Friday 29 June 2012

Romance and Love

Recently I have been reading Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch.  She has some interesting ideas on Love; genuine love can only occur between equals.  This I recognise and agree with it to a point; for a relationship to work there needs to be a basis of mutual respect and understanding, not adoration, obsession or pity.  One partner cannot feel superior or inferior to the other, it would undermine their entire romantic relationship.  


However, Greer expands upon this by saying: 
"If a person loves only one other person, and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow man, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism."
This  is where I begin to deviate from Greer; Helen Fisher believes that humans have evolved to develop long-term romantic relationships.  She came to this conclusion after studying brain scans of individuals in varying levels of love, some recently heartbroken and some married for quite significant portions of their life.  Fisher found that the love is a chemical reaction in the brain similar to that of taking drugs.  One could argue that this proves objectively the existence of love, but that would be another point entirely.  


My own opinion is romance does not mean that a woman, or indeed a man, has to subordinate their own personal desires outside of the established relationship.  Commitment to another individual, or group if that is your thing, does not mean subjugation.  In some cases this will happen and it is up to the individual to assess if this the case and take measures to correct it.  Love will always be a risk, but it's a risk worth taking.  


Romance and heterosexual love do not spell out the end of emancipation of women at the hands of men; your partner, if they are your partner in the truest sense of the word, should be able to support you make your own way in the world.

Faye Stone

Tuesday 26 June 2012

Complacency

At University it seems that whenever I get passionate about an issue regarding women in some way, usually after my friends in Psychology or Counselling attend a lecture about are exposed to some angry revolutionary from the Second Wave, I am met with a disgusted, "Are you a feminist?"

Well, yes I am, thank-you very much.



What angers me in this situation is that no matter how calmly I express my point, using as much reason and restraint I can muster, the chauvinist merely smirks and cracks a joke about how a "woman's place" is in the kitchen.  Sometimes, when the man is completely lacking in the required creativity it takes to repeat a joke that someone else has has already told me too many times, he simply demands a sandwich.


I guess part of the problem is that, men and women, have been allowed to become complacent.  I see it all the time at university, students drifting about and using the three years it takes to obtain a degree as a buffer between adolescence and adulthood.  Some have absolutely no direction at all and merely attend university to escape their parents.  Others are truly inspiring individuals who cling to every opportunity presented to them because they need it to grow and develop into self-actualised human beings; but these are disappointingly a minority at my university.  University has become a time-consuming transaction to purchase access to the middle-classes.  This change in student's expectations has altered the type of education we therefore receive; it is changed into a hoop jumping exercise with learning objectives aimed at passing assessments rather than developing life skills.


Where are the mass student demonstrations that occurred in history?  After all, was it not students who began the Hungarian Revolt?  Was the White Rose group in Nazi Germany not a student organisation aimed at proliferating anti-Hitler propaganda?  I have known of only one student protest in my two years as a student, The Demo-lition.


It is this level of complacency that is allowing ignorance in both men and women to breed; If this is allowed to continue unchecked then what we will soon face is social regression.  Violations upon our rights will go uncontested, resulting in evermore disastrous infringements until nothing is left but the life that women have previously striven so hard to improve.  The Glass Ceiling Effect needs to be challenged, as do gender roles and the UK's Government Budget Cuts.  If we want changes we need to be prepared to make them happen.


My generation, like those before, needs to join the debate and start questioning the world around them.  Is this the world you want to live in?


Faye Stone

Friday 22 June 2012

My Feminism

The belief of many, or at least some of the “jokingly” chauvinist male or deluded females that I consort with, is that feminism is irrelevant.  I would argue that it is not.  I can sit in any high street coffee shop and observe the victims of the The Feminine Mystique or objectification.  I myself have tottered off to meetings in a pair of high heels which hamper my ability to walk and cause pain with every step.  Why?  Because I allowed myself to be seduced by the media’s representations of “successful” women and bullied into buying irresponsible shoes by a friend too meek to forge her own personality but strong enough to attempt to subdue mine. 

As a young woman who has grown up in during the Third Wave of Feminism it is easy to take for granted the opportunities I have.  After all, the protesters of the First and Second Waves engaged in the hard fight to secure the female right to vote, to pursue education and engage with our destinies.  I feel my generation has become complacent, all too ready to submit once more, firm in the belief that there is someone else out there who is fighting for our rights.  But what if there isn't?  What if we are merely being lulled into a false sense of security by the world in which we live, the communities which we belong to?  There is no choice but to use our own voice. 
"To be nobody but yourself- in a world which is doing its best to make you like everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight, and never stop fighting."
E.E Cummings
In feminism I have a true passion, and potentially a vocation if I apply my skills as writer successfully in the advancement of sexual equality.  At the moment I am making it my purpose to research those who trod this path before me so that I may develop my views further.  Hopefully, one day I will have made a difference.

Faye Stone