What Strikes Fear into Every Man’s Heart?

Women Talking a film by Sarah Polley.  With Rooney Mara, Judith Ivey, Emily Mitchell, Kate Hallett.  Streaming on Apple TV.  *****

Reflections on a Movie

In Women Talking, a group of women finally gets together to talk about the things nobody has been saying.  It is based on a novel about Miriam Toews, and borrows its premise from something that happened in Bolivia in the early years of the century.  As the IMDb website puts it: “From 2005 to 2009, nine men in the remote Manitoba Colony, using livestock tranquilizers, drugged female victims ranging in age from three to sixty and violently raped them at night. When the girls and women awoke bruised and covered in blood, the men of the colony dismissed their reports as delusions–even when they became pregnant from the assaults–or punishments from God or by demons for their supposed sins.”  In the movie, we’re never sure where the conversations are taking place; it seems to be a rural community, and the women are speaking English (so it isn’t Bolivia).  They’re trying to decide whether to leave or to “stay and fight”; by the end of the film they’ve made a decision.  Part of the reason the decision is difficult is that they believe that, if they leave the community, they will not be permitted to enter the Kingdom of Heaven.

Though the movie makes reference to a very specific and bizarre situation, it is also rather obviously speaking to our present moment, when women have begun talking in a different and more public way (not in a barn in the middle of nowhere).

What struck me was the way the situation itself resembled so many that I’ve heard about through the years, always connected with a religious situation, always with some group of men.  I know absolutely nothing about the Mennonite religion, except that they’re a sect of Christianity and they’re obviously a tightly wound group, something like the Amish, in that they’re represented as using old implements like horse and buggies and old farm implement.  No cell phones or texting for them.  It seems to be a dour haggard group, everybody—including a number of pretty women—looking like they’ve spent a lot of time in the wind and sun.  They obviously believe in hard work, family values, and no fooling around.  Oh, and they don’t allow the women to learn to read.  They wouldn’t be texting even if they had cell phones.

On the very face of it, this all sounds so preposterous that you want to throw up your hands and say, Really?  In a Western country, in the 21^st century?  But of course, the same thing goes on in Arab countries, where conservative religion is intent on keeping woman from being educated.

I hate to state the obvious, but a fundamental basis of this religion (and most others) is sexual repression.  I’m not sure what’s permitted and not, but I could take a wild guess (no fooling around when you’re young, sex only between a husband and wife, and that only for procreation, no gay sex, no masturbation).  So a group of men decide to drug females—from the age of 3 to 60!—and have sex with their inert corpse-like bodies.  And abuse them and bruise them.  And this is supposed to be fun?  What kind of man wants to do that (other than Bill Cosby)?  What kind of men get together and say, you know, we’re not getting enough sex, and we’re not really allowed to in our religion, but I got an idea.  See, we got this horse tranquillizer . . .

This is the same kind of repressive situation that makes men want to have sex with little boys (see Catholic priests, altar boys), as long as they’re helpless and can be persuaded that it’s God’s will.  It’s the same situation that makes men give up sex altogether and turn to drink (see The Banshees of Inisherin.  The Irish see drink as a “good man’s failing.”  By good man, they mean someone who has given up on sex).  Christian fundamentalists, the Taliban.  We have no shortage of examples.

What bewilders me is the essential stupidity of so much religion, which always seems based on the idea that sex is the number one sin (though everybody wants to do it), men need to be in charge and in control, the only way to do that is to hold the women down, keep them ignorant, keep them from talking, tie ‘em up, get the damn horse tranquilizer.  Sex is bad, the body is inherently evil, especially the female body, men are the truly religious ones, they make and enforce the rules, and if they don’t do that and keep things under control, everybody’s going to hell.

I think the truth is not that men hate women (though it often looks that way), but that they fear them, because they know women have a power they don’t.  That power is intuitive and spiritual, and involves being in touch with their bodies, partly because they menstruate and therefore are in touch with the cycles of nature, partly because they give birth.  If they’re in charge, the men believe, things will be vastly different (indeed they will), and everybody, and everything, will run amuck.

I practice a religion (Alan Watts would say it is not a religion, but a way of liberation) which says that the body is not evil, but a source of wisdom (it is where the intuition essentially comes from).  It does not believe in suppressing the body, but deeply inhabiting it.[1]  It sees sex not as a problem, but as a koan that must be met, essentially a spiritual question: “In order to know the Way in perfect clarity, there is one essential point you must penetrate and not avoid: the red thread (of passion) between our legs that cannot be severed.  Few face the problem, and it is not at all easy to settle.  Attack it directly without hesitation or retreat, for how else can liberation come?”  It has had its own patriarchal side, but as practiced in America today it has as many women priests as men, and welcomes people of all types and preferences.  It is, I would hope, an example of the future of religion.  But the old religion is going out kicking and screaming.

It can’t survive if the women talk.

[1]The simplest expression of this I know of is a poem called Song of the Grass Roof Hut, which ends with the lines, “If you want to know the undying person in the hut, don’t separate from this skin bag here and now.”  A more modern example comes from Zen teacher Joko Beck.  “The ‘secret’ of life that we are all looking for is just this: to develop through sitting and daily life practice the power and courage to return to that which we have spent a lifetime hiding from, to rest in the bodily experience of the present moment—even if it is a feeling of being humiliated, of failing, of abandonment, of unfairness.  We learn to rest in our experience without thought, to sink into a nondual state. . . .

“. . . Call this enlightenment if you wish.  But please remember: we do not do this bodily experiencing just once, or in one sitting.  We are describing a lifetime process with many ups and downs, probably one that is never complete.  It doesn’t matter!  What does matter is the slow, slow shift in the way we see ourselves and live our lives.  This is Zen practice and an end to our substitute life.”