Is the Feminine "Left" & The Masculine "Right"? - A Call for an Emergent Co-Created Holy & Sexy Marriage of Polarities in Politics

In a funny, dated and problematic SNL sketch^[1], men think about Rome and women about astrology. The men in the sketch dream about a glory-filled history of strength, valor and blood. The women dream about navigating the future, and influencing their men to do what the women want, through astrology.

What’s clear, though, is that these polarities never meet. Women and men don’t understand one another, and they are not in contact with the greatness in the feminine and the masculine, nor in each other. The sketch thereby mirrors the political trajectory of the West, and increasingly in the rest of the world as well, where women and men are drifting apart, not understanding one another. The point of this article is to explore these differences and to show what’s possible if the feminine and the masculine recognize and celebrate one another on a philosophical and practical level, and how it all starts with the erotic call of the feminine. But before we go deeper into the call, let’s explore these differences between women and men, left and right, and what they actually mean, starting with my own journey and how it has informed my sense of appreciation of both.

My journey with politics & spirituality

I grew up with two brothers and a family that related mostly through politics. The discussions were fierce, global and right of center. On my mom’s side, political activism had been a red thread for the past 150 years fighting against poverty, especially women’s poverty; with my grandmother’s mother being one of the founders of the Swedish Social Democratic Party. She also became of one of the first women in the Swedish Parliament.

With that influence it felt natural, as a five-year old, to decide to take on the mantle of becoming the US President. A notion quickly disabused by my older brother; I wasn’t born in the United States so it was a no-go plan (the only apparent perceived obstacle in my world). My plan B, at seven, was to be the Secretary General of the UN, because it was based in New York. The position felt like a down-grade and somewhat stodgy even then, but still, good enough. Humility was not a concept I could relate to at that age.

Fast forward some years after I received my MSc in International Economics, I was considering getting involved in politics, but I couldn’t find a party that resonated with me. I could see different viewpoints that made sense to me, yet no single party offered the deeper complexity and meaning-making that I was seeking. So, I let politics go, and focused on entrepreneurship and leadership and became a futurist. A few years later, I left Sweden for the US, where I lived for 15 years, starting out in San Francisco and Silicon Valley and then moved to LA. I began coaching and teaching executives, became the President of the Swedish-American Chamber of Commerce in LA, and built the foundation for a breath-enabled bio-feedback-video game, while going deeper spiritually and writing with screen writers in Hollywood. Embracing my spirituality was a big deal, since I struggled how to mediate my rational and pragmatic geo-political take on the world, with my felt intuitive boundless way of experiencing existence, which had been with me since I was a child. I also chose to support primarily women, who at the time were the underdogs of society, which still is true in many parts of the world.

Awakening Feminine Leadership

Since I returned to Sweden from the US almost nine years ago, I’ve let myself surrender more into the sacred and erotically embodied feminine, creating a path of feminine leadership, with its foundational principles being pleasure, power and presence. Pleasure stands for activating an embodied eros through the vagina and can be equated to the Jungian Archetypal Maiden. My term for the vagina is the jewel, where the jewel represents what is holy and precious. The jewel force creates the foundation for calling in what we want to create and it calls the masculine into co-creation. Power represents the Archetypal Mother. This power is soft and firm, sets clear boundaries and is a wild and expansive power, derived from the body and life-force. Presence is a fullness (instead of an emptiness) that contains both a unity-consciousness and a readiness to show up in the world, without blinders. It’s a practice of Tantric playfulness, instinctual power and clear-headed thinking, being in service of the feminine life-force, which has sparked the emergence of a whole new way of leading with and for women. The women who practice feminine leadership go from being good girls to seductresses, being able to savor the world instead of needing to save it. And these women call in the masculine into his highest self. You can read an older article about the call of Feminine Leadership here, co-written with Fanny Norlin, collaborator and student.

It's from that viewpoint that I’m sharing my thoughts about what’s happening between women and men and where a potentially unified, and did I mention, seductive, solution lies. And it is the meeting with men and the masculine that has enabled that path. Maybe that is also why I’ve gotten increasingly concerned with the lack of support of men, and how unbalanced society becomes when there is a rejection of the masculine.

I’ve also seen how important it is to talk about the underlying foundation of politics, and how both the deeper aspects of feminine and the masculine and the higher forms of left and right are needed if we want to create a better world. United they show the potential of freedom, clarity and pragmatism, imbued with beauty, compassion, juiciness and wholeness as pathways to realizing the true potential of humanity. I’ll come back to that later, but I’ll start with defining left and right.

What do I mean with left and right?

Many argue that left and right are obsolete constructs, but I find that as a framework for this article, they remain useful. In order to define left and right, I lean into the wisdom of some thoughtful men.

Constrained vs unconstrained vision

The first inspiration comes from Thomas Sowell. Thomas Sowell is an American intellectual who describes why people disagree about politics in his book Conflict of Visions: “We disagree about politics”, Sowell argues, “because we disagree about human nature. We see the world through one of two competing visions, each of which tells a radically different story about human nature. Those with “unconstrained vision” think that humans are malleable and can be perfected. They believe that socials ills and evils can be overcome through collective action that encourages humans to behave better. To subscribers of this view, poverty, crime inequality and war are not inevitable. Rather, they are puzzles that can be solved. We need only to say the right things, enact the right policies, and spend enough money, and we will suffer these social ills no more. This worldview is the foundation of the progressive mindset.

By contrast, those who see the world through a “constrained vision” lens believe that human nature is a universal constant. No amount of social engineering can change the sober reality of human self-interest, or the fact that human empathy and social resources are necessarily scarce. People who see things this way believe that most political and social problems will never be “solved”; they can only be managed. This approach is the bedrock of the conservative worldview.”

Preserve vs fix, or compassion & idealism vs truth & pragmatism

According to philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Conservatism is wanting to preserve what’s right and Progressivism wanting to fix what’s wrong”. Lex Friedman, a computer scientist and podcaster, writes: “At its best, I think, the left prioritizes compassion & idealism, and the right prioritizes truth & pragmatism”.

I like the combo of the above-three definitions, which ties in into my definition of the feminine and the masculine and how it relates to change and time. However, it doesn’t include the deeper potential of what is possible if we combined the wisdom of both.

So what is the feminine and the masculine?

Definitions of the feminine and the masculine

I define the feminine as the creative impulse of the universe. She is the essential yearning, or desire, wanting to manifest. We can call it Shakti or life-force expressed through sexual energy.

My definition of the masculine is a deep abiding awareness, providing the basis for the feminine creative impulse. It is the isness and the suchness of existence itself and without which nothing can exist.

You can also define the feminine as the wave and the masculine as the particle. Both co-existing at the same time, one or the other collapsing, or joyfully melting into the other, if we add some Eros. We are both and need both, but there is also a strong correlation to both our biological sex and our gender preferences, in which way we lean and have access to.

Another way to define the feminine is as a presence, our soul, that through the body transforms us. Another way to define the masculine is as an awareness, our spirit, that enlightens us. Once again, both being equally necessary, even though all current religions worship the masculine, wanting us to be liberated from our bodies, thereby enforcing a disconnect from the transformative power of the soul and feminine embodiment. 

Maybe the most well-known way to relate to the feminine and the masculine is to talk about yin and yang. Yin, as the moon, the soft, receptive principle and Yang, the masculine as the sun and the directed, penetrative principle. The problem with this definition is that it misses out on the creative, wild, and powerful feminine, as well as the loving protective holding of the masculine.

So a more relevant definition of the feminine and the masculine is to speak of the polarities within each. That the feminine has one polarity that is soft, nurturing and receptive and the other is fierce, creative, playful, seductive and, wild and takes no bs – and that in the feminine it’s an undulation between these elements, mirroring the cyclical nature of women.

With the masculine you also have the holding, building, nurturing wise masculine paired with the polarity of the directed, goal-oriented, creative, intense and playful polarity.

And it is through eros, through turn-on, that the feminine calls in the masculine. You can read more about those definitions and the framework in this earlier article co-written with Fanny Norlin, elaborated in Fanny’s model here.

The Good Girl Syndrome, Mean Girls & The Collapsed & Devouring Mother

When the feminine is disconnected from her powerful side, and is disembodied, none of the healthy developed aspects of the feminine is present. Instead, she becomes the good girl, who easily turns into the mean girl. The good girl is often accompanied by the collapsed and sometimes even devouring mother. Since there is no embodiment, no eros, and no presence, the mothering instinct takes over, coupled with anxiety and worrying, which leads to a desire to save anyone that can be construed as a victim. While culture and how we are raised matter more than we think, women are also impacted by the social nervous system, which is, in itself, primed through a heavy dose of estrogen and oxytocin in utero, encouraging us to take care of others.

On an aggregate level, this leads to compassion and empathy, which is essential for developing a healthy society, but not at the expense of reason and pragmatism. When empathy is mixed up with a desire to approved of as well, we encounter the good girl syndrome, together with the collapsed mother who needs someone or something to save to feel good about herself. (When a woman is connected to her true power, her body and eros, compassion is transformed into a capacity to be with pain, and where compassion becomes a pathway to truth).

The good girl wants to save the world and the collapsed mother can’t stop worrying about it. Since neither are grounded in their bodies, in their sexuality, and in their life-force, neither are connected to their raw power. Because of the disconnect to her inner self, her wild nature and her crone, she is naive, and doesn’t recognize the predator in some men and in some women. And even if she did, she might even decide to join the predator in some ill-adapted strategy, not understanding that as the thin veneer of civilization wears off, she might end up as prey. Without a felt, embodied street-smart understanding of the world, she will keep feeding on the helplessness in others, since that’s how she asserts her sense of value.

As women take on more power positions, especially in media, the public sector, and in academia, this tendency gets more exaggerated. Free speech is seen as a hindrance and the need to push out the dissidents through identity labeling, often ‘the far right’, or just ‘toxic masculinity’, grows. In the end, it might be that the mean girl becomes the devouring mother, enabling a new form of authoritarians.

The Aggressive Masculine, The Good Boy Syndrome, the Lost Father & The New Incel

What we are seeing expressed as the unconscious masculine is the competitive and aggressive driving force, turned authoritarian, with no wisdom behind it; a force that uses senseless violence, like in Russia’s violent and brutal attack on Ukraine, a force that isn’t in contact with the feminine. This distorted version of the masculine is rising across the world today. Maybe partially as a counter-reaction to the rise of post-modernism and women’s increasing influence in the Western world, but also due to the fact that the US is no longer willing to be the world’s bad cop, or said in a different way; the protective father has left the building. He no longer believes he serves a purpose and has gotten lost along the way. The US, as the geo-political Alpha Male, is thereby retiring and now all the ‘young’ warrior guys, China, Russia and Iran, are fighting each other, or more likely, teaming up to, if not to overthrow, at least to make sure the West is no longer running the global show.

In the West, we also see a new phenomenon arise, where many men want to hide in the collapsed feminine. Instead of being men, it’s boys at any age who decide to stay home, and want to be saved by a strong Mom, or join the disembodied feminine and become manly mean girls. This coincides with the tendency for many women who are brought up to live in the masculine, to reject the feminine. Which in turn is related to an increasingly aggressive feminism and a strong post-modernism that has made women openly diminish men. (The slapping of Jason Momoa in the SNL sketch is an example of that disdain). The sting of that rejection; a rejection that also is societal in the hyper-relational reality we now live in, has made many men to give up. It’s simply harder for men with more traditional masculine qualities to belong and thrive. And when society and men are disconnected from the loving holding, protecting side of the masculine, often due to lack of role models, and maybe also for a push for feminization, men can’t access that side of the higher masculine.

From there it’s easy to go MAGA or become an incel, and through computer games dream of a simpler time when society was more traditional and men were men, in charge, and women were women, subservient. If we add the impact of the spread of a militant Islam, which unless reformed, is one of the greatest threats to feminine life-force in the world today, together with the threat from rest of the authoritarians, we are facing a new dark reality. Expressed in a different way, we are becoming more separate and we don’t seem to be able to find a way forward; a way to meet in unity.

In order to create that unity, we need to understand more about our differences and how they support us, and how they can be met instead of ridiculed or rejected. One of those differences is that women and men on an aggregate level operate under different timelines.

Women and men on different timelines

On an aggregate level, women^[2] initiate more divorces, the numbers cited are often above 70%,. Overall, women leave relationships to a much higher degree than men. Women are also the biggest givers to causes compared with men, which correlates with the fact that women rate higher in agreeability traits than men. It’s when we come to politics, however, we see the biggest differences between the sexes. First of all, women are not as interested in politics, especially geo-politics. But second, and most importantly, women vote more to the left, especially among the younger generations and with non-partnered women. And the gap is growing and it’s happening all over in Europe and in the US. Men vote more conservatively, no matter what age.

When we combine this data, we see that women believe in the unconstrained vision of the world; she believes she can change the world, ahum, him, and sometimes she is right. As I write in my book, and as you can read in this article, the feminine, on a more energetic level, drives change. She calls the masculine into his higher self, Another way to put it is that women move faster, relationally, than men, and need more, not only in a relationship, but also in society. She sees something that needs “fixing” and goes for that.

Which then puts men, relationally, on a slower time-line, which also applies to society. Men voting more conservatively, using the previous definitions, means that men want things to stay mostly the same, whether in a relationship or societally. The exceptions are sex and technology. In the former, men move faster than women; where men can get aroused in seconds, whereas it takes a woman up to 45 minutes to be fully prepared for penetrative sex. In the latter, it is men that are creating the system architecture of society and of technology, often going at a much faster speed than women, thereby often inadvertently ending up excluding women and the feminine from participating in the systems creation.

So when it comes to relating and change, she wants to go faster, and he wants to go slower. And when it comes to sex and technology, he wants to go faster and she slower. Neither is right or wrong, it’s just different takes, and different sides of each side’s double-sided polarity, and as I will argue, equally important to understand. However, what also is clear that the faster we move socially, the less stable society gets. An example of this is the impact of mass immigration from cultures with different value systems. After a point, we lose our societal connective tissue, which leads to a loss of moral alignment when we no longer value the same things. Rapid change in values and demographic changes have been the downfall of empires throughout history, especially if there is no cohesive vision of a new potential future.

Will Western women save the world?

I used to hope Dalai Lama was right in his quote saying that it’s Western women that will save the world. But based on where we are heading, it might be so that disembodied post-modern or woke Western women will be its downfall.

That doesn’t make the feminine obsolete, however; it’s the other way around. More than ever, we need the erotically embodied and empowered woman who is not naïve, has discernment and comes with a no BS-meter. She feels her emotions, but is deeply anchored in her body, in her power and in her jewel. Essentially, we need what I call the archetypal energy of the Dark Seductive Goddess. She incorporates her Maiden qualities of pleasure and aliveness, with her capacity for creating life and softness as the indomitable power of Mother and brings in the Crone, who is wise, present, street smart, wild, understands predators and has no qualms of wielding her power. When combined, she becomes the whole essential woman or the archetypal Dark Seductive Goddess, who can call forth the highest levels of the masculine through flirtation. The most underrated tool of cosmic transformation there is.

So, yes, in a way, it’s still women, but women in service of the embodied erotic feminine across the world that have the power to be part of saving the world. Not because we are trying to, but because we are so full of life-force and play, while also being in contact with a raw, embodied power, wildness and truth, coupled with a deep wise presence. Compassion is no longer about feeling sorry for everyone else, but instead the capacity to see and hold suffering as a pathway to truth. And it is from this place we can call in the masculine to stand in his power, the protective King Warrior, who can respond to the call, leading to a Hieros Gamos, the Sacred Marriage; a divine co-creation of love and power.

The Dark Goddess & The King Warrior – A Sacred Marriage - Hieros Gamos

Ralph Waldo Emerson continues: “It may be safely affirmed of these two metaphysical antagonists, that each is a good half, but an impossible whole. Each exposes the abuses of the other, but in a true society, in a true man (woman), both must combine. Nature does not give the crown of its approbation, namely beauty, to any action or emblem or actor, but to one which combines both these elements.”

Hieros Gamos is the sacred marriage between the divine feminine and the divine masculine. It is when we combine the understanding that both the feminine and the masculine are needed, in its developed forms, and it’s in the meeting of a unified field; a sacred marriage, that we can start building something new, inspired by the wisdom from both, led by Eros.

Were I to give some advice on how to get started, I would recommend bringing Thomas Sowell’s constrained vision to the foreground, for the time being – while not forgetting the need of an eros-filled vision of a thriving society in support of the feminine and the masculine. A world that is going darker and turning authoritarian, needs to be met not only with fierceness, pragmatism and truth, but also with love, showing what is possible – in a grounded, co-created, unified and seductive way.

In love, eros and truth,

Lovisa Alsén,
April 10, 2024

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^[1] The sexist slapping of a man in the sketch is not funny, even if it’s the giant Jason Momoa. It’s toxic and cringy.

^[2] Most of this data comes from US research, where the data seem to be pointing to that women initiate between 70-90% of all divorces. This number, however, has been contested, especially since it’s not a clear definition of what ‘initiate’ means. In Sweden the differences might not exist at all. But it seems overall that women, when having financial security of their own, are more inclined to leave a relationship than what men are.