Today I am joined again by my very fabulous friend and colleague Sasha Ostara. Sasha is a Somatic Intimacy Coach. Sasha and I both have a really strong aversion to the labelling of behavioural traits as masculine or feminine and instead prefer to categorise them as human qualities.
In this podcast we talk about why we believe this and how our somatic training around the nervous system has helped inform this view. We also discussed:
How labelling a behaviour masculine or feminine just weaponises the division that already exists between genders. That they are often confused with gender and somewhere along the way historically, someone decided to assign males to masculine and females to feminine, it could have been the other way,
How our autonomic nervous system drives our behaviour and actually it is more helpful to look at the nervous system state in any given moment,
How women have been conditioned to be in fawn and freeze response and that behaviour is deemed acceptable,
The wave of gender self help books that came out in the 1970s and 1980s whilst helpful for some people in understanding others just further replicated earlier ideas of division and reinforced this point of view,
How hormones impact on our nervous system response,
The different polarities that exist in a social system and that it is the polarity and the patterns to look for not a masculine of feminine quality,
How our relationships can be a replica of broader patterns that exist within social systems and cultural contexts that we are a part of,
That we’ve noticed with female clients who want their partners to be more masculine, when asked to describe what that is what they are actually looking for, what they responded with is a description of adult behaviour, not child like behaviour,
How gendered terms carry a confirmation bias and it is important to actually look at these terms and whether you are doing this when you label a behaviour masculine or feminine and how that narrows people’s perceptions of how they can show up in the world.
We talked about three different books in the podcast, they were ‘The Tragedy of Heterosexuality’ by Jane Ward, ‘Delusions of Gender’ by Cordelia Fine, ‘The Flowering Wand: rewilding the sacred masculine’ by Sophie Strand. The podcast Sasha Mentions is “If books could kill”
You can find Sasha at her website www.sasha-ostara.com or her instagram page @sasha_ostara