The Female Mind

[Image 1] courtesy of Unsplash

Recently, my husband and I took a short trip to see our daughter and her family in northern Utah. Her husband was recently reassigned to Hill AFB, making it much easier for us to visit more frequently.

The trip was a whirlwind, and on the way home, exhausted from splitting our time between our daughter and my husband’s family living in the area, I rather lost it—“it” being my cool.

My husband and I had been discussing different subjects and current events, from family to spirituality, politics to career paths, and I could feel—as women often do—an intuitive impulse rising beneath the surface of my more composed emotions wanting to burst out and be heard.

After hours on the road, serious lack of sleep, and an itch to be home relaxing, the intuitive impulse burst through the surface of my polite, obligatory thoughts and verbal expressions, and landed with a major thud.

Without regard for incoherence, I fairly ranted out a few distinctive, passionate thoughts, the likes of which surprised even me.

My husband, to his credit, listened quietly as the intuitive impulses turned from ephemeral disorganization to clear and rational assertions that solved several life-altering contradictions I had been ruminating over for months, maybe years. Find them here.

What was so surprising, was that I had never, up to this point, articulated these particular feelings before, at least not with so much clarity and certainty; the clarity of which, I imagine, was mostly mine, as much of the understanding was felt internally by me, rather than heard in my verbal expressions to my husband.

It was like a dam that had been solidified by my will to be acceptably good broke inside of my heart and mind, allowing feelings to flow that I had purposely, yet not always consciously, kept at bay for years, trying, I suppose, in vain, to hold onto the belief that I could live a dichotomy of goodness I didn’t really believe in.

After thirty years of marriage, my husband and I have learned to peaceably support one another through our different trains of thought. Although my husband probably felt he had heard this topic rehearsed in detail in prior discussions, his ways and my ways of reaching conclusions are, of course, different.

Feeling, than thinking

Despite my best efforts, I most often feel before I think. In fact, much of what I think is informed by what I feel, and I am much more successful in coming to concrete and rational judgments when I allow what is natural to lead, rather than what I learned from males about how I am supposed to process thought.

Is that how every female approaches their own thought process? I couldn’t say conclusively, as I am only one female. However, from the many female circles I’ve moved through since birth, this process seems to cover the gamut.

Over the course of my life, as most females do, I’ve had to learn how to maneuver through a male world, first, in my home growing up, then as I moved in and around culture and society, and throughout my many years of marriage to a male.

Females and males think differently. Of course they do. No surprises there. Any one with even the slightest degree of common sense could make that distinction.

Yet, where many females spend their lives learning to speak male in order to communicate somewhat effectively with their male counterparts, it is less common to find males who attempt to reverse the gesture.

Perhaps, it is because they can’t.

Males may learn to be patient with the females in their lives, but that is as far as most males go in comprehending the distinct differences of thought and feeling between them.

I feel very lucky to have found one of the few males who is open and conscientious enough to value feminine perspective. Perhaps it may be going too far to say that he understands my perspective, but he is more than tolerant of it, he genuinely listens and takes what I think and have to say seriously. For that I will always be grateful.

Yet, we think very differently, and I’ve had to learn how to communicate in male effectively enough to get my point across. Thankfully, he was able to articulate how I could do that, but to this day, he acknowledges that he still doesn’t have the intuitive inclinations in communication that I do, and doesn’t feel as if he can sufficiently develop them to a point at which it would be natural.

Even those males who profess to have the ability to transition from male to female, still do not think like biological females, although there is some attempt on their part to do so.

In fact, males who attempt to mirror feminine thinking and behavior only appear, in my mind, to clumsily put on an exaggerated effeminate tone, thinking females are simply a slightly differing toned version of a male, not a species of their own.

However, despite the absurdity and crudeness of the male attempt at female personification, the female thought process is not simply a toned down, less rational and more emotionally imbalanced version of the male thought process.

It is, instead, a mechanism all its own.

Intuition—The Great Divide

The female thought process has many facets not readily understood or acknowledged by science.

For example, intuition is still considered by many to be fringe. Yet, females find it to be a commonplace experience. The fact that it is not commonplace to males seems to be what makes it fringe.

Until males can experience intuition in such a natural state for themselves as females do, they will most likely continue to choose not to bother with it.

Males who do experience it and bother with it had to find concretized reasons for its practicality and usefulness, namely energetic tolerances found in physics and other such sciences, religious and spiritualistic organizational structures, and other scientific drivel, the likes of which do not come close to exemplifying the experience of it in a female’s life.

Whereas, for females, it is so second nature, so integrated a reality, they don’t have to find an explanation or reasoning for it, it just is.

We know it. We live it. We don’t have to explain it to each other or anyone else for it to be real. Intuition is, by its very essence, female.

Females don’t need religion or science to explain intuition to them, because they are intuitive. They are intuition. Intuition is female.

Intuition drives the bulk of female thought process. We feel and that compels us to think and to form rationales for our life and existence.

As females are not rudimentary clones of one another, nor are their thought processes. There are, as with males, varying degrees of intuition-based emotion and spirituality in contrast to mental thought process.

The Female Thought Process—A female’s perspective

Men have, for thousands of years, found the female thought process an irrational and aggravating bit of machinery.

But let’s be real here, women have also found their own thought processes somewhat aggravating at times as they maneuver through male-dominated environments and attempt to explain their thought process to the male brain.

Within the framework of female mechanisms you find a dichotomy of working parts, gears and levers that work on both feelings and rationality, intuition and assertion, experience and empirical observation.

Certainly, males have feelings. Despite that fact, I almost never observe a male who is governed primarily by intuition; intuition being a highly attuned energetic relationship with environment, both spiritually and physically. In fact, a male who has developed an intuitive disposition has had to work for it. It is not innate.

Being highly attuned to social cues of need, expectation, opinion, and other such communal dependent and interdependent forms of communication, females rely heavily on their ability to read and adapt within environments quickly, and intuition enhances their ability to understand and respond on many energetic and physical levels simultaneously.

Hence, the female mind is more of a viscous fluid, than a nuts and bolts structure.

In fact, if a male had the capacity to peer into the mind of a female, which, despite their scientific equipment and psychological analysis they are still unable to do, it would take them centuries of research to break down the viscosity of the female mind into something relatable or definable to a man’s more clunky cogs and wheels organization.

The reason males have played the reductionist game for thousands of years, minimizing the intelligence of females down to irrational and emotional creatures incapable of the clear and sober judgment of the illustrious male, is because the two minds—female and male—are so nonconformingly different.

The female thought and feeling process was not designed for complete and purposeful integration into a male-dominated world.

Although it has the capacity to function within a multitude of environments, the female mind is at its best, just as a male mind, in an environment that is partial and bias towards it.

Despite the biological differences studied and deduced in labs, the purposes of the male and female brains are, as many have pointed out before me, distinct.

The feminine, locked in a primordial state of masculine identity and organization, will always, at least in this state, be alien to its male counterpart.

In a male world, the female mind and thought process is, by all counts, a foreign and unsympathetic mess of counterproductive methodologies, because it does not fully conform to male standards and construction.

Yet, in a female world, the female mind is perfectly calibrated and would find itself, in all respects, superior to the male mind, which in a female-dominated environment the male mind would find itself to be grossly inadequate.

However, the reason I am making this distinction is not to polarize further the relationship between males and females.

Instead, I feel it a duty to the female population so wrongly accused of irrationality to find some measure of vindication in the fact that despite the attempt by many, mostly males, to synchronize brain activity and thought process under a universal scale, often painting women as lesser on the scale because males comically dominate the spectrum’s of their own measurements, female intelligence is not lesser when appropriately considered, not on a male-paradigm, universal scale, but in the same way males gauge their own intelligence, through a lens of bias.

In other words, female intelligence needs the same biased research methods males use. The female mind is female, therefore, it is not male and cannot be weighed and measured consequentially through a male-modeled lens.

Much of science was designed by men, for men. I can only imagine what would happen if the tables were turned and men were constantly under a so-called microscope of female superiority and scrutiny, that biology and intelligence were weighed and measured through female bias.

Would not the scrutiny be the same? Males being inferior in every way to females? Of course it would, because males are not females, and therefore would be inferior if the scales were weighted in favor of female biology, thought process, and judgment.

Yet, my point here is not a resentment-based shift in the superiority complex to one favoring females. I’m not a member of the “If only females ran the world” sort of club.

Instead, I have a real desire to offer a solution to the biased, yet purportedly impartiality of male-dominated distinctions of universal natural and scientific law, that of distinct differences in proportions unacceptable under a universal guise.

Females are not simply a different sort of male—a lesser type of male.

They are their own alien species, perhaps not as male-based scientific taxonomies delineate, but by nature they are not male. Hence, they are not a product of, nor can they be categorically defined, by the male species.

Females are their own breed.

The only way to produce a measure of peace between males and females is to universally recognize this as fact, not by laughing it off as some sarcastic annoyance, but as a legitimate fact.

Females are not some bizarre version of deviating males.

Despite the compatibility that allows males and females to procreate and produce offspring, females are not a male wolf in a weaker sheep’s clothing.

Conclusion

For many years, especially in my adolescents, I loathed my feminine tendencies.

Why? Because males dominated my world, and the males I associated with most frequently, saw themselves as superior in every way.

The women in my life, although outstanding examples of the feminine, did not claim any kind of superiority to their male counterparts. In fact, they most often took a back seat.

Certainly, they had their own minds and were even stubborn at times, but simply being stubborn didn’t really represent their sovereignty successfully.

In my youth, and sometimes in my adulthood, I was highly praised when I conformed to male standards, both physically and intellectually, and I was shamed when I conformed to female standards.

I was a highly intuitive child, a highly sensitive person (which wasn’t a thing back then), and an empath. Yet, my intuition was only useful in a religious setting, one is which taught me that my only connection to intuition was through a male counterpart that was spirit.

What was there about my feminine self to be proud of? Nothing, except my ability to procreate with a male and provide him with posterity, and through posterity legacy.

I struggled, not with gender fluidity or trans-ideologies, I always knew I was female and that I was sexually attracted to males, but I felt an inscrutable gender bias in favor of males, and loathed myself for being a weak and pathetic female, because I couldn’t quantify the validity and value of what it was to be feminine.

As individual identity and sovereignty are wildly important aspects of my own value system and being able to see past the prejudices of all kinds of cultural infringements on one’s intuition and inner knowing, I’ve worked to re-frame my perspectives on feminine identity.

Yes, I bear some resentments toward male superiority complexes, and I’m sure the frustration over any kind of oppressive human-domination is woven into my writing.

However, I do not consider myself a feminist, inasmuch as I will not swallow another outside ideology to help me feel worthy and equal, although I appreciate women who have fought to eradicate the oppression of females by male superiority complexes in all of their forms.

In the end, I don’t wish to be anything other than what I am and coming to terms with that is much more personal than buying into this or that cultish ideology. I can think for myself, and so I will.

Yet, there are many ideas touted as scientific fact these days that with a little of one’s own critical thinking one is able to see through the charade of such nonsense and develop for oneself a rational sense of right and wrong.

I am female, biologically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, and intuitively. Therefore, I have found myself rethinking and redefining what it is to be feminine.

Through my explorations I have discovered that being female is not anything like the superficial, reductionistic, and pathetic distinctions many males so arrogantly make and that females have chosen to adhere to, preach, or believe about themselves.

My challenge to the females reading this is to take more time delineating what being female is through experience, not through the melodramatic, warped and twisted lens of culture.

The female mind is not designed for male use or distinction. It is ours alone, as are the other important aspects of femininity that are housed within us.

We define who we are as females. We are the sole-heirs to the female birthright and matriarchal gifts. We think the way we do because it is useful, purposeful, and correct for our endowment of sexuality and femininity.

We are not male. We are not some bastardization of males. We are not the weaker plane of the male dominated field. We are NOT male.

We are female, and that means that we are our own distinct and separate breed of human, not lesser, not better, just wholly and utterly different.

That thought should excite the soul and make all females thrilled to own.

Share this post