I would like to invite women to play a significant role in helping to orchestrate a better 
future for the planet and all who occupy it – humankind and animals alike. All of nature, for that matter.
If we continue to pursue a path of negativity, an apocalypse could be the outcome. To avoid that happening, we need to make more conscious efforts to think, speak and act positively to create a more peaceful, compassionate and harmonious future. By developing a more positive outlook on life we could in the future create a haven on earth.
Well, how can we women play a significant role in making the changes which will improve the quality of life on this planet?
1. Firstly, I think we need to return to the qualities of the goddess. The god, I feel, has outlived its time, a time of wars and destruction, a lack of regard for the planet and an abundance of greed and selfishness.
The god or masculine energy – yang – needs to be replaced or rebalanced by the energy of the female – yin, the nurturing and compassionate.
In order to achieve a balance which could significantly improve the quality of life on this planet these are the changes I would like to suggest.
Bring wars to an end so that we may live in harmony with all of our brothers and sisters regardless of background, nationality, skin colour or status.
Wars have been perpetrated by men since time immemorial and continue in this so called age of enlightenment. With more women in positions of influence in decision making, a more peaceful environment could develop over time, changing future generations of men from a war like to a more peaceful harmonious species.
Another of my suggestions is to have a closer look at the effects religion has had on society as a whole.
Religion is a system introduced and organised by men and if looked at more closely is quite disturbing. For example:
God is portrayed as being male
Woman (Eve) was created from the rib of a man (Adam)
It was the woman (Eve) who disobeyed the word of the Lord and ate the ‘fruit of the tree’ and was cast out of the garden along with the man (Adam).
Men were given the freedom to ‘be fruitful and multiply and fill the earth’ (Genesis 9) whereas the woman was told by the Lord ‘I will greatly multiply your pain in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband and he shall rule over you – Genesis 3-16.
As one continues to read Genesis there is little mention of daughters, but sons were constantly being portrayed.
Until quite recently, women were not allowed to be ordained as priests (priestesses?) Even now, the Catholic church continues to forbid women from being ordained. Although religion has been around for a very long time, have we stopped to consider how much or how little it has served us?
Religion over the centuries has been the cause of countless brutal wars and remains the cause up to the present day. Because of our advanced technology regarding the war machinery, far more people are being killed as a result with little regard for civilians. Men’s yang energy is one of the likely causes of this aggressive behaviour.
It is my belief that a good strong healthy seed of spirituality was implanted in each and every one of us at birth, but has sadly been contaminated by religion.
Religion was introduced into our lives at a very early age, either by our parents, our teachers or the church. When we look more closely at the teachings of religion, there is more fear taught than hope.
Fear is one of the most negative of emotions and seems to have a much stronger influence on the minds of young children than the more positive emotion of hope.
As children we are force fed religion and at that early age we are not equipped with the discerning faculties to make the distinction between religion and spirituality. They know of no way of regurgitating the religious teachings as they grow older and as a result they pass the teaching on to their children when they become adults.
Children have a natural tendency to live in the moment, but as they grow older they seem to lose that ability and learn instead to live in fear. Fear of doing or saying the wrong thing and from the religious point of view, there is fear of going to hell.
I speak of no one ‘brand’ of religion, but religion across the board.
2 While we are considering change, why not abolish marriage altogether. Give couples the choice, without denying them any possible benefits, to consider a binding contract for a specific length of time which can be renewed when they come to the end of the said contract.
I see marriage as a form of slavery – ‘my’ husband, ‘my’ wife! One should have the freedom to live and love without the feeling of ownership hanging over one. Let me quote this passage which is a part of the marriage ceremony: ‘until death do us part’. This is another stumbling block in a marriage ceremony. We have to remember that nothing is permanent, including marriage.
One can put one’s best efforts in trying to maintain a happy, peaceful and loving marriage for as long as one can, but nothing remains static. Everything around us is changing all the time and so are we humans. Marriage is no exception.
It would be an ideal situation if both parties in a marriage changed in the same ways and at the same time and remained compatible. This, no doubt, happens, it seems, in some cases but obviously not in all as we see from the increasing number of divorces year by year.
It is no less an insult on the part of politicians who try to bribe couples to stay together by offering monitory incentives. Whatever the incentives I think it is a grave insult. We have to think of the impact on children in a family where there is no love between partners but constant conflicts.
What I think, is for us to recognise our strong procreative instincts. One of the most powerful instincts in most women is to have a child. In men their most powerful instinct is to ‘sow their seed’. The institute of marriage, organised by religion, has created deceit in men who lie to their wives about their movements when the need to ‘sow their seed’ becomes pressing.
Children are extremely delicate creatures who need as much quality of life as possible in their early childhood. Having to adjust to both the male and female energies at such an early stage of their development cannot be easy for them.
As the female energy is all encompassing – loving, gentle, kind and nurturing, children thrive better in such an environment without having to adjust to the male energy which tends to be more destructive.
Now don’t get me wrong. I do not hate men. On the contrary, I cannot begin to think what life would be like without them. But we have to recognise the difference between the male and female energies and allow our children to benefit from them at the appropriate times.
We have to think of the impact of our behaviour on our children. Perhaps it would be better for couples to separate amicably for the sake of the health and well being of their children than to stay together in a loveless atmosphere, shrouded in continuous conflict.
Contract unions between consenting adults could replace marriage.
In the first instance, couples could elect to stay together for a specific length of time, eg seven years, under a legally binding document. At the end of that period, if they were able to maintain a strong loving relationship, they could consider renewing the contract, the length of which could be agreed between them.
We all know of the seven year itch. After a period of time the itch may become unbearable, in which case the couple could decide to live apart and not renew the contract. The children would remain the responsibility of both parties even in this situation.
In some African tribes, children of both sexes are brought up solely by their mothers until about the age of seven when the male children are sent to live with their fathers in order to learn male skills.
This seems like an excellent arrangement as both male and female children benefit from the female yin energy in their formative years, not only from their mothers, but from all females in their environment.
Although this system is unlikely to be replicated in our sophisticated western society, there is much from which we could learn and perhaps a modified system adapted.
3 The next change I would like to see are women reclaiming their bodies.
We read about women in developing countries who are encouraged or, more likely, forced to abort female foetuses. This is not acceptable.
Women should retake control of their bodies and not be influenced by their partners or parents. To abort a female foetus simply to perpetuate cultural demands, in favour of a male child, in order to carry on the family name, or to be able to fight for their country as adults, or for whatever other spurious reason, should not be allowed to continue. This sort of pressure and procedure can create untold damage to a woman’s psyche.
Men have both the X and Y factors in the sperm and are therefore responsible for determining the sex of the foetus. But it is the woman who bears the foetus and should be the one to make the decision as to whether she wishes to bring the gestation period to its normal conclusion or to abort the foetus. This should be wholly the decision of the woman.
If this trend were allowed to continue, future generations of men will be deprived of females with which to procreate. What then? Let us be a bit more far sighted and stop this unacceptable trend in its tracks.
- Hilda Carni
at Manchester Airport. The idea is that security staff can identify hidden weapons without the time consuming searches which currently take place.
Art Photography
Spirit of the age
Tags: bright future, hope, memes, moon landing, optimism, outsider character, Science, Science Fiction, spirit, The Future, youth
“What a glorious time to be free”
When I was a kid I was into the space program. I stayed up late watching the moon landing and I dreamed that, one day, I would watch a launch at Cape Canaveral in Florida. I bought all the model rocket kits and was a bit unique in this respect as most kids of my age were into football or kung fu. In the evenings I would stay up to listen to the “Bongs” of News at Ten to see if there was an item on the space program. Gradually, after 1969, the space program lost momentum and fewer and fewer bongs included astronauts. The public had become blasé about space.
No matter, I had discovered Science Fiction. I started on Marvel comics. The outsider characters were my favourites: Spiderman, The Hulk, the Silver Surfer. I graduated to the novels of Ray Bradbury, Michael Moorcock and Phillip K. Dick. I eagerly devoured the meagre diet of Science Fiction films which were screened on British TV: The Day The Earth Stood Still, Silent Running and Dark Star. I was regarded as a little eccentric by my peers. One guy told me that I could see a brick and think it looked like a space ship……and I could.
I listened to Hawkwind and Tangerine Dream and subscribed to two magazines: Omni and Analog. These ran Science Fiction stories alongside the latest thinking in science and technology. I discovered the wonder of fractals and read about memes, chaos theory, alternative universes and virtual reality.
In 1977 Star Wars and Closer Encounters Of The Third Kind were released and at last we had big budget films with fantastic special effects. Science Fiction was suddenly popular.
I studied computer science at school and got a job as a computer operator working on minicomputers known as PDP11s running an operating system called RSTS/E. Our first machine had 96K of RAM and the disk drives were the size of washing machines and held 40 megabytes each. Locked away in machine rooms with computers the size of wardrobes I was pigeon holed, not as a “techy”, but as a “computer person”. Nobody knew what we did and nobody set any rules. We dressed how we wanted, we worked how we wanted and we had a lot of fun. Moving to London I discovered an obscure science fiction book shop in Denmark Street called Forbidden Planet.
Home PCs became available and it was possible to create fractal images with the press of a button. Computer gaming got going and the simple text based games such as Advent and Dungeon, which I had played at work, were replaced by full colour shoot ‘em ups.
Something odd was happening: My interests were becoming main stream. The popular media seemed to be mining my childhood for ideas.
In 1982 Blade Runner was released and suddenly all the weird and disturbing themes of Phillip K. Dick were simplified, tarted up and splashed all over the big screen. A fantastic film yet the special effects and the charisma of the actors overshadowed the subtle and mundane realism with which Dick somehow manages to portray the strange and insidious.
In the 80s a wave of technology based innovation ran through finance and banking and governments deregulated. Money sloshed around the industry and fortunes were made. Computers became ubiquitous and as fast as Intel improved the hardware capacity Microsoft bloatware ate it up. People started paying allegiance to software vendors as if they were football teams; Windows vs OS2, Windows NT vs Netware and, these days, iPhone vs Android. Had we all lost the plot?
Publishers such as New Riders churned out endless poorly edited books claiming to teach IT but which were little more than rewritten documentation. Computer departments appeared in book shops. In the early 80s I struggled to find books on operating systems and networking but by 1990 the computer departments in bookshops were ballooning and Foyles devoted a whole floor.
The money attracted Price Waterhouse and KPMG who read a few books on technology, set themselves up as consultants and started selling the bleeding obvious back to customers. The smooth talking suits followed a simple creed: “Bullshit baffles brains” and if there was one thing they knew about it was bullshit.
Hollywood made feature length versions of the old Marvel comic books. Batman in 1989 then moving on to the anti-heroes of my youth, Spiderman in 2002 and the Silver Surfer in 2007.
In 2001 the Lord of The Rings was released. Hold on, this was getting personal. Was nothing from my childhood sacred? It seemed that the very stuff of my psyche was being commandeered by the corporations. The fabric of my personal philosophy was being ground up, digested and regurgitated back at me stripped of subtlety, emotion and meaning.
The spirit of the 60s and 70s was optimism and hope. Science would create a bright future. “Just machines to make big decisions, Programmed by fellers with compassion and vision” sang Donald Fagan belatedly in 1982. I recommend listening to this song and reading the lyrics. The young may get a feel for the optimism of a different age and the old man like to remember.
However, the seeds of doubt were always present and I had picked up on them in my youth. Now the dystopian ideas of Phillip K. Dick were taken up by new authors such as William Gibson and transformed into cyberpunk. In 1999 The Matrix was released portraying a sinister world in which humanity lived unknowingly in a virtual world while their physical bodies lay inert.
The marketing industry got into its stride and started targeting our sub-conscious. We mortgaged our futures to pay for the dreams used to sell deodorant. As Dick had predicted the corporations bent reality to maximise their profits.
This week Hollywood are, again, engaged in recycling cultural icons from the past. A new movie has been released based on the marvel comic book character Captain America. Perhaps, at this time of conflict and economic uncertainty, America is trying to return to its youth. Trying to revert to those days when most of us had faith in science, democracy and the future.
But what does the future hold? What stories or icons or memes of today will Hollywood recycle in thirty years time? Corporations cannot generate art they can only package and sell it. They can only reproduce existing ideas so where are the ideas? The blind optimism of the 60s and 70s is as outdated as the cynical greed of the 80s and 90s.
It’s time for a new direction but our compass is still spinning.
So why do I feel optimistic? Right now we are on the cusp of change. Right now is when the seeds of the future are being sown. I am maturing in years and rather than thinking about spaceships and time travel I find myself speculating about pensions and politicians. I suspect that the young already have an idea of where we’re going.
It would be nice if they shared it with the rest of us.
St Malo Beach
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