Picks to nit at (part the first)

So for my birthday, my wonderful sister sent me some old books of hers, specifically occult books since I can’t really find any where I am (and definitely not where I was)! Of course, as with all books, you kinda have to filter out what doesn’t make sense, and one of the things I’ve been struggling with is how these books talk about feminine and masculine energies.

Keep in mind I am a feminist, of the stripe that believes that nothing really separates the genders other than their junk; there may be a bell curve of certain characteristics for each gender (males on average might be more assertive than females, for example), but there’s no way of determining if cultural conditioning is the cause or effect, and there’s enough exceptions to the bell curves that they’re pretty pointless anyways.  And the whole concept of saying “you’re born with this set of genitals, you should be like this; you were born with that set of genitals, so act like that” is so retarded I don’t even… Most people don’t work like that- everybody has a mix of things society put in the girl box and guy box (a female can be a total jock and have a green thumb; a male can like shooter games and be a talented artist; etc.). Feminists have made a lot of progress in making it socially acceptable for females to explore “masculine” aspects of their personality, but unfortunately there’s still a lot of work to be done to make it allowable for males to explore their “feminine” sides. Segue: You know how in the yin and yang concept, traits are grouped together? Like, Yin contains receptive, femininity, lunar, darkness, while Yang contains active, masculine, solar, day energies? This has never made sense to me. It’s like saying cats are the opposite of dogs, and orange is the opposite of blue, so cats and the color orange are related while dogs and the color blue are related. What? This idea is very pervasive throughout American culture’s dealings with gender, though- art and science are opposites, therefore males should have one and females should have the other. Logic and emotion are opposites, therefore one should be a feminine trait and one should be a masculine trait. Service jobs (nurses, secretaries, etc) and active jobs (construction, professional sports, etc) are pretty much opposites, so one should be the domain of males and one should be the domain of females. Etc, etc. Can you see the problem with this? Actually, there are multiple problems, see how many you can spot…

So the whole concept that there are a set of energies that consist of female traits (lunar, earth, sea, depth, receptive, passive, delicate, emotional), and a set of energies composed of male traits (solar, air, fire, height, active, giving, robust, intellectual), just annoys me! And strikes me as completely wrong… Until I figured out that me and these books were just speaking different languages. What I would call an active energy, they label masculine; what I call receptive, they would call feminine. They seem to be subscribing a little bit to the yin/yang concept as well, but for the most part it seems to just translate as either masculine=active (giving) and feminine=passive (receiving) energies. I’m thinking this is all their doing because they will name specific energies, and talk about the multiple energies within something (they do think it’s possible for masculine earth energies to exist within a working, or to work a solar feminine spell), so… Yeah, I can live with this. Hopefully this reasoning might help one of you dear imaginaries having a similar issue with wording ^.^