Cursing the Gold-Digger Perpetuates Patriarchy

Dear Patriarchal White Men,

You still have so much to learn about desire and power. You’ve unwittingly taken the cultural the stage this year with unprecedented stories of intolerable harassment. As the pain caused by and the intolerance for sexual and economic dominance emerges into the light, we all have the opportunity to heal. Light is needed in order to heal, so it is necessary for the pain to become visible and palpable.

But healing can be so long delayed that a cycle of blame ensues. I begin with what my logic tells me: the only reality is love. Following that, there are mistakes and biological limitations. So, with the knowing that there is a place that is already healed, I acknowledge you and thank you for being hot for pussy. It is an endearing quality of men of your generation.

In all your simple complexity, you possess the simultaneous appreciation for seeing something sacred and beautiful, and feeling a desire to own it. This childish reaction to beauty is both an innate understanding that beauty is part of you, conflicted with a feeling separation. Just as a child feels that the toy is a part of him, he holds it tightly to feel the security of being bigger, more whole, and lashes out if his precious toy is pried from his sticky little fingers.

To forgive the perpetrator as we would a child, is to recognize the wound. Violence is an expression of being out of control, the fear of losing that which we love. Not coincidentally, the desire to possess, rather than experience, drives destructive economics as we know it. And our greatest fears become reality.

Our cultural persona is a male adolescent who hasn’t had his needs met: a bully. His feminine expression was belittled; he was forced to share himself without tears; he was violated. Having not experienced wholeness as a child, the bully flexes his independence, righteousness, and sense of immortality. But domination ultimately makes those in power over others suffer most, falling into the despair of insatiable longing to feel, they are cut off from what is aliveness and the expression of beauty within, and create their own hell of consumption, destruction, and violence. Thomas Jefferson, in his hypocritical wisdom, recognized the curse of tyranny: it creates a tyrant.

Now, as we approach the edge of a cultural evolution and the liberation of gender, will the underlying wound have time to heal? Will the female archetype again be blamed for sensitivity? For trying to reclaim the adoration she has been deprived of after centuries of being enslaved, will she be cursed as a gold-digger? Will she be able to forgive?

Anger is her right, but forgiveness is her power.

But will the male archetype be able to accept forgiveness? Allowing the beauty of life to regain prominence, and drive the value of our institutions and economic model? Or will Adoration itself whither, not knowing how to feed itself, as it turns away from the mystique, rebuked? Neglect is truly the greater abuse and suffering.

The next generation of gender fluidity is my hope for the future. They can help our cultural archetype heal the wound of separation from beauty, and recognize it is everywhere.

While the baby boomer generation has been criticized for being selfish, stealing from the future for their own economic gains, we have to recognize the economic truths in which these desires not only exist, but are reinforced. The baby boomer generation grew up valuing the ethics of freedom and hard work. Similar to Victor Frankl’s proposal to America, that the Statue of Liberty should be bookended with a Statue of Responsibility. Frankl, however, was suggesting personal liberty be balanced by social responsibility. Whereas, the American religion of freedom and hard work describe and is reinforced by a brutish obsession with profit motive and personal gain. As contemporaries, Christian philosopher Charles Avila more accurately described the primitive logic of American ethos when he said: “If I am my own, and my labor belongs to me, then what I make is mine.”

Unbridled white patriarchy, in its dominance of force moves in a singular, ever upward and outward trajectory. The force is a surrogate phallus as it grows into an ever larger profit machine. Eternally in the state of growth, each phallus competes with one another, afraid to let go. He is afraid the monster of dominance will destroy everything he is. Hoping to feel, he devours beauty, destroying it in the process. He doesn’t recognize that beauty is ephemeral, and Beauty is the very sensation that comes from witnessing it. Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder. The more we see Beauty everywhere, the more we recognize it as Intelligence. Which means conversely, the more able we are to manifest beauty and intelligence. This is the importance of feeling and honoring feminine orgasm without trying to own it. Pay tribute to it, but don’t try to own it. Economic release of the seed that has been hoarded is necessary for regeneration.

But I am not demanding, not even asking for redistribution of wealth. It will happen on its own as we learn to value ourselves and each other. If you punish the prostitute, it from your own fear of wanting, and thinking that you do not already have. It is because you are still limited by your adolescent vision of acquisition.

So while fear destroys life, I will only forgive the mistake, so I can love you more intensely, with the love of a mother. An adolescent is still a child, after all. A mother loves from a distance, waiting for the adolescent child to find his own strength, to recognize he is not in danger, and begin to experience love in return, a natural wellspring that comes from being finally sated and at peace. And when he begins to see that the whole world is already part of him, he can begin to forgive himself, and find beauty everywhere.

So I will be the mother and the prostitute, coaxing your desire, not to monetize it, but to release it. I also don’t want to own part of you. Only in the way that I know we are already bound to one another, because I know we are already lovers and co-creators, I will enjoy kinky sex and role play. But let us save these roles for the bedroom, not for our sacred economy, not for what describes our true relationship to one another.

As for the rest of women kind, and the feminists who love the planet, beware of blame. When we rebuke Jezebel and the Gold-Digger, we are unwittingly upholding the same male patriarchy that is holding back.

Singer Common, bless his soul, wants to lead a feminist revolution in hip hop. Watching him perform one night, he audaciously plucked a young woman, round, brown, and beautiful, from the audience and made a performance of wining and dining her, taking for granted her receptivity. He sang about the day when women ruled the world (mistakenly handing over the linguistic tense to an unforeseeable future rather than an acknowledgement that can be made at any time, in the present time, of a woman’s power). Finally, and most egregiously, he followed up with another song, lambasting with severity the gold-diggers of the world.

Cursing the gold-digger just perpetuates patriarchy.

Wanting to remain in control, patriarchy holds back, unwilling to redistribute the energetic power of creation. By hoarding and hiding his wealth, investing it just to acquire more for himself, he is severed from the pleasure of experiencing ephemeral beauty, and devours and destroys the beauty within. This must be gently healed. He must learn to cultivate and honor his Desire. Desire becomes Euphoria as Beauty is cultivated, gently and adoringly touched. He will learn that Orgasm walks with Desire.

We can help heal humanity be innovating on how to honor the sacred feminine in economics. Grassroots economics allows the Feminine Orgasm to grow in healthy soils. It values Diversity as an expression of Intelligent Life, it values Curiosity over consumption. Feminine energy loves to sacrifice itself for the pleasure of others, because it loves to be appreciated and adored. When it is appreciated and adored, it is regenerated. The love begins to flow freely from both sides, and the giver and receiver become one and the same, and we are healed. We begin to recognize that redistribution of wealth is akin to yanking a toy from a small child, we can redirect our focal point in valuing the multiplicity of pleasures life has to offer. Then we are free to experience the gift that comes from giving, and understand that the wellbeing of one is the wellbeing of the other. Then, interest becomes freedom, and we free ourselves from slavery to an insatiable master. Then the economy will grow like grass, from the bottom up, as the desert of scarcity is quenched.