Can Self – But Need to Have Other People…

”…the needs of realizing the individual’s responsibility for her/his own situation and her/his relation.”

Sounds quite moralizing…

I read a blogposting which made me smile and my eyes glitter, the quotations in the beginning comes from that posting. Written by a female Swedish blogger Jenny W. (whose postings I have written about earlier). She is so angry, sarcastic, and ironic or how I shall express it. Rebellious? Questioning? So refreshingly! She points to contradictions in the society I think…

Her posting has the title “Can Self – But Need to Have Others…”

She writes apropos texts, written by two female writers, Anne Heberlein and Isobel Hadley Kapmtz, on the question of personal responsibility, which she on the one hand thinks has a “fresh strike” and on the other are at risk of simplifying all that is difficult… From a bitter complaining to the dashing cheering on oneself and others, the two poles or opposites. Yes, it was this with the “positive thinking”!! Which awakes applauses everywhere. The clever girl (boy)!!

She writes that she should want to embroider things about the importance of understanding the weight and meaning of “institutions” (in this case the institution which the family is, and preferably the nuclear, with mum, dad and children. One shall not live alone or two men/women together. And definitely NOT two people of the same sex WITH children. And two grown ups of different gender without children are suspicious too for many. But she also reflects over other sorts of “institutions”, but this posting is mainly about the family though).

An understanding of the weight of institutions she thinks is entirely absent in both the texts, and also in a remarkable way in the Swedish understanding generally. If I interpret her right she thinks (with my words) that we speak quite moralizing about that we are slaves under psychic ill health (exhaustions, burnout etc.) and sex-addictions!!

But she wonders (quite ironically in my interpretation) why we don’t question phenomena like when we hear people saying they want to get married ”to have a really fun party”??

“But no! Fuck all that ridiculous talk about such things. It’s bullshit that one can believe in a thousand year old and more tradition and doing a nice party of it, while one miraculously are spared from all depressive cultural duties.”

Quietly: No, that sort of superficiality we hardly question!

She thinks that the weight of these long traditions (the deep cultural representations as she describes or expresses them) we live in and have around us has to become problematized at the same time as we discuss personal responsibility. Messages many people probably feel the weight of, and at least need to get relieved from to some extent. She thinks that if one doesn’t have any feeling for this weight one is more tone-deaf than would be acceptable… Yes, this is very, very insensitive. What’s the problem if nobody is harmed??

A pretty dangerous quality (this insensitivity) in other circumstances she thinks.

She wonders upon the vehement, furious trend of family-living which rolls over the world, as she writes.

“Yes, why is it so damn popular managing things on ones own at the same time as we obviously need to have people tightly around us – i.e. [having] the family [around us].”

She writes about the talk, in the debate about the own success managing or making things, and the question of the family as a poof of “how simple it is in fact”! But in it she can at least discern (skönja) a climate which doesn’t further (or promote) women’s will and possibilities talking about their troubles in their relations (and men also loose on this!! As their children; not least seen to what sort of models those parents and their marriages and all other relations and ideas they have are. But also to live in such families. The hypocrisy I grew up with too, maybe a bit different, but in many ways still there. Yes, it is this with painting things rosy, not talking openly about how things in fact are and how we maybe can change and handle them better and more constructively without harming anyone. No matter what gender. Just talking more openly about them would mean a lot).

She also mentions all life-style magazines and fitting-up-stuff (all make over programs of different sorts. See Thomas Johansson here in Sweden for instance and his ”Make over mania”! See earlier posting "The Pursuit of Harmony...") and wonders how many she has to mention and point to to prove what she is trying to say.

Things are described or brought forward as measures worth striving for (living in a certain way and after certain patterns, not outspoken “rules,” and here it is a backlash again, my comment) while they at the same time are institutions which have been created during millennia for the continued existence of the society – and that continued existence has not leant on an overwhelming interest for the women’s need, have they, however? But of course, pairing and making children gives one something, especially as the human species is a flock-animal. And life isn’t in first hand about lots of injury-minimizing measures, but one has to be allowed to try even if the odds are low, so to speak, as she writes. You must be allowed to fail she means. Without getting judged, rejected or moralized over, yes.

“But jeeez, how many men there are walking around I wouldn’t want to share responsibility or every day life with, however.

Then we come to another aspect I would want to write about too: the tendency that all those debates are starting to be about glorifying oneself and not least the finest we have here in the equal Sweden: our equal men.”

In a book (grounded on a dissertation??) they established that one of the biggest threats to the freedom and peace of women seem to be the normative notion in women themselves that equal lives are finer and better then unequal.

And she writes:

“At the same time it’s always you yourself who has to live your life [in some way or another, and try to manage it the best one is capable!!] and that one has to dare being bothersome, hard as stone and hard-working to reach ones goals, if it’s what’s demanded. Here is a whole Swedish culture one has to do something about. Anyhow, I haven’t got more time. The society and my duties are calling. My family, or the group [son and ‘husband’] as I use to call it, is in another town doing other things. For them, for me and for the country and the world: now I have to work.”

In a PS. she writes about the admirable in divorcing. Her apprehension is that the one divorcing is a truly successful person seen from a self-realizing point of view. Because it is very heavy things we are playing with when one gets married. Getting divorced is therefore damn hard core.

Yes, I think this Jenny doesn’t want to moralize over people’s struggles and troubles… On the contrary…