Why We Need To Find Our Authentic Voice
Until recently, almost every single thing we have heard, seen or read has in some way been dictated or controlled by men. Although this may seem to be changing, is it really?
Go look at the Billboard Hot 100, the top shows on HBO, top shows on Showtime or the Top 100 movies of 2021. In every case, you will find music and movies made by men dominating every list. The only place women really seem to be making significant headway is on the NYT Best Seller lists. Although you may see a lot of female faces starting to appear in movies and TV, however, doesn’t mean we are actually injecting our authentic voices into the culture. The question we really have to ask is, who controls the narrative?
Everywhere you look, you see women rising to positions of power and authority. From pastors, priests and rabbis to doctors and lawyers to producers and directors; scientists, songwriters and CEO’s. Women clearly seem to be making significant headway into arenas that have previously been dominated by men. We even have a female Vice-President. Before we bust out the champagne, however, let’s take a closer look at what this really means. Has anything really changed?
You see, every woman is trained and educated by someone. And in probably 99% of cases, those people are still men. If you are a female doctor, you obviously went to medical school, where probably 99% of your instructors were all men. In addition, men wrote all of the textbooks you learned from and probably developed at least 99% of all the techniques and methodologies that you are taught. So what, if anything, are women actually being allowed to bring to the table?
For so long, we’ve all thought that just getting a seat at the table was enough. But what really happens when there are 10 men and only 2 women sitting at the table? No one minds women sitting at the table as long as they bow to the wishes of the men. If she speaks up, speaks out or violates the wishes of men, however, she’s gone. Men are fine with women doing almost anything, as long as there is a man above her, controlling what she does! Although a woman reaching the level of VP in the U.S. is a huge accomplishment, it’s still not as big of an accomplishment as it seems, because men are comfortable with women being the “right hand” of a man, just not the person actually in control. They even have a name for it. It’s called being “under authority.”
The price for getting a seat at their table is that you get to look good sitting there but you don’t actually get a voice.
No one minds a woman speaking, teaching or leading, as long as she is communicating the same thoughts as men, teaching a message approved by men or leading others in the direction men want them to go. The problem is, we have been so thoroughly and completely indoctrinated into the ways of men that we often don’t even know it’s not our wisdom we are spreading or our authentic voice we are using!
Look at Hollywood. Sure, there’s all kinds of women in TV and movies now, but are they really representing who we really are? Look at how many female “Superheroes” we have now. Wonder Woman, Black Widow, Scarlet Witch and now we even have a Pakistani-American Muslim superhero named Kamala Khan (just to name a paltry few). But here’s the thing.. are “superheroes” really true to our authentic nature or are superheroes really just men with tits? You ever notice none of these superheroes are married or have children?
Our culture tells women that we have no worth or value unless we are mothers. So, we can be superheroes as long as we’re young and look good in skin-tight leather, but eventually we have to hang it all up and go do our duty as mothers - while men go right on saving the planet. Which they can do, because they have wives at home raising their children for them.
When men make women the stars of their movies, they are really just recreating themselves.
You ever notice that female characters created by men always have the same motivations and characteristics as the men that created them? William Moulton Marston, the creator of Wonder Woman had an obsession with bondage and was in a polyamorous relationship. So is it any wonder that Wonder Woman used a lasso to tie men up to extract the truth or came from an island of women?
Female characters created by men don’t generally act or behave in ways that are authentically true to how women behave. In movies that men make, women who have something taken from them always want revenge. They want to kill whoever hurt them. Because that is what men do and they want to believe that we are the same. Yet, the truth is that Bill Cosby raped more than 60 women (that we know of) and not a single woman tried to kill him!
In fact, women only commit only about 10 to 13 percent of homicides and when they do kill, they don’t use guns. Only eight percent of perpetrators of firearm homicides are female. An FBI study of 160 “active shooter” incidents between 2000 and 2013 found that only 6 incidents, or 3.8%, were perpetrated by a female shooter. In spite of how men continue to portray us in movies and media, we are nothing like them.
If you pay attention to how women actually act, we do not purposefully walk into danger, nor do we go exploring scary, creepy things. And yet in almost every single horror movie ever made, there is always some woman walking into a creepy basement or dark backyard, almost always in underwear or lingerie, with something like a golf club or a wrench for protection. And for decades, women have been treated as if we are stupid for doing this. Real women have paid a high price for the actions of characters that MEN created!
We need to stop believing the things men tell us about ourselves in the media they create.
2020 was a great year for women in film, since we had THREE whole movies that much more accurately reflected the reality of what it means to be a woman. In “Nomadland”, director Chloé Zhao explored the rich inner life of an aging woman living life on her own terms, played by Frances McDormand. There were no car chases, no explosions, no violence of any kind. She didn’t do anything stupid and her life was not actually a complete train wreck. Something that flies completely in the face of the narratives most men create for female characters. She also didn’t have perfectly coiffed hair or a very subtle “aging beauty” created by a thick coating of makeup, as men generally direct.
In “Land”, Robin Wright plays a woman trying to heal from an unimaginable loss. A series of flashbacks showcases the stark reality of the plight of women in America; in which we are not allowed space by our families or communities to truly grieve and mourn even the most unthinkable loss. We live in a culture in which people expect us to simply shut it down and “move on” - generally for their sake and their comfort. This is a truth that very few men could ever grasp, since they are usually the ones expecting us to just “let it go” and “move on,” or just go kill someone in revenge.
Perhaps the best and most accurate portrayal of the genuine truth about women versus how we are portrayed by men, however, was Emerald Fennel’s “Promising Young Woman.” There are two things that make this movie true to the reality of women. The first is that, when seeking a form of “revenge” for the life of her friend. She doesn’t kill or harm men, she exposes them to the reality of who they really are. That is what women do.
We are not murderers, we are truth exposers.
The second thing she does, however, which is true to the reality of women, is that rather than killing someone else for revenge, she sacrifices herself. This is the truth men cannot see because it is a truth they cannot relate to. When someone wrongs them, they will kill and destroy for revenge but they will not sacrifice themselves for justice. Some have. Martin Luther King Jr. and Gandhi, for instance, but it is safe to say it is an incredibly rare event. For women, it happens all the time. Women regularly sacrifice their own bodies to save those of their children. It is who we are.
We need to stop allowing men to portray us in ways that are not true to who we are. Second of all, we need to stop buying the lie that their truth is the only truth. We don’t just need more female doctors, we need more female scientists, but beyond that we also need female scientists that do not work for companies run by men. We need more female pastors, but we also need more female theologians to go back in and dig into the very root of the religious narratives perpetuated by men for centuries.
Men have even controlled all the narratives around reproduction - to women’s detriment.
For centuries, men promoted the idea that their sperm was the most critical aspect of reproduction and women were merely “vessels” into which they deposited a fully formed human. Although this myth was eventually debunked, over and over again, men have managed to make their contributions to procreation far more “weighty” than a woman’s. In the 21st century, as more and more women have made their way into laboratories, we’re getting a far more accurate picture of the full “weight” of a woman’s role in actually creating the human she eventually grows.
For instance, men have long held the belief that sperm travel directly to the ovaries, with the fastest winning the race. In truth, a woman’s reproductive tract very carefully sorts through millions of sperm, weeding out the weakest as they travel, so only the healthiest make it to the womb. In addition, a woman’s body is basically a DNA lab that first analyzes pheromones to determine genetic compatibility. When pheromones were first discovered, as per usual, men tried to exploit them to their advantage by trying to use them to lure women.
Turns out, women are only attracted to men whose pheromones tell them they are genetically compatible. (If you want to know why a woman just can’t seem to quit a dude that still lives at home with his parents, this is why). Beyond that, though, a woman’s body does further testing when you kiss. If you’ve ever wondered why at least a single kiss is considered such a critical part of a date, this is why - because your body is literally testing for genetic compatibility. If the kiss is a dud, it doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with the dude, it just means you are genetically incompatible.
Our bodies are designed to minimize birth defects and miscarriages.
Just think about how much pain, anguish, misery and suffering is caused by this notion that a woman’s greatest contribution to the world is to bear a child. But first, we have to get through high school and college and get a “good” job in order to make sure our child has the financial support it needs - so we don’t have to be dependent on men. But then they also want an equal say in how “their” child is raised. We literally have evidence that a 16-year old can pop a baby out in between geometry and French and be right back in class.
Yet, somehow society has decided that it’s better for a women to wait until she is in her 30’s or 40’s to have a baby. So, she spends most of the years when her body is best suited for childbearing on birth control. Then, when her hormones are completely out of whack from years of having her natural hormonal balance thrown off, she goes off birth control and expects to immediately get pregnant. When she can’t, she goes to an “infertility” specialist, who only further throws her hormones out of whack and takes away her body’s ability to create the most healthy child by carefully choosing only the most viable sperm.
This has incredibly serious implications for the health and safety of artificial insemination, particularly with random sperm donors. Just one more process that was invented by men that could potentially have severe implications for women and children. Ultimately, for decades now, men have essentially studied themselves and promoted whatever theories and ideas benefitted them the most or cast themselves in the best light with little, if any, consideration to how this might impact women or others. Their only consideration seems to have been to ask “can we” rather than should we.
They have spent most of history trying to stack the deck in their favor. This includes getting to be the ones who determine which man gets which woman. Trying to ensure that women were never anything more than a reflection of their greatness. The great irony is that they are the ones that created the rules that the most “powerful” man gets the most attractive women, but then they also blame us for being “shallow” when we follow their rules! They say wealth and power should buy you any woman you want, yet they also get angry when women choose a wealthy or powerful man over a “nice guy.”
This is why it is so critical for women to find their authentic voice. To throw out so much of what we have learned from men and to discover our own truths for ourselves. Almost everything we know about the human body, about how it works and functions and how we fit into society has all been discovered or delineated by men. Women, on the other hand, have spent years having their bodies senselessly ripped and shredded to pieces because we are basically just a science experiment to men.
HOW DO WE CHANGE?
While there is nothing wrong with learning from men, and they have much to teach us, it is important that we also find our own voice. We do this by immersing ourselves in the voices of women throughout the ages. While books written by women are harder to come by and movies made by women even harder, they are out there. I think you will find that when you read something a woman has written using her authentic voice, it hits different than something written by a man or a woman indoctrinated by men.
Moreover, we need to learn to question everything we have ever been taught. Unfortunately, this is difficult for so many women because men have built systems into the very fabric of our culture and the institutions they created to ensure they remain unquestioned and unchallenged. We have been conditioned to never challenge or question them and that conditioning can be hard to overcome. If we ever hope to live a life true to ourselves, being guided by our own code, however, we will have to break free of this conditioning in order to find our own voice.