I notice some similarities between insight meditation and the goals of feminism that I would like to propose for criticism. I see some philosophical differences, but more importantly I find that feminism has been very helpful for me to gain insights, and I suspect it would be helpful for others, too.

First of all, feminism and insight meditation seem to have the same goal: breaking down the subject/object duality. With mediation it is between our minds and the "world" of our sensations. With feminism it is between men as subjects and women as objects, but also looking at how women self-objectify.

The BIG difference between feminism and meditation seems to be in technique. Feminism is generally a social science, so it tries to overcome the duality between men and women by changing the structure of our society, yes? As an extreme example, perhaps feminists petition for sexual images of women to be banned from billboards. I understand the goal of these kind of campaigns is to decrease our habit of thinking about women sexually if we aren't surrounded by sexualized images.

I personally don't believe that removing sexualized images of women would change much about our culture. However, I think that feminism is right in pointing out just how important images are to our unmindful behavior toward women. The mistake is that removing physical images will also automatically remove mental images.

This was a big hint for me as I continued to practice insight meditation outside the monastery. For whatever reason, bringing awareness to mental images has been the most helpful for me to strengthen awareness. I suspect my mind is unusually filled with them. Anyway, studying feminism suggested to me that I may have many sexualized images of women in my mind when I interact with women. As mindfulness became more automatic for me, I was able to apply it while out in the chaotic world, and I intentionally put some extra awareness into noticing any mental images that arose when I noticed an attractive stranger. I found many! In fact, I was very surprised at how unusually vivid they were. By focusing on the images instead of the person in front of me, I noticed that the images were bound up with other mental objects, especially intentions (like, "make a move!!!"). And many pleasant physical sensations that I shouldn't need to describe. I noticed that when I applied strong sati to these images so that they eventually vanished (as all mental objects do under good mindfulness, of course), that the intentions vanished with them, as well as those specific pleasing physical sensations. What was left was just normal intentions toward a fellow human, and the less intense but more satisfying pleasing sensation that always comes after strong mental formations dissolve from strong mindfulness, as usual.

I believe that this experience of intention dissolving is exactly what feminism is shooting for when activists try to pull down sexualized images. While noticing how my mind works in this context is one small step toward spiritual liberation for me, I suspect this experience was also one even smaller step toward the feminist goals of social liberation. I'm sure that I've saved a least a few strangers from my small yet not insignificant objectification of them. Perhaps I didn't stare too long at someone as they got on the bus, and saved them a moment of discomfort.

Regardless if my slightly changed behavior is doing anyone good or not, I now know that attractive strangers start a fascinating sequence of co-arising phenomena for me, which are excellent objects to practice insight with. And I'm going to keep studying feminism because I suspect it will continue to point out possible moments in my life that are rich with sensations to observe. Another "finger pointing at the moon" as the Tibetans say.

Very interesting, and thanks so much for sharing your opinions and experiences. Your account here, it occurs to me, is a good illustration of the connection between Wisdom and Ethics (in this case, Feminism). Isn't it interesting that when you consciously practice even just one, the other will inevitably follow? I've found myself trying to explain this very connection just recently (to someone who doesn't practice any form of meditation) and having an unexpectedly hard time giving real-life examples.
Are there any particular sources for Feminist thought have you found to be useful in the context of the Dharma/contemplative stuff, or is this more the result of a general study?

Note: For the sake of discussion/enabled criticism, this post is written with a stance of little respect for (not necessarily my position) and little knowledge of (my position indeed) 'modern' feminism.



This seems needlessly far-fetched. If you bend it far enough, the same comparison may apply to meditation and sliced bread o_O



Could you describe this in more detail? What do you mean by 'pleasant sensations', 'normal sensations', 'less intense but more satisfying pleasing sensation', 'intentions (like, "make a move!!!")' and 'normal intentions toward a fellow human'? any mental images that arose when I noticed an attractive stranger <- what were they?

For this post, I'll assume that 'pleasant sensations' = 'sensations of attraction/caused by felt attraction'
In this case, I have another interpretation of what is happening:

This is actually suppression, and I suggest that it may not be doing you any good. If sati is applied to the mental images correctly, then they will probably change, maybe even vanish soon. But if you apply sati to the attraction, why should it just go? If you're standing in front of an attractive person, and applying sati to your feelings of attraction makes them vanish, then you're just doing it wrong. Unless the vanishing of these feelings is your goal, of course. But is it?



I agree that it's a cool thing to observe what happens within you in those instances. Also, I'm quite bugged by all those sexualized images. I feel that they're just annoying. Also, they are all fake and thus distracting from the attractiveness of real-world women. But I'm not convinced that removing sexualized images stops objectification. Note that the rise of sexualized images has been accompanied by the achieving of feminist goals. In terms of direct perception, I think this is what happening:

sight of attractive person -> recognition of attractiveness -> feelings of attraction
Up to this point, it's all pretty unchangeable. After this may come:
feelings of attraction -> craving -> intentions
or
feelings of attraction -> associated mental images/thoughts
or some random combination of those, mixing with other associations.

I don't know what is the goal of 'modern feminism'. If it's the dissolution of unwanted attraction or its expression, then to me it seems to me quite misguided. If it's something else, then it may be a good idea. If it's the stopping of 'objectification', then I sincerely don't know what they're talking about. The craving? Intentions of some kind? Specific thoughts arising as a consequence of attraction?

What do you think about this? What is your goal in it? Do you want the chain of dependent origination to change in some way? If so, in which way exactly? And how is watching attractive strangers on the bus an objectification?

I will address bernd's criticism first. You mention too much for me to get to in one post, but I will do my best.

I am not familiar with modern feminism, or post-modern or third-wave feminism for that matter, so I am happy that there are others on this site that are more familiar with them. I apologize for making sweeping claims about the "goals" of feminism as an entire field. When I make claims about what is useful or effective or not, I'm only talking about the personal use I have found for feminist theories and techniques. From now on I think I will just focus on how I have used these theories to help me pick apart my immediate experience in the world. I would not be surprised if my methods would only be helpful for other straight white men, especially those that were as heavily socialized with mass media as I was growing up.

First of all, some definitions are needed. I understand attraction and repulsion as a genuine and important parts of my life, and in practice I strive to treat them that way. They seem to cause problems for me when I don't realize what exactly I am attracted to or repulsed from. During this ignorance, I tend to just express my reactions immediately. When I do know what I am reacting to, I can choose whether to express it or not. All I'm against is blind, automatic behavior.

I like your method of listing the sequence of direct perceptions that happen when meeting an attractive person, and I'm going to repeat it now. I believe that this is exactly what happens in my mind:

1) Sight of attractive person
3) feelings of attraction
4) craving for those feelings and the person that inspires them
5) intentions to keep this interaction going.

While this is accurate, based on my experience applying awareness to this sequence I believe that it can be applied either to the real person in front of me and how that real person makes me feel, or the image of a person I have in my mind and how that image makes me feel. What follows is what I now know happens in me when I meet an attractive stranger, a process that happens whether I am aware of it or not:

1) Sight of attractive person
2) Immediately, two things happen: pleasure in my body and an image in my mind.
3) This combination of pleasure and image become more convincing than the real person in front of me.
4) I develop craving and intentions toward this image and how it makes me feel, and because the image is just an image, my intentions are very basic, like my interaction with a simple tool.
5) I treat the person in front of me as I treat the image in my mind. This I define as objectification. I have just enough awareness of the real person to know if they match up to my expectations or not. If they do, then the image becomes even more real and more hidden at the same time. If they do not, we both feel discomfort, and I may blame myself for failing to play a part of blame the person for some reason.


I am thankful for radical feminist writers who point out how extremely socialized women can be to conforming to behavior expected of them by men. This made me realize that if I didn't apply some careful mindfulness, I might never realize that an image was in my head to begin with. If I have an ideal image a woman in my mind and the real person meets the expectations of that image, then there is no shock to break me out of my daydream. Insight meditation has always required me to recognize something in myself to be aware of that isn't obvious at first. Like, after rapture fades, it is important to be aware of my suddenly fuzzy and distracted mind. That took a long time to realize I could be aware of those things! It helps so much to have someone more experienced to recognize when a student may be having a particular experience, and suggest they casually look for it in case it is there. This is what feminism did for me. It pointed out that I may be experiencing something that I would never have thought to look for, and now that I did look for it I found a tremendous amount of material.

Here is the change that happens when I apply awareness to this sequence:
1) Sight of attractive person
2) Forget the real person. Intentionally experience only my person physical feelings, and the image in my head with full awareness that it is just an image. This requires forgetting about the real person for a while.
3) The physical feeling and the image depend on each other. The physical feeling is easier to focus on, and it in this context it is always that feeling you get with adrenaline. When I focus on images directly they just disappear. But when I focus on the physical feeling, the image comes back, and I examine it indirectly, like out of the corner of my eye. I watch it carefully, noticing details. These images never have faces, I notice, just shapely curves inspired by the real person I first noticed. Eventually the image changes. It starts out as a composed image of a person, but starts to break up into individual body parts. I can't keep track of these and eventually I realize that all the images are gone. And to my frequent surprise, the adrenaline is gone. Perhaps I can't recall the image because I no longer have the physical reaction to focus on to recall it.
4) I open my eyes and notice the person again. I always see them in a different light. Their bodies turn out to be much different than what I initially noticed. Sometimes I realize again that I am attracted to them, sometimes I realize that I am not. Regardless, I lose a sense of urgency, and this is always a relief. It's like the difference of going to a dance club desperate to find someone, and going there just to enjoy life, whether that involves meeting someone or not. Perhaps without the extreme motivation to act, there are missed opportunities.

Okay, that's enough for the moment. I still have not outlined a complete step-by-step experience including all the images, reactions, physical sensations, emotions, and memories that come up in this context, because this post is long enough already. I chose to focus on the sequence of steps, how that changes with awareness, and the somewhat vague "goal" of just having a more aware experience of attraction. Does this clarify my experience any more, or are some of my descriptions of internal states still vague? I very much want to be clear and will keep trying.

Gabriel Hill, I personally find stories by women specifically on the subject of objectification the most helpful to encouraging me to be more aware of the difference between the images of women I have in my head and the real woman in front of me. My purpose in posting is a proposal that there could be a lot more working together of these two areas, but this is currently my only example. Also, it certainly is interesting how purely internal experiences lead to a huge motivation to connect them with external behavior. It is more complicated, which is why I felt the need to post and discuss all of this.

I think there definitely are some reasonable comparisons between feminism and insight meditation. However, I think much the same philosophy can be applied to subjects such as linguistics or pretty much any of the social sciences.

For example, I remember a class that brought up the philosophical question of... what is a cat? How do we know what a cat is? What are the defining characteristics that make up a cat? If we consider a cat to be a four legged animal and then define it as such, what then of a three legged cat? Or, what of a cat with floppy ears? Or one that acts like a dog? How do we dissect out precisely what the essence of a cat is?

Underlying there somewhere is the assumption that there are some basic defining characteristics (a "true" nature) that lead us to call something a cat and, likewise, the assumption that there even exists an entity that can be labeled as a cat and that it is valid to try to do so. Similarly, there is also the assumption that we can all agree on precisely what a cat is and that some consensus can be reached.

I know that probably sounds like mumbo-jumbo, but I think that most fields try to get at this non-dual / complex reality in their own ways. I remember awhile ago thinking that we as humans love to categorize and label things and how that process isn't inherently bad. It allows us to simplify an otherwise incomprehensibly complex world. However, when taken to extremes, we end up with stereotypes, false identities, and black & white thinking. "All men are like this" or "All women are like that". In my opinion, meditation is really good at revealing the underlying complexity. Mainly, it makes a very key assertion that there is no solid identity that exists that is unchanging and permanent. Likewise, reality, however we like to spin it, is probably not as simple as it is made out to be.

Anyhow... those are just my thoughts.

This is how I see it:

Insight meditation is something one or many people do to become free of conditioning and freedom from suffering.

Feminism is an ideology like other ideologies, and proponents of the ideology try to describe their view of reality, how they think others perceive reality, and then they try to act in order to change how others (and themselves) perceive reality, so as to bring about (their idea of) a more just society.

Your applied mindfulness in everyday experience is a great thing. But I would caution against any attempts your mind might make of trying to embed feminism into insight meditation practice, not because feminism per se is inherently bad, but because it would be a bad idea to embed any conditioned view of reality into practice, which is about experiencing the unconditioned.

But it seems like possibly, your interpretation of experience is filtered through a prism of (your idea of) feminism.

Try to keep practice at the sensate level, or you risk getting lost in theory building.

I hoped with this post to have a discussion about the specific sensations involved in this context of gendered interaction, but I see that the most criticism has been against using an external guide to where mindfulness can be applied and what kind of sensations to look for especially. I see that this is a more fundamental issue and I hope to get to the bottom of it.

@Marten and @Lara, I think both your posts are similar, a warning against relying on a pre-defined structure of experience. I see the danger of imposing categories on my internal experience based on ideology, and I do not believe that is what I'm proposing. Instead, I see the vast world of feminism as proposing an especially fruitful direction to apply mindfulness: the culturally-defined structured interaction between men and women. I think that is a broad enough perspective to include much of feminist thought, while at the same time still pointing at a aspect of reality that deserves more attention. Without feminist theory I may never have gotten around to watching the specific sensations that arise during my interaction women.

As an example of why I think this emphasis is important beyond just the usual meditation practice, I point to Tibetan Buddhism. I've read complaints by female students that the institutional structure of Tibetan Buddhism has disadvantages for their practice, but when they confront their teachers about the problem, the teachers are more than happy to change the rules, and are even shocked that anyone found them to be a problem. Then there is the problem with local monasteries not being accessible or inviting to people of all demographics. I think mindfulness can be a crucial tool in addressing the root cause of these bigger and more social problems, but not without the guiding help of social sciences like feminism to point out that a problem exists.

Summary: meditation provides the answers, but feminism can help ask the right questions.

(I broke my account and had to make a new user, sorry for any confusion)