Personal sovereignty is a constant struggle

It may not seem like it, but we’re in a constant struggle to keep our sovereignty. Our decision-making powers. Our lives are a reflection of geopolitics, just on a much smaller scale. People around us want to tell us what to do, people around us want to give us advice, guilt us, compliment us, gaslight us, people do all sorts of things. It takes a sharp and strong mind to meander between all these traps. Not everyone wants to respect your right to self-determination.

Money, of course, gives a lot of freedom but it’s still no guarantee. Some families are like cults, for example, and the money is often controlled by a narcissist who uses money to ensure everyone is his or her pawn.

How we walk, who gives way to who on the sidewalk, how we talk and gesture. The Nazis, of course, were notorious for using the sidewalk tactic to remind their victims of their demeaning status. It was psychological, more than anything else.

There’s the public sphere and the private sphere. Women, even today in all sorts of ways, are often forcefully relegated to the private sphere. The way women are conditioned to sit, gesture, walk, and speak also signals to society their sovereignty can be infringed upon much more often than in the case of men.

A stream of pathetic pickup lines that women often have no choice but to smile at and even compliment the sad seducers is yet another example of this. Hell must be listening to such ”poetry” for all eternity. The role of the damsel in distress where women’s agency is denied under the guise of protection is yet another example of not having a say in what their life is going to look like.

I read a story where a first-born son got cursed to be a woman and disinherited. The control of the company went to a much less experienced younger brother who wasn’t even interested in running it. Still, he was given credit as a man while the cursed and smarter older brother was ignored and derided if he made any comments outside of what was seen as belonging to the private sphere. To paraphrase Daisy Buchanan (the Great Gatsby), the first-born son had to accept the role of a beautiful little fool, as that’s ”the best thing a girl can be in this world.” Well, still a better fate than getting turned into a giant cockroach, as Kafka would have attested, though the Metamorphosis can be used in reductio ad absurdum arguments.

In some cultures, women in particular are taught different language varieties, the so-called ”women’s language.” And the way we use our language not only reflects our status but it also makes others relate to us in a particular way. Religious rituals (some reserved for women, for example) is another good example. Are rituals reserved for women a sign of their empowerment or quite the opposite? Good question.

For this reason, more polite forms are often drilled into women (could you please and so on) and female speech tends to have less certainty and bravado. It doesn’t mean women can’t sound like what we stereotypically would associate with men – it means that women were conditioned to speak and sound a certain way to reflect the status society wants them to have. In a K-drama I watched a while back, a businessman and a gangster got tricked into being a woman by an impish deity. Not aware of his manly mannersisms, as they had been drilled into him, becoming a part of who he was, he wanted to firmly shake the hand of another man, only to be poked by a woman next to him and reminded to smile and bow. The guy wasn’t keen on smiling and bowing but he had no choice. It’s as if he had stepped into a different world where his sovereignty had been much more limited. He was even banned from a secret society, in spite the other members knowing it was him and formerly respecting him, which was as sad as it was hilarious.

To me, it shows that our degree of agency depends on who we meet and our relationship with that person. You can do what you want around your friends, you might even be dominant, but when talking to your boss, you’re the subordinate party, and so on. Context is key.

Who you have around you in your formative years has a huge impact on how you relate to others and how fiercely you’re willing to fight for your sovereignty.