Why We Do What We Do.

The conference yesterday went swimmingly. My speech was heard, and well-received, by members of the Nepalese planning committee, UNICEF, UNFPA, W.H.O., and many, many gender activists. I’ll try to post a digital copy later this week, but I cannot make any guarantees. Despite the success of the conference, today we immediately returned right back to work. I found myself re-writing a foreward and a blurb, the short description of a book found in the back cover, for a publication that examines the results of this study on women’s sexuality in Nepal. What remains most interesting in all the research I’ve read here is the dissonance between religious belief and social practice. In Hinduism, the creative force of the universe is the divine feminine, and this resides peacefully with the masculine force. As such, femininity is worshipped as something which creates, sustains, and perpetuates life. Socially, though, women occupy some of the lowest rungs of the social ladder, e.g. when a woman has her period, she is forced into isolation for between four and twelve days. Though most of these practices have ended in urban areas, they still remain quite prevalent in rural areas, hence the need for this project. Simply by encouraging women to openly discuss their sexuality allows them to be able to reclaim it for themselves. This, creating safe and open spaces for women to be women, is the first step in breaking patriarchy. The continued empowerment of women, despite some of its successes, will remain incomplete until women can reclaim their sexuality and make it something that is their own, something that is not possessed by their husbands or their families.

On an unrelated note, I remembered something yesterday I heard in passing in some predictable picture (Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist-despite its predictability, still delightful). In passing, one of the characters mentions the Jewish idea of tikkum olam, or “the repairing of the world,” a belief which states the world is fragmented and shattered. It is the responsibility of each human being through her actions to strive to repair the world. Now, if ever there was a way to form a morality this would be it; actually, it would be a combination of this and Nietzsche’s thoughts concerning the eternal return. Nietzsche writes in Thus Spoke Zarathustra that each choice we make, we should make believing that we will relive it and its consequences for all time. Life repeats, over and over and over, ad infinitum. Instead of fearing this, we should live in such a way that such a fate would be one we would great wholeheartedly, yelling on our death beds, “DA CAPO!” “Once More!” “From the Top!” The combination of this, and the repairing of the world, now that, that should be how we live.