The unpowered woman rooted in scarcity moves those around her with control rather than command. Control is a finite resource that needs to be constantly fed and maintained. At the root of control is an unwillingness to surrender, but beneath this is an unwillingness to develop a relationship with pain.
For the woman who chooses the path of control, pain is something to be avoided at all costs. Again, this is the adoption of masculine values grafted onto feminine consciousness. The masculine will attempt to escape into the rational mind, away from the body where pain exists, and from here, arrange a life that is all about pleasure.
This woman will use any means necessary to force outcomes, from emotional blackmail to seduction as bribe, from hysterics to being the only one capable of doing the job. She will sabotage others to make herself needed and sabotage a situation to show that it can't be done without her. Her primary tool is withholding and withdrawal.
As a way to keep herself front and center in importance, she withholds approval or under-expresses as a means to keep people scrambling for her approval. She has mistaken dominance with power.
Pain for the erotically powered woman is power itself. True power operates through command, and command can only be delivered as a signal from the body. Command has the ultimate authority of aliveness, of undeniable nobility—absolute security in oneself and one's position. It has the qualities of generosity, approval, and unshakable love.
It dispenses with the hard labor of micromanagement and vigilance, drops down into the body, and from there moves the world around her. It does this not in order to get finite approval but because it feels good to do so. To command requires attention not on others, not on comparison, but on oneself.
A woman lacking power lives in reference to others, perpetually comparing herself, internally tearing others down when they seem better than her in order for her to maintain a position of control. She cannot afford to be in deep connection with people of equal power; she cannot be friends with peers. If they are less powerful than she is, she can control them. If they are more powerful, she can draw power from them. She is thus most often referring to authority figures or garnering "respect" from those she perceives as less than her. She will never admit this, however, instead being the first to say, "We are all equal."
Mostly, though, she is alone with a shrinking world because the world at large is too daunting to control. Even when she is with people, she is alone, which is the most prominent symptom of control. It is so insidious because it says, "If only you could be more in control, you would have connection in your life." In fact, if only she had more connection in her life, she would be nourished enough to relinquish control.
Connection organizes a nervous system for command. It builds a natural inflow/outflow where her extra is precisely what is lacking in the other, and their extra fills her. As she is filled, the relentless grip of the feminine lets go. If suffering in masculine tradition is brought on by craving, suffering from the feminine is brought on by control.
When she moves into this state of alliance, a gravitas floods in. She fills with and exudes a knowing. This knowing, as is true of all natural knowing, is generous—not as an act, but generous as a characteristic, the way nature is generous. It fills us with beauty, providing an eternal calm. Not because nature is virtuous but because this is what nature does.
This is what woman does. She commands the best of those around her. She draws forth what they did not know they were capable of, because she can see it, because she has no agenda other than to live in the sphere of excellence that is Eros. Because this presence carries with it the power of this generosity, it commands attention even while doing absolutely nothing. Control, on the other hand, schemes and plans itself to exhaustion, always calculating, always anxious and insecure.