17: Girls and boys

Fairly early in pregnancy, a single chromosome in the growing embryo triggers a minute change in the amount of a hormone in the mother’s bloodstream: and that’s what determines those major shifts in body-structure that we see as the two different sexes. It’s weird that a tiny difference in an otherwise unremarkable body-chemical can lead to a huge divergence in life-experience: but just how much of these differences between the sexes are due to nature, or to nurture? How much of the problems, and the advantages, that we have in our lives really derive from our sex - and how much from plain old sexist stereotypes, about what we ‘ought’ to be? Whichever they may be, a wyrd perspective will probably help…

Nature…

The two sexes are different: our experiences of sexuality - to continue our previous theme - are distinctly different, for a start.

Another ‘exercise in empathy’: how well do you understand how sexual experiences feel for the other sex? If you don’t know - which most of us don’t - then ask… which may bring up some weird responses! Notice the difficulties which arise for you in doing this - or even in response to the suggestion to do this… why should this simple question seem so difficult?

Some of the differences are not so obvious, and could certainly be described as ‘weird’. In their work on the trance-effects of postures, based on religious sculptures from around the word, Felicitas Goodman and her colleagues found that exactly the same posture can create entirely different experiences for men and for women, and that different postures are sometimes needed if both sexes are to experience the same effect - and that these sex-differences have been recorded in different traditions throughout history. Goodman’s ‘Chiltan Spirits’ posture from Uzbekistan, for example, requires the women to sit cross-legged, and the men to stand, in order to experience the same trance-image - usually of a circle of women seated round a fire, in this case. Another matched pair of postures, from Cernavoda in Romania, appears to be used for a healing trance: the woman sits in a rather awkward position with one leg straight and the other bent, while the man sits in a kind of pensive or sorrowful position: the men in this posture hardly experience anything at all - other than exhaustion - but their presence means that “the women report having access to powerful reservoirs of energy to do their healing work”. Weird… the threads of wyrd do pass through us all, yet it does seem as though our sex can make it harder for us to access some threads, but much easier to access others…

Another subtle difference is simply the different experience of change: adult women are changing all the time, weaving their way through many different cycles of the body, whereas men - although they do have their own cycles - tend to experience change as something less internal, and more ‘out there’.

There’s a beautiful African tale that illustrates this point. Imagine an old woman sitting in front of her hut in the heat and the dust of an eastern evening, with a gaggle of girls squatting in a semicircle in front of her. “A long time ago”, she says, “I was a girl, just like you. And then my body changed, and I became a maiden. And through each month, and through each month, my body changed, and I knew myself as woman. And I met my husband: and through each month, and through each month, my body changed - but he was always much the same. Then by him I became pregnant: and through each month, and through each month, as my baby grew within me, my body changed - yet my husband was always much the same. Then I bore my child, and I fed my child: and through each month, and through each month, my body changed - but my husband stayed much the same. Then I bore my second child, and my third: and with each child, and with each child, my body changed - but my husband, he was always much the same. Now I am an old woman”, she says, “my body has changed: I can bear children no more. But my husband, he’s still much the same as he ever was. How boring!”

Whether you’re a woman or a man, in what ways are you aware of the rhythms and cycles of your own body? In what ways are you aware - if at all - of those of others? Without awareness, there can be no empathy; and without empathy, relationship can become more than a little problematic…

We’re never responsible for others, but it’s useful - to everyone - to be responsible about others and their constantly changing needs. Reaching out in empathy with others along the threads of wyrd, sensing within you the ways that they change, and change in response to you, what can you learn about your own cycles, your own changes?

It’s if we’re not aware of our cycles that the problems can arise - because we’re then likely to project the changes in behaviour onto others instead, blaming them, in a subject-centred way, for changing, when the changes are actually in us. Unhappy memories, for example, of trying to co-exist with Kara in that office, because, to her, everything was always our fault: “you should have known it’s ‘raging hormones’ season”, she’d yell, “I’m not responsible for my bloody hormones, am I?” For the hormones themselves, no: but even under their influence - especially if aware of it, which she obviously was - she surely had some ‘response-ability’ to manage how she related to others? But then I can hardly talk, I suppose: “Why are you angry?” I snarl, when it’s clear that it’s just one of my mood-swings that’s going on…

Pregnancy is perhaps the extreme example of this - so much so that some women describe it as like being taken over by a kind of parasite: symbiotic, perhaps, but not always benign - especially in terms of what we may choose. “I’ll tell you what was wrong”, says Ursula Le Guin’s character Takver, in her novel The Dispossessed; “I was pregnant. Pregnant women have no ethics - only the most primitive kind of sacrifice impulse. To hell with the book, and the partnership, and the truth, if they threaten the precious foetus! It’s a racial preservation drive, but it can work right against community; it’s biological, not social. A man can be grateful he never gets into the grip of it. But he’d better realise that a woman can, and watch out for it.” She may be right on the last point: but looking around in our society, particularly at many fathers’ felt response to the complex issues of abortion, I’m not so sure about that…

Mark, one of our grumpier technicians, is obviously having trouble at home: “Don’t ever let your ol’ woman get pregnant”, he says, while we’re sitting in the tearoom; “her brain’ll go to pudding, and then you’ve really had it…” A few of us start muttering: “hey, that sounds a bit sexist, Mark…” But then a quiet voice cuts in, unusually excited: it’s Mai, one of the senior programmers. “It’s true!” she says; “all the time I was pregnant with Anna, I had to struggle to keep my mind working, and I still don’t think I’ve got it all back yet”. Mai’s done both her master’s degree and doctorate and had her first child since moving here from overseas seven years ago: she’s no sluggard, and no fool. For all his surly sexism, perhaps Mark might have a point…

Pregnancy affects everyone differently - including the fathers who so often get forgotten, and who can help a great deal when they’re allowed to be involved! It can be a time of wild changes for everyone: so once again, it calls for mutual respect - and for empathy, not sympathy. In what ways can you help in creating this? Whether you’re a woman or man, what ‘response-ability’ do you have?

The one obvious difference between women and men is that women can bear children, and men cannot: and that in itself has some some weird results. Women have a kind of literal immortality built into them - an immortality which men can only access through women. If she so desires, a woman needs no direct contact with a man in order to become a mother; but to be an active father, a man is entirely dependent on a woman’s presence - a dependency which can easily lead to all kinds of abuses, in both directions. Some societies resolve the problem by building a philosophy of personal immortality - either by ‘redemption’, as in Christian theology, or through reincarnation, as in eastern religions or early Celtic concepts. But where the only available ‘immortality’ is through children and grandchildren - such as in Judaism - it tends to lead to ‘ownership’ of children (and arguably of women too): hence, for example, all those endless ‘the son of… the son of… the son of…’ lists of patrilinearity in the Bible…

It’s useful to explore this dependency through empathy, by the age-old trick of inverting the options - and exploring the reality of that inversion.

If you’re a woman, imagine that you have no way of bearing children on your own: if you want to be a parent, you have no choice but to involve a man, to bear the child for you. Explore how you’d feel in that scenario: would you succumb to a sense of emptiness and purposelessness if no man would have you, perhaps - or even try to trap a man into depending on you, to hide your dependency on him?

If you’re a man, imagine that you have ‘immortality built into you’, in the ability to bear children: but the responsibility - and the risks - are yours alone, and women have no way to reach that sense of immortality except through you. How does it feel to be depended on in that way - and to have that responsibility for others as well as for yourself?

Both these scenarios are inverted from physiological fact: but how much are they true in other senses? Explore those twists in reality for a while…

Many of the old stereotyped gender-roles arose from real physical differences: many of them quite small, but crucial in terms of survival for a society always on the edge - as most were until well into this century. A surprising number of sex-differences can be categorised under the old ‘gatherer/hunter’ split: male anatomy focusses the strength in the upper body, and is geared for high-power but lower-endurance tasks typical of a hunter, while female anatomy focusses the strength more in the lower body and is geared for lower-power but higher endurance tasks typical of a gatherer - hence the comment, from the Vietnam War days on the Ho Chi Minh Trail, that “women can carry only four-fifths of a man’s load, but can carry it half as far again”. Even in city-based societies, the same stereotypes still have their validity: women tend to be better than men at ‘multi-tasking’, and at picking out patterns in an overall structure, but tend to have more difficulty than men at spatial tasks such as reading a map ‘upside-down’ or judging the exact distance between their car and the next. It’s these weird differences that emphasise that it’s useful for everyone if we can be allies for each other!

Given the omnipresent ‘incentives’ to complain - such as that “special attention which is the prerogative of the miserable” - it’s all too easy to see the disadvantages of our life, or the advantages that others seem to have: but what are the advantages of being the sex that you are? What do you not have to face because of the type of body that your ‘I’ wears?

And how true for you are those stereotypes about the ‘typical’ man or woman? How much is the opposite of that stereotype true for you?

Quite minor physiological differences can have significant effects on our emotional behaviour, too. Most men will remember all too well the childhood admonition that ‘big boys don’t cry’: but it would be more accurate to say that big boys can’t cry - whereas small ones certainly can… - because a specific ‘female’ hormone, tightly linked with the ability to cry, shuts down in males during puberty. It’s much the same reason why many women - often to their intense frustration - find themselves crying when, in reality, they’re angry; and conversely, for men, the inability to express emotion in tears, as they were able to do in childhood, often leads them to express sadness as anger - especially in times of grief. Weird… but that’s the way our bodies work - and it’s important to learn to work with it.

There are differences between the sexes - and important ones at that. But in many ways the differences between the sexes, in practice, are far less than the differences between individuals - each one of us - regardless of their sex: the intra-gender differences, technically speaking, are far greater than the inter-gender differences. But often it won’t seem that way: not because of our nature, but because of our nurture - the expectations that were thrust upon us by others in the society and family into which we were born. Often we don’t have much choice about what we’ve been handed by nature (though a little persistence can often pay dividends!); but we do have choices about our nurture - especially once we start to unravel some of the weird twists that can seem so ‘natural’, ‘just the way things are’…

…or nurture?

Feminist theory draws a useful distinction between sex - the facts of physiology - and gender, which is more of a stereotyped role imposed on us by society’s subject-centred expectations of what boys and girls ‘ought to be’ - constructing, from infancy onwards, a picture of ‘proper’ behaviour for women and men. For example, there’s that pervasively nasty little nursery-rhyme:

“What are little girls made of?  Sugar and spice and all things nice    - that’s what little girls are made of. What are little boys made of?  Snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails    - that’s what little boys are made of.”

“Oh no, not that nursery-rhyme!” said Fred, who’s now in his sixties. “My mother thought it was wonderful: she put a framed copy of it above my bed, and she used to recite it to my sister and I every night - she had no idea how much I hated it. It made me feel like I was being blamed for everything, and that my sister was always perfect, whatever she did - and that’s certainly how it seemed, because I was always getting into trouble on her behalf. I hated it so much that in the end I did start to act like I was made of ‘snips and snails and puppy-dogs’ tails’: and Mother didn’t like that at all - even though that’s what she’d told me, night after night, that I was supposed to be…” “Fair enough”, says his partner Sylvia, “but how would you like to be told, endlessly, that you have to be nice to everyone? ‘Sugar and spice’ indeed! - we always had to look so damn ‘nice’ that we were never allowed to play out in the street, like you could, in case we got our clothes dirty!” They both laugh: a healing laughter…

Innocent nursery-tales - or a serious source of sexist stereotypes? What do you feel in response to what that rhyme says about you, about what you’re ‘made of’? Explore some other songs and stories of your early childhood: looking back through the feelings of that time with a more adult empathy, how much have the gendered ‘morals’ of those tales pervaded your life - and your choices now?

Nature and nurture are so closely interwoven that it’s often hard to tell the difference: though they’re both part of our wyrd, that much is for certain! One solution to the problem is to take the stereotypes as if they’re true, and then twist them around a bit… This is what Jungian psychology does: it starts with basic stereotypes of ‘the feminine’ and ‘the masculine’, and weaves outward through the complex threads that are described as ‘archetypes’, until it arrives at a richer, deeper, wider fabric that approximates to a description of the wyrd itself.

It’s a useful tool: but like all such tools, there’s a real danger in taking it too literally. I’ve seen quite a few ‘women’s spirituality’ texts, for example, that insist, almost in a kind of Jungian parody, that the moon - or whatever - is always ‘feminine’, and likewise that intuition, nurturing, sharing, peace-loving and so on are human attributes that only women have, whilst only men are violent, competitive, controlling… Not only are such ‘essentialist’ ideas little more than an embellished version of those childish sugar-and-spice/snips-and-snails stereotypes, but they’re also exactly what earlier feminists fought against - because they knew how much those stereotypes stultified women’s choices. As Jung’s concept of the ‘animus’ and ‘anima’ - ‘the man within the woman’ and ‘the woman within the man’ - make clear, every thread passes through every one of us: everyone, everywhere, everywhen. As we saw earlier with those issues of use and abuse, perhaps the only real ‘gender-difference’ here is in which threads tend to show more easily on the surface…

It’s worthwhile looking at some of the standard gender-stereotypes - ‘masculine’ strength and courage, ‘feminine’ beauty and nurturing - and exploring their opposites within yourself. So, for example, what is feminine strength, feminine courage? What is masculine beauty, masculine nurturing? What form do they each take within you? What form do they take in others - particularly those of the ‘wrong’ sex, according to those stereotypes?

Take a look around you - at how you interact with others, at how others interact with you, at images in the media and elsewhere. How much do those standard gender-stereotypes dictate how you, and others, relate with each other? Make a point of looking for those ‘opposite’ threads - such as feminine courage, or masculine nurturing - in everyone you meet: what difference does it make to how you perceive them, and relate with them?

Another important ‘nurture’ issue arises from the dominant role of the mother in most children’s upbringing: even where the father is permitted to be present at all - which he’s not for a surprisingly high proportion of families - he’s far more likely than the mother to be away from the home, at work or elsewhere. The result is that girls and boys tend to have quite different problems in what Jung described as ‘individuation’ - the spiritual process of identifying ‘I’, and defining boundaries between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’, which comes to a head in adolescence.

The problem for girls is to separate from the mother, to identify herself as an individual in her own right. From birth onwards, she’s known herself as ‘same as’ her most prominent - perhaps only - parent: so it’s easy for her to regard herself as an extension of the mother - and courtesy of the usual subject-centred confusions, many mothers do treat their daughters in that way, even to extent of sharing each others’ clothes. So the late teen years, when the need for individuation usually becomes too strong to suppress or ignore, can be a suddenly explosive time - and particularly hard for the mother, who may well feel she’s been betrayed, or at least unfairly attacked. But it’s actually a kind of wrestling, in which the daughter is trying to find her own strength and power - and needs someone to push against, someone who will push back hard, but will still let her ‘win’. As one wise friend - a grandmother - commented to me the other day, “of course it’s ‘unfair’ - but the main task of the mother of a teenage daughter is to be in the wrong!”

The boys’ problem is somewhat different: they’ve known from birth that they’re not ‘same as’ their mother, but that’s about it. Right to the end of primary school, they’ve lived in a world populated either mostly, or entirely, by women: hence many, perhaps most, boys have no idea of who they are, or what they’re ‘for’ at all - and almost the only images they have about what it is to be male come from the media’s mangled stereotypes, or from women’s often disparaging remarks. Sometimes the only ‘self-definition’ that boys have is a fear-driven negation - that they’re not-female, not-homosexual, not-weak, not-cowardly and so on; and since, by its nature, the wyrd keeps reminding them that they are all of these things, in one sense or another, they may well try to ‘export’ those fears, through ‘gay-bashing’ or similar kinds of scapegoat-abuse.

The systematic, if not obsessive, ‘pro-feminist’ denigration of masculinity and maleness in the past few decades has certainly made the problems worse - there can be no doubt about that. But throughout history, boys have always been easy ‘marks’ for any group or cult that seems to offer them any sense of meaning and purpose: and the spiritual need for ‘a sense of meaning and purpose, a sense of self and of that which is greater than self’ is so strong that it almost doesn’t matter what the group is or does, as long as it does seem to offer that spiritual ‘security’. The fanaticism of many sports-fans may seem pointless to most of us, but it’s actually one solution to this problem: and least it’s a relatively benign one, because many cults and cliques are not. Where most girls seem simply to need someone to wrestle with - in one sense or another - most boys do seem to need this sense of group-membership to provide them with a stepping-stone to personal identity: and if our society doesn’t seem to care what form this takes, it can hardly complain at the results! Inaction and indifference are choices, even at a societal level: “there’s always a choice”, says the wyrd, “but there’s always a twist…”

Look back - or within - your teenage years, at that crucial period of individuation: that time of becoming yourself, as an independent - and sexual - being. Was it a time of turmoil for you, as it was - and is - for so many others? Understanding a bit more about the nature of abuse - and being aware that blame for the past - whether of others, or yourself - helps no-one, look a little closer: what did you do to others, and to yourself? In what ways did you try to export those confusions to others - or try to ‘buy being liked’ by ‘importing’ others’ inner chaos? How much do those choices then still affect your life now - especially in the ways in which you relate with others?

What was happening to your peers then - how did they cope? In what ways did you allow their choices to influence how you relate with others - both then and now?

By the time we get to adulthood, the basic gender-stereotypes can be summarised in two simple matched pairs of statements. The first of these ‘summaries of sexism’ is the ubiquitous assumption that ‘men do; women are’. Men are defined in terms of what they do - “what are you? oh, a used-car salesman… how nice… see you!” - or in terms of some arbitrary, external definition of success - “February’s ‘Salesman of the Month’: that’s good”; but they often struggle to be acknowledged for who they are, as human beings rather than ‘human doings’. By contrast, women are acknowledged for who they are (or rather, who they appear to be - hence a huge and highly profitable cosmetics trade…), but often have to struggle to receive any acknowledgement of the vast amount of work that they do - “well, isn’t that what women are supposed to do? what’s special about that?” These stereotypes permeate through every aspect of our society: every Mother’s Day the cards are about ‘mother’s love’, and the advertisements are for flowers, for fashions, for perfumes, or (the nearest to acknowledgement that mothers do indeed work!) for household utensils; every Father’s Day they’re for tools, for car parts, for paints and glues - and ghastly socks and ties! - and the cards talk more about ‘fatherly duties’. But these are stereotypes which are surprisingly hard to challenge - even within ourselves. It all seems so much a ‘fact of life’: and yet the weird twist is that it is, in reality, nothing more than a choice - though one that greatly affects how we relate with each other.

The other matched-pair makes stereotyped assumptions about our inner worlds: “women don’t think, can’t think”, it says; “men don’t feel - can’t feel”. Although some male politicians, and some feminist theorists, seem determined to prove the stereotypes true in their own case, they are no more than assumptions. Perhaps because they’d gone against those stereotypes, most of the women engineers at the research establishment were above the average of their male counterparts; the same seemed to be true of the male nurses at the hospital. But breaking free from those stereotypes can be surprisingly hard work…

To illustrate this point, let’s do another of those inversions, and assume a stereotype of ‘men are, women do’. It’s just another choice: but it may seem a weird one…

Imagine, as a woman, that you will only get acknowledgement for what you do - or appear to do. People aren’t interested in you at all, and especially not in what you feel: they’re only interested in the size of your purse. Everything hinges on status: without that, you’re nothing, especially to the other sex - so status, and a sizeable purse, are your only hope for a family, or even for friendship, of a kind. If that’s the stereotype, how would you relate with others of your own sex? If the other sex seems interested only in your status and your ability to act as their ‘provider’, how would you relate with them? If status is everything, how safe would you be in expressing what you feel? And how much would you rely on outward ‘symbols of success’ to shield yourself from inner uncertainty? Since no-one takes any notice of how you feel, how easy - or not - would it be for you to care about your own appearance and health - or would you expect to have to sacrifice it in the desperate search for that elusive ‘status’?

And imagine, as a man, that you will only get acknowledgement for what you are - or appear to be, rather - and even that ‘acceptable appearance’ is set within tightly defined limits which change wildly according to the whims of fashion. Although people will pay lip-service to what you say you feel, no-one seems to have the slightest interest in what you think, or even in what you do - everything you do is either unnoticed, or taken for granted. Everything hinges on how you look: without that, you’re nothing, to anyone - especially as you get older, and are less ‘desirable’. If that’s the stereotype, how would you relate with others of your own sex? If the other sex seems interested only in your appearance, and in your ability to prop up their all-important status, how would you relate with them? If appearances are everything, how safe would be in expressing what you really feel? And how much would you rely on artificial aids to prop up your appearance, in order to shield yourself from inner uncertainty? Since no-one seems to notice what you do, how easy - or not - would it be for you to care about your work?

Again, these do have their counterparts in the so-called ‘real’ world: but how much do those ‘natural’ stereotypes - “men do, women are; women don’t think, men don’t feel” - still dominate in our society? Those are the choices that our society ‘chooses’ for us: yet what are the twists that arise from them?

Smetimes breaking free of the stereotypes can seem more trouble than it’s worth. The weird fuss over ‘the first woman to…’ - doing something that seems quite ordinary and natural to the woman concerned - leaves many a woman feeling more like a performing monkey than the professional that she is. And ‘nice guys’ often pay a painful penalty for being open and empathic, because many women want to “practise having a male friend without causing emotional damage” - as on friend put it - yet fail to notice the damage they do cause whilst they’re ‘practising’… So it’s often essential to be well aware of what we’re doing before we breach the stereotypes - and to be clear about the boundaries of ‘I’.

Yet the wyrd passes through everyone - every one of its threads. And each of us - and the choices we make - are expressions of the wyrd and its weavings. These gender-stereotypes place artificial boundaries on those interweavings, and greatly limit the range of possibilities available to us - for no real benefit to anyone. In the name of equality, if nothing else, it’s wise to challenge them - especially within ourselves.

But George Orwell’s famous warning applies here as much as it does in politics: if we don’t take care in creating our ‘equality’, “All are equal” can easily mutate into “Some are more equal than others” - and that’s exactly what’s happened with those gender-stereotypes. Over the past few decades ‘Western’ societies have done a great deal to tackle the women’s side of those matched-pairs: much has been done to acknowledge what women do - and have always done - and no-one can reasonably doubt that women do think, and have as much right as men to say what they think. But the other side of the equation - acknowledging who men are, and what they feel - hasn’t yet happened: if anything, the stereotype has become even more entrenched, and few people - feminists especially - seem willing to face it. That’s been our society’s choice, if only by default: but there’s always a twist, says the wyrd, and the twist seems to be that unless we tackle the whole of the problem of sexism, we’ll end up right back where we started, or worse - which would not be a good idea… If we want genuine equality of the sexes, nurturing the full expression of the wyrd within each and every one of us would seem to be the only way to go.

Nurturing the wyrd

Equality is a difficult concept, and gender-equality especially so: as we saw a while ago, in all sorts of issues such as the public provision of toilet space, identical treatment is often far from ‘equal’! But the wyrd passes through us all: with very few exceptions - most of which can be attributed to nature rather than nurture - almost all so-called ‘gender-issues’ are essentially human ones. And it is disturbing to see just how one-sided most ideas of ‘gender equality’ have become: most governments now have an ‘Office for the Status of Women’, or some such department, for example, but few - if any - have anything resembling an ‘Office for the Safety of Men’, which - given the social stereotypes of gender - would be the effective equivalent for men’s concerns.

The front page of the newspaper consists of a story about a TV anchorwoman who’d ‘collapsed’ at the newsdesk, and all the worries about her health; the back page, of course, is full of sport. Women’s safety; men’s status… priority news, it seems. Yet side by side, tucked away in a forgotten corner near the middle of the paper, are two items apparently almost too trivial to mention: about a leading woman novelist winning a major international award; and a man crushed to death in another building-site accident. Women’s status, men’s safety - or lack of it - as invisible as ever…

We can’t do much individually about major social stereotypes like these, but it’s certainly worthwhile exploring how they affect the way we think - and the way we interweave with others in the wyrd. If true equality would mean that “the needs, concerns, feelings and fears of women and of men are of exactly equal value and importance”, how much do the images in the media and in our society in general support this? How much do those images influence your own attitudes to men and to women? And once you start to see those influences, what can you do to counter them - both in yourself, and in your relationships with others?

Equality goes far deeper than merely that between men and women, girls and boys: it’s about understanding that everyone is “equally deserving of respect” - simply for being who they are, as an expression of the wyrd. There’s always a choice, there’s always a twist: given the nature of the wyrd, choosing to nurture a genuine equality for everyone will bring us face to face with some very twisted attitudes - especially within ourselves…

There’s always a choice: so what do we choose? If power is ‘the ability to do work, as an expression of choice’, what is our power? That’s up to you, says the wyrd…

Germaine Greer once commented that feminism was about “exploring all the possibilities of what it is to be fully human, in a woman’s body, and from a woman’s perspective”: a committed exploration of the wyrd, yet understanding, and accepting, that there is such a thing as sex, there is such a thing as gender - and there is such a thing as our own, peculiar, particular body. The same could be said for men, too, of course - otherwise it wouldn’t be equality!

In what ways do you commit yourself to “exploring all the possibilities of what it is to be fully human”, in your own body, and from your own perspective? In what ways can you support others in doing so? In what ways can you support everyone in doing so?

Each of us is an expression of the wyrd, a clustering of its threads; a series and sequence of choices - each with its own inevitable twist, and its own ending. Our power arises from awareness - awareness of ourselves, of others, and of the wyrd itself - and from choice, for ourselves, and with others. So what do we choose? Answer: it is always up to us. But nurturing choice in the infinite ‘We’ that we share with others - treating everyone, including ourselves, as “equally deserving of respect” - eventually weaves its weird way back to us: it’s a wiser way to go.

The catch is that what it asks for from us is trust: trust in the wyrd, trust in ourselves, trust in others - boys, girls, everyone. And it also asks us for commitment: to be ourselves, to be here, to be now, and accept the wyrd for what it is - the interweaving of everyone, everywhere, everywhen. Yet there are times when trust and commitment can be very hard to find… and that’s when trusting just a little - enough to trust our knowing in the wyrd - can make all the difference in our relationships with others, and with ourselves.