Our 21st Century Should Pursue Collective Progress, Not Individualism!

An article in Forbes last week was brought to my attention; “Why Millennial Women Do Not Want To Lead” by Julie Zeilinger, founder and editor of FBomb.org.  In it, she concludes that despite “impossibly high” standards of achievement for women vs. “upsettingly low” standards for men, women should not shy away from leadership for “their intelligence and integrity are more than enough”. 

OK, but part of women’s trouble is that they are pigeonholed for their intelligence and their integrity:  perfect for constituting the dossier, and then have others take all the credit.  Or being outcast for being overly ambitious. 

There’s no doubt that women are given a harder time (as Ginger Roger summed it up, “I did everything Fred Astaire did but backwards and in heels”).  But the problem goes much deeper, for it touches on a societal trait that transgresses questions of gender and sex:  it’s our societal love affair with shows of power, of domination. 

It’s suggested that women lead with intelligence and integrity.  But are we socially prepared for such a switch? 

Do we collectively value integrity?  Not so often; or at least we waive it when it’s a figure we like – why else do mafia sitcoms and movies make blockbuster ratings?  A couple of years ago, there was the joke what if Lehman Brothers had been “Lehman Sisters”?  But safe bets and risk-taming measures and regulations do not have rock star kind of value and are systematically refused by half of the American population. 

Do we value intelligence?  Street smarts, maybe; business acumen that can make someone rich and powerful, sure.    But nuanced thinking?  It’s often seen as “weakness” – just consider the last couple of presidential debates and elections.  Critical thinking?  It’s slowly disappearing from educational curricula increasingly focused on skills and trivia rather than a solid, well-rounded education rooted in knowledge and critical thinking. 

And what about some of the other values Americans learn in kindergarten:  kindness?  Sharing?  No, we still trump with whatever will stoke the dream of making it rich, fast, with cold razor-sharp calculations or with no effort at all.  No, in our current mores, fame and fortune are exciting; kindness and sharing are for the suckers. 

For some of us, it’s a no brainer.  Cooperation is a key asset for performance and for survival.  It’s a key part of Darwinism – survival of the fittest is not only about competition but knowing how and when to cooperate.  But explain that to a conservative American who accuses any positive collective measures put forth by Obama of being “socialism” (as if it were a great evil!).  The truth is we are societally in awe of the powerful and aim to get there ourselves, at whatever our level. 

Love is often leveled out to sex which is leveled out to domination

Work, which used to include loyalty toward a company-wide endeavor and allegiance to the workforce, is all too often leveled to outsourcing, productivity fragmented into individualized skill sets so that some few individuals can get ahead while the many more get ever lower

Profit, which used to be reinvested into a company to improve R&D (research & development) and boost its employees, is now often leveled to a few wealthy shareholders’ returns, widening the gap if the figures are good… and widening it further if the figures are bad as they will choose to cut heads before lowering dividends.

We are letting it happen because of our awe of the rich and powerful

And/or out of fear for our own personal survival, attempting to be part of the elite so as to not find ourselves entirely disenfranchised.

But it doesn’t have to be this way.  We can have a very productive and healthy society if we move away from such dogma (performance society, still-life identities, monotheistic beauty…).

One of the legs of the women’s movement was making the personal political.  But we’ve lost control of what makes up “personal”.  At the time, it meant using collectively each individual’s experience to help society progress.  But through the 1980s, then on through the 90’s and 2000’s, the “personal” because a very “personal” singular recipe for making it on one’s “own”.  Every person has been composing with his/her “own” to get ahead, make it big, make a break… or just make it through the day! 

And where has this left us?  “Every second’s a calculation”.  Each woman strives to live the archetype of each facet of a woman’s life, simultaneously… locked into her “own”.

And our current societal model is exacerbating that:  Nuclear family as opposed to community.  A walking portfolio of skills as opposed to a company of people.  A still-life, projected identity for others as opposed to a solid self concept with a sense of our individual and collective worth.  Personal/individualized intelligence and integrity as opposed to having higher expectations of our society for an environment conducive to collective progress.

It’s even got to to the extent that a single mother in the US is one of the most isolated members of our society as described in the NY Times.   And firing-up the debate as to whether women can “have it all”.  But how can we when we’re set up for every woman to take on the entire battle single-handedly and separately, individually?  Another article showed mothers proudly taking no breaks (no maternity leave), having babies for whom they’ll have no time and for whom they have no intention of making any space… because they’re going to try to do it all… individually.  And, with such models, how will those children cope?  Individually! 

The solutions we need now is to get back to the original call for the personal… A shift for making the “personal”… collective!

What does that mean? 

-          Continue protecting family planning and pushing for universal healthcare. 

-          It means reconsidering the nuclear family and how we can raise future generations more collectively (to at least give them a more collective mindset while freeing up more time for parents to balance career and family).  As says the Nigerian proverb, and taken up by Hilary Rodham Clinton, “It takes a whole village to raise a child”.  This is a great way of summing it up – we cannot do everything each on our “own” – economically and energetically, it isn’t sustainable.  Even these powerhouse, “superwomen” cannot sustain indefinitely doing it all on her own. 

-          It also means reconsidering work, collectively.  As says one mother who took very little maternity leave, “there is no way to have a ‘blissful maternity leave and also stay in the game’”.  Work is more cut-throat than ever and, she’s right, a short absence can be an irretrievable set-back.  But, is that necessary?  Must it be this way?  This is our society, our world, it’s up to us to demand change – but we must do it collectively.  There is enough scientific research to convince us that a company is most productive when its employees are in a trusting and empowering environment and feel a certain amount of security and motivation.  If a woman wants to have a baby and not miss a beat at the office, why can’t she do it from a distance? 

We must break out of this narrow-minded idea of individual gain and remember there’s little lasting individual gain without collective progress. 

Let me know what you think.

Talk to you soon for another bite from the apple,

Eve

Refining What 21st Century Progress Should Mean

I’ve recently come back from a trip to India.  As would be expected, they have totally different points of reference when it comes to societal codes. 

On the one hand, living of life that we keep behind closed doors or in back yards, they live out in the open, before anyone’s eyes to see: washing clothes, combing hair, feeding children, napping…   For a Westerner, it’s rare to glimpse what is usually private, intimate… and left me with a rather friendly invitation to focusing on our common humanity and daily lives. 

On the other hand, the sexual and the sensual so ostentatiously flaunted in the West are, in India, more latent and discreet. 

This got me to thinking about the society I would like to build, the one I would like to welcome my children; I got to thinking about what constitutes progress and how it comes about.

Oftentimes, countries that are emerging have the luxury of adopting the technological advances of the first world countries, then improving upon them thanks to a combination of their own vision and the benefit of others’ learning curves.   Instead of following the same slow curve of progress as the initiators, these countries can jump start at the heights where others’ progress has reached.  For example, despite widespread poverty, nearly 74% of India’s population (over 880 million), own mobile phones (http://www.dnaindia.com/analysis/column_why-india-has-more-cell-phones-than-toilets_1655351) and enjoy stunningly low rates for communications compared to many first world countries. 

But does this same “progress curve” rule apply to social and societal advancement?

Looking around some parts of India, I witnessed this:

But what did I discover on the cover of the Indian publication of GQ?

This is practically racier and more extreme than Western standards, which are already in great need of revision.

What I find disturbing is for “progress” and, I suppose, “freedom” to have the face of images that are so deprecating for women.  Should modernity be represented by visuals that suggest a woman’s main value amounts to her surgically enhanced breasts?  Is this what we should be aiming for?  Should we allow a great international media machine to pull countries with much potential and richness to slip into anti-progressive attitudes for women as a sign of advancement compared to traditional attitudes?

Is it progress for one’s body to be a commodity?  Is it progress for the person to be reduced to a sexual object?  I don’t mean to imply that beautiful women can’t represent anything other than sex.  But I do mean to imply that every time we mainstream and focalize on pornography (which used to have a reserved time, place, and function), we sideline the other hard-won aspects of woman-become-subject (vs. the “object” Simone de Beauvoir so aptly identified at the beginning of the 20^th century).  This ostentation also raises the pressure on overly busy women trying to “have it all” to unreasonable standards of Monotheistic Beauty & body in the seduction game, as well as feeds unreasonable expectations in terms of our sexual performance (as opposed to sexual fulfillment)…

The more extreme this ostentation becomes, the harder becomes the backlash of who reject such extremes.  Take, for example, the resurgence of French women choosing to veil themselves.  For some, it is a means to reject this sex-centeredness.  For others, it’s a means of survival in their environment (the creation of the group called “ni putes ni soumises” in 2003 brought attention to the regressive choice for young French women living in the “cités” to dress in bulky sweat suits or veil themselves to avoid being cast as a hoar and become an easy target for slander or even rape / gang rape).  Another example is the adoption of “women’s only” space on public trains and subways in India to help protect women from unwanted staring, fondling, or worse. 

But, in a modernized and/or modernizing world, surely we needn’t resort to veils or segregation to shield ourselves from an unhealthy objectivizing gaze?

Artist Shreyas Karle collecting data for the “closed space fantasy meditation” and studying “camouflage to get around censorship”

I usually balk at these types of innovations because, for me, men should learn to control themselves and change their gaze rather than forcing women to cover themselves.  There is no reason for making the woman simultaneously the victim and the one to pay amends while the actual perpetrators are shielded from any responsibility.

After all, is progress about makeshift protection or about reevaluating the rights and obligations of each empowered member of a society?

But for this, we need to get collectively clearer on exactly what “empowered” entails in a progressive society.  I have already voiced my opinion on this subject, but India’s hesitation between the dynamic progress of human industry and superficial Western codes of sexual liberation has helped me realize other adjacent issues to be addressed and unintended consequences to measure:

·         Where is our frontier for intimacy?  There was an article a year or 2 ago about young women getting piercings in the vicinity of their pubis to reassure themselves there were still some parts of their bodies seen by a select few.  We exhibit more and more of ourselves, enabled by social media to spill out all of our private lives over the world wide web… creating a greater need for exhibitionism and approbation… and in turn leading us to build our sense of self and worth only through the other’s gaze.  Intimacy is a means for reclaiming our own prerogatives and preferences.  But when it is eroded, our defenses and confidence erode as well.  To give a concrete example, check out the youtube “am I pretty?” in which young women, even young girls, ask the internet to rate their beauty.  They are clearly tying up their self concept to others’ gazes while diminuing their intimacy and personal territory. 

·         Where may we safeguard a harbor for desire?  For longing?  Love and lust are increasingly commoditized and beholden to our consumerist expectations of instant gratification whereas the bylaws of more lasting and fulfilling relationships seem to build according to a slower dance.  We should start giving the market of love a little more substance and a little less “eye candy”.  But as long as love is misused as a way of confirming our self-worth and societal acceptance (like in the “am I pretty?” videos) instead of self-discovery and growth, we will be demeaning one of the world’s most important renewable resources and sources of hope and welfare.

·         What is our responsibility for protecting our children and How far can we allow media to go with its soft to hard porn without it creating new social norms that cross a serious (albeit unintended) line of fostering children’s sexual exploitation (cf. The See Hear Speak Campaign)? 

These are the kinds of questions no one wants to consider for fear of taking away liberties.  But the other day, when I was walking in the street in a Parisian suburb with a dress whose skirt flowed just above the knee, I felt quite uncomfortable and isolated as young men made suggestive remarks and the other women nearby were veiled.   Could it be that if we toned down ever so slightly our race to sex-centeredness, we could preserve our right to dress lightly in full confidence?  It’s time for us to establish our own conditions on these questions before we find ourselves all locked-in a bind, far from the real liberty and progress we’re seeking to preserve.

Let me know what you think.

Talk to you next week for another bite from the apple,

Eve

Pink Brain, Blue Brain… or How to Stunt Everybody’s Growth

The February 2012 issue of Sciences et Avenir reports on current scientific conclusions that male and female brains are the same; that any theories or postulates stating brains are hardwired according to gender are not founded in scientific proof.  We now know that cognitive functions such as memory, attention, and logic cannot be attributed to one gender rather than the other.  As points out Rebecca Jordan-Young of Barnard College, Columbia University, the consensus of the brain being differentiated by gender is both unscientific and political, “neuro-sexism”, as Catherine Vidal, neurobiologist and research director at the Institut Pasteur calls it. 

The article reports on a number of conclusive studies which both prove this basic, “hard-wired” equality and bring to light the realities of “soft-wired” inequalities rooted in “the stereotype threat” and other socio-cultural factors (math scores directly correlated with the country’s level of women’s emancipation, the clear impact of stereotypes on both men’s and women’s testing performances).

The article also explains that the human brain is made up of 100 billion neurons and one million billion synapses, governed by only 6,000 genes, not enough to control all the connections.  The scientists interviewed explain that at birth, only 10% of neurons are connected. The other 90% will connect progressively in interaction with family, education, and culture.  Nothing is “fixed” in the brain and it will be continually reconfigured through-out one’s life, which is known as cerebral plasticity (“plasticité cérébrale”).   Your brain will be what you do with it.  Any activity you spend time doing will reinforce the cerebral circuits mobilized by that activity, to the detriment of those not used.  Considering the difference in girls’ and boys’ social activities, it follows that their brains develop into functioning differently.  40 years of research show the most differences in gender are due to social, historical, or politic construction and that biology does not justify inequality.

It is this point I would like to build on in what I call my “stunted synapse theory” mentioned in my headings.

Thanks to the plasticity of our brains, we are (and we become) what we do.  This is of major importance in terms of our potential and possibility

• in an era and world in which we increasingly can (and are even required) to make ourselves, this fact of “becoming what we do” is essential to our lives (as opposed to preceding generations were fare more dependent on birth right and externally determined circumstances (place of birth, social milieu, sex, religion, etc.)
• in an era of ‘marketing of me’ and “projected identities”, our activities have more to do with portraying – spinning – storytelling than physically building
• in the virtual orientations of many of our jobs/livelihoods, as well as the economy, et al, this idea of ‘doing seems almost novel

So, we become thanks to our doing.  Indeed, a study conducted in 1997 on 2000 people concluded that multitasking is a myth and that humans can only do two things at once (one on each frontal lobe).   Our brains, thus, can only be focused on two activities at a time (focused in a way capable of creating new synapses – not what we call automatic pilot with which we act without focus).

Here is my thought:

As long as we’re focused on

• Contorting ourselves to maintain our still-life identity
• Constricting our bodies and eating in order to fit into unrealistic norms
• Paralyzing our bodies to meet the Beauty Myth
• Binging on consumer goods to avoid asking deeper questions

We’ll be reducing our brains to a conservative role instead of a constructive one, plus, we’ll be stunting our growth… and even, even more importantly, stunting our capacity to grow!

Many years ago I read a great essay in Rebecca Walker’s To Be Real titled, “The Fat Lady Sings’ in which the author testifies from her experience of not accomplishing her potential as long as her brain, mind, and body were being starved and obsessed by weight loss.  All of her brain waves were mobilized, first refusing to eat that treat, then the pride of having not eaten, then the frustration of not having the treat, then the anger of the refusal, then the eating of it anyway followed by the guilt and then the promise on never starting again… and so on until she realized she barely had the energy or availability to focus on anything else!  On thinking, or innovating, or doing, or building.

I have lived through the same trap.  I have also experienced the liberation of delving into a project instead of getting stuck in the egocentric quest for self-perfection.  As I’ve often exclaimed to friends, there’s no better diet than a project.  It stokes creative energies and canalizes them into constructive flow instead of imprisoning them to a closed circuit of misplaced control and repression.  It fosters  new connections in our brains and represent a learning curve… making new neuronal connections in the brain for real self-improvement instead of falsified (or temporary) self-perfection.

Women:  it isn’t our brains that’s our problem; it’s our choice of activities!

As long as we allow ourselves to be duped into spending disproportionate time on the Beauty Myth, Age-masking, still-life perfectionism, etc., we’ll continue to foster a kind of inertia around our development and progress. 

We have to push ourselves out of our comfort zones.  We must talk not only to like-minded people but also converse with others who are not convinced by the same arguments.  We must open ourselves, and our synaptic connections, to growth!  To creativity!  And above all, we must stop imposing upon ourselves this rigid exoskeleton of perfection.

Sincerely,

Eve

Rendez-vous next week for another bite from the apple.