Feminism and Male and Female Balance

 

Q:      What do you see as the role being for people who are not married or for whatever reasons do not find a partner or choose to have children or whatever?

 

RK:   Nobody has to get married here [Stelle].

 

Q:      I am not saying they do. I am just saying, what do you see that role being, because I think society is made up of people who have paired off and people who are not, and is there some feeling you have about what’s happening now with them?

 

RK:   In the world at large?

 

Q:      I guess what has been seen as the feminist movement outside of Stelle. I am not sure how it is seen here, but is this history happening for a reason? Is there in your philosophy, a way to see things, and some good things?

 

RK:   There is a great deal of confusion going on now in the minds of men and women in society at large. All Western societies seem to be kind of “up in the air” at the moment. I think that there will be a finer appreciation of the mutual humanness of men and women as a result of this. I think in the past a lot of women have seen men as kind of strong-arm types who are forcing a lot of things down a woman’s throat, and have done that. I know my mother and my grandmother both felt they were really suppressed; that they were not looked upon as being fully human; not entirely franchised. Maybe they might have gotten the vote in the nineteen-twenties but they never really felt that they were fully accepted; had the same rights. That gives rise to a lot of resentments on the part of women.

 

I think men are going to have to look at women for what they really are: human Egos with mind powers identical to theirs and with rights which are identical; just inherent in the fact that they are human beings. And, not creating stylistic roles that they have to fit into: that women are necessarily the ones to do the cooking and the washing, and they better stay home, and are very docile, and men go out and do the things that they want to do, and the “old lady” better stay at home if she knows what’s good for her, and so forth. I think men really want a woman who is an equal. They did not know that, because society kept telling them they were supposed to be the strong ones, the superior ones, and they always had to work together with all their brothers to keep the sisterhood of women down; to keep them from getting too feisty or too much in control. I think that was based on fear.

 

Q:      I guess I have a tendency and I am sorry to lay things out without—is this a repeat of something that happened?

 

RK:   I think it is fairly cyclic, but it can be many years, many centuries between these cycles. As a woman, I would not want to have a relationship with somebody who is my inferior. I would not want to think of him as my inferior. I do not want to keep him in a position where somehow or another people recognize that he is lesser than me. I would not like that. I like to deal straight up like a friend. If I choose a friend among men, and most men can identify with this pretty easily, we like to deal with things straight from the shoulder: right out on the surface, no pussy-footing around, and no games. Here is who I am, and I know who you are. I like who you are. I want you to like who I am, and we don’t have to play games between one another.

 

Our society was set up for a long time where it was almost impossible for anything other than games to be played between men and women. He had to be allowed to be the strong decision maker and the protector and the wage earner, and she was supposed to be the meek and docile, the rearer of children, and the one who comforted him when he came home, and definitely backing him in whatever he had to do in life: the little woman behind the man who was able to go out and conquer the world. Under those circumstances, she had to be very manipulative to get what she needed. She had to play all the little coy games and what have you, and it really kept him from regarding her as a person who he could level with; who he could just be who he was. He had to play his strong man role, and she had to diminish her strengths into this little docile lady at home role. It was a fake. Everyone was playing games with one another, but they expected that that is what they were supposed to be doing, because that is what society seemed to imply. It kept people from being good friends except unusual couples who, maybe their intellectual composition or the way they were put together emotionally, dealt with one another, as equals right from the beginning.

 

Well, according to the Brotherhoods, They have been aware for a long time that human Egos are human Egos. It is the bodies that primarily that are sexual. There is no doubt about that there are female Egos and there are male Egos, but what seemed to impose the roles was their physical bodies. As Egos they were always mental. You do not have sex on the Astral plane. You do not have anything to have sex with. You have to engage one another on a purely mental level as equals.  But, then when we come into physical incarnation, we are scrunched down into these crazy roles that everybody is afraid about. Men are afraid of their roles, women are afraid of their roles, and I think we are breaking out of those stereotypes. Women are allowed to examine, for the first time in a long time, what all of the capabilities and the potentials are of being a woman are. And it certainly is not as the bourgeois intellectuals of the last two centuries have tried to impose, and that is that society was trying to give women the right to be free to be men.

 

They need to have a different consciousness. They need to understand that they are trying to develop what it is to be a woman, and the feminist movement is not pushing that. That movement is just saying, “You have got to have equal rights with the men,” as if somehow or another the things that men are doing are glamorous, glorious things that women should aspire to, and that they aren’t really living up to their potential unless they are beating men at their game.

 

Most men that I know would just as soon get out of the commercial aspects of living altogether, because they hate it. A lot of them are kind of stumped to figure out why, when I hate the business world as it is, that women want to get into it? It astonishes men quite a bit that that is the trend that women are trying to get into. We have got to have a whole new system, of course. I think the economic philosophy—the Lemurian Philosophy—is going to allow people to put more emphasis on their humanness instead of their productiveness, or their part in being a cog in the whole economic structure; the political structure. (11-1981)

 

 

Womens’ Roles in the Nation of God

 

Q:      I find it very hard to reconcile what you say in some of the things in The Ultimate Frontier. For example, the limitation of occupations for women, and so on, and perhaps if women are to find out what they are as women maybe we have to be allowed to make what you might consider some mistakes. You have to find out what you are not sometimes, in order to find out what you are. But, it seems to me that the limitations to what you think women should do in the community. I cannot reconcile that with how you talk now.

 

RK:   I did not say that. That is what Dr. White told me, and this refers to the Nation of God. One of the reasons for some of those limitations, of women getting into the commercial aspects of the community, is that there will be so little work to do because things are supposed to be so put together that items, that you buy at the store in the way of furniture and automobiles and homes and what have, just go on and on and on for generations. They do not have to be replaced constantly, as they are designed now. The system is not to be designed where everybody is running around like chickens with their heads cut off trying to keep up with the basic necessities. Under those circumstances, it is stated that we should get back to the way the Lemurian economy was where the average work week is twelve hours. There is barely enough for the wage earners in the families to do that (enough work to go around), and so the women are essentially to be eliminated from the commercial aspects of “bringing home the bacon.” Now, that does not mean that women cannot be experienced in practically anything they want to do, as long as they do not do it for gain.

 

Going to college is going to be a big item for most people’s lives. The optimum age for getting married for a woman will be twenty-eight, as if was back in those days. For a man, about thirty-two or thirty-three. Under those circumstances, so much time is given to learning that much of it will be spent in the university where people can learn how to really understand about biology, nuclear physics, the healing arts, history, and philosophy, and to become truly acquainted with these ideas so they understand them.

 

Under the Lemurian system, as I understand it, we will have to work towards in the new nation a system where if a person develops himself to be in a public function— governor, a mayor, eventually work himself up to the possibility of being a candidate to be a governor of his province and maybe even the head of the nation—that his wife has to go through the same special training that he does; which means up to about age thirty-five a continual going to school. That is so that she is part of that team. It is not just the man who does those administrative positions all by himself. His wife is also a part of that, and she has to understand about all of the aspects of how that nation is to be run. How she is going to fit this in with rearing children is another question, but that will be one of the requirements.

 

So, it is not to diminish the possibility of women doing the things they want to do, but to keep them out of factories and the stresses of the commercial situations so that they are in a better framework for rearing children, which is by far the more important task than having a trade to earn a living. In the first place, a woman, in all the kinds of things that she does, generally develops proficiency in many areas of living, where a man concentrates on some specific trade. He may know everything there is to know about machining, but she has to know how to properly rear a child, things about nutrition so that she, her children, and her husband are kept healthy. All the little chores that go along with running a household give far more scope and broader opportunities to learn many kinds of things and bring it into balance, as opposed to the guy who just does his one thing.

 

Women tend to have been the arbiters of civilization. Seems like historically the idealists of how civilization should be put together have been the men, but the ones who actually make it happen have been the women. I am not saying those are the roles that they should have. It just seems that that is the way it has turned out. Whatever characteristics seem to be developed by males as opposed to females, that seems how it has worked out. I do not know that anybody has ever imposed that or tried to grab those roles for themselves, it just seems inherent in the masculine and feminine characteristics.

 

So, what Dr. White, in the best estimate that I have of what he was trying to say was do not try and promote women in commerce. That is not where they are going to have their greatest strength. That is not the things that they are going to be doing, which is going to give them a better chance at fulfilling themselves as human Egos and serving mankind in the best way.

 

Q:      How do you avoid the unfortunate thing that goes along with that situation? Generally speaking, the things that men do tend to be held up as the things that are the most important, and the things that women end up doing are not the commercial aspect, seems to be—

 

RK:   I think that results from men blowing their horn. They keep convincing themselves that this is really great stuff. But women, say, two hundred years ago when most people were either farmers or involved in some cottage trade—cottage industry—they were home, they were with their children, with their wives, all the time. Regardless of what they were doing, at least, they had other ones around them. Now, they have to somehow bolster themselves up and say: this is really great, I go off early in the morning, I go off before my kids get up, I spend an hour getting to where I am going to go, doing the ridiculous things all day long that nobody could care about ten years from now, come back home fighting possible death on the freeways until you get back home again. By that time the kids are cranky, ready to go to sleep, you have some kind of hurried dinner and have little fights with them and you sit exhausted in front of the television. Somehow, they have got to tell themselves that; convince themselves that this is really what they like to do and it is really a great thing and I am really excited to do this, in order to kick themselves out of bed every morning.

 

I do not think they really want to do that. I think they would really prefer to be home and have some way by which to earn a living in the presence of their family where instead of being divided from their wife for such a long period of time, she is always there: a friendly voice to talk to, because you know you marry a friend and someone who you can count on, rather than having to be wary about what you say to every single person around you because they are possible competitors for the better-paying job somewhere down the line. I think we are in a sick situation. (11-1981)

 

 

Humanness Is Most Important in the Nation of God

RK:   If we look at the ideas of the Lemurian philosophy and the Nation of God in the future, and take with us our present views of modern life, it is going to look wrong to us. It is going to require an entirely different viewpoint on the parts of men and women. You have to start developing that here in Stelle so that we can go into the new Nation of God with a better appreciation of how men and women should be relating, and it sure as heck is not supposed to be a commercial relationship: “Now, I am bringing in more money, you are bringing in more money, or the one person who is working is not bringing in enough.” The whole works has gotten distorted as a result of that. My generation, your generation, the younger generations around today, have all been brought up in the context of regarding the proper way of doing things and the modern, most advanced way of doing things in a highly industrialized society. I do not think industrialization is entirely compatible with humanness. I think we have to put commercial activities and industrial activities and technological activities in their proper place, and it is not at the top. They are important; we cannot do without them, we would be greatly diminished if we did not have them, but right now their importance looms too large in our considerations. It is going to take really quite an important turnaround in our appreciation of what really matters. And, what matters first is humanness.

 

The kids should not be coming in somewhere fourth or fifth down the line. They are supposed to be number two in a person’s life and their spouse is number one as far as persons are concerned and material considerations are concerned. So far as spiritual considerations are concerned, I think one’s relationship to the Higher Beings such as Christ or God really takes top priority. Few people have time to give the depth of consideration and awareness to that in our present society that they should have. So, we are looking forward to a different kind of thing, and then what Dr. White says, which sounds like harsh proscriptions, just says, “Well, yeah, naturally.” But, when you first read it in The Ultimate Frontier, it sounds pretty hot. (11-1981)

 

 

 

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