@Metamedia @errante @orangelantern My one feminist teacher was an insecure coward who used to bully boys in her classes, constantely teling them that they were worse at math than girls because they were male, taking any opportunity to emasculate and belittle them. I despised her because I despised bullies, and this early encounter made me critical of feminism.

Eventually meeting self-described feminists who are more concerned with *positive femininity* than with emasculation/belittling of men (or "honourary manhood" for women) did do something to challenge this. But ultimately my cognitions of the masculine and feminine weren't fixed by politics (which I have no faith in anyway) but by psychology and mythology.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_Who_Run_with_the_Wolves

In this book (written by some kind of native american shamanic woman who is also a PhD in Jungian Psychology) positive feminine archetypes and their repression are discussed at length. I admit I haven't read it myself, it's on my reading list but it has a lower priority than some other books that I want to read. But this is the kind of positivity I'm talking about. I much prefer the notion of an essential and distinct femininity (and masculinity) to hylic notions of pure gender-constructivism. As I said before, Hindu perspectives resonate a lot for me, and their *primary divisor* below the Oversoul itself is into the divine masculine and divine feminine.

Jung recommends that men contact and ratify their anima, and women their animus, and this chimes with my magical experience too. I think "climbing the ladder" to ekstasis ("going outside the self") and enthusiasm ("infusion with the divine") means addressing your opposite number. This is, for example, why WIZARDS WEAR DRESSES. It's why Shaktist magic is popular with Hindu men. It's why even Kabbalah, rooted firmly in a cognition of "God as Masculine," just takes the L and acknowledges a "feminine divine power."