When did patriarchal structures begin to be born? What physiological and social conditions did it originate from? If this situation is limited to historical contingencies, is it possible that in the path of human development there will be a sudden change in some link, thus producing a completely different social context? "The Power" challenges today's inherent state of affairs, assuming that women suddenly awaken powerful abilities one day, and that electric current can be transmitted through the twisted shaft between the collarbones to the fingertips, which can cause strong stimulation and damage to human nerves, and how the overall world will change dramatically.
At first glance, the book is easy to interpret in the context of feminism, and although the author himself points out in the afterword that he does have feminist tendencies, it can discuss or touch on a wider range of areas, as the title suggests, it shows how power is born, in what form it takes to seduce and change the masses, and ultimately how power should be properly placed and used.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="39" > explanation of power</h1>
Most of the power in modern society is hidden in the bureaucratic system, which is flat and light to be imperceptible, but it is always parasitic in people's daily life. Like the words of your boss asking you about the progress of your case when you are about to leave work, appearing in a place on time according to a properly divided clock, it is easy to think of the micro power that Foucault said, and people are now dealing with not leviathan beasts, but values as fine as dust.
These forms of power are difficult to grasp because most of the frameworks are based on some kind of invisible hook, or follow traditional conventions that have been handed down for decades, and are too long to touch the indiscriminate pursuit of history. Or based on the tacit understanding of the exchange of common interests between the two sides at the top level, the so-called high level has been elevated by the system, and the subordinate civilians cannot be ignored.
These powers are some distance away from us, and we can't really perceive the intimidation that power brings, which is really as shocking, ecstatic, and painful as an electric shock. The core experience of power is that one person can command and force another person to do something, and the most fundamental cause comes from force, which is physiologically powerful and can blackmail the other party with pain.
The book describes several scenes, which are very painful, whether it is a direct shock to the male eyeball, spine or lower body, the bones are brittle, and finally shrink into a scorched corpse, and the physiological damage established on the physiological nerves is one of the most feared shadows of human beings, and deduced to the end, it is a silent death that completely loses its survival function.
The use of electric shock as a symbol of power in the book is a very specific presentation of the primitive state of power, and it also induces the corresponding "force-pain" connection. From this starting point, like the Lisigbeten totem in the book, which spreads after an electric shock, the branches of the red veins branch out, twist around, and eventually expand into other forms of power.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="38" > second, when women have absolute advantage in force</h1>
The character groups developed differently in response to the awakening of electric shock abilities, and Ellie became the spokesperson of the mother goddess Eve, creating a religious system that hovered around the specious doctrine, which advocated that the mother god had a higher status than the Son, and absorbed many girls who were wandering because of the awakening through love and charity; Mag became famous for advocating the establishment of girls' training camps, gradually gaining an important position in the political arena, using women's military power to exchange continued interests with others.
These two main lines mean that when women have absolute superiority in force, they begin to re-establish new institutions that are very different from their previous state, and in religious ideology, they re-expound the importance of the female body of the mother in historical legends, the responsibility for childbirth is higher than other things that men can do, and they flip the fictional story of the original male masculinity and dominant angle.
Politically, it is to maximize the superiority of physical force, and to roll it with social reputation and political capital, to continue the expansion cycle of profit and profit, and to create a new generation of hegemonic system. Interestingly, the change and invariance of the institutional transformation may be observed, and the core of the content emphasized by different systems may change, but the transition from the former to the latter, the growth trajectory of power followed is still similar, and the importance of power is not what it says, what it feels is important, or what kind of value system it advocates, but its final operation and influence is the ontology that must be examined.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="37" > the setting of "women have power"</h1>
The seductive reality of power is playfully narrated in the book, and when girls know that they can protect themselves and even turn to attacking men, they feel a sense of freedom in their hearts. Feeling "I can do this, but I want it or not" is a very pleasant feeling to say, especially for women who were previously oppressed under the patriarchal system, this freedom is extremely dreamy and confusing. They finally came to the front of the line, but whether or not to cross over was a big question, which involved moral or indulgent interrogations, classic mysteries that man could not escape since ancient times.
However, this freedom is dangerous to the overall situation, and if only one party has this psychological immunity, it will cause great pressure on the other party, and no one can accept that his life is only between the thoughts of others, which will inevitably affect the state of the group, and eventually lead to mutual aggression and the possession of resources to achieve the balance of terror. This is why the book describes dystopias, where normal harmony cannot be achieved between powers as long as this "fatal sense of freedom" exists.
Another interesting setting comes from the fact that "The Power" is actually a book within a book, and there are two letters at the beginning and end, which turn out to be written by a male historian who only sent the manuscript to another female friend to read. Among them, the reader can vaguely know that in the era of correspondence, women had the advantage, and the purpose of men writing novels was to guess "why the power structure of this world is like this."
He sought much historical material in an attempt to reconstruct the true appearance of the past, writing in his letter: "The world is what it is is is because of the power structure that has been entrenched for five thousand years, and as long as we do not have to act this way now, as long as we understand where these ideas come from, we can see ourselves in different ways and imagine our possibilities." ”
Ironically, despite the seemingly good friends of the letters, the woman used the No offense in the end, suggesting that he publish the book by a woman's name. So familiar, this can be imagined as a mirror image reversal of male hegemony.
They also do not know why the world is the way it is, why God has decided the fact that one side is higher than another, and the dominant party never bothers to think about why, and the person responsible for conjecture and reconstruction is always the inferior, against the strong wind, at the risk of losing the right to speak, constantly telling the voice of the self, always sounding in the unreachable distance.
<h1 class="pgc-h-arrow-right" data-track="33" >4</h1>
Strictly speaking, I don't think "Electric Shock Girl" is purely critical of patriarchal structures, if men can be so strong is only a set of genes by chance, it is more worth caring about how power lurks in various shapes and blind spots that we don't know. Walking backwards in the dense and tangled pattern of electric shocks like flowers and leaves, you should find the first bit of the whirlpool that blooms, which is the starting point we must see.