"Mr and Mrs Smith" (2005): Ending the Gender War

Howdy, Steve Barnes here with Life Writing Live. And it's good to see you guys. I have to admit something I'm a little bit nervous about today. And you'll find out why. I've been reluctant to directly state some of the things that I'm going to be saying today. I've been dancing around it, but I haven't put it all together in one place and I'm going to. I had a couple different motivations for that. One was, was the fact that we're getting ready to do our Soulmate class next year. And the other was a particularly disturbing post by a young man who clearly has the foggiest notion of what relationships are, how to navigate them. And it's this sort of delusional human being who gets themselves into an emotional trap where they can't get out, start feeling so much fear and frustration that it leads to anger and can lead to violence. We've got issues that we're dealing with in our culture right now and in the world right now. And I have some perspective on this that I decided finally that I could not be coward enough to not state directly, even though I'm sure that there are people who are going to be a little happy with me. I realized there's no way to speak about healthy relationships or healthy human sexual psychology and philosophy without goring a few sacred cows. So, you know, there just isn't. I just have to kind of swallow it and do what needs to be done. So consider this conversation in the article that I publish it as a form of a manifesto. Call it a new opportunity to open the door to a new potential in human relationships. But understanding how the past created our present without believing that it must limit our future. Understand that everything I'm saying comes with position of believing in basic human equality with a little bit of complementarity mixed in. And hi to everybody there. So here we go. My basic goal is to show how the racial war and the gender war are related to the same illusions and to call a truce. Okay, let's talk about a movie movie that I saw yesterday. Really, really fun film. Mr. And Mrs. Smith, which came out in 2005, is an exciting and hyster funny action movie. The film starts with Mr. And Mrs. Smith and absolutely gorgeous Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie in marital therapy, bemoaning their lack of communication and sex life. The problem, we soon learn, is that they're actually assassins working for competing American agencies. Neither of them is aware of the other's true identity. They finally realize that truth when Their agencies assign them to assassinate each other. Oh my God. And then the fun begins. They say they try to assassinate each other, ending in a wonderful, lethal, bruising shootout punch up in their house. Which is just glorious. I mean, it is so much fun. It is so great. See the movie. But what's clear to anybody who is watching this movie is that the entire time is that they're pulling their punches and neither really wants to kill the other. But, you know, why are they shooting and punching and blowing each other up then? It's mating behavior in a lot of ways, because underneath it all, they're a matched pair of predators, human predators, each of whom was pretending to be a leaf eater, you know, carnivores pretending to be herbivores, as it were. So at one point, Brad Pitt gets the drop on Angelina and. And he cannot pull the trigger. If you want it, it's yours, he says, lowering his weapon. She can't kill him either. And they fall into each other's arms for some absolutely volcanic sex. Why? Because for the first time they told each other the truth. For the first time, they've shed their masks. But they're real with each other. That kind of deep, transformative, orgasmic explosion usually only happens in two contexts. One, strangers or new lovers experiencing sex with each other for the first one to 10 or 20 times or so. Two, bonded couples who are totally committed and open with each other with all masks dropped. There are problems with such abandon. Of course, it can be very dangerous to open completely and vulnerably to strangers, but it does happen. Anyone remember hearing somebody talk about how much fun crazy people are in bed? There you go. But I think that what we want is something healthy to take a look at how that works in committed relationships, or at least healthy relationships. In committed relationships, there can be a problem with passion. I mean, the actual business of life can drain that passion away. Because the passion exists to both signal who you are. This is who I am, this is my creativity, this is my life, this is my physical energy, and so forth and so on and to bond the pair bond instinct. And that heat that you feel creates steam to drive the engines of the family just to actually accomplish work for the family. As you work and strive together, it can be very difficult to recapture that magic. Although it's absolutely worth working for it. When your values and goals are the same and the passion isn't pulling you in opposite directions. And if you are careful to protect the intimate time and space, the six isn't the same kind of volcanic first time discovery but it is deeper, hotter, even more shattering and satisfying. It is. It's qualitatively different. Newness is interesting and novel, but honesty, stripping away the masks is even better. I had the honor of studying sexual magic for years, comparing approaches from Native American, Taoist and yogic traditions. And what they have in common is the notion that the intensity of an orgasm is in direct proportion to the amount of ego released at that moment. In other words, if you can remember your name, wasn't very good sex. I've spoken often about the chakras, the seven energetic levels used in yogic psychology. They're a roadmap of the human energy centers. A map is not the territories. Don't get caught up in the literality of it. If you get lost in discussions of whether they're actual little spinning wheels inside your body, you're missing the point. You look at them at the level of metaphor, and if you do that, the most primary chakra is the base, the core, muladhara. It's called survival. Now, nothing trumps it. You know, Maslow's hierarchy starts there as well. Those who believe that sex is the strongest human drive are deluding themselves. No one has ever stopped running from a forest fire to get laid. But sex is the next one up, the very next personal survival is at the base. It's the most important one, genetic survival, right upstairs. That energy and survival is non gendered, okay? It splits at the second chakra, the sexual chakra, which is called sva sthana in Sanskrit. And you know, in order for there to be an ego to dissolve and free the energy, you almost had to have those two, those two sides, you know, just why are we not androgynous? You know, why are we not hermaphroditic? Why are we sexually dimorphic? There are good reasons for that, and some of them are fun reasons. Another metaphor is that of something called the ida and the pingala, the male and female energies that supposedly climb up the spine or a channel of the spine called shishumna. You know, they climb up and when they manifest on all the different levels of being, it's called a quote unquote, kundalini awakening. And it's a doorway to extraordinary perception and function. They wind their way up through power, emotion, communication, thought. And there is gender difference in thought. You know, there, there, there are differences in the type of synaptic connections between groups of neurons, but there are no, you know, there are no significant differences in the number of neurons or one's body size. And what's called Packing density are taken into account. So get away from that. Men and women are about equally as smart, although we do think a little differently apparently. Anyway, they join up on top at what's called spirit. Sahasarara is the last chakra. And so you have a non gendered beginning gender, gender, gender and then a non gendered end. We come from oneness, we return to oneness. It's the stuff in between that gets us into trouble. Many years ago I was arguing with a mentor of mine about the racial situation in South Africa, specifically apartheid. My contention was that apartheid was damaging for black people. One question was whether they had problems and disadvantages relative to the white dominators. But another was whether they were worse off than blacks in surrounding countries. Those two different questions. He suggested a standard for me to research. The World Health Organization has a simple standard for the health of a people. It's kind of fast and dirty and they use it all over the world. It's lifespan and infant mortality rate. Looking at Maslow's hierarchy of human needs, or again with the chakras, which are a 6,000 year old tool of yogic psychology, personal and genetic survival are, as I mentioned, clearly primary. There are other things that measure personal satisfaction. Wealth, inherited wealth especially, which is often much worse than income. The gap between and these two are foundational. You handle these survival and survival of your children or the rest of them really doesn't matter much to my very great chagrin. While applying these standards to blacks and whites in South Africa clearly demonstrated the disadvantage Africans had relative to whites, it also demonstrated advantages relative to their cousins in the neighboring countries. A factor that I could have predicted if I take a look at migration patterns. More blacks entering South Africa than leaving. That implies opportunity. That was embarrassing. You know, the situation was clearly more complicated than I had anticipated. Apartheid was bad, but it wasn't utterly demonic. I didn't want to believe that, but I've got two different sides to my personality. Sort of a science side and a shamanic side really. And the scientist side said follow the evidence no matter where it leads, even if it makes you uncomfortable. So I had to do that. I've used these standards of lifespan and infant mortality and inherited wealth and things like that as primary. You know, with. Well, actually lifespan in infant mortality of primary. And things that deal with income and power were more secondary, but still very, very important. If they were massively important, they'd impact the bottom line, the bottom survival line. Looking at these things proved very useful in simplifying complicated situations. For instance, the efficiency and effectiveness of socialized medicine. The answer is pretty clear. Every country with higher lifespans and lower infant mortality rate, which are those measures of health, has socialized medicine, every single one of them. Add in cost of delivery per capita and the picture is very, very clear, in my opinion. There's hardly anything to argue about, in my opinion. One of the things that's very interesting is noting the way that opponents of socialized medicine will try to attack these basic statistics. Distract you, get you to ignore them, complicate them. Okay, I promise you that if corporate healthcare, profit driven healthcare were superior in these measures, they would talk about nothing else. But they can't. So they try to get you to ignore those things or try to invalidate them. I find these are very useful standards, and the degree to which they are useful standards has actually proven problematic. I want to offer another set of definitions, philosophy and politics. Philosophy is asking what is true? Politics is about how can we win. And remember that song, Everybody wants to rule the world? Any group, every group, would be best assumed to want to control the rules in the conversation, especially if they're politicized. The more politicized they are, the more important it is to remember they're not trying to be equal, they're trying to win. And this is where the problem comes in. It's a matter of faith in gender politics that women are dominated, controlled, disadvantaged, that the patriarchy controls and subjugates women. It is common for woke men and women to believe this. And one day I decided to apply these same standards, dealing with the same factors, and a rather complicated picture arose. Yes, it was very true. Women have less control, overt power and finance, no question about that. And they should. There's no question they should have more of that. I'm not doubting that for a moment. But they also live longer and die less often from violent causes. And unless you believe that men want to die, I would suggest that the situation is a little bit more complicated than politicized people will say. Racists and their allies will often apply eerily similar arguments to explain racial disadvantages in America or almost anywhere you have a dominated colonized people relative to whites. Blacks not only earn less money, have less inherited wealth and higher incarceration rates, but they also have higher infant mortality rates and shorter life expectancies. And racists will say, sometimes directly, sometimes, the implication, this is just something innate in black people. Maybe they don't want to live. Maybe they just don't love their children, which in my mind violates not just common sense and basic Biological reality. All organisms will move away from pain and toward pleasure. In fact, maturation is largely a matter of learning to override this and postpone reward. Trust me, we love our children as much as anyone on the planet. So let's stay away from those kinds of arguments here. Let's resolve the dualism. If you resolve the dualism, and if you look at all these different factors, not just income and power, but who lives and dies, then I ask you, who's in charge? Who's really in charge? Men or women? There's no way that I can say anything here that'll make everyone happy, so I'll just say what I believe in my heart to be true. It matches as much observed biology, sociology and psychology as possible, and also maps with the spiritual revelations of most cultures. And that is the world doesn't exist to satisfy men or women. It exists sort of selfish, gene wise to produce the maximum number of grandchildren. And it will use both sides, both men and women, to that end. Viewed that way, women's dreams and men's lives are relatively disposable. It's a strategy that means each side has programmed and bred the other for psychological and social sexual dimorphism, with societies exaggerating the natural differences. On one political side, you have people claiming it's all programming. But on the other, and frankly, less appealing side, you have people, mostly men, claiming that we are totally controlled by our genetic history. But nature, nurture, meet and mingle in so many ways, including epigenetics, turning genes on and off as the environment changes. Oh God, How do we untangle this? There's a fight going on, a war going on between men and women, dealing with safety and opportunity, risk and consent, communication and agency, freedom and responsibility. I'm speaking to the ones who want to end that war. Whatever the truth was in our pasts, technology has changed the game hugely in the last couple of centuries. Industrialization, firearms, maximum population density and effective birth control are obviously freeing both sides from the rigidity of their past roles. The result is both opportunity and danger. Both sides can explore new roles, shed the masks that we've worn for countless thousands of years. The result? Greater freedom, opportunity, creativity and the energy released by dropping the mask, a new potential for men and women to relate to each other more honestly than ever ever in our biological history. If an organism, if an orgasm is the energy released by dissolving the ego shell, then the movie and Mr. And Mrs. Smith must have blown each other's minds that night. And on an unconscious level, it's obvious why they would have been attracted to each other in the first place. Whether finding your soulmate or nurturing that relationship afterward, the key to thriving is being true to yourself. And one of those truths is that we hunger for mating. Something so deep that once the bond is formed, it is more important than personal survival. This reproduction driven hunger goes way beyond mere reproduction. Influencing the behaviors and desires of gay couples or older couples beyond the time of reproduction. Basic wiring that is now meeting a modern world where the old rules no longer apply. In the same way, to get that energy, that aliveness, the passion and sensuality and state of being, we have to stop this war between men and women. And to do that, we have to stop the war between the male and female aspects of our own selves. As soon as I applied these standards to race and realized that if I started from an assumption of equality, I could understand the entire history of the world, our country. I spent a decade of my life writing books like Lion's Blood, Zulu Heart, Shadow Valley, Great Sky Woman, and Blood Brothers that specifically explored this equality. What happens if we're equal? Neither side is especially smart or evil. It's just the territory human beings have been crossing and emergent qualities of, you know, the we rule, you drool that begins in the schoolyard and, you know, or monkeys flinging poo at each other from trees and manifests in massive slaughters and prejudice and all sorts of horror. When you apply that to men and women, it's very similar with the difference that they're complementary as well as basically equal with that pesky sexual dimorphism thing. But then whatever differences there are are, as said, exaggerated by societies to the advantage of neither side. Once you factor in what Maslow and the Chakras say is most important, which is survival. I have my own theories on why the illusion of dominance is so persistent, but that's for another time. The advantage of this perspective, challenging as it might be, is it is a perspective on how we got here. One that explains our world without demonizing anybody, without limiting anyone either. Because we can both program and because we both program and epigenetically adapt, that means we can create our future. And what will that future be? I suspect that the future is less dimorphic in marriage and bonding. We're talking mated pairs of animals, equally good and bad, similar strengths per pound, capable of switching and modifying roles to a degree that would shock those born before, say, effective birth control. Those who want to blame or shame, who don't care about men's lives or women's dreams need not apply to what it is I'm talking about. This will not move you at all. Whether for the rest of you, whether you're talking race or gender, I invite you to begin with the assumption of equality and modify it only if there is no rational option not to like we have to admit that men don't have babies. If you want a future of freedom, joy, possibilities, strength, passion, power and fulfillment for our sons and daughters, where female human beings have the same freedoms and responsibilities as the males, or at least as close as we can come, I would suggest that we start with that assumption of equality. If you like that idea, you'll like what I'm going to have to say about this in the future. Meantime, believe in each other, in our shared potential, whether we're speaking of race or gender. We might have to modify the picture a bit, but if you start with the assumption of equality, I believe you'll make fewer errors and less egregious errors than if you go with the default, which is assuming that one of the other side is inferior or superior. That was yesterday and I welcome you to the future. If you've enjoyed this talk, please share it with your friends. And remember that in 2019, just next year, my wife, award winning author Tananari Dhu, and I will be conducting a seminar on finding, wooing and nurturing your soulmate. To learn more and to get a free copy of the Dynamic Ancient Child Visualization for Inner balance, go to www.the ancient child.com Take care everyone. Have a wonderful day and thanks for listening.