Rewrite Our Story

I’ve always had mixed feelings about the feminism movement. On the one hand, I’m all for women’s independence. I’ve witnessed too many tragedies where women are trapped in dysfunctional and abusive relationships because of their financial situations. Financial independence would free women and bring them the confidence and freedom they deserve. On the other hand, I see some feminists go too far by denying the biological differences between men and women and in a sense losing their femininity and becoming just like “men”. As Nietzsche once warned: “Beware that when fighting monsters you yourself do not become a monster”. This is not to say men are monsters, but I firmly believe men in general are biologically stronger than women and tend to harness traits like aggression and egotism, whereas women do tend to exhibit more feminine qualities like caring and nurturing. To claim men and women are the exact same creatures just feels wrong to me. Furthermore, I’m concerned in this process of claiming independence and equality, women may lose what makes us uniquely female and some of our strengths.

It bothered me that I did not have an answer to the problem – how to claim feminine power without becoming excessively masculine. That is until I read Elizabeth Lesser’s new book: Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes. Elizabeth Lesser is the co-founder and senior adviser of Omega Institute, the largest adult education center in the US focusing on health, wellness, spirituality and creativity. She was a hippie in the 70s and lived in a commune and is well versed in both Eastern and Western philosophies and spiritual readings. The thesis of her book is history is not about what happened, but who wrote it. In fact, the very make-up of the word “history” is his story, making it clear that men wrote our history and made masculine qualities seem desirable while devaluing feminine qualities. If women are trying to claim power in a system that is rigged against us, we cannot win. The only way to win is to rewrite our story.

Just think of the Bible, the foundation of Western Christian culture. It portrays Eve as a second human, created from Adam’s rib and she is the one who was tempted by the serpent and ate the forbidden fruit, angering the God who banished them from the paradise and cursed her with painful childbirth and subservience to her husband. Similarly, in Greek mythology, Pandora, the first human woman, disobeyed Zeus’ instructions and opened the box that released sickness, famine, war, hatred, etc. In other words, it is always the women that are responsible for the evils of the world.

The evolution of male dominance in Eastern culture is a little different, but not much better. I remember growing up I was taught in history classes that the prehistoric society was matriarchal. I was shocked when my son told me it was not true, that he never learned that from school. Turns out the pre-historic matriarchy society is a Marxist theory, highly controversial and mostly dismissed as hearsay in the West. Regardless of what happened during the prehistoric age, by the Zhou dynasty, the Chinese society was decidedly patriarchal, with female and male social roles determined by a strict, feudal hierarchy. The Book of Changes unambiguously states that "women's proper place is inside and man's proper place is outside.” Under Confucianism, girls were expected to follow the “Three Obediences and Four Virtues” -- to obey their fathers, husbands, and sons, and to be modest and moral in their actions and speech.

The seeds of gender inequality were planted from the very beginning of times and they were perpetuated throughout the ages, through literature, art and even fashion. The Scarlet Letter portrayed a woman who conceived an illegitimate child and consequently had to bear the scar of shame her entire life. It may be a great drama, but it also served as a cautionary tale against any woman who dared to step outside the boundary of what society deemed to be proper for a woman. And of course, it was written by a male writer. In fact, for a long time, women writers could not publish unless they used pseudonyms, the Bronte sisters being one example among many. In the four great classical novels in Chinese literature, women barely appeared in three of them. Lesser noticed in New York’s central park, pretty much all of statues are war heroes, celebrating the conquerors, not their mothers and wives who silently supported them. And worst of all is probably the inhumane Chinese practice of “bound feet”. My grandma (on my father’s side) who has passed away, once showed me her “lotus feet”. Because she failed to bind her feet in childhood, she had to break four bones to make her feet small enough to get married. Far from being “a mark of beauty”, what I saw was disfigurement, a cruel punishment against women disguised as “aesthetics”.

These cultural traditions and religious teachings have an indisputable impact on our collective consciousness and pervade every aspect of the social ethos, including what is considered acceptable social behavior, who we look up to as heroes, what self images we have as men and women, and how men and women treat each other. If we have been told for thousands of years that women were born inferior, are more prone to temptations, are the source of trouble, is it any wonder why we live in a society full of misogynists, where women frequently suffer from inferiority complex and lack of self esteem – we are where we are because this is exactly what we have been brainwashed to believe. In fact, gender equality is the hardest to achieve (estimated to be at least 100 years away) compared to race equality (60 years away) and sexual orientation (10 years away).

I had a visceral reaction when I watched “Allen vs. Farrow”, an HBO series documenting the accusation of sexual abuse against Woody Allen involving Dylan, his then 7-year-old adopted daughter with Mia Farrow. While I knew about Woody Allen’s infamous marriage to his adopted daughter Soon-Yi, who is 35 years younger than him, I had never heard of Dylan’s story. It evoked memories of the first sexual harassment I encountered when I was eleven when a man on the bus started touching me. I screamed but a bus full of people completely ignored me. I had to jump out at the next stop and ran home as fast as I could. I buried that memory and many other dreadful episodes where my dignity was assaulted, but all I could do was to “suck it up” and silently suffer through these traumatic incidents because to tell those stories would only bring shame to myself. I am glad Dylan is telling her story and so are many other brave women. I believe their stories because I know how prevalent sexual harassment is -- hardly any woman ever grows up unscathed and no one wants to relive that pain or be stigmatized by the “scarlet letter” unless the pain is so strong we have to speak our truth.

And that is Elizabeth Lesser’s panacea – as women, we have to speak up. We may have been cursed like Cassandra, a princess in Greek mythology, who was given the gift to see the future but the curse of being never believed in. Our voices may have been stifled, but the human story is incomplete without women’s stories. What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? What would Pandora have said about opening the box? What would the Woody Allen movies look like if they were told from the women’s perspectives rather than from that of a neurotic, sick man who fantasized about all these gorgeous women wanting him? In those stories, women may have been victimized but we have also endured and triumphed. We are resilient. A different kind of hero emerges — one who values caretaking, champions compassion, sees the world through a collaborative lens, and achieves world peace by communicating rather than by violence and brute force. We celebrate a different leadership style, like that of Jacinda Ardern and Tammy Duckworth, who can be tough as nails but tender and loving as mothers at the same time. And when women start to tell our stories, the human story may change: Women are no longer given the false choice of toughen up as a man or you will be treated as frivolous and unimportant. We no longer engage in cat fights to compete for a few good men, but shine in our own confidence and bond in sisterhood. We can be our authentic selves, as masculine as we want and as feminine as our hearts desire.

Let’s rewrite our story!