This Sunday’s Twittercast will be all about Power. What do people associate with power? How do they experience personal power, political power, sexual power, economic power or any kind of power they know from firsthand experience?

Read on for Madama Ambi’s intro to our ‘cast, which she will be moderating (and follow her on Twitter here)!

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The hardest job is convincing women to take their power. It hurts to say this. Women are ambivalent about power. They don’t know what it is, they don’t know where it comes from, and they’re not sure it’s a good thing to have. I’ve witnessed women undermining other women who have power or who show power. I’ve heard women say they don’t want power, they want consensus. They don’t need power, they have love. They can’t feel power, they are too helpless to even hold a charge.

We need to talk about power, sisters. We need to understand what patriarchy has taught us about power. We need to understand why women get nervous about the idea of taking power. We need to see power in all of its shadow and in full sun and the entire spectrum that lies between, so that we can decide what to employ, how to deploy, and how to ingest healthy, nurturing power. I’ve unearthed some clues about power.

Clue: men assume power. They feel entitled to it, and if they don’t get in their power suits on the job, they will take charge somewhere else in their lives. Furthermore, if this entitlement to power is frustrated over and over again, men will get angry and act out their anger.

Clue: women do not feel entitled to power. My generation and older generations learned we were not even entitled to have power over our own bodies and our own desires. We learned to trade power for virtue; we convinced ourselves that we didn’t want dog-eat-dog power. Let the men fight the wars and battle for market share, and we would exercise domestic power. We would influence our children and our PTA’s.

This is no longer true. Much progress has occurred in my lifetime. Yet, I still say, women as a class worldwide, and even in the U.S., do not locate power within themselves. Women do not assume power the way men do. Women need to be convinced that they have power, the power to command, the power to demand, the power to re-vision, the power to step into positions of authority that affect lives outside of their domestic domains.

Yes, I’m asserting that power is an illusion. “Make believe you’re brave, and the trick will take you far. You may be as brave as you make believe you are.” Maybe you recognize these lyrics from the musical “The King and I.” No? Too young for old-timey musicals? Ok, I’ve got a more current example of magic power and keeping up a good lie. About a week ago, I heard Scott Simon interview Philippe Petit about his famous wire-walking. Apparently, a film about Petit recently won an Oscar.

Asked if he thought about what would happen to him if he missed a step and fell from the perilous heights he sets for himself, Petit answered that he never wire-walks as a question mark. He is an exclamation point! He is writing in the sky with an unshakeable confidence such that it is impossible for him to miss a step and cause his own death. Confidence takes up all the room in his body, in his being, leaving no space for anything but confidence, not even for a glancing doubt or the possibility of a gust of wind.

Yes, yes, I’m thinking. My singing teacher used to tell me to concentrate on the thing I wanted to do, not on the thing I fear. Yes, it’s all about confidence, isn’t it? Then Monsieur Petit, artist that he is, tells Mr. Simon that of course it’s all a lie, because he knows, utterly and unavoidably, that he walks the wire in a state of complete fragility in a fragile world.

My love of artists wells up in my chest and I’m happy that I understand the contradiction Petit throws himself into every time he walks the wire. He understands the illusion of power. He knowingly puts himself up against terrifying odds with only a self-fabricated certainty, a power that he has created, that he relies upon, that he performs, and that at every instant is also a lie.

Clue: it’s hard to trade virtue, love, nourishing relationships and raising children for a lie. It’s hard to know what to believe when you realize you’ve bought into one big fat lie.

Madama Ambi is an activist feminist artist. Background in feminist psychotherapy, education and the arts. She has worked with the richest (millionaire producer of Broadway & film) and the poorest in this country (pregnant teens in the Bronx), and everyone in-between.

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