It’s Okay, She Can Handle It

I was having a book discussion with women from my beekeeping apprenticeship last week and we got onto the topic of sovereignty and body autonomy.

I teach about asking the bees for permission each time you enter a hive or manipulate them in some way. This is NOT a common practice. In part, because we don’t know how to ask. We aren’t taught emotional and intuitive pathways toward knowing, or ways to work with our feminine side. In a Patriarchal system, we value our masculine side and masculine ways of knowing. Intuition and body knowing don’t have visual evidence to back them up, so they are undervalued.

I have a lot of students come to me after a rather upsetting lesson or in-the-field experience with a conventional, or even natural, beekeeper. It goes like this: beekeeper has an agenda. Beekeeper moves fast. Beekeeper quickly manipulates hive. Student expresses concern. Beekeeper says: “Don’t worry, they can handle it.”

There it is. The ubiquitous term that immediately devalues a being’s sovereignty. Not to stereotype, but only twice in the stories I’ve heard has this beekeeper been a woman.

What got me, is how often this phrase is used when manipulating or harassing humans. The female coworker experiencing sexual harassment: don’t worry she can handle it. The young boy being forced to toughen up: don’t worry he can handle it. The child being “lightly” bullied by their own parents: don’t worry, they can handle it. The 13 year old girl being teased by family for her changing body (me): don’t worry, she can handle it.

This attitude of toughness, or the ability to survive something, is so prevalent we don’t even notice how often we all say it. There’s a different between surviving and thriving. I think this is the crux of modern beekeeping: the commercial beekeeping industry has enforced a model of survival for human gain, dulling our senses to what it means to truly thrive.

The toughen up model of living may be great for survival in challenging environments, but it also comes with the Patriarchal disdain for those girly things like emotions, intuition, softness, gentleness, and god forbid, taking your time.

So next time you hear yourself of someone else say, “Don’t worry, she can handle it,” stop and check yourself. She may be able to handle it, but it does not mean she is okay with it.

Photo by Onyx Baird

Untangling the Narrative

Yesterday I had another rude awakening in the long journey of untangling the poisoned threads of Patriarchy. Before I go any further, let’s establish once more that Patriarchy is a well-fed idea, whose systemic markers are expressing themselves within all of us. Dismantling the Patriarchy requires and inward gaze, as well as a recognition of its expression in society, infrastructure, classism, racism, and sexism.⠀⠀

Forward ho! So, I have an Instagram bookclub (#honeyreads) where I recommend books on bees, ecology, and the feminine. This month I recommended Austrian philosopher Rudolf Steiner's lectures on bees. I was vaguely aware of his racism, but felt his view on bees worthy of sharing. And that alone, irks me about the inherent nature of white blindness. Yesterday I discovered the extent of his racism and white supremacy. Here’s a quote from him: “If the blonds and blue-eyed people die out, the human race will become increasingly dense ... Blond hair actually bestows intelligence.” ⠀⠀

I feel like the only thing I can do is dismiss all his work. I feel angry at all the times I’ve heard people say “he was just a product of his times.” I’m a product of my times, and I can either be supportive of concentration camps for children in the United States or I can fight against them. The times don’t justify your beliefs about superiority over another rare, gender or sexual orientation. I want to cut him out the way we cut out cancer, but is that the answer? I went digging. Wanna know who else fits the profile or either racist or sexist/misogynist?

So many (mostly white) dudes who greatly contributed to, well, everything. I mean obviously, right? But here’s a starter list anyway: Albert Einstein, James Watson, Aristotle, Friedrich Nietzsche, Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Jefferson, Mohandas Gandhi, Roald Dahl, T.S. Eliot, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Charles Darwin. The cut-out-the-cancer model is one way to deal, but how do we address the whole body holding the illness? How can we recognise the uncomfortable, wrong, and unjust, and face it so that we can heal them?

 How do we tease out the fibers of value within the works of people who were/are deeply flawed and downright harmful?

How do we benefit from Einstein’s Theory of Relativity while also addressing his views on the Chinese? How do we celebrate the writing of Vonnegut while also looking at his beliefs that women can’t be educated? Or appreciate Steiner’s contribution to social reform (and bees) while untangling his sickening beliefs about non-white races. Perhaps it starts with looking at it. I wanna look away so badly. But looking at it and patiently examining how someone’s belief might just play into their brilliant findings/writings/philosophies. It becomes your job not to consume such works whole, but to ask: what is valuable? What is true? What is influenced by sexism/racism? What needs to be reworked here? What did I believe out of ignorance? How can I keep looking with more discernment? How can I take this work and bring more ethics, awareness, justice, and equality to it? Where are the resources that disrupt the passing on of nearly invisible systemic disease? Look it in the eyes. Nothing set out to sabotage the sovereignty of a race/sex likes to be seen with the curtains pulled back. It prefers to function in the subconscious corridors of conditioning. Keep being willing to look at it and ask the difficult questions. Not just about the oppressors, but about yourself as well.

Feminist Beekeeping

I’d like to take a moment to talk about why Feminist Beekeeping is a thing at all.

First, let’s understand a few things.
1. We are all struggling with language and the meaning behind words.  
.
As a natural beekeeper part of my job is to rework the language around beekeeping. Changing words like “worker bee”, to “female bee” or “sister bee” helps to shift our mentality away from the industrial era model of beekeeping which equates bees to factory workers. Similarly, working with empowering women and celebrating the essence of the feminine in all things/genders requires some tricky navigation around the rocky shoals of language.

2. Feminism is not exclusive to women. 

I know this is basic feminism 101, but men can be feminists too. 

Let’s review:
.
fem·i·nism
noun
the advocacy of women's rights on the basis of the equality of the sexes.

fem·i·nist

noun
1. 
a person who supports feminism

Okay so we have a dictionary definition. That’s a start, but also riddled with pot holes. The point is, you can advocate for the equality of the sexes in all areas of your life, including beekeeping. You can be an advocate for how women are treated in this industry, etc etc

3. Feminist is not a bad word. 

.
If you look back through the history of language, many words denoting bad, angry, evil or weak characteristics have their roots in gender shaming. Look up left-handed, sinister, witch, wicked.

Our modern stereotype of the angry, man-hating feminist is but one example of the demonizing of the feminine. You don’t have to be an angry woman to be a feminist. You are also completely allowed to be angry and a feminist. Just saying.

Feminine is derived from Latin ‘femina’ meaning "woman, female," literally "she who suckles”. As in, she who bears children and suckles them at her breast. So in its oldest sense, feminine means woman. The word has gone through centuries subjected to patriarchy and is now associated with qualities of the “weaker” sex. Qualities associated with delicacy, male-attracting, handkerchief waving, the good Christian wife, being soft spoken, being shrill, being emotional etc.  
However, the term has been reclaimed by women and men alike to denote an energy or quality that is not solely based on biology, but can be understood as something that exists within all things and people. This type of feminine is often paired with other words to differentiate it. Sacred feminine. Divine feminine. Feminine principle. It has a mirror energy we call sacred masculine, divine masculine, or masculine principle.
These terms are adopted social constructs that help give us language in a dualistic world, but they don’t in an of themselves mean woman or man. We all have these intertwining, nuanced, full-spectrum internal forces. We play with the terms masculine and feminine as they are expressed from within us to help us better express our own wholeness, REGARDLESS OF GENDER.

When I talk about the feminine or the sacred feminine and its importance in the beekeeping conversation, I am referring to this: in the cultures of the ancient world (namely before classic Greek and Roman, where our language and much of our western social structure comes from) there was once a time of predominantly matriarchal cultures. This did not mean the inverse of patriarchy, where women dominated men (that’s patriarchal thinking), but rather cultures that honored and celebrated that all life comes from woman. These cultures revered the life-giving qualities of woman: breast milk, pregnant body, maiden/mother/crone, cyclical phases, etc. The earth was seen as the mother of all peoples because the planet literally provides us with life. Certain creatures and aspects of nature were also associated with life-bringing: cow/bull, moon, ocean, rivers, bees, and serpents, to name a few. Furthermore, what brought life could also consume and destroy (floods, decomposition, winter), which is where we get the many goddess myths associated with both these qualities. Hathor/Sehkmet, Kore/Persephone, Brigid, Kali, etc.  
Enter the slow transition over to Patriarchy, which brought with it not just a cultivation of nature (hunter/gatherer to agrarian transition), but also a dominance over nature. Blend that with a shift to male dominant gods and eventually monotheism, and the power over women became synonymous with power over the land. I’m aware that is a very short, crude surmising of a very big topic. 

Now we have in our lexicon a number of negative associations with anything to do with the life-bringing/life-consuming ebb and flow of that which is associated with woman. Furthermore, our dominance over nature continues in its most abhorrent destructive expression. We have experienced a terrible, life-threatening loss of the sacred associated with earth and nature as our life-bearing mother. This dominance-over mentality (let’s just remember this is also part of rape culture) is deeply imbedded in conventional beekeeping practices. It is found in our hive designs, our methods, our chemical uses, our thought and our language around one of the creature most heavily associate with the sacred feminine throughout time.

So, does feminism have a place side by side beekeeping? You bet it does.