The Long-Term Effects of #MeToo

As consequências previsíveis, inevitáveis e necessárias, de qualquer "desequilíbrio" instalado há demasiado tempo.

– Uma reflexão necessária.

No entanto, fazendo referência aos dados estatísticos mencionados por Heather Mac Donald, não consegui evitar que a lembrança da reflexão (ainda pertinente?) que Virginia Woolf, expressa no seu livro, "A Room of One's Own", me invadisse o pensamento.


Heather Mac Donald Warns about the Long-Term Effects of #MeToo

In praise of procrastinantion

"The true hero in the Black Swan world is someone who prevents a calamity and, naturally, because the calamity did not take place, does not get recognition – or a bonus – for it. [...]
A very intelligent group of revolutionary fellows in the United Kingdom created a political movement called the Fabian Society, named after the Cunctator, based on opportunistically delaying the revolution. The society included George Bernard Shaw, H. G. Wells, Leonard and Virginia Woolf, Ramsay MacDonald, and even Bertrand Russell for a moment. In retrospect, it turned out to be a very effective strategy, not so much as a way to achieve their objectives, but rather to accommodate the fact that these objectives are moving targets. Procrastination turned out to be a way to let events take their course and give the activists the chance to change their minds before committing to irreversible policies. And of course members did change their minds after seeing the failures and horrors of Stalinism and similar regimes.
There is a latin expression festina lente, "make haste slowly." The Romans were not the only ancients to respect the act of voluntary omission. The Chinese thinker Lao Tzu coined the doctrine of wu-wei, "passive achievement."
Nassim Taleb, in "Antifragile"

What does it mean to regret, when you have no choice?

It's what you can bare.
There it is. No one's going to forgive me.
It was death. I chose life.

To look life in the face.
Always to look life in the face.
And to know it.
For what it is.
At last. To know it. To love it.
For what it is.
And then... To put it away.

do patriarcado / Virginia vestindo as vestes de Psique

imagem tirada de aqui

"Life for both sexes — and I looked at them, shouldering their way along the pavement — is arduous, difficult, a perpetual struggle. It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are as babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority — it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney — for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination — over other people. Hence the enormous importance to a patriarch who has to conquer, who has to rule, of feeling that great numbers of people, half the human race indeed, are by nature inferior to himself. It must indeed be one of the chief sources of his power. But let me turn the light of this observation on to real life, I thought. Does it help to explain some of those psychological puzzles that one notes in the margin of daily life? Does it explain my astonishment the other day when Z, most humane, most modest of men, taking up some books by Rebecca West and reading a passage in it, exclaimed, "The arrant feminist! She says that men are snobs!" The exclamation, to me so surprising — for why was Miss West an arrant feminist for making a possibly true if uncomplimentary statement about the other sex? — was not merely the cry of wounded vanity; it was a protest against some infringement of his power to believe in himself. Women have served all these centuries as looking-glasses possessing the magic and delicious power of reflecting the figure of man at twice its natural size. Without that power probably the earth would still be swamp and jungle. The glories of all our wars would be unknown. We should still be scratching the outlines of deer on the remains of mutton bones and battering flints for sheepskins or whatever simple ornament took our unsophisticated taste. Supermen and Fingers of Destiny would never have existed. The Czar and the Kaiser would never have worn their crowns or lost them. Whatever may be their use in societies, mirrors are essential to all violent and heroic actions. That is why Napoleon and Mussolini both insist so emphatically upon the inferiority of women, for if they were not inferior, they would cease to enlarge. That serves to explain in part the necessity that women so often are to men. And it serves to explain how restless they are under her criticism; how impossible it is for her to say to them this book is bad, this picture is feeble, or whatever it may be without giving far more pain and rousing far more anger than a man would do who gave the same criticism. For if she begins to tell the truth, the figure in the looking-glass shrinks; his fitness for life is diminished. How is he to go on giving judgment, civilising natives, making laws, writing books, dressing up and speechifying at banquets, unless he can see himself at breakfast and at dinner at least twice the size he really is? ...The looking-glass vision is of supreme importance because it charges the vitality; it stimulates the nervous system. Take it away and man may die, like the drug fiend deprived of his cocaine. Under the spell of that illusion, I thought, looking out of the window, half the people on the pavement are striding to work. They put on their hats and coats in the morning under its agreeable rays. They start the day confident, braced, believing themselves desired at Miss Smith's tea party; they say to themselves as they go into the room, I am the superior of half the people here, and it is thus that they speak with that self-confidence, that self-assurance, which have had such profound consequences in public life and lead to such curious notes in the margin of the private mind."
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

dolce far niente

"Ela estava a perder a consciência das coisas exteriores. E quando perdeu a consciência das coisas exteriores [...] a sua mente continuou a lançar coisas das profundezas, cenas, nomes, citações, memórias e ideias, como uma fonte a jorrar [...]"
Virginia Woolf, in Rumo ao Farol

"Sonhar acordado é essa "fonte a jorrar", à medida que o cérebro mistura conceitos habitualmente arquivados em áreas distintas. O resultado é a capacidade de reparar em novas ligações, de ver as sobreposições que normalmente negligenciamos."
Jonah Lehrer, in Imagine

O poder do espelho

At the Mirror (1921), by Otto Dix

"It calls for gigantic courage and strength. More than anything, perhaps, creatures of illusion as we are, it calls for confidence in oneself. Without self-confidence we are babes in the cradle. And how can we generate this imponderable quality, which is yet so invaluable, most quickly? By thinking that other people are inferior to oneself. By feeling that one has some innate superiority — it may be wealth, or rank, a straight nose, or the portrait of a grandfather by Romney — for there is no end to the pathetic devices of the human imagination — over other people."
Virginia Woolf, in A Room of One's Own

A word is not a single separate entity

"Words belong to each other. They do not live in the dictionaries. They live in the mind."

No caldeirão

Virginia Woolf

"For example, the restrictive and intense interests of someone with autism and the manic drive of a person with bipolar disorder might provide the necessary focus and determination for genius and creativity."
Aqui.

Isn't that what people do?

Stay alive for each other?
diz Mrs. Dalloway (Meryl Streep)