This post is part of the ongoing Alphabet Series. Listen along to my recording on YouTube and/or read the article below ♥♀

So imagine you’ve had a stressful day. It could be good stress or bad – a good performance review at work vs being sexually harassed on the street. The body doesn’t actually differentiate between types of stress, even if your conscious mind does. So your body tells you to deal with the stress by doing things that have comforted and consequently rewarded, you in the past. If you’re lucky, these are positive and healthy things like relaxing at home or going out dancing. But for many people, our stress reactions don’t truly help us and can even take the form of an addiction. For those actively trying to conquer bad habits or compulsive behaviours, stress can trigger a crazy-making inner dance that involves giving or denying ourselves permission to indulge in self-soothing and/or avoidance. For me, personally, my only true addiction is to sugar, a problem I developed in childhood to deal with a stressful family environment. And it is a lifelong struggle that is triggered by both positive and negative stress. The permission-granting process is basically a series of rationalizations involving being deserving, being kind to ourselves, making promises about quitting, minimizing negative effects, and the like. We all know this inner dance, and if we’re lucky, the stress reactions aren’t too harmful, but for many of us, they are. And they can be anything from overeating to using drugs and alcohol to allowing abusive people back into our lives after liberating ourselves.

Everything we do is governed by rules. Even in the scenario above, the rules are informal and self-created, even if we don’t realize we have them. Some people are really good at following rules, especially if they are societally policed.  A minority of people are exceptionally good at self-control in these situations where we are both the rule-makers and the potential rule breakers. Sometimes it is because they are extremely goal-oriented or purpose-driven or they haven’t experienced a lot of trauma requiring self-soothing or they have had good mentors to help them develop healthy ways of dealing with stress and staying focused.

People break formal and informal rules for a lot of reasons, and in this article, I’m going to explore different kinds of rule-bound situations, and why different people may seek or fail to seek permission for breaking rules. I’m going to say right off the bat that I believe that women and girls struggle more with rules, rule-breaking, and requiring permission to do things than males do. First, as is typical of all male-dominated societies, more rules are imposed on females, and as a result, girls learn to start policing themselves and creating even more nonsensical rules to follow for themselves. This manifests in a great deal of self-sabotage, low self-confidence, and the development of neurotic, self-policing behaviour and associated guilt, shame, depression, and physical and psychological suffering. Males on the other hand, grow up with fewer rules and less punishment for breaking rules, and of course, biologically and intellectually as members of the predator class, I think they are less capable of feeling empathy, shame, guilt or of engaging in self-analysis. So let’s take a look at how permission and rule-breaking factor into different areas of our lives.

Self-Control and Rules We Create for Ourselves

As mentioned in the introduction, we wrestle with the many informal rules we make for ourselves every day. Some of these rules are internalized over a lifetime of programming by parents, school, television, religion, etc. Some of them are developed on our own as we try to control our lives and our natural impulses and learned bad habits. To reference what I have come to call the Freudian Cerberus, a famous, but simplistic and silly, male theory of personality that will be repeatedly rammed down your throat like a forced mouth rape if you are a psychology major, it is a battle between the id, ego and superego. Giving into your impulses or stress-induced bad habits is a permission granting that takes the form of rationalization. You allow yourself to procrastinate, to binge eat, to drink or take drugs, or to allow the abusive ex-boyfriend  back into your life to make yourself feel better or to avoid dealing with reality and stress.

Family Rules

The family is the first place we encounter actual rules in our lives and it is where we develop healthy and unhealthy patterns when dealing with life stress. These are the people who lay the foundations for our addictions and determine our mental health path. If we’re lucky, our parents are mentally healthy people with a reasonable and consistent moral compass and an ability to teach rational and critical thinking. Most of us aren’t that fortunate, however, and we end up repeating parental mistakes, and dealing with arrested development. Depending on the roles we’re cast in within the family system, we end up being rule followers and authority respecters, or rebels (usually without a cause). And then there are the outliers who forge their own paths and systems of morality, picking and choosing which of society’s  rules have merit and are worth respecting, and which don’t and aren’t.

It is within the family that we see our first sex-based differences in rule establishment and permission denial and granting. Girls will usually discover that compared to any of the males in the family, there is a more complex and vast system of rules for them, that ‘no’ is a more common reaction to the asking of permission to do something, and that the breaking of rules is more harshly punished for them. We see the results of this unacknowledged misogyny in how girls develop in all societies. Compared to boys, girls are risk averse and more conservative in their aspirations, they are less confident, more submissive and rule-abiding and predictable, and they are more accepting of denial of permission, punishment for rule-breaking, and to atone for perceived and real wrong-doings. I suspect none of this is natural, and almost wholly the product of social conditioning. It reminds me of the story of the chained elephant and is a form of learned helplessness. I see the way most girls are raised as a form of child abuse. But what happens in most families is preparation for what happens at large in the world. As women out in the world, girls will continue to face more rules, more denial, and more punishment than men. Girls who rebel as children end up being the ‘bitches’ of the world, labeled as such by all males and compliant, but miserable women. Boys who rebel, on the other hand, often end up respected for breaking rules and even committing crimes, and often are touted as heroes or ‘great men’ making their mark on the world as males are supposed to do.

Unspoken Rules

There are tons of environments where there are rules, but it is sort of a cultural understanding rather than something written in stone. There are still punishments for breaking these rules, and there are more rules with more punishment for females than for males. Females are more likely to be punished and denied permission than males are as well. These environments include marriages, workplaces, schools, social groups and on the streets.

One of the most common and most universal unofficial rules is that concerning breeding – and this is almost completely a rule forced on women and girls. I am not aware of any country that makes it illegal NOT to have children, but every single country in the world pressures women to breed, and the subliminal messaging starts in childhood. There is no true way to gain permission to be exempt from this unwritten rule and still enjoy the perks and respect of motherhood. You can get a semi-pardon if your plumbing doesn’t work and you are unable to have children, but you won’t attain the highest level of female human status. Males don’t experience anything like this and can either breed uncontrollably or not at all without a dent put in his social, financial, or legal status. Fatherhood isn’t tied to primary identity for men. This is solely a female burden.

What’s more, despite world overpopulation, many countries’ leaders are becoming testerical over the large number of non-contributors compared to taxpayers that has resulted from baby boomers aging out of the workforce and today’s youth having fewer children. Many countries are offering women and heterosexual couples numerous incentives to breed, including cash, maternity packages, pardoning of jail sentences for women, and eliminating the requirement to pay any income tax at all. I was speaking to a close lesbian friend in China the other day, and she mentioned that the propaganda mill has been put into overdrive to pressure women into having children, and she is extremely worried that the next step will be to punish women who refuse to breed. And I’ve heard similar sentiments echoed by women in other countries. There is even a conspiracy theory that the recent American overturning of Roe vs. Wade was a step made to force an increase in the birth rate in a country where women are breeding fewer children or not at all. I keep envisioning a dystopian world like that envisioned by famous Canadian author, Margaret Atwood, in her book The Handmaid’s Tale, where women are reduced to baby factories and hating each other – not men, who enjoy all the perks of this world  – passionately.

Now, another, but related, unwritten rule in 2/3 of the world is that concerning homosexuality. Like all oppressions, homophobia is rooted in misogyny and male domination, so it makes sense that when men fail to rape women and women fail to seek out rapists – aka the heterosexual lifestyle – male domination is threatened and the world as we know it teeters on the verge of collapse. While 65 of our world’s countries criminalize homosexual behaviour, and 12 countries, including Northern Nigeria – completely or predominantly Muslim, of course – put gays and lesbians to death, legally, there is no country in the world where a homosexual lifestyle is free from the threat of attack, sometimes even fatal attack.  Even in the most liberal countries, gays and lesbians are not permitted to walk through the world with the safety and acceptance that their straight counterparts take for granted.

In middle-of-the-road countries where homosexuality is not illegal, but still is far from acceptable, governments will engage in covert methods to shut down groups and render invisible gays and lesbians. When I lived in China, my university went to great lengths to discourage homosexual activity. For example, they reorganized many academic departments and locations of student housing to different campuses to spread out the much smaller female student population so that males could have access to them and to discourage homosexuality. Before this, the majors women tended towards were mostly housed on one smaller campus where I lived, and instances of gay male activity had been noted on the main campus where few women were to be found. Stupidly, the administration didn’t understand that moving women around to provide male student access to suitable rape objects wouldn’t change homosexual tendencies in males. All they achieved was to put ALL the women in more danger by thinning the bit of safety they had due to strength in numbers. I heard many times from my female students that they didn’t feel safe walking around on campus at night, and I myself, was the target of a black man who stalked me for weeks for the purpose of raping me. He made his intentions very clear, and according to him, Chinese women don’t put out for free like white women do, so he didn’t require permission to assault me. I reported the problem, but the university refused to do anything except encourage me not to go outside after dark…

Rules Governing Human Interaction

There are a lot of social rules that don’t have explicit, written law linked to them, but it is understood that permission governs everything. We can sum this up by the following: your rights end where mine begin. There is a two-part problem, however. First is that males and females don’t exist on equal footing. Males understand themselves to be full humans and any transgression they perceive against their body or property is akin to a crime. And females, as they are defined and dominated by males are understood to be partial humans that exist to serve males. Even the most liberal of males does not see a female as his equal, even if it is just on a subconscious level as his words may reflect all the politically correct stuff. His inner predator still sees you as something he can take advantage of in some way, and your permission is granted by default, especially if you have granted it at least once before.

Second, males and females see permission in different ways. Let’s use a well-known saying to illustrate the difference in thinking:

It is better to seek forgiveness than to ask for permission.

Various sources¹ and wording, one version dating back to Agnes Strickland’s 1846 work, Lives of the Queens of England.

When males and females go ahead and break a rule and then go back to ask for forgiveness, they do it for different reasons. Males usually don’t give a shit if they do something wrong, even if it harms another person, especially a female. As they grow up, they are imbued with a sense of deserving and entitlement as males, so it may not even occur to them that they need to ask permission to do what they want to do. And as they inevitably break rule after rule, they accumulate a lifetime of forgiveness from females – mom, sisters, classmates, teachers – and learn that they can get away with anything, especially if afterwards, they pretend remorse or use the ‘love’ word, or shower their victim with gifts. Some men do know that they are doing something wrong, although most will feign ignorance and put the onus of their education on their female victims.

When females dare to break rules and then go back and ask forgiveness, they usually do it because they know they will be denied permission. And most of this rule-breaking usually isn’t about sexually harming others. It could be trying to do something at work or school, or trying to obtain something they wouldn’t normally have access to. Girls are used to the word ‘no’ from an early age, so if they are daring enough to risk punishment, they know they might have a fighting chance of getting what they need or want if they just go ahead and ask for forgiveness later.

So as we can see, males tend to be more selfishly motivated, while females are usually just trying to avoid being stopped from achieving something simply because they are girls and they face more barriers than males do. Unfortunately, males are much more likely to break rules, even if they know they are doing something bad. As I mentioned before, girls get used to having more rules, hearing ‘no’ more often, and being punished more frequently and severely, so they tend to risk less and self-sabotage or self-censor more.

Rules Governed by Law or Something on Par with Law

Males have designed all the systems that we use to govern society. This includes the rules written into law and the acceptable and expected behaviours that they believe are allowed by religion, nature, and science. Religion, of course, is a male creation used to control the population, and cement male domination. Nature doesn’t really have ‘laws’ although men like to think it does when it suits their purposes. And science, although just a methodology for seeking answers, has been elevated by some men to a series of ‘laws’ and they use them as such to control women and give men power. The legal system, natural law, and science have all been badly abused throughout history to justify taking rights away from women and girls and to give males blanket permission to commit violence and other atrocities, to justify feelings of entitlement and superiority to all living creatures and the earth herself, and to make up nonsense about what females are and to strip them of their humanity and right to control their bodies and lives.

To conclude, I suspect the crazy dance we are forced to do with men to negotiate our lives and safety in a world catering to their dominance and bent on our subservience, and the crazy dance we do with ourselves in order to deal with the stresses of living in a patriarchal world wouldn’t be an issue in a woman-centred society. I doubt we’d spend even a moment trying to figure out whether we have permission to live in freedom, whether we deserve to be unencumbered. Self-actualization can only occur when there are no barriers to success.

♀️ If you care to support Story Ending Never, we are appreciative. ⚢