Brain Food #735
Telling the wrong story
Thoughts of the day
The earliest version of International Women’s Day first occurred more than a century ago, in 1909. It is impossible for anyone today to imagine how it must have been like when it was the norm for women not to be able to vote, to work, to be considered equal beings within the realm of humanity.
Still, being a woman in the modern world carries with it a certain sense of conflict, of different roles one must play, often perceived in a zero-sum way.
And so we build our narrative: the stories we tell ourselves to justify our actions, that may not always feel right. First, we create sides, and then we take them.
Historically, mankind has banned and justified things that felt uncomfortable, often skewing the truth. Like slavery, which was driven by a certain idea or ‘story’ that something was right, just because it had historically been so, until one day it was not.
Discomfort is a sense of internal conflict, leading to experiencing cognitive dissonance. It is the result of taking sides, or taking the wrong side, telling the wrong story, even to ourselves. But women and men can share masculine and feminine qualities. The suppression of those within each person can sometimes lead to ugly outcomes.
To craft the right story, perhaps a good place to start is the acceptance of others, and of oneself, and to begin to acknowledge the conflicting parts within. To know when you have been telling the wrong story, and that one side does not always have to win, as long as a better narrative will eventually unfold.
“All this pitting of sex against sex, of quality against quality; all this claiming of superiority and imputing of inferiority, belong to the private-school stage of human existence where there are 'sides,' and it is necessary for one side to beat another side, and of the utmost importance to walk up to a platform and receive from the hands of the Headmaster himself a highly ornamental pot.”
― Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own
Poster for Women's Day, March 8, 1914, demanding voting rights for women. The poster was banned by German police.
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