Reckoning with gender and division - and offering a way forward
I spent a lot of my 40s angry at the patriarchy and crafted Mighty Forces as a well-honed response to it, sharp like a shiv, because we were prisoners and it was past time to make a break for it. I would help women tell their stories and raise their voices, especially online, where there was potential for exponential impact. Together we would rise up and create a world that finally vibrated with the beauty of our wisdom, a future that shone with truth and justice. We would finally be heard.
But fighting a dragon keeps you trapped in the narrative of a fight. Battling for women put me in the role of army general rallying troops, when really all I wanted was to give women a hug. Inspired by my 11-year-old daughter’s expansive thinking about gender, I suddenly realized, through a vision I had during meditation (yes, really — it was quite something), that this wasn’t about women and men. Not only did I not want to exclude those who identified as non-binary — I actually had love in my heart, once again, for men (men in general — I never stopped loving the individual men in my life!). I wanted every single person out there who felt that their voice didn’t matter to feel me hugging them, and telling them, “It very much does. In fact, it matters more than anything else.”
Going beyond gender
In my work with women, I name all the social forces that have conditioned women to stay quiet and small. And they’re very, very real. I talk about the research showing how dangerous it is for women of color to be authentic at work, pointing to data that is devastating. All of that is true. All of it needs to be dismantled. And yet, I don’t think helping women get what men have is the way forward. When I saw the Barbie movie, I expected to leave feeling revved up about fighting patriarchy. Instead, I emerged feeling like gender itself is the trap.
I’m laying down my sword in the gender wars. Patriarchy is real, but fighting it only strengthens it, because to fight it is to buy into it. To dig in our heels in the us vs. them paradigm it perpetuates. I’m done with us vs. them. I’m interested in us.
Sometimes, we need to create brand new paradigms to get us where we need, and want, to go. This is one of those times. I don’t want to be part of getting women to be louder, or as loud, as men anymore. What about the non-binary person who is ignored? Or the man, or boy, who feels trapped by mainstream expectations of masculinity? We are trapped in these little boxes, and then we sharpen our shivs to try to battle our way out, thinking our reward will be a taste of freedom. But it’s not freedom if other people are still in boxes.
People don’t belong in boxes. (Photo by cottonbro studio)
Interconnected divisiveness - beyond gender
Of course, gender is just one of the ways we find ourselves in boxes.
Until this year, I spent my entire adulthood as an urbanite, living first in Washington, DC, and then New York City (Manhattan briefly, then Brooklyn). While there were many joys and creative satisfactions to be had in these places’ bustling arms, there was also insularity. I lived in liberal bubbles. Now I live in a neighborhood where I think but do not know for sure that a lot of my neighbors will probably vote for someone whose name it still hurts my heart to type. And I do not hate them.
I hate everything that person stands for (and I’m sorry if mentioning them has hurt your heart; as a friend who read an earlier draft of this essay said, his name still “sucks all the oxygen out of the room” for her). But even more than I hate that, I hate how divided we’ve become. How entrenched in our two sides. And if we aren’t digging in our heels about red vs. blue, we’re doing it with Israel vs. Gaza. Maybe in the overall arc of history we need these dialectics of opposing sides to push on each other and ultimately move us forward, but living in the middle of it sucks. What’s more, it hurts.
Which brings me back to the binary of women vs. patriarchy. It hurts — and, it’s not getting us anywhere. In 2023, UN Women released new analysis showing that “despite decades of progress closing the equality gap between men and women, close to 90 percent of men and women hold some sort of bias against women.” Just let that sink in for a minute. Also last year, a friend who is a woman of color and an immigrant told me that “patriarchy is cute.” She also called it “a white woman thing.” That hurt. But I think I see now the truth underneath her perhaps less-than-ideal phrasing: Focusing on one paradigm of division and oppression keeps my gaze locked and loaded in a way that can narrow my ability to see the broader truth of the human experience.
My friend Lindsey, who’s in her 20s, once told me that the point isn’t to rank our suffering. The point, I think, is to love each other, and ourselves, and to see ourselves in each other as much as we possibly can. As my daughter (apparently the resident guru here at Mighty Forces) once observed, “I think no two people are exactly alike, but every two people have something in common.”
My husband Jordan’s cousin, Sarah, saw this quote when I shared it on Facebook, and had it made into a needlepoint 🥺. Now it hangs in our home, and I love it.
Finding our power amidst the pain
The problem I am responding to, with all of this, is that we are in so much pain. You can feel it everywhere you go. Like we’re all finding ways to get through the day and find some kind of peace and normalcy, while beneath it all we’re aware our democracy is in crisis, our planet is in crisis, racism is running rampant, poverty is running rampant... and thanks to the hyper-mediated world we live in, we’re aware of all of it, all the time. Unless we dodge the news cycle. Unless our spiritual practice or that inspirational Instagram account we follow encourages us to get still, to get quiet, to rest.
Speaking of Instagram, I saw a post the other day about how the world may be in shambles, but what a poet is interested in is what the flowers and the moon can teach us. It resonated. But I feel like I can be in one mode or the other: Centered and at peace, or, informed about what’s happening in the world. How do we integrate awareness of all the horrible things happening with humanity, and to our earth, with recognition of and appreciation for the best parts of humanity, and the gifts the earth still gives us, every single day? How do we hold both things, simultaneously?
There is no life hack for this. There is no YouTube tutorial that instructs us how to live right, in these times. And so each of us tries to find our own way through the pain, ignoring it or engaging with it to differing degrees. And we try, too, to find peace, and more often than not, we end up feeling exhausted, and disconnected. The surgeon general has declared an epidemic of loneliness in America, after all, and not even for the first time. How do we find our way back to each other?
How do we help each other heal?
How do WE heal?
What if we focused on finding commonality with our fellow humans, no matter their identity, and grew our strength through those connections?
The power of our authentic voices
What I believe, in the deepest part of myself, is that the path back to connection lies in the power of using our authentic voices.
Perhaps the most crushing truth about our times is that we are not using our voices to help ourselves, or to help each other. That’s an exaggeration, of course. Some people are using their voices.: Activists, artists, certain leaders in business and government who are unafraid to speak up and speak out. But for all the noise in our modern lives, there is so much silence — the deafening silence of not saying what we really mean, and of avoiding the things we most want to say (or, god forbid, cloaking our meaning in jargon and sounding the way we’re “supposed” to sound).
The truth is, everyone’s voice matters. And everyone’s voice is unique, shaped by their unique experiences and their unique spirit . It is a sacred part of us, this voice. And it is powerful. Oh, is it powerful!
“There is a vitality, a life force, a quickening that is translated through you into action, and there is only one of you in all time, this expression is unique, and if you block it, it will never exist through any other medium; and be lost. The world will not have it.”
- Martha Graham
“When the whole world is silent, even one voice becomes powerful.”
- Malala Yousafzai
If you struggle to express your authentic voice, or aren’t even sure what it is, then you are a normal human being. No one teaches us how to express ourselves authentically — not really. Unless we luck out and have a parent or teacher who is really focused on the importance of self-expression, we can easily go through life quietly contorting ourselves to fit in, without any understanding of how to take what’s inside of us and share it.
That’s where Mighty Forces comes in, along with countless teachers and coaches all over the world who are available to help us with this, if we ask. At Mighty Forces, our focus (new as of February 2024) is on helping change makers and creative souls of all backgrounds find the words and create the platform to show the world the truth of who they are (previously, we focused on amplifying women, but we pivoted for all the reasons explored in this essay).
Using your voice means exercising your agency. And authenticity + agency = hope.
Authenticity plus agency equals hope
I recently learned a turn of phrase from a client of mine: “Admiring the problem.” It seems to have originated with business leader Mellody Hobson. The idea is that sometimes, we get so caught up in studying a problem, describing it, discussing it, that we forget: our job is to do something about it. And, I’d add, the more we describe a problem, the easier it is to become entrenched in whatever binary or paradigm the problem suggests: Right/wrong, good/bad, them/us.
Now, a problem one person has admired for years, is a problem another person is just discovering. 30-year-old Amanda didn’t know what the hell patriarchy was. If no one was talking about it, I may never have had my eyes opened to the insidious ways in which women are oppressed. (What I would have given for the Barbie movie to come out when I was young!) Knowledge is power, and in calling for all of us to recognize the power of our voices, the last thing I want to do is suggest that any topic is off limits. My message instead is that if you’re someone who spends a lot of time talking about patriarchy, or the ways in which women are oppressed, what might happen if you stepped outside of the box that paradigm puts you in?
What if you looked around and noticed, for example, people who are non-binary, or have more multifaceted gender identities, and got curious about how much your women-vs.-men framework excluded and minimized them, the same way that women have been excluded and minimized for all of these years?
What if rather than admiring the problem — of people who vote for someone we find abhorrent, of people choosing the ‘wrong’ side in a war, or people who work for institutions that perpetuate inequity — you chose to “enter the arena” (as Bréne Brown and Teddy Roosevelt encourage), and focused on creating solutions?
And if that sounds daunting, what if you believed that using your voice — your authentic voice, the truest expression of who you are — was a solution, in and of itself? What’s more, what if you believed in the power of other forms of authentic self-expression — from how you choose to spend your time and energy (at a job or in a relationship where you feel safe being yourself, for example — or not; resting when weary — or not); to how you spend your money (on businesses that align with your values — or not); to how and whether you vote (channeling your concerns and complaints about the world in a constructive way — or not); and how you play.
…Yes, play. It may seem out of place in such a serious essay, but here is what I know: It is so important that we create space for play in our busy, serious, adult lives. Why? Because play connects with our truest selves, and it reminds us of joy, in ways that fuel our hope. Not a “cross your fingers and hope for the best” kind of hope, but a hope born of authenticity and agency.
…The kind of hope we all so desperately need.
Here’s to an inclusive and connected future. You are a mighty force.
