Advancing Toward the Equality of Women and Men — Part VI
The next part of the document continues to focus on overcoming oppression through the acquisition of self-knowledge:
Even in societies where women have been granted certain political and economic rights and are legally empowered, both men and women are denied knowledge of their true selves. Women are objectified and sexuality is made the core of their identity. Their aims and aspirations are set in terms of pleasing men. Attraction to beauty, another force seeded in the human soul that can potentially shape one’s moral purpose and direct one toward standards of excellence and refinement, is deliberately perverted to the point where women and men are seen as no more than means for the gratification of material desires. Rather than counteracting such views, existing educational programs often serve to reinforce them by emphasizing intellectual development without due consideration of moral values and spiritual qualities—values that enable individuals to move beyond a preoccupation with the pursuit of personal wealth and satisfaction, toward action for the benefit of the whole. Other potent agents of socialization today are systems of mass media, including emerging forms of new media. Around the world, adolescent girls and boys are raised in an environment that is strongly influenced by media systems that propagate and exploit misconceptions about human nature. Acting on the dictates of certain industries and interests, media systems are frequently used as instruments of manipulation. Media systems also work to naturalize the messages and habits of thought they propagate, until these messages and habits begin to appear as normal, inevitable features of social life.
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[...] funding and somewhere along the way they got to decide how we like to view women. As it explains in the document, “media systems work to naturalize the messages and habits of thought they propogate, until these [...]
On the theme of beauty, one thing that frustrates me is the narrowing of concepts of beauty and the shrinking of the ability to respond to beauty. In other words, as the media hijacks our God-given attraction to beauty and uses it to get us to buy things, our ability to recognize and respond to all different sorts of beauty is atrophying. I am not just talking about human beauty (but that too) but also the beauty of nature, the beauty we create through arts and crafts, the beauty of a life well-lived, the beauty of human qualities like love and kindness and forbearance. I recently read “Little House in the Big Woods” to my daughter and I was struck by how every aspect of Caroline Ingalls’s life was dominated by beauty–the work of her life, providing food for her family and caring for them, was craftsmanship at its highest degree, and the natural environment around her, with which she interacted as she chose her daily activities, was beautiful. I am not advocating a return to a more rustic lifestyle, which I couldn’t survive myself! But there is something important to me about tuning in to the beauty that God has placed at the center of our day-to-day lives.
I think beauty is a truly mystical thing, calling us to the center of reality and guiding us to a good life. John Keats famously wrote, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” I think it is the true definition of beauty that justifies his thought. If we believe in truth, the coherent reality of all things (and I do), and if truth and beauty are inseparable (and I think they are), then our quest for social improvement will be accelerated as we focus on these two interacting elements, truth and beauty. In my personal life I found that when I learned to focus on the beautiful, true good, then my own circumstances were revolutionized. Before, I was oppressed, but focusing on goodness and truth lead me into emancipation. Because truth, in order to BE the truth, has to be one unified whole, which can be called reality; and I believe that reality operates in a consistent way, pushing and guiding us, individually and collectively, into the path of progress and human advancement. When I began to engage in the process of individual surrender to the force of life in the universe (for me, that is religion), it was as though I had found some wonderful jet stream that is flowing in the direction of betterment for me and for my family. And I think it’s allowing me to contribute to society in my own small way as well. So my key thought here is that there is truly only one reality; that reality is beautiful, in the truest sense; and therefore our pursuit of truth and beauty can help us become attuned to reality and contribute to our own advancement and that of society.