Enter label: don't let the politicization of feminism fool you into thinking it's not a useful tool for healing

and the first Jody Wogan reading list

Oct 27, 2024

Dear Companions,

Womanhood. What a shitshow. Beauvoir wrote: A woman is not born but becomes one. She meant that femininity is a social construct, but I read it with the sentiment of Camus’s Rebel. Womanhood is destruction first, then creation. Indeed, womanhood did not come to me by way of choice—between picket fence and glass ceiling. Sure, over the years, I got a taste of that dilemma— rebel, conform, repeat. Option C cut out my tongue.

Option C: dissolution. Get trampled and betrayed by my body, reduced to nothing, unable to care for my daughter, unable to have friends, unable to interact with family, unable to do anything, thus unwinding a life. I became a woman by experiencing both sickness and motherhood. On top of being a stressed-out founder for a decade prior. The masculine and feminism colliding like two jumbo jets mid-air. Thus, it took this recipe: first ignoring over a period of three and a half decades, and then suddenly becoming in a period of 5 years.

Then there’s Jody Wogan. Jody is my wild woman archetype who finds salvation and meaning. As the motel groundskeeper told me when I was an 8-year-old and got my leg stuck in a fence: if you got it stuck there, you could get it out. Womanhood got me here; can it get me out?

As I go down the rabbit hole to find the female Joe Rogans, I’m forced to examine what led me to aspire to her image—as an alias, as a myth, as a dream of liberation. In this exploration, I find myself combing through the oft-raked soil of feminism, a faraway land I had managed to ignore or avoid for most of my life.

I am not the first to arrive here dragging feet. Nearly every feminist book begins with the same chapter—of the woman who doesn’t want to discuss being a woman.

The subject (of feminism) is irritating, especially for women: and it is not new. Enough ink has flowed over the quarrel about feminism…yet it is still being talked about.

-Simone de Beauvoir

Why now?

On a personal level, I need more than Marla Singer. Something more than Bravo, which I genuinely mistook for women’s interests, in other words, that to be women, is to numb one’s mind. I need access to a force. On a broader level, the declining fertility rates, the increased medication usage in women populations, the number of women disabled by Covid, the rate of women quitting jobs, the reversal of reproductive rights, the incessant marketing of poorly manufactured luxury goods, the sorry discourse of female media—it all smells bad.

I never wanted to “disavow the principles of productivity and disembodiment in a masculinist society,” but my sickness infected all of them. Was this the feminine in me rebelling against my troglodyte ways—becoming a mother with no respect for my body, turning my back on my sistern? It’s hard not to see this virility of my experience as punishment for sins like that. Or am I just seeking a false religion?

We can debate on how much of feminism stems from power dynamics in society, or whether men truly seek anything different from women, but I chose to look at feminism through the lens of the Healingvrse, as an exploration of meaning, as another handy tool for survival.

A thesis

The very definition of what it means to be human is narrow, and altruism, idealism and public life (except in the forms of fame, status, or material success) have little place on the shopping list. The idea a life should seek meaning seldom emerges…

-Rebecca Solnit

Maybe that’s the thesis for Jody Wogan. It’s not about defining her in opposition to Joe Rogan or making her message exclusive to women—it’s about her exploration for meaning.

If Joe seeks greatness in martial arts, meaning in aliens, testosterone in ice baths, were does Jody?

Perhaps she does warm baths to boost serotonin, but also adds two minutes of cold shower for her vascular system. Perhaps instead of saunas it's float tanks and theta waves.
Perhaps her version of longevity isn’t peptides, blood bags or NAD, but IVF, or surrogacy, and the other reproductive tech which allows her to be in two places at once.
Perhaps instead of lectures on hustle she’s bringing on experts in TMS and brain rewiring techniques.
And maybe she’s a little crazy and unpredictable.

Perhaps she concerns herself with declining fertility rates, with men and women getting split into isolated media bubbles, hiding their voting preferences even from their spouses, and about AI’s impact on equality.

I never saw the topic of meaning tackled in Lean In, whose enormous cultural influence shaped me as I was coming of age. The meaning is assumed, and that’s why it isn’t totally working. There should have been guidance there for the person leading in the family and workplace. Without finding the essence, we remain just as out of touch with ourselves as ever.

And Jody—she’ll be doomed.

Disclaimers

First, to my male friends—don’t assume I’ve ventured down an irretrievable path, one where my words become an attack, simply because I’m examining how feminism can play a crucial role in the Healingvrse. Ultimately, I hope these ideas will be useful to you as well, serving as a bridge to the women in your life.

For my female friends, I ask you to pay close attention—not necessarily to my interpretation, but to the books I’ll be mentioning. Many of my friends, especially those who consider themselves apolitical, may be unfamiliar with feminism, just as I am. They may not realize how beneficial it can be to read some of the key texts by the most influential feminists in history, helping to make sense of certain problems in their psyche.

How can reading about feminism help us in healing?

Find strength, like reading Nelson Mandela at the most painful points of the journey.
Let go of being chronically afraid, a fear born from making too many tough decisions.
Get in touch with Wild Women inside, insight, intuition, endurance, tenacious loving, keen sensing, far vision, acute hearing, singing over the dead, intuitive healing and tending to your own creative fire
Organize the ideas that feel nameless within; avoid reinventing the wheel. Embrace what’s already known and understood. Remember, you are not patient zero.
Become more in tune with one’s body. Leverage hormones. Support them.
Have more robust dialogue with people like:
Lirpa Strike

Katherine Dee
. These are actively sharing (and changing) their views on womanhood, and even go into manosphere territories to discuss it.
Find meaning, just as you would in reading Yuval Harari or Sam Harris.
Understand our parents, grandparents, and the conditions that made them. Realize not everything is genetic. We aren’t just worried about becoming like our mothers, we are worried about becoming women. Why?
Dismantle beliefs formed by repetition, especially those that may be fueling weaker physical or emotional states.
Solve problems of purpose and passion. How to pivot when one cannot achieve what they want. How to heal pain or depression.
Identify hobbies outside of grooming, being marketed to.
Access new stories, people, and sources of humor not featured in the manosphere.
Identify pathological behavior or neurosis and dismantle it.

I hope to better understand:

Who is Jody Wogan, and what does she talk about and care about?
Can she serve as a bridge, rather than a divisive figure?

Here are the books on Jody’s reading list:

(Note, many are contrary to the childless feminist archetype.)

The Second Sex (1949) by Simone de Beauvoir

Not just feminist manifesto but also a deep philosophical inquiry into the nature of life. It’s the Guns, Germs, and Steel for gender. She discusses biology, history, mythology, historical materialism, you name it.
She wrote this opus at 38, had been enfranchised for only a year, and throughout her life, she was Sartre’s lover, although they maintained an open relationship. Someone told me she groomed young women for him, but I didn’t investigate that.

The Feminine Mystique (1963) by Betty Friedan

Credited with sparking the second wave of feminism in the United States
At 42, tapped into the widespread dissatisfaction in suburban domesticity, coining the phrase “the problem that has no name.”
Friedan herself was a mother, so she didn’t reject motherhood, but rather questioned the idea that it should define a woman’s entire identity.

The Mother of All Questions (2017) by Rebecca Solnit, written in her 50s, no children, and the most recent book on the list, Solnit questions why the issue of motherhood even comes up when discussing brilliant artists like Virginia Woolf.

Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (1976) by Adrienne Rich is a groundbreaking exploration of motherhood, written when Rich was 47, a mother of three. The book looks at the dual nature of motherhood—both as a personal experience and as a social institution designed to control women’s lives.

Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (2013) by Sheryl Sandberg is a modern take on feminism in the workplace, written when Sandberg was 44 with two children, and serving as the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook. This book encourages women to take leadership roles, speak up in professional settings, and overcome internalized barriers. Here’s a post about coming of age under its cultural influence.

Middlemarch* by George Eliot (the pen name of Mary Ann Evans) is not explicitly a feminist tract, but it is often considered one of the greatest novels ever written for its nuanced portrayal of human relationships, societal structures, and the limitations imposed on women in 19th-century England. And unlike the controversy surrounding the Italian pseudonym Ferrante, this author is a woman, written at 51.

*In an exercise like this you need fictional greats to avoid becoming too didactic, too pedantic. To lubricate the mind.

Women Who Run With the Wolves: Myths and Stories of the Wild Woman Archetype by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a Jungian psychologist, is exactly the kind of book I would have avoided before entering the Healingvrse. It explores the "Wild Woman" archetype, not as a woman out of control, but as one deeply connected to nature, intuition, creativity, and strength. If you aren’t journeying through the more far-flung, Jungian disciplines within the Healingvrse, you’re probably still missing out.

Notes from the Ancient Manosphere and Beauvoir

Aristotle said females are defective. Similar things found from Rousseau, Nietzche, Hegel, and countless others. The Manosphere is a lot more ancient than I realized.

In the biological discussion, Beauvoir is able to demonstrate how a woman is her body, save for exceptions, just like a man, but because of reproduction, her body is something other than her too. This makes the women’s body a situation, not thing. Thus, biology alone cannot define her.
That being said, a woman is often far more deeply divided than man. Women live as long as men but are often sick and indisposed. A woman’s destiny is even more fraught the more she rebels against it by affirming herself as an individual.
While she admires the psychoanalytic view for shifting focus away from biology, Beauvoir ultimately dismantles the popular psychologists of her time—Freud, Adler, and others. Freud’s idea of woman having "penis envy," for example, is, to her, absurd because it assumes women feel incomplete without something they never had. She argues that it’s not the organ women envy but the power and freedoms that society grants men.
How come when a girl climbs a tree, they say she is acting like a boy? Every time she acts like a human being, the woman is said to be imitating the male. How quickly I defaulted to that perspective with Jody!
Jody isn’t just a woman excelling in man’s world of hobbies, it’s more of a country song duet, where she brings her own triumphant blend—perhaps she excels at things that balance her hormones, surfing, bird watching, brewing teas with adaptogens. This makes me imagine her talking to someone like
Reunion
about film, tea, and swimming in the ocean.

From here, I am thinking about…

Figure out how to better share Jodys. Should I send a few here occasionally? Should I have a separate mailing list? Should I give her a YouTube channel?

Away Messages

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