Equal rights and balance between the sexes.
A lot of people have commented on how my work seems to focus on the more feminine aspects of life. I will admit that I do paint a lot that is connected with both the female and the Goddess but this does not mean that I believe that the corresponding male energy is of any less interest of importance. Often, many people believe that male and female energies are separate issues, that female energy is different to male. In some cases this is right but it is not the entirety of the story. Men and women are wired differently & do have different hormone levels, so because of this there are differences. Yet if the sexes both got off their soap-boxes & listened, really listened to each other, they would find that there are many similarities.
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| Lightbringer - Elemental Fire. Trac Davies© |
I have met men and women from very many different walks of life, I have met highly creative women, women that prefer to be housewives, women that are as strong, if not stronger than the stereotypical male, women in academia with PhD's that are at the top of their chosen field, women that are blatantly anti-male and are aggressive when stating their opinions, women that do not want children & women that do and women that work in highly powered careers in a typically masculine world, that have been ostracised by their own sex because of it.
I have also met men that prefer to work in hairdressers rather than on a building site, men that prefer the building site, men that teach, men that are top of their chosen field but also feel the pressure of their elevated status along with other men and women that relish in it, men that are househusbands, men that are so chauvinistic they take women's breath away with their audacious machismo, men that like to wear more feminine things, men that are in academia, creative men & men that feel that they have as much right to access to their children as women have once a partnership goes wrong.
There is a lot of stereotyping of what people feel a man or a woman should be and what they are entitled to. I feel that nobody has a right to pigeon-hole what a person is or wants to be or to base individual rights on sex. When I think about what a man or a woman is, I know that there are certain biological differences that leads to a divergences in how we present ourselves, how we see things, how we deal with things & sometimes our natural drives. Yet, much of how we present as our sex can be linked not just to our biological differences but how we have been parented, what propaganda assaulted our earlobes in childhood and what conditioning we each received from our parents, other family members, teachers & other adults, what culture we are living in, what religion our family observes and how strictly it is adhered to and most importantly, how this all affected us on an individual level. Nurture and nature is very important to what a person will be, this has never been dismissed in biology itself but so many people ignore the fact that our environment is just as important as our genetics and biological differences & contrariwise other people ignore the genetic and biological components. Sometimes, some people will even ignore that each person is also very different & have a tendency to generalise & will do this with individuals to populations, which is where the stereotypes come from.
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| The Centurion - Trac Davies© . |
However, even in this more enlightened age, there is still this pressure for men and women to display certain tendencies that may not actually to be natural to who they really are, for example, the expectation in some places of men to join the forces. Thankfully, in some countries these days there is no longer the need for every man to conscript in the forces. In the United Kingdom from 1939 to 1960, conscription was called National Service and unless a man had a legitimate reason that exempted him from enlisting, it was a law that had to be adhered to.
Now only those that wish to become part of the forces join and I personally believe that there is a good reason for that. Not every man has the right nature to be in the forces so why should every man be viewed as a natural soldier when they are not? In addition, there always have been many women that desire to be in the forces, I am not one of these women but I respect the right of other women to have this need fulfilled & now they can if they so wish.
Yet there is still a core of people that believe that women joining the forces and fighting on the front line is wrong but why should this need be viewed as an entirely masculine one? There are good examples of women that were warriors from history, e.g. Boudicca, one only has to look back to realise that the need to protect others is not just a male trait & never was just that. There are also good examples from nature itself - would you go into the lionesses den, especially one with cubs?
There is also the belief that one sex should earn more than the other. This to me beggars belief, if men and women are doing the same job and doing it well they should be paid the same. I might hear some male grumbles here that I am going from an entirely female perspective, untrue. The Catwalk for example, is a place where women can earn much more than their male colleagues but on the other side it is well know that in the world of finance, men can earn much more than women.
Then there is childcare, why should this be a predominately female occupation & why should many women be penalised in the job-market because they have had or are going to have a child. On the other hand, why should men not have their share of paternity leave and not be financially penalised by their employer either?
The list could go on & so many of these stereotypes are not only dangerous to progress and to our relationships with each other, they are grossly outdated in a modern world. However, different cultures and places in our world have very different viewpoints from my own. There is such a huge imbalance in the treatment of men and women in certain countries that this cannot be ignored. Even in the UK certain cultures prefer to keep to their own laws and ways of life. At times, this underlines the fact that to many types of culture, women are viewed as property and not people in their own right. This, I will add is not adhered to by every person from that culture, only some but if things like enforced marriage occur in one family from a different culture, people that generalise will tar all of that culture with the same brush. This is unfair, individual behaviour should not account for everybody else from a certain culture but this should go for all cultures, even my own.
Sometimes personal need drive us to where we do not want to be in this world & with each other, this can only be countered if we are all given the same rights and respect, not only from the laws and authorities, but to each other because we are all, at the end of the day, just human.
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| Light Being - Trac Davies© |
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Also further reading:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_in_the_United_Kingdom
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/may/10/women-british-army-fighting-front-line-hammond-combat-sexist
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/11276724/Army-front-line-Women-are-to-fight-on-the-front-line.-Now-the-battle-really-begins.html
http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/historic_figures/boudicca.shtml
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-business/10360181/Is-equal-pay-between-the-sexes-the-new-barometer-of-a-good-place-to-work.html
http://www.fawcettsociety.org.uk/2013/11/equal-pay/
http://ifsw.org/publications/human-rights/different-cultural-perspectives-and-human-rights/
Trac Davies - Artist ©
