Sacha, your post about our unfortunate lack (and tribal people’s use/practice) of a “women’s community” recapped a good bit of a conversation I’d just had with a couple of my housemates the night before. (That sort of explains why we all live in the same house! Support rocks.) Amazing timing.
Regardless of “feminism”, “gender roles”, “identity” or any of civilization’s misleading constructs that provoke us to run screaming in the opposite direction out of fear and self-protection, putting together ways for people to live that nourish and support everyone, from soup to nuts, oldest to youngest, and all possible sizes and shapes, while oppressing no one, pretty much defines what I want from rewilding.
I just saw this in a Tom Brown book–“Seek not to follow in the footsteps of the men [sic] of old, but seek instead what they sought.”
I’d say rewilding encourages us to take a look at what has worked for others, and particularly at why it worked, and allow that to influence the shape of our new culture, to make it work for us. No reason we have to take anything in direct translation that doesn’t work for us and doesn’t derive from our particular context of people and place! Like Reverse Transition Tech.
Yes! I feel that the feminism of civilization (please ignore if this doesn’t fit you! I realize many flavors of feminism flourish out there) that seeks “equality” sociopathically manipulates women to want the same thing men have, the money and power and career status that our culture identifies as wealth, while (forgive my pun) throwing out the baby with the bathwater by stigmatizing and de-valuing vital functions like hearthkeeping and raising the kids, outsourcing these precious roles, giving them away, trading them in (in part by splitting them up into separate house/box/cubicles a la June Cleaver, as Sacha mentioned, a potent recipe for insanity and dysfunction. Or by making daycare and school the “normal” place where kids to spend their time, putting the whole family into separate boxes like a plastic lunch tray).
The whole thing feels divisive to me. As long as folks focus on reacting to the last failed cultural movement (x-ism, post-x-ism, etc.) and feelings of scarcity (“I want what he has! Not fair!” like kids in the sandbox), how can we move beyond choices a and b to find c, d, e, f and all the combos in between? Think of the yin and yang symbol. Maybe a good new thing has room for traces of the thing that didn’t work, instead of just boxing itself into the farthest opposite corner?
Doesn’t equality and sameness fly in the face of rewilding? Don’t we value diversity? Uniqueness? Particular qualities that make us special? Yes we all have human bodies and can do many of the same things. But I’d rather celebrate the differences than pretend they don’t exist.
Maybe rewilding feminism itself (whoa, did I just hijack this thread? sorry BlueHeron. maybe we need a new thread? ) means taking a hard look at what we really need and want and value, taking a step back from just reacting to what we’ve had. The very existence of feminism implies the context–> a patriarchical society, otherwise, duh, we wouldn’t even have to come out and say that we value women and all things feminine, we’d just all know it!
And when I say we, I don’t mean each individual, I mean what does our whole culture want and need? What about our grandchildren? what if that includes those grandchildren who don’t carry your blood and DNA? what about their grandchildren? How do they need for us to live?