Women Are The Destination

To design a future, one must have a destination. True design works backward—you map from the endpoint to where you stand. This is what feminism, to date, has sorely lacked. We have focused on what we don’t want, on saying, “Not this.” But that’s like getting into a cab and saying, “I don’t want to be here” instead of, “Take me here.”

Design works best with specificity. If we return to the cab analogy, rather than saying, “Take me to the other side of town,” we’d provide a precise address. One can start broad, then refine.

Take me to freedom.

Okay—but each person defines freedom differently.

So we need a working definition.

Freedom is space with decreasing degrees of domination and increasing degrees of possibility. We can think of it as freedom from—external control—and freedom to—express. If we are looking for flight, for freedom, these are the two wings.

If we were to plug in our coordinates, we might discover something unexpected: we are already at the destination. As Joseph Campbell says, “Women are the destination; they need only to know it.”

The journey for a woman, then, is different from the journey for a man. He goes out to encounter forces that strip away excess ego. She must go inward to reclaim the lost elements of self.

She must recover her value. And to do so, she must take the exact opposite approach from a man—he seeks outside himself, while she finds within.

This distinction matters because all the models we have—all our descriptions of experience—are man-made. Our concepts of power, for example, are simply incorrect when applied to women.

Men wrestle with power.

Women are power.

To see the world through the lens of power dynamics is an ineffective framework for women, which is why modern feminism has left us stalled, going nowhere. All the Foucaultian positioning—the belief that any man, anywhere, ever has power over a woman—is just traffic. She is the diamond; he is, at most, the holder of the diamond.

She must find her wings—value transmuted. The element of connection must shift from dependency to offering. The focus on self—self-pity, self-diagnosis, self-obsession—must shift to self-expression. Value takes flight on offering and expression.

But the bird needs fuel to fly—this is power. She must define it as the source, not as one seeking it. She must transmute cultural ideas that swing between force and powerlessness into the truth of power: determination and upliftment. These are the two wings of feminine power.

The source of this power must come from her own depths, from her deepest biological drives. What has been used against her—who she is—must be transmuted for her. Rather than seeking outside for the source, she must recognize that she isthe source.

Here, she taps into sexual energy—its two wings: the power to create and the power to inspire through bliss. True power flies on creativity and bliss.

From this fundamental base of sexuality arises the vertebrae of a strong, supple backbone: compassion, creativity, clarity, and confidence.

And this is where she sits upright on her throne and begins the work of her nobility—knowing that she is the fundamental source from which all things spring. She is power. Her power lies in the compassionate shaping of the world. Her actions are determined by a deep inner well, rather than by seeking outward.

She soars on the wings of who she is and what she is here to do.

She is the vision and the engagement that calls forth from men—and from the world—the execution and production of the deepest, most whole vision for all.