I had wanted to pen a poem, describing the inner strength, beauty and the delicate thoughts and emotions exuded by women. I gave up. Penning a few proses might do injustice on the opinions I needed to express and besides, I couldn’t quite articulate and express my heartfelt thoughts about the emotional and psychological stirrings that are constantly keeping us, women, in our place.
Jokes aside for being a ‘happy feminist’, my intention is not to decorate or celebrate women of history on their achievements or martyrdoms. Nor am I here to chastise women for their seeming foolishness when they are besotted with men or rather, the ideals of love or the prospects that love is supposed to bring about. I don’t know much about men. Or rather, God has whispered into my ears that it’s not my job to dissect and interpret men because He has made them the way they are anyway! So, in case you start refuting my opinions here; my point is this — what I’m going to say is going to be biased because God has made me to think, to function and to perceive as a woman.
Let me also get this clear — what I’m about to share are not evidence-based; I’m not interested to bore everyone including myself with what the experts say, what the guru say and what studies have shown. Yet, I try not to oversimplify or over-generalise my observations. Often, I engage in what I called, “contemplative practices” — reflecting about not just my life, but on everyday encounters with people, at the workplace, at the malls; on societal trends to even how pop culture is depicting, in this case, the struggles and sensibilities that women face. I am also spending considerable time with God, to trace the origins of the great gender divide and on what God has to say about the interactions between men and women.
In the case of pop culture, metaphorical images have often been used to symbolise womanhood, transition into womanhood, captivating beauty, vanity, vivaciousness, courage and tenacity in the face of despair or challenge and of course, vulnerability. I’m not a movie-goer but the only films I will spare some time to watch belong to the biographical, historical account kind of genres. Since young, I have always been mesmerised and fascinated by historical accounts of life in the English Court, especially during the period 1500s — 1600s (think about the Tudor era, reformation of England period). This was a period marked by great upheavals with constant clashes between the Protestants and the Catholics through politicisation. One would agree that the political mayhem during this era would have made very good plot twists for a Hollywood movie and they sure did.
What I am more interested is this — I often wonder how women living in this era experience their lives, the anguish, torment of being accused and tried, thrown into the dungeons without trial. I wonder what might have gone through the minds and the hearts of the women sovereigns (we have a couple of queens like Queen Elizabeth I, Mary Queen of Scot, Anne Boleyn, Catherine of Aragon etc.) as they struggle to rule their kingdom fraught with not only political and religious upheavals, but more so, the disappointing acts of men whom they have trusted.
Fast forward to 2020. The narratives surrounding womanhood — the roles that we play or are expected to play at home, at the workplace or in the society; the behaviours that are acceptable to ourselves and to others; the dreams that we continue to dream despite being suppressed by circumstances — all these did not change much. They just took on a different form, in a slightly different shade.
Asymmetrical Evolution
I can’t help but to suspect that the ceaseless conflicts entangling both men and women, from gargantuan issues to the littlest ones like what to have for dinner, has something to do with ‘flawed evolution’. It’s almost like both genders (underscore the specific use of word ‘gender’ here), how they interact with each other, their respective perspectives and expectations on each other, didn’t really catch up with the order of the day. If we think about the mentalities and the roles that each gender plays beginning from the Garden of Eden until the present day, we may be still using almost the same lens to perceive and to react when it comes to addressing or solving the issues presented to us today. An irony is this — while women fight to install equality or at least, equity on gender-related issues, I would say a good number of us haven’t quite evolve fast enough in the way we relate to men as evident in the way we manage our relationships with them.
While women goes about proclaiming their rights and asserting their capabilities in the open, our fundamental sense of self is still pretty much anchored to age-old rhetoric surrounding child-bearing responsibilities, submission to husbands as a virtue and the biblical depiction of women as temptresses. And yes, some of us continue to believe and behave in the same manner since pre-historic times. For men, they continue to uphold their views and expectations about how women should behave and how their wives should behave, again, ironically being fuelled by the beliefs from their very own mothers. Of course, pop culture did little to help cast a new light on the need to evolve the gender relationship when we continue to celebrate love and romance in a certain way and how those timeless portrayals of the greatest love stories ever told tend to be those classics that we will rewind again and again (Think “Titanic” where being loved means the need to be “protected” and to be “heard”).
Corporate Powerhouse or Argumentative Bi**ch?
Some men really detest women who call the shots in the boardroom. The intense debates and rationalisations put forth by women sometimes come across as affronts to men’s masculinity. I mean, who can blame men when they have been wired in a certain way? No number of perspective-taking exercises can help both men and women “walk in each other’s shoes”. I may be guessing here, but I think it probably takes double or triple the effort for women to earn the respect from her male counterparts and at the same time, taking another triple or if not, quadruple the effort to dispel any remote suggestion of under-table hanky-panky. I sometimes wonder how assertiveness can be communicated by women without being perceived as argumentative.
Again, I guess one of the ancient virtues (I think this still applies now) relates to how a graceful woman or wife should hold her tongue and be submissive. But my point is, this would work very well in a patriarchal society. For all we know, the women who lives under a patriarchal system may well be seething with resentment for having to hold their opinions to themselves because of man-made rules. So, as with other forms of human behaviours and they are being modified; the instruments and structures we put in place implicate and confound men and women to behave in certain ways on the surface, to fulfil the agenda or desires of various groups of people. Perhaps deep down, the fundamental yearnings to be human longing for intimacy, acceptance and belonging, didn’t change after all.
Raw Vulnerability
As human beings, we are vulnerable, regardless of being a man or a woman. Even the greatest heroes of our times have their fair share of vulnerabilities. In case you immediately associate ‘vulnerability’ with the state of being ‘weak’, I would like to offer you a more accurate view of what it means to be ‘vulnerable’. As how Brene Brown has purported the state of being “vulnerable” in her book, “Braving the Wilderness: The Quest for True Belonging and the Courage to Stand Alone” — The definition of vulnerability is “uncertainty, risk, and emotional exposure. Vulnerability is not weakness; it’s our most accurate measure of courage”. And all these lead to the hard question that we asked ourselves as women: ‘Are we willing to show up and be seen when we can’t control the outcome?’
For most of us whose raw emotional nerves have been wounded time and time again, the answer to the question is likely to be a “No”. Especially in the world we live in today where we conduct our lives based on immediacy and fulfilling our needs instantaneously. Everything seems to be highly controlled and calibrated with almost zero margin of error. Our confidence on virtually every decision, every policy we make, are set at sky-rocket levels. Imagine losing control or even just relinquishing a little bit of control amidst a highly structured life. Because this sense of control is insatiable and it’s so tightly coupled with our sense of worth (since we kind of reason that our accomplishments and how capable we are result from how well we control the upstream course of actions), we find it very disconcerting to “let go”.
So, what happens then? As women, we tend to our pile up heaps of defences — playing down the need for a shoulder to cry on when we are upset, buffing up our mental toughness to prevent any possible attack from others that we don’t really have what it takes to be at where we are and swallowing bitter pills of lonesomeness as a deliberate choice we make to disengage to minimise conflicts.
Pride and Prejudice?
Men might agree with me on this, “Women are conflicted beings”. I think we sometimes are. We are truly vulnerable, but we want to appear invincible and yet we wonder why no one thinks we are vulnerable and we cry over it. If we choose to lay expose our vulnerabilities and when others do not know how to handle your vulnerabilities, it will be detrimental anyway and we cry over it too. So, it’s not a matter of pride. It’s never a matter of pride. It’s more of getting to an effective way and possibly, time to communicate our vulnerabilities. Yet sadly, it still takes two hands to clap. You can have the most brilliant articulation ever but you just keep on communicating them to the wrong audience. This is when you probably know that it’s not about your own shortfalls anymore. Some men are just plain prejudiced about women’s intent. Their lenses are so heavily coloured that every single word that comes through are marred by presumptions and inferences. Same goes with the some women as well.
Emotional Blackmail or Bargain
The universal perception that women is the weaker of both sexes tends to feed men’s claims on how women can and will play this “weakness” to their advantage whenever they fail to broker a deal. Perhaps this is true for some couples but it’s definitely skewed to generalise the notion of women having such an unfair advantage over men. To be fair, even men can resort to using this “armament” but let’s not degenerate this conversation. My point is, everyone is capable of using emotions such as greed and guilt to manipulate others. And again, it takes two hands to clap here. You don’t have to fall prey to emotional blackmailing if you suspect that the other party is doing this to you. That said, I think what women are driving at is more an “emotional bargaining”. This sounds almost like haggling over some stuff at the marketplace but I guess the psyche has been pretty much wired for us to do this. On the outset, this sounded rather transactional, however, what gives rise to this sort of mentality really stemmed from women having an untainted and faithful hope that her love will not go unrequited. Is this a selfish act of self-preservation and how do we view this vis-a-vis our lofty ideals of acts of selflessness? It all depends on the ideals and experiences that individuals are exposed to and we can all debate until the sun sets. What I can say is this — regardless, it doesn’t dilute the love that women have for men. It just makes relationships a little more complicated to handle in the already complicated world we live in.
The dangers of Beauty
In March this year, Harvey Weinstein, the infamous character who spurred the #metoo movement was convicted of all his sexual crimes. This topic is particularly intriguing and personable to me and I wrote about it in January, albeit, a very brief commentary. No, I’m not talking about the outright sexual confrontations like rape or molestation. The manifestations are more sublimal in nature, so fleeting that you either fail to catch it or the perpetrator don’t even think he’s out of line; and often, the whole suggestion just gets dismissed off as another run-of -the-mill joke.
The whole point I’m trying to make here is this — beauty is a multi-edged sword. It cuts many ways when yielded by different parties. For instance, beauty has been misused to promote women and by the same token, beauty has been met with disdain from those who cry foul. Women have been unfairly accused of playing temptress to get to where they are because of beauty which they didn’t choose in the first place. Beauty has been so commonly used to flatter and coax women into submission. At the end of the day, we are again left conflicted — do we celebrate or hide our beauty? It’s not how young girls are being brought up when it comes to dealing with their ‘beauty’. As little girls, we were being brought up to be as “beautiful” as we can. We play dress up, we imitate princesses in lavish dresses, prancing around with elusive prince. And now, we come face to face with the harsh reality that “beauty can be ugly”.
The Great Naive Storyteller
I’m not sure if this trait has its roots from our formative years indulging in fairy tales. We are such convincing storytellers, conjuring up hopes and dreams and visions of a happily-ever-after ending that we are almost able to find explanations and reasons to justify any potential red flag in a relationship. And it takes immense effort from ourselves and from others to cajole, reason or even to force ourselves out of this self-fulfilling prophecy that things will somehow fall into place eventually. I don’t know if women are more sentimental creatures but I guess most women tend to always be in a “rewind” mode. The visitations into the past either to immerse themselves in happier times or to remind themselves of the pains are almost like a favourite past time or a nightly ritual. And yes, most men can’t fathom this. The illusions and the re-visitations (which come with compare and contrast between the ‘then’ and the ‘now’) just hit the wrong note in men. Well, the scary thing may be this — once a woman gets past this lengthy episode of relishing the past by teasing out every single detail that has led her to her present state, the relationship will be over sooner than the man realises.
I’m not saying that nature got it all wrong and our mental models should have evolve as fast as the rhetoric we have sought to surround ourselves with today. On the flip side, could we have gotten the rhetoric wrong, meaning, we should have been who we used to be and most importantly, what God has made us to be?
I leave you to form your own judgement on this.
