This weekend I picked up a book that I’ve been meaning to read for some time. “The Power” by Naomi Alderman was in one of my favorite book genres, futuristic dystopia and supernatural powers, and also landed on Barack Obama’s 2017 reading list.
The basic premise of the book is that, in a not-so-distant future, adolescent girls discover that they have the ability to sense and create electric currents. This power comes from an organ that people call a “skein.” These skeins seem to have appeared out of nowhere, although almost all the females in the story are born with it, and older women can activate latent abilities through exposure to shock.
As women begin to realize their own collective and individual strength, they begin to use their abilities to gain more power over their lives. As the women’s revolution goes on, they soon transform from being powerless to possessing the capability to restrict male rights.
Under the new female dictatorship men are required to have a female guardian sign off on all their travel papers and they are unable to own property. Finding themselves in a similar situation to women in the 1800’s, the men soon develop similar characteristics: they accept their helplessness with fatalistic attitude and try to be attractive to powerful young women.
“The Power” made me think about the ways in which women are complacent with the reality of men and women being socially-stratified. The barriers that bar the way of women, but lift when a man needs to get to something.
The expectation for men to carve their own path out of life and for women to follow the one that is already heavily trod before them. Men are natural in the role of inventors, engineers, scientists, politicians, soldiers, and entrepreneurs. Women are natural in the roles of team members, secretaries, nurses, and assistants. Because of their empathy and kindness, we are made to believe the dominant narrative about genders.
Just as we have exceptional men recorded in history — Magellan, Julius Caesar, Galileo, Isaac Newton, Keats — all pioneers in their own areas, as explorers, emperors, inventors, scientists, poets, they were able to leave the mark of their obsessions on history. They pursued their dreams — like Benjamin Franklin with his kite in a thunderstorm, and Steve Jobs working on the first PC in his father’s garage — of course they still needed validation whether from their partner or close friends, but what usually stands out for famous geniuses like Ben Franklin or Steve Jobs is their ability to self-validate and the ways this strength led them to take the risks that led to their greatest successes.
The fact that females in our culture feel perpetually dependent on others ever-changing opinions for their self-esteem means they will forever be caught chasing after a mirage. Romantic relationships will inevitably not be able to provide enough words of acceptance and approval to sustain self-acceptance in them. Because women seem to blindly pursue this goal of validation, they miss the opportunity to be leaders and become, by default, followers.
In the end it comes back to power; because individual men are physically able to fight off an attack, it is accepted that they will naturally show regard for their independence. In contrast, because women are rightly afraid of physical or sexual abuse from aggressive and forceful men, it is expected that they will become dependents of the men around them.
If women suddenly developed skeins, as they do in “The Power,” and if they were able to hold their own against men in combat by using electrocution, this comfortable feeling of dependency would become maladaptive, quickly.
For now, internalized misogyny will have to be overcome by women before they can begin the challenging task of self-advocacy.
It is difficult for women to escape the role that was assigned to them as children, when they were praised for conforming to their parents’ rules by being quiet, meek, and not causing trouble. Little girls with low self-esteem grow up to be adults who end up in codependent relationships and feel too afraid to leave and start over. A woman in a codependent relationship might declare that she is unable to change the oil in her car or file taxes by herself and rely on her male partner for that. Her lack of knowledge on the subject might make her feel more secure in the relationship, while his greater competence with the subject gives him psychological power over her. For equality in a relationship, a woman needs to learn more about the technical and mechanical facets of her life and know how to do things by herself.
For women to truly begin to take responsibility for their own lives, changes to current system must occur, which make the part of the passive female victim a maladaptive behavior, so that it occurs less often. As Machiavelli says, it is better to be feared than loved if your goal is power, and no matter how much a man might love a woman individually, they will never be on equal footing with men, unless they are willing to fight.
The best practical approach to this issue is a lot of experimentation with women in new roles, which is already occurring. This will help uncover new layers, errors and lingering sex-based prejudice that are in current feminist thought. To set our sights high enough, however, we will need to take on the genuinely difficult task of retelling the collective female cultural myth that defines what it means to be a man or woman. Optimistically, women will band together and fight for equality, including taking on an equal amount of responsibility for living a good life as a human being.