The Titillating Overview
“…Tiresias, having been transformed into a man and then a woman by the serpents, had knowledge of both the female and the male experience and knew more than either the god or the goddess knew alone…I’ve often thought that if you could get in touch with your feminine side… you would know what the gods know and maybe beyond what the gods know.”
Bill Moyers in conversation with Joseph Campbell, Excerpt from The Power of Myth
Supposing that Truth is a woman – what then? Is there not ground for suspecting that all philosophers, in so far as they have been dogmatists, have failed to understand women – that the terrible seriousness and clumsy importunity with which they have usually paid their addresses to Truth, have been unskilled and unseemly methods for winning a woman? Certainly, she has never allowed herself to be won…
Beyond Good & Evil by Friedrich Nietzsche Sils Maria, June 1885
A WORD OF WARNING…
I am an Experimental Philosopher, and The Man who became a Woman who became God and Saved the World is the hardcore tale of my salacious adventures of unexpected discovery; in fact, the body of this book is really the unexpurgated experimental journal I kept during this remarkable passage – it is the raw, naked data so to speak, and I present it here word for word without a single edit for reasons to be explained in the After Story.
Being a study written solely for myself, I had the luxury of complete honesty. Yet because this diary was never intended for the eyes of another human being, it will likely shock and even revolt you because of its utter openness and honesty, and also because of the explicit nature of my research. To be clear, I have not changed a single word: my journal is exactly as it was on the last date of entry: October 14th, 2005 (a study that began in December of 2004). Except for the obligatory name changes, nothing has been edited, fixed, softened or made politically correct. Ergo, the manuscript is as raw and bloody as a Kalahari kill, and therefore, as I have said, likely to offend… so beware.
I offer this current book for several reasons, but primarily to give the reader an idea of how my unique experimental method works, and how I used it to create a new model of human experience that speaks directly to our relationship to ourselves, to each other and to the wider world and the Cosmos. I call this new paradigm the Art & Science of Belief. This particular experimental journal, however, is but a small part of the research I conducted on myself for well over two decades (there are many other journals). Yes, it took me that long to crack the code of beliefs, so profound is the grip that beliefs have upon our collective sense of supposed reality.
Origins of this Book
I am a man, ostensibly a white heterosexual man, one who has always had a profound love, admiration and respect for the opposite sex, so much so that I was inspired to become a woman… at least for a while.
Let me be clear, I have always been quite content in my manhood and have never wanted to become a woman literally; for example, this book is not the tale of a person born male yet feeling inwardly female which is another level of human experience. Rather, this is the tale of one man’s quest to expand his understanding of himself and the world around him through the portal of intimate female experience (as best as I could conjure) for a complex of reasons to be explained.
Like many men, I have harbored the unfounded presumption that I somehow knew what it would be like to be a woman – after all, I have been studying the female sex nearly my entire life! Well surprise, surprise for I discovered that nothing could be further from the truth, for unless you have walked in the heels of a woman in the most intimate of regards, it is literally impossible for a man to even begin to understand (to any clarifying degree) what it means to be a woman.
Lacking this fundamental understanding regarding female experience, it is by implication equally impossible to understand the meaning of ‘manhood’, and in turn – and perhaps a wee bit surprising – the meaning of life itself. It’s much like having a gold coin and only knowing its head or its tail: Without being able to hold both sides of the coin in your mind at once, you can never fully grasp the entire currency, nor understand the deeper relationship between the opposing sides, nor can you appreciate what exists beyond the gilded exterior of the coin itself, which, as it turns out, is what my research was all about – seeing the world beyond the coin itself.
In our shared world, set against the backdrop of 10,000 years of recorded history, man implies woman as reciprocally as woman implies man – each arises out of the other from its cultural context and biological imperatives – and the separation between the two, what makes a man, a man and not a woman (within our Western Culture at least) is… drum roll please… a 24 karat currency of terror.
Yes, you heard me correctly: Terror… 24 karats of it.
I use the word ‘terror’ purposefully because it is psychological, for the difference between men and women is not so much physical as it is a mental, especially given that each of us has both a masculine and feminine side. What my investigation made painfully clear to me is that our socialization into either camp is based in large part upon a conditioned psychological fear of being in the opposite camp, and this ‘fear of the opposite’ surreptitiously generalizes itself across our entire life-experience to one degree or another, all of which confounds our perceptions and understanding of basically everything. It is this discombobulating fear that emerges whenever we are accused of crossing over to the opposing camp, as when you shout at a jogging man, You run like a girl! And for the rest of the day the jogger thinks to himself, WTF… Do I really run like a girl? It’s similar when we disparage a woman for being too assertive or aggressive, which really means she’s being too much like a ‘man’ for our own comfort, unless of course she is Wonder-Woman-sexy, and then she gets the green light to hurl tanks through the air and smash bad guys in the face, at least from all of us encultured male drones.
As my research made painfully clear, men are men by virtue of not acting like or looking like women (and vice versa), for how else could opposites be defined but in relation to each other? After all, black is black because white is white. And though this may come as a shock to a reader of the feminine persuasion, for a man there is literally a visceral terror in being accused of being ‘womanesque’, which explains why the prison system has it nailed: men fear prison mostly because they fear being made into another man’s bitch. Thus, as controversial as this may sound, men are men in large part because we have been conditioned to be afraid, nay terrified, of being women. And we cling to our manhood by consciously and unwittingly eschewing that which is feminine (though secretly being fascinated, as when an adolescent boy surreptitiously tries on his mother’s brassiere).
This last assertion regarding the terror inspired in men by the feminine is the formidable thought that crystalized in my mind one day, and it basically knocked me on my ‘manly ass’, for how can men be men – brave, free and strong – if the very experience of being a man is founded in large part upon a dire fear of being a sissy, a wimp… a woman?
Yes, men, let that sink in for a bit…
And if that thought wasn’t enough to ruin my day, there came yet another thought, more generalized than the first but equally impactful and motivational to the degree that I was inspired to embark on my apparently absurdist research of becoming a woman, well, not entirely a woman, not fully and completely, thankfully, but a ‘woman’ for long enough to smash my entire conceptualization of men, women and the broader reality in which we all uncomfortably stew.
Okay, so here is that second thought…
We all live in fear, not just men but women, too… simple as that, this second thought.
This may seem quite obvious to you – this idea that we all live in fear – but for me it wasn’t because part of being a man is to lie to yourself about your fears, often by labelling them something completely different. For example, the best manly label for fear is anger; you see, a ‘real man’ can be angry but not afraid, and if you are a man and you are afraid, then it behooves you to be angry at being afraid, and in this way, you can at least recapture some of the essence of your sliding masculinity.
That being said, stop here for a moment and consider all of the things you are afraid of happening to you, or happening to your loved ones. Yes, actually sit there for a bit and consider all of those yucky, horrific things… It’s quite the list, isn’t it, especially if you have younger children.
I think we can all agree that being afraid is no badge of honor, that fear in no way grants us bragging rights, no egotistical impetus to regale our grandchildren with tainted tales of terror. And so, it is no wonder that we all go out of our way to disguise the facts of our fear. For men, it is all about bravado, machismo, accomplishment and conquest, going to the moon, going to Mars, waging war, climbing a mountain, jumping off a mountain, making loads and loads of money – in a word, winning, in a phrase, proving yourself worthy of your own inflated testicles. Oddly enough, the techno-revolution has afforded even nerdy men with spindly biceps and coke-bottle glasses the grand opportunity of being tough-ass, conquistador-type males – Oh look at me! I’m a billionaire many times over. For me, this begins to explain why tech companies are notorious for facilitating grab-ass, misogynistic workplace cultures – mere boys imagining themselves to be real men.
It seems to me that all of this benighted drama devolves directly out of fear, for fear is fear by any other name.
Thus, from the time we awaken to the time we fall back asleep, and across all of the nightmares and daymares in between, we live this currency of fear and terror; it is a currency that burns like a pilot light within the very center of our domesticated self, always ready to flare up into fight-or-flight and stark black-and-white judgments. And when we are not in the throes of being blindsided by an unexpected life-event, staring aghast as we crash through the floorboards of our allegedly fragile lives, we worry about the remote possibility of being thrown by an unexpected life event, of things not going our way, of losing and losing our sorry way into homelessness and beggary. In this way we collectively live worry like a fundamentalist religion, while keeping as busy as possible to silence the incessant chattering of uncomfortable thoughts.
You see, worry is the creepy winged offspring of fear, and it stalks us like the flying monkeys of Oz.
All of which begs the question: could it be that the worldwide cultural atmosphere of masculine bravado and rhetorical justification of male superiority is merely a clever cultural subterfuge shielding men from a deeper, uncomfortable truth, a truth which in reality is little more than an incredibly well-disguised, infinitely rationalized not-so-masculine fear? Could it be, for example, that men’s abominable treatment of women, animals and the very earth itself is actually rooted not in strength and surety, but in a profound masculine weakness that drives all of this masculine arrogance, privilege and entitlement?
Well men, here is the slap in the face that came directly out of my research, something I could never have expected, something I wished wasn’t the case at all, me being a ‘man’ and all…
As ball-crushing and vasectomizing and circumcising as this may sound to my manly cohorts, we men believe we are superior to women not because deep down we actually believe we are superior to women, but because we have been unwittingly raised to be in absolute terror of the quintessentially defining feature of the Feminine – submission and surrender, or in masculine terms, being a loser (yes, harsh words but this is the essence of ‘man-speak’).
In general, then, we men are expected to be winners and victors and forever dominant, whereas women are expected to submit and surrender – submit and surrender to their monthly cycle, submit and surrender to pregnancy, childbirth and childcare, submit and surrender to the role of second-class citizens who are overworked and underpaid and constantly under the scrutiny and obligation – and even the physical threat – of the men they must love, honor and obey. And nowhere is this submission and surrender more salient than in the act of rapport sexuel wherein women since time immemorial have been expected to simply bend over and take it (yes, I saw Clan of the Cave Bear), or for the more religiously skewed, lie flat on their backs and take it à la missionary (yes, I was raised a Christian though I am definitely apostate).
Thus, with masculine knees quaking I began to realize that if I were to begin to understand the full breadth and depth of my human experience, I, the Experimental Philosopher, had to pursue my investigation of the feminine at the primal level of sex, because only at this level could I fully embrace the core experience of the feminine role: submission and surrender to a man. Moreover, submitting and surrendering to a man sexually à la femme would allow me to face my own culturally ingrained masculine weakness: the insane and terrifying fear of becoming the biggest loser, aka a man’s bitch, aka a woman.
Why do I say the ‘biggest loser’? Because submission and surrender imply (at least superficially) complete and utter powerlessness – the exact opposite of what defines the Masculine Imperative. Of course, in my research I learned firsthand that true power and authentic empowerment can only arise through the crucible of surrender and acceptance, for this is the only time that the ego can be fully extinguished, which in turn allows us to move beyond the polarizations of Culture, and therefore access our deeper intelligence, our Common Sense (aka our Onboard Personal Guidance and Morality System).
Well let me tell you, I could never have predicted just how terrifying it would be to walk in the heels of a woman! Yet my utter fear spoke to this deep and well-hidden rift within me (and within most men and women) between the Masculine and the Feminine, between that which is Yang and that which is Yin – something I could never have imagined, given my open-minded, liberal stance on life which allowed me to fool myself for the majority of my life into thinking I was actually a balanced human being, after all, I wrote poetry and was not particularly unnerved by hugging another man.
Of all the polarities we regularly bounce between – life/death, right/wrong, good/bad, good/evil, rich/poor, fat/thin, beautiful/ugly, more/less, winner/loser, etc. – the masculine/feminine polarity is absolutely the most powerful and pervasive for it is our broadest and most basic level of personal packaging, which is why the most frequently asked question in the entire world is: Is it a boy or a girl? We don’t ask, for example, is it healthy, does it have two heads, three arms, seven toes, is it a monstrosity of some sort and shall we leave it on a rock to die? No, we ask none of these reasonable questions, rather it’s all about the junk down below.
Which brings to mind the French: Every damnable thing in the world to a Frenchman and Frenchwoman is either a Frenchman (male) or a Frenchwoman (female). I mean, the desk I’m working on is a lady, my computer is a man, yet my memory stick is a lady while my pen is a man (which kind of makes sense, the pen), meanwhile I’m sitting on a lady (ma chaise), looking out a lady-window, whereas the French Dictionary I’m using to look up le fenêtre is a man (le dictionnaire), yet surprisingly ham and cheese are both men, which I totally agree with, while crepes and quiche are both women, also a good choice. Yet none of this sex talk surprises me. Why? Because at our most elemental core what we are is a boy or a girl, a man or a woman, masculine or feminine. And even in regard to gay couples, the burning question to the culturally tainted mind is too often: Who’s the boy, who gets on top? Which is generally an insensitive guy question.
Quite interestingly, across the course of my research as I systematically overcame my culturally conditioned, super-ingrained fear of a long, long list of things, I unexpectedly discovered that my fear of the Feminine, of being a woman, of being antithetically Masculine, stood by far the largest within me, even greater than the fear of death. Consequently, I got the greatest philosophical mileage out of Freefalling through this particular fear; in fact, embracing and surrendering myself to my greatest fear gave me the mental octane to systematize a quarter century of research and experimentation into a decoder ring for the Human Experience.
One of my most shattering discoveries is that beliefs operate as a faulty Mental Software, a bug-infested psychological operating system that divides us from our deepest level of information processing, and therefore, our most comforting, inspiring and connecting emotions. In other words, beliefs dumb us down and make us feel bad more often than not, largely because they keep us in a relatively constant state of tension. This is why as the Homo Domesticus – the overly socialized Homo Sapiens – our emotional landscape is populated by high-tension emotions such as fear, anger, the need to control, worry, shame, blame, hatred, pride, envy, jealousy, greed, competition and the unrelenting need to judge ourselves and others – emotions that are both the symptom and the foundation for deep-rooted, inter-generational trauma.
Ironically, our strongest and most cherished beliefs work as a Cultural Lobotomy that divides us from our complex, layered intelligence, which in turn, renders us Culturally ill, that is, split from our deeper thinking and feeling intelligence, and therefore split from our true nature and the Natural World. And while mental illness can be imputed when a person becomes a danger to themselves and/or others, Cultural Illness can likewise be imputed when a culture becomes a clear and present danger to itself and/or other species. My own Cultural Illness – powered by the seductive, addictive, overpowering, delusional nature of beliefs – explains why it took me so many harrowing decades of clever investigation to finally crack the ‘code of beliefs’ and rise above my own Belief Blindness: It was exactly like dragging myself kicking and screaming out of the most powerful cult in the history of Earth: Civilization.
Broadly, what my work boils down to is how civilization through its masculine top-down authority model quite unwittingly screws with our mind, and then completely screws everything up to the extent we are so out of touch with reality that as a species we are committing the greatest murder-suicide in the history of the world: all because we are trained into a very unnatural, constant state of tension that is part and parcel of our belief systems. It is this unwitting, constant state of psychological tension that blocks our access to our deeper intelligence simply because of the way our Mind is designed to process information (all of which I explain simply in The Secret Life of Beliefs).
Yes, I know, I know… this does seem like a weird sort of leap jumping from playacting a woman to the broader issues of the world, but hey, I am the man who became a woman who became god and saved the world, and as such I am here to explain how masculine power corrupts, and how absolute masculine power corrupts absolutely. For example, what all my years of mind-bending labor revolved around was deciphering the hidden impact that large-scale, complex civilization (characterized by strong beliefs and vertical power structures) has on our mental and emotional wellbeing; specifically, I studied the structure and function of beliefs in relation to how our mind processes information within a so-called civilized setting.
At this point you must be wondering about the exact nature of my experimental method and what makes it such a powerful basis for analytical philosophy. Therefore, I will now offer a word on the particulars of my experimental method – PsychoSocial Freefalling – so you will better understand why I ultimately ‘became’ a woman, a stretch of time which marks the most dramatic and profitable phase of my maverick experimentation.
albertthor.ca 