It Has Come To My Attention...

That girls are ridiculous. RIDICULOUS. Obviously I've known that for many years now (I didn't go to an all girls for nothing) but I always managed to see that hilarity in other girls, never myself. The fact that a few chemical changes can cause havoc, creating nightmares out of everyday occurrences.

As different as men and women are, we really aren't. In short, we have more similarities than differences, and there are always a million exceptions to the rule. Given, that rule was laid down by the assumptions we build from our experience of society, real and scripted, but we see it as a factual cliche that 'men are from mars, women are from venus.' How narrow.

Can we really generalise to the extent that women 'empathise' and men 'systemize'? Can it really be a biological definite that men seek competition, structure and logic over the touchy feely notions supplied by women? There are millions of stats on this, and I guess there is no smoke without fire. But the eternal question lies in whether this behaviour is innate.

I often wonder how I would have turned out if I had either never gone to an all girls school for eight years or even if I had stayed there for another two instead of going to college.

We are affected, not only by those in our networks, but how dense they are. And by network I mean the people you most interact with. An example of a dense network would be my secondary school, maybe 50 or 60 girls in the year who all knew each other well and saw each other in multiple situations; school, sporting events, social events. I learnt today that the Pharaoh Islands have a fairly isolated population of around 20,000, causing their language to remain similar to Old Norse and their lifestyle to be unaltered from the simple yet satisfying rural way.

I would love to know how this affects the human, especially female psyche. Having a social network that dense based on positive things (If you've read my blog before, you'll know I'm a huge fan of the simple things and countryside ethics) is extremely beneficial to the self esteem of people. This simplicity and slight isolation, albeit unprogressive in the world, is the key to ultimate satisfaction in my opinion. Living in a hierarchy where everything depends on beauty, strength, who you know not what you know, winning everything and having the most money, the best car, apartment, designer dog... that type of network is unhealthy.

Albeit productive.

But maybe it's not that kind of productivity the human race needs anymore. Is it productive to squeeze every last bit of oil out of the earth instead of slowly integrating new fuels? Is it productive to give out money to those that barely qualify, just for a quiet life with less paperwork? And at the end of the day, who defined this to be productive any way? We've set rules for ourselves over hundreds of years, a way of life that it would be ludicrous not to follow. The ludicrous thing is actually that we have convinced ourselves of these things to the extent we can barely comprehend another way of life. Money good. No money bad. Winning good. Losing bad.

When will people stop being so worried about winning or losing and realise that there is no real competition. It's something we created. Just like the supposed 'norms' of male and female behaviour. It's just what we created.