Are Psychedelics Inherently Feminist?

My conversation with Professor Kim Hewitt on the "psychedelic feminism" movement.

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When we look back on the history of psychedelics in America, the big names are overwhelmingly male: Timothy Leary, Ken Kesey, Cary Grant, Aldous Huxley, The Beatles. But in recent years, there has been a movement to recognize the ways that psychedelic practices can help to specifically empower women, dubbed “psychedelic feminism” by activist Zoe Helene.

I talked to Kim Hewitt, a professor at Empire State University who studies this very intersection. Her 2019 paper “Psychedelic Feminism: A Radical Interpretation of Psychedelic Consciousness?”, published in the Journal for the Study of Radicalism, examines the idea of psychedelic feminism and its connections to ecofeminism, third-wave feminism, and French feminism.

Our conversation here, about how psychedelics help dissolve gender constraints, allow women to trust themselves more, and encourage positive masculinity, has been edited for clarity and length.

JKA:: How would you describe psychedelic feminism?

KH: Zoe Helene coined the phrase, and she really uses it as women using psychedelics to empower themselves, right? That’s great. I think that’s a starting point.

The way I conceive of it is as a whole new kind of feminism that really folds in empowering women, because they start finding their own voice, they start finding their own intuition, they start finding their own power of imagination. And I don’t think that’s just for women. Like anybody who works with psychedelics, they start to feel into a whole new way of being and a whole new world.

JKA: Acknowledging that this can happen for men, too, do you think there’s something in this practice that specifically can benefit women more?

KH: Yeah. I think specifically women are still often struggling to find their own voices and feel empowered, especially women who maybe come from either religious backgrounds, or live very conventional lives and raise families—it is a different world for them. Women are more likely to say, “I learned so much about myself. And I trust myself more. I trust my own intuition. I know who I am now. I’m less scared of people. I’m less scared of being judged because I don’t care anymore.” They find themselves in that way.

I only did like 20 interviews with men versus like 60 interviews with women. In some ways, several the men I interviewed had really pointed reaction: “Wow, I am discovering what kind of man I want to be. Like, all those gender things I’ve been fed about, I need to be strong. I don’t need to be taken care of and blah, blah, blah. I don’t need to be that kind of man. I can be soft, I can be nurturing. I can want to be nurtured.” Which I think it’s really beautiful.

JKA: That’s also a feminist reaction to psychedelic practice. To me the goal of feminism is actually to be aiming for no gender constraints.

KH: There’s a piece of my project that’s been really hard for me, which is maybe half the women I interviewed talk about the divine feminine and the divine masculine, and I just kind of cringe, because I don’t like those kinds of labels. And the only way I can configure it myself is to look at it as not biological, not gender, but energies and qualities and characteristics.

And often these women talk about wanting to have a balance, and have the divine masculine and divine feminine in relationship to each other, in balance. I can totally get behind that from talking about energies. You know, like, yes, we all have divine feminine in us, we all have divine masculine in us.

JKA: You wrote about how French feminism was your inspiration for this project. Can you talk about the connection between French feminism and psychedelics?

KH: What I loved and took from French feminism was their idea that there’s a certain logic of domination that embraces a linear, rational way of viewing the world. And that is exactly what has allowed colonization and hierarchies. And so for them, “feminism” is simply embracing everything that was left out—every emotion, and imagination, and the body, and eroticism.

JKA: Do you see that as what psychedelics allow more of?

KH: Yes. That really is just the starting point. I mean, obviously, so much the psychedelic world is taking indigenous rituals, customs, world views, medicines. I’ve come to really like the word interrelatedness—seeing the ecology of the world. There’s is no separate self. And I try to avoid my long tirades against capitalism and the industrial revolution, but so many of those pieces are building blocks of the patriarchy.

That’s the logic of domination, you know, the enlightenment, the scientific revolution that says, oh, there’s one way to have knowledge. And that’s the right way. And it’s the only way people know. And when you do that, who are you leaving out? You’re leaving out the mystics, the seers, the witches—all those people who rely on other ways of knowing, and other realms or the supernatural, and you’re saying that’s not the way.

I’m taking this from French feminism, the ability to embrace everything. Don’t leave anything out. Embrace men. Embrace all the systems. There’s a certain wholeness to the kind of feminism I’m conceiving as psychedelic feminism.

JKA: When women have like all female ceremonies, for instance, do you find that there is a difference in their experiences?

KH: Yeah, it’s interesting. This is where I started. One reason is obvious: People are really vulnerable in the psychedelic space. So for women to be only with other women often feel safer to them. Because unfortunately, there is abuse of power sometimes.

Women often would say, they just felt more relaxed, they felt like they could let their guard down in a different way, not have to worry about what the men think, not have to take care of the men. And without that layer, they can often have a deeper experience.

I don’t have quotes in front of me, but there was one woman I interviewed, and she was in her 60s. She had the most touching description of how, using DMT, she came to really feel that she was equal to any man. Like experientially, suddenly, she knew she was as good as any other person, including men.

And that’s such a good example of someone, with the help of a psychedelic experience, finding her own voice and trusting herself instead of what was given to her from the outside. So many people who have worked with psychedelics know this, it’s a very different kind of knowing.

JKA: I wrote down a quote from you. I’m just gonna read it. “As participants begin to explore their psychedelic experiences, they are empowered to author themselves in the same way Third Wave feminists chose to playfully configure themselves while admitting incongruity and contradiction relinquishing a postmodern pastiche of identity.” That seems like the crux of your argument to a large extent here, right?

KH: That’s also from French feminism, the self-authoring. I would say the piece I really like about that is the fluidity of it. Like, okay, you know what, the world is not congruent. The world has contradictions, and so do we. And that’s okay.

Not just as individuals, but as a culture, I really think psychedelics are going to help us deal with complexity and grow up, both as individuals, and as a culture. At least that would be my hope.