19. The revolution is in the hands of women

Women as indicators of social development

I read somewhere that the true level of development of a country is down to how well women and children are treated, and it normally comes in that order: women's movements and then issues related to children and -I would add- other minorities in the wider sense. We see these issues being discussed through its negative consequences: aggression, violence, sexual exploitation and degradation, as well as from a positive/progressive angle: fighting for recognition of individuality, respect and freedom.
These topics of discussion and public debate emerge when we are trying to resolve individually and collectively the most basic conflicts with the "other" and 'healing' the hatred of the weak.

So something must be boiling when we read:

• Breaking the taboo: The Moscow women taking a stand against domestic violence
• The Arab Spring failed women: we need a sexual revolution in the Middle East
• How Argentina rose up against the murder of women

That's why we also read:

• Chinese women's rights group collapses under official pressure

Even though women's power and influence should be discussed in all its multidimensional richness, in this entry I will focus in motherhood. Why? It is not because women and mothers are the same thing. No. First of all, probably due to the need to de-couple womanhood and motherhood, motherhood has become a taboo subject. But most importantly, it is because the narrative of mothers shape society, so the first step to a revolution is for us -mothers- to take ownership over our words and become conscious that what we say and don't say -if we are mothers- is crucial. In this sense, it is curious what happens with women politicians in Russia: "Female politicians always enter parliament as feminists and as representatives of women’s rights, but – because they need to pursue their political career – they become outrageous saviours of traditional values.", says Ekaterina Dementieva. Sadly, they lose their own narrative, their voice in a survival game. 
This is why one of the most revolutionary acts we can do are completely under our control: the first one, I argue, it is becoming conscious and reflective of what's the narrative that we are passing on (at personal and social level), how coherent it is with our reality and our acts, how coherent it is with our feelings and emotions, if the words we are saying are truly ours, why we adopt alien speeches and why do we keep silent in some cases.
The second one is ensuring our children are seen in their own individuality and recognised as individuals by this narrative so they have the right tools to break away from it and write their own version of the story when they are ready.

Mothers as architects of the world psyche

Mothers. We are the custodians of the next generation consciousness. We lay the foundations, we are the first organizers of the world psyche through our children's psyche. With our words we interpret our children's reality during the first years of their lives, naming what exists, what happens and what's important. 
Our children live this period of their lives tuned to our emotions. They express with their bodies what we don't say. Our children are attentive observers of how we feel, what we do, how we react to our environment, the amount of attention we give them, and all of that shapes them.

We are also the ones able to create a negative space in our children: our silences, our disapproval and our incoherence. Our lack of words will leave emotions unacknowledged and disorganized, floating in the unconsciousness; our incoherence will create a tension within them. We are also the first to point out the things they "should" not like about themselves, the things that "should" be rejected: we design our children's shadow. This shadow not only stores what we consider bad, but also talents that we don't acknowledge or value.

Etruscan bronze statue: She-wolf, Romulus and Remus

When we are present, in the moment, practising our perception, we are able to truly feed our children, connect to their reality, and realize what's going on, putting words to the situation, containing and channelling emotions to be used as a positive driving force.

We need to know that this is not always the case, and that when we are not present in ourselves it has a big impact on our children. We can be toxic, feeding from our children's attention, invading their spaces with an excessive projection of what we want them to be, instead of guiding them in their journey of discovering who they are. These mothers appear in fairy tales as witches (also a bad mother archetype) that eat children, the woman that appears when "the mother is not there".

We can be emotionally absent too, withdrawn in ourselves, distracted by other things, or living in auto-pilot unconsciously following our formed habits, leaving our children unseen, emotionally unfed. These mothers appear in many fairy tales as the step mothers (another bad mother archetype) that replaced the dead/absent mother.
Emotionally absent mothers in the past accepted and sustained a culture of "children are to be seen but not heard", which contributed to create a context that enabled child abuse to go unnoticed and unpunished. Children, hungry for attention, looking for love sometimes found (and keep finding) abuse instead, and felt they have no one to go to. They found (and keep finding)  those predators that appear in the fairy tales, the wolves. They automatically assumed no one will hear them...  "children are not to be heard". They weren't helped in interpreting what went on in the first place. There were no words, not understanding. They were left to believe that it was their fault.

Some mothers may think they don't know how to do it and look for a third party and send their children to boarding school, which may lead the child coping with the consequences of this virtual abandonment. See this short video from George Monbiot on the subject.

Some other mothers, disappear completely. With this rejection, children are left full of self destructive tendencies. Chunchi is a canton in Ecuador with the highest level of youth suicide in the world. It is also a canton where mothers left their children behind to go an make a living in the developed world after an economic crisis in 1999. 51% of school children live in a house without parents. They dutifully sent dollars and technology. But this is not what they needed. Children with dollars and an hole in their soul meant that drugs and alcohol became a epidemic, as much as suicide.  

"Not being able to receive the love of your mum is like being dead" Luis, a boy from Chunchi, says. 

This anger and self-destructive behaviour might be behind the Charlie Hebdo attack. Before making this tragedy an issue of millions against millions, we can also see it as the tragedy of two children that lost their father quite young, and then were abandoned by their mother soon after she got re-married and had another child. She decided she could not cope with the boys any longer and abandoned them in the moment that they needed her the most (their background story was researched by Der Spiegel). In religion, they found another 'mother' who offered them recognition and did something that expressed a deep rooted anger and ultimately enacted their self-destructive behaviour.

In this context, it's almost scary to think how many orphaned children have been produced during the recent conflicts, how many children are being born after rampages of rape, with mothers that despise them and the effect this will have on their future and our future. 

Being aware of the effect we have, as mothers, is the first invitation to work on our awareness of ourselves, our emotions, our own childhood, our auto-pilot, our absence, our shadow -as mothers and as women-. An invitation to work on the awareness of who we are, and more: accept it, and even more: love it. This very subtle work, almost invisible, will however have a huge impact on our children and the future generations. 

We can put words in what before was left unsaid; we can tell a different story and this can be truly revolutionary.

Hungry women, angry men and the taboo of imperfect motherhood

Women were for ages considered weak, irrational, even reduced to the level of property. One of the rationales against women's voting was that a married man would be voting twice. So what sort of mother is a woman that was taught she was "unwanted" and inferior? A rejected woman grows up hungry. She lives hungry of love and acceptance, but she is not aware of it because this hunger was never named. And how does she behave in front of a daughter who holds up a mirror of what she is? If she rejected or did not approve of her own femininity, she'd likely do the same with her daughter's, discharging more negativity to her than she would do on a boy, pushing her to turn to her dad for approval, becoming a bond in a trans-generational chain of hungry-angry women that can only find acceptance in men. Even if the effect gets very slowly diluted down the chain. 

And how does she behave in front of a son? She'd probably unconsciously teach him to reject what she rejected in herself too. So men have to learn to be men, strong and undoubtedly masculine. Emotions are bad. They have to suppress everything in them that is loving, caring, sweet. They have to hate it inside and hate anyone that manifests these qualities (in some cases leading to violence against them). She'd probably feed from this son that accepts her, leaving him angry-hungry for this reversal of roles, for this invasion. "I am the one that was supposed to be fed. Where is my tit? I want the page 3 of the Sun." and thus becoming a bond in the trans-generational chain of angry-hungry men. Even if this chain gets very slowly diluted. 

Motherhood, the untouchable institution

But wait a minute: on top of being labelled weak, inferior, unable to own anything not even our bodies, being paid less for equal jobs, having a glass roof, and all of that... we are now criticized as mothers??? Give me a break. Motherhood is an institution that no one can speak about. Whatever I do is my business, I've read this or that book and I'm on this camp of perfect motherhood and don't you dare to say a word, don't you dare to make me feel guilty.

Yes, of course. But guilt and responsibility are two different things. 

Louise Bourgeois - Maman

As Spider-man would say (digging deep into the rich realm of superhero philosophy) "With great power comes great responsibility" and our first responsibility as mothers and women is to discover who we are, becoming aware of our emotions and our relationships (with our own mother is usually a good start) and then talk about motherhood without taboos. Accepting ourselves, our attempts to do what we can and put words to our discoveries in order to make conscious what was left unconscious. Being aware is accepting responsibility. Being aware brings more coherence to the triad of what we think, feel and do. This will help us shape our lives with honest coherence instead of trying to fill in the space that a cultural stereotype has drawn for us. There are studies that show that the biggest is the mother ideal in a country, the lower the birth rate. It is difficult for young Italian women to see themselves as the traditional 'mamma', or for the German to see themselves as die perfekte Mutter that, by the way, cannot do anything right. So somehow we are leaving these stereotypes untouched and just avoid the whole issue altogether. Who dares to say that being a perfect mother is a bad thing? The point is that it is not real. Women cannot feed others with love and attention if they don't feed themselves with love and attention. 

And how women feed themselves is a mystery, some sort of divine source of food. (Some assume) They don't need to be paid fairly, or recognised, or given a job at the level of her capacity, or given assistance while she searches for her own food. Feeding women generates resentment if we haven't sorted out our own history with our mothers. 

Left and right politics are still shaped by traditional mother and father stereotypes

In the first entry of this blog, I argued that the world we live is an emergent result of what we are, built up in scale. We all carry a pattern of polarities within ourselves, we build it in our families, and every social structure upward. When we overcome our fears, when we resolve our issues, when we integrate our shadow and our polarities and we change, everything changes even if it takes a while to see it. 

Somehow mother and father figures -and how they have developed in history- represent the basic pattern that built up the model of any hierarchical structure we live in (it does not have to be like that, but that's what we -collectively tend to do). The State v The Private sector, Left and Right (plus liberalism as the child perspective), our own relationship with the Company that employs us (which gives us food) and our boss (which gives us directives and makes us accountable), west v east (and the developing countries), are all examples on the entities we usually project our own model of mother, father and child. We project it outside, usually we participate too in creating it and building it, to then see it, understand it and eventually to overcome it and create something new. 

Mother and child -
Fernando Botero

In politics, the left (frown upon in general in the West world), normally follows a mother pattern, focusing on education, health and giving equal opportunities to all (nothing wrong with that). Has a more holistic view but it can appear as "waster" of money, not smart in economical terms. The state, that is the embodiment of the mother, should be big.
Communism represents its extreme, becoming the toxic mother: where the state should be everything, control everything, it also stops the masculine to act (in separating the children from the mother, in guiding them to penetrate the external world through self mastery, in creating wealth).

The right focuses on structures, law abiding and efficiency, controls the money making process, the cutting dependencies from the state (nothing wrong with that either). However, under this ideology, the state cannot do much right, its economical activity is "spending" and therefore it should be as small as possible because "there is no money". And of course, feeding the state with taxes... we rather not. The private sector is said to be the income generator, somehow seen as the bread-winner, and should be left alone.

The liberals too were concerned about the individual and its rights (of men only) in front of the political power of the State -when it emerged it was against monarchies and aristocracy- (somehow representing the child trying to break away from its parents), seeking to maximize deregulation, but failing to acknowledge that the political is not the only power that can subjugate the individual. The concentrated, organized economical power has been largely ignored. 

We are not in front of a conservative set up of politics: we are in front of an old-fashioned view of the world, a view of the world that seems to have frozen sometime in 1950.

Even if in 1950s, the role of the state was much more active that what seems to be fashionable now. It is only in this context, this old-fashioned view, that Nick Clegg, the leader of the liberal democrats in the UK, can claim he would add a heart to the conservatives (right), and a brain to Labour (left).

See this article from Kofi Annan: The Global Order can only be saved if new powers are let in

The role of the state and the missing woman

In this old view of the world we are submerged in, women have to fight to be seen and recognised, left and right are antagonists instead of two important complementary roles. It also sees the state in negative terms whilst we see the rise of corporate power acting carelessly and unchallenged. We are constantly prompted to react to any crisis, quickly taking sides and condemning the other, with half truths making up full narratives.

It seems to me that this is no more the time to talk about how fat the state (or any woman) is, in the shape of austerity programs, but instead what it can create, what it does and how it will occupy the space it needs to be in without crashing anyone. It is not the time to speak about how much freedom corporations need, but how much responsibility and presence they should have in society. It's time to stop projecting our own shadow, our aggression onto others but look at the "what for" behind our rejection of the other.

I dare to think that this change will happen in the eyes of women and it will trickle up. Women that don't think like men but rather integrated their masculine side and accepted their feminine, that are not concerned about slimming down so she can fit into the good girl costume. Women that see themselves, her partners and her children (if there are any) for who they are, and not what they want them to be or they are supposed to be. Women that look at the calendar and shout "Come on, people, it's 2015, it's time to wake up!".

AB

If you liked this article, you may also like:

Women: invisibility or blindness?
The absent mother
Fear and power: owners of our fears, writers of our history

PS: 
Examples of concentrated unregulated economical power
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9wHzt6gBgI

Nawal El Saadawi

11. The absent mother

A couple of months ago I read this article where the CEO of Pepsico, a woman, Indra K. Nooyi explains that women can't have it all. See full article in this link.

I've seen this article being shared in facebook and people commenting how true and how sad it was. They mostly empathised with the feeling of powerlessness that this woman was transmitting. But there was another reaction too. The one of disappointment in front of the message "I have a big job so I won't be a good mum". 

She draws this conclusion from a particular example: she was told she would be promoted to CEO and came home 10PM instead of midnight as she would've normally done. She was very happy and wanted to share the news with her family. But she found something else instead. As soon as she had arrived, her mother asked her to go and buy some milk.

"I got home about 10, got into the garage, and my mother was waiting at the top of the stairs. And I said, "Mom, I've got great news for you." She said, "let the news wait. Can you go out and get some milk?" I looked in the garage and it looked like my husband was home. I said, "what time did he get home?" She said "8 o'clock." I said, "Why didn't you ask him to buy the milk?" "He's tired." Okay. We have a couple of help at home, "why didn't you ask them to get the milk?" She said, "I forgot." She said just get the milk. We need it for the morning. So like a dutiful daughter, I went out and got the milk and came back. I banged it on the counter and I said, "I had great news for you. I've just been told that I'm going to be president on the Board of Directors. And all that you want me to do is go out and get the milk, what kind of a mom are you?" And she said to me, "let me explain something to you. You might be president of PepsiCo. You might be on the board of directors. But when you enter this house, you're the wife, you're the daughter, you're the daughter-in-law, you're the mother. You're all of that. Nobody else can take that place. So leave that damned crown in the garage. And don't bring it into the house. You know I've never seen that crown."

The mother 2
Jaco Van Der Vaart

Of course I understand the sadness that people feel. The sadness I feel however is not about her being powerless. I think she is not, not a bit. It's about these two women being absolutely blind, not able to see each other and both somehow resenting the absent mother. Mrs Nooki, resenting a mother that doesn't understand that she worked hard all day and that is tired. A mother that quite ruthlessly does not join in the excitement of her promotion while she was expecting a deserved little cheer. And the other that resents the daughter as an absent mother, the one that does not put limits to her company, that is not aware that there is no milk and expects her to fill the gap. Of course here, the lack of milk is highly symbolic to what goes on.

In this case, when I speak about presence or absence is not about physical presence. I am a working mother too. It's the psychic and emotional presence. It's this feeling, this overall awareness of what's going on in the family and within ourselves. It's a lot about being present when you are present, connected to the moment and perceiving what's going on now. Mothers that see and pay attention to others and to themselves.

But instead of resolving, of talking at least about this absence that both felt, they fall back to their masks. The dutiful daughter, the resentful mother. The dutiful daughter that burns herself working for a company until midnight instead of leading the company and changing the rules (probably projecting in the firm her own unsatisfied mother). The 'good girl' that goes to buy milk instead of confronting her own mother, talking to the family about her news, asking them about theirs and trying to resolve together this small issue that there is no milk. But we, the world, are left with powerful women choosing to be dutiful daughters, choosing to obey without even thinking of challenging unwritten rules, not even in their own house. We are left with women that see danger in this burn-out and escaping from leading roles. We are left with men (with the useful blind spot in systemic issues and always relying on individuality) justifying the absence of women to their lack of ambition. We are also left with the Queen Bees that quite enjoy being the only ones up there, with their crowns, and instead of pushing for change, have discouraging messages for the rest of the women.

The Pink Floyd's song Wish you were speaks about absence in a very universal way, but consider it in this context:

So, so you think you can tell Heaven from Hell,
blue skies from pain.
Can you tell a green field from a cold steel rail?
A smile from a veil?
Do you think you can tell?
And did they get you to trade your heroes for ghosts? 
Hot ashes for trees?
Hot air for a cool breeze?
Cold comfort for change?
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?
How I wish, how I wish you were here.
We're just two lost souls swimming in a fish bowl, year after year,
Running over the same old ground. 
What have we found? The same old fears.
Wish you were here.
Writer: WATERS, ROGER/GILMOUR, DAVID JON 
Copyright: Lyrics © Warner/Chappell Music, Inc
source: http://www.lyricsondemand.com/

I do rescue that Indra "sees" herself as an imperfect mother. And says so without a taboo. It is not a small step when (imperfect) motherhood is still a taboo. But the whole anecdote lacks so much insight, so much self awareness that is worrying rather than sad.

Women need to see themselves, see their mothers, see their children to be able to connect with their own power: the power to drop the masks and to lead the needed change in whatever task or profession they chose to be an actor in. 
And their children need to see that they are being seen in order to awake their power in turn. It's not about children getting on with stuff preparing themselves for the future. It's about children that are living their lives now and feeling valued now. See Ken Robinson's Ted Talk How schools kill creativity.

In its most extreme, when absence is tinted with rejection, children are left full with self destructive tendencies. Chunchi is a canton in Ecuador with the highest level of youth suicide in the world. It is also a canton where mothers left their children behind to go an make a living in the developed world after an economic crisis in 1999. 51% of school children live in a house without parents. They dutifully sent dollars and technology. But this is not what they needed. Children with dollars and an hole in their soul meant that drugs and alcohol became a epidemic, as much as suicide.  

"Not being able to receive the love of your mum is like being dead" Luis says. 

I like the expression paying attention because it (kind of) represents a monetary exchange. Attention has that sort of property. Those who receive a lot, feel rich. Those who receive little attention, feel poor. When I pay attention to you, I am valuing you. You are worth my time and my attention. But attention is a scarce resource and it is where the tension lies. 
Jobs and women's inner circles should be a source of "fuel". Professional and/or personal recognition should help mothers to have their tanks full (and their pockets) so they can feed their children with food, love and attention. If we feel 'poor', if our tank is empty, we cannot give others our attention for free, sometimes not even to our children and might even try to grab their attention instead, feeding from them, leaving them feeling empty, invisible.  So invisible-blind mothers give birth to invisible-blind daughters who become invisible-blind mothers. All 'poor' women that were never seen or recognised. 

In order to cut the trans-generational chain of blind-invisible women, a generation needs to wake up and see themselves first. So women in power are... women (not daughters), present and connected with themselves so they can see the game and the rules that have nothing to do with business and more to do with our old wounds.

Andrea

Bonus: On absence: The making of Wish you were here Pink Floyd (must see documentary)

8. Women: Invisibility or blindness?

There is a topic that people are starting to talk about: women invisibility. In most cases, it refers to how the lack of sex appeal renders women invisible in everyday situations like waiting to be catered at a certain shop. This is reported as a phenomenon that starts when a woman turns 40 and most common in her 50s. But this invisibility is also reported in other less superfluous situations such as when a woman is sharing her opinion in a meeting, when she is overlooked for a promotion or when their achievements are badly recorded in history.

In art:

http://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2014/may/19/why-female-artists-airbrushed-history-annie-kevans

In science:
Here Prof. Michio Kaku tells the story of Vera Rubin (who first postulated the concept of dark matter back in the 60's but was largely ignored) and Jocelyn Bell (who discovered the Pulsar, work that gained a Nobel prize... for her male thesis adviser) from min 4. (see note 1).

In economic theory:
http://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/feb/01/syriza-cleaners-economics-needs-new-broom-greece

The moment we speak about this phenomenon as women's invisibility, of course, we are putting the blame on them. It is something that happens to them, it is "theirs" and therefore it is somehow their fault or their choice. Their problem, right?

Far from being a superpower or a liberating choice for some, the lack of visibility is linked to the lack of recognition of women and this is a problem for all.

So instead of speaking about invisibility, what if we talk about our blindness instead?

With this question, you now might be prepared to a "women versus men" argument, old-style feminism. However, I would argue that we are all -women and men- selectively blind towards women, and that we all have been sustaining a masculine dominated society: where men are on top, we are rational beings -particularly in economic terms-, emotion is bad, competition and free market is the mantra, the state is incapable of doing anything efficiently and our deity is a trinity with a remarkable absence (or should we say an invisible presence?).

The point is that we are only blind to things we don't want to face, things we don't want to see. Things we have relegated to our shadow. Why would we put women in the shadow then?

Mum.

Motherhood and our relationship with our mothers is almost a taboo subject. 

When it comes to motherhood we tend to skitter above the surface or even shut down completely to talk about it.

We may feel we owe our mum everything, or a lot, or just the opposite: we may sustain the feeling that she should've given us everything for free and she didn't. We may have a recount of her sacrifice: the unbearable pain of labor, the hundreds of sleepless nights (at least, for some of them), what she gave up for us. We may even go to the length of saying that she did her best (at least, some of them). For many years of our life, we understand and label the world using the words and labels that our mothers have offered. This is a dog. This is a tree. This girl is a bad girl. This is dangerous. This is good. This is bad. This is your place. Boys don't cry. Girls wear dresses. You are intelligent. Pink is for stupid girls. Your father is stressed because he has a very difficult job. Or whatever it is. Her words map the foundation of our consciousness in the first years of our lives: we know what she names. In this construction of the vision of the world, however, she is frequently excluded from the narrative.  So much so that most of the fairy tales don't have a real mother in it, only fragmented representations of our feelings towards her: the perfect mother ie the matriarchal mother, who "has to die" otherwise we wouldn't be able to separate from her, and the shadow of the mother ie the patriarchal mother, witches and step-mothers (the bad mother). (Note 2)

In our lives she is the invisible-hand writing our story (the mother is the big Other for us), lending us words and descriptors, interpreting the world and our emotions for us; even if she writes a paternal narrative, she is the one transmitting and validating it. We struggle to separate the truth from her version of the story. So difficult this is, that most of Hollywood films tell the story of this separation again and again, using the monomyth, the Hero's journey. They show, mostly from a male perspective, the process of individuation after the separation from the feminine (the mother): most Disney princesses don't have a mother, the hobbits leaving the shire, etc.

On the other side, it's easier to see fathers probably because the narrative of the mother made them visible. In this BBC interview to Roger Waters, he is asked about his father whom he never knew (from min. 2 approx). 

He speaks about him vividly and at length. He tells the story of him full of emotion. He spends almost 3 minutes going through the figure of his father, finishing with "I admire him so... (much)", and then adds "and my mother". Barely half of a mention at the end when she was the person "present" in his life, the one that he could see with his own eyes. What he lived somehow was his father absence. I don't want to minimise the significance of the absent father, particularly for a man. However, it is clear that this detailed account is a story that he was told. Probably mostly by his mother, making the father more present, more visible than herself.
Collectively, we also receive narratives: the history that our nation (our motherland) taught us, what we get from the media, our culture, our religion, etc. 


The truth is that even if we received love and swear we had a happy childhood (that is not always the case), most of us have suffered -as children, some as adults too- because of our mothers. Lack of attention, lack of being looked at, or seen in the deepest sense, lack of hugs, lack of recognition, lack of love. Lack. At some degree we all have the mark the umbilical cord leaves. The scar. The hole. But for most of our lives we won't see this pain. We won't recognise it.

We are all humans, all scarred in the same place.

She is an imperfect human being (how dares she?) and that is a hard realisation against our infantile expectations. And this is the first trigger for blindness.

We are "programmed" to overlook women because we do not want to confront our own history with our mothers. We are supposed to idealise maternal love. We have to survive and she gives us our best chance. So we adapt and, without words to describe our feelings, we don't register pain or anger. We repeat or buy into her version of the story where our point of view is not well documented. But our experience left a mark and waits there to be named. In the meantime, these hidden feelings get projected onto the women we meet. In this context is not surprising that Margaret Thatcher and Julia Gillard were referred to as witches and Angela Merkel is called "mutti" (mummy) in Germany. Here, blindness is the most innocent consequence, in reality. If we store negative infantile emotions, and are not healed, it may derive in active forms of aggression against women, the ones we read every day in the newspapers (in many cases even here women are invisible and what prevails is the language of the perpetrator as we saw in the killing of Reeva Steenkamp).

We are "programmed" to overlook women because we do not want confront our own fears. Mothers are our first weapon against fear. When we hold on to this infantile view of the world, we keep expecting our mother to come and rescue us (here the maternal role could be transferred to any maternal figure: a friend, the company that employs us, the state as the rescuer). Acknowledging these feelings would force us to see our fears and the characters and masks we had created to survive and most importantly, assume responsibility.

We are "programmed" to overlook women because the surviving mask we chose to wear is blind. In fear of our own survival we created a character, a persona, a mask that we wear in front of the world with the help (or as a direct result) of the labels that our mothers gave us “you are a rebel without cause”, “good girls behave like this”, "he is so intelligent" "you are the strong one" etc. This mask hides our wounded self, the one that has been traumatically separated from the maternal, which we don't want anyone to see. It is, by definition, her handwriting. This mask has been useful to survive but it is also very restrictive. If we were labelled intelligent, we won't feel free to act silly or irrationally or maybe even express our emotions. If we are a rebel, well we have to be a rebel and see any rule as a monster. The ones labelled strong will struggle to admit vulnerability and to ask for help. And good girls... so many women live under this label. The good girl, the good pupil, who always do the work perfectly without challenging the authorities. Even if there is injustice. Being aware of the mask would lead to becoming aware of the fusion we sustain with our mothers' story. In other words, the attachment to the mask hides the unsatisfied need to be attached and feel secure with our mothers.

So how do we solve this conundrum?

New eyes and self awareness.

This is not about "burning the witches" or "killing the mother" (that collectively has taken the form of fascism). Ideally we should all have a mother that is self aware, that is able to feed herself without needing to feed attention from her children. The one that can see and recognise the individuality of her children, that is able to let the father do his work too in helping the children break away from her narrative. But history has not taught women how to feed themselves very well. So, let's not expect her to come to the rescue. It's about us. It's about "seeing" her and ourselves, separately. Not the official story of her, but seeing her as an imperfect human being, as a woman that lived through particular circumstances and went through the same or worse with her mother. And ever more: seeing how we built our relationship with her. How WE lived it. Our side. Our pain. Our wound. Our mask. Ourselves. Finding the adult narrative of our own story and re-position our mothers in it. Even more so if we are mothers ourselves. 

We may find out then that we can cut the umbilical cord without leaving a scar, that we can actively and consciously decide to become adults. In this process, we may discover our own individuality, we may start to own our fears, our choices, find our power within, start to see our mother, and even without realising... start to see other women on the way.

“With a truly tragic delusion,” Carl Jung noted, “these theologians fail to see that it is not a matter of proving the existence of the light, but of blind people who do not know that their eyes could see. It is high time we realized that it is pointless to praise the light and preach it if nobody can see it. It is much more needful to teach people the art of seeing.” 

― C.G. Jung

Andrea

External links:

• Un día, una arquitecta  (A day, a (female) architect): it is a blog done by two female architects rescuing other female architects out of invisibility.

Notes:
1) I added the video because I thought the cases were very relevant. However, in my lens constantly analysing discourses I do not particularly like that in this story what is "named" is Jocelyn Bell's mistake. Even if it is told with a sense of irony, what is named is what's important. In contrast, her professor unethical behaviour or the Nobel prize commission lack of diligence to assert in the first place who was the rightful winner and then to correct the oversight are implied but not named. Therefore the lens in which this anecdote was seen was with the lens of "women are to blame".

2) a nice article about de-sanctification and de-demonisation of women in films. Exploration of a shadow in a more integrated, less polarised way (Frozen, Maleficent, etc) http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/films/bad-girls-gone-good-angelina-jolie-brings-your-childhood-nightmare-to-life-with-maleficent-9436703.html

Also, some of the latest films from Disney with princesses find their mothers (they are not dead! ey!), they start to rescue themselves (ey!) and start to explore the separation wound from the female perspective as in Brave, where the mother and the conflict with her is central to the story and the mother is visible (ey!).


If you liked this post, you may also like:

• The absent mother
• The foundation of this blog: we put outside what's inside
• Revolution is in the hands of women
• Fear and power: Owner of our fears, writers of our history
• Demonising and Idolising
• The absent father and our quest for freedom

6. Fear and power - Power is asymmetry

Power is asymmetry. 

Power is asymmetry. It is the resolution of a tension that exists between sides originally equal. Power is the triumphal action of the winning side to precipitate and materialise potentiality. Making a decision and taking it to action means that one idea, one intention, took power over other or others. Even if the winning idea has integrated part of its opposite, there is always a winning idea.
Shall I make the pragmatic decision or shall I decide out of principle? Without this asymmetry we would not be able to eat as we would not be able to decide anything. Symmetry neutralises, asymmetry creates. For that reason, power (and the perceivable physical world) is by its own nature unbalanced. In this natural order of power, hierarchy is an intrinsic characteristic of power and therefore inevitable (even though it doesn't have to be static). We would never be able to create (organize ideas, make a decision and take an action) without some sort of hierarchies. See The hierarchy of values.

In economy, in politics, asymmetry is a very well known principle of power management. If a company would split the shares in two equal parts, the likelihood is that the decision making will be inefficient or non-existent.

At an individual level, how we use our power will dictate (or be dictated by) our personality. 

Vertical versus circular power

When we are connected to fear and we are in front of a perceived threat (real or imaginary), power will be structured vertically (in our brains and socially) as it will generate quicker responses, albeit less intelligent and innovative as it tends to replicate known formulas of coping (it triggers instinctive survival behaviour governed mainly by what's called the reptilian brain). See Identity and crisis.

Portret van het Menselijk Tekort.
 by Jaco Van Der Vaart

The more vertical the power, the less dissent it will allow, the more aggression and violence it'll require to sustain it. In this dynamic, there is no recognition of the other's individuality, which is only seen as a resource. This is easier to see at social level or in interpersonal relationships but it happens first within us. We fragment our personality and give power to certain characters -normally the ones that were in charge when we felt fear early on in our lives- and we remove power from what we consider our weaker sides, our wounded self. In an article of The Guardian, they included some anecdotes of encounters of US politicians with Vladimir Putin: "When George W Bush looked into Putin’s eyes at a Moscow summit in May 2002, he reported, “I was able to get a sense of his soul”. When Joe Biden visited the Kremlin in 2011, he had a very different impression, telling Putin: “Mr Prime Minister, I’m looking into your eyes, and I don’t think you have a soul.” According to Biden, Putin smiled and replied, “We understand each other.” Seeing "souls" is -of course- about seeing beyond the mask that wants to hide our vulnerability. In his reply, Putin outwitted Biden suggesting he wouldn't find any vulnerability in him.

Darth Vader is a clear example of "the tragic hero" wounded by the separation from the feminine (his anger develops from the early separation from his mother, her death and the pregnancy of his wife), and this wounded side -the son, the husband- gets hidden under a mask. The warrior took charge but only to obey a ruthless Emperor. This character only survives with aggression. Once he got in contact again with his son, with love, he kills the emperor outside and within and ends up removing his mask (literally).

There is an irony in the impatience of the West to impose its democratic ideas. There is also anxiety. In fact, some people in the US argue that power is depleting, it's eroding (See: the end of power). In federal politics, this is partly because elected governments show due obedience to the contributors of the campaigns more than the electorate. Campaigns burn dollars in advertising so they need a lot and "one person, one vote" slowly changed to "one dollar, one vote". But this due obedience is a choice, a self preserving choice.
In World politics, it is simply too expensive to impose your will to the entire world. In this regard, power is slowly shifting mechanism from vertical (concentrated, single-minded, highly hierarchical, quicker BUT less sophisticated) to circular (more agents in the table, micro-tensions, asymmetry created by micro-alliances, might be slower if not disciplined, generally smarter). In this shift, that includes the US being more part of a circle, the creative result of power, how it precipitates and materialises, will be much greater (albeit maybe slower). More things will be done. 

But this is a process: a process of individuation of people that adds up ("trickle up") to a social and international power rearrangement. Power of an individuated person, the one that has become adult by successfully separating himself from the (m)other, will associate in circles. The problems are: 1. no one can do this process for us 2. we cannot do this process for others 3. We are not all at the same stage of this process, ever. 
Once we recognised ourselves, then we are able to recognise others and are able to successfully organize circular power, more creative as it unlocks collective intelligence. Circular power not only requires trusting individuals but also the ability to read, recognise and connect with others whilst have the discipline to conduct conversations and transactions that enable action.

During the dictatorship in Argentina, people were not allowed to gather in public spaces. The mothers of the people that started to go missing did not have any place to go, to denounce, to complain. They started to gather in Plaza de Mayo and under police orders of "circulate", they started walking in circles, in silence every Thursday. They walked around the pyramid. This circular power was one of great defiance against the vertical power of the dictatorship.

When this process does not truly come from an inner transformation ie someone else killing the "external" Emperor, it does not "work" in terms of enabling people to organise in circles (eg a democratic system), at least not immediately. It was their job to recognise in the external emperor the internal one and gather the force to overcome this brutal father figure -outside and inside-. When the process is cut, we'll probably run amok trying to build a new emperor to kill or we'll go through a period of deep crisis. If this is constantly interrupted, it can become a chronic issue. This is a current topic of discussion that analyses the result of West intervention in the middle east: how much it failed in imposing democracy, can you accept or work with dictatorships?, how much can you really do to bring about stability and social order?, etc. (See The truth about evil,  Are dictators worse than anarchy?, Anarchy vs Stability: Dictatorship and chaos go hand in hand).  

The blurred lines of a circle: still democratic?

However the difference between what is truly a circular and vertical structure sometimes is subtle and not easy to distinguish. The European Union and even more the United Kingdom are in serious debate about it, with the Scottish Independence referendum and even the EU referendum promised by David Cameron. More broadly democracy (circular power) is being discussed more than ever. Is it really circular including us all? or are these circles responding to a vertical structure taking power away from people, like the Lord of the Rings's rings circles ended up responding to a single unchallengeable ring (ie, the 1%, the "market")? In this sense, it's always interesting to see "the market" not approving a democratic result, such as Dilma Rousseff reelection in Brazil. 

In vertical structures there is always a surrendering of power. In fact, every time we feel identified with anything there is a transfer of power. 

Whose wish is it?

Whose wish is it? is in my opinion the key question to think about when any sort of union is taking an action (a couple, a family, a group, a country). When it is the wish of one made true by the strength (the libido) of all then, there is domination. In this case the leading force in the union becomes a 'devouring mother': the one that feeds from the libido she steals from the children, depriving them of expressing their own identity. The one that wishes for you, the one that thinks for you, the one that does for you. Many fairy tales are based around this conflict, normally through the figure of the witch (representing the bad mother). 
I remain truly puzzled by by John F. Kennedy famous speech "My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country." It is supposed to be an empowering message but... If we change 'country' for the word 'mother'... then it becomes a slightly creepy 'devouring mother' message and the standing ovation slowly becomes a paused and isolated applause. It does not say "ask what you can do for yourself, for your family" or "whilst we think what this country can do for you, ask what you can do for yourself, your family and your community too" (I admit, though, that it lacks the power of a snappy quote). 
The distinction can be quite thin. We read it everyday in the news. "Italy is not pushing fast enough for the changes that Angela Merkel wants to see". Whose wish is it?

In economic matters, "this is truly complicated, let us do the thinking for you" is a tacit and constant message which slowly pushes democracy towards the realms of elitocracy. It's refreshing to hear and see Dr. Ha-Joon Chang saying otherwise in his book "Economics, but not as you know it".

But the examples are everywhere. Whose wish is it? is behind our lack of understanding of the Ukraine crisis. How much the Crimea referendum voices the wish of the people living in Crimea? How much it is a civil war and how much it is a covert invasion to stop Nato? 
But most important of all, because everything starts in a small scale, is "whose wish is it" in our lives? why did I study the career I chose? Was it truly my wish or was I trying to make my parents happy, feed them instead of myself with my choice? (In this article Venus Williams says that tennis was in fact her father's wish) Whose wish is it being expressed with my partner? Do all voices have their space? And with my children?

Dynamic asymmetry 

Power is by nature unbalanced, I said. But it does not mean that the unbalance needs to be always leaning towards one side (nor that any particular hierarchy needs to be set in stone) on the contrary. The more it is unbalanced towards one side, the bigger the change needed, the bigger the revolution (this word sounds particularly evocative in this context). The quicker we move to regain equilibrium, the further we'll get. As much as walking or probably even better, spinning (it's a circle!)... revolving.

Crisis points would still tend to require a slightly more verticality, though (quicker, more assertive action). I always think of it as I go up a mountain with my car. I could not advance well in fifth gear. I might need to be in 2nd or 3th. But I cannot remain in 2nd gear forever. I would not get where I need to go. 

And why is there a mountain anyway?

AB

More links:
Elif Shafak, about the power of circles: The politics of fiction

Ha-Joon Chang: Economics, but not as you know it

PS: Huffington Post UK, Scottish Independece: Darth Vader chases Labor MPs around Glasgow. :)
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/2014/09/11/scottish-independence-darth-vader-music_n_5804224.html?utm_hp_ref=uk