Women Gateway of Love, Womanism is the Kernel of Humanism
Here, I describe a deeper, spiritual understanding of love that extends beyond romantic or familial bonds. I take “Love as a tremendous force that unites all living things…” (Peck, 1978) that unites all living things, protects us, and frees us from fear. Love also grants us freedom. “Love enables us to be authentic, express our emotions openly, and forgive others” (Fromm, 1956). It is about feeling connected to everyone, every Earthling, and everything including Mother Earth. We are all woven into the same fabric of life.
love allows forgiveness allows us to let go of anger and pain, resulting in a more open and tranquil life. By accepting this spiritual vision of love, we may bring greater harmony, serenity, and purpose into our lives while also making the world a better place.
Women are the gateway of love; “Women are the gateway of love; she is the final common path of compassion and empathy…”(Walker, 1983) She is a grower of love. Men as babies depend on her for all physical and psychological needs and are at her mercy during infancy. If the mother fails to take care of her baby for any reason, even if he survives with the support of other elders, the child will never grow as a normal child psychologically and socially. “A woman is a genuine and authentic giver…”(Gilligan, 1982)
I consider myself the result of the seeds of the love of my mother, without her care and support my existence would not have been possible. My sanity and normalization were due to her love. “It is a relationship of mutual love and trust between the baby and the mother that is most important for a child’s healthy mental development” (Bowlby, 1988)
Ask a psychiatrist what happens if a mother stops loving her baby, even if she takes good care of his physiological needs. He will never grow as a healthy human being. “Any problem in child-mother relationships is one reason for mental illness” (Winnicott, 1965). “I found the medicine that can set right the pathology of human relations, this is love” (Rogers, 1961)
It is only through love that we can dismantle power structures and dissolve the envy, narcissism, and hatred we see all around us. Just see the world through a woman’s eyes, everything will change, and you will get transformed, and the world will look different to you as if you have not seen it before. It was the same ecstatic experience I had felt when I renounced Islam and embraced atheism and Cartesian rationality. “Love is the only solution to the existential problems of man” (Tillich, 1952)
It is not only an emotion, but it is also a human relation. It is the magic wand that can turn a bed of thorns into a bed of roses and an enemy into a friend. Love means the mutual recognition of each other’s autonomy and identity and unconditional human solidarity. Love is the kernel of my spirituality and womanism is its manifestation. It gave me a new sense of self and the historical mission, I must fulfill. I am not indulging in mere emotionalism; it is a radical and informed subjectivity that is the result of my new worldview. “The reason liberated me from blind conformism…” (Sartre, 1946) and showed me the path that I have to tread upon alone, leaving reason behind. I have entered the domain of love, transcendence, and relatedness. Reason does not know anything about it.
I consider rationality as a means, not an end in itself, and the end is derived from human subjectivity. Human subjectivity and mind have their own logarithm of relationships, which cannot be completely understood through Cartesian rationality. Human cognition is highly complex not an all-or-none reflexive reaction as that of animals. It is a mediated response that involves lingual and non-lingual signs as represented in individual consciousness and the collective mind.
After discussing the pathology of love, this is now time to say more about Womanism. The woman is a giver, a true species being, and she is inherently against all forms of exchange relations. She gives life to her child but does not ask to return the favor from her child same as our mother earth gives us everything without asking from us anything in return. “Womanism taught me ‘to be’ means ‘to be with others’…” (Walker, 1983). Existentialism has taught me that ‘to be’ means becoming what you are, the unique individual, but with love, respect, dignity, and recognition of others as they are, relate to them meaningfully and authentically and share your life with them. It means to create a space for mutuality and co-existence for others. The biggest tragedy for humanity is that womankind is unaware of her creative power, and her godlike attributes, and she is alienated from her creation, mankind that degrades her and violates her dignity daily. One reason for all this may be that womankind is heavily under the influence of ‘genetic nepotism’, Dawkin’s Selfish genes (Dawkins, 1989) due to her key role in procreation and her unique parental investment in her child. “Womanism is the highest stage of humanism and love is a kernel of it” (Phillips, 2006)
I would like to call Womanism an atheistic, secular, humanistic, and spiritual way of life, a dharma, a deen, a religion, and a worldview. It is capable of performing all the social functions that your parental religion claims to do but fails miserably in doing so. It will give you transcendence, and relatedness, fill your heart with love, and make you fully human. As it is against all forms of laws based on authority and the use of force, it is the only spirituality that cannot be transformed into a brand, cannot be sold for profit, and cannot be turned into an organized religion. Womanism is predominantly a product of the right brain and is responsible for the welfare and well-being of humanity including mankind, as she invests more in the propagation and survival of humanity.
Womanism has no religion and no politics; it is against all religions and ideologies dominated and created by men, on the left or the right, secular or religious political divide. It is a modern version of primitive humanism that is neither matriarchal nor patriarchal. It is apolitical in the sense of being against all forms of power struggles and stands for the entire humanity, mankind as well as womankind. “Womanism is global, inclusive, and based on love and social justice” (Walker, 1983)
Under Womanism, difference does not result in social exclusion, and is not considered a disease, and deviance is not criminalized. It stands against one-dimensional economic man and seeks his overthrow, bringing back the humanity that we have lost under capitalism. “It is against separating economics from ethics and ethics from collective life” (Noddings, 1984)
Taking an eschatological view, “The woman is the first anarchist, nonconformist, and progressive on the planet Earth” (Friedan, 1963) Women refused to live as slaves of God with all the pleasure they had in paradise and defied His orders as she believed that there is no good and evil unless there is freedom of disobeying. She was the first to renounce the pendulum-like life of paradise, mechanical and linear, without change and history. She just wanted to write her history, and she did it by disobeying God. She had the courage to question God, take risks, experience new things, and venture into the unknown world. “It is because of women that humanity has inherited this beautiful planet Earth” (King, 1995)
Men know women before they become adults and sleep with them naked. They depend on them for all physical and psychological needs and as adults, they need them for sexual gratification. In short, a man’s biggest need as a baby or as an adult is to be with a woman. However, his greatest fear is domination by her the way she overwhelms them as babies. Men feel a woman still treats them like a baby, and they are overwhelmed by the power of women. They appeased her when they were kids and also when she was their beloved. Men suffer from fear of woman’s power to get sexually attracted and her control over them. This is the reason that men think that when they are sleeping with a woman, they are sleeping with the devil.
The sense of being insignificant and inferior makes them unable to face the woman in subjective mode, as a person, inter-subjectively, and they feel comfortable with her as an object of sex. (Marshal, 1995) Men have the feeling that a woman pulls them towards herself as a piece of the magnet pulls iron filings. However, men have compensated for their weakness by creating religions and double moral standards, unequal nakedness norms, body shame, and brutal use of force over her. Men talk of a woman’s biological inferiority and her alleged inability to exercise wise judgment. No one can be superior or inferior to the other because of the anatomy, and colour of his or her body.
Honestly speaking, I feel most impertinent and insignificant before a woman, her power of attraction, her overwhelming power over me as a baby and as an adult. When men sleep with a woman, they feel to notice her sameness with their mother. They forget that they already know those breasts, that body, that warmth of her body, that softness of her skin, and that touch of silk as babies. Our literature is abounding for her praise; she is praiseworthy, and singing a love song for her evokes my deep emotions. I bow my head before her in reverence. Some of her attributes are godlike. Due to an inferiority complex, some men use physical force, their muscles against women out of fear of being dominated. Empowerin Women is the only solution to existential problems humanity face.
References
– Beauvoir, S. (1949). *The Second Sex*. New York: Vintage Books.
– Bowlby, J. (1988). *A Secure Base: Parent-Child Attachment and Healthy Human Development*. New York: Basic Books.
– Friedan, B. (1963). *The Feminine Mystique*. New York: W.W. Norton & Company.
– Fromm, E. (1956). *The Art of Loving*. New York: Harper & Row.
– Gilligan, C. (1982). *In a Different Voice: Psychological Theory and Women’s Development*. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
– King, Y. (1995). *Healing the Wounds: The Promise of Ecofeminism*. Philadelphia: New Society Publishers.
– Marshall, G. (1995). *Reclaiming the F Word: Feminism for the 21st Century*. London: Zed Books.
– Noddings, N. (1984). *Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education*. Berkeley: University of California Press.
– Peck, S. (1978). *The Road Less Traveled*. New York: Simon & Schuster.
– Phillips, L. (2006). *The Womanist Reader: The First Quarter Century of Womanist Thought*. New York: Routledge.
– Rogers, C. (1961). *On Becoming a Person: A Therapist’s View of Psychotherapy*. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
– Sartre, J.-P. (1946). *Existentialism Is a Humanism*. New Haven: Yale University Press.
– Tillich, P. (1952). *The Courage to Be*. New Haven: Yale University Press.
– Walker, A. (1983). *In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose*. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
– Winnicott, D.W. (1965). *The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment: Studies in the Theory of Emotional Development*. New York: International Universities Press.
