Cut the strings

"I'll tell you what I reproach women for doing, in essence: They think too much of themselves." ~ Simone de Beauvoir, 1960.

I am currently reading a collection of articles and interviews by and about the iconic de Beauvoir, one of the raging mothers of feminism. My passion for this movement, and my utmost respect for this woman and everything she stands for and believes in has only continued to flourish, however, as normal human beings do, this is the furst statement I found my head to be shaking at in disagreement.

I disagree. In the sense that compared to the stereotypical man, women are too selfless for their own good and all it does is cause harm on both an individual and a societal level. Women have it in their 'nature' (or, rather, have been conditioned to classify it as subconscious natural instincts) to place emotions above all else, to please others and ensure their happiness before their own, whether it be the husband or the children. Women are held by the strings, taught to play the role of the martyrs, to sacrifice their own sufficiency, happiness, and most often carreer. Countless families still nowadays, in Western, modern homes, lead unequal lives- the eternal curse of cleaning the house and looking after the children still plaguing the mothers' roles, while fathers never cook, clean or care.

It is simply disgusting. How this form of behavior is so easily overlooked, both by men and women, who have been conditioned to consider it a norm, to say it's 'in their nature'. Who decided that in the first place? We're not in the 50s anymore.

However, even though I'm not calling women selfish, I do hold them guilty for feeding so easily and allowing themselves to be so manipulated by such a patriarchical and mysoginist society. After all these years of playing our parts, of following the script shoved into our faces by the men on the high thrones, always reading word for word, we've slowly been forced to truly become our character. To identify with it and believe it's who we have to be in order to be accepted. To learn how to sew, to cook, to clean and change diapers in order to find a husband one day. We didn't write the script, but we can change it. So many girls sacrifice themselves to please the boys ever since they are small, believing it's a simple norm, excusing their behaviors because it's a part of their 'nature'.

"Mom, the boy hit me today," A little girl says to her mother as she comes home from school.

"Oh, silly boys, always violent. They just can't help it." The mother answers.

The little girl is going to grow up into a woman, excusing her husband of occasionally hitting her because she knows that all men are inherently violent and she would never find someone different for her anyways. She's going to give up trying to teach her son to not hit his sister, and simply excuse it with the fact that siblings fight all the time. As humans, we are haunted by our own worst enemy: excuses. We study the brain, emotions, the mind and how it works, trying to classify everything into rules and patterns, ultimately justifying psycopaths and giving motivation for everything. I'm not suggesting that there are no patterns. That a criminal does not have a broken past which perhaps explains his future actions. All these criterias can be very true and fascinating. They only turn damaging once we don't do anything to change them, once they become cycles we choose willingly to pursue for all eternity, once we use them as excuses for both ours and the people around us' behavior.

Women are perhaps even more harmful to masochist societies than men, as they allow themselves to be taken as prey so easily and so willingly. For a feminist society to truly succeed, you not only have to convince the opposite gender to treat the other as basic human beings, but you also have to teach your own to cut the strings that hold us so captive in the world we're trying to change.