Rabia Roberts: HerStory, Part B
Dear Sisters,
Happy 2021!
We came so close in the United States of America.
We came right up to the edge, looking into a very deep and bleak abyss.
But we didn’t fall in, we pulled ourselves back, and democracy – at least to the extent we have realized it -- has prevailed. I, along with so many of my fellow citizens, am thrilled.
I have not generally been a person to wave the flag of the U.S. and tout our exceptionalism, though I love my country like I love my family.
I was one of those kids that resisted saying the Pledge of Allegiance as early as 14 because I was already very aware of what my country was doing in Southeast Asia. Fast forward to this podcast, I am all too aware that the U.S. spends more on our military than the next 10 countries combined, and uses our military might to dominate the world in very much the same way the wealthy have used our police to dominate poor black neighborhoods to keep assets pouring into the hands of a small, mostly white, male few of Wall Streeter types – some of them my family members.
But today I feel more patriotic and proud of my country than ever before.
It feels like we have just gone through a hazing, a reckoning and perhaps Donald Trump has done us a favor to wake us up. Like the saying goes – it takes a lot of pounding to create a good bar of steel.
I read a book a long while back called the People of the Lie by M. Scott Peck, the same guy who wrote The Road Less Traveled if you remember it. The premise of the book is that lies are the core of human evil.
Seeing ourselves clearly -- as a person, as a country, as a world -- is the beginning of healing and real positive change. As we say in the gestalt world -- awareness works: It’s a paradox that change happens most quickly when we can by see the fullness of 'what is' in the present moment.
A few weeks back, when the run-off elections in the State of Georgia tipped the balance in the U.S. Senate to a Democratic majority I tweeted:
I am so deeply moved by what has just happened in Georgia. Thank you Stacy Abrams. Change Georgia, change the country, change the world.
And “bing” -- I immediately got a like from a young woman in Asia who is an activist for democracy in her own country.
I love how connected we are, and how movements for justice and democracy inspire each other around the world.
After living with the Trump administration for the last four year that used bullying and the fantasy of a lost, white, Christian and patriarchal America, it was so super moving to see, in the words of one of my friends
“A glorious display of inclusivity including all the raw feminine power. . . How bright & radiant”
and knowing that that was brought about, in part, by the activism of so many of us, of which I am proud to be a part. One turning point was on January 21, 2017, when women, with our pussy hats on, marched on Washington in the largest single-day protest in American history that dwarfed Trump’s inauguration numbers of the previous day.
So, I am feeling optimistic, but there is so much to do and the climate clock is ticking
The contribution I have chosen to make toward a deeper democracy is focusing on empowering women by building our negotiation capacity, and showcasing through the podcast some cool content about interventions to build common ground in complex systems.
One CAN bring very polarized groups, even warring factions, together to build common ground.
I have done it.
I have seen it.
But so many of our world governments, including my own, are still so steeped in win-lose, adversarial, “power-struggle” methodologies, egged on by a media that leads with what bleeds. Making better use of the collaborative – and yes, more feminine – processes we know work would help us become less polarized, and more creative and relational. Humans are very capable of dealing with complexity and problem solving if given the right process “containers”.
Power over v power with. . .
Win-lose, win-win. . .
Both of these have big gender implications.
On the podcast front, I’ve been frustrated with how slow I am to get episodes out. There are so many I would like to do, so many cool people to interview – but like so many solo “socialpreneurs” like myself, there is the issue of bandwidth and making a living.
This fall, I put together a six-week, virtual course called Women, Negotiation & Power which was thrilling. I will launch an even better version of that course in March so stay tuned, please enroll, or send people my way. Check out this testimonial video here.
I am also super excited by my growing audience of women whose stories and struggles I am hearing either through my online courses, or individual or group coaching. So thank you. I am here to serve you and make the best content I can for women around negotiation, and for this podcast.
Getting gender right is delicate -- just like democracy. (Tweet this.)
Patriarchy tends to cut humans in half and say that men can be this way, and women can be that. What is happening is people are becoming more fully human, and being allowed to develop themselves fully, not just according to gender roles, or reconnect, for example, to what it means be a woman and not have the divinity in that taken out in any way. This is exciting, and this will create a more peaceful world.
As Carol Gilligan so aptly said feminism is the movement to free democracy from patriarchy.
We have a lot of work to do because honestly the model of so many things is still fundamentally the man, supported by the woman.
It’s gonna be weird, but it’s gonna happen in the U.S. soon enough, that a woman becomes our next president with or without an intimate partner standing beside her.
It's gonna feel uncomfortable and probably unnatural to many because it is uncharted territory in the U.S. though so many other countries around the world are leading the way.
So how did we get to this moment in time, to all those colorful flags and empowered women and people on the Capitol steps of the U.S., a young black woman, a descendant of slaves, delivering the inaugural poem and declaring her unabashed desire to be President of the U.S. someday?
I think it has come from untangling narratives that are untrue.
For me, that has defined so much of the work I have done to grow as a human.
Seeing ourselves clearly v. the stories we have made up,
Discovering truth v. lies or fictions like
the election was stolen from Donald Trump
women came from the rib of Adam, that
my brother was more valuable than I was from the moment of birth.
These are all untruths, but powerful narratives that have big consequences.
So in Part B of Herstory, Rabia continues to unpack our human history, herstory, from the perspective of women.
The first you heard in Episode A but she repeats it here:
That “the basic format for a human being is female. The X chromosome has about 1000 genetic messages in it, the Y chromosome has 50”. As Rabia continues, “that’s true of other species as well. The female was here first. Maleness developed over time, and it serves to create great diversity. Our species probably would not have made it this far, if males hadn't begun to add their genetic pool. So we're both necessary. But most of the myths are incorrect. We weren't made out of the rib of Adam. It's amazing how tenacious those stories are, and while they might seem like a joke to some of us, they totally influence substantial parts of our population.
That even though we don’t want gender to be determinative of what our options are in life there are differences in our bodies and evolution that impact our experience. For instance:
girls at birth have 10 to 30% more cells in the corpus callosum than males have, “the spot that links the left and right side of the brain and makes it easier generally for women to talk or write feelings”
“that women have more rods and men have more cones. So we literally do see the world differently”.
How the way the female pelvis evolved has shaped women’s need and desire for collaboration. . .
That aggression is wired in males of many species. Rabia gives some great examples of how the females of other species keep this in check, and calls on women to step into our extraordinary power to better manage male violence whether it be intimate, domestic or global ;
By way of example of how resilient we have been, Rabia describes the “incredibly successful period of about 70000 years that we girls with our daughters and our mothers our grandmothers and of course our male brothers walked the earth, surviving two ice ages. As she emphasizes “What we're capable of, and what our grandmothers went through to get us here”
Thinking about this gives me some hope.
I like both urban and rural life but, in 1996, the same year that our planet became more urban than rural, I chose with my then husband peter, to move out of NYC and raise our kids 50 miles north in a more rural place. We did this in spite of the relative whiteness, which neither of us were a big fan of but it felt important to have them understand the natural world which was under such deep assault. They do which is both great, and a constant heartache.
If you are watching, you know that the earth is changing fast before our eyes.. on my little piece of the planet, the pond I live on has not frozen for the last two winters. There is virtually no snow, there is a new kind of moss growing on rocks everywhere, in the forest there are blow downs everywhere because of the severity of the storms.
I can often feel pretty depressed about this because while I feel we can keep improving on racial, gender and economic justice, but we may not be able to turn back the clock on what we have done to the planet.
It seems ironic that as the fierce mother that I have been that I put so much effort into creating a good life for my children only to see the earth on which they depend dying beneath their feet.
That is heavy.
But this episode provides great perspective -- the 70,000 years Rabia talks about compared the 10,000 years that we tend to learn about as our history. It makes me more hopeful for all of our grandchildren
She describes in some great detail about periods of the goddess
Goddess cultures were highly sexual. Spirituality and sexuality for a couple thousand years seemed to go together everywhere from Turkey to Egypt. You see it in paintings and in architecture so it wasn't only the goddess that the patriarchy wanted to get rid of, it was sexuality.
She talks in this episode about the emergence of patriarchy, gaining force through imagined orders, hierarchies, narratives.
“The time that women start becoming the property of men ….the most important thing about owning women is that she had to be chaste because a man's honor was dependent on a woman's behavior. If she had sex, he was dishonored. There was now no honor for women. Things had changed, honor became something that men had -- that was their only thing. Bravery was measured by going to war and wearing armor and killing a lot of other men, not bravery in the pregnancy of delivering a beautiful baby, which had been for thousands of years from Spain to Indonesia”
She goes on to talk about “the first three commandments of the Bible say what no other god has ever said, I am god. I am the lord thy god you shall have no other gods but me. This is not how humans developed spiritually. This is a real break in human consciousness.
Rabia continues
“you cannot take my name in vain, okay you can't talk about God unless you're really worshiping him. He is a far-away God that, he dips into human affairs but is distant, he's all male, and everything that comes after the ten commandments, a quarter of the stories are about how women should be treated and behave.
And she says, The Hammurabi Code, it’s the same, one-third to one half is about how to deal with women who have sex, who don't clean your house, who talk back
So, I encourage you to listen to the whole thing. There is so much insight and will make you rethink many of the assumptions we make about how we got to this moment we live today.
Listen to the FULL podcast episode here.
Warmly,
