Yesterday I wrote about how I might be breaking up with feminism for a great many legit reasons. There are plenty of things to be disappointed about with feminism as a movement.

But, this seduced me back in:

Brilliant, accomplished women, feminists, which I am proud to be associated with.

Brilliant women. Smart women. Creative women. Strong women. Worthy women. Gifted women.

What’s not to love?

Feminists are invested in creating a new feminine experience for themselves, their daughters, their mothers and their sisters.

Creating is the key word.

The movement is sometimes painful, sometimes ugly and sometimes bitchy. So is birth. So are most acts of creating something new. Feminism is by its very essence, stepping into the unknown.

The movement is contentious and discontented precisely because it is born of discontent. While we glamorize the past, and there were some pleasurable things about previous gender roles (even if many are fictitious and romanticized), it only worked for some people. It didn’t work for everyone. Obviously, there was and is a huge faction of the population which wasn’t being served by the status quo—or they wouldn’t have wanted to change it.

This is the United States of America, in which we are self-governed. Which means the very essence of us is about creating our own experiences, our own lives and our own value system. The United States itself was born of discontent. Had we been content with our role as colonies, we would still be colonies today. But, we’re an independent sort of people who believe in radical ideas like the right to pursue happiness and the right to equality and the right of free speech and the right to self-govern. We have chosen this. We collectively share this vision and that’s what makes it so powerful.

Discussion on Feminism and Blogging put on by Feminism & Co. Heather Janssen, creator of get born magazine (in orange) was a brilliant display of smart, witty feminism.

Abraham Maslow, a father of psychology, studied self-actualization. During his research he discovered that the happiest people are those who paid attention to their own discontent. But, it wasn’t simply noticing that they didn’t like the way things were, it was the fact that this set of people did something about it. If they hated their marriage, they divorced. If they hated their jobs, they quit. If they didn’t like what city they lived in, they moved.

The happiest people were not the ones with a perfect set of circumstances. They were the ones who exerted power over their circumstances. In other words, they changed. They sought something better. Even if it was scary, imperfect and hard. Happy people place a high value on their right to pursue happiness.

That is what feminism is. It is a movement of people who have noticed that part of the way culture, politics, speech, media, economics, social hierarchies, religion, families and sexuality simply isn’t working for them as it currently is.

Feminists are people who are exerting power over their circumstances. When we set out to invent something new and unheard of—a self-governing democracy—no one expected that it would be easy or perfect. The way was unpaved. The pitfalls were as yet undiscovered.

Yet we somehow held to a vision. A cohesive vision of what it should be like, what it could be like.

As with America herself, the Feminist movement is divided on many issues. So is the Democratic party. So is the Republican party. This discourse, this discontented back and forth is what makes our self-government a safe and healthy process. In fact, it is how we designed it on purpose. So it is with Feminism.

Feminism is not the end result. Feminism is the art of discontent. Feminism is the power of taking action to create something better. Feminism is the exploration. Feminism is the journey.

Feminism is the discourse.

Tracee Sioux is an Authentic Power Life Coach, author of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories; and she blogs atTheGirlRevolution.com. Contact her at traceesioux@gmail.com.

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I’m going to a panel about feminism and blogging with Heather, the queen of getborn magazine tomorrow.

I’ve long said that blogging and the internet brings Freedom of Speech to reality for women in this country. Women may have had the “right to speak” before, but who would hear them? I’ve also identified as a feminist since my teenage years.

Still, I’ve been disenchanted, shall we say. Here is a rundown of the things that kind of irk me about the whole stupid label.

• Feminists give men too much credit. Feminists like to say that women are like men and men are like women. They said that when women went into the workforce, men would step up to provide support in the home. Where is that? Statistics showed that women took the load off men and then men went to play golf and have a beer in front of a football game. As near as I can tell men don’t even want this “utopia.”
• Feminists ruined dating. I’m back in the field now and I’m not simply annoyed when a man doesn’t pay for a date, I find them instantly repugnant. Man the fuck up! Dear feminists: I want to be wooed and courted and it looks like you’ve made that irrelevant by being so understanding and demanding to be equal. Dislike.
• Feminists make a lot of excuses for their own men. Let’s face it, women still obey men. Wives still submit to their husbands most of the time. They just don’t call it that. They do things they don’t want to do to keep the peace in the house. Whether it’s keeping jobs that they hate, or doing the laundry, or always being the one who goes grocery shopping, feminists aren’t very feminist when they are in relationships. But, they always seem to find a “reasonable” reason for this to excuse the fact that their men aren’t manning up. At least conservatives are honest that he gets his way because he has a penis. Or as my mother always put it, “he makes the money.”
• Feminists really require nothing of men. Of course we’ll have sex without commitment or even dinner, we’ll “balance” everything, we’ll pay for everything, we’ll pretend we need no romance, we’ll understand your need to look at porn and even look with you, we’ll do everything. Which pretty much leaves men to do whatever the hell they want. Feminists lowered our expectations of men. Men ran with it. They know a good deal when they see it.

• Feminists glamorize jobs, even though jobs mostly suck. What’s so great about a job anyway? “Working women” is nothing new. My grandmother picked cotton for 10 hours a day her whole childhood. My great-grandmother got up at 4 am and dragged a few kids out to milk cows so she could feed her children. My grandmother, when she raised her own family, was grateful that her husband was willing and able to support the family and she wouldn’t have to have a job. My mother was super grateful that she was allowed to devote her life to raising her children and not having to juggle a dumb job. Myself, I spent 12 years fighting off my husband’s expectation that I have the kinds of jobs he thought were awesome. I didn’t want to do everything all at once. Because it’s a joy killer and its exhausting. So thanks a lot for putting that kind of bullshit expectation on me, feminists. It ruined my marriage and it wasn’t much fun. Yeah, I want to be a badass, successful writer and run a profitable life coaching company—but that’s is not equivalent to having a lame job. And I didn’t want to have to do it while I was breast feeding babies or chasing toddlers. Most people think jobs kind of suck. It’s way more awesome not to have to have one. Men don’t even love having a job. If you’re going to pick a battle ground, aim for one that’s more profitable and takes a lot less work. Women should be seeking wealth not jobs. In fact there are about a million more valuable things in the world to try to get than jobs.

• Feminists are short sighted. Equal pay is a craptastic goal. Better pay is a better goal. More money than men have is more awesome than scoring a lousy 22 more cents an hour. Whatcha gonna do with 22 cents? Feel all respected and validated because you’re making the same shitty pay as the guy in the cube next to you? Could you lower the bar any lower, feminists? Come on, get an imagination and think wealthier!
• Feminists are always talking about moving up the corporate ladder and breaking through the glass ceiling. A better goal would be women building empires and owning our own businesses and designing our own feminine-friendly work cultures. Again, is being a middle manager or a CEO in someone else’s company the biggest thing you can dream up? Is it women’s dream or men’s dream. Just because they have something doesn’t mean we should have to want it. Maybe this is a great dream for some women. But, it’s not my dream. Why do I feel sucked into this common dream? I’m annoyed by it.

• Feminists act like single mothers are helpless moron victims. How is a single mother going to Lean In? I just heard on the news. Uh, sit back and watch bitches! This is how. How they always have. It’s not as if single motherhood is a new invention. Having children without having a husband is not the same as having a debilitating handicap. Givemeabreak. 
  
• Feminists act like teenage mothers are helpless moron victims. Teenage motherhood is not new. People used to regularly have children before they were 20—on purpose. FYI, just because you need fertility treatments to get your eggs to act like teenaged eggs doesn’t make teen mothers bad mothers.
• Feminists act like women and girls in general are helpless moron victims. We all need to be empowered! Because we are what? Powerless? Because we can’t actually do anything without a movement? A grant? A new law? That’s why we need so much empowerment? Most feminist rhetoric sounds like it wants to empower women, but truly it just calls us out as helpless victims who need additional help. Maybe we did in the 1970s, but honestly in 2013 it’s time to get our shit together and put on our big girl panties.
• Feminists act like women are at the mercy of everything and everyone. Really, we’re all just jumping up and down asking for permission to be pretty when we complain about prettier, thinner women in magazines. We’re just begging for a nod of approval every time we go to congress and tattle that we’re not being voluntarily granted equal pay. You’re pretty. You’re worthy of equal pay. Believe it. Demand it.

• Feminists work for 22 cents an hour less and then whine about it. Grow some balls, Ladies. If you want 22 more cents, walk off the job until you get it. If feminists really were willing to stand up for their own value in negotiations they would be making far more than men.
• Feminists are really, really good at keeping women trapped. They act like they want women to have equal say and equal value, but if a woman has a different idea about what that means, or God-Forbid votes for the wrong candidate, they act like ferral cats. Women have always been the gatekeepers for other women, and feminists can get far more venomous than other people about making sure that women stay in the “feminist box.”

• Feminists manipulate other women with abortion and birth control issues. And Feminists fall for it. For 40 years we’ve taken the bait. Then one day you sit back and ask yourself, wait what am I concerned about here? Is birth control really in danger or is this hype to manipulate my vote? Is the right to kill my own baby or to have my daughter kill my grandchildren really important to me? Then you reread that sentence and ask yourself how the hell we got here.

Tomorrow night it will be interesting to see if I’m back to enchantment, I’m turning in my feminism member card or what.

Tracee Sioux is an Authentic Power Coach, author of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories; and she blogs atTheGirlRevolution.com. Contact her at traceesioux@gmail.com. 

Images from Wikimedia Commons.

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It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel fine. ~R.E.M.

I woke up on the morning of 12/21/2012. So did my children, and judging from the activity on Facebook, so did you. Of course there exists the possibility that sometime today a comet could come screaming to earth, eliminating life.

More likely though, is that the Mayan Calendar signifies a magnificent, yet subtle change in the way we live. By subtle, I mean, that we will go about our everyday business and only later will we look back and see dramatic, magnificent change.

Family Redefined

Shifts in Reality

Story traditions from many religions, cultures and prophecies don’t simply tell of a shift towards the light. They tell of a stronger, faster, more extreme play between light and dark. Shadow worker, Debbie Ford puts it this way, The brighter the light, the darker the shadow. 

It’s a spiritual paradox.

In my own life the stark contrast between shadow and light was enormous in 2012. There was a divorce, the end of a 12 year marriage, which was both painful, scary and filled with grief and loss, but which also opened my life up to a previously ungraspable light, joy, freedom and an undeniable feeling of being on the right path. I learned essential spiritual lessons: that my soul will always get what she wants, and that to resist her will cause misery and that my inner wise woman will never, ever lead me down the wrong path.

2012 was the year of release and surrender for many. One friend put it this way, “2012 was about the emptying of the cup.”

Go Slow!!!

Inner Voices

Other things are speeding up for me as well. My intuition is heightened. The still small voice has become loud and insistent. It tells me to do scary things and pretty mundane things too. It tells me to go ahead and spend the money on a rebranding for The Girl Revolution, to launch my life coaching business in 2013 without waiting for an “authority” to grant me permission and validation to fulfill my calling to help people navigate this shift.

Not only is the voice louder, but the feedback from listening or not listening is on fast forward.

It tells me to slow down and I don’t. Within months I get three tickets, a sprained ankle and a severely broken clavicle. Slow down . . . slow down . . . slow down . . . SLOW THE FUCK DOWN!!!!! Finally, I’m left with no other option.

I reason with the voice and it ends in disaster. I listen and it ends in miracles.

Wasband and Self

Declarations Powered Up!

I began this year with a declaration that I would surrender and release everything which no longer serves me, to make room for what does. It happened fast. Simultaneously, it felt like walking uphill in quicksand.

My business shifted dramatically, clients in and clients out. Divorce, redefining what a family is. TGR Body, my skincare line, failed.

But there are other, less visible things I’ve released. Many, many beliefs about myself and my place in the world. My fear of Mean Girls and bullies. My political loyalties. My social circles. Alcohol. Forms of struggle and striving. My beliefs about money and the habits those beliefs attached to me.

I wish I could say that I gracefully opened up my hands and let these things peacefully fly away, like butterflies in the wind. What really happened is that my ego clung desperately to many of them until my higher self and God ripped them from my hands. Strategies that had always worked before stopped working. Drinking beer stopped being fun and climaxed when it took me three days to recover from my Divorce/Birthday party, also I witnessed my dad turn into a very ill alcoholic, a glimpse into a potential future. I struggled with money and became so miserable with worry that I no longer begged for money, but begged to be released from money controlling my happiness and well-being. Mean Girls and Bullies showed up periodically throughout the year, forcing me to stand up for myself and not buy into their shitty soul sucking energy. I let go of tremendous amounts of guilt and shame.

My old ways of being in the world simply stopped working for me. This is a pattern I’ve been witnessing around me, in the broader world. What was working, isn’t.

We keep doing what we’ve always done. We keep using the same strategies to live this life.

Until it doesn’t work anymore.

The Dance of Light & Dark 

The dance of the light and dark is playing itself out right before our very eyes. A presidential election brings it to the surface.

Jesus said, “Shoot the hell out of your enemy.”

Witnessing the Conservative Christian Right beat the crap out of gays, immigrants, liberals, women, minorities, other religious perspectives, the poor and anyone who has the audacity to get sick while being poor is enough to turn anyone’s stomach. Fear and anger consumes them and they want to wield war-designed machine guns to protect them from crazy people wielding war-designed machine guns, who are also consumed with anger. Then, shouting warnings about judgement day, while doing everything they can to manifest it as a reality, with what appears to be absolutely no light consciousness whatsoever. We believe in Jesus’ word to Love One Another, but why the hell should we take care of you losers?

How DARE you say “legitimate rape,” there is no such thing as “illegitimate rape!”

Non-religious people aren’t much more palatable. Using inane arguments about a woman’s right  to knock off her own off-spring at the rate of a million per year, so they can choose—what? While paradoxically arguing that the gendercide in other countries, an abortion rate of the same number but limited to girls, is unconscionable. Becoming incensed that the other side would dare to address the issue of “legitimate rape,” while millions of the same women heatedly turn the pages of 50 Shades of Grey, a very explicit series about the sexual, emotional and spiritual violence committed by an older man against a naive virgin. No means no, you sick perverted bastards, but explicit details about consensual rape and getting the shit beat out of us and being demeaned and dehumanized during sex is making us so very horny.

Watching people trounce on humanity itself makes a person feel like taking a shower. Good people, most. But, distorted ways of attempting to bring about their version of right instead of light.

The dance goes on. Light. Dark.

Awakening to Consciousness

Meanwhile, I believe a shift is happening. I see Conservative Christians becoming more loving and accepting to those around them who do not align with their religious views. I see millions of non-religious people devoting their lives not to a church, but to a deep spirituality that expands faith, hope and love. I see transformation and light brought out of the very experiences that bring us to our knees in pain and surrender. Why humans need the dark to force us into chasing the light, I don’t know. But, it is a real phenomenon.

Unconsciousness appears to default to the dark, embracing cynicism, pessimism, depression, anxiety, anger, fear, addiction and the fall of mankind. It takes far more diligence and faith to turn towards the light in the faith of the overwhelming evidence that we’re screwed. It takes consciousness to recognize the fear and anger within and turn away from it. It requires far more courage to have something tragic and terrible happen to you and then choose to heal anyway.

Genesis tells us that first there was dark, until God made a declaration, “Let there be light.” Perhaps it is not choosing the light that saves us and makes us better: but becoming whole, using the darkness for good as God appears to do.

Love is Power

The End. The Beginning. Love Wins. 

I know how this drama ends. Love wins.

What I don’t know is how it’s going to play out for us. But, I have some ideas.

What was working for us won’t keep working. We will be forced to reinvent our way of living, our way of being, our way of interacting with our fellow humans. What we mean by the word “love” will have to shift.

We can, and I believe we will, declare over our planet, our families, our religions, our political systems and our schools an end to the old paradigms and a beginning of better ones.

I commit myself to playing full out. I commit to the journey of consciousness, awaking and wholeness. I commit myself to helping others navigate their own new way of being. I feel called to help other people declare a gentler transition through this shift in our reality.

Declare With Me: Love & Light Win. 

 Tracee Sioux is a Northern Colorado writer, life coach and the author of Love Distortion: Belle, Battered Codependent and Other Love Stories; she blogs at TheGirlRevolution.com. Contact her at traceesioux@gmail.com.

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So, the Paycheck Fairness Act , which “addresses pay disparities between men and women. The bill limits the defense that employers can use to respond to charges of wage discrimination based on sex, among other actions,” (HR.BLR.com) failed by two votes.

Good Riddance, I say.

Because Equal Pay, is not enough to correct 2000 years of financial repression and oppression of girls and women. It’s what we were settling for, thinking it was more achievable than what is really enough. Thinking “fair and equal” would be enough. “Enough” would be that pay disparity swing in the feminine direction. That we use their own rules to flat-out best them.

Every indicator suggests that the woman’s day in the sun is on the horizon, closer than it feels.

In The Rise of the Sheconomy, by Belinda Luscombe, in Time Magazine the statistics point directly to not just mere equality between the sexes in regards to pay, but the surpassing of women’s salaries over men’s.

In October 2009, The U.S. workforce became nearly half female: women held 49.9% of all nonfarm labor jobs and 51.5% of high-paying management and professional positions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. This is not likely to be a blip. For every two guys who graduate from college or get a higher degree, three women do. This is almost the exact opposite of the graduation ratio that existed when the baby boomers entered college.

And as the U.S. continues its migration from a manufacturing economy to a knowledge-based one, women are poised to snag more jobs. They make up the majority in the workforce in 9 of the 10 occupations the BLS predicts will add the most jobs in the next eight years.

. . . about a third of women outearn their husbands.

Childless women in major-metropolitan areas out-earn male counterparts by 108%. It’s suspected that once these women have children they will narrow the Motherhood Penalties faced by previous generations.

. . . women hold sway over 51.3% of the nation’s private wealth.

“We’re on the brink of a massive power shift, a grinking of the gears of history into a new human condition, [Maddy Dychtwald] writes. “It’s a world where women can, if they choose seize the reins of economic control.”

So, you can keep your measly Paycheck Fairness Act – the bar of Equal Pay is way too low for women now. We’re going to leap over it like a hurdle in a race – a race women are going to win. The American Way is turning in our favor. It’s The Rise of  Sheconomy Baby!

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I’ve been excited to hear about the 100 women who claim authority as Catholic Priests in the United States, as in this Time article.

While there is evidence to suggest that women were equals and held authority in early Christianity, The Church – Catholic, Mormon, Protestant – have spent the last two thousand years eradicating femininity and authentic feminine godliness from its rituals and hierarchy.

It appears that it takes quite some time for women, who have been slaughtered throughout history for being “witches” if they believe in their own authentic spiritual power or exhibit any of God’s power and authority, to stick their toe out and reclaim this inherent authority.

Interestingly, while Rome is using the same verbiage against these Womenpriests – delictium gravius (grave crime) – as it used against the many pedophiliac priests, it is only excommunicating the women who claim God’s authority and not the “legitimate male priests” who abuse God’s authority and molest children. This, itself, is delictium gravius.

Time reports that 59% of U.S. Catholics favor ordaining women.

I’ve long thought that any church or religion with waning membership, especially among the younger population, should look first to its gender issues and its rules about authority. Perhaps there were generations of women who would do the heavy lifting of the church, yet be denied religious authority and spiritual powers, but these young women coming up in a world of increasing gender equality consider such policies delictium gravius.

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