I Am A Woman And Not Stupidly Touchy About It by Santosh Jha (ebook reader android TXT) 📕

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CHAPTER 2

When something is exposed to overuse, it lands itself in the tumultuous domain of populism, available to all shades of conveniences and every gratifying initiative, it not only loses its true meaning, rather also starts gathering such meanings, which essentially corrode the very idea of that something…!

This is general hypothesis of entropy – usage has this innate alignment with diminishing efficacy of qualitative aspect of any realism. To make it simple; meaning of an idea is rarely singular as it means different in different domains of individual minds as well as social consciousness.

Somehow, even though it may sound preposterous, it seems the idea called ‘empowerment’ and the meaning associated with this term has hit the above-mentioned state of reality. And, when it comes to women empowerment, it seems, the reality is far more complicated. Empowerment seems to have attained the dubious-distinction of ‘nothingness of everythingness’ that happens when an idea or term is exposed to overuse and lands itself in domain of populism…

Moreover, as we talked about the importance of the need to ‘unlearn’ old and archaic yet deeply embedded cultural mind-consciousness of seeing realism with the perspective of ethnicity and gender; the term and idea of ‘empowerment’ needs to be pruned of stereotypes of gender perspectives. Energies must remain value-neutral and untouched by ethnic-divides.

Someone said, ‘If something is described as empowering, we can safely assume that nothing of authoritative and powerful elements can be anywhere near to it’. Why? This probably is a statement marking the deeply ingrained confusion, conflict and chaos associated with the idea of not only empowerment, but many other human ideas.

On the other hand, Ruth Whippman, author of ‘America The Anxious: How Our Pursuit Of Happiness Is Creating A Nation Of Nervous Wrecks’ says – ‘The word has taken on a kind of ubiquitous vacuousness, with virtually any act performed enthusiastically by a woman –from washing her hair to contouring her body – are now officially designated as empowering.’

The trouble with idea of empowerment, as enlisted by many wise women and men is – The term ‘empowerment’ is being associated with almost everything men and women do and feel, however, the true and real ‘power’ is hugely elusive in the contemporary realism of ‘empowerment’. As we said earlier, this is happening because of two reasons –

Clarity of the idea and its associated elements are missing as it is being defined by all in a way, which is essentially either personal whim or cultural populism…

As the idea of empowerment, like most human ideas, has no singular, logical and objective benchmark or signpost, almost all stupidities find it easy to ride the steamy bandwagon of self-vindicating stupidities of viscerality…

Therefore, we just have to understand why this is happening and what is missing, which is making empowerment – both for women and men, an elusive realism –

Semantically, empowerment as an idea is in the mist of confusion. We first have to see and accept this mysticism about the idea of empowerment. By definition, empowerment is often referred to as ‘freedom and power of self-determination’. This very definition is muffled in confusion. Let us understand it –

Empowerment is also about self-determination but it is not only that. Empowerment is more about ‘self-awareness’ and ‘self-control’ than ‘self-determination’. Let us define empowerment in best possible holistic way –

‘Empowerment is the self-ability of a person (woman or man) to rise above and be in self-control of the instincts and culturally learnt notions, which form our subconscious behaviors and actions, to test the validity, utility and worth of all our actions and behaviors very consciously.’

The core idea is – Our body-mind mechanism is designed for reactionary actions and behaviors, which are controlled in auto-mode process by our subconscious mind. Science says, almost 90% of our daily life actions and behaviors are decided not by our ‘conscious self’, but by our subconscious mind, over which we have little control. What this means…?

The simple idea is – When ‘I’ do not and cannot control my actions/behaviors and do not and cannot own the onus of 90% of my actions, how can I say I am an empowered person? If ‘I’, my conscious ‘self’, is not powerful enough to exercise effective ‘self-determination’ over my own actions/behaviors on daily basis, how can I say I am empowered? If by having freedom and power of ‘self-determination’ over what I eat, what I drink, what I wear, what job I do and with whom I have relationship, etc, I think I am ‘empowered’ then I am doing the cardinal mistake about which Whippman has pointed out. That is – ‘The word has taken on a kind of ubiquitous vacuousness, with virtually any act performed enthusiastically by a woman –from washing her hair to contouring her body – are now officially designated as empowering.’

The simple idea is – when we are very proud of ‘self-determination’ of all our actions and behaviors in any milieu of all times, there must be ‘total control’ of ‘I’, or the ‘self’ over them all. We determine, what we can own and control. However, scientific evidence is beyond doubt that 90 percent of our daily life-living decisions of actions and behaviors are visceral – controlled by subconscious mind, not our conscious mind, which alone can have the semblance of slightest of control.

So, essentially, usually, we own, control and determine only 10 percent of our actions and behaviors. Out of this miniscule 10 percent, 90 percent of determinations are guided by populist cultural benchmarking in modern milieus, which we essentially either ape or are influenced by others – celebrities or dominant trends. So, this very core hypothesis of populist notion of ‘empowerment’ is erroneous and a misnomer.

Let us see and accept that empowerment is an intangibility and it may have its external expression in so many tangibilities of our body-choices but essentially, empowerment is an internalized attainment, which comes not through external expression of ‘self-determination’ but internal attainments of ‘self-awareness’ and ‘self-control’. Empowerment comes through a tough process of ‘self-actualization’, which is not an auto-mode attainment of body-mind viscerality but a learned, evolved and matured of higher consciousness. This comes through self-control and self-discipline…

Now, we need to accept that for a holistic perception of empowerment, we have to accept a larger and deeper definition of the idealism of empowerment. This definition says –

‘Empowerment is not only about how a person feels and accepts him or her, but it is predominantly about how the milieus – Social/cultural/political/economic/religious, offer, sustain and nurture the elements of equality, equitability and objective neutrality, which transfers and ingrains power and authority to all consciousnesses in people – whether they are women or men, to facilitate self-determination through self-awareness and self-control…’

The simple idea is – all energies need a medium and this energy of empowerment also needs the medium of amicable and catalytic milieu. As true empowerment can happen only when our subconscious minds accept the idea and idealism of equitability and freedom; it is important that we have a milieu, which allows these elements to get embedded in our subconscious minds. Usually, what we subconsciously do or follow is meme – this collective unconscious. We can call it ambient, predominant culture in a milieu.

The core idea is – Empowerment is the idealism less in the side of people but mostly in the domain of milieus – the ambient socio-cultural and physical environment, where women and men grow and mature. A milieu which ensures equality, equitability and neutrality of all identities, not only man/woman, is the seed situation for the idealism of empowerment to grow and blossom. The meme must have seeds of empowerment; the collective unconscious must have these entrenched elements of equitability and freedom.

Unfortunately, this milieu is missing…! Most milieus invariably lack the idealism of equality-equitability-neutrality, which is the soil where empowerment grows. This is valid for both men and women. Men need this nurturing milieu for their excellence as good as women. Empowerment for women surely has to do with freedom and power of ‘self-determination’ but this is only partial. The holistic empowerment comes only when all women, for that matter all people of a society, have equality-equitability-neutrality, which women themselves cannot ensure. That is why women still miss the true empowerment.

Empowerment is not entirely an individual enterprise but a social and societal one too. And, as we still have societies and cultures where men dominate most enterprises, empowerment of women and all others is essentially a man’s enterprise…! It seems, men have to be more compassionate about women empowerment as many men are using the ‘few and scattered’ examples of some women ‘misusing’ their ‘so-called empowerment’ as pretext and basis for talking against true women empowerment. We need to create this meme of equitability and for this to happen, this current gender-divide and ‘gender-battle’ must go. We, both men and women, as collective entity, as a society have to work together in collaboration, not competition and conflict to attain and install a society where equitability and freedom is in the milieu. This shall ensure ‘empowerment’ to all, sans gender identities.

The most important part of empowerment is to understand that it surely is not ‘freedom and choice to do what one feels like doing’. Many women feel and accept that being visceral – accepting the ultimate righteousness of innate instincts; is true empowerment. The women have seen since ages that men have been doing what they wish and desire; therefore an empowered woman is also like a man, who could be trigger happy following her viscerality.

This is huge trap for women. Age-old and archaic stupidities of men may look like the shining gold but all that shines is not gold and even modern men are unlearning these archaic stupidities of their visceral-selves. Women’s empowerment surely has this good contribution from these evolved men. The world already has enough of such men-stupidities. Women needn’t add more to the men-stupidities, the world is over-burdened with. In the next chapter, we talk about this viscerality as necessary unlearning element for true empowerment.

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CHAPTER 3

Populism often has this weird tendency to ride on ‘abstract logic’, mostly suiting personal utilities. As individual desires are common and operative ambient milieus too are symmetrical, such populist perspectives become memes, which we call as ‘collective unconscious’. Pop cultures often have deep shades of powerful memes, painted on the canvas of collective unconscious, beyond conscious cognition. Consciousness anyway is usually in constant drift, blown apart by powerful pop sinews.

One such populist perspective is the term and idea called ‘visceral’. The populist perception is that what is instinctive to all of us has the ultimate utility and wisdom. This emanates out of this contemporary liberal and consumerist meme that ‘I Know and I Know It Right As It is Visceral To Me’. This seemingly embedded over-egoism of ‘I’ and its avowed ‘super-hero’ imagery has fueled this penchant for all things visceral.

This populist perception to validate all shades of desires and wants of our instinctive urges and drives however is only a very personalized value, which has become a meme but has no roots in logic and objective prudence. Interestingly mystical seems the realism that what happens to us, felt obviously by its deep-seated ‘desire-drive’, is more believable and acceptable than some distant and ‘external’ prudence of objective logic. That is why, pop feminism seems to have this penchant for accepting viscerality and drive-driven choices as true empowerment, as this comes easy, without any enterprise of conscious initiatives.

Scientists warn that most human drives or instincts are without conscience. They do not care about long-range effects. It seeks only immediate personal gratification as to most of us, feeling one’s own desires is the easiest thing and many believe – All good things need to be simple…!

Modern knowledge of brain realism also accepts that consciousness is very localized. It instinctively being a reactive mode facility cares