Modern culture is primarily interested in producing men who are technically adept. In ancient Taoist practice, young men underwent extremely rigorous spiritual training. This included spending up to two months in pure darkness.
No spiritual tradition is more pro-female than Taoism. In its primary text, the Tao Te Ching, Tao is “the Mother of all things” and men are instructed to “Know the male but keep to the female.” This, I’d allow, is the solution to everything.
If nothing is an option, do that. But furlough the head. Do it with your whole heart, as if you had 90 seconds to live—alert, aware, not thinking. This is a profound and dynamic state. Laozi: “When nothing is done, nothing remains undone.”
We are not male or female in different bodies. We are male and female in the same body. “He who knows the male / And yet keeps to the female / Becomes like the space containing the world.”
Misogynist? A man at war with himself.
Political repression has produced an art movement called excessivism. Think of George Floyd’s head painted on a brick wall. Nobody’s painting over that expanse. Or of Ai Weiwei and his sunflower seeds. Or of Bansky. The more repressive the state, the more biting the art. Excessivism fulfills British philosopher Alan Watts theory of polarity, also called the law of opposites. As he writes in “The Two Hands of God,” opposing qualities create, define and sustain one another.
Men's Work 