CONVERSATIONS THAT MATTER
Young Women and Feminism with Quinn Yang
Heidi writes
I was a teenager when feminism showed up as a strong force in the western world. I didn’t participate actively, but I, definitely, was influenced by the rebellion of women who refused to stay at home any longer and take care for cleaning the dirt which mostly others, husbands and children, created.
My response in those times was trying to be able to do what normally is done by men. In childhood I had suffered from not be taken seriously by my elder brothers, so now I would show them that I do have value. This started with studying Maths and Physics at University and by doing all sorts of men’s work like cutting grass and trees, putting tiles on the roof or on the pavement, building kitchen furniture and using land machines which wore me out quite a bit. I realised that most men have just more physical strength than I had – whenever it happened that someone came to lend me a hand.
This was not the only occasion where I realised that I am not a man, even if I tried very hard. But it took a long time until I understood that I was not on the right track at all. “Equality between men and women” doesn’t mean that we have to become the same, in neither direction. It means first of all that we women come to a deep self acceptance and knowledge of what it means to be a woman and that we bring our shadow to light rather than asking men to become the way we want them to be.
In my conversation with Quinn Yang, a woman of less than half of my age, I realised that the self-understanding of women is still a work in progress, far away from having provided any new model for being a women in this world. Quinn is sincerely digging into this inquiry, she started at a time when feminism already had derailed into a power struggle and war on men. She realises that this can never be a way to live a life together with the other sex. We had an interesting conversation in which I found myself speaking from the perspective of an elder who has passed many of the necessary experiences and failures and is now speaking from a meta perspective. It is not that I want to teach anybody what I believe is going on between men and women, but hopefully my shares can inspire young women to not end up in despair and isolation because they believe that they need to give up on relationships with men.
Videopost for July 1st, 2020
Recorded in April 2020
Quinn writes about herself
My name is Quinn Yang, a Ph.D. student studying human motivation and development at the University of California Irvine. I am interested in Ken Wilber’s theory of human consciousness and it’s evolution. Some topics I am exploring include levels of consciousness & the procedure of transcendence on the hierarchy, theoretical integration, male female dynamic, racism, loneliness vs. connectiveness. I am open to learning from different perspectives. (Personality type: INTP. Consciousness level: I think orange, green and yellow are all present & taking turns in dominance currently.)
RESOURCES
Expectancy Value Theory https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Expectancy-value_theory
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