misssky ~

Something strange happens when you’re alone in a new city outside of home – you obtain clarity and perspective you wouldn’t otherwise had you not left your comfort zone. It is almost as if you get a view of your life from the outside. Suddenly those obligations and distractions that originally tied you down have fallen away and all that is left is yourself.

The majority of Girls are brought up being taught to be a ‘good girl’. Some girls fall to the way side, but a portion of them will continue to be a ‘good girl’ until they mature into adults. From a young age we’ve drummed into them that they should be sweet, smile alot, cross their legs, be tolerant of others and kind hearted, be polite, and above all, be considerate to others. We’re instilled values that encourage us to nurture, and that includes putting others before ourselves, and always attempt to please those that we care about.  These aspects come naturally to girls and they fulfill them wholeheartedly. Disney movies about fairies and princesses also help. As they grow older, these values follow them from their girlhood to their adulthood - be kind and considerate, be quiet when spoken to, put others before self, and the list goes on. This sounds good doesn’t it?

The problem is that the modern competitive world doesn’t reward qualities of kindness and consideration to those who offer it consistently and for the sake of kindness alone. People have a word for people with these qualities and that word comes with negative connotations - ’soft’.  That isn’t to say that society doesn’t value the ‘good girls’, but let’s face it, in a world driven by competition, it is the hard qualities like aggression, persistence and cunning that provide a person with the edge to come out on top. In a competitive world kindness and consideration become mere farces under which people weave their actions. When a generation reaches a certain age, it appears that acts of kindness and consideration begin to come from a self serving standpoint, much like the celebrity who runs charity fundraising events or adopts a child from Africa for publicity reasons rather than the cause. These acts lose their warmth, they no longer come from the heart. The harsh landscape brings out human nature in survival mode. The problem is that the ’good girls’ have been instilled a set of values that mismatch what is required of them to survive. On human nature, Freud wrote in his ‘Civilisations and its Discontents’:

“. . . men are not gentle creatures, who want to be loved, who at the most can defend themselves if they are attacked; they are, on the contrary, creatures among whose instinctual endowments is to be reckoned a powerful share of aggressiveness. As a result, their neighbor is for them not only a potential helper or sexual object, but also someone who tempts them to satisfy their aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity for work without compensation, to use him sexually without his consent, to seize his possessions, to humiliate him, to cause him pain, to torture and to kill him. Homo homini lupus [man is wolf to man]. Who in the face of all his experience of life and of history, will have the courage to dispute this assertion? … Anyone who calls to mind the atrocities committed during the racial migrations or the invasions of the Huns, or by the people known as Mongols under Jenghiz Khan and Tamerlane, or at the capture of Jerusalem by the pious Crusaders, or even, indeed, the horrors of the recent World War — anyone who calls these things to mind will have to bow humbly before the truth of this view.” 

Perhaps the language he used is a little on the strong side, but his point has validity. From a logical perspective, putting others before ones self leads to others benefiting from limited resources, resources that could have been used to further our own purposes. The ’be considerate to others’ stance only works when all other parties are doing the same. The world will push you around. If the ‘good girl’ is acting alone in kindness, then she risks being pushed and trodded on without even realising why. So many kind natured friends who grew up on this model have found their mild nature and soft heartedness an inadequate set of tools for the real world. On the contrary, the people whose personas were scheming, slightly cold and able to calculate their profits and losses, seem to be doing pretty well for themselves. It seems like the ‘good girl’ construct can only work in theory, not in practice.

No one has witnessed a nice sweet considerate girl become a millionaire (discounting those who inherit). Even the supermodels and actresses use various forms of competitive tactics to prise themselves above others.  The question is, how does a ‘good girl’ survive in these conditions? What happens to ‘good girls’ when they get older and the ‘good girl’ model starts to fail?    There seems to only be two choices – convert and assimilate, or become an obedient housewife, none of which are truly pleasant or realistic for a modern girl. Sadly, ‘good girls’ when left meeting repeated unpleasant situations, often slowly die and morph into something less pleasant.

While we might need certain skills to survive, being kind is one of the greatest gifts we can give to one another.  For ‘good girls’ it may simply be a matter of narrowing the selection of whom to give it to. Or it may mean that necessity calls for the head to be obeyed before the heart.

This Blog is currently in hibernation and will return shortly.