Common Ground with Gloria Steinem
By Geoffrey Holland
“A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.”
Gloria Steinem
For humans to save ourselves from ourselves, the way forward must be built on gender equality in all ways.
We need unambiguous gender parity. We need equal rights under the law, equal pay for equal work, and gender equal access as leaders to all levels of social, political, and economic power. The same goes for non-binary human rights.
The natural world we all depend on is in very big trouble. There is nothing we can do collectively as global citizens that would have more impact, near term, than to cooperate and build a gender equal, partnership way of being human.
For humanity, equal rights regardless of how a person identifies sexually, are an essential step in any survival scenario. The sooner we get there, the better.
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‘What we need is a new way of thinking that goes beyond secular vs. religious, left vs. right, Eastern vs. Western, socialist vs. capitalist, and so on. Old social categories ignore the impact of childhood and gender relations on how our brains – and hence our beliefs and behaviors – develop. Nor do any of them provide the new economics, narratives, and language to meet the challenges facing our world. The real struggle for our future is between the domination configuration and the partnership configuration worldwide. Once we understand this, we can build a solid foundation for a more sustainable, equitable, and caring partnership-oriented world’. – Riane Eisler, Author, The Partnership Way
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The Partnership Way
I have been inspired by a number of brilliant women over the years. For now, I want to focus on the social scientist and author, Riane Eisler. She is an Earth Mother. Her work has revealed the central role of gender dominance in the cultural evolution of humanity. In Eisler’s book, The Chalice and the Blade, she illuminated the anthropology of gender dominance, and the long entrenched cultural oppression of women. For ten thousand years, at its most basic, the human culture has been shaped by men controlling women. Dominance and misogyny are still planetary-scale realities.
The cultural domination of women by men, combined with our egregious exploitation of nature’s living fabric, has brought life on Earth to the brink. The biosphere we all depend on, the only one we have, is increasingly at risk from human overreach. It all stems from one culturally corrosive idea: that humans are above and superior to nature; that our Earth and all its resources are here for us to exploit without limits.
I find both solace and inspiration in Riane Eisler’s remedy for gender bias and mindless overreach. She calls it The Partnership Way. It is a cultural design that fosters cooperation, equal opportunity, and shared responsibility for protecting nature across the gender spectrum.
The Partnership Way is how we survive our own worst instincts. It’s men and women together; cooperating together; caring for each other, together; taking responsibility for nature, together; practicing proper planetary stewardship, together; men and women together, There is no other worthy way forward for humanity.
How Did We Get Into this Mess?
Think about where we come from. Humans have been around as a distinct species for about 200,000 years. For nearly all of that time, we were nomadic hunter-gatherers living in small clans, roaming the wild landscape, living on the edge of survival. Female and male humans shared the struggle together. Survival was favored by cooperation. If anything, the anthropological record suggests that women were regarded as more crucial to survival than males, because they were the birthers, the source of new life emerging.
About ten thousand years ago, the human narrative took a big turn. We began to evolve away from endless wandering. We traded the nomadic life for living in permanent settlements and growing our own food. As agriculture emerged, so did a permanent warrior class. That was the beginning of hierarchy and male dominance, and the end of gender cooperation. Female humans were relegated to a form of property subject to male control.
Christianity, Islam, and other mainstream religious doctrines were and remain structured according to a male dominance paradigm. The Christian Bible for instance is built around an omniscient male god, who declares that men are in charge, women must be submissive, and nature is a wealth of living resources gifted to humans to exploit without concern for consequence. The social, economic, and political dynamics at work pretty much the world over are rooted in gender dominance. Men have been in charge. Men have made the rules. Men have shaped the history we know. The human narrative is a litany of overreach driven by the male gender’s self-absorption and cruel ambition.
Over the millennia, humans expanded their dominion into every corner of our home planet. Humans have progressed less because of men than in spite of them. We have succeeded until now because our population numbers and our consumption were relatively limited, and nature’s bounty was both wondrous and massive in scale.
That was then. This is now.
Fast-Forward to the 21st Century
The human impact on planet Earth has become entirely unsustainable. Our consumption habits translate to us taking pretty-much everything nature has to offer for ourselves.
It took about 200,000 years, from the beginnings of humanity until 1974, for the human population on Earth to reach 4 billion. In the less than 50 years since then, our numbers have doubled to more than 8 billion, on the way to 10 or even 12 billion by the end of the 21st century. Quite simply, we are massively exceeding our planet’s ability to provide. It’s not complicated. Human life on Earth has been built on human expansion, exploitation, and consumption. The natural world we all depend on is under unprecedented assault…by us. No one did it to us. Humans are entirely responsible.
We must come to terms with the reality that we are not superior to nature, we are a part of nature. The road we are currently on, the road we have made for ourselves, is a dead-end for humanity. We’ve got climate change causing every kind of extreme weather: droughts, wildfire, floods, and massive storms, ever more powerful, ever more often. We’ve got deforestation, desertification, top-soil loss, and food insecurity spreading across our Earth. In a few decades, there may be more plastic waste in our oceans than fish. The biological resiliency of our only home is collapsing. Plant species are threatened as never before. Wild animal numbers are in free fall. In fact, the World Wildlife Fund reported recently that in just the past fifty years, as the human population doubled from 4 billion to 8 billion, our Earth’s wildlife populations collapsed by nearly 70%. So many species are in danger of extinction. This is not fake news. It should alarm every caring human.
Bottom line: life on Earth is massively out of balance. We humans must get real about our extreme overreach. We are the problem.
There is hope. Younger people in many parts of our Earth are waking up and stepping up. They are showing that humans have the capacity to confront our dire reality and correct course. Young activists recognize that our politics have been deeply corrupted by people who use money and power to marginalize the common good in favor of profit and self-interest.
Countering Our Deeply Destructive Cultural Inertia
Here are two big problems with our enduring political narrative.
- Around the world, human politics remain subject to long entrenched gender inequality and legalized political bribery.
- The global economy is largely built on a constant growth model that puts profit and self-interest before the public good.
The US remains a male dominant society. Much progress on gender has been made, but women are still underrepresented at all levels of power within the culture.
The current political and economic narrative has made life on Earth largely dysfunctional. The industrial era we are emerging from has delivered obscene wealth to a privileged fraction of our citizens, while massively under-delivering for the vast majority of our people. The current system elevates profit above all else. Bankers, billionaires, and big business elites use their wealth and power to escape responsibility for the destructive environmental impact of doing business.
We have to get past that.
The Focus on Decriminalization
For centuries the human culture has imposed a morality clamp on female sexual expression. This repression is reflected in the form of criminalization, misguided morality, and shame. These strictures are not part of nature’s design. They are about gender control and oppression.
In a world built on gender equality and respect for human rights and responsibilities there is no cultural constriction on consensual sexual expression. The operative word is consensual.
In 15 nations, including New Zealand, Australia, and many of the European nations, sexual choices are decriminalized…decriminalized, but subject to regulation designed to provide health and safety guidelines, and even tax revenue. That’s just good public interest governance, and for the most part it is working in those places.
Women will never be completely free until they have the right to make their own choices sexually without being subject to criminal or moral judgement.
The United Nations, the World Health Organization, the American Medical Association, the ACLU, and Amnesty International all stand for the decriminalization of sex work worldwide. Decriminalization is a powerful step in support of unencumbered personal choice in sexual expression. It is essential to achieving real gender equality worldwide.
Decriminalization means the law and criminal prosecution get focused on the real criminals – the sex traffickers. exploiters, and victimizers of woman and children. It also means that sex workers can function more safety, because they are less marginalized and less at risk of violence or victimization.
There should be no rest in the struggle for gender equality. The same holds true for decriminalization.
A Case of Misguided Conflation
Good, card-carrying feminists do not all agree on the issue of decriminalization. While there seems to be broad support for decriminalization among gender activists, there are a handful of high-profile organizations like the National Organization of Women (NOW) that have chosen to oppose the momentum. In a recent article titled, Liberal Feminism has a Sex Work Problem, journalist Melissa Gira Grant reports that ‘sex work decriminalization supporters and opponents fundamentally disagree on what makes sex workers vulnerable, and from what and whom they need protection.’ In her article, Grant tells us that opponents of sex work insist on conflating decriminalization with violence and trafficking. What criminalizing sex work actually does is keep sex workers vulnerable to cultural overreach.
NOW is one of the only mainstream feminist groups that rallies its members against sex worker rights by opposing decriminalization. NOW has never addressed the issue of sex worker rights. In fact, NOW President Toni Van Pelt has characterized sex work as ‘gender-based violence’ which by its existence victimizes all women.
Really? Where is the logic in that kind of broad dismissal? If the law is shaped to protect women by criminalizing trafficking and exploitation, isn’t that where the line should be drawn? What should an individual person’s rights be with regard to expressing their sexuality? Should sex and the terms under which it becomes consensual be policed? Are women truly free when they are denied the right to choose those terms for themselves?
A Fish Without a Bicycle
I was a young man when the gender rights issue really began to gain traction. I became a fan of the feminist writer and activist, Gloria Steinem. This lady takes no prisoners. I’ll spell it out. Ms. Steinem is super smart. She’s been on the front lines forever, championing equality and gender rights. She’s just been an exceptional human being, and a powerful and highly respected voice for women.
Gloria Steinem condemns and dismisses misogyny in unflinching fashion. She once said, ‘A woman without a man is like a fish without a bicycle.’ She was talking to the men of the world, who assume they are entitled to dominate women. Gloria Steinem sees gender equality as a human right and has no use for anyone who resists equality for all humans in all ways.
I admire Gloria Steinem. As a voice for gender rights, she is a legend, and she remains an iconic leader bonded to the equal rights agenda.
I do not know Gloria Steinem’s view of sex work these days. She may have changed her tune. Wherever she is on this issue now, there was a time when she characterized sex work as ‘Commercial rape’. Really? I have to believe that people who choose to engage in sex work, in whatever way, on their own terms, would probably not agree with that.
It’s true, some women who engage in sex work make that choice to survive. In those cases, criminalization serves no good purpose. Criminalizing sex does not help women, who engage in sex for survival. For other women, sex work is undeniably a free choice. A society shaped by gender equality does not police or impose moral judgement on consensual sexual behavior. Decriminalization is where the world needs to go, and ever more, it is happening. We are seeing whole nations decriminalizing and coming to terms with sex work. In all places where women are truly gender equal that’s how it should be.
Gloria Steinem also has said, ‘A feminist is anyone who recognizes the equality and full humanity of women and men.’
The Steinem Standard for Feminist Designation
By that standard, I am a feminist. I live my life by the Steinem standard. I recognize and celebrate gender equality in all ways. I am a feminist man and a citizen of the Earth. My profile on the net corroborates my credentials. In fact, I am entirely in accord with Gloria Steinem in almost all ways. But there is this one big point of contention. Gloria Steinem opposes the decriminalization of sex work. Gloria Steinem stands with NOW on this issue.
I disagree as a feminist man and an advocate for nature as well as for the health and welfare of all humans, regardless of gender, including those who claim their right to be sexually expressive as they wish, on their own terms.
A Dialogue on Decriminalization
Let’s focus on cultural attitudes in North America. We need to get real about decriminalization and gender equality. This writer respectfully invites Gloria Steinem to a dialogue on this issue.
The central question: Does every human own their sexuality and the right to express it as they wish?
A public dialogue on decriminalization would be a useful exercise in resolving what remains of the struggle to achieve gender equality in all ways. It could also encourage a worthy reckoning with our relationship with the natural world we all depend on.
A dialogue on decriminalization could potentially be transformative. The goal of the dialogue should be to encourage a legal framework for decriminalization that respects human rights as well as nature’s design.
Nature’s Grand Design as a Cultural Rallying Point
We should be able to forge a worthy understanding on living – men, women, non-binary humans – together as gender equals in all ways. We need to accept our sexuality as a natural human function. Every person should have a right to their personal brand of sexual expression and control of the terms under which they express it. A person’s sexuality is a gift from nature. It’s human instinct. It’s a way to be in touch with of the most basic kind of joy in life. Whatever qualifies as natural sexual expression should not be subject to any kind of unwelcome moral judgement.
I very much admire, Gloria Steinem. She is a feminist icon. She has earned a prominent place in the history of humanity. I urge Ms. Steinem to give her voice to a cultural dialogue on decriminalization that will lead humanity to be collectively tolerant of the entire spectrum of natural sexual expression. Let’s find the common ground that respects the rights of all humans, while honoring our connection with nature. Where sexual expression is concerned, let’s make consent without duress the universal human standard.
Let’s focus the law on the real criminals, those who are trafficking, abusing and exploiting women and children. Government should protect all people, particularly those vulnerable to criminal sexual exploitation of any kind. At the same time, the law should protect the free choice of those who chose to engage in sexual expression for whatever reason. No matter the terms, consent should be the final word.
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Criminalizing adult, voluntary, and consensual sex – including the commercial exchange of sexual services – is incompatible with the human right to personal autonomy and privacy. In short – a government should not be telling consenting adults who they can have sexual relations with and on what terms.
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Geoffrey Holland is a veteran writer/producer. He writes commentary for Transition-Earth, and is Curator of Dialogues for the Millennium Alliance for Humanity and the Biosphere. He is also the principal author of The Hydrogen Age.
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