Ego is not a dirty word (originally written in April 2013 and since then some ideas have evolved)
Full disclosure — I am woman!
Therefore I write from the perspective of a woman. Keep that in mind as you read this.
The stories, the books and the knowledge that has been passed on to the world since time immemorial are overwhelmingly written by men. We call the writers of our Constitution, “the Fathers of the Constitution”. The Bible, the Koran, the Torah all written by men with, naturally, a distinctly male perspective.
The economy, the monetary system, legal system and political system, were all designed exclusively by men. The International Monetary Fund, the European Central Bank, the World Trade Organization, the Federal Reserve, the U.S. Congress, the White House, the judiciary, are all overwhelmingly populated by men.
Women make up 50% or more of the population. It is common today to track the ratio of non-whites in most groups or organizations and when there is an over or under-representation, remedies for the imbalance are sought. You’d think — just out of fair play — that men by now, would have invited women to take up positions in groups or organizations where men out-number women. And of those there are myriads. But men don’t do that. And we women don’t even expect them to. Why?
Men and women, most would agree, are rather different. Our culture is built on male characteristics such as power, greed, dominance, competition, death — the worse qualities of the human species. An unconscious consent to permitting these ingratitudes has been inured into our psyche. We women ourselves barely notice the male-stamped template that infiltrates every corner of our existence (and theirs). Men are bigger and physically stronger than us and we have demurred to them due to this and so have kind men demurred to this. It is now an evolutionary habit that we need to confront. Sabre-tooth tigers have been extinct for some time and the strength that men were needed for is now handled by machinery (not that anything can replace a strong, muscular male physique — perhaps in power — but certainly not in beauty). But not all men aspire to living up to the traditional male image; in fact most are coming to see the folly in it as much as many women are beginning to see. Men too have evolved since the days that Helen Reddy belted out her song, I am Woman (hear me roar) in 1972:
The base rationale of a system that stems from male values, will have the corresponding implications just as a system based on female-designed systems have other types of implications. The profit system has given our lives direction in a way that sends us along a certain path, one which can often be predicted. For example, a system based on competition, though healthy in some ways also allows the most successful few who equate to a very small percentage of the population, to virtually have their competitors for breakfast. Being ultra-successful at making money is like being ultra-successful in any other field. Only the top 5% or so reach the heights. But anything one practices, one becomes better at. However, some people are not driven by competition, let alone the kind of competition-on-steroids it takes to get to the top of this perfidious architecture. It is patently clear to anyone with a modicum of consciousness, that this system does not allow for those who are just as valuable to the community as the monied classes, but who are not driven by competition or who are just not configured that way.
An economy based on traditional male values leaves out many important elements that matter if we wish to ensure that everyone gets to have a reasonable quality of life. The highest accolades in society are directed towards those who make the most money and this basis virtually encourages nothing more than hoarding and self-centeredness. Hoarding money is not good for the economy as it takes money out of supply and leaves scarcity in the demand/supply chain. This affects areas that are not associated with finance. And we also need to acknowledge that self-centeredness is not good for perpetuating life on earth.
Money is meant for the exchange of goods and services and when people are insecure about money, (which they almost always are) they hoard it hence drying up the funding for business to flourish and to maintain a reasonable quality of life for all.
As a civilization, we have not figured out a limit to the amount of money one should probably decide to stop at, before the obsession becomes somewhat of an abnormality, a disorder that needs psychiatric treatment. There isn’t even a consensus of a ball-park figure that determines some kind of satisfactory level, a concept of “when is it ever enough”?
Were we talking merely about preferences of ice-cream flavors that differed among different people, that would be one thing. But quantifying the amount of money that is considered enough is important because some endowments can be immense enough to wipe out a city. There are limits to everything but there are no limits to money-making. The few who direct the system, naturally, want to keep it that way. But for the rest of the population, it’s not so functional anymore. And it’s getting worse as we can see, with the gap between the rich and the poor growing like never before. The effects have literally, compounded over time so that now this main objective of the economy, that profit should come above everything, is causing the economy to metastasize like a cancer.
When an economy attributes value arbitrarily, then values can also just as easily be attributed in any other way. Our economy pays no value to the bounty of Nature, that is, the stuff we get for free. It places no value to the happiness of a workforce or the health and longevity of a population. These omissions I feel are causing the state to become malignant, despicable and dangerous.
And I mention this to bring attention to the extent of male thinking in our society, and how it has permeated every facet of life. Women are objectified in advertising, rarely men; men rape and are usually the ones to beat up uncooperative lovers; men fill minds with notions of superiority and inferiority, secrecy and death threats. Men kill indiscriminately 95% of the time (or perhaps more). Men decide to solve conflict by dueling and warring; “an eye for an eye” was mans’ invention as much as was the iPhone.
I can hear you now dear reader, building up resistance to these ideas, especially if you are male. Females also tend to respond in a defensive way, as though I am calling for a return to sexism. That is not what I am doing and I’d like to clarify that these ideas are radical, and yes, they are disruptive. But please hear me out and send me your critique after you’ve heard my case.
The male influence goes deep and it is as inconspicuous to us in many ways as water is to fish. In the area of equal pay and in preparing girls for taking on traditional male roles, there has been awareness over the years particularly since the 60’s and changes have been profound. But remember this that the entire edifice was constructed solely by males. Even today, you can look through a newspaper, and note the frequency of pictures of males to women, not counting the ones meant to titillate. Notice that ratio that occurs in positions of clout, like in Congress, board members, CEO’s, the military. The church, always a bastion of tradition, remains also a bastion of male domination and that’s easy enough for even a child to observe. Yet little criticism is made of it and women simply defer to following in all these strongholds.
What about the values we place on such matters as motherhood, breastfeeding, child-rearing, grand-parenting, caring for the aged? We don’t place any value on clean water, or clean air, helping a stranger, or protecting natural pollinators or the voiceless. We have only recently become aware of the widespread disaster that is imminent due to the wholesale die-off of the honey bee. I hope this is not getting too dramatic for you, because it is even worse than this.
Time is money we are told from birth. But why should I demote my life to the mere worth of what someone, somewhere, attributed to these pieces of paper? Do we have to surrender the sands that drain from the hour glass of our lives, in order to merely have food and shelter? Or for our children to go without (not just a proper) education but an education that has no bounds, no limits, that encourages full potentiality? What about the value of healthy babies and children that chuckle sweetly when they’re happy? What would it be like to go without that sound? What’s the value of loving the work you do, or the happiness of a population, or of laws based on true justice? Well, we say feebly, “there is value, but we can’t quantify those kinds of things” But why not? Why can’t we attribute a value to these things such as they are attributed to say, an hourly charge for labor, or a barrel of oil? Because men tend to not value such things and so left that out of their scheme entirely.
We have been missing out, dear people and we think we cannot live well without an economy based on profit. Much of the time, we can’t even imagine an economy based on anything else, except perhaps bartering, if we imagine an alternative economy at all. Well what of a whole new change, a new paradigm in fact? Have we seen enough of these paradigms (that women are inferior and that we cannot live without a profit system and that we cannot use renewable energy (because we want to be able to waste as much as we like without limits). But a new paradigm could spell the most exciting world we couldn’t ever imagine. But we keep saying no to change.
People generally feel that we have to remain on this treadmill, the daily drudge of common every-day life, one we feel boxed into, one we feel we cannot escape — in order to pay for our necessities. But we may be pitifully mistaken. Could we not have a much better quality of life if we didn’t keep buying so much useless trinkets and invested more love and cooperation towards each other instead? The reason we don’t ever get to see another way, a way that works for all of us and makes us flourish, is because, as mentioned, 51% of the population has been essentially barricaded from entering the public space in a thorough way — physically, psychologically and spiritually (for want of a secular word) and hence the visions of better systems and structures were kept unexplored. It is masculine to put oneself first, it is feminine to take everyone into consideration. We women have to allot our own value without demeaning men.
I would never want to demean a man. I don’t need to. I love men, I have a son who I think is stupendous and several close male friends who I have had a long time and love also. It hurts me to see some women treat men in much the same way as they might treat tampons. There are as many types of women, however it is belittling of a woman to treat a man badly. Women who do resort to such acts do so as an unconscious tendency to emulate a man’s power in order to feel like an equal. Most women are by nature, caring, and are not naturally inclined to be soul-destroying. Caring-ness is a quality we should value. I would not want to see women revert to dominant, blustering, or unyielding behavior. However standing up and claiming her feminine dexterity and discarding any squeamish modesty, she should now come forward and take hold of the wheel.
Humans are still in motion evolutionary-speaking and this emulation that women do of men is simply a reflex which will probably continue until at least we learn how to simply and intrinsically know our own worth. Women don’t have enough belief in themselves because the cultural inferiority that is our legacy from the past, still exists. Women have been taught that they must wait (“like a cookie on a plate” as one famous woman author coined, her name escapes me now). Girls and women must wait for a guy to ask them out (that’s how I was reared but perhaps not so much nowadays); they must wait for promotion, and of course must always wait until the guy stops talking before saying her piece. In short, women wait for approval as a matter of conditioning. In any kind of group of mixed genders, the men take all the time they need to make their narrative without a notion in the world they are dragging it out, whereas women will often rush through their words in order to “not take up too much of the valuable peoples’ time”.
That’s because we’re still learning. And we need the help of men. We need men to guide us in self-promotion. We don’t need them to tell us what will and will not work because they often don’t have an expansive-enough vision and discount most of that which doesn’t align with it.
We have to sometime account for what men have brought us to. Yes, men have built impressive structures and invented complex systems. But they have also brought us to the brink of being wiped out, if you’ll pardon my restraint. I do not apologize for sounding like, what some people would refer to as a “drama queen” because we are, let’s face it, at a dramatic time in our evolutionary path. The only planet we know, is heating up at an exponential rate; the population of the world is growing at an exponential rate; resources are being depleted at an exponential rate; trash and pollution is accumulating at an exponential rate and we have weaponry that can obliterate countries, and which are overseen solely by groups of maniacal and secretive men.
Men have brought us to this point with their ideas of making money at the expense of people, the atmosphere, the oceans, the soil, or anything for that matter. In their eyes, everything is to be mined, exploited, taken advantage of, pissed on, or destroyed if need be. This attitude is driven by the tacit approval of society which women inhabit too. The attitude persists, that the accumulation of money must be our major pursuit.
Most of us now have seen the results of that thinking — sophisticated advancement of technology that can take us into space, while people of the world live in abject hunger and poverty; continued lack of proper land management and environmental stewardship; children becoming poisoned with chemical poisoning that we still do not know the repercussions of, and widespread, almost third-world poverty in the United States, the wealthiest country in the world. There is no opportunity for us to reach for another time to refer to from history to find some kind of guidance. This point in our existence and all points going forward, will be the culmination of the many factors that have been lining up and which will result in exponentially different outcomes.
We have a planet that is being over-supplied by CO2 and because of this, it is heating up. Due to the “greenhouse effect” the heat is being trapped in the atmosphere. What if we had an economy that was based on reducing CO2? This would change the entire paradigm. Currently CO2 poisoning is extremely inexpensive. I don’t want to go into the genocidal nature of burning fossil fuels, I wish to address the subject of the “advancement of women”, let’s call it that for now. Later we may rework it, if we agree to call for the overthrow of men and the appointment of women.
By leaving out the majority of the population in constructing our world, we have also left out vast amounts of alternative visions and pathways. People think that if it wasn’t for money, we wouldn’t have the wonderful lives that we have now. But what if they are mistaken and what if that view was off by a longshot?
We can start doing it “our way” immediately; women and girls could help each other rise whenever they see their sisters stumble, sometimes all she needs is a wink. Everyone needs support! Men could also help women rise.
Sexual discrimination is what we do every day, and have been doing right up to the here-and-now. We just don’t realize it because women have accepted being the weaker ones, the ones always in the background, looking to men to fulfill our souls. But is is us who must direct ethics. We have earned the right to do this because we have proven ourselves more ethical (men constitute the overwhelming majority of murderers and thieves and almost 100% of rapists).
Why do we sink? Why do women underestimate themselves? I think it’s because we have not practiced enough. One always perfects with practice. But we haven’t taken on enough unfamiliar roles, we don’t speak up in a group, we don’t take the time we need to do it our way, we don’t like to make people think we are grabbing the limelight. These are insidious ways of keeping ourselves down. We must put aside petty jealousies between ourselves and recognize that every woman’s rise is a rise for me and the world, because a woman has a sharing nature, she usually doesn’t keep it all for herself.
Be prepared to stumble a bit like starting upon any new odyssey. We can ask the men to be there beside us with their arms ready to hold us. And in return we’ll teach them how to love deeply and fulfillingly.
Girls who don’t like the thought of hogging the limelight because they’ll seem pushy, should just get out there and get over it. Feel magnificent because you are, and don’t be afraid to express yourself. Don’t be afraid of making mistakes — mistakes are good, that’s how we learn the most. Recognize that you have influence, and exercise it firmly but kindly. You have the right to your dreams. Always welcome criticism because it is the one thing that will keep you humble so that you’re not lost in the stratosphere. Let’s stop pussy-footing around. Remember, even a man as humble as Jesus said he was the son of god!
Wouldn’t it be better if we rewarded people who reversed this patriarchal trend? What about then, an economy that rewards CO2 sequestration? That would translate into people being rewarded for doing good things such as growing plants, building soil, using renewable energies, designing alternative energy technologies. We could encourage everyone to use less dirty energy and encourage inventors and entrepreneurs to find new, clean and abundant forms of energy. With our ingenuity and dynamic computer power, my hunch is that we would lick this thing faster than can be imagined in this cumbersome, torpid and banal economic construct.
Women of the light — behold!
