Many men hold this ideal, and indeed experience shows that women typically choose dominant partners who have strength on many levels. I shrink from this idea in terms of what it represents from the point of view of the development of higher values. Please elaborate.
The idea of male dominance is outdated and outrightly childish. Men and women are and should be equal partners. In fact if one is to compare in terms of qualities, then most of them such as the sense of beauty, harmony, love, care, tenderness, affection, sacrifice, self giving, courage, loyalty, fidelity, spirit of perfection in works, compassion, kindness, intuitive intelligence is more often found in women. Men, on the other hand, have mainly brute strength and a developed intellectual side. A woman has soft powers mostly. But of course today everything is corrupted, partly as a reaction of women to the long standing dominance and oppression by men, especially in the Mideast and even Medieval Christianity and the Victorian morality. In India, we were already on a sort of course correction by the cult of Devi worship. In India at least, Woman is not just an equal but an object of worship as we see in countless legends and Scriptures, especially the Mahabharata and the Purana. But in regressive societies like Islam they are largely still like a slave girl, whereas in the Western World women emancipation means they can indulge in all the evil that men are prone to such as drugs, drinking and all the rest, ultimately though they are treated as pleasure object as one can see all over in cinema, advertisements, sales, dress that promotes over exposure, party culture and all the rest.
Of course, there are exceptions all over, which is what gives hope. But the general trend is to treat woman as a slave girl or a dignified pleasure object. That is what ultimately the spirit of dominance leads to. Which sane and sensible humanity can support it, especially in India, where we have grown up with the idea of woman as an equal partner and even more a complementary being.
So these are regressive thoughts and it will do good to humanity if they get rid of it soon. Here is a beautiful writing of the Mother that sums it up very well.
‘Let us first take for granted that pride and impudence are always ridiculous: only stupid and ignorant people are arrogant. As soon as a human being is sufficiently enlightened to have a contact, however slight, with the all-pervading mystery of the universe, he becomes necessarily humble.
Woman, by the very fact of her passivity, having more easily than man the intuition of the Supreme Power at work in the world, is more often, more naturally humble.
But to base the fact of this humility on need is erroneous. Woman needs man not more than man needs woman; or rather, more exactly, man and woman have an equal need of one another.
Even in the mere material domain, there are as many men who depend materially upon women as there are women who depend upon men. If humility were a result of that dependency, then, in the first case, the men ought to be humble and the women to have the authority.
Besides, to say that women should be humble because it is thus that they please men, is also erroneous. It would lead one to think that woman has been put on earth only for the purpose of giving pleasure to man—which is absurd.
All the universe has been created to express the Divine Power, and human beings, men or women, have for special mission to become conscious of and to manifest that Eternal Divine Essence. Such is their object and none other. And if they knew and remembered that more often, men and women would cease to think of petty quarrels about priority or authority; they would not see a greater mark of respect in the fact of being served than of serving, for all would consider themselves equally as servitors of the Divine, and would make it their honour to serve ever more and ever better.’
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwm/02/woman-and-man)
‘No law can liberate women unless they liberate themselves.
What makes them slaves is:
(1) Attraction towards the male and his strength,
(2) Desire for home life and its security,
(3) Attachment to motherhood.
If they get free from these three slaveries, they will truly be the equal of men.
Men also have three slaveries:
(1) Spirit of possession, attachment to power and domination,
(2) Desire for sexual relation with women,
(3) Attachment to the small comforts of married life.
If they get rid of these three slaveries, they can truly become the equal of women.
1 August 1951
Women are not more bound to the vital and material consciousness than men are. On the contrary, as they have not, in general, the arrogant mental pretensions of men, it is easier for them to discover their psychic being and to allow it to guide them.
In general, they are not conscious in a mental way which can be expressed in words, but they are conscious in their feelings and the best of them are so even in their actions.
There have been many outstanding feminine figures in spiritual life. But on one side women are more interested by action than by mentalisation and intellectual expression, that is why very few women have recorded their spiritual experience and thus they have remained unknown.
To be truly a good wife is almost as difficult as to be a true disciple.
The idea that women should cook for males is against my principles. Are they slaves?’
(Ref. https://incarnateword.in/cwm/14/men-and-women)
My personal idea is that man and woman are meant to be complementary beings, one rational and ideative, the other emotional and intuitive. But in their essence they are one, both in terms of the Divine Presence within as well as in terms of the forces of nature that move them.
In terms of their mutual relationship, I have noticed that the ancient distinction between the rakshasic / asuric, manavi and daivi type are still valid and true.
The Rakshasic type is centered around various hungers, physical and vital feeding of and feeding upon each other’s energies, largely centered around food and sex. The asuric type is centered around power, money and ambition. The human type is a bond of deeper emotions, care, sacrifice for each other, tenderness, a joining together at different levels of our common human existence. The higher and daivi type is truly as complementary beings living for a common high uplifting ideal. The highest, of course is the rarest of rare, where the woman is the Shakti without whom the man can do nothing beyond his personal realisations. Man here is the prototype of the Ishwara who has achieved self-mastery, which he naturally transmits to the woman. The woman, on the other hand, is the Shakti who helps fulfil the Divine Idea that is yet unexpressed in the man.
Affectionately,
Alok Da
