If liberation is power, what does the female or feminine form of power look like if it is not externally defined? Are women switching stereotypes from the side of being culturally defined as subjugated to being culturally defined as liberated? Are we simply masculinizing the feminine—because that is how power currently expresses itself in culture—and calling that liberation?
Are we basing the concept of liberation on the conditions of masculine values, such as materiality and buying into the notion that money is power? If every woman on the planet came into power, would that remain true? Would money still be what made the world go round if every woman knew her value, and as a result, the value of the wisdom she carries?
Rather than seeing herself as a reflection of man, always positioned for or against him, what would this power look like if every woman knew her value and how to operate it as a sovereign being? If women, were to truly access her power—the type of power that, like gravity, moves the world around it instead of using force or the push and pull of being in reaction or response to everything—what would she look like? What would the world look like?
We have been remiss in the collective calling that could bring women the real liberation she seeks. Women's approach to liberation has been to act in response to the masculine form of power by fighting against, positioning against, or separating from it. But, when she does this, she is operating from that form. Fighting the powers that be is a method learned from the powers that be. Believing there is anything to fight is a legacy passed down from the powers that be.
Believing that fighting is power—rather than love—is a legacy passed down from the powers that be. Ultimately, the powers that be want to lose the fight to something more powerful.
A woman's liberation, and the path to it, involves not engaging with, fighting, or wasting energy on a system that is ineffective for all, including the powers that be. Instead, it is in building a new order that makes the current one so clearly obsolete. And, not in spite of anyone. A woman's power, when it is true power, knows there is no one against her.
To operate as if there is anyone or anything to fight is the old paradigm—a paradigm that prevents her from doing the real work of liberation that is at hand. The real work is to remove, define, and build. Remove the old ideas. Define the new. Build accordingly.
At the foundation of the old idea of woman is that she is a possession—partial and dependent. Embedded in this is the idea that she is a reflection of man, the way the moon is the reflection of the sun. She is not substance in and of herself. A whole subset of beliefs and behaviors follows from this construct, upon which the old paradigm is built.
It is from this internalized belief that woman herself continues to hold the existing system in place. First and foremost, on the path to women's liberation, it is essential to remove this idea of woman as a possession, reflection, and without substance.
By holding this idea in place, woman absolves herself of the true work of liberation—that of developing an identity. Instead, she has taken on masculine spiritual concepts designed to bring the masculine into balance—namely that of self-negation. But self-negation, when she has never developed a self, is not honorable; it is remiss.
Woman does not need to extinguish her appetite, her hunger, her desire, her power. She needs to develop, evolve, and come to know it. She does not need to engage in another selfless act when she has no self to begin with. She does not need to renounce or deny her body when her body has never been her own. She needs to claim these—every single one.
Man's overabundance of hunger exists as a result of the vacuum of woman's hunger, her identity. It will take waking up a woman's awareness to begin to see the roots of real power, to see that she could change an entire system, not by attempting to get men to change, but by taking on her part of the bargain.
The most challenging step might be to name the elephant in the room. She is the one with the power. To date, it has simply been used passively. But it is always she who moves him, not the other way around. She holds the trump card. Until she takes the mantle of that power, cultivates it, and expresses it, man will have no guidance. He will be left to build according to what he knows.
In other words, she has the power, but her unwillingness to claim it, and then engage in guiding men, creates a world where she is forever unhappy with the results. To continue to absolve herself of her responsibility to guide, she contorts herself to ever-smaller conditions—making her body physically smaller, her identity more demure and spiritual, her emotions more "in range" and less sensitive, or turning her sexuality off or down, or saving it for a man.
She hooks her hopes and dreams onto a man, or onto the masculine value of success, rather than spending all that energy and focus on discovering and developing what a world on her terms would look like.
To reclaim her power, she must start where any spiritual journey begins—with the question, "Who am I?"
