In this age of feminism and women’s liberation, one often hears the phrase, “the future is female”, bandied about. Women have more confidence than ever before to take on the skillsets and the jobs that have been traditionally assigned to men. And although there is still a certain amount of social resistance to this social transformation, particularly in more conservative groups and cultures, and although women are still not receiving equal pay for equal work, and although they still face obstacles to rising to positions of power within organizations, their situation is, nevertheless, inexorably improving.
The question is why is this social transformation occurring at this point in history? I use the phrase “this point in history” rather loosely, because the movement into men’s roles has been occurring very gradually over a period of time. And it has involved not only changes in work roles for women, but changes in their social roles as well. Long before the development of many modern contraception methods, women were taking risks in the back seats of automobiles, which were able to transport them away from the watchful eyes of their parents. Sexual independence was an intrinsic part of the consciousness raising that led to a desire for the financial independence made possible by entering more and more male jobs and professions.
But entering male jobs and professions was the result of more than just sexual experimentation. It was the result of changes in patterns of stimulation in the fields of experience of the people who were living in modern technological society. People were increasing living away from the traditional natural environments that were the sources of so much organic stimulation and that gave grounding to their mammalian natures. They did this in order to escape the enveloping aspects of these traditional natural environments, aspects that tended to swallow people up and undifferentiate them into people who were more ruled by their emotions, by their passions rather than by their more cerebral reason.
In these more traditional natural environments, people were living more in a state of preconsciousness, filled with flowing blendable continual stimuli. The grounding was so great that it threatened to suck them in. This was more true of women than men, because they had such strong internal organic stimulation as a result of their menstrual cycles and their pregnancies and their breastfeeding. For women, the combination of their strong internal organic stimuli and the strong organic stimuli in their traditional natural fields of experience tended, in most cases, to depress their levels of consciousness even more than those of men, to undifferentiate them even more than men. For many readers, this may all sound very off the wall, and highly insulting, but try to suspend judgment until the end of the article. Anyway, it is because of this greater depression of consciousness in traditional natural environments, that men have been able to be the more dominant sex in most societies.
With the development of modern technology, which begins to cover over the traditional natural world with new patterns of stimuli and new fields of experience, the behavior of the two sexes relative to one another begins to change. The numbness from the experiential vacuum generated by modern technology tends to have a much greater effect on men than women. This is the result of men having much less internal organic stimulation than women to give them a sense of internalized grounding. So as the experiential vacuum becomes more pervasive in human living environments, men, more so than women, start to float off into space, metaphorically speaking. They develop conative anesthesia or a numbing of the will. At the same time, there are many men who fight against this numbing effect through different kinds of aggression and different kinds of addiction. Anything to give them the kicks they need in order to feel temporarily sharply alive. But these kicks and the behavior they generate are, when all is said and done, still a reaction to the growing influence of the experiential vacuum that they are experiencing.
I want to emphasize at this point that women also experience the numbness from the experiential vacuum just like men. But paradoxically, in many cases, that numbness helps to release them from the oppressive effect of too much organic stimulation and thus raising their level of consciousness significantly. I know I am moving my social philosophy in a very different direction with these ideas, but no one said that a social philosophy model can’t evolve. I am sure I will continue to elaborate and refine these new ideas in future articles. It is just that I can’t think of any other explanation for the explosion of female power that is occurring in the modern world. I can’t give a timeline to the notion of the future being female, but unless something changes dramatically, I will have to answer the question embedded in the title in the affirmative.