When the World Wants Me to Pick a Side

Recently, I revisited a clairvoyant reading I received years ago. Its title was Advice to the Modern Woman for the Next 50 Years.

Around the same time, I read a fierce post about “womb sovereignty” — a call for women to take spiritual responsibility for the state of masculinity in the world.

The two messages could not be more different.

One suggested that men built the infrastructure of society — roads, governments, systems, technology — and that women often feel frustrated inside structures they did not create. The advice was almost tender: seek out the playful, hardworking men. Admire them. Leave your small nests. Step into polarity.

The other message was unapologetic. Women give birth to men. Women must move beyond victimhood. Women must take responsibility at the root. No more innocence. No more blaming patriarchy. Sovereignty or nothing.

Both messages contain truth.

And both contain danger.

The first risks romanticizing male builders and subtly shrinking women into admirers. It forgets that equality did not arrive by admiration alone. History shows that without courageous women — and without enlightened men willing to support structural change — many of us would still be confined to our nests. Progress has always required relational evolution, not flattery.

The second risks turning responsibility into moral weight. Yes, women influence culture. Yes, silence sustains systems. But to suggest that predation begins in the womb is to simplify something far more complex. Men are responsible for their actions. Culture is co-created. Power is human, not gendered.

What struck me most was not which message was right.

It was how quickly each one tries to recruit me.

One invites me to soften and admire.
The other invites me to harden and stand as warrior.

Both offer identity.
Both offer certainty.

But clarity asks something else.

How do I think clearly when the world wants me to pick a side?

I notice where language inflames me.
Where it flatters me.
Where it tempts me to feel morally superior.
Where it tempts me to feel protected by nostalgia.

At 80, I have no appetite for grand gender narratives. I have lived long enough to see that human beings are capable of domination and awakening, regardless of sex.

Men have built systems.
Women have sustained systems.
Men have oppressed.
Women have enabled.
Men have liberated.
Women have resisted.

None of this is simple.

True sovereignty, as I understand it now, is not about elevating one gender or indicting the other. It is about refusing unconscious participation — in domination, in blame, in oversimplification.

It is about staying steady when rhetoric becomes seductive.

In a time when division is profitable and outrage is addictive, clarity may be the quiet rebellion.

And clarity does not need a side.

It needs honesty