Another piece of evidence that we shouldn’t be doing what we are doing…
Yes, they did it! Proof that women were hunters too. About 70% of them. In fact, they were the ones making the tools. ( so what were the men doing, you might ask?) Anyway, we are done now, right, with this weird patriarchal stuff that we keep telling ourselves??
We carry our assigned genders as if they define our personalities. We dream within the unnatural limitations that come with those labels. We are male or female first, the rest of our lives gets decided from there. Women are more tempted to stay at home, men go to work while they can be as ambitious as they want to, nobody is going to bring them down for it. They might be judged, however, when they want to care.
But that division is not natural people.
There is nothing natural about women being the cares, and men being the providers. I can tell you what natural is, though. Wanne hear it? Might change a thing or two.
It is about what you naturally do best.
You are a person first and foremost. So when we are young we aren’t supposed to be limited by our assigned gender. We are supposed to be free, developing ourselves in a unlimited way. Doing what comes naturally. Meaning, we get to find out what we love to do and get really good at it.
That is what we are supposed to do.
So, back then, if you were good at hunting, or making tools, you would do that. And be a mother or a father if that was your path. But you were the most beneficial to the group doing what you did best. So people wouldn’t question your existence, it was clear you were contributing to the group!
So what on earth are we doing now?
Three minutes after a baby is born their parents start to treat the baby differently according to their gender. Defining them, limiting them. Making it unable to ever reach its full potential because they have to live, work and dream withing that limit. And that I haven’t even begon talking about what happens when a pregnant person discovers that they are pregnant with either a boy or a girl. They will start to treat their pregnant body differently affecting that fetus before it is even born. This might not be so different in the individual scale, but I think we can see what it does on the scale of, well, the full population of the planet that know the gender of the baby before it is born.
So, we are here now. Until now our lives have been determent by our gender. Our dreams were infected by it, our chances, our choices for education, everything. The way we move and how-easy-it-is-to-hammer-something-into-a-wall has been effected by our assigned gender at birth. How to get everything out of life that it has for you, and not just what you are supposed to have?
Because this stuff affects us. If you have that feeling, right now, that you can’t find our purpose, it may be because you are trying to find it within the limitations of your label. If you feel that you might not be contributing to society as much as you could, it may be that your label is limiting you. In the best case, your label isn’t limiting you anymore, but society might be limiting you because they see you as your label and not as the individual that you truly are.
So think back. Find out if you are truly free as who you are; what is it that crosses your mind every now and then, that you love to do but didn’t because it was hard choosing for it? You would have been the only one, voicing the desire. You would have been the only one of your gender sitting in that particular classroom? If you think back to the things that you decided were not for you, than you get a hint at how you are limiting your existence. What you should try out.
At the very least, now that you know all this, try not to be afraid to admit it, anymore. For me, personally, I whished that I was expected to be handy as much as my brothers. Now, whenever I want to hang a shelve and I can’t get the drill in the wall properly, I ask one of the men in my family to do it for me. It takes them a few seconds, they are more experienced than me. But each time I see them finish my work, I realize that is wasn’t that hard. I know I can already do it a lot better than quite a few men.
So what if you secretly dreamt about being a stay at home dad? Or if you wanted to be in IT as a female or in nurse-school as a male? Ok, so maybe it is hard imagining that you would do it from the start all over again. At the very least start admitting to yourself that this, where you are now, isn’t really where you wanted to go. Maybe then you might find a way to let some of those dreams come true. While you are there, changing your life to a place where you feel much more at easy and happy with it, start pointing a finger at the real problem. The thing that made life harder for all of us, not just women. The thing that defines who we are before we have even started to find out who we are. That patriarchy with its labels and its rewards if you adhere to what it has to say. Then maybe, just maybe, we won’t limit the others that come after us as much as we did ourselves.
