Learning the enneagram has changed my life, transformed my marriage, and changed my outlook on reality as a whole. It has helped me understand so much about people, interpersonal dynamics, my family, my children, and generational problems within my family. The first couple of years I studied the enneagram, I was so excited that it broke down traditional, cultural understandings of masculinity and femininity, and masculine and feminine roles in the family and in society. I felt that it explained everything there was to know about people.
But there is something that has been distressing me more and more as I trudge onward on the enneagram path towards understanding: it does not explain male and female differences.
The enneagram explains so much of underlying human nature and motivations but it does not take into account differences between male and female.
For example, why is it that there are more couples than I can count whom I know personally, where when the man is the one who initiates sex, they have sex, but when the woman initiates, nothing happens. Regardless of type, regardless of instinctual variant, regardless of dominance, aggressiveness, passivity, this is a common pattern across male and female sexual relations. (And, by the way, if the man consistently turns down the woman when she initiates sex, it is a red flag for sexual and other kinds of abuse.)
I need an answer. The enneagram does not have an answer for male/female issues because it sees all people as simply human, completely sexless. Either the enneagram is seriously lacking and it needs to have an added component or there is something else I need to learn about all this.
Either way, it is incredibly frustrating.