Just been trolled by The Jellicle and ended up feeling pissed off with the world, this happens from time to time. He had me read some article by a kid advocating that girls don’t need college, they need beauty school maybe because they just need to be able to go shopping with the money that the nice rich guy they marry gives them.
Obviously I was annoyed. We’re living in the twenty-first century and some kid (who, to be fair, was writing in a school magazine and had to try and get her ideas out in a limited space) is advocating not having to think and a life of total dependency. This lead us into a weird argument about choice and fulfilment.
Sometimes I get frustrated with the whole world and I just want to drop LSD into the water supply – thus denying everyone of all choices that I wouldn’t make. That’s when I’m feeling frustrated however.
So, what do I believe in; responsibility, equality, and fulfilling yourself. Stretching that very essence of self until it has been all that it can be.
I can’t help it, when you have a girl, and especially when it’s a girl because I have this gender bias imminent in me that women need to realise how oppressive this world can be just as all oppressed peoples need to know about it – not just of the oppression that they themselves are under but also of the rest of the oppression and how it feeds. As I was saying, when it’s a girl advocating a life of dependency then it makes me flip because girls have fought so hard to get us where we are in this country and I do think that we owe them, owe our mothers and grandmothers a hell of a lot of respect. Because we have a position as women thanks to them.
I don’t think that any human being on the planet should rest on it’s dependency, it’s a bad state for people to get into and it absolves them of responsibility for themselves when every person should be responsible for their own actions and inactions and no one person’s opinion is worth more than anothers – they should be judged on their own merits. (No one person meaning mine and that girls are equally valid, yes they are, but of course I think that I am right.) All people are equal and all people should believe in that equality and accept the responsiblity that goes with it. Life is about growing in understanding of yourself not being satisfied with the baubles that it offers gratis, free of charge, happiness should be earnt and life should be learnt until you have achieved that knowledge of self and humanity to the best of your ability.
I can’t help it, I care deeply when I hear other people wanting to just coast through life with no consequences to their actions and no desire to take pleasure in meaningful actions. Only baubles that have no meaning other than, that’s what I’m supposed to be doing, to make them happy.
There is no shame in being a housewife, that means taking responsiblity for the education of your children and the asthetics of your house. There is no shame in being a career girl, that means taking responsibility for your household’s finances and working hard to get where your ambitions lead. I could go on with a thousand stereotypes but my point is that when someone’s ambition in life is to coast and live off someone else without lifting a finger then there’s something wrong with the way they think.
We are who we are because of other people. We can only know ourselves through ourselves. But no matter how hard we try we are always going to owe others, and if we don’t even attempt payback then that makes us freeloading scum. And to try and describe a whole gender, my gender, as freeloading scum who shouldn’t be anything else. It makes me want to cry. Relationships are communications, they are about valueing people for themselves not what they bring to your life – they bring themselves, anything else is your responsibility. Oh, life looks so tawdry and cheap sometimes and people don’t seem to care about each other and they just take pleasure in the misfortunes of others.
I can’t help it, I care deeply about pretty much everyone on the planet and we’re just going to sink into our own morass if we end up caring purely about surface things.
Just fucking love each other and do it properly. Really, feel it and stop valueing things above people.
Too many articles out there look like parody while being intended with total sincerity by their proponents. It’s a fucking arsehole of a thing, but there it is. My family are a long-lived one, and I don’t expect to outlive gender, race, age or class bias.
That said – yes, that there concept is a clearly stupid one. Anyone should be permitted to reach the peak of their own merits, and the only real recourse to us is to teach the next generation that and shut out those who claim otherwise.
That article might as well have been written with upsetting you in mind. It was bloody absurd, and I agree that its points are foolish, poorly thought-out and inimical to notions of free choice and gender equality, but I can’t say it produced such a strong reaction in me simply because it was so clearly absurd. It might as well have been a parody, the way it looked.
However. The main issue here seems to be that of fulfilment, of potential and achieving that potential no matter what. This of course begs the question, what is it that makes a person ‘good’? What makes one person’s life better than another’s? Why is one person worthwhile, while others are not? In the end, the answers to these questions are entirely personal. Should everyone be bound to achieve their potential, compelled to understand that this is the right thing and that anyone who tells them otherwise is simply dead wrong? Is it acceptable for someone to stop and say, "No more, I’ve done all I want to and I’m happy," when they can still go further? What, indeed, counts as achievement? Is it better to be a happy pig, or a sad philosopher?
For myself, I’ll vote for happiness and plurality. People will always believe differently to us. Their views may be toxic, we may despise what they say and see no reason why they should say it, but it’s not worth taking away people’s freedom for. They can’t tell us that we must believe as they do, we go our own way. The least we can do is afford them the same courtesy, and then never speak to them again. Or, indeed, in the first place.
I do expect to outlive gender and race bias, the others being based on experience and intangibles will take longer but by gods I do want to.