The Eight Master Lessons of Nature by Gary Ferguson

Author:Gary Ferguson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2019-10-21T16:00:00+00:00

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This illusion—that the world turns not on an equal partnership between masculine and feminine, but by the masculine suppressing and controlling the feminine—has pretty much been with us ever since. In the 1800s, Europe and the United States delivered a flurry of scientific findings “proving” that women were incapable of having original ideas. If females wished to participate in science, it could only be to shed new light on the theories of men, a rule promoted by even the most progressive male scholars of the day. By the early twentieth century, women were being routinely warned away from higher education, cautioned that it would lead to defects in their sexual organs.

In other words, by suppressing women’s voices even science ended up throwing a lot of shade onto the feminine. And given the influence that both science and religion have in the culture at large, it’s hardly surprising that such bias would spill out into every corner of life.

It certainly washed over my own life. My boyhood, like that of others, came wrapped in hundreds of such messages big and small—from notions that sports were best left to boys, to the lone-male storylines in the Westerns I watched on television, to the near absence of women in my schoolbooks.

Even the nature books I gobbled up as a kid were slanted toward male-centrism. In fact between 1900 and 2000, of the most popular children’s books set in the natural world, male animals were almost four times as likely to be cast in the lead role as females. No wonder that when I went to the zoo I heard my parents, as well as other kids—boys and girls alike—more often than not referring to the more captivating animals as “he.”

Such are the stories we’ve been telling ourselves. And as anthropologist Peggy Reeves Sanday noted, held within the myths and stories a culture tells is “a basic statement about their relationship with nature and their perception of power in the universe.”

Little wonder that my friends and I ended up with notions of actual girls and women being less important, less capable. At the same time, such bias made us strangers to the archetypal feminine—to those qualities the goddesses had held up for all to see, males and females alike, including creativity and relationship and nurturing.

It was only in my later teens, when I was really steeped in the natural world, actually seeing how these energies were entwined, that some of these earlier assumptions began to unravel, including, happily, many of the misguided conclusions I’d made about the value of the feminine in boys. In men. In me.

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