Your Story Is Your Power Read online

  To the memory of Adupa and For Gerald O. Barney

  Who shared her story powerfully because he envisioned a better future

  “We are volcanoes. When we women offer our experience as our truth, as human truth, all the maps change. There are new mountains. That’s what I want—to hear you erupting. You young Mount St. Helenses who don’t know the power in you—I want to hear you.”

  Ursula K. Le Guin Author

  Introduction

  Part One

  How We Got Here

  Part Two

  How You Got Here

  Part Three

  The Center of Your Story

  Part Four

  Why Feminine Power is the Best Way Forward

  Part Five

  Where We Go From Here

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Type

  About the Authors

  “We shall not cease from exploration and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place from the first Time.”

  T.S. Eliot Poet

  Whether we realize it or not, we define ourselves through stories. Understanding your own story is the key to understanding yourself, your world, and your capacity to act within that world.

  In the heart of your story, you will find you—your voice, your power, and your truth. And because there is only one you, and you are unique in all of time, your story can be known and expressed only by you. And we need your story—your point of view—and your feminine power now more than ever.

  We are at a juncture where we need women’s voices, women’s intelligence, women’s compassion, and women’s courage to help us navigate the difficult challenges that our species and our planet face. We use the word “woman” to apply to anyone who identifies with being a woman, regardless of their birth sex. When we say “feminine,” we are speaking to the feminine energy that lives in everyone. It is our deepest hope that this book will guide you to the center of your story so that you can share your voice and your true gifts with the world.

  The labyrinth is an ancient metaphor for this journey, and it is the organizing principle for this book.

  In a labyrinth, there are no roadblocks or tricky turns. The path flows continuously, like water, spiraling and meandering as it goes. It is not a direct line from one point to another, but an organic, evolving process that takes time and moves to its own rhythm. Similarly, the path through this book is designed to help you spiral to the center of your story and then out again, giving you ways to digest what you discover and to create space for new insights to emerge.

  May the meandering, renewing, and turning path of your story continue to guide you—as it has guided us—home.

  With love,

  Elle and Susie

  The point of a maze is to find its center. The point of a labyrinth is to find your center.

  Part One

  How We Got Here

  "The most powerful person in the world is the storyteller . . . The storyteller sets the vision, values & agenda of an entire generation that is to come."

  Steve Jobs as recounted by Tomas Higbey, Journalist

  Stories live inside you and shape your life. But why?

  What were the earliest stories you heard that hooked you? What compelled you to want to hear them again and again? What inspired you to share them with others—perhaps even your own children—passing those stories on throughout time, giving the stories life?

  The most enduring tales tap into something larger than mere entertainment: They literally help us evolve.

  We warm our hands on stories—both historical and imagined—all the while taking in essential information:

  The sharing of fairy tales from generation to generation is among the most enduring methods for creating and sustaining culture. What does that mean for us?

  For women, much of our early collective education resides in these tales. It is as though each of us is given a recipe that shows us what to do to create a successful life, as well as how to behave to get that life. The characters, attributes, and themes of these well-known tales socialize us from a very young age, shaping our earliest ideas of who we are, what our culture values in us, and who we feel we ought to become if we want to find our own happily ever after. As women throughout time grapple with the directives for happily ever after, we watch the story, we learn from the story, and, unless challenged, we will, in time, live the story. So what’s the story?

  For girls, the earliest and oldest story is often a fairy tale. What young girl or woman today isn’t intimately familiar with “Cinderella”? “Beauty and the Beast”? “Snow White”?

  In the classic fairy tale “Cinderella,” a beloved daughter is orphaned, adopted, and turned into an indentured servant while everyone else gets to go to the ball. With the help of a fairy godmother, a dress, and a famous pair of shoes, Cinderella goes to the ball and is so beautiful that the handsome young prince falls in love with her. Despite the jealousy of her stepmother and stepsisters, Cinderella gets the prince, becomes a princess, and is lifted out of her painful life of manual labor.

  Another classic tale is “Beauty and the Beast.” The main character, Belle (“beautiful” in French), is also a beauty. She finds herself in a horrible situation—her beloved father is imprisoned by the cruel, arrogant Beast, so she sacrifices herself and becomes the Beast’s prisoner in exchange for her father’s release. Beast frightens Belle and is cruel to her, but he develops feelings for her. Trapped in an abusive relationship, Belle uses her beauty, sexuality, and submissive spirit to turn Beast into a kinder man, with whom she eventually falls in love.

  Finally, “Snow White.” Like the other women, Snow White is slim, demure, and physically attractive, but her beauty makes her stepmother jealous. This conflict creates the central plot of the story: Multiple attempts are made to murder the girl—asphyxiating her with a corset, putting out a bounty on her head, and, finally, poisoning an apple, of which Snow White takes a bite. Ultimately, a handsome young man (who also happens to be a prince) falls in love with the girl because, once again, she is beautiful. He kisses her while she is unconscious—obviously without her consent—and brings her back to life.

  When a culture's most popular stories demote women to beautiful housekeepers, what does a young girl begin to feel society values in her?

  With the main plot points laid out plainly, we can’t help but wonder why these foundational stories are centered on a woman who has no capacity to take care of herself and needs a prince to come take care of her.

  As women, do we see that these fairy tales are a part of the brainwashing

  of women? Do we call the bluff? Do we write our own children’s books or craft our own nursery rhymes? As girls, are we simply too young to know any better? Do we begin to believe that we need to strive to be like Cinderella? Do we get carried along in the fun songs and the parts that we do like, all the while sweeping the stories that don’t seem quite right under the rug?

  We might not like to think we’re susceptible to conditioning from something as innocent as a fairy tale, but children learn from everything—especially stories that are intriguing or entertaining.

  In the early 1900s, Edward Bernays, a nephew of Sigmund Freud, used some of his uncle’s ideas to subconsciously manipulate the people who viewed advertisements. It involved crowd psychology. Upon studying motivations that led people to do what “the crowd” was doing, he discovered that if the most beautiful and powerful people were doing something, others would subconsciously want to do it, too.

  This breakthrough was the
n applied to the cigarette industry and to women, specifically, because they smoked far less than men. His first strategy was to encourage women to smoke instead of eat, celebrating images of thin women and gaining doctors’ endorsements that said smoking was better for you than eating sweets.

  The next step was to suggest, through imagery, that men oppressed women and that smoking cigarettes publicly would signify freedom. The cigarettes were branded as “Torches of Freedom,” which they hoped women would proudly display and consume in public. They did—in mass numbers.

  Years later, the author and activist Naomi Wolf examined the effects of these messages on women. In a research study, women were shown advertisements that featured women of various appearances, sizes, and ages and were asked, “Who is the most attractive?” The overwhelming majority of participants pointed to the women who adhered to unrealistic, unhealthy, and compulsory ideas of beauty.

  "Our society does reward beauty on the outside over health on the inside . . . A thin young woman with precancerous lungs [who smokes to stay thin] is more highly rewarded socially than a hearty old crone."

  Naomi Wolf author

  These stories aren’t new, and they aren’t limited to Disney or even to the last one hundred years. But if it’s so obvious to see how we have been conditioned, then why don’t we simply choose to do something different?

  When so many messages are imprinted from an early, impressionable age—from how we should behave to achieve a fairy-tale ending to how we are supposed to look to be considered beautiful—it seems that no matter how conscious an adult each of us grows up to be, we find ourselves tied to the fairy tale.

  But like any good science-fiction story where the heroine or the hero starts to figure out what’s going on just in time to correct course, many women, and some men, are beginning to realize that roughly half of the human race is being manipulated.

  Women are beginning to see the dire need to take the story away from the storytellers and bring it back to us.

  Part Two

  How You Got Here

  “I need to listen well so that I hear what is not said.”

  Thuli Madonsela, South African Advocate

  In order to take back your story you first must know yourself.

  Becoming more aware is a process akin to looking for a light switch in a dark room. You might pass your hands over the dark walls for a long time, or you might find the switch rather quickly. But either way, once you find the switch, the lights go on in a way that shifts your perception of everything. You can never unsee once you see. And with this newfound understanding, you receive the greatest gift of all—choice about how you want your life to unfold.

  The path to seeing the fullness of your story starts with recalling memories, experiences, and the important twists and turns you made along the way, even as your story continues to unfold. While writing down your story might seem like a large task, think of it as a discerning road map that will keep you from going down rabbit holes and getting lost in random minutiae. The benefits:

  Your story is composed of three intersecting narratives: your cultural story, your family’s story, and your personal story. Let’s start with the largest of the three contexts—the cultural story.

  “The Truth will set you free, but first it will piss you off.”

  As quoted by Gloria Steinem, activist

  We all get our opinions from somewhere, but we might not know exactly where or how. In order to understand the impact of your culture on your story, start by answering some questions:

  How do you feel you are treated in light of your culture, country of birth, gender, religion, or other distinctive factors?

  How are others, who are like you treated?

  As you start to identify and understand the patterns that show up around you, you will begin to see the cultural impact on your own story. It is usually the unsaid or unseen that impacts our psyche the most because we blindly adhere to memes that we are not conscious of.

  What beliefs do you have about politics, marriage, child rearing, and education, or any other cultural influencers that leap to mind?

  Some of the cultural categories that can impact you are race, religion, country of origin, age, economic status, and sex. The most pervasive and unseen cultural impact on women’s lives is how they have been treated by society because they are female.

  Patriarchy is the dominant world paradigm, and it affects every woman.

  a society or system of government in which men hold the power, and women are largely excluded from it.

  By definition, patriarchy is a hierarchy. There are many types of hierarchies, and some of them are necessary and helpful. For example, you wouldn’t want a summer intern in charge of building a spaceship engine that will send astronauts into outer space. You also wouldn’t want to lose the classifications and hierarchies within the animal kingdom because it’s a helpful way for us to understand the food chain. But hierarchies stop being helpful the instant one group subordinates another group in the name of authority, domination, or power. These types of hierarchies are sustained, as Gandhi observed, through humiliation of the dominated group. When this happens, these systems become hierarchies rooted in oppression, and

  patriarchy is one of these hierarchies because it is built on the oppression of women.

  From a very young age, girls are exposed to countless messages that reinforce this notion that men are the “head of the house” and women must obey. As a result, men are given more resources, have more cultural authority, and are not held to the same cultural expectations as women.

  Patriarchy

  Men hold primary power in family, government, religion and society

  Women do not

  It’s just locker room talk. All men do this. Not under your father’s roof boys will be boys. Don’t do anything to make your father angry.

  The most insidious side effect of patriarchy is misogyny. While sexism is a prejudice or stereotype on the basis of sex, misogyny is defined as the hatred of women. More specifically, misogyny can manifest as:

  Indifference to women’s needs

  Aggressive attempts to coerce or keep women controlled

  Enjoyment of women’s misfortune or oppression

  The psychological effects of cultural misogyny on girls are astounding. By the time a young girl is six or seven years old, she has already begun to formulate an internal template based on the countless impressions that have told her men are superior to women. If these impressions are left in the unconscious, these girls could grow up to be women who suffer from a range of psychological disorders.

  Learned helplessness, intergenerational post-traumatic stress disorder, an overwhelming fear of homicide & abuse, acute stress & anxiety, low self-esteem, depression, migraines (or other external reflections of an internal discordant template) wounded relationship between internal masculine & Feminine, splitting (where someone is all good or all bad and there is no middle ground), continued embodiment and reinforcement of the patriarchy & internalized misogyny (meaning that the misogyny is directed inward at the self)

  If the psychological impact of patriarchy on women is so well documented, and if almost every woman currently alive is born into patriarchy, why haven’t things shifted already? Why is this trio of patriarchy, sexism, and misogyny still here?

  “We are like fish challenged to understand water: since the fish has never experienced anything else, it is almost impossible for it to see or conceive of the water. But a bubble rising past the inquisitive fish can offer a critical clue.”

  David Eagleman Neuroscientist

  Where did misogyny begin?

  The origins of misogyny are debatable. While some say it is five thousand years old, starting as early as the origin of writing and commerce, others believe that it is as old as human culture, and stems
from the belief that since women can create human life, they must be oppressed to keep them from dominating men. What we do know is that it is a worldwide phenomenon that has been expressed consistently and horribly throughout history.

  Was there ever a time in history where women held equal positions with men? Or have we ever had a society where women were in charge? Historians don’t know, but what is evident is that there have been periods in history where women have had wildly different statuses, ranging from being considered nonhuman (meaning they held the same status as animals) to being the leaders of empires.

  Here are a few things that have been said about women throughout history by individuals you might recognize:

  “When a woman has scholarly inclinations there is usually something wrong with her sexual organs.”—Friedrich Nietzsche

  “The feminist agenda is not about equal rights for women, it is about a socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism, and become lesbians.”—Pat Robertson, southern Baptist minister & broadcaster

  “Nature intended women to be our slaves they are our property.”—Napoleon Bonaparte

  “Woman is a temple built over a sewer.”—Tertullian