Four Feminist Men

A Decade of Rejecting Non-Feminist Folk

We have a decade-long history of well-intentioned men coming to us ‘to help’.  When we get less than an hour into conversation with them, we usually recognize all the red flags that tell us they are really there to exploit.  Sometimes, we don’t figure it out for weeks or months. Sometimes, we went all the way to the altar with them with both parties’ lawyers having worked for months, and then it fell apart at the signing table.

There came a point where we realized the helpful men were trying to turn us into the Catholic nuns working for the priests.  ‘Put your houses and all your personal belongings into the business so the balance sheet looks better,’ some vulture capitalists explained.  To which we responded, ‘No, are you putting your personal possessions into the deal?’  To which they said, ‘No.’  And that was the end of those discussions.  Or they wanted to help but needed a worldwide exclusive license to operate our brand. That’s not help, that’s exploitation. Or, they approached saying they want to help, but it comes with a big price tag.  That’s not help; that’s the sale of services.

We walked away, thank God, from all the non-feminist men (along with the one non-feminist woman) that tried to help us in their own exploitative ways, and it left us free to engage with the right partners when they finally came along.

Four Feminist Men

The first feminist man we met was Damian.  He was waiting to greet us at the Hawthorne Lounge, our first stop in the Los Angeles Catalyst/Traditional Dispensary Tour.  He was instrumental to the partnership forged between the companies.   He got his law degree while serving in the Navy, a man who is well-traveled, well-read, soft-spoken, and a fierce warrior for a free and fair cannabis industry in California.

With each stop, we do this very old-fashioned but necessary greeting of the staff that work the location. I mean, we do this at every dispensary, not necessarily at the bigger facilities that do growing, harvesting, curing and packaging.

We stand in a line outside the dispensary with our baskets.  The staff come out one by one, greet each of the Sisters individually, and are given a scroll and gift from the Sisters.  Depending on the number of staff, this sometimes took 45 minutes.  After that, we visited the inside of the dispensary.  And after that, we sought the local sesh place to sesh with the budtenders.  The only lounge there is for smoking is the Catalyst Hawthorne, a lovely place, but all the other dispensaries and most dispensaries allow no smoking on the grounds.  It’s state regulation.  But we know from earlier dispensary tours that the budtenders have a place to sesh nearby.  It might be an alley, it might be a tree with some curb to sit on down a street, but they have a place.  We sought out those places at the end of each visit to sesh with the staff.  It was a warm and wonderful experience every single time.

The second feminist man was introduced to all the Sisters at the Hawthorne lounge, during the sesh part of our visit.  His name is Elliot and he also came to the farm the day after Damian came, so he had already been introduced to Sister Kate and Sister Hilda, but not the others.  Like Damian, Elliot is a devoted family man.  We had the extra pleasure of meeting his wife and children.

The third and fourth feminist men we met on our journey were Aaron and Alex.  One is the owner and operator of Traditional Co (grow operations and chain of dispensaries) and the other is the President and General Manager of the same company.

If you are wondering, it is not possible to meet too many feminist men.  And speaking of feminist men, a funny thing happened during the podcast with Aaron.  Sister Esme was in the back with the camera technicians and as the conversation turned to feminism, she asked the technician if he was a feminist man.  He said ‘no, oh, no.’  (emphatically).  She told us later, ‘Then, you and Aaron kept talking and he learned what it meant and suddenly he said, ‘oh, that, oh, yeah, I am a feminist man!’  Delightful.

How do you know if you are dealing with an authentically feminist man?

They give themselves away with clues.  Damian wanted to be there to greet us when we pulled up in Los Angeles, but the timing had to be military-style or he wouldn’t be able to drive his son to sports practice.  Elliot, the founder of Catalyst and a man who reigns over a growing empire, shows extreme consideration to his wife and children, and you get a strong  sense that these men are serious about protecting and caring for their families.

When we first met Aaron, I asked him bluntly, as I’m prone to do, if we would be meeting his wife.  ‘No wife, but check out my daughter’ and yikes, someone should have warned me that I just triggered a ten-minute period of fawning over images of his daughter on his cell phone.  She’s about a year old and, frankly, gorgeous, but even if she wasn’t, he would think she is.  The only pictures he had on his camera were of his daughter.  He must be a first-time dad, we were amused.

Aaron also took us deep into the bowels of the indoor cannabis grow operation and with five sisters and Aaron alone, amidst the whirling fans and engines, he wanted to talk to us where his staff couldn’t hear.  That was a warm-up to the podcast.  And we were treated to a feminist speech that was tender, sweet, and encouraging.  It was entirely absent of mansplaining.  Just Aaron wanting us to understand that because we have entrusted them to grow our dispensary cannabis, because we have entrusted them with our packaging and distribution, that we have to be comfortable there as if it is ours.  He wanted us to know anything we wanted would be done.  He specifically wanted us to know that the organization welcomes our spiritual practices, and he relayed his messages like David the Elder would have done it — in a standing talking circle in a private place.  He did it like an older brother would do it, quietly, conspiratorially.  We were having that talk with plants all around us, heat from the sunlamps on us, a weed-nun version of a sweat-lodge, maybe?

And then we met Alex, his partner.  Like Damian, he is a quiet legal warrior, standing next to a big personality and making a lot of things happen in the background so the big personality can keep doing his job.

As we went on tour and met the staff at both Catalyst and Traditional, we became keenly aware of the women in power in those organizations.  Hanna, who is the manager of the Traditional Mendota grow operations, Myra, the manager of the Hawthorne Dispensary and Lounge, and Bree managing the vendor relationships.   We also met men in management positions, so it’s not like it’s a lopsided formula, it felt egalitarian — men and women working together in harmony as God intended.

When I think of this new partnership that allows the sisters to launch their brand in forty Los Angeles dispensaries, I think of a group of us sisters standing in the center, flanked by four strong men constituting a brotherhood.  To our right is Damian and Elliot of Catalyst, and to our left is Aaron and Alex of Traditional Co.

Gender Role Customs with Compassionate Exceptions

It is in our customs, practices and core beliefs that we divide the work based on gender.  The men grow and tend the crops.  The women make the medicine from the crops.  Both teams work together during harvest season.  This is an ancient custom we practice on our small hemp farms.  This custom has an obligation that comes with it, and so it is on the shoulders of the elders to notice a person that doesn’t fit comfortably into their gender assignment and make exceptions and movements based on that.  So we have had a young man work only with the women for the three years he was here, because he fit more comfortably there than working with the men; he was a gentle man and worked in the kitchen with the women, like the women.  We’ve had women volunteers, as well, who exclusively work with the men on the outdoor plants; those are individual decisions.  We prove that you can have structure based on gender, while making the empathetic choices for the exceptions that need to be made.

The Role of the Brothers

This might not be a popular principle, but it is authentic.  The Sisters go through a rigorous period of qualification before they can take the veil and they go through a second a third rigorous period before they are allowed to take their final vows.  No such thing happens for the brothers.  The brothers are here at the will of the Sisters.

For as long as patriarchal history has been recorded, powerful men have had wives and mistresses and both have to put up with the situation.  Men of influence or wealth could bring their wife to one dinner party, their mistress to the next, and the world would continue to bow and curtsy as if it the swapping of women was a royal gesture.  Again, the women involved with the two-timing man would just have to deal with it.

Our custom is not based on wanting to get revenge for those women who suffered, but rather to empower women to say, we, too, can just declare who is right for us at the moment.  The men have to be helpful to us or be gone.  It’s a very basic survivalist thing, in my humble opinion.

The men who become brothers do have a specific role in the organization, however.  They have two main jobs, fire tending and fire prevention.  The fire-tending is literally the tending of the fires of the sunrise and sunset ceremonies, and tending the torches, as well.  The ‘fire prevention’ is used metaphorically, as it is the role of the brothers to interface with local lawmakers and officials as well as any other influencers of such things, on behalf of the Sisters.  It is their job to keep their ears to the ground and report any information that is circulating publicly about the sisters, especially that which could harm them.  This is a protection role that the brothers take on to be of service to the Sisterhood.

This is a direct quote from the Book of the New Beguines, produced in 2019, a book that summarizes the core tenets of the Sisters’ belief system. This paragraph came from the section called ‘The Role of the Brothers’:

Brothers have a distinct role with the Sisterhood.  They are to protect us.  They are our political ears to the local ground hearing what people say about us and reporting back (politically, socially).  They protect us.  They tend our fires.  They play an important role in our community and we will never want to be without them.  They are not disrespected.  We are simply focused on women empowerment and believe strongly that men will only benefit from this focus – because we believe that choices are empowering to women, we will, from time to time, choose to partner our commercial enterprises with men who share our values. 

It’s a curious symmetry that after so many years of politely declining “help” from men who came to conquer, we now find ourselves standing shoulder to shoulder with four who came only to collaborate. We began this journey learning how to say no to the non-feminist men who mistook our mission for an opportunity. We end it surrounded by four feminist men who saw our mission as their own. The lesson is not just that good men exist, but that when women stand firmly in their sovereignty, the right men show up — not to lead, but to walk beside us.

You can shop in our store for our CBD products, merchandise and mushroom coffee.  Our high-THC flower will be in Los Angeles Catalyst and Traditional dispensaries next month.