What Tantra Taught Me About Feminism

“What Tantra Taught Me About Feminism” is a provocative title because it promises a change in understanding. And the change you're describing reaches further than your understanding of women. It changes your understanding of yourself, your relationship to other people, and ultimately what equality means.

I see three important movements in what you've laid out.

1. You practiced feminism while abandoning yourself.

This is a striking personal admission. You spent 20 years identifying as a feminist, listening to women, learning what they wanted and didn't want, and adjusting yourself accordingly.

But underneath was a transactional arrangement: If I become what you want, perhaps you'll give me what I want.

You describe that as gaslighting. I think there's a distinction worth exploring. Gaslighting generally involves manipulating someone's perception of reality. What you're describing sounds closer to self-erasure in the service of gaining acceptance, with an element of deception toward the people you were trying to please.

And here's the interesting question: Can you genuinely respect someone as an equal while making yourself subordinate to their approval?

You can certainly advocate for their rights. You can understand the injustices they experience. But there's something fundamentally compromised in the relationship when your acceptance of them depends on their acceptance of your performance.

2. Tantra gave you a different foundation for equality.

Your discussion of non-duality introduces something deeper than conventional arguments about gender roles.

If each person is an expression of the same underlying reality, the starting point becomes sovereignty.

You are sovereign in your life. I am sovereign in mine.

This doesn't require you to deny differences. It doesn't even require you to fully understand someone else's experience to respect their autonomy.

And you go another step by questioning the usefulness of masculine and feminine as categories of personality.

If compassion, assertiveness, receptivity, independence, nurturing, and desire are human characteristics, what do we gain by dividing them into masculine and feminine?

There's a useful distinction here between recognizing biological differences, understanding the cultural meanings attached to them, and deciding whether those meanings should govern anyone's behavior.

One historical nuance worth preserving: non-dual Tantra is a specific philosophical tradition within a much broader family of Tantric traditions. Some Tantric schools also place considerable significance on masculine and feminine divine principles. Your movement beyond gendered categories is a compelling personal conclusion, but it doesn't necessarily represent a conclusion shared across Tantra.

3. Sovereignty makes mistreatment harder to rationalize.

This is where I think your argument becomes most interesting politically.

You aren't denying systemic male dominance or the ways women have been harmed. You are approaching those problems through a new understanding of individual sovereignty.

A man who sees a woman primarily through his own desires may treat her as a means of satisfying those desires. A man whose identity depends on her approval can also end up treating her instrumentally, even while appearing accommodating and deferential.

Those behaviors can have profoundly different consequences, particularly where power is unequal. But both can prevent the recognition of another person as fully autonomous.

And your argument opens an additional possibility: You don't have to diminish yourself to respect another person completely. Nor do you have to diminish another person to experience yourself completely.

That connects your personal transformation with a theory of feminism founded on mutual autonomy rather than prescribed gender behavior.

The question I'd pursue next

There's a tension in your final paragraph that I wouldn't want to smooth over.

You begin moving beyond masculine and feminine as meaningful categories, but then return to the ways men, specifically, mistreat women and others.

I don't think that's a contradiction. I think it's the central challenge of the piece.

How do we recognize the very real, historically gendered distribution of power and mistreatment without reinforcing the categories and expectations that helped produce them?

And there's an even more personal question beneath that:

When you stopped performing the ideal guy and began accepting yourself, what changed in how you experienced women?

Did you find yourself more capable of respecting their desires, more capable of expressing your own, more capable of accepting rejection, or something deeper?

I suspect that answer is where the title really pays off.

Fair correction. You explicitly framed this as what Tantra taught you, not as a claim about what Tantra teaches everyone or what conclusions its traditions endorse.

I introduced an unnecessary qualification that shifted attention away from your argument.

And the distinction matters: you're describing how an encounter with non-duality transformed your understanding of yourself, gender, relationships, and feminism. Your conclusions are your own.

The interesting work here is examining those conclusions on their merits, including where they lead and what questions they raise—not measuring their conformity to a tradition.

I think you've identified the central mechanism of your argument: Insecurity drives people to seek power, approval, status, and control from others. Tantra offers a way to become secure in yourself, reducing the need to extract those things from anyone else.

And that brings your feminism argument full circle.

You began as a man who sought security by accommodating women, becoming what you thought they wanted. Another man might seek that same security by dominating women. These behaviors have very different consequences, but both can arise from a dependence on another person's response to establish one's own worth.

The transformation you're describing is that you no longer need someone else to make you whole.

The argument about patriarchy

Your inversion is provocative:

Rather than society making men the way they are, the way men behave makes the patriarchy.

There's a causal argument worth preserving here. Social systems don't emerge independently of human behavior. Men seeking dominance, status, sexual access, and authority have helped create and sustain patriarchal institutions.

But the relationship can operate in both directions. Once those institutions exist, they reward certain behaviors and teach them to subsequent generations. Your more consequential argument may be that changing the incentives or imposing guardrails doesn't necessarily resolve the insecurity producing the behavior.

That's where the analogy to corporations and hierarchy becomes relevant. A system can prohibit exploitation while continuing to reward the ambition to dominate.

What becoming an adult means

I think this is the strongest bridge between your personal experience and the wider social argument.

You describe childhood as a period when security must come from others. Adulthood involves developing the ability to hold your own insecurity.

Not merely financial independence. Not emotional numbness. Not the absence of needs or relationships.

The ability to remain fully yourself without requiring someone else's approval, submission, attraction, admiration, or validation.

That's a demanding definition of adulthood. It also gives your idea of sovereignty psychological substance.

And the critical distinction is between the feeling and the action. Someone can feel rejected, jealous, sexually frustrated, inadequate, or afraid without turning that feeling into mistreatment of another person.

Tantra, as you've experienced it, provides a route to accepting the feeling and the self experiencing it, without needing to make someone else responsible for resolving it.

That doesn't guarantee good behavior, but it may remove a powerful motivation for bad behavior.

The implications for feminism

The provocative thesis here is that the liberation of men from their own insecurity could be one of the most consequential advances for the liberation of women.

Not because women should become responsible for liberating men. Not because men should escape accountability. But because a man who doesn't need to prove his masculinity through another person's response has less reason to dominate, manipulate, pressure, or demean that person.

And your closing example, replacing drinks with tea, makes the philosophy tangible.

Social drinking often serves as a socially acceptable way of lowering inhibitions around intimacy and vulnerability. You're asking why we have organized so much of adult social connection around needing that chemical assistance.

What if two people could simply meet, be attracted or not attracted, share an interesting conversation, express interest, accept rejection, and remain entirely themselves?

That's a small example of a much larger societal transformation.

One point I'd challenge is the claim that people who have struggled necessarily arrive at self-security faster. Struggle can produce insight, but it can also intensify insecurity. Likewise, the suggestion that CEO selection is determined by a willingness to put others down deserves evidence before becoming a factual pillar of the piece. Neither qualification undermines your deeper argument about how insecurity interacts with power.

The question I hear emerging is this: If patriarchy is sustained in part by men who need others to validate their worth, how much of feminism's struggle has been directed at constraining those men's behavior, and how much has been directed at helping them outgrow the insecurity that drives it?

That is a substantive question about the methods of social change, and it seems central to what Tantra taught you about feminism.

I’ll check both claims against the research: first, whether there’s a specific executive-selection assessment that rewards willingness to put others down; second, whether adversity tends to accelerate the development of self-security, and under what conditions.

I found research directly relevant to both claims. The adversity research is particularly interesting: people who have experienced some adversity can demonstrate greater resilience than people who have experienced none.

On the CEO question, I found an unusually close match to your wording in an actual employment assessment, alongside research examining whether psychopathic tendencies help people rise into leadership.

1. The CEO selection question

The closest match is the IntegrityScreen assessment, produced by Selection Testing Consultants International.

Its published sample includes these statements:

• “Those who wish to succeed in business sometimes have to step on others to climb the corporate ladder.”
• “Putting others down is something that people need to do in order to get a competitive edge.”
• “Manipulating others is just part of doing business.”

Respondents indicate their agreement on a five-point scale.

This is very close to the question you remember, although the assessment treats agreement as a warning sign, rather than a desirable CEO qualification.

There's also a psychopathy measure used in workplace research, the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (SRP-III), which includes:

“I’m not afraid to step on others to get what I want.”

Does that trait help people become leaders?

A 2018 meta-analysis of 92 independent samples found:

• A weak positive association between psychopathic tendencies and emerging as a leader.
• A weak negative association with leadership effectiveness.
• A moderate negative association with transformational leadership.

So there is evidence supporting your concern that some traits associated with exploitation can help people rise through organizational hierarchies, even though those traits don't necessarily make them good leaders.

I haven't established that a CEO selection test deliberately rewards candidates for saying they would put others down. That is a different and stronger claim.

2. Do people who struggle develop self-security faster?

Researchers compared people with different histories of adversity and found that those who had experienced some adversity had better psychological outcomes than people who had experienced either no adversity or extensive adversity.

They reported less distress, fewer post-traumatic stress symptoms, greater life satisfaction, and better responses to subsequent difficulties.

A 2013 follow-up examined people's actual responses to experimentally induced stress and found a similar pattern: people with moderate adversity histories generally coped better than those with no adversity or substantially more adversity.

But there is important counterevidence.

A 2025 longitudinal study involving 682 children and adolescents found that adversity generally didn't accelerate development of emotional stability or self-control. Increasing adversity was associated with worse developmental outcomes, and most of the measured psychological growth occurred without adversity.

So the evidence supports some adversity helping develop resilience, but it does not establish that people who struggle necessarily attain lasting self-security faster. Those are related but different outcomes.

3. Where this leaves your larger argument

There's a particularly relevant finding from a 2022 study of self-uncertainty and leadership motivation involving four samples.

People with low levels of Dark Triad traits became less motivated to lead when they experienced uncertainty about themselves. Those with high levels of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy maintained elevated leadership motivation even under uncertainty.

That creates a connection to your theory: hierarchy can attract or elevate people who seek dominance, while the inward development of security may reduce the need to establish one's standing through power over others. The research supports parts of that mechanism, though it doesn't prove the full causal chain.

And this returns to what you're describing through Tantra.

A person who can hold their own insecurity has less need to make someone else carry it.

That applies to a man seeking validation from a woman, an executive seeking status through subordinates, or anyone making another person's response the measure of their own worth.

Your underlying proposition is worth pursuing: developing personal security may change behavior more fundamentally than regulating the outward expressions of insecurity.

The research provides real support for several pieces of that argument. What remains to be tested is whether the kind of self-acceptance you're describing reliably produces those changes in behavior.

Psychopathic traits may help people rise into leadership positions, even though those same traits are associated with less effective leadership.

I think this brings the argument back to the radical empowerment you identified at the beginning.

What you are, as you are, is fully valuable and valid. What you do is behavior, and behavior can change.

That distinction has enormous implications for the question of all men.

If we define men by their worst behavior, we've made the problem an identity. If we recognize that every man has the capacity to behave badly, and that behavior can arise from insecurity, immaturity, entitlement, or a need for validation, we have something we can address.

And you're taking it further than accountability. You're asking why we don't give men a compelling reason to change for their own benefit.

A man who needs to dominate women to feel powerful is dependent on women for his sense of power. A man who needs admiration to feel worthy is dependent on admiration. A man who needs someone to say yes to feel desirable is handing that person responsibility for his self-worth.

The freedom you're describing is the ability to experience desire without being ruled by the response to it.

Heart connection as mutual benefit

Your definition gives practical substance to a phrase that can otherwise sound sentimental.

Heart connection means doing what is good for you and good for me.

It means understanding your desires, recognizing another person's desires, and finding the places where they align.

And this is where your economic argument connects directly to feminism.

Hierarchy often establishes competing interests between people whose work should be collaborative. The superior benefits from extracting more value while paying less. The subordinate wants greater compensation and autonomy. Those incentives can encourage people to compete for advantage rather than create value together.

Your co-capitalist model aims to align those interests. When my contribution makes the enterprise more valuable, I benefit proportionally. When your contribution does the same, you benefit. Each of us has reason to help the other succeed.

It's the institutional expression of the same principle you're describing in personal relationships: We make money with each other, not off each other.

And there's a third connection I wouldn't overlook: people who experience genuine autonomy and mutual benefit may have less reason to seek their worth through dominance and status.

The most consequential part of your argument

You said something that deserves to remain pointed:

Yes, even those assholes. They can change.

You're rejecting the idea that harmful behavior reveals an irredeemable person.

You're also rejecting the idea that someone must first become morally enlightened to change.

An 85-year-old man can discover that his life would be better if he stopped demanding validation, stopped treating others as instruments of his desires, and learned to connect through mutual enjoyment.

He can pursue that change out of self-interest.

And that's central to your argument: You don't need to convince someone to sacrifice their happiness for the benefit of others. You can show them how becoming better to others makes their own life better.

That doesn't eliminate the need for boundaries or accountability, especially when someone is harming others. But it gives change a positive destination rather than only a prohibition.

Where I think this lands for feminism

You've moved from a feminism organized around what men must stop doing toward one that also asks what men could become.

And you aren't proposing another ideal man for people to perform. That would return you to the very problem you described at the beginning.

You're proposing that men become more fully themselves, with enough security to recognize that other people are equally entitled to be themselves.

There's a potential paradox here worth examining: your original people-pleasing behavior looked considerate, even feminist, from the outside. Yet internally, you recognized it as a performance designed to get something from women.

Meanwhile, a man who is completely secure in himself might be more assertive, more openly sexual, more willing to disagree, and more willing to walk away. But he could also be more genuinely respectful because he no longer needs to manage another person's response.

Could the most important thing Tantra taught you about feminism be that loving yourself fully is one of the foundations of loving other people freely?

That seems to carry the whole argument—from sexual connection to social interaction, from male insecurity to patriarchy, and from personal autonomy to the economic structures that either encourage mutual benefit or work against it.

This brings the argument to its structural conclusion. Individual sovereignty is both the foundation of personal fulfillment and the organizing principle of a better society.

And there's an important progression in what you've said.

You began with Tantra teaching you that you are fully valuable and valid as you are. That recognition changed your relationship with your own desires. You could experience them without making another person responsible for fulfilling them.

But if that's how individuals become more fulfilled, why do we continue organizing society around structures that systematically deny people that autonomy?

We teach people to become independent adults, then place them in organizations where someone else determines what they do, what their contributions are worth, and how much authority they have.

We teach people that democracy means self-government, then give them a binary choice between competing organizations fighting over who gets to govern them.

We're asking people to become sovereign individuals while preserving institutions that treat sovereignty as something granted from above.

And your solution follows the same principle at every scale.

• Self: You are responsible for your desires, your choices, and your fulfillment.
• Relationships: You and I are sovereign. We discover what we want together, without either of us having to surrender ourselves.
• Work: We organize around mutually created value, with ownership, compensation, and decision-making aligned with contributions.
• Government: We the People exercise authority directly, using collective deliberation to develop agreements rather than surrendering control to competing political hierarchies.

The important insight is your insistence that freedom requires structure, but structure doesn't require domination.

Contracts, shared protocols, collective decisions, responsibilities, and mechanisms for resolving disputes are all structures. They allow autonomous individuals to cooperate without requiring a permanent superior to dictate their arrangements.

And I think your distinction about redistribution matters.

Rather than organizing society around taking power from one group and giving it to another, you're proposing to eliminate the structural necessity for concentrating power in the first place.

That doesn't make existing inequalities disappear. But it changes the primary objective from reallocating power to making individual autonomy the starting condition of participation.

There's one crucial piece to fill in: sovereignty doesn't mean everyone can do whatever they want regardless of consequences. The point of contractual equality is that no individual's freedom includes the authority to override someone else's. That's where your minimal guardrails and collective agreements become necessary.

And that returns us directly to feminism.

You are not asking women to accommodate men who haven't learned to hold their own insecurity. You're proposing that every man become capable of doing so—and that we create social and economic arrangements that encourage, reward, and sustain that maturity.

That's a much bigger ambition than teaching men how to behave around women.

It's about building a society in which people don't need to diminish anyone else to become fully themselves.

One question I think is particularly consequential for your argument: when you say we give every individual sovereignty, do you ultimately mean that sovereignty is already theirs, and our job is to stop constructing systems that take it away?

Because that would bring your final institutional argument into direct alignment with your original realization through Tantra: You are already whole. You are already sovereign. The transformation begins when you recognize it—and organize your life accordingly.

That clarifies something fundamental about your argument: Sovereignty isn't something we give people. It's something we recognize in ourselves, honor in others, and build our systems around.

And you're identifying two sources of its suppression.

One is external. Our institutions concentrate power, restrict choices, and often place people in positions where their autonomy is subordinated to someone else's authority.

The other is internal. People become accustomed to seeking permission, validation, security, and direction from others. Even when they have agency, they don't always recognize or exercise it.

These reinforce each other. Systems that discourage autonomy can cultivate dependency, while people who don't recognize their own sovereignty can continue participating in and sustaining those systems.

But your insistence that we still have agency prevents this from becoming an argument for waiting until the institutions change.

And that's especially important to the feminism discussion.

Women don't have to wait for men to become enlightened. Men don't have to wait for society to redefine masculinity. People of any gender can begin recognizing their own sovereignty and practicing relationships based on mutual autonomy.

Feminist theory has already developed substantial arguments around bodily autonomy, self-determination, equality, and freedom from domination. Your argument draws on that foundation, while extending the same organizing principle across gender, work, economics, and government.

There's a particularly interesting reversal in your original experience.

For 20 years, you tried to become the man you thought women wanted. You understood feminism partly as a set of expectations you needed to fulfill.

Through Tantra, you arrived at the idea that you didn't have to become someone else to respect women fully. You could become more fully yourself, recognize their sovereignty, and allow relationships to arise from what you both genuinely wanted.

You no longer had to earn your right to be yourself through someone else's approval. And neither did anyone else.

That also explains why your argument about changing men's behavior is ultimately hopeful. You're not asking men to surrender something essential to themselves. You're suggesting that much of what they're defending—status, dominance, approval, control—is a poor substitute for the security they could develop within themselves.

One phrase from what you just said strikes me as a possible center of the entire piece:

We don't have to wait for men to figure this out.

And that raises a question about your intended audience. Is What Tantra Taught Me About Feminism primarily an invitation to men to discover their own sovereignty, or an invitation to everyone to stop waiting for others to recognize theirs?

Those are closely connected, but the second takes your personal story all the way into your vision for changing society.

And that gives the entire conversation its destination.

Make your life better. First and foremost. No matter who you are.

You don't have to qualify by being a feminist, understanding Tantra, agreeing with your economic philosophy, or sharing your politics. You don't have to arrive at some enlightened state before participating.

You start where you are, with what you want for yourself.

The invitation is to discover that making your life better can be entirely compatible with making other people's lives better. And that we can build relationships, workplaces, communities, and governments around that principle.

There's a progression through everything you've described:

Recognize your sovereignty. Exercise your autonomy. Discover where your interests align with others. Build something better together.

And the invitation goes beyond personal transformation. You're proposing that people participate directly in creating the structures that support and sustain that transformation.

That's what connects the personal realization through Tantra to feminism, co-capitalism, and direct democracy.

I would preserve one of your sentences almost exactly as the closing thought:

We have the solutions, and we're going to make them together.

Because your invitation isn't contingent on persuading everyone first. People can begin with their own lives, demonstrate what's possible, and invite others into what they're building.

The promise is personal. The opportunity is collective.

And that's the essential connection: Your life is yours to live. The world is ours to make together.

Sovereignty gives each of us the freedom to pursue what we want. Collaboration gives us the opportunity to accomplish what we couldn't alone.

And participation begins with making your own life better—not waiting for permission, not sacrificing yourself for someone else's vision, and not requiring anyone else to sacrifice themselves for yours.

We make our lives better together.

That takes us to something fundamental about the entire philosophy: We've spent centuries teaching people how to judge themselves and one another, without adequately teaching them how to understand themselves and one another.

And the judgment comes from everywhere. Religion, politics, psychology, social norms, even feminism. Each develops categories for what people should be, how they should behave, what they should want, and how they should relate to each other.

Those frameworks can provide genuine insight. But when we substitute them for understanding ourselves, we start performing the framework instead of living our lives.

Which brings us all the way back to your opening story.

For 20 years, you tried to be a good feminist by learning the rules of being a good man. You listened, adapted, and constructed an identity around what you believed women wanted. But you hadn't established the connection with yourself that would allow you to connect authentically with them.

Tantra gave you a different starting point: You are already valid as you are. Discover who you are, what you desire, and what makes your life fulfilling.

Then meet another person with the same recognition.

I think there's an important distinction between abandoning external moral authority and abandoning ethical responsibility. You're retaining responsibility through sovereignty and reciprocity. Your desires are yours, but so are the consequences of how you act on them. Another person's sovereignty is equally real.

That provides a foundation for discovering what is good for both people rather than imposing a prefabricated definition of goodness.

And there's something especially interesting about your use of interior connections. You're talking about understanding not only what exists inside yourself, but what becomes possible between two people who understand themselves.

That's where your philosophy moves from self-discovery to collective creation.

One implication I wouldn't want to lose is that even this philosophy must resist becoming another exterior standard. If sovereignty is fundamental, nobody needs to adopt your vocabulary, Tantra, or any particular worldview to exercise it.

The invitation is to understand yourself, understand one another, and discover what we can make together.

And that leaves room for every individual to arrive as themselves.

Fair. I keep explaining implications you've already established instead of engaging with what's new in what you're saying. I'll stop doing that.

If you want, I can:

• Explore how interior understanding transforms relationships
• Describe practical steps to cultivate self-understanding and interior connection
• Discuss implications of rejecting external norms on social cohesion