Women, Freedom, Truth, and Fire
On risk, freedom, and being fully alive.
Before discussing women spinning fire, the sexually robust and the women leaving men behind, let’s talk about art.
Why limit yourself to relating to art, using it as a symbolic selfie, attempting to look in the mirror? When you relate to something, you’re looking to the past and seeing something familiar. But not everything orange is an orange. Art can be a doorway, not into another world, but out of your world of habits. You’re still in this world, seen differently. Things our habits hide can be seen, like a chameleon among ordinary things.
“A diamond fell in the market, lay in the trash. Many busy fools passed by. A tester took it away.”
~ Kabir
Some women I know delight in the fire arts: spinning poi, fire staffs, fire fans, etc. This love of fire is not exclusive to women, and could easily be explained away as vanity.
When a woman is spinning fire, clearly she is saying “look at me.” That is not necessarily bad when you consider the perfume and color of every flower, the song of every bird, the roar of the lion and the tone of the tenor, etc. Life in its existence is an exhibitionist. But why fire? Isn’t it dangerous? Isn’t it scarring? Couldn’t they lose their beautiful hair or beauty itself? In the Burning Man community, one very talented fire spinner, Linda Farkas, died actualizing her art.
Spinning fire pulls a person into the moment. Anything dangerous makes you feel more alive. Truth is also risky and it makes you feel more alive too. This is entirely different than the daily grind, and takes intrinsic sensitivity to understand.
Let’s look at the fire arts as a metaphor: the risk women take to feel alive, daring to step out of conventional roles, whether the sexually robust woman who is single but not celibate, or women in the 4B movement walking away from marriage, motherhood, and sex with men.
I have been finding fault with traditional relationships for over 30 years in writing. I embrace the choices women are making because they are seeing what’s wrong with the tradition, a tradition held up by conservative influencers like a specimen in a jar of formaldehyde, which after moderating for half a century is now becoming more extreme. There is even a movement to strip women of rights, including the right to vote, and it’s growing. People connect this with the male loneliness epidemic. That cliché is misguided. Loneliness is a symptom. Let’s call it the male banality epidemic. That banality is far worse when hidden behind cruelty and power labeled dominance (and I’m not talking about a consensual kink here. I’m talking about the non consensual subjection of women).
One way to understand this relapse into barbaric thinking: the thinking of everything, including themselves, as an object that can be commodified. That is why you hear language of “high value man,” “high value woman,” constantly discussing what lovers “bring to the table.” This has nothing to do with the intrinsic sensibility of life, including affection and intimacy. It’s vulgar. In days gone by, the sultan’s favorite slave would have their own slaves. If they, todays men, are going to be a commodity in their career and life, valued only for what they do, they want a similar relationship to women. They have not learned to recognize women’s intrinsic life because their whole world and language is of commodity. About the only place these men can think outside commodification is if they have a pet they love, which exists for no other reason than it is a wonderful part of life. With the expense, mess, and uselessness, affection for them cannot be justified based on use. Many of the men I have spoken to only easily grasp intrinsic sensibility with pets.
When women take risks and accept loss to feel alive, they understand something more than most men: life is about being, not just doing. They do not want to be root bound in a pot. That means rooting themselves into the ever changing experience of life, exposed to risks of weather and predators. You can understand how thorns became an adaptation. Transplanting oneself from the terra cotta pot of habitual beliefs is not easy. You must step into the unknown (some discoveries wonderful, some neutral, some awful) and painfully cut roots habituated to the pot so they regrow toward freedom. Anyone who has set a potted plant on the Earth knows the roots will try to escape. That is one way to look at cheating.
“Women have always had to choose between infidelity or being half of themselves.”
~ Lou Salome
Salome wrote that after refusing to be Nietzsche’s protégé and lover, rejections he did not take well. Women in the West today have far more choices than Lou Salome, and they are not giving them up without a fight. Many are not afraid of fire. What gives them such courage? Not because feminism has misguided them. It’s because they’ve watched their grandmothers, mothers, aunts, sisters, cousins, friends, and their own relationships. That observation did not confirm traditional relationships are good. If it had, feminism wouldn’t have such a solid mountain to stand on. Women want a life worth living. If that means taking risks, many are willing. I respect and admire that willingness.
When you hold something down, you must also hold down what is joined to it. No man can clip a woman’s wings, be with her, and fly himself. To men who value freedom: be courageous. Risk even heartbreak so women can fly where their freedom might take them away from you. It doesn’t matter how much money you make. Without that, everything else is debased even trivial. But there is something wonderful conservative influencers can never give you: the knowledge that if she is with you, it’s because she wants to be.
By Todd Vickers
Photo By Jacob Avanzato
Edit: feminism wouldn’t have a leg to stand on changed to: feminism wouldn’t have such a solid mountain to stand on.