So, I've been doing a lot of thinking about equality and the female experience in a male driven world.
Yeah, me, and the rest of the internet liberal 20 somethings, I know.
But really, I've been doing some work that I hadn't been brave enough till now to inch towards, let alone actually engage in. Looking at past decisions and situations and how I've stored them within myself and evaluating how I carry them with me has been a terrible, awful, no good, very bad monster lurking in my closet or under my bed or whatever other place monsters hide. Except in creepy wardrobes like that kid in "Night Terrors" who stores the real-to-him monsters he imagines and turns into dolls and then Amy's a doll and oh god creepy and everything is made of wood and the sonic screwdriver doesn't work on wood and yes, this kind of distracted thinking is why I've been able to avoid true self evaluation. But I'm doing it now. And it's been hard, and will continue to be hard. I'm finally putting a name to those "bad things" and finally processing. I'm beginning to be able to understand what's triggering my anxiety, and how to work through it or around it. I'm starting to feel enough self-worth to be able to say "that's not okay." I don't think I'd ever been able to say it before.
Part of what's helping is this wonderful facebook group that a friend of mine put together. We post and comment on articles and other web based goodness about gender studies. I haven't been saying a lot on the group wall, but I've read every single piece posted, and even found a youtuber that I'm now totally obsessed with. I'm not a huge poster there, and I don't mean to become just a reposter here, even if my last few entries have been reposts. But, I really like this piece I want to talk about a little.
This is just another opinion piece in another blog on another popular blog service site. But, I really liked what it had to say. Yes, there are tons of people making the same point. And there are internet memes out there making fun of the Disney Princess dysfunctionality and everything it teaches young girls. Sometimes, the "humour" of the ones listing "stockholm's syndrome", "compulsive lying", "necrophilia", etc. are so disarming when you look at it all at once like that, it's hard to really evaluate the concepts those posts are trying to bring to light. And of course, few articles talking about what we loved as children being "bad" actually point out that many of those stories aren't original, but come from the folk tales of fill in the blank cultural group. But our society loves them so, and they really do inform our lives and basis for reality.
I don't know how anyone, parent or otherwise, sitting down and telling me "you know this movie is make-believe, right?" would have changed my life. I'm not sure that stubborn child me would have wanted to hear "it's okay to love something and still know it's not right in real life". I'll never know, I can only guess. But how wonderful would it be if that was the new norm? If parents could articulate, "this is a great story with big problems if it were to really happen to you." The closest I think I've ever heard was "she's not a good role model for little girls. You can be more." That's certainly the wrong message, isn't it? It's not "she's not good enough" that worries me. It's "what she goes through is okay". It's "it's okay that society treats her like this and no one stops it". It's "there's nothing wrong with this". Granted, we hide it within magic carpets, witches, and extreme circumstance, but it's all still there.
It's a little scary to realize how hard wired this all is...
No comments:
Post a Comment