Does My Wild Scare You?
The untamed women may be unnerving but she’s vital
Shakti is the universal primal energy that is inherently feminine. It is sexual energy but so much bigger than just the desire to couple, or the desire to procreate. Shakti is the creative, generative juice of life. Wild women are full of shakti. This is what is so confronting to the society or the man who wants to control her. She is alive and unbridled, with her feet in the earth and her arms reaching for the universe itself. She is the source of life, and of nourishment. She communes with the numinous within her. In other words, she’s too big for her britches.
It took me until I was nearly 50 to fully find and embrace my wild self and to completely deprogram from being a “good girl.” I worked hard to uncover my authentic self, but I am still reminded nearly every day of how threatening that feels to some people. Everything from newspaper headlines to comments directed specifically at me reinforce the idea that women should be demure, accommodating, pleasing to men, deferential, and nice.
It’s not just my sexual freedom that is threatening, although that is a significant factor in my case. I am married to James but have another life partner in Nat as well. I also have a female lover (Tamara) and from time to time, other sex partners. Living this way, in this expanded version of love, has brought James and me even closer together than we were before we opened up our relationship. But this doesn’t make sense to a lot of the world. How can our relationship function if one of us isn’t the boss and my life is larger than the ways that I can serve my family? We are breaking all the rules, and, specifically, I am breaking all the rules. In the face of that, we shouldn’t be happy or satisfied — but we are.
In a society that is founded in stratification and domination, anyone who refuses to fall in line is a challenge to the status quo. I do not “know my place” because I have rejected the right of anyone else to tell me what my place is. I make my own place. I live by the rules that work for me and the other people I am in relationship with. For that, I have been called selfish, greedy, and a narcissist.
I was a very good girl in my school years, compliant and easily pushed around, but I started stripping some of that away in my early 20s when I began to realize that being a “good girl” wasn’t going to get me the things that I wanted. There were so many layers though, so many years of societal programming, it was like peeling an onion. I had to do it piece by piece and it took a long time. There was a fair amount of pushback along the way.
At 20 I began to realize that I was an Amazon at heart, and not just because I was 6 feet tall. I was no longer able to keep myself small and contained enough to fit into the boxes I’d been given. I yearned to be myself and to figure out who that even was, but I did know I wanted to be free! It still took me another 30 years to finally get there, to figure out who I truly am and to allow her to live fully. I had to swim the entire time against the tide that told me this was not an acceptable thing to strive for.
I no longer defer to authority or to experts out of hand. I run their input through the filters of my own inner knowing and see how it feels to me. I trust myself and my own instincts because that is a muscle that I have honed over many years. Because I know who I am now, it is much harder than it used to be to take advantage of me. I am kind, but I am no longer nice. I am no longer afraid to be disruptive.
When David Mueller put his hand under Taylor Swift’s skirt and grabbed her ass during a 2013 photo op, he counted on her training as a woman to make nice and not create a scene, and he wasn’t wrong — at least not at first. Swift tried to move away from him but did not say anything at the time. She did not disrupt the photoshoot but did complain later in the day which ultimately resulted in the radio host losing his job — something that so took him aback that he actually tried to sue her.
Swift was still young (23) when this happened, and still honing her wild woman chops. They got a bit more of an opportunity to show themselves when she testified under oath about that day. When Mueller’s lawyer suggested that Swift should be critical of her bodyguard for failing to protect her from being groped, she replied, “I’m critical of your client sticking his hand under my skirt and grabbing my ass.” When asked for her reaction on learning that Mueller was fired: “I’m not going to allow you or your client to make me feel in any way that this is my fault, because it isn’t. … I am being blamed for the unfortunate events of his life that are a product of his decisions and not mine.”
Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes’ book, Women Who Run With Wolves, is an in-depth look at the wild woman archetype and how embracing the natural primal aspects of our female nature, which has been so curtailed by society, helps women to reclaim their own inner wisdom and power. It has been a classic for women trying to find and reclaim themselves since it was first published in 1992.
What does this wildish intuition do for women? Like the wolf, intuition has claws that pry things open and pins things down, it has eyes that can see through the shields of persona, it has ears that hear beyond the range of mundane human hearing. With these formidable psychic tools a woman takes on a shrewd and even precognitive animal consciousness, one that deepens her femininity and sharpens her ability to move confidently in the outer world.
(Young girls) are taught to not see, and instead to “make pretty” all manner of grotesqueries whether they are lovely or not. This early training to “be nice” causes women to override their intuitions. In that sense, they are actually purposefully taught to submit to the predator. Imagine a wolf mother teaching her young to “be nice” in the face of an angry ferret or a wily diamondback rattler.
To be strong does not mean to sprout muscles and flex. It means meeting one’s own numinosity without fleeing, actively living with the wild nature in one’s own way. It means to be able to learn, to be able to stand in what we know. It means to stand and live.
Those who are afraid of the wild woman are unsettled by her refusal to turn away from her intuition and her knowing, both about herself and about them. She is like a tree with deep roots who cannot be blown over in a storm. She is unlikely to be charmed by bullshit and self-serving narratives. She learns from her mistakes, finds a way to heal from her wounds, and helps others to find their way as well. She has a mind of her own and is not easily controlled. Because of this, she is profoundly dangerous.
None-the-less, the quest for a wilder, more real and more primal identity is one of the most important things that any woman can do for herself and for her world. It’s the place where we can reclaim ourselves from the numbing effects of consumer culture and constant comparison to the people around us. It’s the place where we can be most in touch with our connection to each other and to the natural world. A wilder woman is a vessel for love, creation, and expansion. The world may feel unsettled by her, but the world desperately needs her as well.
© Copyright, Elle Beau 2020 Elle Beau writes on Medium about sex, life, relationships, society, anthropology, spirituality, and love.