Exploring America’s Deification of the Masculine

And its abject terror of the Feminine

Please note: This essay contains nude portraits of the female body.

They have come in large crowds. There are so many — too many to identify by name, mostly white men. They wear them in plain sight. They make a show of them on the floor of state capitol buildings when legislators are in session. No one is arrested. This is all legal — not just legal, but encouraged by questionable interpretations of a constitutional amendment.

Ginger Pierro brought hers to a beach in New Hampshire in the summer of 2016. She, too, wore hers in plain sight while doing yoga. She was arrested and fined (though the fine was suspended). Two more women, protesting the arrest, were also arrested and fined. These women broke the law and their lawsuit alleging that their constitutional rights had been violated was dismissed.

What were the men showing off in plain sight? Assault rifles.

And the women?

Their breasts.

In the United States, there have been more than 230 school shootings in the past twenty years. Over 300 people have been killed in these shootings. Our children regularly perform safety drills in preparation for the inevitable future mass shootings — even kindergarten students are taught how to hide behind the teacher’s desk in a dark room, stay away from the windows, and be as quiet as possible.

Due to the fact that our laws have not changed despite ongoing violence, we can surmise that most Americans are okay with this. Apparently, most of us think a school shooting is a normal part of life, even though no other industrialized nation comes anywhere near this level of violence.

What is definitively part of normal life is breastfeeding, though you wouldn’t know it based on cultural prejudices that often label public breastfeeding as “obscene.” Breastfeeding in public only recently became universally protected in the United States. Utah and Idaho, the last holdouts, finally got on board in 2018, but only after extensively changing the original language of the proposed laws to ensure “female modesty.”

Even today, not every state exempts breastfeeding mothers from public indecency laws, though breastfeeding women have never been prosecuted, the unspoken understanding being that these measures are “feel-good” in nature, “providing protection from a nonexistent risk.”

That “risk” being the exposure of the female nipple.

Interestingly, we don’t appear to be worried about the very real risk of our children dying in a mass shooting or our elected officials being killed during legislative sessions...

America has spent the last four years listening to its president make divisive, violent comments in speeches and on social media. Over the past year, preceding an election that he knew might remove him from power, he launched a long-term propaganda campaign that fomented an insurrection aimed at overturning a legal election.

It took the insurrection and plans for further violence for these platforms to finally suspend Trump, even though he’d already violated their policies countless times.

Many — even those who oppose Trump — find this an egregious attack on the First Amendment (which it is not — the First Amendment is often misunderstood thanks to political propaganda and lawmakers who are not well-acquainted with the Constitution).

Meanwhile, thousands of women have had their social media accounts suspended or entirely deleted for posting content that was flagged as pornographic (typically on Facebook and Instagram). These run the gamut from clothed photos of women performing pole dances to nude portraits. Even photos permitted by the platforms’ community standards, like images of breastfeeding (nipples out of view) and mastectomy scars, are routinely removed. And any depiction of a photographed female nipple is explicitly prohibited — even in a photo of a woman breastfeeding her child.

Further, Instagram has only recently acknowledged that it is time to take a closer look at “algorithmic bias,” which evidence supports is suppressing Black female voices and bodies.

As a culture, we are very comfortable with dominance and masculinity. With violence. And even more so if these things come in a white package.

Even as these qualities cultivate a culture of instability, fear, divisiveness, and danger, we seem to find peace in that.

We find it normal to see average citizens, members of militias, and even those associated with SPLC-designated hate groups carrying assault weapons with the express intent to intimidate lawmakers and the public. This is a freedom our country cherishes and fiercely protects.

But we are terrified of the feminine.

A group of topless women descending upon a capitol building anywhere in this country would be arrested immediately for public indecency, even if they were unarmed and seated in silent protest. (Or, apparently, practicing yoga.)

Why are we so afraid of Her?

I will not force a binary moral judgment on Her — or on the Masculine. Neither is good nor bad. They are both everything: death and life, light and dark, chaos and order, peace and conflict.

We choose the Masculine again and again because our culture is patriarchal. We’ve been taught, by two thousand years of bias and propaganda, to honor the Masculine above all else.

But we know better now. We have learned to identify our inner biases. We have learned to see that we have thrown away the Sacred Feminine and perhaps we are not doing very well without her to help keep us balanced.

Yet still, we choose the Masculine. Still, we keep the Feminine locked away.

A body that could give, lose, or take away life just as easily as an assault rifle.

A dazzling machine of miracles and mortality.

A quiet that asks for more silence than many are able to handle.

A receptivity that is beyond our spiritual capacity at this point in history.

A softness that could break stone and metal.

We are so afraid of Her.

And we’ll never be okay until we learn to embrace her once more.

© Yael Wolfe 2021

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