The Dance of Deception

Truth-telling cannot co-exist with inequality. Our vision of truth is profoundly eclipsed by the loss of diverse voices and visions that give complexity, texture, and depth to what we name reality

the extent that we can make room for a rich weave of women’s stories and voices, we will be better able to identify those universal threads that do unite us as women. Such unity will not be based on the silence, suppression, and shedding of difference, but rather on the recognition and celebration of difference.

d radically different from ourselves. And it requires that the context of this conversation be a safe space where everyone can be herself, where no woman feels she must leave behind a part of herself

Truth-telling demands far more than “honesty” and good intentions, as these are conventionally defined. It also requires us to relinquish our habitual, patterned modes of reaction and thought, so that we can move toward an expanded vision of reality that is multilayered, complex, inclusive, and accurate. The process requires us to be in conversation with other women similar to and radically different from ourselves.

Here is the oldest and deepest feminist challenge: to create the contexts in which we can define more authentically our own desires and aesthetics, and to be more connected to our bodies and how we wish to use them.

affirmations to “think positively” and “look on the bright side” can alienate us from our bodies and our unconscious, by serving to conceal emotional complexity rather than uncover what is hidden or lost. Sometimes, however, we only learn what is true, or real, or possible, or “still there” by experimenting with pretending and by restraining our so-called true selves

The solution to the problem is not to become less honest, but rather to become better truth-tellers.

McIntosh advocates the dual vision of recognizing that it is bad for us to feel like frauds insofar as that feeling perpetuates hierarchies, and yet it is good for us to feel like frauds insofar as that feeling may help us to undermine hierarchies.

It is not useful to sanitize the fact that under patriarchy, women are continually lied to, and that in the struggle for love, sanity, and survival, we continue to tell lies. Sometimes, only a harsh word like “lying” will do.

In psychoanalysis—as in the rest of life—insight and self-understanding do not flourish in an atmosphere of self-depreciation or blame.