As we approach February 14, 2013, both Nova Earth Day and One Billion Rising Day, it must be time to consider some of the old-paradigm ways we have of binding ourselves.
One that I wanted to mention is perhaps one of the greatest taboos in our society. It’s taboo to mention it. It’s taboo to question it. It’s obligatory to bow before it and manifest it in our behavior. But it’s just another false god we bow down to and sooner or later we have to let it go.
Here’s the taboo. It’s obligatory in our society to call a woman beautiful. If that woman is not somehow beautiful in face, then we must compensate by calling her beautiful in something else – heart, form, grace, it matters not. In our society, one of the unspoken taboos is that we cannot depart from the practice of calling a woman beautiful.
And you can argue that these golden chains are justified because … what? Because women are receptive sexually and so must attract the man? Because women are traditionally loving, or passive, or … the rationale really doesn’t matter. Someone comes up with an explanation if they’re really obliged to. But in most situations they’re not. Very few people question the practice of obligingly calling a woman beautiful.
But what is the price paid for stereotyping women in this way?
The hidden price of making a woman what sociologists call the “cynosure of gaze” is condemning them to passivity, to a pose that obliges them to demur, not protest, accept inequality of income, rely on men for many of their needs in life … and we could go on and on. Forcing women to worry about whether they’re beautiful keeps them preoccupied and bound in knots and reinforces a social order that fundamentally militates against their well-being and keeps them subservient.
Enter Jackie Evancho and Susan Boyle, who in the video above, sing A Mother’s Prayer. Susan was, last time I looked, 47 and not your Hollywood vixen. Jackie is 11 and is one of the new children – golden, rainbow, magenta, I don’t know – who are here to awaken us from our failed ways of being.
I believe it was Archangel Michael who told me that Susan had agreed to come here to awaken us around our stereotypes of women. I imagine Jackie has come here to awaken us generally by her extremely youthful but mature voice.
And Susan did in fact cause a tremendous stir when she blazed onto the scene on Britain Has Talent. Jackie has never failed to cause jaws to drop with her angelic voice, coming from a child.
But if we’re to fully allow them to work their mission, which is to wake us up to our old imprisoning paradigms, then we need to see, I think, how we’re imprisoning women by forcing them to focus on beauty and how we’re cheating them by relegating them to courtesan status while leaving the men in charge of the “real” decisions in life.
Forcing women to work and spend their substance to remain beautiful in men’s eyes obliges them to spend an inordinate percentage of whatever they earn to pass inspection by those who gaze upon them. It instills fear in their mind that when their beauty fades they will be unemployable, unmarriagable, etc. Their conclusion often is that they must make hay while the sun shines. All of these are perpetrations that we pay a price for in our aliveness.
We cannot subjugate one half of the planet and preserve our own aliveness. We pay a price for exploiting others. The deadness of our society is in large measure attributable to the perpetrations we practice on women.
So there. I’ve said it. I personally don’t believe in the beauty game. I don’t require it. I don’t enjoy it.
I enjoy beauty as much as anyone else, but it’s not a factor in my loving another being. And it isn’t a factor in my decisions around employment or any other decision of weight.
During the Sixties and Seventies, it looked like women would escape the beauty trap. But the male establishment fought back. In addition to all the perpetrations made against society from subliminal ads to dumbing-down additives to food and water to airport scanners that dehumanize and demean, the establishment worked overtime to reinforce the bill of goods sold to women to try above all to remain beautiful.
This year, this beautiful, freedom-loving, paradigm-busting year that we’re blazing through, as we regain our individual sovereignty and honor everyone’s free will, let’s drop this insipid and confining conversation about women’s indispensable “beauty.” The next woman you meet, for heaven’s sake, don’t tell her she looks beautiful. Break the mould. And tell her what you’re doing.
See her for who she is, whatever that may be, even if it’s the first time you may have done so. Admit your awkwardness. But lay some new track, going to an entirely new destination. One where people are authentic and free, as all of us have always wanted to be.
