Yet as Fromm notes, "The more the drive toward life is thwarted, the stronger is the drive toward destruction; the more life is realized, the less is the strength of destructiveness. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life." This counts for men and women.
Venus Conjunct Chiron: A Tantric Perspective
Psychology and sociology only get us so far. To gain some additional perspective, let's switch lenses to a pre-Christian view of sexuality, which today we call tantra. I'm not referring to "spiritualized sex" or to pujas and rituals, nor to the Kama Sutra. I'm talking about a cosmology that holds the feminine principle to be the equivalent of what we call the universe.
Consider that all people are conceived and gestated inside the female body. Maleness contributes one cell and half the genetic code. (As Simone points out, this is not even necessary, since females have most of what they need to clone themselves.) Female provides the dwelling place of the womb, all the nourishment, the patience, and the dangers of childbirth (a near-death experience, even on a good day). Male and female are not equal, and are not even equivalent. Just knowing this, we have all the information we might need to figure out what's going on in the world, where there is so much raging against existence.
In classical tantra, existence as we think of it—by which I mean the Earth and the cosmos—is a female phenomenon. The male principle provides a seed of energy that activates existence, which is inherently feminine. In the tantric cosmology, female, and by extension woman, is the center of all existence, and the source of all creation.
If you've ever taken a moment to wonder what the heck is calling forth all this anger and resentment and attack toward women, what the power source is, it makes more sense in this context. All the effort to hold back women, and to exploit whatever is perceived as feminine—oceans, forests, and all the resources of the Earth, for instance—is an attack on existence itself.
Yet consider how much responsibility this places on women, and in particular, on women so long conditioned to think they are irrelevant and that their existence is wrong. It's difficult enough to explain that voting matters or that a wife owns half of the property in a marriage. It verges on impossible to convey to women the notion of sexual autonomy, largely because there's so much guilt involved. If you've ever experienced group sex, you may have learned that one woman can take on a whole room full of men.
Most men cannot hold a match to the power of fully expressed female sexuality. As Betty Dodson has joked about her own sex parties, the women were still going at it long after the men had retired to the living room to watch football.
It would be just as difficult for men, conditioned for so long to think that they are masters of the universe, endowed with the privileges of pillaging, rape, and murder, to accept the fact that they play a very small role in a universe in which they are inherently aliens. It's difficult for men to accept that female, or what we call woman, is the giver, the nourisher, and the taker of life.
It is possible, though, to touch this reality, and that's enough to set a creative process in motion. Barbara Hand Clow described Venus conjunct Chiron as "orgasmic fusion with the cosmos." But there's more to it than that. One of my clients yesterday paraphrased her teacher, Tamara Slayton, who quoted a much older source: "As long as the blood of women is not revered, the blood of warfare will be glorified."