Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes

The world wold have been different - and better - if women had had an equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human.

If all we do is immerse ourselves in the stories of bad people doing bad things to each other and the planet, we will sink under the weight of a lopsided story.

Emotional intelligence is learning how to decipher and channel the brilliance of your heart.

When it no longer would destroy a boy to be likened to a girl, when a girl feels vital doing the things she values, when it's considered as brave to be womanly as it is to be manly, than boys and girls, man and women can break out of the boxes that constrain us all

The basic belief of feminism is not that women are right and men are wrong; It is merely that women are people and therefor their voices matter, their values matter and their stories matter. It's time for women to tell their versions of what it means to be fully human. It is time for men to respect those insights and it is time for all of us to integrate them into a new story of power.

That's why we tell the stories. To ease the anxiety of being soft-skinned mortals. To inspire the soul to fathom eternity. To give order to what feels out of control. To guide, to blame, to warn, to shame. To make some kind of sense out of why people do what they do, why things happen the way they happen, and how we might all meet each other and daily life with less turmoil and more stability. That's why we cling to the old stories.

From bars and bleachers to media panels and the halls of government, it’s men who do more of the talking. This has been going on for a long, long time—women being accused of talking too much, even as men often dominate conversations, interrupt, mansplain, and do more of the sum total of all human talking.

Women are at the forefront of that kind of revolution now—a paradigm shift away from a gendered value system where the male experience is at the center of reality and all other ways of being, thinking, feeling, and doing are at the periphery.

What if our myths and teaching tales had purposely led humanity to believe that it was the ultimate sign of strength to nurture and love? What if the urge to care for children and nature and each other had been chosen as the most important tasks of any society? What if care as opposed to conquest had been the marker of virility? What if resources were granted to the people most skilled at peace making, healing, creating and opposed to those with brute strength and a pension for violence?

... I was flipping through a National Geographic magazine and I came across an article with this headline: "Women Created Most of the Oldest Known Cave Art Paintings, Suggests a New Analysis of Ancient Handprints. Most Scholars Had Assumed These Ancient Artists Were Predominantly Men, So the Finding Overturns Decades of Archaeological Dogma."... According to the article, Snow "analyzed hand stencils found in eight cave sites in France and Spain. By comparing the relative lengths of certain fingers, Snow determined that three-quarters of the handprints were female. 'There has been a male bias in the literature for a long time,' said Snow... 'People have made a lot of unwarranted assumptions about who made these things, and why."' But Snow suggested that women were involved in every aspect of prehistoric life-from the hunt to the hearth to religious ritual. "It wasn't just a bunch of guys out there chasing bison around," he said." Leaving the Cave - pg. 93

It's important to understand the significance of how our society's origin story is based in blame. It's good to contemplate what our culture would be like if the first woman had not been branded as "second born, first to sin." How would things be different if humankind's first big mistake wasn't to follow the lead of the woman? And if Eden's punishment hadn't been subservience to Adam?

Let's put aside the goal of doing it perfectly, and replace it with the trust that we can do it differently.

So much of the sorry state of our world hangs on the excess of the so-called masculine virtues in our guiding storylines.

He is disgusted not only by the whores of his city but also by the “wicked” sexuality of women in general.

A good way to measure the ubiquity of the male perspective masquerading a the human perspective is to check out the Nobel Prizes. The Nobel Prizes are awarded in six categories: literature, medicine, chemistry, peace, physics, and economics. Who we are as a species, what we value, where we expend our energy and our resources, and our priorities, goals, and dreams can be charted through the development of these categories. As of 2018, Nobel Prizes in total have been awarded to 853 men and 51 women. One hundred ten Nobel Prizes in Literature have been awarded since 1901, and only 14 of those were awarded to women... The world would have been different-and better-if women had had equal say in the development of literature, medicine, chemistry, physics, peace, and economics. Better, not because women are better, but because they are more than half of humanity, representing more than half of what it means to be human. If you can convince me otherwise, you should receive a Nobel Prize." The Greatest Books - pg. 80-81

Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing,” he writes, “there is a field. I’ll meet you there.

People who are placed on a pedestal are expected to pose, perfectly. Then they get knocked off when they fuck it up. I regularly fuck it up. Consider me already knocked off. —Roxane Gay

My dad was a man of his generation—the Greatest Generation, as it is called, because theirs was the one that grew up in the Depression and fought the Nazis in World War II. But theirs was also the generation of men who never talked about the war, never processed the trauma, kept that stiff upper lip that men were supposed to keep. Which my father did. He also kept his emotional distance from his four daughters.

T. S. Eliot says, “The end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

As you enter positions of trust and power,” Toni Morrison wrote, “dream a little before you think.