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

I can’t change my mold, no, no, no, no
It’s just sex and violence, melody and silence
I’ll take you down the only road I’ve ever been down

from The Verve – Bittersweet Symphony – men tell us about themselves, what they think and do, all the time. On some level, all males know that their most basic purpose is to sexually control, torture, and gradually kill females. They can’t and won’t change, and they will force you to travel their path with them. And in that way, they define your purpose too.

Just a note before I start, in the YouTube recording of this post, I’m using a clip from London Grammar’s version of this song, mostly because of Hannah Reid’s excellent contralto voice. You’ll notice that she leaves out the repeating line “It’s just sex and violence” from the song that the dude-bros of The Verve originally wrote. I’d like to assume that Reid was choosing to sing from a female’s point of view, meaning that sex and violence are not part of our natural purpose. But of course, it may not be that at all. She may be part of the ‘Not All Men’ and “Women are Violent Toooooo” movement championed by liberal men and women. Or she may just be like the majority of women in the world, with her head in the sand, pretending that sex and violence are NOT the fabric of our lives and that life is super great with a few rapey hiccups along the way. Regardless, Reid’s voice is enough of a reason to choose her version over the original.

So in this last of the P-posts, I’m not going to get into the more general “Why are we here?” question that is basic to all thinking humans. I am not sure that there is an answer to that. Personally, I choose to believe that humans are the complex product of millions of years of evolution without any grand purpose at all. But as we have unfortunately also evolved consciousness or self-awareness, we need to construct a purpose much in the same way that we’ve had to construct the concept of ‘time’. So, I’m going to discuss briefly what female purpose is NOT, and at this point, should never be, despite what our male overlords say, and then get into the why’s and how’s of finding a healthy and productive purpose to help us deal with living in a male world. I touched on this topic a little in H is for Hope, and it warrants a deeper discussion as it is really elusive, hard to achieve, constantly evolving, and sometimes the deciding factor in a person’s decision to keep going or to end it all. Consider it the alphabetical segue between H is for Hope and the upcoming S is for Suicide (if I end up naming it that – censorship is a consideration here for obvious reasons).

What a Woman’s Purpose is Not

There isn’t a male on the planet that doesn’t believe that women were put on this planet to serve them in some capacity. Men might mouth the politically correct words to curry favour with you, but deep down, they believe in men first as the protagonists and directors, and then women in supporting roles. And we know this and see it evidenced every time a male feels emasculated when a woman or girl does pretty much anything that garners positive attention,, or demonstrates, usually unconsciously or naturally, that she doesn’t need him for anything at all. Our purpose, according to men, is to be stolen from, parasitized, filled up, impregnated, used up, experimented on, owned, controlled, degraded, manipulated, hid behind, scapegoated and blamed, and ultimately destroyed. That’s what we’re here for.

Except that we’re not. Not a single one of those things makes sense from a thinking woman’s point of view. If we were here to be used essentially as cattle, we wouldn’t have amazing brains. Research in the burgeoning field of neuroscience tells us that female brains mature faster and stay cognitively younger with age (meaning they diminish more slowly) than males’ brains. Having done my done my early research in neuroplasticity and later in human intelligence, I have always found it interesting and very revealing of male motivations, that modern brain research usually contradicts and/or is much more complicated than what males have been telling us (without evidence, I might add) about females in order to hold us back and build themselves up. They know that male and female purposes are extremely different, and dare I say, contradictory on a fundamental level.

What is Women’s Purpose?

I’ll just say a little bit about this before getting into answering a more practical question. There is no definitive answer to the question of women’s ultimate purpose. Like I said, I don’t think humans as a species have a purpose any more than any other living creature does. We evolved, and perhaps the most unconscious purpose of any living thing is just survival. But as self-aware creatures, this is where things become problematic. Males, as I’ve said many times in the past, are destructive. Even when they think they are creating, they aren’t. They are violent on a basic biological level, and this shows up in their drive to create class-based hierarchies (sex, race, economic class, etc), and then to control, torture, and kill, and to rationalize it all as survival and progress. Females, whether human or not, are creative beings on a basic level. Our bodies have the capacity to create, we are better equipped to think and act in concert with other living things. We are better able to compromise and share. And we survive through balance, cooperation in a system, and self-defense rather than aggression. The manifestation of females that we see today is not evidence to contradict our nature, but rather, evidence of the twisted, colonized creatures that men want and need and have created in order to maintain their dominance. Females have been socially evolved through male control to value male modes of living. And interestingly, a typical liberal female will lust for male ideas of power. And while she mistakenly thinks this is freedom, she is still just a construction of the male mind, serving him and the male drive to destroy. But she just destroys herself in the pursuit of male purpose.

To Find One’s Personal Purpose

If it is a living creature’s purpose to survive, but as members of a self-aware species, we know that we need a greater constructed, intellectual purpose than just survival, how can we manage? In other words, if we are not willing to accept how males run things, then how can we develop a personal purpose to rationalize staying alive? I mean, there is no handbook or recipe for this. The reason most people just go along with the status quo, even if it makes them miserable, is because it is easier. This is why males developed religion and drugs and alcohol and other addictive materials. These tools give a false purpose to the oppressed, rationalize suffering, provide the means to repeatedly escape reality, dull the urge to think and analyze deeply, and ultimately, make them easier to control. If you reject religion, drugs, alcohol, mass media, computer games, social media, etc, then you need to face reality and construct a personal way to keep going. Purpose, in other words.

Now, I am older and more experienced, but by no means an expert on purpose. I’ve wrestled with purpose and the meaning of my own life since I can remember. Honestly, it was a lot harder when I was younger, so if you are a younger woman and are struggling, I get it, and I assure you that this is perfectly normal. But please know that meaning and purpose are very personal things, and you may have questions and concerns that I or others don’t have. Myself, for example, I’m not much bothered by the question of why humans exist, as I don’t think it matters much. But I need to have a reason to stick around. Luckily, I wasn’t raised in a religious household, although my parents put me in an Anglican Sunday School when I was 5 and quickly pulled me out when I came home with some very fucked up ideas about ‘evil’ and drinking wine. I have explored the religious beliefs of various friends through my life and have only seen hate and illogic that seemed like attacks on my intelligence and sense of fairness. I’ve also experimented with drugs and alcohol, but none of it felt very good or helped me achieve anything other than getting sick or sexually assaulted. So really, I learned that I was going to have to use my brain to keep myself alive and achieving. And after many years of mistakes, achievements, depression, and joy, I’ve boiled my own purpose down to three things.

1. Mentoring – I’ll be the first to admit that I never wanted children, but I do get a lot out of helping youth, particularly young women and girls. I don’t discount the potential value of older people – I quite like older ladies actually – but I don’t understand why so many choose to contribute nothing despite their accumulated wisdom and experience. You don’t have to do a formal job, but given how long people live these days, spending 30-40 years draining society of resources, especially if you never contributed anything in your so-called productive years, doesn’t make sense at all. But children have more potential to make positive contributions and need our investment, particularly feminist values. Myself, I have a beehive mentality, which is a classic female society – every member contributes to the survival of the hive until the end. So for me, I value and seek out intergenerational relationships, and I’ve come to see my formal jobs as an educator as something much more than just preparing people for examinations. I seek to be an example of non-traditional womanhood for the girls of today. And I try to pass on the idea of asking why and how questions and to reject blind acceptance of male-dominated society.
2. Learning – we have these amazing, complex brains, and it doesn’t make sense to me not to push them as far as we can. We have the capacity to learn and create that no other living thing has. And yet, our brains are wasted and so often used to do horrible things. Male creativity usually destroys, and female brain power so often goes to supporting males. It is a waste at best, and human, animal and environmental rights abuses at worst. So for me, I am always looking to learn new things formally or informally. I take online classes – there are so many free resources out there that there is no excuse not to do this. I attend lectures in person if I can find things in a language I can get by in. I walk as much as I can because moving more slowly lets you see more around you. I try to know more about the world, and I’m happy to say that I’ve learned a lot through my own students, as well. You can teach the young, but you can also learn from them. In a nutshell, I can say that I am a lifelong learner. Plus, I think it helps your brain from atrophying.
3. Do no harm – it is easy to hurt and destroy and just not care at all. It is easy to rationalize passing the buck, and avoiding responsibility. One person can seldom fix large problems, but that is not a reason to contribute to the problem or to turn a blind eye. For me, I try to leave things as I found them or better than I found them.

In conclusion, note that I’m not trying to tell anyone what to do or to imply that I am better than everyone out there because of what I try to do in my life. I don’t think my life is ideal, nor have I achieved a state of bliss or complete satisfaction. I’m seeking meaning – that’s all. And here, I’m providing an example of how to make your life make sense in a world of male chaos and violence when you don’t want to be a part of it, but are not allowed to be truly separate. Is this a form of escape in and of itself? Who knows? If it is, at least, it can be more productive and feel better than an addiction ever would or could. But if you think about it too closely or for too long, it can often end up seeming like you are looking at yourself in a mirror and you just see the endless smaller versions of yourself and the mirror, and it can make you crazy. Smash the mirror. Just take a photo, look at it, and ask yourself what the person you see could possibly do to inspire you. Then stop thinking about it and just get to work doing it. And re-evaluate periodically. Ask yourself if what you are doing holds any meaning for you. What other people think doesn’t matter. You are surviving and hopefully working towards a higher level of satisfaction. That is purpose, and I think it is the best you can do in a world that wouldn’t agree with this approach at all.

** I’m including a cool clip of of the song Pompeii (original band, Bastille) done in Latin by Belgian singer, Heleen Uytterhoeven. The song itself speaks to me of the shortness of life, how it can end unexpectedly, and how we waste what we have by doing nothing or worse.

We were caught up and lost in all of our vices
In your pose as the dust settled around us

And the walls kept tumbling down in the city that we love
Grey clouds roll over the hills bringing darkness from above

But if you close your eyes
Does it almost feel like nothing changed at all?
And if you close your eyes
Does it almost feel like you’ve been here before?
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?
How am I gonna be an optimist about this?

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