The Feminine Struggle With Femininity

A deck of large yellow cards were spread out in front of me. A yellow-haired Australian girl sat behind them smiling wide. “Pick the one you’re most drawn to,” she said.

They were all face down and the backs of them looked exactly the same. I was in Bali co-facilitating a retreat and, one quiet afternoon, I found myself face to face with a fan of Tarot cards.

I picked one at random, willing myself to have fun with this silly ‘game’. I flipped it over and showed it to her. “An upside down Aphrodite, the Goddess of femininity. That means your feminine energy is blocked.” She looked up and smiled.  

I remembered that just a few days earlier as I was packing for my trip I had to field my 6-year-old daughter’s demands to pack my bag full of dresses, “because they’re prettier”.  

That’s the same daughter who, in her first two years, I had manically protected from being exposed to the color pink anywhere in her vicinity, to prevent her from becoming too girly, only to have a friend gift her a hot pink Surfer Barbie on her 2nd birthday, which she promptly fell madly in love with.

As a woman from the Arab world, I’ve always felt that my counterparts spend too much time and effort on their looks and not enough on their personal development, confidence, leadership and presence. And so as a teenager, I played basketball with the boys, went into Electrical Engineering as my field of study and shunned dresses, makeup and vanity.

It was only years later that I discovered the solution to being too girly was not migrating to full on masculinity, it was managing myself in such a way that both my masculine side and my feminine side had a voice.

So when the Aphrodite card came up I couldn’t help but feel it was a cosmic reminder for me to recalibrate my energies.

The truth is, I had felt it in the months leading up to the retreat: my masculine self-muscling out my feminine self from everyday existence.

A few days after getting back, I flipped open one of my favourite books, Women’s Bodies, Women’s Wisdom, and read this: “But my husband still wants me to carry his anima – his moods, his enthusiasm, his fun. And when I let down and allow any of my own feelings to show, other than enthusiasm, he gets depressed.”

I looked up the meaning of ‘anima’ and discovered it was a term coined by Jung. It is all the unconscious feminine psychological qualities that a man possesses while the ‘animus’ is all the masculine qualities that a woman possesses.

Apparently, these aspects of ourselves are ones we project on opposite sex members in our lives when we are unwilling to feel our own emotions and work through them. We’re very good at suppressing those parts of ourselves or outsourcing them to our partners so that to feel complete, we become completely dependent on another person’s disposition. Not good.

Jung said, “the encounter with the shadow (our dark side) is the ‘apprentice-piece’ in the individual’s development…that with the anima is the ‘masterpiece.”

I loved that. How often do we encounter those parts of ourselves with raw authenticity instead of dumping them on someone else, a father or spouse or brother, to handle for us?

All this got me thinking back to the overly-dependent, seemingly-helpless women I had seen while growing up. I had blamed what I saw as their shortcomings on their femininity, whereas they were simply outsourcing their animus to the men in their lives. Just as men do with their anima.

We seek to find the other side of ourselves in others and by doing so, we deprive ourselves of an entire half that we could call upon to make us feel whole and carry us through life with more confidence, self-assurance and wholeness, making us better partners and better people.

Those who manage to encounter their anima or animus are people we see as Gods and Goddesses, more complete and with more presence.

In my own case, I rejected my femininity in favour of my masculinity, thinking this would prevent me from being overly dependent and helpless. It just prevented me from being fully me.

The day after I drew the card, I did indeed get in touch with my inner Aphrodite. I put on a flowing bright blue dress, got my makeup on, let my hair down and took charge of my femininity, just as I had been doing with my masculinity.

And I felt so much more myself.