What is this slogan for?
Suzanne Moore in The Telegraph:
I was a bit worried, I must admit, that I was doing this womanhood thing all wrong. For my whole life I haven’t really got the hang of it. There are many things that women are meant to be interested in: shopping, baking programmes, thrillers in which other women get tortured that leave me cold. Ditto: weddings, dating, baby showers, celebrity gossip about torsos with pouts.
And that’s just to start with.
But I shouldn’t have worried because the United Nations has come up with a new slogan and tweeted “There is no wrong way to be a woman. There is no wrong way to be a woman.” They actually said it seven times, but I don’t want you to pass out with boredom. Maybe if you chant it you reach nirvana or maybe women are just so thick they need telling over and over.
It’s because repetition makes it convincing.
It’s probably a page taken from religion’s book: repetition is a valued tool in that particular way of making humans believe stuff that is just made up. Recite this prayer every day, or better yet, recite it ten times every day. If you say it that often it must be true.
The right way to react to this ridiculous mantra is surely to feel murderous. What is this slogan for? Who is it for? These endless attempts at inclusivity mean that being a woman can now even be a feeling in a man’s head. Eddie Izzard, I saw the other day, had been voted the best female comedian. Sorry, but I am not laughing.
There is no wrong way to be a woman. Are they serious? Let me list the ways. I and many women live with them every single day.One of them is to live in fear. One woman is killed every three days in this country – a figure which has become much higher in lockdown. Being old is also seen by many as the wrong way to be a woman. Another is wanting sex. Or not wanting it at all. Both of these things can be regarded as “problematic”.
Having an opinion; not having an opinion. Talking; not talking. Laughing; not laughing. Having a job; not having a job.
You see, in recent years, it has been mostly wrong to be a woman in public life who stands up for the sex-based rights of other woman. Standing up for trans people is decent and right, but standing up for the rights of women apparently makes one a transphobe. If you start talking about the female experience and think it’s not just different to men’s but different for women of different ethnicities and classes, you will be called a bigot. Your job as a woman, unlike a man’s, is to include everyone, all the time.
And that goes double triple a hundred for men who say they are women. If you don’t include them in the Women Club you might as well carve up puppies and make tacos out of them.
One thing is clear though – if you are a woman the message you receive from birth is that you are pretty much always doing it wrong. That you will never be good enough.
Of course we can unite around all kinds of differences, and let them flourish. But these are differences that need to be acknowledged and talked about. Not brushed away in a simple ‘inclusive’ virtue signalling slogan. Otherwise we are left with a regurgitation of patent nonsense and the denial of women’s embodied experience. Womanhood becomes reduced to just an individual choice.
And if it’s just an individual choice, what the hell are we complaining about?
?????
Not just include everyone, but center everyone…everyone except women.
All the yes. Religions also have learned that the effectiveness is bolstered by the presence of other people who are repeating the same thing. Hence the important of weekly mass. Ritual is massively important to human psychology, and religion leverages that. So do a bunch of things, but religion’s the single greatest example.
On the darkly horrifying side of that public repetition, though, is a facet of social psychology that religion has evolved to exploit: the plausibility of the thing being affirmed is inversely related to people’s tendency to convince themselves of its truth. That is, the more ridiculous my public statement, the more likely I am to engage in something like cognitive dissonance reduction and convince myself that what I’ve said is true. Which is why evolution doesn’t do away with religions’ outlandish claims: they’re a feature, not a bug. TWAW is the same phenomenon.
Which is just one more reason why I sometimes wonder if I’m actually human. I hate ritual. That’s another reason why I struggle with therapy, because they are determined to impose ritual on you – affirmations, etc On the rare occasions I ever gave in and wrote affirmations, they always ended up in the trash before I finished.
“There’s no wrong way to be a woman” is only empowering if it’s a rejection of gender, not sex. Gender is what leads to toxic masculinity and the idea that only a compliant, obedient woman is the “right kind of woman.” Gender turns age and weight and beauty into liabilities, and creates the “madonnas” and the “whores,” the “ladies” and “beasts of burden.” They’re all social constructs built up around ideals and expectations concerning sex — otherwise known as “gender.” Thinking like a real woman; behaving like a real woman; feeling like a real woman; looking like a real woman — or falling short — isn’t the language of biology. It’s the language of the mind, and the collective mindset of the crowd.
How the hell do they get it all assbackwards? That defining “woman” using the reproductive pathways involving the production of large gametes is inviting all the judgey judgements of the mean girls who sneer at the insufficiently feminine, the women who do it the “wrong way,” whereas defining women according to what it feels like to know you’re a woman introduces no judgements at all.
iknklast,
I’m with you. It’s why I never could understand some of the efforts to create “churches for atheists” or whatever they were called The notion of sitting in a congregation and singing hymns and listening to a sermon and doing call-and-response stuff or whatever gives me hives even if you take the god stuff out.
Weddings and funerals and graduation ceremonies I can understand, though I’m still not as enthusiastic as most.
Same here. How I hated church as a child, the few times we went. (Fortunately attendance stopped altogether when I was still quite little.)
I grew up nominally Jewish, but always an atheist. My ex-wife is Jewish, and we joined a Humanistic Jewish congregation for a while, as a form of compromise. It didn’t work for me, and I eventually realized that I really didn’t care for ritual and ceremony at all, even without the supernatural stuff. There were good lectures and discussions, and that would have been enough (damn, now I have that song stuck in my ear), but all the rest of it was annoying.
But some people, many people, like that kind of thing. Tradition. (Now I have a different song stuck in my ear.)
I think I like some ceremonies. Parts of Obama’s inauguration for instance, parts of Biden’s. (I didn’t watch all of either one.) Graduations. Award ceremonies. Stuff like that – ones that are about celebration and arrival and the like. John Lewis’s funeral, and the one in Charleston. But those aren’t ceremonies that are trying to rope you into something.
“Credo quia absurdum” TWAW is another Big Lie.
The way they’re using it, “There’s no wrong way to be a woman” should really be translated as “You can claim to be a woman without being a woman at all.” There’s also the unwritten (yet understood) threat underlying any refusal to go along. It’s understood because we’ve already seen it in action when women fight back. This campain is another bullying iteration of TWAW, and would not have been used had the other phrase not already been out there. It’s all the same message: Obey. Acquiesce. Submit to Untruth.
In many instances, this now enforced by the power of the State.
I was fortunate that, although my family was fundamentalist, my mother was one of the laziest people that ever lived. At some point, she decided getting out of bed was too much work, and spent most of her days there – including Sundays. So we stopped going to church. That was fine with me, I hated it.
We do ritual things at some of our work meetings. If no one’s watching and making us, I just cross my arms and sit there glowering. And sports…oh, my god, some of the things they do that are so like religions! Someone starts a wave…the entire goddamn stadium flutters. A cheer? Same thing. Chanting and hooting and howling together…tribal rituals I am not able to be a part of. On the rare occasions I find myself stuck at sports games, I put the time to use taking action shots (amateur photography as a hobby) and then bury myself in a book or a crossword.
I remember somebody…maybe Jerry DeWitt…enthusing about the “Sunday assemblies”, saying how “everyone” misses the ritual of church, they just don’t want the God stuff. Speak for yourself…I notice a lot of former preachers do though. Of course, they got to be in charge when they led a church, and may crave that feeling of power again.
That was something that puzzled me greatly when I lived in Berkeley in the 1960s. I thought of it as an American notion. My first wife, who was American, thought one should go to church on Sunday regardless of religious belief. For a while we had to go to the Unitarian-Universalist Church of Berkeley — as close to an atheist church as one could ask for. I found the services just as boring as those of the Church of England that I had grown up with, more so, even.
Or it makes the person repeating it seem convinced. See #2.
iknklast, Screechy, Ophelia, et al: (paraphrased)
I think y’all are using a different sense of important than I am. That something is important to you can mean that you value (or enjoy) it. It can also mean that other things in your life are dependent on or are affected by it to a noteworthy extent. This latter sense was my intent.
My initial version of this comment was quite pedantic, with a whole series of questions like, “Is there something you say when you accidentally bump into someone? When someone sneezes? When you sneeze? When you meet someone new? When making or receiving apologies? When people leave?” Because it’s all ritual. Basic interactions like ordering a drink at a bar are ritual. Every speech act is a ritual. As someone who had to consciously and programmatically learn things like how to respond to being greeted on the street with something other than paralyzed confusion, I wish that people wouldn’t take that sort of procedural knowledge for granted.
That’s all ritual is, really: behavior schemata. Doesn’t matter if they’re shared (i.e., bits of culture, like saying, “bless you,” when someone sneezes or wrapping presents) or more personal (e.g., taking the dog for a walk when you get home or a monthly B-movie night with your friends). The structure they provide facilitates decision tree pruning in navigating life, from the daily and personal to the rare and national. Rituals, particularly of interaction and law, also help to keep societies of irrational and often violent primates functioning.
Ah yes, the Goffman explanation. I get it. But I think getting that is compatible with finding lots of rituals stupid or pointless or outright bad, and with just wanting to defy them or play with them just for fun and the hell of it.
Think of it as the difference between journalism and opinion writing. When I write for editors who are not me I sometimes get everything ironed out so that it sounds more like everything else, and I reject all or almost all of those changes. Very conformist neutral rule-following writing is ok for straight reporting, when you don’t want to distract, but for everything else I think it’s far too bland and boring. Social rituals are somewhat like that.
Oh, absolutely compatible. That ritual is important does not at all entail that every ritual is important, enjoyable, or even beneficial. And many times playing with or defying rituals is necessary for well being or simple entertainment. One partial account of comedy, for example, is that it functions by deviation from expectation, convention, and, of course, ritual.