Tigress 2: Growing Up In THe Patriarchy

By:   Priscilla A. Wainwright, Ph.D., CPC

            Betty grew up with parents who praised her; they trained her that she could be anything she wanted.    She grew to become very much her own person.    She went to college, grad school and began a successful career.   Yet, she didn’t really get in touch with her full feminine side until she became pregnant!    Her parents tried to raise her as gender-neutral as they could.    Betty is an empowered, liberated woman by all normal standards.

            However, the Patriarchy presents a male-model definition of success, and a rather linear path to get there.    Society has made great strides under the Patriarchy, and the model has been immensely helpful to men and women alike.

            So, women like Betty grow up feeling good about themselves, and feel “empowered”.    However, the Patriarchy subtly offers a male-oriented model.    Women think they’re “empowered” when they succeed and rise as high as men, and feel equal in status.    This is only partially true, however.

            So many highly accomplished women who have succeeded in their own right, still have lost touch with part of their Feminine Nature, their Inner Tigress.     Yet they are either not, or are only dimly, aware of that part of themselves which has gotten lost along the way.

            The Patriarchy objectivizes women in subtle ways that most women, even many who consider themselves “empowered,” do not see.

            [Sidebar – How do you boil a live frog?  You put it into a pot of cold water. While it’s swimming around, you slowly turn up the heat.  The poor frog dies and is cooked before it even knows what is happening.  Well, girlfriends,  that has been what has been happening to us in the Patriarchal culture.]

            Why do even many of the most “empowered women” miss it?   Because we all grew up in the Patriarchy.   Even “women’s lib” was shaped by it.    It is the ocean we swim in, the air we breathe.    We take it for granted, believing it to be “the way it is”.    We go along with it, or we rebel against it, but even that is done within the patriarchal framework.

            We accept, go with the flow, or rebel.   But we have not – until very recently – called the whole patriarchal system into question. Why?  Because we have assumed the patriarchy and the typical model of achieving success in work and society, organizational leadership, family structure, religion, etc. is “the way it is” (or in the case of religion and the human motivation movement, “the way it should be”.)    According to the Patriarchy, if you are not “succeeding” or “achieving” in a goal-oriented way, you are off track.

            Now don’t get me wrong.   There’s nothing inherently wrong with any of this.    It works, and the patriarchal system has produced huge wonders in human creative, scientific and technical progress.

            It’s just that the Patriarchy devalues qualities that are typically “feminine”, including important factors related to female power and knowing:    emotion, temperament, gut-reaction, intuition, unpredictability, etc.    As a result, many of us women also devalue (or at least underestimate the value of) these qualities.

            So, the power and success system that works great for guys is insufficient to include all the broad aspects of female power.    The result:   women who are immersed in the patriarchy, and who strive to succeed in a “male-dominated” way of defining and understanding society and culture, often lose touch with the full feminine spectrum of experience.

            The full feminine spectrum (Inner Tigress) slowly slips away, so slowly, so subtly, that the average girl is unaware it is happening.    Until one day, she awakens to an empty feeling and wonders what happened.    Because it happened so subtly, she hasn’t a clue.    She feels the emptiness, but doesn’t know what is missing, and has no idea how, or with what, to replace it.

            To make matters worse (or to complicate the issue, at least) we have been taught that true success in life for women is to be attractive and pleasing to men, well-married, and to be good “servants” of others’ needs.   While on the surface there is nothing inherently “wrong” in this, when you really dig into those messages, they are belittling of women, and limiting it terms of encouraging women to bring forth their true, full power and potential.  Problem is, men are not  taught the same things in relation to women.    Men are taught to succeed, treat women well, and to expect their female partners to be “helpmeets”.

            Deny this all you want, it plays out in families.    Even in homes where the woman is “empowered”, has a career and makes a good living, in the vast majority of cases, when it comes to housework and domestic duties, most of that work falls to women.    And when there is conflict with the children, the kids are more likely to listen to, and show more respect to, the father than the mother.    This is the result of Patriarchal poisoning, in spite of the apparent empowerment of women.

              You see, there is a subtle sister-myth to the Patriarchy.  It remains mostly unspoken.  Women’s empowerment has driven it much more underground, but its rumblings and messages are still present, even if subconsciously. That is the Myth of Female Subservience.  Its basic message is that women are secondary and lesser to men in the “natural order” of things.  This is part of the poison that has been in our atmosphere growing up.  While women in their mid thirties and older have been more affected by this myth than our younger sisters, this myth is resurfacing with great power in the oversexualizing of young girls and women by the media.  Objectifying of women is not going away. It’s just changing form.

             As a result, there is greater need for girls and women of all ages to reconnect with their Inner Tigress than ever before.  Maybe not so much for the sake of assertiveness as was more necessary in the past, but in terms of fully honoring the Female within us beyond sex and into the full range of female power.

             Much more could be said about these issues, and I will be addressing them in future blogs.  The objectification of women is a key topic in Bridge 1 of my “4 Bridges” model of Female Empowerment.

              Now, back to the Tigress, the direct subject of my next blog, where I define and spell out the Inner Feminine Spirit and key Tigress qualities.