On September 20, 2021, at Shanghai Zhonghai Huanyuhui Mall, dream-building artist Tanya Schul t z's "Candy Utopia" fairy tale amusement park toured the world, attracting people to punch in photos and participate in interactive games, and feel the sweetness and beauty of the childhood wonderland created by the "other-dimensional world". (Photo/ Visual China)
The American literary magazine Paris Review once asked the scholar Beauvoir: "Why have you never created a truly independent and free female character who can express the theme of "The Second Sex" in one way or another?" Beauvoir replied: "What I write about in the novel is what women look like in reality—contradictory people, not what they should be." ”
Being born as a woman is like living in a huge glass house, and there will always be all kinds of voices telling them how to live, how to make choices, and what to become. There are always moments of staring from the outside world, but there are always women who jump out, reject this definition, and are unwilling to live in prejudices and stereotypes.
The so-called female consciousness is women's experience and awakening of their own value, as well as the questioning and subversion of traditional shackles. In recent years, women's issues have emerged in an endless stream, women's consciousness has become increasingly high, and girls have shown female power from different dimensions. New changes are taking place, how do post-90s examine themselves, and how to express women's demands?
Don't deliberately pander
Li Jiu, a northeastern girl born in 1996, came to Beijing to seek employment after graduating from graduate school. When she first entered the workplace, she was kind to people everywhere and wanted to integrate into the group as soon as possible. She was extremely glad that the leader of the group she brought was a gentle-looking elder sister, who had no sense of distance and was very cordial to get along.
Once in a group building, she and another girl organized a game of "werewolf killing", after losing and being punished for drinking, she made a "1" gesture and said, "What is this wine?" It's okay to drink it all the time." This was supposed to be a joke, but the speaker had no intention, the listener had a heart, and before long, the big sister of the group leader found her and the girl, asked them to stay after work, and would arrange important things.
Unexpectedly, the important thing was to eat with the big leader of the department. The group leader couldn't drink, so he took the two little girls to socialize. The whole night Li Jiu was not in high mood, did not talk much, and never took the initiative to toast, when it was necessary for everyone to raise a glass, she pushed back and said that her stomach hurt and chose to replace the wine with tea. The next day, the group leader came to her and asked her what was wrong and why she was throwing a tantrum for no reason.
Through this incident, all the previous good feelings were ruined, and Li Jiu began to alienate the group leader and told other female colleagues in the group that if something similar happened, they must refuse. She then collected chat histories with another colleague and said, "If something like that happens again, be sure to expose her." ”
"What did you do to me?" I studied hard all the way and worked hard, not so that one day I would come to society and attract attention by drinking with the leader, which was too disrespectful to people. Li Jiu felt that by currying favor and pandering, winning the attention of his superiors, and exchanging some resources, the other party would only feel that he had pinched a weak person, and then became more and more inflated and did more outrageous things.
In Li Jiu's view, "wine table culture" is an exploitation of power from the top to the bottom, a test of obedience under an unequal relationship, with obvious gender discrimination, which must be stopped in time at the beginning. "I can only win real support and respect by differentiating myself from the competition through my strength," she said. ”
After this incident, Li Jiu shed the green skin when he first entered the workplace and became angry and bold. She soon found that after clearly expressing her anger, the people who had previously looked high and extremely picky had been more polite to her, and did not dare to bully the soft and afraid of the hard. But she still had the idea of leaving, and felt that such a company should not stay for a long time.
Li Jiu informed his colleagues at the opposite table of his plan to jump ship, and he did not expect that his colleagues also had plans to leave. Colleagues told her: "When you are out of place with your surroundings, you don't have to blindly reflect on yourself, it is likely that there is something wrong with the environment." Girls should support each other and watch over each other, rather than using each other to achieve their goals. ”
After leaving the job, Li Jiu and this colleague have been in touch and developed into a true friendship, and they go shopping together on weekends, sharing their thoughts, and telling each other what books they have read recently and what plans they have made.
A passage from Calvino's "Invisible City" shared by a colleague not long ago made Li Jiu particularly touched - "The hell of the living will not appear; if there is, it is that there is already here, we live in it every day, and we are gathered together to form it."
There are two ways to escape suffering, and for many people the first is easy: accept hell and be a part of it until you don't feel its existence. The second is risky and requires constant vigilance and learning; looking for non-hellish people and things in hell, learning to discern them, keeping them going, giving them space. ”
They all firmly chose the second option.
I didn't want to be her at all
From childhood to adulthood, Liu Xiaojuan has always been very distressed about her mother. She loved her, respected her, and wanted to be with her whenever she had time, but she didn't want to be a mother. How she wished her mother would be nice to herself, dressed up beautifully, and have her own life outside the family.
When I was a child, my father was doing engineering in Zhengzhou City, and my mother took their three siblings to live in the countryside, in addition to raising children, but also taking care of the elderly on both sides. Sometimes, Liu Xiaojuan watched her mother in the kitchen cutting vegetables for a while, brushing pots for a while, busy sweating, eager to step on the hot wheel. After this meal is cleaned up, it is time to start preparing for the next meal, and the pot and stove that has just been cleaned up will soon be messed up again. Mom's life is like a top, constantly spinning under great inertia.
The mother's hard work and complaints have allowed the elderly in the family to be properly taken care of, and the three sisters and brothers have also grown up healthily. A few years ago, four elderly people passed away one after another, and my mother was finally willing to move to Zhengzhou to live with my father. Dad made a lot of money doing projects in Zhengzhou, Liu Xiaojuan thought: This is good, my mother can finally take a break and enjoy a leisurely life.
When Liu Xiaojuan saw the story of 56-year-old Su Min choosing to leave her family and travel alone in the news, she was overwhelmed with regret. Liu Xiaojuan feels that Su Min is very brave, and at the same time feels that she has spent more than 30 years to complete all the maternal work, and when she sent her grandson to kindergarten and was 56 years old, she began to look for herself, which is also very sad, to some extent, very similar to her mother.
But Mom doesn't act like Su Min. After moving to the city, the busy mother became depressed because she had nothing to do. The sister, who sensed something was wrong, dragged her mother to the hospital for examination, only to find that her mother was suffering from depression.
Mom was completely accustomed to an unhemped life, and when she got to town, there were fewer people to talk to, and her social circle was smaller. Later, my mother insisted on finding a cleaning job in the community property, and not long after, my mother's illness magically improved. In the past two years, Liu Xiaojuan and her sister have entered the marriage, and her mother urged them to have babies, hoping to help them with the children as soon as possible, Liu Xiaojuan sighed: "My mother is really idle, and it is uncomfortable not to work." ”
The writer Virginia Woolf once said in "A Room Of Your Own": "The woman is a strange mixture, and in the imagination of the people, she is extremely high; in real life, she is insignificant." ”
In recent years, more and more women's real dilemmas in marriage have been brought up for discussion. Books such as "Kim Ji-young, born in 1982" and "Home on the Slope" have caused a lot of resonance, and people have begun to discuss the value of women's domestic labor and social identity outside the family. Liu Xiaojuan is very happy to see this, she feels that every time there is such a discussion, women's value will be more likely to be seen once, and women's choices will be continuously broadened. She is grateful to those who have not been harmed, but who are gender-aware and continue to speak out for it.
In life, many of her mother's demands will also be ignored, so that Liu Xiaojuan has always resisted becoming a woman like her mother.
Some time ago, Liu Xiaojuan read an article and was concerned about it. "If one day I choose to have children, I want to be only 30% of the mothers, the rest of the 70% to share in what interests me, and learn to draw happiness in more places, so that there is enough love to feed the child, and the child will be happier," she said. ”
On January 22, 2020, on the streets of Wuhan, a girl went out with her pet dog. (Photo/ Wang Fei)
You just have to be yourself
In order to cater to the rising sense of women, many entertainment programs in recent years have tried to get close to women's issues. However, many media products are presented in the name of feminism, and the purpose is only to cause controversy, and there is no intention to explore the problem in depth.
Born in 1997, Chen Bing has always been keen on women's topics and likes to argue with people on the Internet. Chen Bing has a maverick cousin, erudite and knowledgeable, and Chen Bing regards her as an idol.
Recently, Chen Bing experienced an epiphany moment. Her cousin told her that there was no need to make herself a thorn in the face and engage in endless quarrels following stereotypes. "Inciting one gender against the other, or blaming either gender in general, is absurd at all times."
Her cousin shared with Chen Bing Nancy Smith's poem "As Long As There Is a Woman", telling her that the traditional concept of gender actually makes men and women very unfree, and that women's issues are by no means a red line that pits men and women into antagonism, so both men and women need to re-examine gender differences.
The poem reads: "As long as there is a woman who feels strong and therefore hates the disguise of weakness, there must be a man who realizes that he is also vulnerable and is therefore unwilling to pretend to be strong; as long as there is a woman who hates to play a childish and ignorant little girl, there must be a man who wants to get rid of the high expectation of 'knowing everything'... As long as a woman takes a step towards her own liberation, there must be a man who finds himself closer to the path to freedom. ”
"We must communicate with an inclusive mentality, the three views should not be too single, do not easily establish dualistic opposition, such quarrels again and again, in exchange for not understanding, but the sadness of killing eight hundred enemies and losing a thousand." The cousin comforted Chen Bing in this way.
Female awakening is a long-term process, during which there will be a variety of confrontational forces, the more noisy the crowd, the more you should think.
As Woolf said, "You don't have to rush." There is no need to spark. You don't have to be someone else, just be yourself. ”