“We have become the men we wanted to marry,” said Gloria Marie Steinem, who is considered one of the most important figures in the feminist movement and who describes herself as a radical feminist. Perhaps her phrase sums up one of the main outcomes of one of the most important battles that contemporary women have fought, which is the battle of self-realization. .
In the midst of the conceptual chaos in which we live, the concept of self-actualization takes on a brightly colored Qushaybah suit, but after wearing it, the woman may discover that it is no different from the suit that the misguided king, Imru’ al-Qais, wore while he was on his travels seeking his glory and searching for his revenge, and after the poison had spread through his body, he found himself… Strange and alone.
After a woman lays down her weapons from the fierce battle of self-realization, she may discover that the dress that the new materialistic system put on her was nothing but a suit embroidered with gold but dipped in poison, and that she remained a stranger, lamenting herself like a person with ulcers as he dies, a stranger and a broken man.
In light of this chaos, one of the most important cognitive duties is to liberate concepts and remove them from the pile of cognitive biases, especially if we know that they are labels and concepts that are not given in vain or in good faith, and do not come to us with the innocence of children in her eyes. In this, Dr. Heba Raouf Ezzat says, “Naming policies are among the most important… The fronts of intellectual, social and political liberation, because misconceptions and false labels are the real prison that hinders the mind and deprives it of understanding the world, and therefore exposing the falsity of concepts… becomes a necessary task.”
When we talk about the battle of self-realization that women wage and raise their slogan and defend for, there must be a calm dismantling of several issues that will reveal to us the full picture and open windows to views beyond the dust of battle.
Inability to define and know oneself
Isn’t it necessary before working on self-realization for a person to get to know himself?! I am not exaggerating if I say: We are in a period of time in which we need, above all else, to stand on a solid foundation of self-knowledge and definition before working to achieve it, and many of the calls for women to achieve themselves are incapable of defining themselves, as stated in the article “Searching for an Alternative” by the team Al-Hosn Project work: “There are studies that indicate that a woman’s anxiety about her identity and self has increased with the loss of her job and her status as a mother and wife, and that this anxiety has a very negative impact on her psychological health and on her attempt to achieve self-actualization, and that it is what leads to the woman’s attempt to fiercely imitate men.” , and the emergence of “uni-sex”.
We must also keep in mind the impact of every productive economic project on family building and on the role of women as mothers. There is “international” talk about “privatization,” and no one has studied the impact of privatization on us humans, and its moral and material cost – knowing that the moral cost translates itself. “After a little while, it will come to a financial cost that can be quantitatively calculated with some effort. I believe that uncontrolled privatization will have a devastating impact on the family and on women, as privatization is in fact expanding the market area and the mechanisms of supply and demand, to swallow everything.”
The inability of the contemporary woman to define herself has greatly contributed to the chaos of hostilities and chaotic battles. At the time when she thought that she was facing others, especially men, for the sake of herself, she was in fact fighting herself and waging the fiercest wars against herself. Perhaps what the French theologian Blaise Pascal said is an important reference to explaining the chaos of life’s battles among contemporary women. He says: “Knowing oneself is necessary. If it does not help to know the truth, it will at least help to organize life.”
In the era of fluid concepts brought about by the post-modern stage, true definitions of the self are absent, which makes knowing them extremely difficult. When we talk about knowing the woman herself, we necessarily mean knowing the essence and characteristics, identifying the areas of difference between her and the man in composition, knowing the points of strength and weakness, and identifying the characteristics of the soul and body, and all of these matters become taboo to talk about that necessitates seeking forgiveness in the hands of the conceptual fluidity that It forces women to fight their battles while they are ignorant of themselves. One of the obvious results of this ignorance is that they are ignorant of their main and real enemy.
The dominance of the phenomenon of stereotyping
In his book “Liquid Life,” Zygmunt Bauman speaks at length about the consumer society, stressing that the society that has internalized the consumerist vision becomes its cognitive model through which it looks at people, and it is the standard by which it evaluates things, relationships, and everything around it, and the consumerist vision is The balance of self-realization for humans in general and women in particular, and in that he says: “In that society, the roads are many and different, but they all lead to shops. Every goal of life, especially dignity, self-esteem, and happiness, requires the mediation of the market, and the world that contains these goals consists of Commodities are subjects whose judgment, appreciation, or rejection is subject to the satisfaction they provide to the world’s customers.
We expect these goods to be easy to use, quick to satisfy, and easy to consume. They require little or no effort at all, and do not require sacrifice on the part of the consumer. If these goods fail to fulfill their promises, and if the satisfaction is not as complete or as great as it should be, “Customers will return to stores and expect to get their money back, and if that is not possible, they will check the shelves full of goods and replace other items with their own.”
One of the results of the tyranny of materialism and consumption is the stereotyping of the concept of self-actualization as a concept that can only be achieved in the labor market or in the fields of consumption. At the heart of this materialistic consumer system, the human interpretation of man withdraws in favor of the materialistic interpretation. It is not possible to explain The nature of a woman Except as a material, and here the woman begins to search for the model in which she sees self-realization, so social media celebrities, movie celebrities, or celebrities created by the culture of consumption become the model; The model in the concept of achievement, the model in appearance which is supposed to be a decent appearance, and they are the model in external and internal beauty, and this modeling entered the woman into a spiral of losing self-confidence and then led her to a state of dissatisfaction with herself and to wage fierce battles with herself in form and content. Body and meaning, and threw her into new waves of concepts of self-realization, all within the framework of material and the market.
My work is my life
In any dialogue, discussion, or disagreement with a woman about her involvement in the labor market, the phrase “I cannot leave work, because my work is me, my work is my life.” This phrase expresses a firm belief that self-realization for a woman is only possible to the extent of her involvement in the labor market. Work, and this is also one of the manifestations of the dominance of stereotyping, and here it must be noted that we do not mean that women’s going out to work is motivated exclusively by self-realization, as there are many reasons for this, especially in poor and hard-working countries and environments suffering from crises. Rather, we draw attention to the fact that women’s going out to the market Work is one of the manifestations of the battle for self-realization that contemporary women are waging.
The Egyptian economic academic Jalal Amin expressed the dominance of stereotyping to which women are subjected in the age of consumerism in his famous phrase: “Let the woman come out of the prison of custom and tradition and enter the prison of the market with the utmost freedom.” It must be noted that women’s involvement in the labor market is only wrapped in a veil of modernity. About freedom, and that women here exercise their freedom and realize themselves.
Aside from talking about the right to work, which is a human right as a human being; Whether a man or a woman, and about the controversy over the value of freedom, which is a fundamental value for a human being without which he cannot be a human being. This stereotyping clearly shows that the blurring of two main concepts that are relied upon in the battle for self-realization, namely freedom and work, has led to many futile battles that women fight; Freedom becomes a vague, gelatinous concept related to matter and what revolves around it, while work is the concept that becomes reduced to the consumer dimension and the world of the market, and the concept of work in the era of consumption is based in its definition on material production while neglecting human production.
Therefore, the description of a working woman is associated with the one who practices work outside the home, while the woman who achieves the highest types of human production inside the home is described as unemployed, which makes the woman feel that self-fulfillment can only be in the labor market outside the home, while working inside the home With all its financial and educational details, despite the hardship, difficulty, and great effort it entails, it becomes like being unemployed.
This reduction made women engage in the battle of self-realization in the labor market. She no longer saw self-realization as anything other than being productive according to the materialistic, consumerist logic. She began to exert effort beyond her ability and nature, and to put herself in hardships that her physical and psychological structure could not bear, and all of this under the guise of Thick from the dominance of stereotyping the model and the gelatinous concept of freedom, she became, as Steinem said: the man she wanted to marry!
Self-realization is an innate issue to which a normal person aspires. However, the distortion of the concept and the reductions and stereotypes that surround it have made women fight this battle against themselves, not for themselves. Returning things to normal requires us to liberate the woman who has been subjected to the role model of celebrities, so her freedom to be herself. Not to be as the dominant image wanted her to be, and it also requires us to reproduce the definition of work and liberalize its concept to include human production, but rather makes it take precedence over material production, in addition to a constant and constant focus on knowing the woman herself; Its characteristics, features, advantages, and its strengths, weaknesses, and distinctions from men; Then a woman can competently fight the battle of self-realization, achieving herself, not the self she imagines she is.
