Seeing Through The Gaslight and Tapping Feminine Power
Feminism as cultural power, and how it shines a light for us all
In observing the ever-brewing clash between feminism and the manosphere (including the international dimension of the South Korean 4B movement), I can’t get over the pull these perspectives have on us because of their extreme points of view. What is it about living in the middle–especially as it relates to gender–that is so abhorrent to so many? Following my curiosity led me into thoughts about the role of feminism, a little family history, and the way speaking up for essential truths can clear our way to see how gaslit we all are. This post includes a member-only exercise to learn to see beyond the ways we’re gaslit so we can unlearn some of gendered assumptions that lead us into powerless thoughts and behaviors.
These essays get long, so I invite you to listen while doing something that puts you into a thoughtful space:
“One of the great problems of history is that the concepts of love and power have usually been contrasted as opposites, polar opposites, so that love is identified with a resignation of power, and power with a denial of love. Now, we got to get this thing right. What is needed is a realization that power without love is reckless and abusive, and that love without power is sentimental and anemic.” - Martin Luther King Jr.
Why does the polar opposite of a thing always feel like the place to go if you’re not excited about the thing itself?
We humans love our opposites, but it often leaves us in a bad place. When only extreme choices face us, paralysis can feel safer. And this dynamic is feeling very true of gender discussions I’m reading about (and participating in) these days. I’ve been pondering this issue of gender extremism for a while, but in recent weeks I feel plagued by it.
First off, let’s just acknowledge that the seductions of extremism are not a gender issue, per se.
I see extremism in headline clickbait. Eating fat will make you fat! *whiplash* Eating fat will make you thin!
I see it in my clients’ thinking. But if I don’t subvert myself (i.e., talking about myself in negative terms), I’ll just be bragging–as if there’s no way to communicate something in between these two things.
I see it in my woman-focused newsletters. Trad wives are manufactured by the patriarchy, so we should give up men! *click on another headline* Real women love men, which means we should do what they say!
Extremist focus is a human tendency when confronted with complexity and confusion. Clarity is a balm to confusion, and extremism helps us focus on essential energy and elements that are recognizable and clear. In this sense, focusing on the extremes simplifies things into essential archetypal patterns, for example, ‘feminine” vs. “masculine.” As archetypes, extremes can be useful distillations of core concepts and dynamics. The problem occurs when we think real life can be lived in these pure distillations. Life is more complicated than that, but we still gravitate to the simplicity, cheapening essential dynamics into stereotypes that often do more to trigger us than to calm us. But still, it’s comforting to feel like you know where you belong on the spectrum, the light or the dark side, the top or the bottom, the this-or-that end.
Existing at the extreme ends of the spectrum also plays a social function. By simply invoking the stereotype, others can grok you, even if they don’t like at which extreme you’ve planted your flag. Certainly, being at one end or another is easier to comprehend–and explain to others–than being somewhere in the middle, perhaps searching for that just-right place.
So basically, I think our extremist tendencies are birthed in archetypal essentialism, but too often manifest as stereotypical extremism. Plus, it’s great clickbait.
When I think of gender essentialism, I am always drawn to consider it as voiced by the feminist movement. I appreciate that feminist voices throughout history have not only won women many of the privileges I enjoy today, but they have also been THE voice that helped me and society as a whole see through the veil of historical patriarchal thinking to understand human potential at a deeper level, a level we really haven’t fully explored for our species. Feminism invites us to shift our perspective on how we think about human beings and human interaction in society. It gives us ways to imagine a future different than the one we live in, a future that better harnesses and enables human potential instead of just male potential.
Gender essentialism has also given us the manosphere, of course. And, like feminism, I think it’s probably useful to many people–women and men–for crystallizing aspects of the male archetype to combat confusion. A problem that I have with the manosphere–beyond the big problem that so many of its followers use it to justify misogynistic actions and mindsets–is that it’s a backward look at who we. There’s no precedent in human history for going backwards as a constructive path forward, and the manosphere is no different. It won’t get us where we need to be. It won’t guide us into who we are becoming.
Strong feminist voices and movements ring down through the ages, but only very recently in historic terms, the last two-to-three hundred years or so. So, through the arc of the human species, women’s exercise of this kind of cultural power is a relatively new phenomenon. And cultural power is important. It’s one of the core four types of power, including authority, relational, and personal power. And it deserves some exploration in thinking about how women can access and heal their relationship with power (which is what we do here at InPower Women.)
My Story: Am I A Feminist?
In 2012, when I started advocating for women in my writing, I actually did not think of myself as a feminist. This was because I had grown up in the 60s and 70s, and in my community, feminists were viewed as man-haters. I am not sure how this particular idea made it into my head, but it did. That said, my family supported civil rights, including rights for women. My mom even bucked the system to role model what a female political candidate could look like in 1968. So I certainly didn’t consider myself a sexist. I never really had a category when it came to women’s rights, or thought I needed one. I grew up told that, unlike my mother’s generation, I could do anything and be anything I wanted to do or be, regardless of my gender (or as we called it back then, “sex.”). I was happy in the middle of the spectrum, someone who liked men and believed in rights for women. How simple was that?
By 2013, I’d been challenged on this middle-of-the-road approach and–with qualification–declared myself a feminist and a genderist, advocating for equal rights for everyone. While I enjoyed the introspection, it turned out to be too little to gain entry to the feminist circles (not that I really tried very hard) and too much to protect me from being labeled a feminist by pretty much every man in my life, by which they meant, “almost radical, but palatable and easily dismissed if she sounds too feminist in our circle.”
I realized that speaking up too stridently for women in mixed gender situations would paint me as a man-hating extremist, so for the most part, I didn’t. Neither did my female friends, cautious of the same potential for being labeled extremist and thus losing our “welcome at the men’s table” card. I didn’t really see the way that gender extremism as articulated by patriarchy was playing into my own thinking, and the thinking of those around me. I didn’t really think about labels and taking sides in the gender debate back then. I was content, believing that my strategy to INpower women as a way of helping them advocate for their own needs, wants, and rights was my best strategy to support equality.
Then came painfully slow advances for women in CEO and other top leadership roles through the early 2000-teens.
Then came Trump 1.0.
Then came #metoo, and its backlash.
Then came my inability to lift the veil of unconscious patriarchal bias from the eyes of people I could have sworn could see more clearly.
Then came the manosphere.
Then came abortion roll-backs and challenges to women’s health we haven’t endured since the middle of the last century.
Then came the Barbie movie, and even a few men in my circle started voicing support for the movie’s feminist message because their daughters felt seen by it. 🤔
Then came Trump 2.0.
So here I found myself, circa 2025, realizing perhaps I’ve been complicit in letting discomfort shut me up from saying important things as we slide backwards into female-discriminatory gender essentialism in some very fundamental ways.
Do I still believe that one-on-one support for women in finding their inner power is the answer? Yes. I have tons of evidence from my client base that this approach works to support individual women (and I’m good at it.) Will it be enough to help women achieve the equality we deserve, much less prevent the backsliding we see coming? No, I don’t think so.
The reality is that INpowered (and EMpowered) women are a necessary step in achieving equality. AND those of us who can access our power–embodying the blended archetypal dimensions of both love and power as MLK encouraged us to do–often create resistance from others (women and men) simply by being ourselves.
That’s because INpowered women don’t fit the stereotype people expect to see in feminine form. And violating extremist stereotypical expectations–especially unconscious cultural expectations that represent a shift in personal power–almost always creates resistance in people who are still seeking extremes in order to find comfort.
My personal ah-ha here is that, while I’ve spent the last decade-plus learning to INpower individual women very effectively, I need to up my game and help them learn to take their INpowered selves into a world that struggles to see past the extremes, that can’t see them for the amazing, complex mixtures of feminine and masculine–human–potential that they are. Much of this means giving them more tools. But some of this means trying to change the world, to coax it into a view of the gender spectrum that respects the positive essentials at the extremes, but is also less binary, where women and men can embody unique blends of the feminine and masculine archetypal essential qualities to great effect. But I want to do that from my place on the feminine side of the spectrum, because that is what I understand best, and that is the perspective most lacking in today’s default cultural discourse.
But what about the plight of men and queer people? This is a good question, and as a mother of sons and someone who might have considered themselves queer early in life if that had been a thing back then, both perspectives I care about a lot. I may go there eventually, but right now, people who situate themselves firmly in the female space still need what I have to offer, so this is where I start.
To my surprise, while my private practice will stay decidedly centrist and female-focused, the realizations above mean my public voice will drift to the more extreme in service of advocating for the essentials of feminine power. I’m becoming more committed to contributing to feminism's cultural power by speaking from a feminine-first perspective.
Why do I believe my voice matters here, closer to the side of feminist essentialism? Let me explore that in the next section.
Eve’s Story and Eve Reimagined are a new feature of InPower Women, based on my shift to provide more direct tools and approaches to help women heal their broken relationships with power.
Eve’s Story: No One To Speak For Her
Here is a truth about extremism when it comes to the gender divide: when we go all the way to one end, the other side suffers. And with very intentional shade to Mark Zuckerberg’s lamenting that “masculine energy” is lacking in corporate America for too much of history, our cultures have been hard over on the extreme masculine side of things. Femininity and feminine-driven spaces and conversations have been—and remain—a subculture at best. To the point that in much of our world’s history, women had no voice at all except in the cultural equivalent of a woman-only red tent (a fantastic book if you haven’t read it!). Here’s a very scary and personally meaningful case in point. The story of Elizabeth Packard. I recently came upon Elizabeth’s harrowing story posted by
here on Substack, which opened with a scene that sent chills through my corporeal self and my emotional self at the same time:In a shadowy corner of the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Illinois, a woman stared out the bars of the tiny window. Three years she’d been in there.
Listening to women cry and beg to go home.
Her baby would be walking now. Wouldn’t know her anymore.
When the men burst into her house, picked her up fighting and screaming, she thought her husband was teaching her a lesson for arguing. Stay a few days, he’d bring her back home, she thought. But when the trunk of her clothing arrived, she knew. She was there to stay. It’s a true story.
All it took to commit a woman to an asylum was the signature of two doctors — or one man if he was her husband, father, or brother.
This is frightening enough on its face because it’s true. It’s also a semi-modern update to the medieval phenomenon of persecuting witches because they were women who held social power that challenged the patriarchal cultural power of the Church. In both times of history represented by the medieval witch trials and the 19th century asylum madness, male-dominated culture conspired to take women’s voices away so thoroughly they couldn’t advocate for their sanity or save their own lives, and any woman or man who came to their aid became vulnerable to persecution as well.
The reason I got chills reading about Elizabeth Packard’s experience in the asylum is that I’d grown up with stories…vague stories…embarrassed stories…confused stories…about how both my grandmothers were “crazy” and even “put away.” I didn’t understand as a child, but it left me with a feeling that the women in my family were vulnerable to mental illness. It made me doubt myself in ways I can only perceive now that I look back at my life.
To write this essay, I called my mom and cousins to try to understand as an adult whether my own family members could have suffered the way Elizabeth Packard did. Not exactly, it turns out, but not as far off as I might have liked. My maternal grandmother’s neurological migraine blind-spells (diagnosed correctly in 1991) were misdiagnosed in the 1950s as psychological problems. Besides the fact that neurology was just about as nascent a science as psychology back then, I would not be at all surprised to learn that it was easier to think she was crazy than physically compromised, because what woman would not act normal if she weren’t crazy? (i.e., What woman wouldn’t float if she wasn’t a witch?) Grandma was put in a psych hospital for several months, and they could never figure out what was wrong with her (because there was nothing psychologically wrong with her.) Perhaps coincidentally, while she was in the hospital, my grandfather divorced her and married another woman. They’re all dead, so we will never know the truth, but I find these facts a bit convenient from my grandfather’s point of view.
My paternal grandmother had the opposite problem. Her family and community observed her to be depressed for her entire married life and, in retrospect, believed she was bipolar and suffered from untreated post-partum depression, succumbing to bouts of hysterical laughter and crying when her children were young. She was reportedly extremely intelligent. After all, she birthed an MIT scientist who invented things like nuclear stuff, but her intelligence went nowhere. She was consigned to raising children as a pastor’s wife.
My father paid the price of her isolated and brilliant-but-untreated mind. She told her husband she didn’t want more kids but–given that birth control wasn’t widely available and religion rewarded women for having children–had a surprise baby anyway (my dad). She admitted to everyone, including him, that she was a terrible mother to him, because after having three children, she didn’t want more children. In the 60s, her husband tried to get her diagnosed by a psychologist. However, the doctor declared she was faking her mental illness. She was simply “brilliant and fooling everyone.” He concluded that nothing was wrong with her. After that, her pastor husband put her on the curb with a suitcase and promptly married another, childless, woman.
I don’t know for a fact that my paternal grandmother was depressed, living the life of motherhood her husband mapped out for her, which she explicitly didn’t want. But I look at pictures of her through time, and I can’t help but believe depression was a perfectly reasonable response to the way her life was driven down an ill-fitting road for who she could have become.
I don’t think it’s hard to imagine that the male doctor who didn’t diagnose my grandmother probably held the generally accepted cultural—extreme— stereotypical view, that every woman must want to be a mother to as many children as she could. Any woman who appeared normal for a few minutes, and who said she didn’t want more kids must just be a mean bitch (though reportedly, this ancestor could be pretty nasty.) This makes me sad. It’s tragic that a stereotype probably prevented her from getting the help she truly needed, and religious prejudices against birth control made it unavailable to her. (And yes, I know dad and I wouldn’t be here if she’d had birth control, but I believe in multiple universes and reincarnation, and I like the idea that there could be a universe out there where all three of us were happy together.)
Not every elder mother in my family struggled this much. In my great-grandmothers’ generation in the late 1800’s-early 1900’s there was reportedly more happiness and healthiness. Ironically, those women had more opportunities to do something other than be a mother. They were also artistic and community organizers, teachers, and entrepreneurs.
The anecdotal story of my maternal lines shows me that when women are allowed to do things that are meaningful to them without shame, to voice their opinions and desires–which can include but also go far beyond motherhood–a woman is more likely to be healthier and happier. But when they’re forced to live within the confines of an extreme stereotype that doesn’t fit who they are, shut down the voice inside them that wants more or simply wants to be creative and self-expressive, they are less healthy and less happy.
Just like men. Who knew?
The scariest part of these stories, both personal and historical, is the realization that the people who “loved” and had agreed to “protect” these women–their husbands–allowed the stereotypes to destroy their lives and their spirits. When my grandmothers needed them to speak up with the power they were granted by a patriarchal culture, my grandfathers did not do so. Or at least I don’t believe they did enough to help my grandmothers as much as I would have liked to believe. Instead, they moved on. Were my grandfathers individually to blame? No, they were trapped in their own stories about what was right and wrong, and their choices didn’t all produce happiness for themselves, either. But since the culture gave them the power to self-actualize with less shame, the entrapments of the culture they lived in took a greater toll from their wives than my male ancestors could ever hope to pay.
“It’s in her bones.” The Ultimate Gaslighting.
Why didn’t my grandmothers stand up and refuse such treatment? Why didn’t that poor woman in the asylum sue her captors to be free? Why didn’t others come to their aid? I don’t know the personal reasons, but looking at what we do know about the ways women have been silenced over the eons, I think the answer is that a critical mass of other women and men thought they deserved to be treated that way. In short, they didn’t have enough credibility on their own, and no one with enough influence spoke up on their behalf.
This silence has had the effect of gaslighting the human race through history, women and men alike, into believing that an essential part of being a woman meant that you deserved the horrible treatment you received. (Men have been gaslit too and are very empowered to advocate for themselves, so back to the female-first perspective.)
The history of the feminine experience paints us this picture.
In ancient times, women were told their place was property and they had no rights, so their voices could not be heard in official forums. Then they were blamed for the downfall of mankind, simply because they might seek knowledge and use their brilliance. Then, if a man didn’t like them or felt threatened by them, they were burned as witches, or later put into insane asylums. The worst part of this mistreatment of femininity (as the stories evolved into ratinoalizing the gaslighting) is that our badness, wrongness, and misunderstanding of ourselves as powerful beings–all of it is literally baked into our bodies, going back to the myth of Eve. The “curse” of menses and childbearing makes us living proof that we’re inferior.
And because the curse is supposed to be literally in our feminine blood, everyone–women and men alike–came to believe that it was true; came to believe that the voices inside us were corrupted and crazy, came to believe that any woman who behaved outside the stereotype of devoted mother was a whoring impostor trying to fool everyone around her. This is the definition of gaslighting: to look at something true like a powerful woman’s voice, and say that it is corrupt and crazy. To say that her true voice is the reason she should be powerless.
And today, women carry this internal seed of doubt about ourselves, planted by centuries of stories that give us different versions of this “truth” in virtually every media message we consume, the whispered tales of our grandmothers, and the way women and men treat us as we live in this world.
This doubt in our power is the ultimate gaslighting, because when a woman in our world feels any kind of personal power stirring in her belly or her soul, her self-doubt that her power may not be real or allowed comes right along with it. Far too often, she silences her own voice.
Sadly, this behavior also passes down the ages as the seeds of self-doubt and self-censorship are intentionally reinforced, often by her mother. And her mother’s instincts are rational. She learned to survive the gaslighting by shutting down her own powerful impulses, so she gives the gift of doubt to her daughter, equipping her with a survival tool to get through the world safely.
Lost In The Fog
Have you ever been gaslit? It’s a terrible place to be. An existential place to be. The essentials become muddled and suspect. The firmest ground beneath your feet, your own intuition and sense of self, rests on what others tell you is non-existent. Those you believe have authority and knowledge beyond your own tell you in no uncertain terms that you will plummet into free-fall when you follow your inner voice, your instincts and intuitions, your dreams, your convictions, your values, and what feels most meaningful. Follow your knowing and you will fail. Lift your voice and you will be shamed. And don’t forget! Shame is the worst fate for a woman, the ultimate sin to carry any kind of Scarlet Letter.
When presented with the dense fog of gaslight so directly, most of us succumb. We lose touch with essential truths. Over and over again, we give in, terrified of falling to our soul’s death on the invisibility and “fakery” of our own power.
Until…someone else shines a clear light into us, sees our strength, inner light, and potential. Until someone asks us to speak louder. Until someone else reminds us of what is most essential and important. Until, sparking a flame in the dark, someone we respect tells us that what we feel inside matters, what we say out loud matters, that we matter enough to follow our inner voice.
We need those beacons from others. We need a “you’re not crazy” perspective to help us explore, build out, and rely on the reality within us until we can rely on it ourselves.
To be gaslit by patriarchy is to be lost on the spectrum between gender extremes and afraid of moving closer to the essentials of your feminine power, while integrating the aspects of masculine power that resonate with you also. So who can find you there in the fog? Who will validate your inner voice and inner power?
For me, and many other women, much of that beacon of light that helps clear the foggy gaslight of history comes from feminists in the form of their voices and the actions they put behind their voices. Yes, they have often been extreme, but for reasons today we take for granted. I think of the suffragettes and how some of them suffered for my vote. I think of how Margaret Sanger and her supporters were cast as radicals in advocating for birth control, until a woman’s right to plan her family only came into being when men “professionalized” the effort. I think of Ruth Bader Ginsburg's work as a lawyer with the ACLU's Women's Rights Project, paving the way for the 1974 Equal Credit Opportunity Act that required lending institutions to accept credit applications from women and hold bank accounts in their own names. I think of many feminists here on Substack (Katie and Zawn come to mind) who help me reframe so many beliefs that are only true through a patriarchal lens, a lens which has not always existed and need not exist at all.
Why did Eve end up cursed for the gift of life her body could produce? Because thousands of years ago, there were no feminists like the ones above with enough cultural power to speak for her. Men with a power agenda wrote Eve’s story, instead.
This is the value of speaking up for women and supporting them in speaking up for themselves. To counterbalance the masculine weight of history with words and stories that orient us to a view of femininity as choiceful and powerful at its most essential, even if we live our own lives somewhere in the middle.
I choose to focus on the essential rather than the extreme, to clear away the gaslight with truths I know empower women and men alike. To empower us to see the value in femininely inspired ways to be in the world. To empower us to believe that anyone who feels a pull to the feminine also feels they deserve to be heard and treated with respect.
Reimagining Eve: Seeing through the fog
This is the part of the newsletter where I try to imagine what a woman’s life might look and feel like if patriarchy had never happened to us. And it’s always the hardest to write.
Because gaslighting.
When it comes to thinking about how to deploy feminine essentialism into the gaslight all around us, to imagine a world where women can speak as freely and without consequence as men, I’m reminded of histories I’ve read describing how free black people left America in the late 1800’s and early 1900’s visiting Europe. For the first time in their lives, they walked among white people who did not see them as the lowest of the low, as lacking rights and respect. For the first time, the extreme stereotype of being black person among whites was not a terrible and powerless vision. I’m reminded of how their experiences abroad, where white people treated them as human beings, shone an essentially respectful light to help them see the gaslighting they lived with in the US. Great thinkers and speakers like Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, and Josephine Baker returned to the states and gave their voices to the civil rights movement because they could see what life beyond the thick fog of white supremacist gaslighting looked like, and they needed to share that vision with others who couldn’t travel to experience it themselves.
I’m not aware of a place on earth I could travel today in order to see what living without patriarchal gaslighting might look like. Maybe the Nordic countries where parenthood is supported for women and men? Maybe, but the relative homogeneity of the cultures there doesn’t give us a very integrated view of what such support might look like for all women. And my travel budget is lacking at the moment, anyway.
There are voices out there that can give us more insight, like bell hooks whom I plan to explore in more depth.
But, here’s where my INpowering lens comes in handy for anyone wanting to tap their authentic feminine (or masculine) power, to become part of a cultural voice for change, or just to change yourself in ways the culture you’re in doesn’t reinforce. All we really have to do is shine the light inside us and listen to our inner voice when it speaks (instead of shutting it down.) When you root around inside to find what really matters to you, and where your power is centered, you have the answer and the tools together, coming to you with your inner voice. The real task is to believe that what you find inside yourself is real and valuable, and to find people in your life who can see and hear these things in you and tell you (sincerely) that you’re not crazy.
I spend my professional life doing this for women. We do it for each other in our monthly Mastermind calls. I know it works.
Easier said than done? Maybe. Have you tried it?
Here’s where we’ll start: Where does your inner feminine voice of strength feel most invalidated by the culture you’re living in?
Exercise: Seeing Past the Gender Gaslight
Let’s try it together. The exercise below is designed to give you ways to start or reinforce what is actually a journey more than an activity. Use it to take stock of your personal power base and the people in your life who can help you grow it into a voice you will add to the chorus of people fighting to see beyond the patriarchal view and see all the places between the essential archetypes of feminine and masculine to choose where you might want to call home.
“Mine is not to reason why.” This exercise will not make you a feminist if you’re not one. It might not make you a feminist even if you are one. It could put you over into the manosphere for all I know, and that’s ok if that’s where you find your true feelings of authentic, internal power. Why do I feel that way? The subject of another post, perhaps.