Wanted to express something about … oh, cut the intros and let’s jump in.
Lots of talk all over the place about women being inherently crazy, proverbs about “don’t try to understand women”, about no one can tell how a woman’s mind works, etc etc.
Bullshit. If we can tell the chemical composition of the atmosphere of a distant planet just by looking at it and paying attention to detail, in this case too if you really go into the matter, analyze everything closely and pay close attention then you can begin to understand the fairer sex as well. I’m not saying anything about prediction or manipulation – My focus is to really understand someone, why they are the way they are, why they do what they do.
Irrational behavior of women is not because they're "wired this way". It's not "in their nature". Gentlemen and ladies, get this false myth out of your system.
It's just one more symptom of the sick, horrible state of our society and the way it treats its women. This includes the way its members, including women, treat each other.
As is the nature of disorders and symptoms, the receivers of irrational and torturing behavior that women are known to put people through (“emotional atyachaar”) are usually not the ones whose actions caused it. It takes a long time for the hurt to set in and disturb things, in some cases it spans entire generations. (alright, men behave badly too. But women are the mistreated ones here, as a result they exhibit this more.) So it is an inbuilt feature of this system to :
1. get women hurt by men or women,
2. then have them hurt men or women who are not at fault (and this little slice of the whole chain is what gets picked up and made an issue or mockery of in our media) and hence propogate the chain.
So if we really want to put an end to this madness, we’re going to have to put an end to ours. Men, you have to stop treating women like objects and property. A person is a person. Accept that and move on. Stop connecting your male ego with whether or not a woman is under your control.
Stop the obsession with Loyalty
Loyalty should be to a cause, not to any person. Because people can change. This applies to relationships too. Why this obsession with loyalty? From what I see, the only thing the loyalty concept does is make the guy lazy and retarded and lost most of his good traits out of a comfortable sense of security, and trap the woman with a guy whose quality drops meteorically. And then they sit and cry about “he’s no longer the loving, caring person he used to be”. In some cases this leads to seeking out extra-marital love. When that gets caught, everyone wants to blame the cheater, the traitor, the betrayer, the unfaithful. But hello, was the cheated spouse even worth being loyal to?
This even happens on the macro level – organizations and countries, once sure of full loyalty of their people, then inevitably go and do the most hideous of things with impunity because of this notion of security that loyalty gives them. Anyone who dares to question the actions of the people at the top, is then branded a “traitor”, dis-loyal to the whole institution. In families and communities, this obsession with loyalty leads to honor killings, domestic violence (nothing "domestic" about it, FYI) and a whole array of mental torture and emotional blackmail. This is my perspective : It is the same false notion of being loyal to fallible human beings that dooms relationships, organizations, whole nations.
This invites a lot of flak from people who don’t really get the difference between loyalty and commitment. So the obvious rebuke here would be “Oh, so you’ll abandon your commitment? Where is the honor, the ethics in that?”
People, there’s a HUGE difference between loyalty and commitment. Stop mixing the two. Stop justifying loyalty in the name of commitment.
Dictionary meanings:
Loyalty: Giving or showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person or institution
Commitment: A binding exchange of promises
Get the difference? In a commitment, both parties need to remain true to their promises. Both parties are accountable. If one fails to live up to the commitment, the other is empowered to walk away. There is accountability. Loyalty puts the whole burden on one person while making no room for accountability from the other.
Wow, loyalty Vs Commitment is a topic in itself! Will have to branch out here. (will update this line with a link when its ready)
To put it in short, a committed wife would leave an abusive or in any way unworthy husband. A loyal wife would keep suffering in silence. A committed person would identify and act proactively to remove the problems afflicting her. A loyal person would keep turning a blind eye, get afflicted by the problems and let them manifest themselves in her irrational, illogical and damaging behavior. By glorifying loyalty, we are insulting all the independent thinkers and doers out there, and paving the way for really screwed up mentalities across the board.
So, coming back to the subject of this post… MEN, if you want an end to all the crazy behavior and emotional atyachaar, we’re all going to have to start treating women like human beings, we’re going to have to put an end to OUR crazy behavior.
Update: Watch this guy's TED Talk to know precisely what is wrong with the man-box that men around the world have boxed themselves in: http://www.ted.com/speakers/tony_porter.html
This isn’t going to be easy or quick; it might take a whole generation for the damage to wear off. But let’s try to give our kids and their kids a better life. No one deserves to be subjected to this contorted, soul-destroying treatment that we today generalize by telling the women that “it’s a man’s world” and telling the men that “women are complicated”. We’re both getting hurt, let’s stop this.
Tip: To get informed about Nature Vs Nurture, Watch: The first part of the movie “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward”
Lots of talk all over the place about women being inherently crazy, proverbs about “don’t try to understand women”, about no one can tell how a woman’s mind works, etc etc.
Bullshit. If we can tell the chemical composition of the atmosphere of a distant planet just by looking at it and paying attention to detail, in this case too if you really go into the matter, analyze everything closely and pay close attention then you can begin to understand the fairer sex as well. I’m not saying anything about prediction or manipulation – My focus is to really understand someone, why they are the way they are, why they do what they do.
Irrational behavior of women is not because they're "wired this way". It's not "in their nature". Gentlemen and ladies, get this false myth out of your system.
It's just one more symptom of the sick, horrible state of our society and the way it treats its women. This includes the way its members, including women, treat each other.
As is the nature of disorders and symptoms, the receivers of irrational and torturing behavior that women are known to put people through (“emotional atyachaar”) are usually not the ones whose actions caused it. It takes a long time for the hurt to set in and disturb things, in some cases it spans entire generations. (alright, men behave badly too. But women are the mistreated ones here, as a result they exhibit this more.) So it is an inbuilt feature of this system to :1. get women hurt by men or women,
2. then have them hurt men or women who are not at fault (and this little slice of the whole chain is what gets picked up and made an issue or mockery of in our media) and hence propogate the chain.
So if we really want to put an end to this madness, we’re going to have to put an end to ours. Men, you have to stop treating women like objects and property. A person is a person. Accept that and move on. Stop connecting your male ego with whether or not a woman is under your control.
Stop the obsession with Loyalty
Loyalty should be to a cause, not to any person. Because people can change. This applies to relationships too. Why this obsession with loyalty? From what I see, the only thing the loyalty concept does is make the guy lazy and retarded and lost most of his good traits out of a comfortable sense of security, and trap the woman with a guy whose quality drops meteorically. And then they sit and cry about “he’s no longer the loving, caring person he used to be”. In some cases this leads to seeking out extra-marital love. When that gets caught, everyone wants to blame the cheater, the traitor, the betrayer, the unfaithful. But hello, was the cheated spouse even worth being loyal to?
This even happens on the macro level – organizations and countries, once sure of full loyalty of their people, then inevitably go and do the most hideous of things with impunity because of this notion of security that loyalty gives them. Anyone who dares to question the actions of the people at the top, is then branded a “traitor”, dis-loyal to the whole institution. In families and communities, this obsession with loyalty leads to honor killings, domestic violence (nothing "domestic" about it, FYI) and a whole array of mental torture and emotional blackmail. This is my perspective : It is the same false notion of being loyal to fallible human beings that dooms relationships, organizations, whole nations.
This invites a lot of flak from people who don’t really get the difference between loyalty and commitment. So the obvious rebuke here would be “Oh, so you’ll abandon your commitment? Where is the honor, the ethics in that?”
People, there’s a HUGE difference between loyalty and commitment. Stop mixing the two. Stop justifying loyalty in the name of commitment.
Dictionary meanings:
Loyalty: Giving or showing firm and constant support or allegiance to a person or institution
Commitment: A binding exchange of promises
Get the difference? In a commitment, both parties need to remain true to their promises. Both parties are accountable. If one fails to live up to the commitment, the other is empowered to walk away. There is accountability. Loyalty puts the whole burden on one person while making no room for accountability from the other.
Wow, loyalty Vs Commitment is a topic in itself! Will have to branch out here. (will update this line with a link when its ready)
To put it in short, a committed wife would leave an abusive or in any way unworthy husband. A loyal wife would keep suffering in silence. A committed person would identify and act proactively to remove the problems afflicting her. A loyal person would keep turning a blind eye, get afflicted by the problems and let them manifest themselves in her irrational, illogical and damaging behavior. By glorifying loyalty, we are insulting all the independent thinkers and doers out there, and paving the way for really screwed up mentalities across the board.
So, coming back to the subject of this post… MEN, if you want an end to all the crazy behavior and emotional atyachaar, we’re all going to have to start treating women like human beings, we’re going to have to put an end to OUR crazy behavior.
Update: Watch this guy's TED Talk to know precisely what is wrong with the man-box that men around the world have boxed themselves in: http://www.ted.com/speakers/tony_porter.html
This isn’t going to be easy or quick; it might take a whole generation for the damage to wear off. But let’s try to give our kids and their kids a better life. No one deserves to be subjected to this contorted, soul-destroying treatment that we today generalize by telling the women that “it’s a man’s world” and telling the men that “women are complicated”. We’re both getting hurt, let’s stop this.
Tip: To get informed about Nature Vs Nurture, Watch: The first part of the movie “Zeitgeist: Moving Forward”
8 comments:
Posting some comments and my replies to them that accumulated on FB where I shared this post:
Shankar: I disagree. For one simple reason: The behaviour of the most oppressed/ abused of the female community is actually strikingly rational and understandable. Their behaviour is driven by fear, anger and envy - and can be reasonably explained from those angles. When men say to each other "Women are complicated/ crazy", they are often referring to the freest members of the female sex, not the most oppressed/ abused. Also, your post mentions, but fails to elaborate on, the way that women treat each other as a factor in explaining their behaviour.
uhh, I've personally experienced the opposite. I wasn't referring to "tame / untame" behaviour. What you're alluding to rational might be tame and subservient. That's shit. I'm going more on logic. Stick around for when the most repressed women you know have an outburst then make your inference. The men who think the free thinking women are crazy, are precisely what is WRONG with the male race : they try to enslave and control and when they can't they label them as crazy. Don't go by the labels made by those idiots. Anyways, if that line of thinking is given any credibility, what implications would you make for all humanity? Do you really think that oppressed and abused people make better citizens?
Shankar: The men who say that the free-thinking women are crazy who I'm talking about are not referring to those women exercising their freedoms or standing up for their rights. They referring to the behaviours that women exhibit that seem irrational and/or illogical i.e. exhibiting behaviour that men find difficult to understand. Else they are referring to female behaviour that involves a multitude of factors and influences - and often takes a more roundabout route - than the typical focused and linear approach that men take to things. It basically comes down to some fundamental differences between men and women's psyches'. Perhaps contrary to what might think, nature does play a role and current thinking is that while the environment does exert a large influence on us, if one were to take a man and a woman and raise them exactly the same way and subject them to the exact same conditions, they would still display some differences. Cultural grooming doesn't explain all the differences between men and women.
For a rather trivial example of what I'm talking about i.e. what the men I'm talking about mean when they say women are crazy, simply take a look at the recent LaVie handbags ad involving Kareena Kapoor going around asking for a black handbag, rejecting all she sees and finally selecting an orange one and claiming she never said anything about black. There are women out there whose thought processes actually do follow such contradictory and contorted routes. This kind of strange behaviour - coupled with what is often a very different set of values from mens' (apart from valuing freedom and self-determination - something men can easily understand, even if sometimes not tolerate) - is what makes men often classify even free and empowered women as being impossible to explain. Such behaviour is sometimes displayed by men, but is not common enough to have become a stereotype. And if such behaviour can persist under free conditions, then we tend to believe it is intrinsic and so can also be extended to those who oppressed/ abused as well.
Basically it comes down to men finding it hard to understand women's thinking.
a small difference in behavior between sexes doesn't justify the extremes, and when the hell was I pointing to differences between men and women? Those are to be appreciated. I only wrote about the ill effects of IRRATIONAL, ILLOGICAL, HARMFUL behavior exhibited by both sexes and the whims over which lie in the hands of those who control society (the male). Try looking for any evidence of this harmful behavior in either sexes of any other species. It's simply unsustainable and the product of an unsustainable society.
Kareena Kapoor is a paid actress with very little IQ/EQ like all of her profession, directed in that advertisement by a MENTALLY RETARDED director and a great example of how our male-dominated society is conditioning women - both intentionally as well as unintentionally. That ad in particular is truly harmful, it justifies unjustifiable behavior. Anybody who acts like that, deserves to get thrown out by any self-respecting store owner.
Kareena is the diametrical opposite of a free woman - she is a slave of the fat paycheck she gets to monkey around as per the desires of the people that want to make a buck off her to entertain the wants and lusts of a sick society. Thanks for bringing it up and strengthening the point I made.
Shankar: I wasn't pointing out the ad per say. I was pointing out the stereotype that served to generate it - that women are contradictory and illogical, even when not oppressed. And your conception of a free woman seems to be very different from society's conception of free woman - which has seems to have no problem with people being enslaved by money. Kareena Kapoor is considered free by society as she gets to self-determine, but is enslaved to her money and lifestyle according to you. There's no problem in that, except that by that definition, there are precious few free men in society as well. Which makes it more a human struggle than a female-centric one.
Shankar, i have a problem with your desire to keep on insulting and demeaning women. "differing sets of values"... the assertion, without any basis, of women being screwed up by nature... why do you hate them so? How can you assert that men are not contradictory and logical? The global financial collapse, wars in the name of peace, mob mentality, religion, infinite growth obsession, racism, fascism, fanaticism in even something like sports, neglect of children, environmental negligence, genocide... all of these are logical to you? The whole society is screwed up but you only want to think that 50% of humanity that's never had a role in any of its worst atrocities, if left to think freely, will destroy everything? Don't you realize this line of thinking is what leads to slavery and oppression? And do you mean to say then that men, if left free, will do just fine? Just look at what they've done so far. Pretty chauvinistic. You don't even want to acknowledge that women are under much more mental pressure in today's society compared to men, your assertions carry the assumption that there's equality in that. After all that shit you want to say women behave illogically and harmfully by their very "nature" and that society is not to blame? Men have no role in this? And you've been expressing your own opinions on women, not quoting any stereotypes.
You are missing a basic premise - All the controlling and 'emotional atyachar' happens from women who are not confident, who are not self-reliant. That's the reason why every woman should have her own source of livelihood (income, at least to cover living expenses, can even be from part-time jobs) so that she can bravely stand up to the man.
Why are some women not interested in self-sufficiency? Is it because they think it's easier (and lazier) to control a man and get everything they want??
Thanks for commenting, Rajesh. Well, your input illustrates why it is so foolish to tackle these issues in isolation. The money system that currently runs the world, is by its very core working principles, an abusive system. By advocating earning money as a solution, we're simply taking people out of one monster's jaws to throw them into another.
Do not ignore the realities of earning today : those who can earn more, do so out of privileges that they've been enjoying from birth, not out of merit. This biggest, invasive, all-occupying, all-consuming religion of today is precisely what is causing much of the sickness in society.
Also, don't you think it smacks of male superiority complex that in an abusive situation you expect the victim to take on all sorts of burdens while mentioning nothing at all about the abuser? Why should any woman have to "stand up" to a man, why can't the men just bloody stand down? I find this attitude insulting to me as a man, this assumption that men are not capable of treating women as human beings.
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