It was about a remote area in China where the culture is currently matriarchal and matrilineal (I'm just using those terms based on what I think they mean but I'm not exactly technically sure that these terms are correct).
Women are the heads of the household and the family, and there is no marriage (as we understand it). Their language does not have the word "daddy" or "dad". The women live with their children and their brother(s) -- if they have one or more. The uncles play the biggest significant role as a male authority/role model. The women do most of the work and they make the decisions. Monogamy doesn't exist. The fathers do not live with their baby-mothers and kids, and it is not expected.
The people believe that the fetuses live inside of the woman, and only need to be "sprayed" by the man, and then the woman grows the baby. They believe the baby is the same baby no matter who the man she had sex with is. There is something about the man being respected for giving a gift to the woman, but it seems they feel he only jumpstarts the growth of something/somebody that already exists. They don't believe children share the same bloodline as the man and that they are only physically of the mother.
This culture is very woman centered, woman power-tipped. And the men seem robbed of power.
Schools have been built and have been in place for about 10 years. They were in place for about two years when the film was the made. I don't know who funds/runs the schools, but they are definitely an outside influence. They teach the children about marriage and being a husband and a wife, and that this is how people in the rest of China live their lives. Within two years some of the children were expressing that they would like to live with their fathers. Boys played growing up into fathers. This was something completely foreign to their culture until very recently. There was a man who began becoming more involved with his child, seeing him every day (instead of every couple weeks or months). The interviewer asked him if he's like to live with the baby-mother. He said yes. The interviewer then asked the mother if she would like the baby-father to live with her, and she said no. She said they are all better off living separately, that this way there were hardly any fights.
A few months ago, I went to an Erykah Badu concert with my sister in law. We were googling erykah on her blackberry and we learned that she has three children (? or is it two and pregnant with a third? yeah, i think so)--I think three different dads, and there was an interview where she definitely gave the vibe that she doesn't live with any of the baby-fathers, she lives with the kids, and the fathers circle around the periphery.
Its hard not to notice the trend or movement in society towards a significant population being single mother households. I wonder what is underlying this? (besides the obvious factors like racism, domestic violence, alcohol/drug abuse, rise in materialism and subsequent intensification of the ego, etc.--those are the social factors. I'm wondering more about the spiritual/etheric patterning that is being mirrored in a physical-three dimensional plane-kind-of-way). Is it the survivalist mentality?
The question I take away from this is how to strike a balance between men and women? The woman receives, the woman receives. I was listening to Armand on WBAI and he was interviewing a woman about the physical history of sex--there has never been a species, apparently, whose females enjoyed sex as much as the human being. Receiving is a major factor in women's pleasure. Can men and women co-create pleasure with balance?
How can we find a balance of power?
How can I find that balance? Last week I took a deep breath and admitted to my husband that I either push him away and get upset that he's gone or I pull him towards me and get mad that he's too close. Balance of power is an issue I deal with daily. Its scary to trust that I am not going to be hurt; there is a program that runs deep within me that says I am not safe.
I need to remember to trust.
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