EMPOWERMENT
and beliefs about gender appropriate behaviour surrounded you and limited the way you could be? In her recently published and
Collapsing personal delusions of gender at midlife
✤ A
8 MAY 2011
A midlife crisis is an opportunity. It is the door to awakening to more of our self as we collapse personal delusions of gender. To not open it can haunt us for the rest of our life.
By Robyn Vickers-Willis
lthough they are connected, the ‘sex’ we are born as and the ‘gender’ we are assigned at birth do not add up to the same thing. Sex is the
difference of embodiment that provides both possibilities for and constraints
on who we can be, mostly relating to reproductive life in some way, while gender is the indentity grouping, a social category assigned at birth based on the sex of our body. Whereas sex identity is inflexible, that is, we are either male or female, gender identities vary from one culture to another and even from family to family. When you were growing up what attitudes
internationally acclaimed book Delusions of Gender: The Real Science Behind Sex Differences, cognitive neuroscientist Cordelia Fine notes that once gender is understood as culturally constructed, biological explanations of sex differences lose their explanatory force. Not only are boys and girls not ‘born that way’ but roles and identities of women and men shift almost by the moment in all major societies as stereotypical thinking around gender breaks down. While analysing many studies of sex and gender, Fine demonstrates that no long standing personality traits are connected to any consistent differences between female and male people. Through socialisation Australian boys
and girls split off parts of themself they see as inappropriate. They then see them exclusively in those of the opposite sex. With such forces boys can fail to recognise and value, for example, their own nurturant and relational capacities as they see them as only natural to girls, while girls can fail to recognise and value their own authority as they assume that boys are more rational, decisive, or objective by nature. But why does this happen? When young
we appear as we are ‘supposed to be’. This is what helps us feel secure in our world. For example, if you are a woman, when young you acted and imagined yourself as a girl and later a young woman. This carried with it limitations in terms of what you considered to be ‘not-girl’ or ‘not-woman’. This other then becomes male, masculine, not-self as you form a gendered self. This conditioned or gendered self remains intact until your psyche encourages you to ‘awaken’ to more of yourself somewhere around your mid 30s. And you risk losing ‘life giving’ parts of yourself forever if you are not willing to collapse personal delusions of gender at midlife.
“
She believes stereotypes
about men being naturally aggressive and self-interested while simultaneously denying her own needs. Conditioned to perceive herself as a nurturing, feminine person she has a tendency to project her more demanding and aggressive aspects onto her husband.
” The door to this time of awakening
typically opens through the experience of self-dividedness, commonly referred to as a midlife crisis. To become a ‘psychological individual’ we need to be able to feel this self-division for, without this capacity, it is impossible for us to develop self-awareness. ‘It is to awaken that part of one's existence which has been hidden from sight’, Bede Griffiths writes, ‘the discovery may be very painful, sometimes a kind of death, but it is the one thing which makes life worth living’. In the midst of the gains women
have made in Australia – after all we do have a woman Prime Minister I hear you say! – the mystifying gender dichotomy of ‘strong’ men and ‘beautiful’ women still holds sway over adolescent Australian girls. Confronted daily by verbal and visual signs of gender as found in magazines and on the internet, billboards and television, girls are conditioned to evaluate their worth in terms of appearance and to believe they are secondary to male people. Strengths,
Workshop with Urban Shaman Raym Sydney-June, Melbourne-July, Adelaide-August, Perth-Sept
In this three day practitioner training intensive learn firsthand from the Master and qualify to practise the shamanic healing technique described in Raymʼs Living Now column.
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