De Rerum Natura

Women are not “meant to dazzle”

It seems to me that many people today—men and women, in at least the Anglo-American context—are guilty of requiring, or reinforcing the perception of the requirement for, women to dazzle men—to prance, to encircle, to sparkle, to draw the gaze of, to arouse, to tease, to serve. Images of Playboy bunnies and game-show presenters come to mind. This is like a pet that holds a toy in its mouth, in front of its owner, hoping that the owner will notice it, so that the owner will donate some of his time to it.

How embarrassing, not just for the woman, but for the man. Does it make you feel better to know that women often act—as you think they should—according to your rules? Do you feel powerful in some way because you were able to convince your spouse, partner, or colleague that you knew what their role was, and what their behaviour, appearance, and mannerisms should be?

None of these gripes are new, of course. It’s just so frustrating to me and many people, that we as a society simply are still having trouble shaking this nonsense off. An obvious source of this frustration is university undergraduates, in their often futile attempts to reconcile their unsophisticated view of the world with their new-found freedoms. Think of the many millions of young women who, in many cases presumably obliviously, find themselves wasting countless hours in some sad drama. Where are you going? Why are you playing someone else’s game?

The socially progressive, on one side, will comment on the crude, binary heterosexuality of it all, derived from ‘classical’ and worn-out definitions of beauty and gender roles. The religious conservative, on the other side, who misses the boat entirely,  will comment on the immodest dress and inappropriate, scandalous behaviour. The young people themselves may believe themselves to be ‘liberated’ or ‘naughty’: the enticing smell of risky excitement, despite it really being just the perception of sexual liberation almost fifty years later. Congratulations, you have boldly challenged the sanctity of marriage in 2013. Put a feather in your cap.

To me, though, this woman-as-spectacle behaviour is a vestige of traditional norms. It strikes me as socially conservative in the worst sense of ‘conservative’: blind traditionalism, where women should behave in this way, because they always have. Women are ‘meant’ to provide men with something to look at—they should relish their role as the male’s favourite source of entertainment. The successful male should be proud of the shiny new pet he has ‘bagged’. Two new objects make him happy: his new iPhone, and his hot new girlfriend. The female, though failing to see the bigger picture, should be proud of her own ability to seduce and secure a future breadwinner—with a little ‘edginess’ and “a pretty fun night” thrown in, too. How charming.

It is in this sense that feminism as a word should come to mean, not as a distinct position or platform (“the feminists”), but simply as ‘rational’. You wouldn’t tell your daughter that she needs to dazzle the men around her. You would tell her that she should be who she wants to be—to do things for her own well-developed reasons. Feminism as a word becomes the same as ‘social intelligence’.

Here’s the concise point in all of this. A man can dazzle, a woman can dazzle: where it goes wrong is where men and women think that someone ‘should’ dazzle. We are all required to look presentable in public and professional environments, and occasionally need to pragmatically adhere to unwritten, cultural norms to blend in and advance. But, we do not serve anyone or anything. And, we should reject entirely any claim about the necessity of the female entertainer, intolerant of any attempt at humour that might reinvigorate or reinforce this obstinate pestilence.

Democracy (in any form) is ‘the default’, not ‘an option’

To authoritarian governments and their sympathizers:

The more we learn about the physical world, and the paths our fellow primates have taken, the more we learn about the openness of things. The indeterminism of the absolute, the inability to separate, the external dependence, the unmapped conditional dependence, the extrinsicality of hierarchies, the construction of norms and values, of classes, of knowledge and learning centralisation, of national identities, of races, of roles, and the shameless attempts to see order of some kind as natural or intrinsic. Even the objects that we think we see, are, demonstrably, temporary, flickering aggregates in an endless ocean of mysterious particles and fields, colliding and disappearing. The molecule, the apple, the person, the planet: these are but approximated individuals, consisting of tiny shards lingering just long enough in friendly conditions for mammals to see them as things.

Unrestricted, metaphysical free will must be an illusion, and yet, any ascription of total determination is as frail a construction as the myth of choice. Human history is an endless parade of truth-defenders, often unwittingly and predictably making things zero or one, good or evil, expensive or cheap, bloody or peaceful. Our finest attempt at refinement—mathematics—is actually the least refined attempt outside of itself. Wherever we turn, we are splattered by reason for doubt—a healthy, persisting scepticism—always reminding us that X at t₁ is not the same as X at t₂.

Because we build our own histories, and our own interpretations of them, which we have historically often shared, imposed, and installed, we cannot, in the face of this openness, allow ourselves to stultify another’s. All existence—all things physical, in some manifestation—is open and indifferent, ready for us to ascribe properties to it. Some will rise above others in some domain, to capitalise, to snatch, to self-soothe, but their superiority will be confined to their own minds—and dependent on our subscription to a given constructed value. Success and failure are derived from our own regles du jeu.

So, we make bargains, build a few huts on the beach, never excavating, never concretising, never pretending that laws transcend the societies they were designed to protect. Contrary to our cultural history, mutability is to be cherished, and not its inverse. This makes our actions more important, and this should encourage a longer, wider vision of own existence, without melancholy and isolation. Alienation and frustration can only come from misapprehensions, and illusions of determination and closed systems, of immutable laws and global-level impositions. Nobody always fails: they just lose whatever game they had designed or we had condoned.

Democracy (in any form) is not a western ideal. Bottom-up governance is the only known political means of actually enabling human agency, of opening it up, of reducing barriers to it, of maximising choices. It celebrates it. It depends on it. It has no author: it is a web, much like that which surrounds and penetrates us. It flows without boundaries, without ends, without beginnings, without purpose. We share, and we affect, and our choices, and our awareness of them, grows.

We should not say there is no truth. We could say that a truth cannot constrict. And, since democracy is the archetype of political openness, of revision, of flexibility, of many nodes, of asymptotic refinement, it is the one, in principle, which cannot constrict. Its institutions are meant to resonate with our social bargains, which protect against statistical threats. A good democracy is one that minimises barriers to individual and collective human agency whilst preserving the bargains that agency had collectively prescribed.

I do not believe in democracy (in any form). It is not an experiment. It is not the guilty pleasure of populist governments. It is not a buzzword. It does not have a shelf life. It is also not an opinion of mine that maximising individual human agency is optimal. I am writing here to say that it is the only form of governance that resonates with what we know about both physics and human culture. It is painfully obvious that any and all political power is built, so I know that people are, in principle, unrestricted. Whether or not people see the world in this same way is irrelevant. And, we can talk about social education and institutional reform at length, but people’s choices are limited only by their imagination.

The only bargain we all must strike is the one that enables human agency in the social sphere, and this is because it does not restrict within it. So, this message is intended for those who desire transcendent order, or those who wish to maintain power for power’s sake: that which you think you have is of unfathomable insignificance. And, with any attempt to proselytise the oblivious, comes the empty madness of your futility. Control, perpetuated by the spectacle of order and blind traditionalism, was always illusory. The sooner you disassemble the rusty machine, the better.