Men, Women, Blogging, Debating, and Relating

Pulling together a few threads from the Buddhoblogosphere:

There is some ongoing conversation about the different ways men and women participate (or don't) in blogging. I can't say that I've been involved in blogging long enough to have much of an opinion about this, but I have been learning a lot, and really appreciate NellaLou at Enlightenment Ward for initiating some intelligent questions about this.

Then yesterday, Nathan at Dangerous Harvests posed a question to the Buddhist blogging community about where the "line" is between the topics we do and no not blog about. This was in response to Mumon at Notes in Samsara, who, in a recent post, stated that he does not blog or even share about his practice with anyone but his teacher, as it leads to competitiveness.

One lens I have been using to understand much of this is provided by the research of George Washington University linguist, Deborah Tannen. She has been studying the communication patterns of men and women; how they differ, and why men and women might continually be misunderstanding one another. She even categorizes this as "cross cultural" communication. Her book, You Just Don't Understand, while getting on in years, is still a helpful tool in understanding and normalizing the different communication styles of men and women.

Tannen studies the communication patterns of boys and girls, which is where the communication patterns and cultural norms of men and women are formed.

"For women, as for girls, intimacy is the fabric of relationships, and talk is the thread from which it is woven. Little girls create and maintain friendships by exchanging secrets; similarly, women regard conversation as the cornerstone of friendship...What is important is not the individual subjects that are discussed but the sense of closeness, of a life shared, that emerges when people tell their thoughts, feelings, and impressions.

Bonds between boys can be as intense as girls', but they are based less on talking, more on doing things together. Boys' groups are larger, more inclusive, and more hierarchical, so boys must struggle to avoid the subordinate position in the group."

She describes that boys and men tend to use talk to establish and maintain hierarchies, and that this is often at the root of many a wife's complaint about a husband who "won't talk" when he gets home -- he does not feel the need to.

Then today, Nathan posts (how do you all post so frequently and keep up with one another?) about noticing the way many blogs, the content of which are much more personal, seem to get a lot less attention, or at least a lot less comments, but "the posts which routinely recieve a pile of comments are dramatic, irreverent, or deliberately contraversial."

Well I haven't read it yet, but Deborah Tannen has written a book on this too: The Argument Culture is her examination of this very phenomenon now pervading so many aspects of our lives. You can read a great article about it here.

Deborah Tannen again:

"In his book "Fighting for Life," Walter Ong points out that men use "agonistic" or warlike, oppositional formats to do almost anything; thus discussion becomes debate, and conversation a competitive sport. In contrast, women see conversation as a ritual means of establishing rapport. If Jane tells a problem and June says she has a similar one, they walk away feeling closer to each other. But this attempt at establishing rapport can backfire when used with men. Men take too literally women's ritual "troubles talk," just as women mistake men's ritual challenges for real attack."

Not that any one way is "bad" or wrong", but as NellaLou has pointed out, there is a spectrum somewhere between "catatonic and hysterical" which leaves an awfully large swathe of Middle Way. And this could shed some light on the different ways as well as the different reasons men and women blog.

Tannen adds the disclaimer:

"This is not to say that all women and all men, or all boys and girls, behave any one way. Many factors influence our styles, including regional and ethnic backgrounds, family experience and individual personality. But gender is a key factor, and understanding its influence can help clarify what happens when we talk."

Indeed, my own very general impressions have been that Buddhist women's blogs do lean more towards the personal / practice side of the spectrum, and men's more towards talking about worldly events and inviting discussion / debate about things.

These questions have caused me to ponder why I blog. Initially, I thought it would be a way for my friends (the ones I knew before) to keep up with me. This is who I thought I would be talking to. Some of my friends indeed are avid readers of this blog, and it is really handy to write and share about my experiences with Zen practice here. However, it turns out, a good amount of my friends are not very interested in this media at all.

Surprisingly to me, I have found that a whole community of Buddhist practitioners is interested in this media, and whom I find very interesting. It turns out that one of the reasons I blog is to connect with this community. And not surprisingly to me, the way I seem to be doing that is by sharing my personal experience with practice. Because I have no interest in jumping into any fray of debate with anyone.

I want to end with and echo this comment about "the line of telling and not telling", from another amazing woman Buddhist blogger at zendotstudio:

"For me one of the first things I noticed and truly admired about my Zen teacher was her sense of transparency, her willingness to share her daily practice with us. And truly that was the real beginning of my own practice. I learned so much by seeing how she manouvered her way through small situations, what bothered her, how she worked with it. It was the best instruction for me.

And of course everyone needs to decide where the comfort level of transparency is for them. And to look at why, perhaps?

And there is a phrase I remember from Dharma talks and I don't know who this it attributed to, "if you know one mango, you know them all." Your stuff, my stuff, it's not all that different. I think we write our blogs for many different reasons but I think it is always an offering."

Coming Home Part I

It's August, 1993:

This is actually maybe 1991. Body image issues? Yep, totally sick with it.

I'm 21 years old. I just graduated in May with my Bachelor's in Social Work, and spent the past year interning at a domestic violence shelter. After graduation I got a summer job at the shelter doing whatever they needed: Overnight shifts listening to harrowing stories of how the residents got there or nearly didn't, pregnancy testing, accompanying victims to court, picking up donated leftover food from the hospital where the woman in charge of the kitchen flirts with me, working in the children's program with some of the most traumatized kids the coordinator had ever seen, organizing rallies for choice, and getting ready to start my new job at the Rape Crisis Center as a counselor...

It has been two years since the movie Thelma and Louise revealed some major fault lines polarizing American culture around the question of sexism and feminism, violence and women's anger. I was right in the middle of this discussion because I have been actively exploring this thing called feminism for a couple years now. In fact, my supervisor and mentor at the shelter wears a T-shirt with a logo for the Thelma and Louise Finishing School for Women.

I was surprised and relieved and gratified to discover that Feminism is completely relevant to my life. Feminism turned out to be so much more than just a word my mom rolled her eyes about. I discovered that Feminism is about more than just women; it's about everybody.

My parents have reluctantly accepted that I will probably never return to my political conservative Republican roots, and they blame the liberal Ivory Tower for this. It has been two years since I started taking Women's Studies and African American Studies, and allowing them to sink deeply into my bones. My parents may be onto something. I read Backlash right after it came into paperback, underlining whole paragraphs and writing notes in the margins with lots of exclamation points!!!

Less than a year ago, I jettisoned a crappy, porn-addicted boyfriend. The rage that fueled that long-overdue breakup is also fueled by P.J Harvey's song, "Dress" (seriously do click that link) pounding from my Honda Civic's cassette tape deck and my fists pounding the steering wheel. I learned about so many reasons to be so very angry; for myself and my newly-discovered world of sisters. I have a cute new SNAG* boyfriend at a University an hour and a half away. His name is Patrick, and I met him through a mutual friend when we all decided to read Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex. He is one of the three men on his campus in their men's anti-sexism group.

I read the Feminine Face of God, and The Spiral Dance, and emphatically turned away from my Christian roots. I sculpted a Venus of Willendorf out of clay and fired her into stone. I declared myself and all women Goddess and Sheela-na-Gig my own. I have started paying attention to the seasons, the equinoxes and the solstices and celebrating them. I have started paying attention to the moon and how her cycles mirror my own. I am learing about the snake as a symbol of women's spirituality, how women and snakes have both been demonized in patriarchal religious culture. I look to the snake and her continual shedding skin for reassurance that there is nothing but change, and that this can be embraced. And yes, I stopped shaving.

Venus

A few months ago, my roommate Melissa's girlfriend Margaret, who was visiting from Chicago, asked me why I hadn't been to the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival yet. She described this amazing place of shirtless Amazons, sacred oak groves -- a land in the woods built by women -- womyn only, and attended by womyn only. She described a place of bodily safety.

My very first article of Festie-wear!

I knew immediately that I would stop at nothing to be there. The Festival is for all womyn-born-womyn, and is an opportunity to experience a place where Lesbians are not the minority. Margaret gave me a pin, designating me officially an "Honorary Lesbian" and we arranged to go. Melissa and I lived near enough for a day's drive to Chicago, stay with her girlfriend one night, and drive the rest of the way up.

I watched Margaret as we got closer to "the Land" as she kept calling it. She looked like a placid and contented statue of the Buddha, if the Buddha had been a forty-year-old Lesbian with spiky gray hair. Driving along the dirt roads approaching the Land, we were surrounded by pine and oak trees above, with dense green ferns below, and miles of cars full of joyful womyn in front of us and behind us. I had never seen so many feminist bumperstickers.

We emerged from the shady road into the bright sun, and onto a huge mowed field through the gate where inordinately happy Lesbians of all ages, shapes, and sizes said to us with all sincerity, "Welcome Home." We were greeted with the discovery that Melissa and I were "Festie Virgins", and this was usually accompanied by lascivious squeals, and even a ringing bell somewhere at the orientation tent. I made sure not to let anybody know it was my first Festival after that.

Though I think it took about five minutes for me to take my shirt off.

I entered the Festival like a shirtless duck to water. Ironically, Melissa was terribly uncomfortable. She kept her shirt on pretty much the whole week, and seemed kind of creeped out from time to time by the various sights and experiences that only the Michigan Festival can provide. The Honorary Lesbian, however, finds herself totally in love with the whole shebang:

Quiet forest paths with soft woodchips for my Birkenstocks to walk upon, fearlessly roaming bands of girl-children with their faces painted and their craft projects streaming behind them, a woman walking completely buck naked except for the beanie hat with a propeller on top, impromptu drum circles around warm firepits, an actual bearded woman in a Goodwill prom dress driving the tractor shuttle, a continuous stream of amazing professional music performances on three stages all day and all evening, Laura Love on Day Stage!, a huge craft area (essentially a feminist mall), live comedy, movies under the stars, amazing outdoor showers where I could see actual womyn's bodies in all their incredible uniqueness, and see my own within this context, beautiful vegetarian food, workshops on everything from astrology, to fomenting feminist revolution, to vermicomposting, and yes indeed, bodily safety.

I had to keep reminding myself about this bodily safety thing: I could actually walk anywhere anytime, and not worry about anyone attacking me or hurting me. I could walk buck naked with a propeller beanie on my head at 3am or 3pm, and the most likely thing to happen to me would be someone saying, "Nice hat." In fact, every single person I passed on the paths smiled and said hi. If I got lost (which I did a few times), all I had to do was ask anyone, and they'd stop whatever they were doing to be of assistance.

Not only was my body safe, but my stuff was safe too: I had gotten a beautiful ceramic mug at the crafts area (gorgeous large mug with raku designs and a snake for the handle), and set it aside with my jacket somewhere, got distracted and forgot about it. I remembered it several hours later, and was sad that it would probably be stolen. Nope. Still there, safe as a kitten.

Before departure, I rented a green pup tent from the university rec center's "Base Camp" and a sleeping bag with a few little holes I suspect might have been from stray burning pot seeds. I nearly froze the first night, because I had no idea I needed a ground cover under my tent, and I didn't even have a sleeping mat. The women I camped with gave me a plastic tarp to put under my tent, and I slept in total comfort right on rugged Mother Gaia the rest of the week. The womyn I camped with shared all their food and their systems for navigating the Festival --like getting their blankets and tarps in a great spot for sitting at night stage, or making sure I had a good volunteer workshift to do. I walked around in stunned awe a lot of the time.

The Meditation Circle was the most amazing place. There was the sacred oak grove, with a veritable carpet of soft moss in the middle. At one end was an overturned tree stump, her roots exposed and weathered, creating an elaborate altar space and focus for the grove. Womyn had come along making beautiful offerings of shells, beads, poems, candles, flowers... you name it. It was absolutely by and for the Goddess, and it was beautiful.

Meditation Circle, Michfest 1993

Indeed, I had come home. I had come home to the Land, to my sisters, to myself.

It's May, 2009.

I'm 37 years old. I have made that pilgrimage every single August for sixteen consecutive years. I have traveled by car, train, airplane, and even hitching a ride home from Fest (that was an adventure). I did five or six years as a Worker -- mainly because I wanted to stay longer than a week, and being on the short crew to help staff the thing allowed me to extend my experience into two weeks each year. What have sixteen years of the Michigan Womyn's Music Festival given me? It is impossible to calculate and maybe impossible to communicate, but I will write about this in my next installment.

*Sensitive New Age Guy

little altars everywhere

I'm not sure I even remember exactly when I began to consider keeping an altar as something other than a heathen and graven-image-bowing thing to do. But once I did, it became a primary spiritual practice.

This is the altar upstairs which we face for our daily meditation practice.

Protestants generally tend towards the spare, quiet, and restrained. There is usually only a cross at the front of the church. The emphasis is on faith, aligning one's deeds as closely as possible to the words of the Bible, and one's personal relationship with God; God being defined as one / all of the Holy Trinity: Father, Son, Holy Ghost. Nobody and nothing else.

The Catholic crucifixes were seen as maybe a bit showy. Jesus was supposed to be inside our hearts. And images of Mary? Well, it had been made clear to me that she was not part of the Holy Trinity, and therefore not to be specifically prayed to, let alone all the saints for whom Catholics have altars, light candles, and say specific prayers. Since I did not grow up within the Catholic Church, I did not have any such relationship with religious iconography, and in fact, had some mistrust of it.

This is our wooden statue of Mary,
acquired when we were searching for a spiritual home,
and practicing with St Andrew's Catholic Church --
a congregation fiercely focused on social justice.

Looking back, I find the root of that mistrust in the versions of the Bible that I heard from the pulpit and in our Bible stories.

Exodus 20 (King James Version)

1And God spake all these words, saying,

2I am the LORD thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage.

3Thou shalt have no other gods before me.

4Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth.

5Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them, nor serve them: for I the LORD thy God am a jealous God, visiting the iniquity of the fathers upon the children unto the third and fourth generation of them that hate me;

Then specifically regarding images of gold and silver, or even carved stone altars or stairs:

23Ye shall not make with me gods of silver, neither shall ye make unto you gods of gold.

24An altar of earth thou shalt make unto me, and shalt sacrifice thereon thy burnt offerings, and thy peace offerings, thy sheep, and thine oxen: in all places where I record my name I will come unto thee, and I will bless thee.

25And if thou wilt make me an altar of stone, thou shalt not build it of hewn stone: for if thou lift up thy tool upon it, thou hast polluted it.

26Neither shalt thou go up by steps unto mine altar, that thy nakedness be not discovered thereon.

I read all this to my spouse, who grew up Catholic. He was a bit horrified, being unfamiliar with this "jealous God" I had come to know in childhood.

This is Patrick's little statue of St. Francis.
He watches over the animals' food area in the kitchen.

His transition to Buddhism was quite smooth. This makes sense to me: The similarity of the liturgy continues to be quite striking -- the smells and bells, the standing sitting and kneeling, the chanting, even down to the mala / rosary beads.

Before this would ever be possible for me, I required a feminist intervention in my 20's. I made several rounds of critical inquiry into the patriarchal underpinnings of the Christian church before I could even begin to look at different forms of spirituality. While it was painful to see the religion of my childhood from this different perspective, I was able to question many of my beliefs and assumptions. It helped me see why I was having so much difficulty in some areas, and Christianity began to prove inadequate to my spiritual needs. This questioning, as I recall, was fueled by no small amount of anger. I had had enough of the white-guy-in-the-sky. For me, it was balancing to learn about the Divine Feminine from the writings of feminist theologians like Starhawk, books like The Feminine Face of God, and The Laughter of Aphrodite.

At some point in my tumultuous twenties, I saw a photograph of the Venus of Willendorf.

Circa 20,000 - 30,000 BC

By then I had already logged no less than a decade of body image problems, and if not self-hatred, definitely self-mistrust and downright fear of fat. To see this large, round, undeniably, unapologetically womanly figure referred to as a "Goddess," and imagining a culture actually venerating this form -- even if that was just speculative -- this caused a shift so strong and powerful, and led to a sense of inner knowing. I knew deeply that the veneration of this female form was safe. Not just safe, but necessary.

Ah, my twenties. During a fiery breakup of a three-year relationship with a guy who was addicted to pornography, having reached the very end of my willingness to engage in the contortions required to fit into the iron maiden of the Beauty Myth, and having no idea what would come next but entirely willing to make that leap,

This is an actual iron maiden -- a medieval torture device.

I birthed this Venus figure of clay:

I seem to recall already having some semblance of an altar upon which to place it. I think it was was an orange crate next to my futon. Or maybe it was my paternal grandmother's coffee table. I was not unaware of the irony since she was the most pious of all the relatives I knew.

Here is a recent sample of what is on my grandmother's coffee table altar.

It was Kwan Yin who helped me make the transition from Goddess-based spirituality to Buddhism.Kwan Yin, Kannon, or Avalokiteshvara is a Bodhisattva. A Bodhisattva is kind of like the Buddhist equivalent to a Saint. One understanding of a Bodhisattva is that it is a human person who forgoes their own enlightenment, remaining to assist all other beings until they all reach nirvana.
The embodiment of compassion, Kwan Yin is known as "she who hears the cries of the world." She is usually depicted with a bottle, either holding it up, or pouring it out, which is a symbol for her tears of compassion, or pouring out the waters of compassion. As a mental health therapist, I readily identified with her. Taking inspiration from Kwan Yin in the daily work of listening compassionately has been such a source of strength and relief.

I learned of her at my first meditation retreat-- a women's Vipassana retreat at Breitenbush Hotsprings. Before even stopping at home, once I had returned to Portland, I acquired this statue of her from a store called Healing Waters and Sacred Spaces, which I happened to learn when I got there, that Kwan Yin is kind of their "patron" Bodhisattva.

Here she is on my dresser. The painting of eggs is by my mother --
it was just a simple still-life she was practicing with
when she was taking a painting class, but I love it.

Once I was able to begin the practice of keeping an altar, it became an important part of my spirituality. Altar practice, for me, is just a beautiful reminder. It is a way to infuse sacred into everyday.

This is the Buddha who lives on our living room mantel.

Patrick spontaneously created this altar
which I walk past every day on the way to my car.
He is the one who usually freshens the flower offering here.

This is in our kitchen right above the sink.

Here is Bodhidharma,
currently greeting all who come through our front door,
and hopefully not scaring people away!

I like to change the altar cloths to reflect the seasons. I like to dust the statues, and dust around them. I like to freshen the flowers. Taking an ikebana class (Japanese flower-arranging) has inspired many beautiful flower offerings. Often, the state of my altars reflects the state of my spiritual practice.

I like the fact that we maintain evidence of our spiritual journey in the various little altars around the house. I read somewhere that regarding religion and spirituality, you can't subtract; you can only add. I like the idea that perhaps the Christian God is not actually jealous -- that implies insecurity. I am working with the idea that God or the Goddess or sacredness or Buddhanature is actually in everything. Altars are just a gentle reminder of that.

Cooties

I forgot for a second about cooties.

In an otherwise very pleasant cultural exchange this morning with a Buddhist priest originally from Malaysia, we were listening to him talk about the ins and outs of building a Stupa. He knew a lot about the energies of the relics, how to differentiate real relics from fake relics, and the faith and determination building such a thing requires. But he had to make sure to mention the importance of "authorized personnel" only in the consecration process, specifically not to allow any menstruating women in on the gig.

I was literally biting my tongue. I wondered what the other women in the room were thinking.

*sigh*

Now, it's not like menstrual taboo impacted my childhood Christian experience directly. Eve and serpents aside, there were no menstrual huts or special bathing rituals. No, it's pretty much filtered down to the medical / commercial realm to indoctrinate me with the idea I am in need of many products to prevent or correct this icky dirty state. I've been trying to unlearn this crap for years.

Like my friend Inga Muscio, says,

That's like hawking floral air freshener to a lady who lives in a rose garden.

Well, there was also the indoctrination of grade school health class.

Girls are told bleeding is a bad thing, an embarrassing thing, a secret thing that we should hide and remain discreet about come hell or high water.

Boys are told to go outside and play sports while the girls learn about some creepy, cootie-laden mystery that makes blood ooze out from our you-know-whats...

...Were we told anything about how our uteruses are almost exactly like the moon, shedding their linings, growing new ones and shedding all over again? Did the Period Movie teach us thing one about how miraculously cool and sublime the human body's reproductive system is when you're a girl?

F--- no.

All I truly gleaned from this experience was that my c--- was the yucksville reason I had to sit in the stupid cafeteria watching some hack nurse show me how to safety pin a three-mile-wide wad of cotton to a pair of brief underpanties even my grandma wouldn't be caught dead in, while the other half of the sixth grade population was out in the sunshine playing softball.

Well, something tells me that for a Stupa under the auspices of Jizo Bodhisattva (Ksitigarbha), menstruation will not be a hindrance.




The Chinese translation of Ksitigarbha is Dizang, which means Earth Womb fer cryin' out loud! And Jizo's realm is that of women, travelers, children, and children who have died. Jizo is known as the Earth Store Bodhisattva -- guardian of all that comes from the earth.

And to my understanding, that includes blood and guts and the miraculously cool and sublime reproductive systems of women's bodies.