One of the aspects of women’s liberation and emancipation seems to be to show that women are like men. In the name of freedom, women are focusing on imitating men rather than on recovering their uniqueness and specialness.
To be human is to be set apart and different from all other forms of life, for human beings have been created as the highest order of life, in the very image of God. For a human being to imitate an animal or a vegetable is both unthinkable and ludicrous. We can masquerade as one for fun or even a play, that is OK, but to imitate or strive to be one is ridiculous.
For a woman to fight to be like a man or to imitate one in order to establish equality or even supremacy borders on lunacy. Being a woman is being different, set apart as being a distinct creation, acknowledging and avowing with divergence rather than with congruity. A woman is unique and distinctive, just as a man is in his own way, each able to contribute uniquely. Each is special and individual, and therefore, impossible to imitate or copy.
A forgery of an invaluable artwork or an exquisite ornament is undesirable when it is possible to have or possess the original. An imitation has not the honour or the respect of the authentic and genuine. A replica does not carry the validity of the bona fide and true. An imitation is just that—a counterfeit —not the same as the real.
A forgery of an invaluable artwork or an exquisite ornament is undesirable when it is possible to have or possess the original. An imitation has not the honour or the respect of the authentic and genuine.
Why is it then as singular beings, the best of the best, we seek to be a copy when we already truly are special since we are unalike! The stimulating and invigorating aspect of this earth is its variety and variability. As human beings, men and women are both distinct and distinguished. To imitate one another is to lose our discrete identities and identifications. Together, a man and a woman make a wholesome ‘one’, unparalleled in complementarity as well as in complexity. To make one as another will cause uniformity through conformity, rather than solidarity through integration.
As women, we do need to claim and demand what is ours by right—equal consideration, equal parity, equal acceptance, equal honour, equal treatment, etc. However, we do not need to surrender our uniqueness to gain all of this. It would take away our contrast with men and deny our unique value.
I, for one, won’t bow down to that pressure, but will forever seek to be who I am created to be—special, quirky and individual!
The women of historic influence who rose up against the injustice accorded to their own, from Alice Paul and Maud Wood Park to Malala Yousufzai and Kamla Bhasin, all did so without compromising their femininity. Championing the cause of women and women’s rights doesn’t mean we must become masculine or like men.
We need to stand for who we are and what ought to be ours!
For a woman to have to be like a man in order to gain value is anti-progressive and damaging to women’s personhood. To surrender specialness in order to win is anticlimactic.
Women, celebrate your originality and strive to be unique while seeking to be equal!
