The un-examined Yang

Madhuri’s thoughts on female sexuality, abuse and self-defence

Here is what is not generally known: there is in the woman a network of nerves going from the cervix and clitoris to the brain’s centre. This carries a possibility – we might even rightly say a mandate – of mystical experience during lovemaking. When time and care are taken, when both are present, when both are ready, when educated and sensitive homage are given to her all-over sensitivity… when the time is right.

The man, I am sorry to say, has nothing like this neural network. So he does not understand… and yet, somewhere along the way, conquering sorts intuited that rape was an effective weapon of war. Why? Because it assaults, brutalises, and can even kill that mystical spirit.

It dulls the eyes of women.

So I’d like to propose that the human male serves himself best if he gently serves and tries to learn from that feminine mystic-sexual spirit in its health, expansion, and brilliant life.

As I read in a snippet of dialogue in a novel recently: “Sex is for the woman. Not many men know that.”

When you begin a study of what the woman is, you begin an approach to your better self. None of this is personal. It has nothing to do with anybody’s quaking little ego. It’s just how Nature decided to package it. And, to look at the other side: any physical structure with a pointed shape – an arrow, a gun, a torpedo, a pointing finger – has molecules streaming off the pointed end. Energy is streaming forward. That’s where it wants to go. And anything which is busy moving or even pointing forward is by nature not receptive. We can say that sensitivity and receptivity are more attuned to each other than speeding like a bullet and being sensitive. Sensitivity requires a bit of openness, waiting, receiving. (I heard Osho say, “Sensitivity is your birthright. Become more and more sensitive…”) Can you imagine a meditation stint in which you are neither sensitive nor receptive? Probably not…

So, to male sexual opportunists (and you are legion): A 12-year-old girl is not born yet. A 15-year-old girl needs support to find her own heart and feelings, her own timing. She does not need to be stolen from – her body, her light – before she herself knows it at all. No matter who you think you are; no matter your coolness, your durable cuteness, your desperation at getting older, your arrogance, your insecurity, your entitlement. Your ignorance of what a female person is. All you will get is a bit of flesh and a resonance of quivering uncertainty – not a nourishment or a challenge to your masculine presence and maturity.

Leave her alone. Praise or befriend or mentor her; but leave her to grow and unfold in the precious time a bud needs to become a flower.

And it is not your flower – it is hers.

…even when battered-woman syndrome is not mentioned in court, women who fight back “are treated pathologically, treated as if there is something wrong with their brains.”
– The New Yorker

So. If a woman is being raped and she does not fight, juries / courts are likely to say it must not have really been rape. If a woman does fight – and even if (as is often the case) she has been getting beaten / raped / abused for years or decades – she is demonised and punished.

In Alabama, for example, a man who kills and pleads self-defence is much more likely to have this accepted than is a woman. Apparently half the women incarcerated in Alabama were convicted after retaliating in self-defence to violence from a male partner. (Often one cranked up on meth.)

So – damned if you do, damned if you don’t.

I have experienced this: as a child I was being sadistically taunted by an older brother, who was in my face… and not for the first time. I blew a fuse and used my nails on him (I’ve always had a good set of nails). My mother acted as if I was an unnatural devil-girl, an evil being not deserving of human status; I was made a pariah.

To feel my usually-loving mom go cold and mean and punishing on me – it was just terrifying. And it taught me a visceral lesson: never, ever, ever fight back! And so when I was 19 and a stranger pushed me down in a flat in Rome and raped me – when a posh bastard in Edinburgh jumped on me on his wedding day – when two friendly college profs took turns on me in London – I was mostly docile (though I shouted at the Italian, I certainly didn’t employ my nails).

Nor was I ever warned about any of these dangers… nor about the friend’s paedo dad who abused me in my sleep when I was eleven – I had not known that any adult anywhere had ever been interested sexually in a child. It made no sense to me. And I could only freeze in shock.

I have rarely met any woman from any station in life who was not sexually abused as a child. Just a few… whole, confident women…

And so perhaps evolution favours the rending of youthful tissues. I would have said that sexual repression was at fault, but if men in a meditation community with free access to willing women still preyed on virgin teens and little children, there must be something more at work. The sexual opportunism and insensitivity of the un-examined Yang?

Human Design, for which I have enormous respect, based on experience, says we have to go beyond evolution. We have to become aware.

Let us share – and share – and let us all become scientists, in the best sense, examining our own motives… and let science employ more and more women, who, I suspect, will put a priority on these things. Let us, male and female alike, meditate on what our biology demands of us. Rather than taking it as a given, watch it with the eagle-est eyes we can muster – unjudging, unrepressing, maybe dancing and howling sometimes. And, before we foist it on someone else, ask them kindly; and, if they are over-young, don’t ask them at all, and leave them lovingly alone.

In the New Yorker article I got the sense that the judicial system punished female victims and let men often go free… because the judges and prosecutors were themselves guilty of spousal abuse and wanted to protect their own.

We meditators are supposed to be much, much bigger than that.

The full power and the full vulnerability of women are both rejected by the world.

Let us be different and new. Let us embrace them.

This brings me to Grandmothers.

Grandmothers are everywhere; typically, though, they tend to be isolated from their families, living in apartments or assisted living facilities. In our community grandmothers were not much noticed or heeded: their kin might be far away, and nobody else was interested in them – we were so interested in each other as possible partners, for short or long, better or worse – that an elder lady sitting behind a desk in a velour tracksuit or a maroon robe was not much noticed.

We were not in that sense really a Tribe, because an elder was a worker and meditator like the rest of us, but wasn’t asked for her wisdom unless she was a group leader. A sannyasin body-worker friend said to me once, “Most of the wisdom in the world can be found in post-menopausal women.”

I think that a post-menopausal woman occupies a blessed niche in our tribal lives.

She’s still healthy and vigorous, she’s full of fun and adventure (estrogen having subsided and with it the broodiness and possessiveness of breeding-age women, and testosterone having thus been bared a bit like a mesa sticking up when erosion has taken the surrounding soil. Just enough for spice and forthrightness; not enough to make her too very pushy.) Since she’s female, her feeling chakra and heart chakra are dominant; she’s loving and empathic. And, she’s experienced. She has known men, she has known children, she has known excesses and insufficiencies; and she’s no longer invested in the whole game of rock ‘n’ roll that sex is, with all its attendant complications: hunger, manipulation, jealousy, power trips, exploitation, charm and blindness and all the rest of it.

So she makes a natural monitor of what the young (and the older men too) are up to. Is somebody a bully? Is somebody’s cousin grabbing young girls and taking them behind trees? I think that we all should have been including the elder women in our sharings and questionings about our love lives, back then – asking them, from their perspective, what might be what. If, at a certain point in my chequered career, an older woman had suggested to me what it might really mean to value and understand my own peculiar self, vis a vis men – if, when I was a teen, an older woman could have spoken without prudery but with respect for my sensitivity, about how I was being treated – I might have actually listened. If it was without prudery, I think that I would. Gratefully.

Every generation tries to re-invent the wheel. I guess they have to do it like that. But it aches at me to see them suffer – young girls with so much loving and mysticism in them, trying to take their cues from the men who mess about with them in dogged ignorance. Not meanly – not nastily, necessarily; just ignorant. I wish we could see each other better. And ourselves.

And if you’re an elder – I hope the young will ask you their questions. I hope they know they have questions. I hope those questions burn. I hope that people everywhere start to speak up and speak out and share about what they go through, what they’ve gone through. That the harming of the young by the old will become more and more difficult, because people will speak, and write, and ask, and talk. And the elders – who were young in a time of permissiveness, and have seen things in so many directions, and have reached a balance – will be such a valued part of the conversation.

Featured image by Claudia Love via unsplash.com/@claudz

The Sexual Revolution in retrospect – “Without the rather clumsy revolution we went through back then, this new and necessary and beautiful higher revolution would not have been able to happen,” writes Madhuri in this essay
Rape and the Mind – Events of Madhuri’s past understood through Human Design and meditation
Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town – Madhuri reviews one of Jon Krakauer’s books
Rape, Trauma and Dynamic Meditation – “Public memory is short term. Some of you may remember. Many, won’t,” writes Prabhu Damini (Akanksha Joshi)
From a Man, to Men – Samvado’s insights on the question: ‘What are the seed points that lead men to rape or abuse women and young girls?’
Osho on Rape – “Rape is one of the problems which is not so easy to decide and judge; there are so many complexities,” says Osho