will be violated with ideas and feelings which may feel threatening.

• It may be more comfortable to remain asleep, but we may pay a very high price for our slumber.

Fear of learning...

• It is scary at times to learn and have secure mental constructs challenged.

• To experience the chaos that comes before the new

creation is difficult but that is essentially the process of life: to experience, to learn, and to change.

Beware the “agreement versus understanding” dilemma...

• Many of us seek agreement or disagreement with ideas before we have paid the price of even understanding the concepts put forth.

• Agreeing and disagreeing stops the learning process.

• First try to understand for it is in understanding that one increases in wisdom.

Defendedness...

• To be defended means to be guarded, shut off, closed and unwilling to learn or to try new things.

• The more defended we are, the less able we are to look inside or to extend ourselves to others.

• Often our defendedness finds its genesis in our woundedness.

This process may be the start of a great adventure...

• Adventures are often fraught with difficulties and dangers. (caves to enter, dragons to slay)

• The metaphor of an adventure is what life is all about.

• I will be inviting some of you who are ready to embark.

• Often the timing of an adventure is the most difficult part.

• A young princess is told by her parents that she must journey from her homeland to alien shores, and there find a precious jewel guarded by a monster.

• In doing so she is to achieve a degree of awareness and enlightenment that cannot be attained except by making this journey.

• After providing her with a special food to sustain her during her exile, the king and queen send their daughter on her way.

• But once she arrives at her destination, she fell into a kind of trance that affects just about everyone in this strange, dreamlike land.

• Donning the garb of the country and engaging in an occupation befitting a good citizen, she forgets her true home and mission.

Tales of the Dervishes

(Story taken from Idries Shah’s Tales of the Dervishes)

Awakening from the trance...

• This awakening is what education, growing up, differentiating, and experiencing life is all about.

• The trance is powerful and pervasive but one can awaken

from its hypnotic grasp.

• “Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone, for the heroes of all time have gone before us. The labyrinth is thoroughly known. We have only to follow the thread of the hero path, and where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god. And where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves. Where we had thought to travel outward, we will come to the center of our existence. And where we had thought to be all alone, we will be with all the world.”

Joseph Campbell, The Power Of Myth

For example: it might be asked whether e=mc2 is true.

“I would argue that as it is stated and believed by most of us, it is neither true nor false, but simply meaningless.

A student could memorize it, and memorize definitions for the terms it contains, and still be talking meaninglessly if she said, it is true, unless she understood the extremely complicated and limited reasoning's of the discourse in which her opinion of its truthfulness can be made to apply.”

Wayne C. Booth, Now Don’t Try To Reason With Me P. 85

“Truth is a gem that loves the deep.”

B.H. Roberts

The coming of wisdom...

• To know you do not know is wisdom.

• To think you know, when you do not know is foolishness.

• To pretend you know, when you do not know is disease.

“It ain’t my ignorance that done me up but what I know’d that wasn’t so.”

Uncle Zeke

Please be cautious...

• Please be cautious of naive arrogance and grandiosity.

• There are yet many things we do not fully understand and if we get too full of ourselves and our ideas then we remain proud and vain and the true transforming power of learning is neutralized in our life.

Zeal without knowledge...

• “True knowledge never shuts the door on more knowledge but zeal often does.

• That is pure zeal that tends to breed a race of insufferable, self-righteous prigs and barren minds.”

H. Nibley, Nibley On The Timely And Timeless P.268, 271

Some definitions:

• Zeal: enthusiastic and diligent devotion to a cause.

• Prig: an over- precise smug or narrow minded person

Traditional marriage roles...

To challenge the traditional is dangerous in any culture because the traditional has assumed a sacred stance with in the culture.

But I again invite you to see with new eyes the reality that allows new paradigms to be considered that may better reflect the realities of our gender identities.

Interpretation

• To express, explain and clarify as to meaning and as to ones understanding.

• To translate, convey intention and design.

The interpretations of male\female roles:

• Every profound idea and truth has multiple meanings and levels of understandings.

• The obvious and accepted interpretation of roles is in agreement with the values and intentions of the culture which created them.

• This is known as conventional wisdom.

Questioning the assumptions...

• This presentation is based upon the questioning of the assumptions that have been created by our culture.

• With the realization that many important truths have been hidden from view because of being impacted by the slumber of cultural death.

Open to challenge:

• Being defended and closed to new ideas will serve you well only if you withdraw from life.

• If you want to embrace life then one must be willing to embrace the complexities, paradoxes, contradictions and abundances of life.

the end