Exploring Integral Relationships: Sex, Gender, and Polarity

I can't even finish this document. I couldn't get past the 1st 6 paragraphs. This is so error-ridden that I don't understand why it is even here. And worse: there seems to be people who think it's brilliant. I am completely confused.

--

"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148

This is an official apology! I wish I could pin it up at the top of the thread so it will get noticed, but I fear it will get buried. I was notified by a third party that your interior is not okay as a result of my tone/words, etc.

Something which I am identified with has obviously been strongly triggered here. Freaking out like I did happens when I am unable to contain or hold my own emotions which arise in response to something "out there". "I" am now going to try and turn that other "I" into an Object in "my" awareness so that we can both be more skillfully cared for.

In an attempt to back up this train to where it began, I clicked the link to your first post in this series and reviewed it and my response to it then. I Voiced some pretty intense pain in my comment. And you didn't respond. The feeling of being left out in the cold with my disliked emotions arose. I must have stashed that away back in July. That feeling is a very old and Traumatizing feeling for me. It's much too painful and intense for me to hold alone, so it has to be either dissociated from or medicated. I have to cry now.

...

Hopefully this won't start a cascade effect where all of the Monsters come out of the box at once. If it does, I will have to medicate.

Waiting for my cognitive functioning to return.

...

While looking for something else this morning, I ran across a blog post I made in October of last year. It was purely serendipitous. That blog post articulates very well what I am having trouble with here. As you may have heard, many women get upset when people - esp. men - speak about them as Objects. Regardless of the intent of those people/men, the spoken or written words that they use demonstrate a apparent lack of shared meaning or shared value about this. Some people think that this is just semantics, but it is not. Speaking about women as Objects is a behavioral habit (LR) in the human male sub-culture (LL) that needs to stop or change in order to reflect the interior values and meanings that arise in the interiors of the women that you now share this space (LL) with. When men were the only humans considered fully empowered agents in society (LL), habits of speech formed which are still with us to this day.

Plus, that habit of males being the only agents while the females are passive property is inherited from our bovine ancestors. It is not a male characteristic. It is a bovine characteristic. We just happen to share similar brain structures (UR) and the pre-conscious impulse patterns (UL) which those structures co-arise with. We have those structures/patterns as well as others. KW as well as other Developmental Theorists skip the animal/pre-human structures/patterns in his diagrams and pretty much begins with Beige survival patterns as humans experience that. It has been an arbitrary place to start. But it has become important now since we are acting as if those necessarily non-human structures/patterns aren't sitting here with us at the table.

Individuals are strongly effected by LR social structures, as I'm sure you know. If the LR reflects meanings and values that are above or below the Developmental Stage or the State of the individual, friction occurs and there is usually an emotional arising in response to that friction. This emotional arising begins in our earliest Stages and many of them are programed into our Body memories as pre-personal conditioning. We may or may not ever be able to turn those conditionings into Objects in our awareness or gain choice over feeling or obeying them. For those who identify as those arisings, concessions must be made. That is the Integral way. For those who can learn to identify those arisings, encouragment to do so must be given. That too, is the Integral way.

Look at this sentence from your first post in this series:

"We begin our exploration by differentiating between biological sex, learned social gender roles, and feminine/masculine polarities of males and females. This allows us to understand her primary sexual fantasy of attracting a successful male protector and provider with status and wealth..."

Here's what respect means to me: I am a Subject. The only way that I am an Object is that I am in your awareness and I am not you who is aware. As a Subject who wishes to be respected as an agent in the We-space who makes conscious decisions and takes actions based on my own intention, I require demonstrations of respect from you and anyone else who wishes to refer to me or other women. If you want to speak about my behavior, then you may speak about my behavior as an Object. If you want to speak about my artifacts, then you may speak about my artifacts as Objects. If you want to speak about my sexual fantasies, you may speak about them as Objects, but only after you've asked me and I have told you what they are because they are arisings in my interior, not my exterior! You have not done this. But please do not speak about me as an Object and similarly all of us women as Objects together and our interior arisings as Objects unless you have inquired of each and every one of us and we have all told you what they are. I am not an Object. And if you looked at what I recently mentioned as a "sexual fantasy" of mine, you will notice that it does not resemble what you have described as my sexual fantasy whatsoever. 

When I, or my interior arisings, are spoken about as Objects by people who haven't even talked to me and attempted to reach some kind of shared meaning or understanding I experience intense pain and rage in my interior which, I am guessing, is in response to my own experience plus from the collective experience of many other women today and also all thruout history. This pain or anger is not shared by all other women either now or thruout history. Some women can't relate to this pain or anger at all. That is fine. In fact, that's the point. Women do not all experience the world in the same way nor do we all have the same feelings about it. What I am wanting from you is your ability/willingness to articulate these kinds of individualities in the way I just did - as a demonstration of respect. Doing so is no guarantee that you will not inadvertently trigger the pain I have described in some women. When/if I treat men with the respect I just asked for, some of them react as if I didn't and totally overlook the fact that I used words like "many other men/women" or "some of them/us/you" and they will fire off rants at me as well. I've been there. This is part of the agony of trying to change old habits and we all share this agony. When I forget to treat men with this kind of respect, I have friends who will remind me to do so. Bless them!

Muchof the time, I am not identified as the "suffering women who is looked at as an Object". I spend alot of time talking to people who are respectful of the fact that I am another Subject, like them, and therefore they cannot know my interior arisings unless they ask me and I disclose them. At those times it is easy for me to speak about the part of me that is identified as the "suffering woman who is looked at as an Object". That self is an Object in my awareness most of the time and I can disidentify from her. But when someone speaks either to or about me in such a way that they decide that they know what I am and what I want, I am jammed back into that identity again and I have to be the "suffering women who is looked at as an Object". This jamming process is the effect that the LR has on the UL and I have to re-experience the dreadful friction and emotional arisings as a result. I have not seen or heard sufficient teaching on how this happens and what we can do about it. For the most part, we all tend to tell the other to stop behaving or feeling thus and so, and that's pretty much it.

Look, for a moment, at the different disciplines of the Quads.

I read the above sentences of yours and it seems to me that you are using one of the Right Quad disciplines. I'm not so sure ethnomethodology isn't a Right Quad discipline since it is quantifying group behavior which is a Right Quad event. Quantifying group values and meanings is more like what I would like to see happening here. Perhaps this chart would be helpful:

...altho I'm not sure what to make of this one yet. I need help in understanding what he means by all this. I gotta read thru that document. KW says in that same document that when you use the pronouns "her/him", you are in the Right side of the Quads. Do you agree? Here is the quote:

" The four quadrants are four of the basic ways that we can look at any event: from the inside or from the outside, and in singular and plural forms. This gives us the inside and the outside of the individual and the collective. These four perspectives are not merely arbitrary conventions. Rather, they are dimensions that are so fundamental that they have become embedded in language as pronouns during the natural course of evolution. These embedded perspectives show up as first, second, and third person pronouns. Thus, the inside of the individual shows up as "I"; the inside of the collective as "you/we"; the outside of the individual as "it/him/her"; and the outside of the collective as "its/them." In short: I, we, it, and its."

Since you are speaking in the above quote about "her" interior events (fantasies), shouldn't you be inquiring instead of informing and shouldn't you be using the pronoun "you" instead of "her"? If you prefer to use the term "her" and prefer to inform, then what I would prefer is that you do not inform me about my interiors. You can inform people about my behavior, and the collected behavior of all women, all day long. That's fine. But please don't attempt to inform me about my interior. There is another alternative. You can say that when asked question X, these certain women responded Y. That eliminates all pretense. Nancy Friday published "My Secret Garden" in 1973. Alot has changed since then. But apparently she hasn't. She is still focusing on transgressive cliches. Her latest?:  "Beyond My Control: Forbidden Fantasies in an Uncensored Age, Sourcebooks, Inc., 2009" She doesn't speak for me. Neither do the women who pursue powerful men. I may have the brain structures and impulse patterns of elk, but I also have other structures/patterns which apparently override those.

The numbers don't matter. There is absolutely no excuse for generalizing here. Generalizing doesn't expose what we really need to know, which is: what is real? What is real is that the structures/patterns inherited from our animal ancestors have come with us but have been widely diffused and distributed in and amongst us humans both because of and in spite of our genders/sex, as well as altered sometimes beyond recognition. And that if you want to know what a woman wants, your best strategy is to ask her. I'm guessing that it is similar for men.

And ladies!: if you don't disclose what you want,

you don't get to complain about men not knowing!

And if you don't know what you want,

then it's on you to figure that out, not men!

Do you see how subtle reductionism has crept in here?

--oOo--

In my first comment in this blog post thread, I spoke of your essay as an "it". I was not speaking to you or about you. In my second comment, I spoke about you as "he/him". I was mirroring the complete lack of interaction between you and me that you started out with. When I speak to the people who post blogs here at the request and approval of IL Staff, I get mixed results. Some respond to me, and some do not. I would prefer to speak to people instead of about them if I have questions or concerns. Since you did not respond to me the first time and you have not responded to any of the others, except for Shikha in the first post, I'm going on a conditioned memory that you are not "here" and that my only choice is to speak about you and your work. If you were here and I was able to speak to you, I would be speaking differently. Not less honestly, but more carefully toward your interior. You have not spoken to me, tho I have disclosed my interior in the We-space and made myself available for dialog. Really big uncomfortable feelings arise in me when that happens which is why I dislike and often block posters who do "drive-bys" - regardless of what they are saying.

When I feel disturbed about something that someone says and I am not allowed to speak directly to them, I become very frustrated because I can't do my part in finding shared meaning. The only avenue of communication I have is complaint and counter-objectification. If you would like to do your part in solving that problem, I am here.

--

"The Left Hand Path, not merely the Right ... must take the lead."

~SES pg. 148

Don't mean to be pessimistic but I've been on the spiritual path -if you can call it that- for a long time. But reading the free chapters he offered, and as meaningful as they are, I just feel that trying to become a better man never ends -all the while I'm getting older. I just want to meet someone and get on with my freaking life! I really believed that if I just keep learning and reading more and more, and more therapy, I'll be at least better off than most men but it seems I'm still far behind ...Ucik says

Men find most women to be sexually attractive, while modern and postmodern single
women consider less than 5% of available men to be suitable partners. Since men naturally
compete for attractive women, they get repeatedly ignored, rejected, or dumped, while
many single women complain that there are no good available men out there.

Elsewhere he says 

The bottom line is that an ever-increasing number of men who try to find a new
partner or to improve their current love relationship find themselves in a confusing,
painful, frustrating, and damaging mess in their partnerships with women, and none of
the currently available approaches seems to solve their problems.

As much as I'd like to know all there is to know about cultivating a healthy relationship, I can't deal with it anymore. There is just too much to know and I'm tired of trying to make sense of women. Ucik's findings isn't encouraging, it's depressing. I can't believe it's come to this. Andrew Cohen just adds to it...

For most individuals this whole notion of being a man or being a woman is so pregnant with ideas that are painfully fixed and rigid that there is literally no sense of innocence whatsoever, and that's one of the many reasons why it's so difficult for men and women to be able to get along together. It's why it's so difficult to really make any kind of rational sense out of this whole notion of gender anyway.

My siblings are long married with kids and I'm still stuck trying to make sense of my relationship with women. I feel like Cypher in The Matrix who said he didn't want to know anything. He wanted to go back living an illusory life in the matrix as a rich actor. I feel likewise. The more I know, the more I'm burdened  trying to become a better man -so why bother? I wish I didn't know anything about integral, about all this empowerment crap. As Ken Wilber said, nobody gives a flying fuck! 

I wish I could shut off my sexual drive so it would no longer be making my life a living hell. Either that or live in a country where prostitution was legal. Or maybe I should find a foreign bride who are not as dysfunctional as women in the US www.youtube.com/watch as Ucik mentioned.

But hey, the US is going to hell in a hand basket anyway, maybe I should leave instead. Bottom line is I'm tired. I'm tired. Maybe it's my deflated ego speaking here -actually, it is. I just found this out recently. I have a deflated ego. How about that? No wonder I fared poorly with my life and especially women. They pick that right up with their amazing intuition and in their eyes, I'm a fucking loser. Hummm...I wonder if Amish women do the same? I doubt it. They're more forgiving. Foreign women are like that too.

And so how do you fix a deflated ego? Meditation? Medication? More therapy? I don' t really care anymore. Fuck it. If God really existed, I'd tell him to go fuck himself. And women? Well, now I know why many of men behave so passive aggressively towards them. As for myself, my deflated ego is so fucked up, anger is not on the top of my list .. it's more like resignation., indifference, boredom, laziness, non existence, despair,- then hatred- but not at women, but of precisely what Ucik said and I'm fucking pissed off about it. Even of I was "all that", even if I knew all that Ucik said in his book, then what? Where am I going to find a woman who is on the same path? I live in the fucking woods for Christ sake and the women here are hopeless. I can't wait till I grow old and die.