Women Can Be Friends

I chose this slightly provocative title because, even though I would wish it to be otherwise, we all know that friendship between women is not a matter of course. Too often, if we are really honest, we have to admit that other women are more our enemies than our friends since in the realm of love and sexuality especially, we all seem to be competing for scarce resources, namely men. The old motto, "all's fair in love and war" pretty well expresses this enmity, and implies the kind of tactics one woman is likely to use against another.

Nevertheless, in any community dedicated to creating a new culture of peace this antagonism between ourselves must change, because it is very clear that women's solidarity is a vital and essential factor for the development of a peace culture. A community purporting to be a new model for a peaceful culture is only viable when the members of each gender commit themselves to support one another thereby eliminating one of the major barriers to peace.

Women's solidarity is therefore the basis for a new women's movement and an essential piece of the puzzle of how to bring about a non-violent culture. It is not merely a matter of sympathy but a political necessity. How can we bring about a peaceful world, when we are, covertly or overtly, struggling against each other? To give up that competition and struggle means a deep commitment to transparency and truth between ourselves, out of which understanding and support for one another will naturally grow. When we do that we will rediscover once more the joy of caring for one another, for fostering each other's highest potential and for working together to preserve Mother Earth.

An important part of a new sisterhood based on truth, transparency and mutual aid means supporting each other in affirming the sexual nature and potential of each of us. I find for myself that my love for another woman is especially awakened when I experience her fully open, in contact with her own joy and love for herself and for others, as for example after she had just come from an erotic contact. I can find my love for a woman stirred if I see her - at times she is a sex-bomb, at times a nun - crossing the street. If I know what she loves, if I have experienced her strength and her sensuality, if I see her joy in going for fulfillment of her sensual, sexual and erotic desires, if I see that she is open and prepared to talk to both men and women about her deepest desires and longings, all that stirs my love for her.

A Field of Women's Power is a New Step in Evolution

Peace in love and peace in the world both depend on women and the stand that women take on issues of trust, transparency and honesty. The development of a field of women's power could mean a new step in the evolution of life on earth. This new power field depends on affirming the elementary life energies which in this context I think of as the joy of life, the care and respect for all living beings, and attending to the small things that bring pleasure to myself and others,. It also hinges on the love of truth, welcoming our sexuality and embracing our "holy anger" at injustice, dishonesty and inequality.

The success of peace work depends on female power playing an active part, but in a different way than the way men lead and direct. Female power is soft power, it is healing power, it is about acceptance and the embracing of polarities, and although it is present also in men, it is above all our heritage. Bringing female power of the earth into the world and awakening it in men depends above all on us asserting and affirming that power.

The conflicts of our world have not been and cannot be solved by either physical or intellectual force; they require the tender but persistent application of soft, female power. Female knowledge contains some little known and rarely used potential clues for conflict resolution, such as the respect for diversity, the ability to find answers in silence and the knowledge that nature is self healing. For women a new era of responsibility is beginning in which they will bring their knowledge and power into social institutions. In the change from the old to a new culture women must be prepared to occupy the highest political positions. This doesn't mean that they necessarily will become the leaders of states and captains of industry - although that would not be bad - rather I think this development of a new culture will create completely new tasks, jobs and roles for which women will be especially suitable. In ancient matriarchal cultures women were in the highest positions as healers and priestesses. What equivalent positions our new culture will develop we must find out together. This is a time of transformation and what is important for a women is that she can imagine and come to believe in the greatest possible changes both in her world without, and her world within.

How can women find their ground of being which strengthens this belief and therefore paves the way for the knowledge to be rediscovered? Belief and knowledge go together, so first of all we have to understand that as women we come out of an historical background in which our female political voices were disempowered and pushed into the background of narrow private lives.

Patriarchy has succeeded in turning women into competitors on the one hand or well-behaved housewives on the other. Thus constrained, love which was always the biggest source of power for a woman, became a trap. In order to break out of that trap women have to recover their ancient knowledge in the area of love, for that knowledge contains the power to create cultural forms in which the life energy of women and men can once more flow freely and creatively.

Knowledge In Love is a Precondition For Liberation

To liberate themselves women need to regain their deeper knowledge. And to do that they need new platforms for freely drawing out and integrating this knowledge among themselves. In these platforms and forums they will have to ask themselves questions like: Why are we still part of a system which disempowers us, constrains our life energy and our creativity and undervalues our female soft power? Why do we still believe so strongly in our powerlessness? When will we be free to look into the world and see it for what it is? When will we be free to move smoothly and naturally between men, other women, and our children? How can we let go of the deep fear of sexuality? How can we step back into our own power? Women need shared study places where they can contemplate, understand and ultimately transcend their history. I see communities as one of those potential study places for such questions. They can provide international networking points where the female forces, within both men and women from all around the world, can meet together to work for peace.

Replacing Competition with Empathy

About a year ago I discovered what has repeatedly stopped me from speaking my truth freely and really showing myself for who I am and preventing me from really understanding and empathizing with other women. I was attending a workshop and suddenly noticed that I had clammed up and didn't feel like revealing myself. So I wondered why I had gone into a shell. I pretty soon figured out the reason, although it was not very pleasant. I realised that I was letting my fears of how, were I to show myself by speaking out, I might be judged and compared to the other woman sitting in that group.

About one woman I was thinking: "Oh, she is so pretty - all the interesting men will be after her." Of another one I thought: "Well, she is so clever that if she speaks after me, I have no chance to be liked and appreciated. Everyone, men and women both, will fall in love with her and ignore me." In that moment I realised that if I continued to let my fears of comparison with these other strong women inhibit me, I would never be able to develop any understanding or empathy for them, and never really get to know them well enough to really want to make friends with them. I would simply sit there mired in an ongoing inner dialogue totally based on competition and judge them exactly as I was imagining that I would be judged. Once I saw all of that I was able to force myself out of this frozen state and take the risk of speaking and revealing myself. This experience was quite salutary. It showed me that as soon as I start to compete with other strong women I cut off the possibility of understanding and empathy because I am out to "win", not to create relationships with them. And I am quite familiar with how creative women can be when it comes to different forms of competition. It can be showing the prettier breasts just as well as displaying a cleverer mind.

Assuming we want to do it, how can we get out of competition mode and into empathic, relationship building mode? In my case, my first decision was to work at our women's congress as a way of affirming that to me sisterhood is important. Just taking on that job liberated me from a lot of my fear of other women. In doing so I discovered the pleasure of working with and supporting other strong women and creating something together with them. This was especially satisfying for me because I was able to turn my knowledge about the qualities of women derived from my history as a competitor into a positive force for creative cooperation - no-one can see a woman's qualities as well as her (female) competitor! This may not seem very altruistic but I found it an effective way to bring my own qualities fully into the service of peace and use them to help build the infrastructure for woman's solidarity.

As I embarked on my commitment toward making friends with women, I was obliged to ask myself just why I mistrust other women so much. I noticed that I had a strong belief that if a woman friend of mine were to fall in love with a man she would lose interest in me. I believed that a woman's friendship with me carries nowhere near as much value as a potential relationship with a man. For years I was carrying this reproach with me, and I knew I was right because it was true - for me!. I would have valued a manfriend more than a womanfriend. I realised that the only way to heal my relationship to women required me to start taking other women seriously and making a commitment to building connections with them. I realised that I mistrusted other women so much because these were my own thoughts. Once this became clear, I started to work to create intimacy with women and to enjoy them. This was a big change for someone who for most of her adult life was mostly interested in erotic contact with men.

Not so long ago I went out with a woman friend. We lay on a blanket, ate pizza and talked intimately. I allowed myself to admire her keen intelligence, her sense of humour which I had not until now even noticed, and her beautiful body. I had a fantastic evening and experienced a quality of connection that until then I had only known with men. This meeting was completely full, there was nothing missing in it for me. I am grateful to the new women who are allowing themselves to make such deep and meaningful contact possible between ourselves. Actually, this free and open non-competitive contact between women abolishes the scarcity-of-intimacy mentality that too many of us suffer from, and is therefore the basis on which to be able to meet men without feeling needy.

Becoming Small in Love: A Cosmic Mistake

Women have their own function in the world which is independent of relationships. It is a cosmic mistake for a woman to allow herself to become small through love. When that happens she needs women who can enlarge her perspective and help her to reclaim her personal power. A woman who is connected to her life force transcends the culturally defined relationship roles based on rights and ownership instead of intimacy and connection. She cannot stand for arbitrary cultural forms, rather she stands for a universal sexuality.

The desire of a woman to connect completely with one man certainly exists and it is strong in all of us. However, it exists because we have for such a long time not seen a possibility to live a life with a free Eros. In my experience a woman's sexual frustration is often a direct consequence of this closed form of couplism.. Another consequence can be that she overwhelms that one man with inappropriately directed motherly care, and if it gets really extreme can overwhelm not only the man but also her community.

At the moment I practice not being the sole partner for one man. My faithfulness and my love include my friends, my sexual partners, my female friends and my child. I especially honor the holy Eros which I have discovered and want to keep rediscovering with men and women. I find this holy Eros in anonymous contacts as well as very familiar ones. In a very significant way I am on a journey of research with love and feel excited about working together with other co-researchers in our community.

I find that I love being a woman is present, warm and intimate for many men. I love men who stand by me in this. I want to do all I can to accept and understand all the uncleared father-daughter stuff, which can inhibit me from embracing the support of men.

Therefore, I need men who help me to overcome old cultural beliefs which tell me that: men don't love strong women; men don't love women who say what they think; men don't love women who like sex; and so forth. In other words, I need men who are waking up and who have begun also to work on their cultural conditioning. Here in the ZEGG community I see myself as a magnet for such men, and I am very grateful to them for their trust.

Peace in the world and in love depends on women coming together in solidarity, and it also depends on them building friendships with men. An enduring peace is going to require teamwork between and within the genders. We are all in this together, working and playing together.

English language version: translation by Marion Kalmbach, edited by Jock Millenson

ZEGG