Strong Women, Hooray

“A Thousand Voices” is a beautiful work of art and reality. 

A preemptive tangent that has nothing to do with the trailer but rather with my familiarity with a certain type of reaction, that goes like this: “It’s NATIVE women we are talking about, stay off!” As you know, I an not big at compartmentalizing people or putting one group against another. I know how it is used by the media and by political powers, and it’s both sad and trivial. I am convinced that we should have the intelligence to distinguish between driving strength from one’s culture (awesome) and patriotic chest-beating (pathetic and /or manipulative). Stronger, kinder, wiser people coming from different cultures, seem to share my beliefs on this one. It is not my business if somebody needs to go through a chest-beating phase to figure out that all of us humans are fundamentally the same in terms of experiences we go through, and entitlement to truth. Those people can do what they like, but I don’t want to pretend that glorifying one culture at the expense of another is an intelligent conversation. I don’t care if that makes me arrogant. There comes a time when my truth is more important than anybody else’s perception. Importantly, these women are real. What they are saying is my truth. We are all in it together.

Back to the trailer. It rings true to me. My angle: For better or for worse, I am a fairly strong human. I greatly rejoice in the fact that I am a woman. Being female impacts everything I do, I love it, it gives me a lot of freedom and a lot of cool perspective. I feel a lot of tenderness towards men. They are different, and that’s endearing. Some men enjoy being protectors, some men enjoy being dicks; I try to distinguish between the two, and treat people on a case by case basis. But there are also general trends and prevailing moods. We live in a very interesting time, and the trailer I mentioned in the beginning hits the nail on the head.

For example, if you are a woman living in a culture that assumes the importance of female perspective, and that is not insulted by female power, being a strong woman is a straightforward honor. But our culture is not like that.

In our culture, the philosophy of doing business is usually male. Realistically, a lot of men in positions of social power are boring, unoriginal individuals, yet they assume that they deserve worship by beautiful women prancing around in lingerie for their entertainment (a note to those men: what people–including women–do for love, in tenderness, or for their own amusement, is different from what people do out of confusion or because of peer pressure). Boring men seem to believe that they are the default people, that they are entitled to having the last word in every conversation, and that a woman who doesn’t shut up is a heretic. In a culture like that, being a strong woman is an honor you have to fight for.

Grown men who are forever stuck in their blind ego will accept the image of you in your lingerie but they will fight your real self every inch of the way, and they will, because your mere existence is an irritation.

I feel very light-hearted about this. I have taken my share of pain, confusion, and abuse, I have a million stories, I have learnt a lot, and I am no longer scared. But it takes a lot.

In any case, watch the trailer. It is beautiful. There is a lot more to say on the topic but maybe next time.