Why feminism?

Why feminism?

I'd be so simple and say that my shamanic version of feminism is a quest for personal wholeness.

The femininity that patriarchal culture requires is, by contrast,  mental and emotional atrophy.   One cannot be whole if one is required to represent half the features of a human being, and moreover the negative and undesirable features at that.

Feminism therefore is part of the shamanic quest, which is the quest for personal wholeness.

Of course, shamanic wholeness means that we recover what was already part of us, not something new.

Feminism also involves personal sovereignty.  This is not a power grab but a mode of being resolute in difficulty and not permitting others to make a power grab on your life.   One needs skills, training and extreme resolve to secure one's personhood in a realm of opposing power relations.

Dominant power systems, including patriarchy, maintain that women have no right to speak authoritatively regarding issues that concern them.  Even commentary regarding one's own life is thrown into doubt.  Those who had never taken the time to know one well may proclaim that they have superior and more accurate perspectives into the features of one's life.   To continue to speak authoritatively on one's own behalf, despite the cultural trend of second guessing women, is the most essential and difficult task that one must pursue for one's whole life.  Without this insistence that one has the right to speak about the things one has known and experienced, and to do so authoritatively, one can never be a full public person.

Finally, feminism is about separating out what one is to blame for and what one isn't to blame for in life, so that one can also be a fully fledged moral individual.  If one is taking the blame for things that were never one's fault, one is mistaken about one's very identity.

In short, feminism involves recovering dissociated aspects of the self, the insistence on personal sovereignty and the insistence that one has the authority to speak in a trustworthy manner about those things one has personally experienced.