We, women are selling ourselves short. We have started to oppress other women. Women no longer need men to feel inferior, insecure and violated. We call each other hoes and bitches freely without realizing that this gives men more reason to look at us and call us hoes ad bitches; an object for their own satisfaction. Worst, our biology works against us. If we are unmarried or have no prospect by the time we are 30, we succumb to the mercy of unmarried men because we feel the pressure to get hitched, have a family before the whole cycle ends. We add problems to our already distressed life because we see our life culminates with the birth and growth of a child. We tell ourselves that then and only then can we experience the “essence” of being a “woman”, as one Miss Universe contestant puts it.
All of which are social constructs, created by men and sustained by women. Married or attached women have the tendency to look down at their single friends. Either because they want us to experience the “joy” that they are experiencing or they are being judgmental and conclude that the reason why we are still single is because we are being picky and unreasonable. Yes, some women are picky and unreasonable. However, the point is, why even go there? What compels these women to feel the need to pity their single friends? As Heidegger puts it, “Meanwhile man, precisely as the one so threatened, exalts himself to the posture of lord of the earth”. There is this need not only for man but also for women to solidify themselves and their reality by exerting it over another woman. Could the married woman be living a life of quiet desperation? That her idea of “happily ever after”, perished or never existed? For one brief moment, while she looks down on another woman she feels happy, but the reality is, she is looking at herself, at her own lifeless reality. We have fashioned ourselves to safebeing, faking ourselves towards living. We defend our reality by pretending to be someone else. We buy the clothes we need, we hope and dream for our knight-in-shinning-armor to appear and seize us away from our life of quiet desperation. In turn, we end up not facing our own reality. Our fear of abandonment has carried us to its core, we have abandoned ourselves.
We are living in quiet desperation on our own for too long, forgetting to see that it is not only us that suffer. Even those women who seem to be perfect and together is suffering, for the standards imposed on us is unreal. As we women perfect the art of hiding imperfection, we have lost our true-selves and focused on the unreal. We have placed it upon ourselves to reach into the abyss without realizing the impending danger. Our illusion of happiness moved us to equate it to marriage or relationships. It seems that only with a partner can we be whole when a partner should multiply our sense of self and not just add. Moreover, we needed not only to define and calculate what is beautiful; we created other definitions of beauty. Created to serve as an alternative, but as Goths, EMOs and punk exists, it also assert the unreal. Moreover, these assertions not only bring into the spotlight the unreal but also have its own standard of what is real. These standards are to exclude the “posers” the very thing the Goths, EMOs and punk once were. We just created more spaces for exclusion.
In order to regain what we lost, we do not need to look at other people for what we lost or do not have, all we need is to look at ourselves. Look at what we are doing, the judgments we imposed on other people and project it towards ourselves. No more escaping the truth of our own existence. However, more than this, we should look at how everyone else’s around us suffers. Place judgment where it should be. Blame photoshoped pictures showing unreal definition of beauty or of women. Look at a photograph and see what is real. Moreover, to live outside the comfort of our home and experience, to let being be. As Heidegger said, be a poet. No longer bounded by the guise of life, but see what is concealed; the art of imperfection and the beauty of the ugly. As such, we should not let go of what people say is wrong, “… where the danger is… the saving power is also”.
For Heidegger, it is his own fear of death that made him look at what they have done and reminisce of a time where immortality is at his hands. It also just as important for us women, to dream and to fantasize for it is then do we challenge the reality we have created. It is then can we poets, grounding ourselves on what is and seeing more, of what it should be. As poets, we should create space for inclusion, fashioning ourselves to find what is real and including other people. We then, should will more than willing, letting Beings be.
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